I’ve read three novels by Friedrich Duerenmatt, and while I was reading them, I thought each was going to be a dismal flop. But two of them, The Judge and His Hangman and Traps, ended up intriguing me.
Judge… features one Inspector Barlach, an aged policeman of the mild-mannered-little-old-man type that is a fixture of some polite mysteries. Indeed, Barlach seemed so tame that he reminded me of Inspector Fernack (Jonathan Hale) in those wretched George Sanders “Saint” movies.
The premise of Judge, come to think of it, sounds like a Saint novel in reverse. Barlach has for years been yapping at the heels of a criminal who fancies himself an international adventurer, one Gastmann. And the years have treated the two antagonists much as Charteris treated the Saint and Mr. Teal. Gastmann has grown suave, wealthy and handsome, his charismatic style betraying no hint of his many crimes. Conversely, Barlach has grown into a tired, dyspeptic fumbler.
I liked the reverse/underdog theme of Judge but the plot seemed (I stress “seemed’) to lack progress When his supercop protege is murdered, Barlach — despite the aid of a new and eager assistant — is unable to cone to grips with Gastmann, who constantly harasses and foils him.
For several chapters, I wondered if any of this were going anywhere at all, of if it could be the German version of a Bugs Bunny-Elmer Fudd conflict. Then, at the end of Chapter 13, after yet another humiliation, Barlach says to Gastmann:
“… I have judged you, Gastmann, and I have condemned you to death. You will not survive the day. The hangman I have chosen for you will come for you today. You will recognize him. And he will kill you because, in the name of God, this is a job that inevitably must now be done.”
and from that point on, the plot jumps onto the tracks and moves — with a burst of action — to a nicely-realized dramatically ironic conclusion.
Traps seemed at first to be astonishingly predictable. Alfredo Traps, travelling salesman stranded in a small town, seeks a bed for the night at the lonely house of an eccentric old man. Turns out, the old man is a retired Judge and (heh-heh) wants Traps to join him and his friends in a little (heh-heh-heh) game. Yes, says the Judge (laughing up his sleeve) let me introduce you to the other guests. My old friend here used to be a Prosecutor. And this other guy was once a Defense Attorney. That third fellow over there? The quiet one? Well sir (hee-hee-hee) Old Emil used to be an Executioner.
The game they all play — each night with a different guest — is a Mock Trial. That’s right, with the guest as defendant. Well, maybe Traps doesn’t think he’s committed any crimes, but let’s just ask him a few questions …
“Cor!” sez I to meself at this point, “They’re gonna kill’im. I’ve read this dreck in comic books.”
But what actually happened surprised and immensely satisfied me. It also made me think a minute or two. Or maybe a little longer.
The feeling I carried away with me from each of these books was perplexing. (Oh, by the way, the other Duerenmatt I read was The Pledge. Bad show, Friedrich.) In both cases, the plot seemed inordinately tired and showed no evidence of inspired handling for the greater part of the book. And both times, Duerenmatt wrapped it up with a perfectly logical, intensely dramatic, and completely unexpected end.
What perplexes me is this: Is Duerenmatt a better or a worse writer because of the work it takes to meet the rewarding endings of these things? Must the triteness of the plots be so apparent? I dunno.
I should add by way of bibliographic note that The Judge and the Hangman was first printed in his country in 1955 and Traps was written in 1956. I have_a lingering memory of a movie version of Judge. That is, I think I once saw an ad for it, but I can find no mention of it in any film reference book.
— Reprinted from A Shropshire Sleuth #4, May 1982.
MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ – Platform. Originally published in France as Plateform, 2001. Vintage, trade paperback, July 2004. Translated by Frank Wynne.
Michel is a single, 40 year old civil servant in the bureau of cultural affairs. His job is to randomly sponsor art events for promising new artists. He gets to decide what’s ‘promising’. He’s good at his work but he’s on autopilot. His heart’s not in it.
His dad dies. They weren’t close. But he left a healthy inheritance. He takes a vacation.
So he goes in one those all expenses paid jobs, with a group of 30 strangers, they fly to Thailand.
Thailand is great for the sex tourism. And that’s really the main attraction for guys like him, other out of shape, middle aged, French and German men, come to sleep with the beautiful, young Thai girls. So expert in their craft.
One of the other vacationers, Valerie, shows an interest in Michel. Her face is plain but she has a great body. They talk a few times. She makes herself obvious. He gets drunk and passes out. On the last day, he asks for her number. Why? She looks at him in disbelief, then writes her number on a card a gives it to him with a shrug.
So he calls her. And so begins a torrid affair. Valerie is the most giving of lovers. Turns out she works for the travel company. She’s actually doing quite well.
Valerie and Michel become inseparable. And he begins to get involved in her work. She is thinking up a way to make more money at the failing resorts her company owns in Cuba and Thailand, the Ivory Coast and the Dominican. They come up with the idea of ‘Aphrodite vacation packages’ — where the marketing makes the sex tourism implicit. And the idea is a winner. The resorts explode in popularity.
Unfortunately, that might not be the only explosion as Islamic terrorists start targeting these sex resorts for their immorality.
And that, dear reader, is that.
——
It was a pretty effective piece of work. It reeled me in. I’m not normally the kinda guy who wants to read about international sex tourism. But the thing was told with surgical precision. And the sudden terrorist violence in the midst of the montage of drab bureaucratic mundanity and sexual abandon — Yeah. I’ll remember it and it was pretty damned good.
CHINA. Paramount Pictures, 1943. Loretta Young, Alan Ladd, William Bendix, Philip Ahn, Iris Wong, Sen Yung, Marianne Quon. Director: John Farrow.
Although it was surely marketed as a patriotic flag waver during World War II, China really does stand the test of time. It remains a solid adventure/war film that has a lot going for it. Directed by John Farrow with some outstanding tracking shots, the film stars Alan Ladd as Mr. (David) Jones, an oil salesman and war profiteer living in Shanghai.
China may be at war with the Japanese, but America is not. So he sells oil to the Japanese, irrespective of their geopolitical ambitions. Along for the ride is his sidekick Johnny Sparrow (William Bendix), a sentimentalist who longs for his small hometown in Oregon.
Things change when Mr. Jones encounters an American schoolteacher (Loretta Young) and her Chinese students and agrees to drive them away from the front lines. Things really heat up when Mr. Jones witnesses Japanese cruelty firsthand. That really sets him off. Soon enough, he teams up with the Chinese guerrilla fighters to wage war on the invading Japanese military.
While there are some maudlin moments in the film, overall China remains primarily an action-oriented motion picture. There’s plenty of grit and explosions aplenty. It’s definitely worth a look, particularly if you appreciate Ladd as a leading man. Here, with his fedora, leather jacket, and name, he’s a proto-Indiana Jones!
(Give Me That) OLD-TIME DETECTION. Autumn 2024. Issue #67. Editor: Arthur Vidro. Old-Time Detection Special Interest Group of American Mensa, Ltd. 36 pages (including covers). Cover image: J. Jefferson Farjeon’s Mystery in White.
ARTHUR VIDRO unfailingly produces a high-quality print mag for people like us who just can’t get enough of detective fiction. In Old-Time Detection, he preserves fugitive information that would have been lost to us except for his diligence. This issue features:
(1) A 1981 EQMM interview with Jack Ritchie: “I suspect that the basic trouble with writers of humor is that nobody takes them seriously.”
(2) Francis M. Nevins continues his 2010 series about Erle Stanley Gardner: “The last ten or twelve years’ worth of Mason novels are as chaotic as most of the episodes of the TV shows.”
(3) Martin Edwards’s introduction to the 2014 British Library reprint of J. Jefferson Farjeon’s Mystery in White: A CHRISTMAS CRIME STORY, with a 2024 postscript: “The cozy yet spooky setting of a country house, cut off from the outside world by deep snow, is a superbly atmospheric backdrop for a murder story, and Farjeon uses it to good effect.”
(4) “The Non-Fiction World of Ed Hoch” this time features “A Mirror to Our Crimes,” from 1979, with Hoch offering up a nice survey of true crime books, which often were inspired by or served as the inspiration for detecfic: “The business of mirroring actual crimes through the fiction writer’s art is as old as Edgar Allan Poe. In fact, it’s older than Poe.”
(5) Dr. John Curran, Agatha Christie Expert Extraordinaire, gives us the latest in Christiedom, including an audience vote on the best Agatha film versions: “Is it at all significant that three ‘old’ adaptations fared best? Think about it . . .”
(6) Charles Shibuk’s “The Paperback Revolution” from 1974 keeps rolling along, as he notes that among the new books is a veritable explosion of classic reprints, one of which you might recognize: “This novel should be familiar to many from its 1945 film version with Joan Crawford that is frequently revived today.”
(7) “Nobody Tells Me Anything” by Jack Ritchie from EQMM, October 1976, is the fiction selection: “How can anybody expect me to solve anything if I’m kept in the dark?”
(8) A lot of detective fiction fans can relate to an article on collecting classic detecfic items: “In issue #65 (Spring 2024), we test-ran a column on Collecting. It somehow struck a chord with many of our readers, and so the subject will continue to appear in our pages.”
(9) ‘Tis the season, and therefore we have Michael Dirda’s 2023 column, “Restore Ye Olde Holiday Spirit with These Olde Mystery Novels”: “Old tales are best for winter, especially when they appear in shiny and inviting new editions.”
(10) “The Readers Write”: “Thank goodness you have a print edition, which is preferred by us dinosaurs.”
(11) “This Issue’s Puzzle”: “What future mystery writer was interviewed for a 1979 episode of ‘In Search Of’?”
As always, OTD is worth a look.
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C. S. FORESTER – Payment Deferred. Little Brown, hardcover, 1942. Reprinted many times, including Bantam #816, paperback, 1951.
Payment Deferred is not a mystery. It is, rather, a stunning tour de force detailing “the perfect crime,” and its devastating aftermath on a working-class British family. Everything is in the telling.
Will Marble and his family exist rather drearily on his income as a clerk at a bank. When a long-lost relative arrives from the colonies (Africa) with a fortune in cash and a sad story about having no other living relatives, Mr. Marble seizes the moment. He murders the boy, buries him in the backyard, and doubles the fortune through a series of crooked financial manipulations. He becomes a man of wealth and station. He has committed the perfect murder and has gone unpunished. All seems right with the world.
What follows is a tale of retribution visited on Mr. Marble, his wife, and ultimately his children. The family, never close, begins to fall apart. The daughter, embarrassed by her parents’ common background, turns her back on the family (if not their newfound wealth) and leaves home. The son, bought off with expensive gifts and enrollment in the public school system, is both unloved and unloving. Mrs. Marble, discovering her husband’s terrible secret, is forced to share his nightmare world of fear and suspicion. Mr. Marble, forever brooding, sits by an open window refusing to leave home and maintains a constant vigil on the unmarked grave. His drinking, always a problem, gets worse. A blackmailing neighbor bleeds him financially. The family seems farthest apart at those times spent together.
Forester’s prose is first-rate and his characterizations haunting. And the ending is guaranteed to surprise, with just the right fanciful touch to make it a perfect ironic counterpoint to the somber tone of the rest of the novel.
C. S. Forester’s fame rests on his later, non-criminous writings, in particular his series of sea adventures featuring Captain Horatio Hornblower, which remain in print to the present. Several films have been made from his novels, among them the 1942 MGM production of Payment Deferred (starring Charles Laughton) and the 1951 Humphrey Bogart/Katharine Hepburn film The African Queen.
His only other crime novel, Plain Murder, was published as a paperback original by Dell in 1954.
PLUNDER ROAD. 20th Century Fox, 1957. Gene Raymond, Jeanne Cooper, Wayne Morris, Elisha Cook Jr. Director: Hubert Cornfield.
This one is lean and mean and doesn’t take its sweet time in plunging the viewer into the action. The opening sequence, set on a dark rainy night, involves five masked men as they steal a shipment of US Mint gold from a train. This scene, as well as its immediate follow up, in which the bandits load their getaway trucks with the loot, is largely silent with very little dialogue to accompany it. It works well enough. Indeed, that much can be said for the entirety of Plunder Road. For what it is, namely a short, punchy crime film, it works well enough.
Gene Raymond helms the cast as Eddie Harris, the ringleader of the outfit, whose cool demeanor helps him pull off an impossible heist. His cohorts are portrayed by Wayne Morris, Steven Ritch, Stafford Repp, and the always enjoyable-to-watch Elisha Cook whose character dreams of absconding to Rio with his young son.
There’s not that much tension between the main characters, which is somewhat unusual and may contribute to a sense of the movie not quite clicking. As readers of this blog well know, more often than not films of this sort will have the criminals turning on each other. That’s not what happens here. It’s more bad luck or their own guilt that gives them away.
What else to say? I particularly appreciated the on location shooting, be it the California highways or, in the last fifteen minutes of the film, gritty Los Angeles. Speaking of the last fifteen minutes, a new character is introduced quite close to the end of the movie. Jeanne Cooper portrays Fran, Eddie’s girl. There’s an argument to be had that she should have been introduced earlier. Then again, this is a 72 minute film without much padding.
BOB SHAW – The Two-Timers. Ace SF Special H-79; paperback original, 1968. Cover art: Leo & Diane Dillon.
Nine years earlier John Breton’s wife Kate had been saved from a murderer;s attack by an unknown rifleman who disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared. Now when he returns, he claims Kate as his wife; his point seems well taken, for he is John Breton himself.
In his alternate, parallel universe Kate had died, and guilt had forced him to find a way to travel in probability, as it were. A new sort of eternal triangle, but before the new John Breton’s plans for resolving it can be carried out, his presence in what is for him World B changes the fabric of space/time itself, foreshadowing the end of the world.
If migraine is a symptom, there are many frustrated time travelers! Imagine the troubles or the police lieutenant still investigating the case: a hopeless sort of detective tale, but effective in science fiction. The characters are real enough to be living creatures, and the effort to make them so is clear and appreciated,
Anyone who has ever been uneasy about answering the phone will understand Breton’s fear of opening his life to the unknown caller on page 6. The touches of the future involved are natural, so only the ending fails to live up to the originality one is led to expect. As a mathematical note, Shaw makes a mistake about a topological problem on page 108, but it is nothing that affects the story.
Before reading the memories of British writer Reg Dolphin as recorded below by his nephew William Smith, let me suggest that you first read Jonathan’s review of the former’s short story “Off the Map” (Weird Tales, July 1954), along with a lengthy list of comments on Mr. Dolphin’s writings.
In Memory of REG DOLPHIN (1915-1990)
by William Smith.
Reginald Charles Dolphin (13.03.1915 – 05.02.1990). Reg Dolphin was my uncle
Reg was born at ‘The Elms’, Crabbe Common, Wadborough, Worcester on 13th March 1915. The birth took place at the house of his aunt and uncle, Edith and Robert Cruse (my great aunt & uncle).
Reg was the first child to be born of Charles Biddle and Amy Beatrice Dolphin (née Palfrey).
His siblings were Phyllis Gwendoline (my mother) 10.10.1916 – 10.07.2020, Muriel Beatrice 30.03.1918 – 28.02.2002. There was also a half-brother William Henry Dolphin (29.02.1908 – 28.07.1982) who was the only child of Reg’s father’s first marriage. The mother died soon after the birth, and Reg’s father married again — to Amy — in 1914.
Reg lived in Coventry soon after his birth, which probably explains why he was born in the home of his mother’s sister. His father and the family went to Coventry as his father had secured a job with Daimler working in the factory during WW1.
Then in 1925 the family returned to Worcestershire (Charles and Amy originated from Pershore) and they lived in Pershore in a house belonging to Reg’s grandfather.
In 1929 Reg moved with his family to Wadborough to ‘Sunnyside’ (where I also was born and lived 1945-1968)– a terraced cottage built by the estate of Lord Coventry for Railway workers. Reg was educated at Eckington School and then at the Royal Grammar School, Worcester.
After school he was employed in the accountancy dept in a furniture shop in Birmingham, where he lived in lodgings. Then he was called up in WW2 –joined the Royal Engineers and then transferred to the REME for the duration.
He met a girl – Irma van Kerkoven – in the NAAFI and married her during the war.
After the war he and Irma lived at 13, Meadow Way, Hyde Heath, Amersham, Bucks. This was his home –and Irma’s- till their deaths. They had 2 children, Tony and Liz (my cousins). After the war Reg worked for Sobell in Slough. The firm made radios.
I saw Reg and family every year until I left home in 1968. They came to stay every year with us in Wadborough. It was where Reg grew up.
We knew that Reg was a writer. I remember the first Sexton Blake 64pp. 1/- book that came out. He sent us a copy. I remember seeing this and the subsequent other 64pp 1/- books as they appeared on the shelves of W H Smith bookstall at Worcester Shrub Hill railway station on my way to the Grammar School in Evesham.
My grandmother, Reg’s mother was thrilled at his writing (she wrote snippets to various publications –recipes, hints etc. and so I suppose what Reg did was somewhere in the family blood).
Sadly, when my grandmother died in 1962, Reg and his family only came to Wadborough to see his sisters — and the house where he grew up — a few times.
We did keep in touch, but after Reg’s funeral his family did not want to keep in touch despite our writing to them. The last time I saw Reg’s wife (my aunt) and my cousins was at Reg’s funeral in Hyde Heath when I took part in the service to read the eulogy.
TANGIER. Universal Pictures, 1946. Maria Montez, Robert Paige, Sabu, Preston Foster, Louise Allbritton, Kent Taylor, J. Edward Bromberg, Reginald Denny. Director: George Waggner.
Capitalizing on the American movie-going audience’s love for exotic locales, Tangieris a somewhat confusing adventure/espionage film that’s nevertheless perfectly watchable lowbrow escapism. It stars Robert Paige as Paul Kenyon, a down and out reporter and Maria Montez, as Rita, a nightclub dancer, who end up working together to track down a Spanish Nazi collaborator named “Balthazar.”
The atmosphere and coterie of unscrupulous characters are meant to take the viewer out of his humdrum existence and into a dangerous world of criminals, informants, and collaborators. It works well enough for the very short running time of the film (a mere 76 minutes), but anything longer would have likely sunk the already somewhat padded programmer.
Directed by George Waggner, best known for the highly atmospheric The Wolf Man (1941), the movie succeeds in creating an ambiance – a sense of time and place – but is far less successful in holding together a cohesive, easy to follow plot. It’s one of those films where everyone ends up in the same room at the end and all is revealed. Not particularly sophisticated material.
Still, it has its moments. Look for character actor J. Edward Bromberg in a small, but pivotal role, and for Sabu as an ambitious nightclub guitarist seeking to ingratiate himself with Kenyon (Paige). Montez, for her part, is cast in a far more serious role than in the colorful exotics she did with Jon Hall.
