EDWARD D. HOCH “The Theft of the Toy Mouse.” Nick Velvet #3. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 1968. Collected in The Thefts of Nick Velvet (Mysterious Press, 1978).

   Of the several series characters created by Ed Hoch over his long writing career, I think Nick Velvet, professional thief, is my favorite. Not only is he always hired to steal something outrageous (a complete baseball team, the water from a swimming pool), with all the intricate care that’s required, but he almost always endeavors to learn why anyone would hire him to steal that particular item.

   In this story, which falls early in his early days in his unique line work, he is given $20,000 to steal a toy mouse which, when wound up, runs in circles. It is the focus of a modern film being shot in France, just outside of Paris, a setting which certainly boosts the story’s sense of place. (He does manage to convince his girl friend Gloria to stay home.)

   The story rambles comfortably along and is a lot of fun to read. Unfortunately the location of toy mouse is in a building which has been built (by Hoch) to make it, on reflection, an easy task to steal. And the reason behind the caper is rather mundane. But not, of course while, the story is rambling on.

   Overall, the tale is a bit of a letdown. Being “lot of fun to read” does manage to make up for a good portion of that, though.

ENEMY OF THE STATE. Buena Vista Pictures, 1998. Will Smith, Gene Hackman, Jon Voight, Lisa Bonet, Regina King. Director: Tony Scott.

   Tony Scott’s paranoid thriller Enemy of the State has a lot going for it. Aside from the kinetic direction that doesn’t let up, the movie features Will Smith in his prime alongside Hollywood stalwarts Gene Hackman and Jon Voight. Smith portrays Robert Dean, a Washington DC labor attorney who unwittingly comes into the possession of evidence showing that National Security Agency bigwig Thomas Reynolds (Voight) had a Congressman knocked off.

   With no one to trust, Dean eventually turns to the mysterious “Brill” (Hackman), a former NSA employee who now works as a freelance spy for the right price. The two men – of very different personalities and temperaments – must work together to bring down Reynolds and his henchmen.

   Set primarily in Washington DC and Baltimore, the movie benefits tremendously from on-location shooting, particularly one sequence in Dupont Circle. The movie also has a strong supporting cast, including a youthful Jack Black and a not yet famous Scott Caan, son of Hollywood heavyweight James Caan. Seth Green (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) portrays a NSA tech guy, though he is for some unknown reason uncredited.

   The politics of the movie, for better or worse, are written on its sleeve. The tension between privacy rights and the government’s desire to monitor threats through surveillance and satellites is front and center throughout the film, with the script taking a decidedly civil libertarian approach to the debate. Notably, the movie was released in 1998, several years before 9/11 would change everything.

   Overall, I enjoyed this one, but I have no desire to watch it again. Final assessment: come for Smith, but stay for Hackman and Voight. They’re both very good here.

PAT CADIGAN “The Sorceress in Spite of Herself.” First published in Isaac Asimov’s SF, December 1982. Reprinted in Isaac Asimov’s SF-Lite, edited by Gardner Dozois (Ace, 1993). Collected in Dirty Work (Mark Ziesing, 1993).

   Pat Cadigan has had a long career as a SF writer, mostly shorter fiction, starting in the late 70s, but she’s produced a handful of well-regarded novels, plus an even longer list of movie and TV tie-in’s.  (These I knew nothing about until I looked up what I could learn about her online just now.) In spite of her long resume, this is the first of her work that I’ve read.

   So, based on very little, or perhaps even on nothing, I’ve assumed she’s been involved solely with what’s called cyberpunk fiction, or perhaps stories centered on near future concepts such as virtual reality. “The Sorcerer in Spite of Herself” proves how wrong I was about that.

   It involves a young woman, married perhaps for half a year, who’s been plagued her whole life by her habit of losing things. She doesn’t know why or how, and when she finally breaks down and tells her husband, he doesn’t believe her. As she explains at some length, he begins to change his mind, gradually of course, but eventually so much so that he begins to wonder how they might cancel out this curse she’s been under for so long.

   It all works out, in a most logical fashion, in a climax that is as funny, say, as it is chilling. A minor work, but one most nicely done.

KEN BRUEN – The Killing of the Tinkers. Jack Taylor #2. St. Martins Minotaur, softcover, 2004.

   The death drive drives to self-destruction. Not just to cease to be, to stop the pain, to nothingness. But towards an earlier incarnation. A oneness with everything. The self is an illusion dividing us against everything and everyone, creating a loneliness we cannot bear. Death is coming, ready or not. But as much as we try to avoid it, to do everything we can to stay alive, to self-preserve, take meds (Christian scientists notwithstanding), to exercise, to exorcise the death from life: It’s coming. And at times we even hurry it along, speed it up along its merry way, brush the front steps, invite it in for tea.

   At the end of The Guards, Jack Taylor kills his best friend. It’s justified. But who gives a crap, justified? What does that mean? What does it matter? Like Sam Spade handing Brigid O’Shaunessy over to the cops. Choosing ‘justice’ over love in this corrupted world. What the hell for?

   So here Jack Taylor finds himself. Alone. Addicted to coke, and drinking himself to death. The usual.

   He gets hired to find out who’s killing the hobos. He fucks up the investigation, gets the wrong guy killed, and hires a hit man to clean it up. The end. A freaking mess.

Meantime, as per usual, he gives the reader a bunch of tips: Songs and books to listen to and read on the road to perdition.

   He reverentially mentions Jernigan. Twice. So I order it.

DAVID GATES – Jernigan. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1991.

   Jernigan is a failed English lit academic who quits to be a half-assed corporate real estate broker, married to another overeducated souse, raising a teenaged boy in the lower Hudson valley. The suburban dream.

   He picks at his wife constantly, little passive aggressive pokes at her laziness and she at his impotence.

   They have a party. It’s the fourth of July. The neighbors are all there. At the pool. And finally she’s had it. She says ‘fuck you—fuck all of you’, strips off her clothes and jumps in the car, backs out of the driveway full speed, eyes full of hate, only to be instantaneously t-boned by a van. Dead.

   Jernigan starts drinking more and more. Gets fired by his firm. And starts screwing his son’s girlfriend’s mom.

   The mom is in a group of suburban survivalists. They squat in suburban buildings, they dumpster dive for barely expired produce behind the supermarkets, they raise bunnies in their basements. To eat. They make their own moonshine. They have no bills. Their kids go to the nice suburban schools. They don’t work. So they can ‘truly live’.

   This kind of life doesn’t suit Jernigan. Does any?

   So he sells his house, moves in with his son’s girlfriends’ mother, and drinks himself into oblivion.

   The end.

   Can’t say I enjoyed this stuff. But there’s something to this death drive. Maybe.

FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH. Apple Original Films, 2025. John Krasinski, Natalie Portman, Eiza González, Domhnall Gleeson, Arian Moayed, Stanley Tucci. Director: Guy Ritchie.

   Given the title of this film and the fact that I’ve placed it in the Action Adventure category, I expect that most of you are thinking right now that you know exactly how the story line will play out, and long before the movie begins.

   And most of you would be right. All but the details, of course, and they don’t matter anyway.

   But for the record, a mostly estranged brother and sister agree to work for a man with lots of money but who’s dying anyway. Object: to find – you guessed it – the Fountain of Youth. The brother is the instigator, who wants to say yes immediately. The sister needs a lot more persuasion, but she reluctantly agrees as well. She’s in.

   The trail leads them from Thailand to the US and then to Egypt and – the Pyramids, where they all have a lot of fun in not only finding what they are looking for but at the same time fending off all kinds of mercenaries on both sides, sort of, plus the police and maybe someone else whom I’ve forgotten.

   Lots of fireworks in this one, folks, and a lot of money went into the production, which is quite superb. It all works well enough – even more than well enough, in fact – except for the fact that it’s all been done before. (The ending suggests that another adventure may even be in the offing. It all may be done again.)

DETOUR. PRC, 1946. Tom Neal, Ann Savage , Claudia Drake, Edmund MacDonald, Tim Ryan. Screenplay by Martin Goldsmith, based on his own novel. Director: Edgar Ulmer.

   Fate laughs at a nightclub pianist, hitch-hiking to Los Angeles to see his girl friend. The man who picks him up dies in a strange accident, and when he takes the other man’s money and identity, the events that follow are unstoppable.

   Ann Savage plays the girl that Neal picks up in turn, and she knows he is not who he says he is.Neal is under her constant thumb from then on – willingly or not, we are not quite sure. A low budget film that makes a much larger impact than you might expect.

WAYNE D. DUNDEE “The Judas Target.” PI Joe Hannibal. First published in An Eye for Justice: The Third Private Eye Writers of America Anthology, edited by Robert J. Randisi (Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1988).

   Of the various authors included in this third PWA Anthology, Wayne Dundee is probably the least well known. But when you’re included in a book that also includes original stories by authors such as Lyons, Lutz, Grafton, Estleman and Pronzini, I’d have been pumped if it were me, and I’ll bet Dundee was too.

   His primary PI character was a fellow named Joe Hannibal, and although it’s been a while since he’s made an appearance, over the years he’s been featured in a couple of dozen short stories and eight or do novels. His stomping ground is, of all places, Rockford, Illinois, a place which if you’re a PI in, you’re probably the only PI in town.

   In “The Judas Target” it’s his good buddy, bar owner Bomber Brannigan, whose life has been threatened – twice before he lets Joe know about it, and once after the Joe talks him into letting him help.

   The case develops slowly but assuredly from that point on, ending in one slam bang of a finish. It’s difficult to learn much about a character after reading just one short story about him, but I can safely say that if someone were after me, for reasons unknown, I’d sure like to have someone like Joe Hannibal on my side.

IF SCIENCE FICTION. October 1967. Editor: Frederik Pohl. Cover artist: Hector Castellon. Overall rating: **½.

HAL CLEMENT “Ocean on Top.” Serial, part 1 of 3. Review to appear after my reading of the full story.

LARRY EISENBERG “Conqueror.” A short but terribly important story of how sex can humiliate the proudest conqueror. (5)

A. E. van VOGT “Enemy of the Silies.” Novelette. More incomprehensible adventures of the Silkies, attacked this time by the Nijjians. Cemp’s only weapon if his Logic of Levels, whatever that might be. You gotta admire van Vogt, if he understands this stuff. (0)

C. C. MacAPP “Winter of the Llangs.” Novelette. An intelligent cattle-like people trapped by the weather are harassed by creatures which might be wolves. Solid alien characterization. (3)

DONALD J. WALSH “Mu Panther,” First story. A hunting party goes after a mutant panther which has more than size going for it, (2)

JAMES BLISH “Faust Aleph-Null.” Serial, part 3 of 3. To be reviewed separately soon.

THE DARK PAST. Columbia Pictures, 1948. William Holden, Nina Foch, Lee J. Cobb, Adele Jergens, Stephen Dunne, Lois Maxwell, Berry Kroeger, Steven Geray. Director: Rudolph Maté

   You might think that, with the title The Dark Past, that this Columbia production was a film noir. And, in some ways, you’d be correct. But overall, this feature is way too optimistic about human nature to be considered a proper noir.

   Let me explain.

   Lee J. Cobb portrays Dr. Andrew Collins, a college professor/psychiatrist whose family home is invaded by notorious outlaw Al Walker (William Holden) and his crew. Over the course of a stormy evening, Collins takes the angst-ridden Walker on as a veritable patient.

   Apparently the distraught and criminally-minded Walker has been having a recurrent nightmare that is slowly driving him to the brink of insanity. Collins, who seems to believe many criminals can be “cured,” breaks down the symbolism of the dream and helps Walker break from his murderous ways. That’s the gist of The Dark Past.

   Supporting cast members include the lovely Nina Foch as Walker’s girlfriend and Adele Jurgens as one of Collins’s houseguests. Truth be told, however, the movie – which is based on a play – centers around the performances of both Cobb and Holden.

   Both do well enough with the material, even the psychobabble. But the material simply isn’t that particularly compelling, at least from the vantage point of 2025. Still, I surprisingly somewhat enjoyed watching this movie, perhaps due to the short running time and the commitment that both leads gave to the work.

A. S. FLEISCHMAN – Danger in Paradise. Gold Medal #295, paperback original; 1st printing, 1953. Cover by Barye Phillips. Stark House Press, 2010, 2-for-1 edition with Malay Woman.

   It’s easily said, but the fact of the matter is that they just don’t write books like this any more.

   Adventure thrillers, that is, written for the fun of it, and for the reader’s pleasure as well, without the bloated look of a book aimed straight for the bestseller list.

   Jefferson Cape is in a small village in Bali when a beautiful girl slips him a message. Upon his return to the United States, she tells him, he is to make sure it is immediately turned over to the CIA. Unfortunately, he is forced to miss his boat, whereupon he distinctly finds himself a center of attention, and from all sides.

   He soon finds he has fallen in love with the girl, of course, has doubts, has doubts erased, then raised again. Underlying his every action, however, is a sense of honor and chivalry no longer adhered to today, not even by the good guys.

   Maybe you can just chalk this one up to nostalgia.

Rating: B plus.