STUMPTOWN. “Forget It Dex, It’s Stumptown.” ABC, 25 September 2019. (Season 1, Episode 1.) Cobie Smulders (Dex Parios), Jake Johnson, Tantoo Cardinal, Cole Sibus. Based on a series of comic books by Greg Rucka (story) & Matthew Southworth (art). Director: James Griffiths. Currently streaming on Amazon and Apple TV.
First thought: What an ugly title for a TV show. I didn’t find out until quite a while later that the TV show was preceded by a series of comic books later collected in graphic novel format. I also later discovered that “Stumptown” is a nickname for the city of Portland OR. (This may be the only time that Portland OR is the home of a (non-licensed) PI.)
Said PI is female, a former Marine in Afghanistan named Dex Parios. She is now suffering from PTSD, gambling debts, and caring for a younger brother with Down’s Syndrome. Offered a job to find a missing granddaughter, she hesitates at first, then decides to take it. She can use the money.
The plot suffers a bit from trying to tell a story along with filling us in with all of the people in her life, most of whom will show up again over the course of the rest of the season. Stumptown was successful enough in its first season to be renewed for a second season only to be cancelled when Covid comes along.
Cobie Smulders is an actress new to me, but she’s been around for a while, including long stints on the CBS series How I Met Your Mother (2005–2014) and as S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Maria Hill in the Marvel movies. (I’ve never watched either.) I also haven’t watched any of the other shows in the TV series to see which way the wind blew after this one, but based on this one, its future success, if any, would of course depend almost totally on her performance.
Which, to coin a phrase, better than satisfactory. Smulders does, I thought, overdo it at time in terms of portraying a woman living a lousy life and being sour and witty and clever about it, but otherwise she is just fine. The young lady, at the end of this first episode, sort of decides she likes the job she has just done, and it is clear that, when offered another, she is almost assuredly going to take it.
THE WEB. Universal International, 1947. Ella Raines, Edmond O’Brien, William Bendix, Vincent Price, Maria Palmer. Directed by Michael Gordon.
A mild-mannered mystery movie which with a little stronger punch might be remembered by more of us fans of old black and white films than I think is the case. To wit: Edmond O’Brien’s brashness as a small hick attorney garners him a job as a bodyguard for a rich man (Vincent Price) who tells him that a former business associate, just released from prison, has been making threats against him.
Also in the story, as it plays out, is Ella Raines, who plays the rich man’s (very) personal secretary, and whom Edmond O’Brien’s character takes a strong liking to. She’s the sleek kind of young lady who holds secrets well, and whom we the viewer are never quite sure exactly how close to her boss (the rich man) she is.
The problem is is that Edmond O’Brien is as always a very good actor, but let’s face it, he just isn’t in Ella Raines’ league. Vincent Price is, of course, as smarmy and unctuous player as he always is, and when his newly found bodyguard kills the former business associate (see paragraph one), we know there’s something going on that our hero is slow in catching up with.
Enter William Bendix as the tough guy detective handling the case. Even though there’s a previous connection between them, he handles Mr. O’Brien a lot tougher than the circumstances seem to warrant. It is a puzzle, but not a overly challenging one.
It all makes for a good movie, but in the mind of no one, I imagine, is The Web more than a mere entertainment, once seen and soon forgotten. Watch this one for Ella Raines’ elegant grace, aloof and yet most charming.
CHARLES ALVERSON – Not Sleeping, Just Dead. Joe Goodey #2. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1977. Playboy Press, paperback, 1980.
Joe Goodey, private eye. Former cop. Fired for shooting the wrong guy, the mayor’s nephew, or some such.
He gets hired by some gramps. Gramps wants to know what happened to granddaughter.
Granddaughter, a beauty, a druggie, leapt, or fell, or was pushed off a high tower of a Monterey mansion. A cult lives there. ‘The Institute’. Of which she was a member. A very wealthy member, bequeathing a considerable sum upon them.
Gramps wants to know who at the Institute killed her. Because if he can prove the Institute killed her, the money goes to him.
So Goodey heads to the Institute. Hangs around. Insults everybody with his hardboiled repartee and scabrous wit. And solves the case.
Decent 70’s PI yarn, with California vibes. Recommended.
“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.”
ANALOG SF – September 1967. Editor: John W. Campbell. Cover artist: Kelly Freas. Overall rating: **½
CHRISTOPHER ANVIL “The King’s Legion.” Novelette. Federation of Humanity #19. Continuation and perhaps final episode of Anvil’s Paradise series. (*) Roberts, Hammell, and Morrissey take on pirates, the Planetary Authority, and the Space Force before realizing that have been recruited into the famed Interstellar Patrol. The series is getting tiresome. (2)
(*) Footnote Added: I do not know whether what I then called Anvil’s “Paradise” series coincides with what was his larger “Federation of Humanity” series, which did continue on for another couple of dozen more stories.
JACK WODHAMS “The Pearly Gates of Hell.” A deadly comic story of suicide in a world where suicide is definitely forbidden. (5)
MACK REYNOLDS “Fiesta Brava.” Short novel. A United Planets story. Section G sends out four unlikely looking agents to help in the overthrow of a reactionary planetary government similar to that of Spain’s. The big feature is their choice of leader through bullfight competition. Part of Reynolds’ thesis is that people get the government they deserve. Only moderately entertaining. **
E. G. VonWALD “Important Difference.” Contact Scouts discover that the monster aliens have human form. (2)
VERGE FORAY “Lost Calling.”After 20 years of schooling by alien teachers, Mirni does not know what he has been trained for, but he is successful at it. (3)
LESLIE FORD – Ill Met by Moonlight. Colonel Primrose & Grace Latham #2. Farrar & Rinehart, hardcover, 1938. Dell #6, paperback, mapback edition, 1943. Popular Library, paperback, 1964.
Leslie Ford (a pseudonym of Zenith Brown. who also wrote as David Frame, has often been accused of being one of the leading practitioners of the “had-I-but-known” school. and it is true that a great many of these leading and tension-spoiling statements appear in her novels. However, shortsighted critics have overlooked her carefully delineated exploration of life among people who are not too different from the average reader except in the fact that, through familial associations, political affinity, or geographic accident, they invite more than their fair share of murder and well-bred mayhem.
This is the second adventure of Colonel John T. Primrose and Sergeant Phineas Buck, one in which the unlikely but highly successful combination of retired officer and retired enlisted man is teared with a thirty-eight-year-old widow, Grace Latham.
Grace is of a distinguished Georgetown family, and her elegant home forms the backdrop for many of the books in this series. Ill Met by Moonlighttakes place in another setting — April Harbor, Maryland, a summer playground for an inbred group of upper-crust families, where Grace and her relatives have been vacationing for years. Primrose and Buck are guests at Grace’s cottage when she finds a neighbor dead of carbon-monoxide poisoning in the garage next door.
An old romance, a troubled marriage, a new love affair, and relationships with the folks in the neighboring town are all woven together in this engrossing and charming tale of love and murder.
THE PHANTOM SPEAKS. Republic Pictures, 1945. Richard Arlen, Stanley Ridges, Lynne Roberts, Tom Powers, Charlotte Wynters, Jonathan Hale. Screenplay: John K. Butler. Director: John English.
The Phantom Speaks is an unusually downbeat crime/horror hybrid programmer from Republic Pictures. Overwrought and over explained, the story centers around a paranormal researcher’s quest to bring the dead back to life, albeit in spirit form. Dr. Paul Renwick (Stanley Ridges) is about as sincere as can be. He truly believes in the supernatural, even though he knows he is an object of ridicule for his obsession. When Renwick learns that convicted murderer Harvey Bogartus (Tom Powers) is about to be put to death, he arranges for a brief meeting in which he explains his desire to bring Bogartus’s spirit back from the grave following the execution.
As one might imagine, things don’t go entirely according to plan. While Renwick is able to bring Bogartus back, it doesn’t play out the way he expected. Bogartus, a thug to his core, fully takes over Renwick’s body and uses it to commit a new string of heinous murders. Renwick, for his part, becomes the victim of his own hubris and doesn’t even realize how his body has been co-opted by an evil spirit. Investigating the weird occurrences is reporter Matt Fraser (Richard Arlen), who in ths one isn’t a particularly compelling protagonist.
All told, The Phantom Speaks is a rather mediocre horror film. But, at a running time of less than seventy minutes, it doesn’t get a chance to wear out its welcome. It’s watchable, but nothing really more than that.
STANTON FORBES – If Laurel Shot Hardy the World Would End. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1970.
During Mime Day at Shenley College, a small eastern school, students from the Classical Cinema Department all decide to dress up as Laurel and Hardy for their annual high jinks. One pair of actors takes the opportunity to murder the president of a nearby electronics corporation, Sacheville, Inc., and newly hired PR director Larry Evans is implicated in the crime. In order to save his bacon, Evans undertakes an investigation of his own, pokes around among a bunch of rather quirky (to say the least) suspects, and eventually unmasks the culprits.
This is a fine idea for a mystery, but the execution is poor. Forbes’s style is a cross between eccentric and sophomoric; so is her humor. Some might find this sort of thing clever and amusing, but this reviewer isn’t one of them. (The best thing about the book, in fact, is its wraparound dust jacket depicting thirteen sad-faced Laurels against an orange background — one of the niftiest jackets on any contemporary crime novel.)
Forbes is the author of numerous other novels, among them the likewise fancifully titled Go to Thy Death Bed (1968), The Name’s Death, Remember Me?(1969), and The Sad, Sudden Death of My Fair Lady (1971). She has also written numerous mysteries under the pseudonyms Tobias Wells and Forbes Rydell (collaborations with Helen B. Rydell).
SARA GRAN – Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead. Claire DeWitt #1. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, June 2011. Mariner Books, trade paperback, May 2012.
So once in a long while I read something written recently. Just to make sure I’m not missing anything. Just to make sure that no one’s figured it out.
And by ‘figured it out’ I mean figured out how to write a hardboiled detective novel like they did in the good old days. I mean contemporaneously — not as a historical novel or as pastiche. In other words: I want hardboiled detectives doing their hardboiled detection right now. In this world we live in today. Not in some synthetic imagined yesteryear. Because if I wanna read yesteryear, I’ll go straight to the Hammett’s mouth. I don’t need a ventriloquist.
Anywho. So this one is written contemporaneously. So there’s that.
It takes place in New Orleans, in the aftermath of Katrina. A DA went missing in the flood. Presumed dead. Left all his considerable coin to his nephew. Who feels he owes it to his uncle to find out what happened to him. Until it begins to seem like maybe he had it coming.
What is unique and disconcerting about Claire DeWitt is that she does not depend upon traditional investigation or procedure. Rather, she depends on vibes and seeming coincidence. She does not run down the list of suspects and evaluate alibis and hard evidence. Instead, she uses a lot of hallucinatory drugs and relies on leads received in dreams. She takes her cue from a (fictional) obscure French handbook called ‘Détection’ by Jacques Silette, from which she constantly quotes.
And it’s the quotes that make this a compelling read. Not the detection. Which is hair-brained and unconvincing.
Here are some of my favorite quotes:
Be grateful for every scar life inflicts on you. Where we’re unhurt is where we are false.
There are no coincidences. Just opportunities you’re too dumb to see, doors you’ve been too blind to step through.
The truth lies — at the intersection of the forgotten and the ignored, in the neighborhood of all we have tried to forget.
He’d been counting on a happy ending. But there is no such thing. Nothing ever really ends. The fat lady never really sings her last song. She only changes costumes and goes on to the next show.
Consider the possibility that what we perceive as the future has already happened, and intuition is only a very good memory.
There will always be people who need to be rescued. And there will never, ever be enough people to save them all.
NO ONE IS INNOCENT. The only question is, how will you bear your portion of guilt?
SPOILER ALERT: The entire case is solved by a single ‘clue’. A discarded calling card randomly found near the table at the restaurant where Claire Dewitt initially meets with her client. Nearly the first thing Claire does in the book is find and pocket the random calling card.
Nearly the last thing she does is call the number. And that’s it. That’s how the mystery is solved. Calling the number on a random calling card you found during your initial client meeting at a random restaurant. If she’d called the number at the beginning of the novel, the novel would be about three pages long.
Everything that takes place between finding the card and calling the number is just one big mcguffin. Which is to say, the mcguffin is the mystery itself. END OF SPOILER ALERT.
VERDICT: Sara Gran is a really good writer. Claire Dewitt is a terrific character. Line by line, they are fresh and new. And I went out and bought a couple more Sara Gran (non-series) novels based on how good her writing is, if that tells you anything.
But the mystery itself? The detection? Strictly for the birds.
