RON FAUST – Tombs of Blue Ice. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1974. No paperback edition.
During a mountain-climbing expedition in the French Alps, a sudden storm breaks and one of the two companions of American Robert Holmes is killed by a bolt of lightning; the other climber, a German named Dieter Streicher, is seriously injured. Unable to move Streicher, Holmes returns to the village of Chamonix to report the incident and request immediate help for the wounded man.
A search party is sent out to the high mountain ledge where the accident occurred, but surprisingly finds no sign of Streicher, alive or dead. What could have happened to the man? Could he have managed to leave the ledge under his own power, for some unknown reason? Or has he been a victim of foul play?
Streicher is the son of a vicious Nazi Occupation leader, and there are many in the little French valley who have good reason to want him dead: among them a woman named Christiane Renaud, whom Holmes desires; and her stepfather, the bitter old mountain guide Martigny.
Holmes sets out on his own to find Streicher and the truth about the man’s disappearance. Most of the novel involves his determined quest, and most of it is harrowing, especially Holmes’s descent into a huge crevasse, literally a tomb of blue ice. This is high-tech adventure writing, with a simple plot, strong characters, and evocative prose that includes memorable descriptive passages about mountain climbing and the glacial Alpine wilderness.
Ron Faust excels at outdoor crime/adventure fiction of all types, as his other novels prove: The Wolf in the Clouds(1977) which is about a pair of U.S. forest rangers and a madman on the loose in the Colorado Rockies; The Burning Sky (1978), which deals with a deadly big-game hunt in a mountain valley in New Mexico (and which John D. MacDonald called “strong, tough … with that flavor of inevitability that seasons the good ones”); and three paperback originals with Mexican settings: The Long Count (1979), Death Fires (1980), and Nowhere to Run(1981).
BASIL HEATTER – The Dim View. Farrar Straus & Co., hardcover, 1946. Signet #668, paperback, 1948. Popular Library #602, paperback, 1954.
Jim Masters (like Basil Heatter), is skipper of a PT boat in New Guinea in WWII. He gets blown up, ass over tit, and wakes up recuperating in Australia.
A young, pretty barmaid falls in love with him, and he with her, as much as he can after what he’s been thru. He’s been thru enough and served long enough, he can get discharged if he wants.
He talks it over with an Navy psychiatrist, German Jewish defector, Dr. Schwartz. “’It is a bad thing to run away,’ Schwartz said. ‘It may not seem important at the time but later there is always a little soft spot, a spot of fear. It is like cutting open a fine, healthy-looking fruit and finding inside a little spot of rottenness. Unless the rotten spot can be cut out quickly, it grows bigger and finally the whole thing must be thrown away.’”
Masters replies “That spot is in me. I guess it was always in me way down. But today it started to spread. It’s rotten, al right, I can taste the rottenness in my mouth.”
How do you cut out the rotten spot of fear once it begins to metastasize? Dr. Schwartz says the most effective way “is simply to go back to whatever produced the fear and to face it and try to master it. I say this is more dangerous because it is a gamble. If you win, the fear will be gone but if you fail then the fear will master you completely and you will be broken and done for.”
So to the dismay of Masters’s cohorts and his lady friend, he decides to return to the New Guinea front rather than be discharged safely to California, to once again captain a PT boat against constant bombardment from above and torpedoing from below.
At 155 pages told in wonderfully clipped language, the story clips along at quite a clip. This is a first novel, and it feels like Heatter put a lot of himself in it. Achingly authentic, the contrast between the languid pace of the Australian recuperation and the Autobahn-esque speed of war quickens one’s pulse as the story unfolds.
Nero Wolfe on Page and (Small U.S.) Screen:
“Eeny Meeny Murder Mo”
by Matthew R. Bradley
The Final Deduction (1961) sees the return of Ben Dykes, head of the Westchester County detectives in the Zeck trilogy, and introduces their D.A. du jour, Clark Hobart, and Captain Saunders of the State Police; Ben earns a “Competent and admirable” from Wolfe, whose weight is given as 285 pounds. Stout is inconsistent about Archie’s weekly poker game with Lon and the ’teers, now held on Wednesday, not Saturday as in “The Next Witness” (1955), with Saul as rotating, not regular, host. Ditto Archie’s Ohio birthplace, given in Too Many Women(1947) as Canton and in “The Cop-Killer” (1951) as Chillicothe, invoked here when he recalls his Aunt Anna’s chicken pie.
Wolfe pledges temporary silence to his client, Althea Vail, whose husband, Jimmy, and secretary, Dinah Utley, are murdered after conspiring to fake his kidnapping and commit tax fraud … the titular deduction being that she killed them. To keep his promise, he flees the brownstone with Archie—avoiding Cramer by taking overnight refuge in the home of Doc Vollmer while his son, Bill, is away at school — and, in appreciation, sends orchids to Vollmer and his assistant, Helen Gillard. Archie hands Lon his “fattest scoop” ever, plus a “second hot exclusive” within three days, while oft-mentioned A.D.A. Mandelbaum has suddenly become “Mandel,” and will apparently remain so in all subsequent appearances.
Two of the novellas in Homicide Trinity (1962) were serialized in The Saturday Evening Post — “Counterfeit for Murder” (as “The Counterfeiter’s Knife,” January 14-28, 1961) and “Death of a Demon” (June 10-24, 1961); “Eeny Meeny Murder Mo” bowed in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine #220 (March 1962). Although Stout rarely revised his work, “Assault on a Brownstone,” a radically different early draft of “Counterfeit,” appeared in the posthumous collection Death Times Three(1985). The “Demon,” Barry Hazen, uses his p.r. business as a front for blackmail until one of the victims he tortures puts a hole in him, and tries to frame Mrs. Hazen with the very gun he used to kill her father years ago.
“Counterfeit” opens with back-to-back visits by showbiz landlady Hattie Annis — told to return when Wolfe descends from the plant rooms, entrusting Archie with a package for which a hit-and-run driver wings her — and aspiring actress Tamiris Baxter, a concerned tenant to whom he admits nothing. Discovered in Hattie’s parlor, the package contains c. $10,000 in new $20 bills; after stonewalling Albert Leach of the Treasury Department’s Secret Service Division, asking about both women, Archie confirms it as phony. But on arrival at the house with Hattie, who hates cops and hopes to split a newspaper’s reward for finding a counterfeiter, he spots Tammy on the parlor’s floor with a knife in her chest.
Turns out she was an undercover T-woman, the counterfeiter/killer presumed to be one of Hattie’s other four tenants, who come to the brownstone en masse at her behest when her intransigence gets her arrested. After a turf battle over confiscation of the bills, Leach’s Federal court order trumping Cramer’s, Archie talks with D.A. Macklin. This took a hard left seven pages into “Assault,” in which the hit and run is fatal, Tammy lives — and even has romantic potential, and Leach’s titular search for the package Archie cached in Grand Central piques Wolfe into action; Stout’s biographer, John McAleer, observes that Hattie 2.0 engages them in “some of the liveliest dialogue to be found anywhere in the corpus.”
In “Eeny,” Bertha Aaron comes seeking aid: the private secretary to Lamont Otis saw an unidentified younger partner of Otis, Edey, Heydecker, and Jett meeting secretly with the opposing client, Rita Sorell. Not surprisingly, Wolfe — up in the plant rooms — refuses to touch a case even tangentially involving Rita and Morton’s divorce, so he tells Archie to get rid of her, but on returning to the office, he finds somebody has beaten him to it. She has been strangled with Wolfe’s own necktie, left on his desk after he got a spot on it, and is presumed, while alone in the office, to have intercepted a call from said partner, who’d followed her, offered to explain … and opportunistically killed her once she admitted him.
Otis arrives with associate Ann Paige, who is asked to wait in — and decamps through the window of — the front room while he reads the statement Archie gave Cramer. He agrees to help with background on Frank Edey (drafted the Sorrells’ marriage agreement), Miles Heydecker (represented gold-digger/ex-actress Rita, née Ramsey, when sued by a former agent), and Gregory Jett (a spendthrift, rumored to be interested in Ann). Archie writes a card claiming that Rita was seen in the lunchroom, hoping that she can be smoked out of the Churchill and followed by the ’teers; he returns home to find Jett, who was tipped off by Ann, his alleged fiancée, and thinks Bertha might have known of a dalliance with Rita.
Just after Edey and Heydecker arrive to complete the set, Rita calls and “admits” she was with Jett, so Wolfe tells them she named the man, although “not satisfied of her veracity,” if not who. “We knew that one of three men had committed murder, and how and when. Okay, which one? Eeny meeny murder mo”; Cramer and Purley arrive with warrants for them both, leaving in defeat after Wolfe calls Parker and their bluff. He then arranges for the other interested parties to be listening in from the front room as he confronts Rita with the truth — it was Heydecker, not Jett, who met with her, followed Bertha to Wolfe’s, and phoned Rita to warn her of possible exposure, while Rita herself committed the murder…
“Eeny, Meeny, Murder, Moe” (sic; 6/3/01) and the subsequent episode of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, “Disguise for Murder” (6/17/01) — both directed by John L’Ecuyer, here making his series debut, and adapted by Sharon Elizabeth Doyle — were attached for international broadcast and DVD in a faux telefilm, Wolfe Stays In. As with “Door to Death” (6/4/01) and “Christmas Party” (7/1/01), yoked as Wolfe Goes Out, the novellas were spaced years apart. Doyle links these two with original material about those poker games, now played on Thursday with Lon (Saul Rubinek), Orrie (Trent McMullen), and Saul (Conrad Dunn), over which Archie (Timothy Hutton) explains Wolfe’s (Maury Chaykin) sparerib mishap.
Bertha (Christine Brubaker) says she fears the news might kill Otis (George Plimpton), who is 75 and has a bad heart, and that when she’d confronted the “traitor,” his reaction precluded an innocent explanation, hence her visit. Of course, Cramer (Bill Smitrovich) is convinced that he withheld the name she refused to provide until or unless Wolfe took the case, while Archie insists that, even absent a client or a fee, “this aggression will not stand,” per the Dude. With Angela (Janine Theriault) sequestered, Wolfe tells Otis, “My self-esteem has been severely injured,” warning him against an attempt at damage control by shielding the killer, but Otis insists he will not put the firm’s interests ahead of justice.
Invoked but never onstage in the novella, Morton (Howard Hoover) is briefly shown here in flashbacks with Rita (Kari Matchett); she “wanted more than half, and … had carefully collected evidence of certain enterprises” of his, which any of the partners could provide. Chaykin beautifully depicts how, due to his rancor at the killer, “I can’t think clearly. My brain-processes are muddled,” and he even declines Fritz’s (Colin Fox) offer of food. Jett (Robert Bockstael), Edey (Wayne Best), and Hydecker (sic; David Schurmann) all come to the brownstone after grilling by the authorities, but Wolfe considers their alibis for the time of the lunchroom meeting worthless, and they were in conference during the murder.
Up next:The Mother Hunt
Editions cited–
The Final Deduction: Bantam (1963) Homicide Trinity: Bantam (1970) Death Times Three: Bantam (1985)
JOHN D. MacDONALD – The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything. Gold Medal s1259, paperback original, 1962. Reprinted several times. Made-for-TV movie with Robert Hays and Pam Dawber, 1980.
Kirby Winter’s uncles had died and instead of the millions Kirby expected to inherit, he received only a gold watch as a keepsake. But he finds that there are others, quite unscrupulous, who believe that he must at least have received the secret of his uncle’s success. And in fact he has; the owner of the watch has the ability to stop normal time and t o exist in that stopped world for up to an hour, free to act without fear of exposure or reprisal.
Such a secret carries with it a tremendous responsibility, and Kirby’s uncle had set up conditions in his will to guarantee that his nephew would have to quickly show that he was worthy. During his adventures, he meets Bonny Lee, and it is his love for the uninhibited singer-dancer that helps change him from the poor ninny he was, afraid of women and life.
Humorous, wild, sexy, science-fantasy: not to be believed, but wouldn’t it be great? Of course moral philosophy is emphasized: responsibility and other obligations restrict the honest user, but then the watch should also not be used solemnly, but, ah, frivolously or happily. Removing bathing suits, for example, rather than killing folks.
Which is precisely what happens. Happily. And justice triumphs.
WILLIAM FAULKNER – Knight’s Gambit. Random House, hardcover, 1949. Story collection. Reprinted many times since, including Signet #825, paperback, 1950.
Nobel Prize-winner William Faulkner wrote six criminous short stories featuring Southern lawyer Gavin Stevens and narrated by Stevens’s nephew and youthful Watson, Chick Mallison. Set in legendary Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, these tales are in classic Faulkner style and are peopled with characters reminiscent of his other work:
Southerners who are not stereotypical but representative of Mississippi at the middle of the twentieth century. Stevens, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard, is a quiet, contemplative man whose methods of detection are often highly unorthodox. But in spite of his erudition, he is no outsider in his native territory; he is equally at home within the confines of his study or out in the hills where moonshine is made. Chick, the nephew, is properly admiring for a Watson, but his more naive questions stem from his youth, rather than from the thick-headedness found in many a narrator of this type, thus making him all the more likable.
The stories are as slow-moving and gentle on the surface as the country in which they take place; but as in much of Faulkner’s work, there is an undercurrent of raw emotion and violence held in check. In the title (and longest) story, Stevens deals with murderous jealousy within one of the county’s great plantation families (whose fortune was founded on bootleg liquor); “Monk” is the story of a retarded man who commits what at first seems an inexplicable crime. And “Smoke” is about one of those feuds between family members for which the South is famous; when the murder of a judge results from his validation of a will, Stevens uses a simple but artful device to literally smoke out the killer.
In these and the three other stories–‘Hand upon the Waters,” “Tomorrow,” and “An Error in Chemistry”– lawyer Stevens exhibits not only great deductive powers and resourcefulness but also great humanity. As he himself states, “I am more interested in justice and human beings than truth.” This concern, coupled with Faulkner’s deft characterization of the people he knew so well, make these stories first-rate tales of crime and detection.
Although many critics have dismissed the Gavin Stevens stories as inferior to Faulkner’s other works, they are as inventive and finely crafted as the author’s mainstream fiction, and in no way should be considered a departure from his high literary standards. As Ellery Queen aptly puts it in Queen’s Quorum, “That a writer of Faulkner’s now international stature should unashamedly write detective stories proves once again – -if such proof is still needed by literary snobs — that the detective story has long since come of age.”
JEAN-PATRICK MANCHETTE – Three to Kill. City Lights, paperback, 2002. Translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Also: A French crime film released in 1980 as Trois hommes à abattre(Three Men to Kill), directed by Jacques Deray, starring Alain Delon with Dalila Di Lazzaro, based on the novel Le Petit Bleu de la côte ouest by Jean-Patrick Manchette.
Georges Gerfaut is a middle sales manager for a tech firm. He’s doing pretty well, drives a Mercedes, has a pretty wife, nice kids.
He’s driving home on the highway and comes upon single car accident. The man in the car is bleeding. Gerfaut makes a split second decision. Do I stop? Or do I mind my own business and keep going.
He stops. He helps the injured driver into the back seat of the Mercedes and drops him off at the hospital.
Then he goes home.
What Gerfaut doesn’t know is that the man was not in a single car accident. Rather, the man was shot by hit men in a passing car.
Gerfaut takes his family on vacation at the beach. Once there, the assassins make an attempt on Gerfaut’s life, and try to drown him in the sea.
Gerfault goes on the run and tries to figure out what the hell is going on.
Once he gets his bearings and sees the score, there’s only three things to do. Kill the hitmen and the man who hired them. That makes three.
RAWHIDE. Fox, 1951. Tyrone Power, Susan Hayward, Hugh Marlowe, Dean Jagger, Edgar Buchanan, Jack Elam, and George Tobias. Written by Dudley Nichols. Directed by Henry Hathaway.
Not to be confused with the Television series, though I suspect there will be plenty of comments about it anyway, and if anyone here feels compelled to talk about Clint Eastwood rather than Henry Hathaway, all I can say is, “Go ahead, spoil my day!”
Westerns aren’t generally popular with women, but Kay watches them with me, and the other day we had a nice talk about “Town Westerns” and “Range Westerns.”
In Town Westerns the action is generally confined to a modestly-built community, and may be more concerned with social interactions than physical conflict. The best-known Town Western is High Noon; more noteworthy examples include Fury at Showdown, Rio Bravo, Fury at Gunsight Pass, Star in the Dust and Day of Fury. — does this suggest a certain pent-up hostility?
Anyway, “Range (I use the term loosely, to include any wide-open space or spaces) Westerns” take place largely outdoors (Ride Lonesome has no interiors at all.) and though passions may be deep, and resolutions complex, they are generally expressed by physical action. Think Winchester 73,The Big Trail, Wagonmaster, The Naked Spur …
There are hybrids, variations and freaks of cinema, of course: Day of the Outlawstarts as a Town Western and turns into a Range Western. The town of Terror in a Texas Town barely exists; cattle drives and Conestoga caravans cross the studio sets of Showdown and The Prairie …
… which brings me to the “Room Western” and — at last! — Rawhide.
There are plenty of exteriors in Rawhide, evoking the endless wastes and the fragile isolation of a stagecoach swing-station, but all the important action takes place in two rooms of a single building: the main room/dining hall where the bad guys quarrel, plot mayhem, and gull the unwary; and a single bedroom where Tyrone Power and Susan Hayward quarrel, plot escape, and try to turn the tables on their captors.
This is a film of masterful tension, ably framed by Dudley Nichols’ teetering screenplay and Henry Hathaway’s firm direction. I should also mention Milton Krasner’s stunning deep-focus photography, capably limning a distant horizon without missing a single snaggled tooth of Jack Elam’s maniacal grin in the foreground.
Jack Elam is even more villainous than usual here, but he’s only part of a very effectively used cast. Tyrone Power and Susan Hayward convey fear, frustration and convincing strength quite well, and Dean Jagger is engagingly funny as an outlaw who’s only crooked because he’s not smart enough to go straight.
But pride of place goes to a surprisingly intense Hugh Marlowe, best remembered for dull parts in exciting films like The Day The Earth Stood Stilland Night and the City. But here, as the head of a makeshift gang of inept and unreliable outlaws, coping with unwilling hostages, desperately trying to hold his plan of robbery and murder together, he’s… well you just can’t take your eyes off him, he has that kind of Screen Presence.
I’ll end by saying this is sometimes considered an unofficial remake of a 1930s gangster movie, Let ’Em Have It. Well maybe, but the finished product resembles it no more than Stagecoachlooks like Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif.”
ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE – August 1967. Overall rating: ***½.
HUGH PENTECOST “The False Face Murder,” A rejected suitor wearing a mask is killed, and everyone is ready to assume the guilt. Would seem to have Meaning, but it all ends as typical detective story. (4)
THE GORDONS “The Terror Racket.” Short novel. First published in The American Magazine, June 1953, as “Case File — F.B.I.: The Faceless Killer.” An anonymous caller threatens a widow’s daughter with violence unless he is paid $10,000. The FBI is called in for protection, and they work quickly to decide which of the mother’s acquaintances is the extortionist. Marred by sloppy writing: the roles of the characters are introduced without introduction, and with no real purpose; and by bad writing: the rookie agent who has to be explained everything, (3)
EDWARD D, HOCH “The Spy Who Worked for Peace.” Rand of Double-C discovers that a defector’s secretary is actually the spy, One of the better ones in the series. (4)
JOHN LUTZ “Quid Pro Quo.” A computer service arranges murders for a price. (3)
AMY. M. GRAINGERHALL (NORMA SCHIER) “Mr, Copable, Criminologist.” Anagram pastiche of Mr. Campion. Otherwise not bad. (1)
MARGERY ALINGHAM “The Chocolate Dog.” First appeared in The Daily Mail, 07 June 1939, as “The Dog Day,” Not a mystery story, but one of British charm. Mr. Campion. (2)
STEVEN PETERS “George Washington, Detective.” First story. Washington traps a spy just before crossing the Delaware, Interesting, (3)’
STEVEN PETERS “The Backyard Dig.” An amateur archaeologist’s discovery. Obvious with a clever twist, (4)
PATRICIA ANN HOLLISTER “The Woman Who Couldn’t Wear Red.” First story. At least her husband didn’t think so. (1)
JULIAN SYMONS “The Main Chance,” First US printing. A con-man gets caught up in a truly fantastic scheme for murder, (5)
BOB BRISTOW “No Margin for Error.” A woman has a secret way of knowing when her husband is out with other women. (4)
H. R. F. KEATING “The Justice Boy.” Novelette. A pet robin is killed at a British boys’ prep school, and an investigation is begun. The appeal is that of reading details of the background. (3)
JOHN McPARTLAND – I’ll See You in Hell. Gold Medal #571, paperback original, 1956. Cover art by Barye Phillips. Centipede Press, hardcover, 2020.
Lee Farr and Pearl Dobson are partners. They met in the war. Now they co-own a crop duster.
Then Pearl Dobson reads a story in the paper about the symptoms of uranium poisoning. And something rings a bell. Back where Pearl comes from, nowheresville Arkansas, there were deaths a long time ago that happened around Witch Cave. With the same symptoms! Maybe there’s uranium in them there hills! We’ll be rich, dagnabbit!
So Pearl heads out to Arkansas to follow his million dollar uranium dreams. And he’ll call up Lee as soon as he knows something for sure.
Lee finally gets a call — and sure enough, Pearl’s excited! He’s found the mother lode! Come on Lee! Stop what you’re doing and come hither to the Ozarks stat!
So Lee heads over to the Ozarks and up to Pearl Dobson’s cabin. But when he gets there: “He found the bodies one by one. The dog first.” Inside the cabin he finds Pearl’s grandparents, executed, and Pearl sitting in a chair, ensnared by ropes, tortured to death.
Lee reports the deaths to the sheriff’s deputy, who immediately decides that Lee is guilty of the murders. And the deputy, in this here town, is judge, jury and executioner.
Lee escapes custody and now he’s on the run, with nary a friend in nowheresville. He’s gotta find the killer before he gets killed first.
HENRY FARRELL – How Awful About Allan. Holt Rinehart & Winston, hardcover, 1963. Avon, paperback, date? Also a 1970 American made-for-television horror psychological thriller film directed by Curtis Harrington.
Everyone in his neighborhood is saying it: “How awful about Allan!” Allan Colleigh, the rather dim bulb in an otherwise brilliant family, has had a shattering mental breakdown following his father’s death in a fire from which Alan could not save him. One of the symptoms is hysterical blindness, and now that Allan has been released from the mental hospital, his admirable sister, Katherine, must shoulder the burden of caring for and supporting him in the old half-burned house where their father died.
Money is short, and when Katherine suggests they take in a boarder from the university where she works, Allan tries to cooperate. But there is something about the student that disturbs him — perhaps his whispery voice, caused by a childhood accident — and Allan suffers a relapse.
At first he tries to control himself — after all, he’s made so much progress with Dr. Greenough. the psychiatrist who has taken him on for Katherine’s sake. But then he begins to feel he’s being watched, being spied on. His friend and neighbor Olive Dearborn has never seen the student, and since Allan can’t see him, he isn’t sure whom he is dealing with.
When he hears that Katherine’s old boyfriend, Eric Walters, has returned to town, he’s sure Katherine has brought Eric into the house, disguised as the mild-mannered college student. And soon he begins to believe that Eric and Katherine are trying to kill him.
The story is an exercise in mounting paranoia and terror, more frightening because Allan’s fears seem to be backed up by fact. And the resolution, while it is something he has repressed all along, is more frightening than any of his paranoid imaginings. The resolution, however, is not quite the end of the story, and the ultimate climax is sure to shock you more than what has gone before.
Do read this — but don’t read it while alone!
Farrell is an expert at inspiring terror in the hearts of his readers, as evidenced by his well-known Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1960), which was the basis for the chilling 1962 film starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. The author of numerous TV and film scripts, Farrell has also written the novels Death on the Sixth Day (1961) and Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me(1967).
