DESMOND BAGLEY – High Citadel. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1965.  Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1965. Pocket, US, paperback, 1966. Pyramid,  US, paperback, 1972.  Harper, paperback, 2009, in a 2-for-1 edition with Landslide.  A condensed version appeared as a “book bonus” in the August 1965 issue of Argosy Magazine (see the illustration taken from that issue at the end of this review).

   Tim O’Hara is a down on his luck ex alcoholic pilot working for a fledgling airline flying in the Andes.

   
   O’Hara’s job is to ferry a disparate group of passengers over the Andes to their destination, and he has no idea how challenging that is going to prove to be.

   Hijacked, they crack up on a mountain landing strip too small for the Dakota, and O’Hara and his ten passengers find themselves in an even worse situation than surviving a plane wreck. Cordillera, the small country on the South American continent where they have gone down is currently held by a Communist dictator and one of the passengers is his chief opponent.

   Naming any single book by a writer like Desmond Bagley his best is tricky business, especially when the competition includes The Vivero Letter, Running Blind, Freedom Trap (filmed by John Huston as The MacKintosh Man), The Spoilers, Bahama Crisis and some of the best reviewed thrillers of the latter half of the 20th Century.

   Bagley was a South African actor (Basil Rathbone was a cousin, also a cousin of Daphne DuMaurier) turned writer who turned an eye for the telling detail, a knowledge of character as well as plot construction likely from his acting experience, and a natural talent for twisty plots that took dangerous turns for reader and protagonists into a series of top selling novels. As an adventure writer, he rivaled Alistair MacLean at his best for sheer pace and action while his mystery plots would not be lost in an Agatha Christie book. He was soon rivaling Hammond Innes and MacLean in sales and surpassing such masters as Victor Canning, Gavin Lyall, and Geoffrey Household in name recognition.

   Virtually overnight he went from obscurity to one of the best known practitioners in the field of the classic British adventure thriller.

   Unlike those masters, Bagley never wrote the same book twice. Each Bagley novel is unique in voice, subject, and style as at home with the first person narrator favored by the John Buchan school as the third.

   Above all, his books are entertaining page turners, never teased by success into over extending themselves or pretension. Bagley recognized his strengths as a writer early and honed them while still remaining fresh and maintaining the ability to surprise his readers.

   High Citadel is an early book, but one that shows a skilled hand. It is a shade more novelistic than some of his work, more in line with Nevil Shute, Ernest K. Gann, or David Beatty than the standard thriller, but it never forgets it is primarily and adventure story written to entertain and provide escape from the workaday world which it does with thrills, chills, and not a little wit.

   At heart it is a Grand Hotel plot. A disparate group of people who share nothing but the coincidence of being passengers on a flight that goes down in the middle of a South American revolution and have to make their way out of rebel territory to safety must battling human nature, their own foibles and flaws, nature, those who want to take them hostage or murder them, and finding in themselves the ingenuity and strength to survive.

   It’s a pity it was never filmed because you can easily imagine the cast, including an old maiden New England school teacher who is a deadly accurate archer born to be played on screen by an Edna May Oliver type and an aging medievalist who happens to know how to make a crossbow.

   I read this sometime in the Seventies and there are passages as vivid today in my mind as when I read them for the cinematic wide screen quality of some of the set pieces and the human well drawn characters.

   The hero, battling his own demons, must overcome them and hold together his small army of strangers, uncertain who can be trusted and well aware they are surrounded by ruthless Cuban-trained soldiers willing to murder them all to get to the one man among them they are hunting.

   Inevitably their luck runs out and the high citadel they have created faces an onslaught of superior force.

   Signaling a battle royal that runs right up to the wire with action, suspense, and the heart that too few modern adventure writers manage to instill for all their pyrotechnics.

   High Citadel is a fine read, a top notch thriller, but something more with human characters you care about and all from the hand of a sure master who hit the ground running from his first printed word and never looked back. For thrills and consistent brilliance it is hard to top Bagley.

   This is thriller writing at its best.
   

ELMORE LEONARD – Valdez Is Coming. Fawcett R2328, paperback original, October 1970. Library of America #308, hardcover: Elmore Leonard: Westerns: Last Stand at Saber River / Hombre / Valdez Is Coming / Forty Lashes Less One / Stories. Film: United Artists, 1971, starring Burt Lancaster & Susan Clark; director: Edwin Sherin.

   Bob Valdez is a local constable in some bullshit Arizona corporation town, late 1800’s. There’s some trouble down at a barn.

   Frank Tanner is the big man in town. He ain’t a big man physically. Tough and wiry as the expired slim jim between the seat folds of your rental car. But he’s got maybe 20 gunmen working for him, and he makes a lot of coin running guns down to Mexico to sell to the revolutionaries and running cattle thru the frontier.

   Tanner says the man in the house is a black deserter of the cavalry who murdered Tanner’s friend. And this deserter has got to die. So he and his gunmen have cornered the man inside a barn, and have been shooting the thing up, indiscriminately.

   Valdez, being the law, figures he’d better come around and see what the ruckus is. None of your business, he’s told. Brusquely. The law is expected to serve the Man.

   Well I’m still gonna go in and talk to the guy, says Valdez.

   So Valdez walks to the barn. Knocks on the door. And talks to the guy and his wife, a Native American woman. Very pregnant. The man has proof he’s not the guy they’re looking for. He was honorably discharged, and his papers are in his wagon.

   They go to retrieve the papers, Valdez yells for Tanner to hold his fire. But Tanner has used Valdez as a diversion to set his rifle sights on his prey. At close range. The man now thinks Valdez has betrayed him. And draws his pistol.

   Valdez, having no choice, pulls his double barreled sawed off scattershot first, and blows the man away.

   Tanner walks up to the man and says: He’s not the guy. Black guys all look the same anyway. But this ain’t him. You killed the wrong guy.

   Valdez says: It was you that made the mistake. You took the woman’s husband. You should pay her five hundred bucks for the loss of her husband, the baby’s father.

   â€˜If I wanted you to talk, I’d tell you,’ says Tanner. Learn your place. And tells his men to kick Valdez’s ass. Strap a cross to his back. In the desert. So he can die.

   Valdez doesn’t die, though. He kidnaps Tanner’s woman. A beautiful blonde. He’ll give her back, he says. Soon as Tanner pays the widow her $500.

   Tanner’s woman “had come from Prescott with her nightgowns and linens to marry James C. Erin, and five years and six months later she fired three bullets into him from a service revolver and left him dead.”

   Once kidnapped by Valdez, turns out she’s not too fond of Tanner either. She likes Valdez better:

   â€œSlowly her hands came up in front of her and she began unbuttoning her shirt, her hands working down gradually from her throat to her waist. She said, ‘I told you I killed my husband. I told you I don’t want to marry Frank Tanner. I told you I have nothing. You decide what I want.”

   Tanner tells his men kill Valdez and bring his woman back.

   But when she tells his men she prefers Valdez, they turn on Tanner. “A man holds his woman or he doesn’t. It’s up to him, a personal thing between him and the man who took the woman.”

   Tanner took the Native woman’s man. So Valdez took Tanner’s woman.

   Justice.

         ———–

   It’s a good, tough Western. Some atypical stuff happens for a Western — not the least of which is the woman’s free will. She’s not your average damsel in distress. And this seems to take all sides by surprise. The ending, too, is atypical. At first I was a bit disappointed by a lack of fireworks. There’s a great buildup to a showdown that never happens.

   But the more I think about it, the more I like it. Apparently the number of actual gunfights in the wild west were surprisingly few. Plenty of folks surely chickened out. But chickens are rarely the stuff of myth. And the western is nothing if not mythology. Elmore Leonard shows great courage in delivering a chicken shit denouement.

   I enjoyed it. If Valdez is coming, you should go ahead and let him in. He’s good company.
   

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Nervous Accomplice. Perry Mason #48. William Morrow, hardcover, 1955. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and paperback.

   Perry Mason is retained by a woman in an admirable attempt to break up her husband’s romance with an attractive divorcee. After buying stock in a company, Mason creates business difficulties to bring out the worst in the other woman. The plan works, but it also creates other events to start moving, and the divorcee becomes an accomplice to a murder pointing to Mason’s client.

   In the preliminary hearing, Burger’s case is unbelievably sloppy, but Mason has to play the jury trial strictly by ear. He is quite lucky to pull this one off. As for the plot, it’s complicated as it always is when Perry gets involved. To me, the details were wrapped up too quickly, but they all seem to fit. The final product makes for very easy reading. (This is a statement that’s true for every Gardner story I’ve ever read.) As a humorous aside, the names of the characters really get me. Regerson B. Neffs is the worst.

   But finally, in case you were wondering, yes, the accomplice was nervous.

Rating:    *** ½

ROBERT DIETRICH – Murder on the Rocks. Steve Bentley #1.  Dell First Edition A141, paperback original, 1957. Cutting Edge, trade paperback, 2020.

   Steve Bentley, series fiction’s toughest tax accountant, was the creation of Robert Dietrich. better known by his more famous (or infamous) real name of E. Howard Hunt. Because he was employed by the CIA, Hunt used pseudonyms for much of his paperback writing in the 1950s and 1960s; the Dietrich name was used first for Dell Books and later for Lancer.

   In Murder on the Rocks, the first book in the series, Bentley is asked by the beautiful daughter of a South American ambassador to investigate the theft of an emerald worth over $ I million. Instead of the emerald, Bentley finds a corpse, and the case becomes even more complicated when the emerald is apparently returned.

   Another murder takes place; Bentley is threatened by gangsters; and the ambassador’s other daughter, even more beautiful than her sister, practically proposes to him. Eventually Bentley, functioning much like any hard-boiled private eye, sorts things out and deals out a bit of his own kind of justice.

   This is one of the better books in the Bentley series, and most of the tough narrative rings true. How tough? Here’s an example: “When Cadena was a tank sergeant on Luzon he had pulled the head off a dead Jap to win a ten-cent bet.” The Washington setting is described with easy familiarity and the characterization is adequate, although readers may be put off by Bentley’s frequent disparaging comments about homosexuals, which are entirely unrelated to the book’s plot.

   Readers looking for more of Bentley’s adventures should also enjoy End of a Stripper (1960). Perhaps Hunt’s best book as Dietrich, however, is a non-series work, Be My Victim (1956).

         ———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
   

      The Steve Bentley series —

Murder On the Rocks (1957)
The House on Q Street (1959)
End of a Stripper (1960)
Mistress to Murder (1960)
Murder on Her Mind (1960)
Angel Eyes (1961)
Calypso Caper (1961)
Curtains for a Lover (1962)
My Body (1973)

LEONARD GARDNER – Fat City. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. hardcover, 1969. Dell, paperback, 1972. Several later reprint editions have been published. Film: Columbia, 1922, directed & produced by John Huston.

   Stockton, California. Circa late 60’s. A slice of the nowhere lives of second-rate boxers in a third-rate town.

   â€œBilly Tully was a fry cook in a Main Street lunchroom. His face, a youthful pink, was lined around the mouth. There was a dent in the middle of his nose. Thin scars lay one above another at the outer edges of his brows…. It was the size of his neck that gave his clothed figure its look of strength. The result of years of exercise, of lifting ten- and twenty-pound weights with a headstrap, it had been developed for a single purpose — to absorb the shock of blows. Tully had not had a bout since his wife had left him, but last night he had hit a man…. He had thrown one punch and the man had dropped. Tully now believed he had given up his career too soon. He was still only twenty-nine.”

   What’s a retired boxer good for? At the peak, money coming in, girls like you, and like the money. The boys wanna be seen with you. To slap you on the back, to shake your hand, to buy you a drink. You’re a hero. And then suddenly it’s gone. All of it.

   So after work he heads down to the YMCA. Spies Ernie Munger, “a tall, lean, sweating youth.” He invites him to box. “Smiling tolerantly, Tully pursued him. After that he felt only desperation because everything happened so quickly: smashes on his nose, jolts against his mouth and eyes, the long body eluding him, bounding unbelievably about the ring while Tully, flinching and covering, tried to set himself to counter. In sudden rage, he lunged, swinging like a street fighter, and his leg buckled. Hissing with pain, he began hopping around the ring.”

   Asks Tully to the Ernie: “How many bouts you had?”

   â€œNone.”

   â€œYou’re shitting me. How old are you?”

   â€œEighteen.”

   â€œWell, you got it, kid. I fought Fermin Soto, I know what I’m talking about. I mean nobody used to hit me. They couldn’t hit me. They’d punch, I wouldn’t be there. You ought to start fighting.”

   â€œI don’t know. I just come down to mess around. Get a little exercise.”

   â€œDon’t waste your good years. You ought to go over to the Lido Gym and see my manager.”

   And so it begins for Ernie Munger. Billy Tully, Version 2.0.

   But for Tully “life seemed near its end. In four days he would be thirty.”

         —-

   A vivid glimpse of a grimy nowheresville, where boxing dreams gild the wilted lilies stroking the gutter. Where you come up for air a time or two. A hundred bucks in your pocket. Thinking you’re on top of the world, ma. Top of the world. Only to fall to the canvas. And rise again and again. And fall.

         —

   Like Ebert says of the film, if you like books about suffering and the burden of dreams, two big thumbs up!

MARELE DAY – The Disappearances of Madalena Grimaldi. Claudia Valentine #4. Walker, hardcover, 1996. First published in Australia by Allen & Unwin, paperback, 1994.

   I missed the first of these (*), which won a 1993 Shamus —The Last Tango of Delores Delgado.   The title deserved an award, anyway. Claudia Valentine is an Australian Pl operating out of Sydney, though a good bit of the action takes place in Melbourne.

   Claudia Valentine has just found out that her father, who deserted her mother and her when she was a child, died a derelict a decade ago. At about the same time she takes the case of a runaway and missing 15 year old child. The father is an intemperate and maybe brutal man, the mother emotionally (at least) bruised. So Claudia has two cases, though she’s only getting paid for one: find the missing girl, and a dead father she didn’t know she’d missed, but who now obsesses her.

   There are two stories here, obviously, and I’ll save you some suspense and tell you that they’ re not connected. The personal search is the primary story; indeed, I found the putative main plot to be almost an afterthought, and not that interesting. Which isn’t to say it was a bad book — it wasn’t. Day writes very readable first-person prose, and Valentine is a believable and likable character

   Still, here’s another not-too-thick “mystery” that without a sub-plot wouldn’t be a book, only partially redeemed by the fact that the subplot does involve detection.
         —

(*) Steve here. The books were apparently published out of order in the US, if at all. Here’s a list of all four books as (I assume) they appeared in Australia:

1. The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender (1988)
2. The Case of the Chinese Boxes (1990)
3. The Last Tango of Dolores Delgado (1992)
4. The Disappearances of Madalena Grimaldi (1994)

CARTER DICKSON – The Plague Court Murders. Morrow, hardcover, 1934. Reprinted several times in paperback, including: Avon, 1941. Berkley G267, 1959. Belmont-Tower, 1974. IPL, 1990. American Mystery Classics, 2021.

   The house in Plague Court had come into the hands of the Halliday family in 1833, having earlier been associated with the horrific figure of Louis Playge, a hangman’s assistant in the time of the Great Plague. For a hundred years, odd happenings, illnesses, suicides, and rumors of haunting had kept the house a white elephant that the family could neither use profitably nor get rid of.

   Now a group of people is invited to spend the night in the house. The group includes Ken Blake, the book’s narrator; Inspector Masters of Scotland Yard; the current head of the Halliday family and his fiancee; and a psychical. researcher named Darworth, who has lately gained influence over two of the Halliday women.

   The night is filled with unexplained incidents, but the climax comes when Masters breaks into the small stone house in the rear court and finds Darworth’s dead body. The door had been double-locked, from inside and from outside; there arc no other exits; and no one else is inside the house. Yet Darworth was stabbed with a dagger that once belonged to Louis Playge and was stolen the day before from a London museum.

   Blake once worked for H. M. [Sir Henry Merrivale] in Military Intelligence, and Masters is a friend of both men. This connection draws H.M. into his first recorded case. He is memorably eccentric, but not yet the full-blown comic figure of the later books in the series. The atmosphere of Plague Court, in fact, is anything but light. An air of brooding and macabre menace is set up in the early pages and expertly maintained throughout. A second grisly murder occurs before H.M. finally traps a truly surprising “least likely” murderer.

   Other H.M. cases include such ingenious locked-room murders as The Peacock Feather Murders (1937) and The Judas Window (1938), both justly regarded as classics of the form. A Graveyard to Let (1949) is set in New York and features another miraculous disappearance, in which a man dives into a swimming pool in full view of family and friends, and never reappears. The series comes to an end in a blaze of comic glory in The Cavalier’s Cup (1953), a substantial crime puzzle (although there is no murder) that reads like a combination of P. G. Wodehouse and Thorne Smith.

         ———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

   Like “Before I Die” (1947), The Golden Spiders (1953) is among Rex Stout’s few works to be adapted for the Nero Wolfe series starring William Conrad and Maury Chaykin, and interestingly, it was selected to kick off both, serving as the premiere episode (1/16/81) of the former on NBC and the two-hour pilot film (3/5/00) for the latter on A&E. The novel finds 12-year-old Pete Drossos offering to cut Wolfe in on a case: wiping windows at the corner of 35th and 9th, he sees the driver of a Caddy, wearing the titular earrings, mouth, “Help, get a cop.” Seen by the passenger apparently jabbing a gun in her ribs, he gets the license number, so Wolfe has Archie report possible illegal activity in connection with it.

   The next day, Purley Stebbins visits to say that Pete was run over on the same corner by a man in the same car, its plate taken from one stolen months ago, and is departing as Mrs. Anthea Drossos arrives. Pete’s last words — spoken to her in the ambulance—were, “Tell Nero Wolfe he got me…. Give him my money in the can,” his savings of $4.30; refusing to return or donate it to the Red Cross, Archie uses it to place an ad asking the woman to make contact with them…since, per “Black Orchids” (1941), “Contact is not a verb under this roof.” She calls to make an appointment while Cramer is there reporting that the car, found parked on 186th Street, had killed Matthew Birch in an alley by a South Street pier.

   Yet the identifying scratch on her cheek, when she offers $500 for Pete’s whereabouts, is recent enough to discredit widow Laura Fromm, who says she was having cocktails at the Churchill with lawyer Dennis Horan when he was killed. Not yet hired, Wolfe agrees to hold her $10,000 retainer and refrain from reporting her visit until the day after, warning her to “beware!” Sure enough, she becomes roadkill, so Archie leaves an account of their conversation for Cramer; in no time, Horan calls, seeking the return of her check, already certified, but Wolfe says he’ll earn it, sending Archie to the Gazette for information, with Lon Cohen revealing that she had dined with Dennis and Claire Horan before her demise.

   The other guests were Angela Wright, the Executive Secretary of Laura’s favorite cause, the Association for the Aid of Displaced Persons (aka Assadip); p.r. expert Paul Kuffner; and magazine publisher Vincent Lipscomb. Hit on the head with a wrench, she was run over by her own Caddy, and had no known connection to I.N.S special agent Birch, so to learn more about her last hours, Wolfe assigns Archie to Laura’s personal secretary, Jean Estey, but he learns little before Kuffner summons her away. When Wolfe asks the ’teers for ideas, Saul suggests posing as a displaced person to seek an Assadip/I.N.S. link, while Orrie tackles the earrings, and Fred tests the hypothesis that Birch was the man Peter saw.

   As they wind it up, Horan and James Albert Maddox, respective counsels for Assadip and Laura, appear unbidden, the latter insisting that as Laura’s executor, he could demand the check from Wolfe, who refuses to reveal what they said, and reports the visit to Cramer. Sent to stir the pot, Archie feigns an offer to spill the beans for $5,000…rejected in quick succession by Jean, Claire, Angela (with Saul slumped in the outer room), and Lipscomb. Back from the offices of Modern Thoughts, he finds Kuffner — clued in by Angela — who tries to accept it, but Wolfe declines; Jean sics the police on Archie, who tells Detective Randall and A.D.A. Mandelbaum, both of Prisoner’s Base (1952), he has broken no law.

   Julius Gerster clams up when Orrie asks about the earrings seen in his shop window, but after Archie — having seen his presumed young son — tells him about Pete, he says Laura bought them. Directed to Horan by Angela and her assistant, Chaney, the undocumented “Leopold Heim” tails the man who tries to extort $10,000 for help; Archie sends Orrie to help as Fred reports learning at bookie Danny Pincus’s bar that Lips Egan has the skinny on Birch. Mort Ervin takes Fred to Lips at Nunn’s Garage, where his cover is blown and they begin torturing him, forcing an eavesdropping Archie to intervene by disarming both thugs, and when the shooting is over, Saul and Orrie appear, having been following Egan.

   Himself tortured (which, while deserved, discomfited me, as it did Steve in his review of the novel), Lips confirms that Birch was in both car and racket, but claims he can identify neither the driver nor the woman who tipped him off to Heim with the password, “Said a spider to a fly.” As Horan appears and is held by Saul, Archie calls for instructions from Wolfe, who has them apologize and suggest that he represent Egan when the pair is taken to the brownstone, where Wolfe brings Cramer up to speed — excepting a notebook listing Egan’s “clients.” In a 180, Horan “reveals” that Laura had fingered Egan, whom he now refuses to represent, and Birch, sending him to Nunn’s to investigate and prevent scandal.

   Tossed to the wolves, Lips returns the compliment; while he is implicating Horan, Wolfe departs punctually for the plant rooms, asking that the trio be removed by an incredulous Cramer, who retaliates by taking Archie, Saul, and Fred as well, but Orrie is on an errand. Hauled before, successively, Deputy Commissioner Neary, boss Skinner, and their fellow mayoral wannabe, D.A. Bowen, Archie is also re-grilled by Mandelbaum regarding Jean, and Cramer interrupts a top-brass confab to say that Horan has been tentatively identified as Pete’s killer. Wolfe summons all and sundry, plus three plainclothes policewomen, to the office to earn his fee, and announces that the murderer was actually a woman in drag.

   Having gotten wind of the blackmailing, and perhaps overheard the password, Laura saw the earrings in the window, gave them to the woman she suspected, and retrieved them to impersonate her, not knowing that she had killed Birch and, fearing he could identify her, Pete. Fetched by Orrie (whose first name, later contradicted in a typical inconsistency, is given here as Orvald), Bernard Levine picks Jean out of Wolfe’s policewoman-enhanced line-up as the woman who bought a man’s felt hat and suit in his Newark clothing store. She claims to have done so on behalf of Claire, whose husband and Lips blow the whistle on Jean; when the dust has settled Wolfe burns the list of the displaced blackmail victims.

   The only episode of Nero Wolfe directed by Michael O’Herlihy, “The Golden Spiders” was adapted by Peter Nasco and David Karp, the latter credited as “Wallace Ware,” as he was on “Murder by the Book” (3/13/81). George Voskovec, playing Fritz opposite Lee Horsley’s Archie, was a scientist in the unsold 1959 Kurt Kasznar/William Shatner Nero Wolfe pilot, “Count the Man Down,” as was John McLiam, later seen in Conrad’s “Death and the Dolls” (4/10/81). Best known as Colonel Pickering in My Fair Lady on stage (1956) and screen (1964), Robert Coote played his final role as Theodore, and George Wyner, cast as Saul, had a recurring one as Murray Chase on Horsley’s Matt Houston.

   An Oscar-winner for Tom Jones (1963), series composer John Addison reportedly called his equally whimsical theme for Murder, She Wrote his “old-age pension.” His feature-film credits include Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966) — abruptly replacing a score by Bernard Herrmann, which ended their legendary collaboration — and A Bridge Too Far (1977), depicting a battle in which he had participated with the British XXX Corps tank force. Katherine Justice, cast as Angela (now Bell), also appeared with Conrad in three episodes of Cannon; Dennis Horan is now Michael Doran (John Petlock), the p.r. man is Barry Green (James Parkes), and Paul Kessler (Liam Sullivan) is a colleague of Angela’s.

   Wolfe displays amused tolerance as Pete (David Hollander) — foisted upon him by Archie as payback for a childish outburst at Fritz — reports his brief encounter with Jean (Carlene Watkins) and Birch. Now no longer fatal, the hit and run puts him into the I.C.U., yet it’s “touch and go,” per Archie, preserving the poignancy as his mother (Rhoda Gemignani) brings his inflation-adjusted $12.35.

   Posing as Jean, Laura (Penelope Windust) says that “her” plea for help was a misunderstanding and she wants to thank Pete but, learning of the attack, leaves Wolfe with no check, only her promise to return the next day; after a fatal fall from the balcony of her apartment, she is identified by fiancé Doran and Jean.

   When Cramer (Allan Miller) reveals the murder of Birch, who matches Pete’s description of the passenger, his habit of annoying Wolfe by “get[ting] out of a chair [using] just his legs, never his arms or his hands,” is noted, as it is in the novel. Faux-turncoat Archie is rejected by Jean and Angela; in the Assadip garage, his “trusty burglar alarm” (a match placed between hood and body) forewarns him of the car bomb planted by L.A. hit man Joseph Moore, who then attempts to silence Pete — also anticipated by Wolfe — and dies in a struggle with Archie. Saul infiltrates the “vile scheme to smuggle the riffraff of the world into this country — the murderers, the terrorists, the fascists — for exorbitant fees.”

   Saul’s timely rescue from Frank Egan and an unnamed friend in the garage is interrupted by Cramer, who has tailed Archie ever since fruitlessly telling Wolfe to “lay back” due to federal pressure. Convening those concerned, Wolfe turns Angela, Barry, and Paul over to “the men of the 18th [Precinct]” for arranging the entrance of the refugees; fingered as the murderer, who conspired with Birch to blackmail them and killed him after a falling out, Jean claims Laura fell accidentally as they’d argued because “she was going to leave me.” Befitting Wolfe’s somewhat softer side on the series, the episode ends as he returns to the brownstone after leaving a check and orchid for his hospitalized young “partner.”

   Neither the director of The Golden Spiders, Bill Duke, nor scenarist Paul Monash carried over onto the ensuing series, but producer Susan Murdoch and composer Michael Small did, while two of the regulars were recast, as Saul Rubinek switched roles from Saul here (replaced by Conrad Dunn) to Lon Cohen (replacing Gerry Quigley).

   In a parallel acting career, Duke appeared with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando (1985) and Predator (1987); Monash was the respective producer and writer of the Stephen King adaptations Carrie (1976) and Salem’s Lot (1979). Elizabeth Brown (cast as Claire) and Philip Craig (Maddox) each made their only series appearances in “Disguise for Murder” (6/17/01).

   Featured were soon-to-be repertory players Gary Reineke (as Horan), Beau Starr (Lips), Nancy Beatty (Mrs. Drossos), Nicky Guadagni (Angela), Hrant Alianak (Gerstner [sic]), Peter Mensah (Mort), and Robert Bockstael (Kuffner). As Archie (Timothy Hutton) sits at his typewriter in an opening montage of the brownstone, with expository narration, we see the portrait of Sherlock Holmes hanging above his desk, mentioned as far back as The Rubber Band (1936). The sage vs. saffron and tarragon kerfuffle, almost verbatim, deftly introduces Fritz (Colin Fox); the day after Pete (Robert Clark) reports on Birch (Dwayne McLean) and Jean (Larissa Laskin), Purley (R.D. Reid) brings news of his brutal murder.

   The ad in the Mirror (replacing the Gazette as Lon’s employer) elicits the visit by Cramer (Bill Smitrovich), revealing the Birch/Drossos link, with Laura (Mimi Kuzyk) hard on his heels; the scratch is omitted, as is Lipscomb, and Wolfe intuits her imposture. Dressed as a mortician, getting him in to Jean, Archie returns as Wolfe tells Orrie (Trent McMullen), Fred (Fulvio Cecere), and Saul, “I resent the assumption that those who come to seek my help may be murdered with impunity.” Saul’s encounters with Angela at the Association of European Refugees (AER), Horan, and Lips are depicted, rather than merely related in the book, while young Irving (Brian Miranda) is explicitly identified as the jeweler’s son.

   The top brass confronting Archie is consolidated in the person of Neary, now “promoted” to Commissioner and given a first name, Walter (James Purcell). Wolfe’s final gathering, where he observes, “This is the first time I’ve undertaken to single out a murderer from a group of mostly strangers” before producing surprise witness Levine (Jack Newman, later seen in “Poison à la Carte” [5/26/02]), is true to Stout, as Chaykin invests his retelling of the crimes with dramatic tension. Monash replaces the burning of Egan’s notebook with an effective coda in which, because Wolfe and Pete were “partners” on the case, Anthea is presented with half of Laura’s fee by Archie, given Wolfe’s aversion to crying women.

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: Three Witnesses

Edition cited —

      The Golden Spiders: Bantam (1955)

Online sources —

JAMES GOULD COZZENS – Castaway. Random House, hardcover, June 1934. Bantam 1007, paperback, 1953. Reprinted several times since.

   Mr. Lecky finds himself in the basement of a nine-floor department store. It is night. He is hiding. There may be others. He’s not sure.

   If there are others, he’s sure they mean to kill him. Best to keep in hiding until he can get his bearings and set up a safer spot to make camp.

   Finally, taking a chance, he emerges. He sees no one. The coast is clear.

   He goes from floor to floor, getting the necessities. Canned sardines, a preserved ham, a tin of biscuits, winter coats, a bedroom suite pushed up to door to the restroom, a shotgun, ammunition, a kitchen knife, an axe, flashlights, batteries, candles, a camp stove with paraffin canisters, scattered toy locomotives for an alarm. A stuffed rag doll for companionship.

   He’s got everything he needs. Everything in the world.

   One day he spies another man, animalistic, slurping the contents of a hastily pried can of sardines. His back is turned to Mr. Lecky. Mr. Lecky picks up his shotgun and shoots, shakily, only wounding his prey, who darts across the store, floor to floor, the most dangerous game.

   There’s a feeling that perhaps we’re in some post-apocalyptic world, that perhaps Mr. Lecky is one of the last survivors of this forsaken realm.

   But maybe not.

   We begin with a lengthy quote from Robinson Crusoe:

   â€œHow infinitely good that Providence is which has provided, in its government of mankind, such narrow bounds to his sight and knowledge of things; and though he walks in the midst of so many thousand dangers, the sight of which, if discovered to him, would distract his mind and sink his spirits, he is kept serene and calm by having the events of things hid from his eyes, and knowing nothing of the dangers which surround him!”

   To Cozzens this quote must be a great irony. Imagine, if you will, we had no enemies at all. If there were no dangers. All our needs provided for. We wouldn’t believe it. No enemies? No dangers? We’d have to invent them.

   We’ve met the enemy and he is us.

         —–

   It’s a pretty compelling, short read. Just over 100 pages. But it wasn’t breezy because of Cozzens’s unique sentence construction. A bit old-timey, maybe. Plodding. Uncertain.

   And no dialogue.

   So it’s interesting that Sam Peckinpah bought the rights and wrote a screenplay. Hard to imagine what the movie would look like. So much of the action happens in Mr. Lecky’s head. And again, no words spoken. So, as written, could be a silent movie. Except for gunshots and shrieks. As of 2018, there were still plans to make the film. Though, alas, too late for Peckinpah.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/castaway-sam-peckinpah-planned-direct-1135342/

   I read it because it was mentioned in David Madden’s Proletarian Writers of the Thirties as the book “which caught perhaps better than any other single work (being untroubled by ideology) the mood of the times.” Those times being the Depression. Now I certainly don’t know anything about the veracity of that statement. However, there is certainly a mood presented. Of paranoid isolation. And if that was the mood of those times, then my oh my how things haven’t changed!

DESTINATION MURDER. RKO Radio Pictures, 1950. Joyce Mackenzie, Stanley Clements, Hurd Hatfield, Albert Dekker, Myrna Dell, James Flavin, John Dehner, Suzette Harbin, Franklyn Farnum. Story & screenplay: Don Martin. Director: Edward L. Cahn. Streaming online here at the Internet Archive.

   When her father is killed in his doorway by a messenger boy, a young woman (Joyce Mackenzie) thinks that the police are working too slowly on the case, and she decides to some detective work on her own. Feeling the cops aren’t showing enough interest in the fellow she picked out of a police lineup, she begins a phony romance with him.

   This leads to her getting a job as a hatcheck girl at the club run by a known gangster (Albert Dekker), which of course gets her into even more danger, not to mention yet another romantic entanglement, this time with the club’s manager (Hurd Hatfield). Even though the movie is only 70 minutes long, this short summary includes only the minimum of the story line, not including a tremendous twist about two-thirds of the way through.

   And I do have to mention the brassy blonde presence of Myrna Dell as the gangster’s girl, or so he thinks. She definitely has different ideas about that.

   Joyce MacKenzie, a new face to me, is a brunette in the Jane Wyatt or Barbara Hale mode, while Stanly Clement as a wise-ass but mostly dopey killer-for-hire, went on to lead the Bowery Boys after Leo Gorcey retired. He was probably typecast in many other similar roles.

   The ending falls a bit flat, or so it seemed to me, but otherwise the players all had some name value and turned in more than adequate performances. No weak links in this one.

   The film itself is sometimes lumped into the film noir category, but if so, it’s only marginally. It’s a straight forward detective thriller in the nightclub and other nightlife vein, and for the time, it was (and is) one of the better ones.