DAVID GOODIS – Retreat from Oblivion. E.P. Dutton, hardcover, 1939. To be published in paperback by Stark House Press, paperback, October, 2024. (See comments.)
Peyton Place meets WWII. Extramarital affairs between friends and neighbors in the rising middle bracket of Manhattan, circa 1939.
Herb and wife Jean, they’re a pretty bad scene. Jean’s screwing Herb’s friend Paul. And frankly, Jean dear, he don’t give a damn.
Then Jean gets preggers and Paul heads with her to China to become a fighter pilot against the Japanese. Which is good for the reader because Goodis can really write a good pulpy aviation yarn (given his record of selling air adventure stories to the aviation pulps).
As Jean absconds with Paul, Herb’s on the make. He’s feeling reckless (was just at a go-kart track with a list of rules including ‘no wreckless driving’. The ‘w’ in ‘wreckless’ still visible through the white-out). Herb heads to Harlem and starts following a very attractive Italian looking girl. She stops and recommends the prostitutes one street over. He says he just needs someone to talk to. And it turns out, so does she.
Her name’s Dorothy. Her husband is fighting the fascists in Spain. So now Herb feels guilty and can’t sleep with her. Even though she first tells him it’s okay and later begs for it.
More good news for the reader. Dorothy’s hubbie being in the Spanish Civil War allows Goodis to write alternating chapters teleporting the reader from Peyton Place to the war in Spain with plenty of battle scenes for the losing cause.
So that’s the picture. Peyton Place melodrama montaged with wartime atrocities.
What it could have amounted is a critique of the hypocritical Manhattan high-life where everybody’s trying to screw their neighbor in every way they can, whilst elsewhere people are heroically facing death and destruction.
Yet when the time comes to hammer this point home, Goodis settles for the Hollywood ending. Perhaps seeking a Hollywood ending for himself, picturing himself in pictures, retreating from the existential oblivion that would hound him til the end.
IF SCIENCE FICTION. August 1967. Editor: Frederik Pohl. Cover artist: Gray Morrow. Overall rating: ***
JAMES BLISH “Faust Aleph-Null.” Serial: part 1 of 3. See report following that of the October 1967 (yet to come).
ROGER DEELEY “The Trouble with Vegans.” First story. They are very clever smugglers. An old joke retold. (3)
KEITH LAUMER “Clear As Mud.” Novelette. Retief and Magnan are Terran representatives on a planet where mud volcanoes are a bad problem. And the complications arise. Fun. (3)
FRED SABERHAGEN “The Winged Helmet.” Novelette. Sequel to “Stone Man” in the May issue of Worlds of Tomorrow. The berserkers’ attacks through time are concentrated on individuals who control a great deal of the planet’s destiny. King Ay of pre-civilized times is killed, and a replacement has to be sent to maintain history. The ending is not satisfying; there may be more to come. (3)
BURT K. FILER “Paint ’em Green.” The search of “effects machines” by Terran governments brings about interference by outside interests, for a second time. (3)
PHILIP JOSE FARMER “The Felled Star.” Serial; part 2 of 2. Report on complete story to appear here soon.
E. X. FERRARS – Frog in the Throat. Virginia Freer #2. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1980. Bantam, paperback, 1981. Felony & Mayhem Press, softcover, 2021.
Virginia Freer, heroine of Frog in the Throat, is staying with craftsmen friends Helen and Andrew Boscott (he’s a furniture restorer, she’s a weaver and tapestry worker) for a much-needed holiday. On a quiet afternoon, in walks the big mistake of Virginia’s life — Felix Freer, her estranged husband. Felix is one of those charming people who have few scruples and an overwhelming capacity for lying-even when he thinks he’s telling the truth. He is now lying about his reasons for dropping in at the Boscott house, and Virginia wonders why.
The events of the evening only complicate matters. At a neighbor’s cocktail party, novelist Carleen Fyffe (half of a famous sister team of historical-romance writers) announces her engagement to poet Basil Deering (whom Felix has expressed an interest in meeting). Shortly after the Freers and Boscotts return home, Olivia Fyffe arrives, saying she has found her sister on the floor of their den, murdered. When they all go to the Fyffe cottage, however, there is no body.
Almost everyone thinks Olivia is being dramatic for some reason of her own, or perhaps hysterical. It takes a second body and the discovery of her sister’s corpse to prove otherwise, and a certain amount of detection on Virginia’s part to determine Felix’s connection with the murders.
The pace of this novel is slow, with good characterization of all participants except the heroine. The plot unfolds in the best tradition of the British country-house mystery, with plenty of suspicion and all ends tied up nicely at the conclusion. One wishes, however, that Virginia Freer were as well characterized as her enigmatic and complex husband and hosts. It is a little hard to care what happens to any of them when the viewpoint character is so lacking in substance.
Ferrars has been writing mysteries for over forty years; many of her tales are set in such locales as Greece, Africa, Mexico, and Australia, as well as in England. Other notable titles include Give the Corpse a Bad Name (1940), Hunt the Tortoise(1950), The Busy Body (1962), The Seven Sleepers(1970), The Cup and the Lip ( 1976 ), and Crime and the Crystal (1985).
Nero Wolfe on Page and (Small U.S.) Screen: The Mother Hunt
by Matthew R. Bradley
FollowingGambit (1962), covered in my post on “Booby Trap” (1944), Rex Stout’s The Mother Hunt (1963) finds Nero Wolfe hired by the widow of drowned novelist Richard Valdon, whose later book His Own Image he had preferred to the million-copy bestseller Never Dream Again. Somebody has left a baby in Lucy’s vestibule with a note reading, “THIS BABY IS FOR YOU BECAUSE A BOY SHOULD LIVE IN HIS FATHERS [sic] HOUSE.” She is understandably eager to learn the mother’s identity, hoping that will be “close enough” to proving that the baby—whom she smilingly says she might name Moses if she decides to keep him, “because no one knew for sure who Moses’ father was”—really is Dick’s son.
His overalls yield a clue, handmade horsehair buttons that baffle “button fiend” Nicholas Losseff of the Exclusive Novelty Button Co.; a Times ad nets a reward for Beatrice Epps, whose temporary colleague at realtor Quinn and Collins, secretary Anne Tenzer, said hers were made by her aunt. Archie is directed by Anne to Ellen Tenzer in Mahopac, and gets the bum’s rush, but when he spots the Times open to that page, he knows she knows more than she’s telling. She leaves while he’s phoning in, and in her absence he enters through an open window to find evidence—later confirmed—that, while obviously not the mother of the child, whom she called Buster, she did have the boy there until three weeks earlier.
Watching the house, Orrie reports seeing Purley arrive with the local law and Lon reveals that Ellen was found in her car in Manhattan, strangled with a piece of cord; Archie feels responsible, and knows it won’t be long before Cramer learns of his visit. Alerting Lucy, he is hauled in and gives A.D.A. Mandel et al. an edited version of the truth—not naming her—before Parker bails him out. Confident that his remit will encompass identifying the killer, Wolfe leaves Ellen to the police and starts at the other end, asking Lucy to convene Parthenon Press president Julian Haft, agent Willis Krug, TV producer Leo Bingham, and Distaff editor Manuel Upton, who knew most about Dick’s broad circle of acquaintances.
Lucy and all but Upton provide lists totaling 148 women, fruitlessly investigated over 26 days at the cost of $8,674.30 to the client, suddenly confronted by Purley with knowledge of both the baby and Wolfe’s hiring, but staying clammed up. Stage three of this mother hunt entails having Lon trumpet the fact that a “nurse”—actually Dol Bonner’s employee Sally Corbett, last seen in Plot It Yourself (1959)—wheels Buster around in Washington Square twice a day. The carriage is rigged with cameras, so that Sally can snap candids of anyone who takes a look, as it is presumed the mother would do; Saul sees a woman take a taxi there, pegged by Lucy as Distaff fiction editor Carol Mardus…Krug’s ex-wife.
Saul verifies that in January, “Clara Waldron” bore a baby boy in Sarasota, Florida, but before Wolfe, risking charges of withholding evidence or conspiring to obstruct justice, can plan his next move, she comes to him. Determined to ask and not answer questions, she admits merely that neither Haft, Krug nor Bingham—all of whom denied recognizing her photo, even her ex—is the father, then decamps, only to be found strangled like Ellen.
Learning of this, a piqued Wolfe actually throws his suit jacket at Archie, who fortunately survives this assault with a deadly garment; also unusually, he gets romantically involved with someone besides Lily, and the client to boot, mixing personal and business relations.
After Wolfe questions the Three Stooges about Carol’s history, including earlier liaisons with Dick—reportedly first among equals—Upton, and many others, he and Archie duck out the back, dodging Cramer. Having providentially obtained a key from Lucy, Archie hides them in her house while she is at her Long Island beach cottage, getting provisions from a deli en route; when she returns, he explains that Krug and Bingham have satisfied them as to Dick’s paternity. Wolfe has Lucy summon Upton, held by force, followed by Cramer and the others, and Saul brings Anne, whose temporary positions included one as Haft’s private secretary, in the course of which she mentioned that Ellen boarded babies.
The inexplicably retitled “Motherhunt” (5/12 & 19/02), a two-part second-season episode of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, bears the credit “Alan Smithee,” the generic Directors Guild of America pseudonym. It here conceals the sole directorial effort of Charles B. Wessler, a prolific producer of lowbrow comedies such as the Farrelly Brothers’ Dumb and Dumber (1994) and There’s Something About Mary (1998). Adapted by that season’s consulting producer, Sharon Elizabeth Doyle, it features several name guest-stars—Carrie Fisher (as Ellen), Griffin Dunne (Lossoff [sic]), and Penelope Ann Miller (Lucy)—and two newbies making their sole series appearances: Brooke Burns (Beatrice) and Erinn Bartlett (Anne).
Doyle gives Lucy a secretary, Miss Mimm (Shannon Jobe); a pet cause, killer fog (caused by coal smoke, and claiming 4,000 Londoners in 1952), on which she is shown delivering a lecture; and a varied musical proficiency. Fisher’s close friend, Dunne makes Lossoff suitably colorful, the first link in a chain that leads Archie (Timothy Hutton) to the sultry Beatrice and Anne and—via directions from a “local sage,” i.e., a Garage Attendant (Jim Davis)—the ill-fated Ellen. Her cottage is covered in shifts by Saul (Conrad Dunn), Fred (Fulvio Cecere), and Orrie (Trent McMullen), who sees the arrival of Purley (R.D. Reid), and her murder is outlined to Archie and Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) by Lon (Saul Rubinek).
In a typically heated confrontation, Wolfe tells Cramer (Bill Smitrovich), “I would sleep under a bridge and eat scraps before I would submit a client to official harassment,” said client directing Wolfe to Bingham (James Tolkan)—now in radio—Haft (Steve Cumyn), Krug (Boyd Banks), and sole holdout Upton (Richard Waugh). A nice montage intercuts the ’teers eliminating potential mothers from Arizona to the Riviera and Fritz (Colin Fox) crossing off their names on a huge chart. Warned that she might wind up at headquarters, Lucy tells Purley, “I’ve always wanted to see them. My grandfather’s company poured the foundations”; Archie deems her a good enough dancer to take to the Flamingo Club.
Doyle adds a flirtatious quality to Archie’s relationship with Sally (Manon von Gerkan), “who had made it necessary to revise my prejudice against female ops,” and is portrayed as a smoldering blonde before being deglamorized in her role as nurse. Rounding out this profusion of pulchritude, Carol (Kathryn Zenna) learns that Wolfe has inquired about her, seeking to find out why; Lucy displays undue interest in her visit, and the jacket-thrower calls Theodore—invoked but unseen on Chaykin’s series—on the house phone to cancel their 9:00 session with the orchids. Wolfe repays Lucy’s hospitality by scrambling eggs for them all, a process that according to him requires 40 minutes to be done to perfection.
WEIRD TALES January 1949. Editor: Dorothy McIlwraith. Cover artist: Lee Brown Coye. Overall rating: *½.
ALLISON V. HARDING “Four from Jehlam.” Novelette. An ancient Indian woman’s curse follows four Englishmen back home and to their not unexpected deaths. Not very well written. (1)
EVERETT EVANS “Food for Demons.” A demon inside one professor’s head feeds on the minds of others. (2)
FRANK GRUBER “The Thirteenth Floor.” Standard tale of non-existent floor in a large department store. (2)
SNOWDEN T. HERRICK “Open Season on the –bottoms.” People whose last names end in “bottom” start disappearing. (0)
JOHN D. MacDONALD “The Great Stone Death.” The great stone lizard attacks two outdoorsmen; one escapes. (1)
HAROLD LAWLER “Lover in Scarlet.” A skeleton in a scarlet cloak. (0)
ROBERT BLOCH “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” A magician’s assistant tries to saw a girl in half, and succeeds! (2)
ERIC FRANK RUSSELL “The Big Shot.” At his time of reckoning, Rafferty finds that his final judge is himself. (4)
STEPHEN GRENDON “Balu.” A boy’s strange Egyptian cat knows the secret of transformation to human form. (1)
MARY ELIZABETH COUNSELMAN “The Bonan of Baladewa.” An old Javanese musician calls of the spirit world to avenge his daughter’s death. (1)
ROBERT HEINLEIN “Our Fair City.” Novelette. A reporter uses the talents of a friendly whirlwind to expose the corruption of City Hall. Farce. (2)
E. X. FERRARS – Alive and Dead. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1975. Bantam, paperback, 1982.
The novels of E. X. Ferrars (a pseudonym of Moma Brown, who also writes under the name of Elizabeth Ferrars) are best described as quiet and polite. The characters are usually normal middle-class British people — which is not to say they are dull: many are writers or artists or engaged in otherwise unusual professions; the women are independent and strong. But they are people to whom violence seldom happens: and when it does, they are shocked, but willingly take charge and get to the bottom of these unexpected happenings.
Martha Crayle is a typical Ferrars heroine. Middle-aged and twice divorced, she has struggled to raise two sons while caring for an invalid aunt and running a rooming house. When the aunt dies and leaves her an unexpected legacy, she moves out all her boarders except the reserved and stem Mr. Syme (who has become her confidant and, when crime strikes, a sort of Watson) and takes up volunteer work for the National Guild for the Welfare of Unmarried Mothers.
It is at their offices that she meets Amanda Hassall, a young pregnant woman who claims she has been deserted by her husband and impregnated by the man she is living with. Amanda does not wish to marry the baby’s father, nor does she want to put the child up for adoption as her parents have suggested. Martha takes the girl home, and a day later takes in another pregnant woman, Sandra Aspinall.
As Mr. Syme has darkly hinted, Martha should not have given refuge to these total strangers. Before Amanda has spent two nights in the house, a murdered man turns up in a local hotel, and she is reported to have been on the scene.
Amanda insists the victim is her estranged husband, but her parents –who appeared shortly before the body was discovered — claim the husband died in an airplane crash the year before. In addition to the parents, the boyfriends of both young women arrive, and by the Lime murder is done twice, Martha thoroughly regrets her involvement and wishes she had listened to Mr. Syme.
The plot twists and turns (with plenty of surprises) all the way to the very end. Ferrars writes well and creates characters that are sure to enlist her readers’ sympathies. This novel is one of her best.
GYPSY WILDCAT. Universal Pictures, 1944. Maria Montez, Jon Hall, Peter Coe, Nigel Bruce, Leo Carrillo, Gale Sondergaard, Douglass Dumbrille. Screenplay: James Hogan, Gene Lewis, and James M. Cain. Director: Roy William Neill.
Filmed in lush Technicolor, Roy William Neill’s Gypsy Wildcatstars Maria Montez and Jon Hall in a fun escapist adventure movie. Montez, as the Gypsy girl Carla, captivates the audience with her beauty and charm. Jon Hall, as Michael, provides the story with a male love interest for our exotic leading lady.
In terms of plot, Gypsy Wildcat may ultimately not add up to all that much. Falsely accused of murdering Count Orso, Michael (Hall) shacks up with a Gypsy caravan. On his trail is the mischievous Baron Tovar (Douglass Dumbrille) who seeks to not only capture Michael, but to marry Carla and steal her royal birthright. It’s Robin Hood, Errol Flynn type of fare and nothing that requires too much thought.
What struck me the most was how absolutely saturated in color the movie turned out to be. Whether it is a Gypsy festival at the beginning of the film or a choreographed fight sequence, color schemes play a vital role in bringing this film to life. It makes for a highly enjoyable viewing experience. Which, of course, was the whole point of this production.
While the ending is both way too abrupt and predictable, most of the storyline is seamless and works quite well. Of note, hardboiled writer James M. Cain is one of three writers credited with the screenplay. But don’t let that fool you. The material here is lighthearted and not even remotely noir.
A final word. It’s long been my contention that Roy William Neill remains one of the most underappreciated directors of his era. Much like The Black Room, which I reviewed here a decade ago, Gypsy Wildcat punches well above its weight, thanks to a director who took the subject matter seriously.
BART SPICER – The Dark Light. Carney Wilde #1. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1949. Bestseller Mystery, digest-sized paperback, date?
Carney Wilde gets hired to find a missing preacher, a Reverand Kimball of the Church of Shining Light. A church of Kimball’s own founding.
Kimball’s gone awol, and no one seems to know where he could have gone.
As soon as Wilde thinks he gets a lead, a church member is killed, and then another. It begins to look like anyone with any information about Kimball’s whereabouts gets erased.
Wilde does some good, methodical detective work, has a bit of luck, and he’s able to crack the case. Of course.
There’s nothing too special about the story. It’s a fine mystery, solved fairly. But what really makes the book good is how good a writer Bart Spicer is. His writing is sparkling clean, his metaphors innovative, and his voice is his own. There’s no tired, rote turn of phrase. All the sentences are written beautifully, and each phrase is fresh and new, in the hardboiled way we like ’em. I’m a fan.
My son Jonathan’s first novel, from Stark House Press:
Here’s the descriptive blurb, taken from the back cover:
Private investigator Mike Levinas’s life has stalled. All that changes when a desperate Southern woman enters his office, asking him to find her dissolute older husband. What begins as a standard missing persons case reveals itself to something far more nefarious. Mike soon finds himself embroiled in intrigue and the target of a dangerous international conspiracy. As Mike traverses the seedy streets of 1980s Manhattan on the hunt for a Nazi war criminal, he encounters an array of shady characters and lonely souls. When the cops prove to be less than helpful and the violence rises to a fever pitch, Mike toughens up and takes matters into his own hands.
Speaking of The Old Days (wasn’t I?), back when I first got interested in Movies there were maybe a dozen books on the subject, mostly very shallow or abstrusely academic. A recent visit to the Library, though, reminded me how much times have changed. On fifty full shelves filled with books on movies I found detailed reference books, books devoted to single films, and a variety of carefully researched works on highly-specialized topics like science fiction serials, the “Road to” movies, Abbott Costello’s horror spoofs, and The Films of the Bowery Boys (Citadel, 1984) by David Hayes & Brent Walker.
Now I don’t recommend the Bowery Boys to anyone; the humor is crude and forced at the best of times, and at their worst, the films are so shoddy as to defy their own existence. But I find them possessed of a raw energy and persistent vision that cannot be denied, and I confess I watch them every chance I get.
The Boys started out in the New York production of Sidney Kingsley’s classic play Dead End, and when the property went to Hollywood in 1937 they went with it, where they were billed as the “Dead End Kids” in films like Angels with Dirty Faces until Warners lost interest, whereupon they took a step down to Universal as “the Little Tough Guys” for a series of “B”s and hung around for a couple of serials. In 1940 they osmosed into “the East Side Kids” at Monogram, and coalesced into the Bowery Boys in 1946, the form they remained in until the series demise ten years later.
By this time, there were only two real members of the group: Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall, plus a changing roster of hangers-on, frequently abetted by Leo’s dad Bernard, as Louie Dumbrowski, owner of the minimalist soda shop where the boys hung out. In this universe the “Boys” – now quite middle-aged and looking every misspent minute of it – went through a series of situations frankly quite beyond their B-movie budgets, but impressive nonetheless, with romps through London, Paris, the Orient, Olde Englande, Africa ….
They were also visited by every character actor with a few free days and some bills to pay. The roster will mean little to non-addicts, but those of us who once worshipped the grainy black-and-white images think fondly of Noah Beery, Erle Blore, Hillary Brooke, Iron Eyes Cody, Lloyd Corrigan, John Dehner, Douglas Dumbrille, Douglas Fowley, Steven Geray, Billy Gilbert, Mary Gordon (from the Sherlock Holmes movies) Raymond Hatton, Percy Helton, Warren Hymer, Ian Keith (once considered for Dracula) Bela Lugosi (who got the part and ended up here anyway), Fuzzy Knight, Martin Kosleck, Sheldon Leonard, Keye Luke from the Chan films, J. Farrell McDonald, Mike (Murder My Sweet) Mazurki, Alan Napier, Sig Rumann, Dan Seymour, Lionel Stander Craig Stevens, Glen Strange, Woody Strode, Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer, Minerva Urecal, Lee Van Cleef and Clint Walker True, we remember them from much better films, but here they are nonetheless, plugging along in cinematic obscurity.
The authors somehow manage to document all this, watch the films and do research on a series to which respectable critics wouldn’t give the time of day. And, as with the Boys themselves, one must admire their perseverance.
Incidentally, one of the Bowery Boys movies actually received an Academy Award nomination, which it turns out is not exactly the same as being nominated for an Oscar, which is the basis of an amusing story which unfortunately cannot be related here.
— Reprinted from The Hound of Dr. Johnson #57, July 2008.
