IVAN T. ROSS – Old Students Never Die. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1962. Detective Book Club, hardcover, 3-in-1 edition.
School teacher Ben Gordon accepts a weekend vacation at a former student’s country hideaway. The student is Jackie Meadows, now a successful comedian, and one who is now negotiating for his own TV show, which explains the additional presence of the many typical show business types on hand.
The unexpected return of one of Jackie’s old girl friends upsets things, and leads top her death. The change in Jackie since high school days leads Ben to accuse him of the murder. Admission, attempted suicide, death.
So far, so good, but the story still has 20 pages to go. Obviously a twist in the tale is yet to come, but for some reason, it is not as satisfactory as it should have been.
Analogies drawn to high school days are uniformly fine. And they would naturally lead one to conclude that Ivan T. Ross has done a considerable amount pf high school teaching.
But Jackie Meadow’s jokes are really not very funny.
THE WINDOW. RKO Radio Pictures, 1949. Barbara Hale, Arthur Kennedy, Paul Stewart, Ruth Roman, Bobby Driscoll. Based on the story “The Boy Cried Murder” by Cornell Woolrich. Director: Ted Tetzlaff.
Adapted from a short story penned by Cornell Woolrich, The Window is an above average thriller and a suspenseful yarn that holds your attention from beginning to end. With child actor Bobby Driscoll as the glue that holds everything together, the film is never dull or lifeless.
Driscoll, whose adult life was marked by tragedy, portrays Tommy Woodry, an excitable, imaginative young boy living with his working class parents in a modest apartment building in Manhattan. He’s known by both his peers and his parents for telling tall tales, stories about gangsters, Indians, and whatnot. So when he actually does witness a murder, no one believes him. He’s the boy who cried wolf.
Aside from Driscoll, the film benefits from some talented actors. Arthur Kennedy portrays Tommy’s father, a man who is torn between the love he has for his son and his embarrassment at how the boy is seemingly turning into a compulsive liar. The upstairs neighbors, the ones who actually do commit a murder, are portrayed by radio star Paul Stewart and the prolific Ruth Roman. They make a great villainous couple.
There’s a lot to admire in The Window, from the acting to the cinematography and lighting. There’s a shadowy menace to the stairwell in the Woodrys’ apartment building, one that is used to heighten the dangerous situation in which Tommy has found himself. There is also a white knuckle ending that takes place in a nearby condemned building.
This was the second time I’ve had the occasion to watch this movie,and I enjoyed it even more this time. I realized how very much it’s both a Woolrich movie and a New York City one. As much as anything else, this film is about the struggles of postwar life (and death) in the Big Apple.
HARRIGAN AND SON “Hello Goodbye.” ABC/Desilu. 12 May 1961 (Season 1, Episode 30). Pat O’Brien (James Harrigan Sr.), Roger Perry (James Harrigan Jr.), Georgine Darcy, Helen Kleeb. Director: Sherman Marks.
While nominally a lawyer series, one watching the video of this episode below soon comes to the quick and savvy conclusion that it was in reality a comedy show instead. Maybe the thirty minute running time should have been the tipoff. Most of the series featuring courtroom cases and the like were an hour long. A half hour simply isn’t enough time to get into the nitty gritty details of a full-fledged murder case, for example.
Harrigan and Son was a – well, you guessed it – a small father and son legal firm, with the ever smooth Pat O’Brien as the father, and three relative unknowns filling out the rest of the cast. (You may, however remember Georgina Darcy playing “Miss Torso” in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.)
The series was on for one season, long enough to be able to blink a couple of times before missing it. After James Harrigan the senior has a rough day in court, he decides to retire and let his son take over the firm on his own. After some not really very funny incidents in which he finds he’s not having any fun either, he decides that he’s not really ready to retire just yet.
Amusing, perhaps, but certainly not laugh out loud funny. I’d never heard of this one before stumbling across it on YouTube, and I’m willing to wager none of you have either.
MICHAEL COLLINS “Black in the Snow.” PI Dan Fortune. Published in An Eye for Justice: The Third PWA Anthology, edited by Robert J. Randisi (Mysterious Press, 1988). Collected in Crime, Punishment and Resurrection(Donald Fine, 1992).
Of the several pen names used by author Dennis Lynds, I believe (but am not absolutely certain) that Michael Collins is the one he used most often. And of the books and shorter fiction he published under that name, most of them were about PI Dan Fortune.
The most distinguishing physical aspect of Dan Fortune as a man is that he has only one arm. This fact sometimes comes up as a crucial part of story; sometimes, as in “Black in the Snow,” it’s mentioned only in passing. Which is interesting, and maybe someone could write a master’s thesis about it someday, but in all honesty, I don’t think it’s likely to be all that interesting to anyone else but me.
Fortune is hired by a lawyer in this one to look into the death of the female half of a married couple, middle-aged or perhaps later. The husband claims he came home to find her dead, stabbed to death by persons unknown. The man suggests a burglar, which is certainly a possibility. The “black in the snow” is that of the wife’s dog, thrown there by the killer. Quite possibly, but why? Fortune has a job to do.
His investigation is limited. He scours the house for clues and has long conversation with the husband’s sister. I may have made the case sound lengthy and boring, but a writer as good as Lynds can make reading the phone book sound palatable, and Fortune gets to the bottom of things very quickly. (I’d sound like a grouch if I said coming up with all the details he does makes the ending a little sketchy, so maybe I won’t. Or maybe I will.)
LEE THAYER – And One Cried Murder. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1961. Detective Book Club, hardcover, 3-in-1 edition.
The stiff manners of Peter Clancy’s English butler Wiggar carry over to the stilted language and dialogue of nearly everybody else. For example, how does “So that’s where the unfortunate fellow got it!” (page 128) really sound? For my first introduction to San Francisco detective Clancy, this story is really a failure.
The death of a rich aunt by carbon monoxide poisoning leads to suspicion of two brothers and a sister, with a mysterious suitor sneaking around in the background. It suddenly turns out that he works for the FBI, and it is [REDACTED], who is the killer. Strictly from nowhere, for the most part. and slow, but interesting in spots.
LAWRENCE BLOCK “By the Dawn’s Early Light.” Matt Scudder. First published in Playboy Magazine, August 1984, Collected and reprinted many times. Winner of the Shamus Award for Best Short Story.
Matt Scudder, of course, does not legally have a license to work as a private eye, or at least he doesn’t at the time this story takes place. That doesn’t stop him from taking cases such as the one in this story that PI’s always take on, with or without the proper credentials. This time around he agrees to help out a casual drinking buddy who’s being accused of hiring a couple of guys to kill his wife.
As it turns out – and this is important – Scudder knows the fellow’s girl friend even more than he does the drinking buddy. What he’s hired to do — not having all of the resources the police do – is to ask around and see what people on the street know about, first of all, his client, but more importantly, the two guys who got caught and are now implicating the client. They never did the killing.
Or so they say.
This may sound way too complicated for a simple short story, and maybe it is, but Lawrence Block could write a story with a lot more going on, ten times as much, and he’s such a smooth talker (well, writer) you’d go along with it all in a heartbeat.
And yet, I said complicated, and I meant it. Even while reading it and the 21 pages of the story are vanishing more and more quickly, and I’m thinking, he could have made a novel out of this. The structure? Exactly the same.
There’s a hint of darkness in the ending, too. Maybe Playboy didn’t get too excited about it, but the story’s a lot tougher than what Alfred Hitchcock’s Magazine was publishing at the time. Face it, though. Lawrence Block is a writer’s writer, and he always has been. This one’s a winner.
TIMOTHY FULLER – Three Thirds of a Ghost. Jupiter Jones #2. Little, Brown, hardcover, 1941. Popular Library #81, paperback, 1946.
When his first novel, Harvard Has a Homicide, was published in 1936, Timothy Fuller — just twenty-two and a Harvard undergraduate — was hailed as an important mystery-story prodigy. He never quite lived up to the promise of that first book, however, either in his productivity or in the quality of his later work.
It was five years before he published his second and third mysteries, another two years until his fourth, and seven more until his fifth and final book. And only Reunion with Murder (1941) and This Is Murder, Mr. Jones (1943) can be said to equal or surpass Harvard Has a Homicidein plotting and technique.
Despite its inherent flaws, however, Three Thirds of a Ghost may well be Fuller’s most appealing work. One of the reasons-perhaps the main reason-is that it is set primarily in a Boston bookshop, Bromfield’s, where writer Charles Newbury (who specializes in roman a clef novels about important Boston families, not to mention mysteries featuring an Oriental detective known as the Parrot) is shot to death while addressing 200 guests at Bromfield’s 150th birthday celebration.
In Catalogue of Crime, Barzun and Taylor call Three Thirds of a Ghost “disappointing.” And so it is, in terms of its rather thin plot and dubious gimmick to explain how Newbury could be killed without any of the 200 witnesses seeing who fired the shot.
But Harvard Fine Arts instructor Jupiter Jones, the amateur sleuth who also stars in Fuller’s other four novels, is an engaging bumbler; the cast of characters — especially Jupiter’s girlfriend (later wife), Helen, Newbury’s non-stereotypical. Chinese secretary, Lin, and some refreshingly intelligent cops — is diverse and well drawn; and there are amusing bits of business interspersed with plenty of barbed commentary on the writing and selling of books and on pre-World War II Boston society.
If your taste runs to the humorous, sophisticated, slightly screwball type of storytelling popular in the 1930s, this bibliomystery (and any of the other Jupiter Jones romps) is definitely your sort of Boston tea party.
MARK CHANNING – Nine Lives. Colin Gray #4. G G Harrap and Co, UK, hardcover, 1937. J. B. Lippincott, US, hardcover, 1937.
Warning, this is an adventure novel of the fantastic from the late 1930’s written by a former British Officer and Colonial resident of India and reflects that. If that is a non-starter for you I understand, but if you have a bit broader view, this is a rousing adventure by that rarest of things, a Colonial who went far deeper and with far more sympathy into his adopted homeland and produced a series of books that reflected that in the manner of another Colonial anti Imperialist writer, the more famous Talbot Mundy.
…there is an ancient saying that the cat has nine lives. Sometimes there happen uncanny things, which almost makes it seem as if the cat, as she steps down through the ages, meditative and aloof…is dimly aware of her ancient divinity and its obligations.
General Hector Dalziell, head of the British Secret Service in India, is in a state. Suleman (sic) Khan, a bandit fanatic who believes himself to be the reincarnation of Genghis Khan, and head of the cult the Servants of Genghis Khan a Pan Islamic movement rather like an early Al Queada, is on the rise and seeks to finance his adventure with the fabulous treasure found in Channing’s first novel, King Cobra, and Dalziell’s second best man is missing.
Channing, being rather saner than most pulp style adventure writers, spends a bit of time discussing fanaticism in religion among all faiths including Hindu, Muslim, and Christian, and it should be noted among Channing’s other works, he wrote about what he believed were the common basis for all faiths, and as the book progresses his hero will encounter allies across the spectrum of Indian faiths, Hindu and Muslim.
It is still a European’s view of India and Indian custom, but it is from a sympathetic eye, not a sneering one certain the native population are children incapable of governing themselves.
Which does bring us to our hero, General Dalziell’s number one man, and the hero of all four of Channing’s novels, Colin Gray, the von “Richtophen of the Indian Secret Service,” the bronzed grey-eyed near superhuman hero of the whole thing, a cross between Talbot Mundy’s Jimgrim and Athelston King, Doc Savage, and James Bond (he’s ruthless, beautiful women fall at his feet, and he likes sports cars with loud exhausts).
Gray is a bit on the splendid side, but Channing allows him to also be testy, and at times blind to the greater powers confronting him. He is not above being wrong, stubborn, and in awe of forces he may not understand. All four books pit the rather grounded Secret Service hero against forces of good and evil at war on different planes of existence and his key role is often despite his blindness to the greater world around him.
Lost worlds, mysterious cults, and secret wars at higher planes fill all the books, but thankfully always act as color to the adventures rather than over shadowing them if the supernatural puts you off.
Gray is currently in Cairo on his honeymoon with his bride Diana (who he met in King Cobra) and is the man who discovered the treasures of the Valley of the Mirror. He is quickly recalled with orders to secure the treasure or destroy it before Khoon can seize it and set India and Asia ablaze. After a bit of set up including a meeting with an expert in Egyptology in Alexandria, a murder attempt, news that Dalziell has been assassinated, and a hurried escape from Egypt our basic crew is assembled.
Gray of course on Dalziell’s last orders, his wife Diana (whose life is in danger apart from him), who won’t hear of staying behind, Limbu, Gray’s Gurkha orderly (and okay, though courageous as a lion he is a bit too Gunga Din at times), and one uninvited and unwanted crew member they simply cannot get rid of, a small black Kitten called Barfy adopted by Diana in Alexandria in the shadows of a statue of the goddess Bast, named after Egyptian mystic Dr. Barfopulos.
The latter had warned Gray and Diana in Cairo of a Mongol assassin of Khoon’s who made an attempt on their life and imparted the strange fact that Suleman Khoon hates and fears cats are the main figures though there are seven characters whose lives will be changed by events.
I needn’t point out after that introductory passage I quoted Barfy is vital and indeed central to the plot, but can reassure you she is not only a cute black kitten, she is also a tough, semi feral little beast who Gray cannot abide but tolerates and is eventually supremely grateful for and gets no more wordage than she deserves.
Mark Channing, Leopold Aloysius Matthew Jones, was a British officer who after distinguishing himself in the Boer War spent most of his career in India. By the time of the Gray novels he was an officer with a British Indian Bank and a student of Indian religion, something that plays a key role in many of his novels, including this one with a high placed adept who can apparently transport himself physically with his mind, something that proves as key to Gray’s ultimate success as a small near feral black kitten.
The fate of the East, is at hand, not the Raj, but all of the East and world peace. Suleman Khoon is no Dr. Fu Manchu, but an ambitious and intelligent political figure exploiting fanaticism for power and personal gain. Modern parallels are fairly obvious.
So our heroes are off into Kalistan, the land of blackness, where man and nature both oppose them, all a run up to a slam bang pulp style ending with a supernaturally malign tiger, Shiv, sent to murder a bewitched Gray and only a small black kitten between him and death, but Barfy is beloved of Sekmet, Bast, the Egyptian cat god and might just be Shiv’s match.
Never worry, though. Channing doesn’t cheat, it is all done straight with perfectly reasonable explanations for what happens, if you care to believe them.
For the course of the book, I align more with Limbu, who sees what the European’s do not.
Like Mundy before him, Channing is a gifted spinner of tales balancing the fantastic with humor and reality. If you enjoy this kind of pulp fantasia done well Channing is in the same class as Mundy, Ganpat, and Achmed Abdullah, and like them his love of the East and its peoples shows through.
Inevitably any Colonial is an outsider, but there are rare outsiders, John Masters, Paul Scott, James A. Michener, and Rumer Godden among them who glimpse something of the beauty of a world not their own and convey it.
The four Channing novels — King Cobra, White Python, Poisoned Mountain, and this — are pulp adventure, but superb pulp adventure and written with sympathy and even empathy for the people and culture they depict and not merely exploitation. Nine Lives is my favorite of the four, but if you want to try them White Python, the second Colin Gray book, is in print in a Trade Paperback edition from Armchair Fiction’s Lost Race Classics for a reasonable price, and King Cobra can be found among the Luminist Society Archives in pdf form.
Besides which I am a sucker for small feral black kittens touched by the ancestral memory of ancient Egyptian goddesses.
BILL PRONZINI “Cat’s Paw.” Nameless PI. First published in separate form by Waves Press, hardcover, 1983. Reprinted several times, including in The Eyes Still Have It, edited by Robert J. Randisi (Dutton, 1995). Shamus Award winner for Best Short Story.
PI stories make up a sizable chunk of the world’s supply of published mystery and detective fiction. There are fewer locked room mysteries, but there’s a sizable amount of them. And of course, as all you already know, the Venn diagram circles for each of these two subgenres, as we shall call them, do overlap.
And while I’ve never made a count, I’m willing to wager that over half of those stories that exists in that aforesaid overlap section were written by Bill Pronzini.
This is one of them. And it’s a good one.
Pronzini’s nameless PI has taken a side job helping guard the expansive grounds of a zoo which has been the victim of several recent robberies. Some of its more valuable birds and animals have gone missing. On the night the story takes place, something more sinister happens. Another guard is found dead in the lions’ cage, shot at close range, but … the cage doors are locked, with the only accessible entry being through the grotto where the lions stay overnight. No way in, without keys, and no way out. Not even for the most expert of thieves.
It is a puzzle. I stopped reading at this point and waited two evenings before getting on to the solution. The extra time? It didn’t help. Didn’t even come close.
It’s a complicated solution, and as usual when it comes to locked room mysteries, explaining it all in the requisite detail is the weakest part of the tale. At least for me. But the clues are there, and with them in hand (and properly noted) the case is wrapped up as tight as a drum.
THE SPIKES GANG. United Artists, 1974. Lee Marvin (Harry Spikes), Gary Grimes, Ron Howard, Charles Martin Smith, Arthur Hunnicutt, Noah Beery Jr. Loosely based on the novel The Bank Robber, by Giles Tippette. (See comment #1.) Director: Richard Fleischer.
The Spikes Gang begins with what can only be described as unrealistic, perhaps a little too innocent, dialogue. A wounded bank robber by the name of Harry Spikes (Lee Marvin) is saved by three teenage boys: Wil (Gary Grimes), Tod (Charles Martin Smith), and Les (Ron Howard). Recovering in Wil’s family’s barn, he develops a budding friendship with them.
Problem is: Spikes doesn’t talk, nor act, like a bank robber or a killer. He’s too genial and the boys, in a state of semi-awe, also sound too saccharine in their dialogue. Only in the second half of the film does one realize that this was all put on screen for a purpose. As it turns out, The Spikes Gang is as much a tragic coming of age story as it is a western.
After a recuperated Spikes leaves on Wil’s horse, Wil decides to leave his family’s homestead and seek new adventures elsewhere. His friends Tod and Les come along for the ride, both literal and proverbial. What begins as a grand adventure, however, quickly turns sour. The boys realize they have no money, no food, and no source of steady employment.
So what do they do? You guessed it. They rob a bank. In the process, Tod kills a state senator. The boys are now outlaws. And where do Texas outlaws go? Mexico, of course. That’s where they reunite with Harry Spikes and form the eponymous Spikes Gang.
The theme of the movie is the loss of innocence. The boys who stood in awe in front of Harry Spikes at the beginning of the movie soon realize that he’s no angel and no role model. He is a self-centered egotist who only looks after himself, even if it means selling the boys down the river for a pardon from the governor.
Overall, I rather enjoyed this one. It’s somewhat unconventional, to be sure. It reminded me in some ways of Will Penny (1968) which I reviewed here years ago. That’s high praise.
