SECRET SERVICE OF THE AIR. Warner Brothers, 1939. Brass Bancroft #1. Ronald Reagan, John Litel, Ila Rhodes, James Stephenson, Eddie Foy Jr., Rosella Towne. Director: Noel M. Smith.

   I really can’t imagine that anyone who went to see this movie in 1939 could have possibly come away from it saying to his wife or her husband, as the case may be, that that guy’s got what it takes to be President someday! But what they definitely would have gotten was a good look at an amiable, good-looking actor with a lot of personal appeal if not necessarily a wide range of acting ability.

   Although only a small budget affair from Warners, the movie itself did so well that three more in a follow-up series were made. I’ve listed two women in the cast, but you can forget about them, even though one of them plays Brass’s fiancée, showing up only at the beginning and once again right at the end.

   In between this is a guys’ story only, one dealing with a tough gang of hoodlums actively smuggling people across the border by plane into California. (How tough are they? Watch this movie and you’ll find out.)

   As for Brass Bancroft, he’s a pilot recruited by the secret Service to go undercover and find out who he Big Boss is. To this end he is framed on a counterfeiting rap and sentenced to a term in prison. Our star of course does this standing on his head. Figuratively speaking, of course. And in spite of his longtime sidekick’s attempt to help (Eddie Foy, Jr.), he’s pretty good at catching bad guys, too.

   Don’t expect too much from this one, as it doesn’t have a lot to give, but you may find this one as much fun to watch as I did.

RENEGADE TRAIL. Paramount, 1939. William Boyd, Russell Hayden, George Hayes, Charlotte Wynters, Russell Hopton, Roy Barcroft, John Merton, Bob Kortman, and Sonny Bupp. Screenplay by John Rathmell & Harrison Jacobs, based on characters created by Clarence E. Mulford. Directed by Lesley Selander.

   A landmark Western… of sorts.

   Even if it were no better than routine, Renegade Trail would be remembered by B-Western buffs for the last appearance in a Hoppy film by George Hayes, who had established himself as trusty-dusty side-kick Windy Halliday in George Sherman’s Hopalong Cassidy series since Bar 20 Rides Again in 1935.

   In the intervening four years, Hayes had worked his garrulous old-timer schtick into a smooth routine, replete with tall tales, amusing double-takes and toothless muttering asides. Small wonder then, that Hayes hit producer Sherman up for a substantial raise. Or that Sherman, running a successful but not hugely profitable enterprise, had Windy Halliday written out off the Bar 20 ranch, into a comfortable sinecure as a town marshal and out of the series.

   George Hayes moved to Republic, playing basically the same character, but since “Windy” was owned by Paramount, he changed the name to “Gabby,” and it stuck. Gabby Hayes. Thus are legends born.

   Getting back to the movie itself, Trail is a bit lacking in action, the plot needlessly complicated, but vigorously directed by Lesley Selander, and has a moment that would have been at home in an Anthony Mann movie:

   Hoppy’s pal Lucky, lying wounded in the back of a chuck wagon, trying to get his gun out as a bad guy walks from long-shot to medium range and murders the driver. The only problem is that Mann would have done it in a single shot, where Selander breaks it into 3 or 4 — which makes the difference between a great director and a talented one.

   But I said this was a landmark Western and it is. Renegade Trail is the only Western I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen plenty) where the bad guy (Roy Barcroft) actually makes his entrance kicking a dog – an act which seems to have gone down in B-movie folklore. And it ties into a delicious ending, so I’ll insert here a SPOILER ALERT!

   Toward the end, the outlaw gang has the good guys pinned down, but Hoppy slips behind their lines, sneaks up close to Roy Barcroft and says. “Tell your men to drop their guns!” which he does and they do. Then in the post-game wrap-up, there’s a conversation I’ll paraphrase as:

   “Nice work, Hoppy. But how’d you know he’d give up?”

   And Hoppy replies, “No man that’d kick a dog would stand up to a fair fight!”

   They just don’t make ’em like that anymore.

A song from Desert Rose ((Sugar Hill, 1984), a solo LP from one of the founding member of The Byrds:

  LESTER del REY, Editor – Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Second Annual Edition. E. P. Dutton, hardcover. 1973. Ace, paperback, December 1975.

   #6. R. A. LAFFERTY “Eurema’s Dam.” Short story. First published in New Dimensions II, edited by Robert Silverberg (Doubleday, hardcover, 1972). First collected in Golden Gate and Other Stories (Corroboree, hardcover, 1982). Co-winner of the 1973 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

   While he had written some short fiction before then, Lafferty is best known to me for his first three novels, which came out in 1968, almost all at the same: Past Master, Space Chantey, and The Reefs of Earth, and his exuberant and truly one-of-a-kind way of telling a tale.

   While his stories were nominated several times for various major awards, “Eurema’s Dam” was the only one to win one of the major ones. To me, at this much later date, the story is a mere trifle, but when it was first published, it garnered considerable acclaim from SF critics and fans alike.

   This is the life story of a unique individual named Albert, and let’s let Lafferty tell you what you need to know about him, starting from the very beginning of the story:

   How dumb was he? He was so dumb about arithmetic that he was forced to invent a pocket calculator. He could not tell his right hand from his left without noting the direction of whirlpools and which side a cow is milked on. He even invented a machine that would help him not be afraid of girls.

   When he had a hunch that he would never be good at hunches, he fabricated a machine to help him with that, and he called it Hunchy. Of all the machines and other devices he invented, and there many of them, all of them built on logic, this is the one that he discovers he needs the most.

   It may be that science fiction fans in 1972 could see a lot of themselves in Albert. If so, I can certainly understand that. There is one thing that is for certain. Only R. A. Lafferty could have written this story, and I’m glad he won a Hugo for it.

          —

Previously from the del Rey anthology: FREDERIK POHL & C. M. KORNBLUTH “The Meeting.”

FRANCIS BEEDING – The Seven Sleepers. Professor Kreutzemark #1. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover, 1925. Little Brown, US, hardcover, 1925.

   Thomas Preston is a British traveling man in Post WWI Europe (a Europe that has just received the first awakening call of what is to come with Mussolini) who finds himself in Geneva, home of the League of Nations (which features prominently in most of Beeding’s thrillers since the two men who wrote under that name both worked there), when his luggage takes a side trip. Not that he is averse to visiting Geneva where the beautiful Beatrice Harvel is working for the League, and as it turns out, for Henri Laval who Preston knew from the war.

   Even before calling on Beatrice, Tom’s visit has been an interesting one, beginning with a strange little man approaching him as if he knew him, shoving a document in his hands, and then promptly being arrested, and then a letter from someone claiming to be Tom’s grandmother setting forth a meeting the next day. These are the things Beatrice doesn’t like and with good reason.

   But no Englishman in the fiction of the between-the-war period, and few since the days of Anthony Hope and the Play-Actor, ever manages to ignore such intriguing mysteries, and in the shadow of John Buchan and Richard Hannay, it would seem practically treasonous. Somehow even when the saner, less adventurous heroes of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene came along, they still somehow never quite managed to ignore that siren song no matter how hard they tried.

   Hero or feckless coward it seems impossible to avoid adventure in a British thriller.

   The Seven Sinners is the work of Francis Beeding (John Leslie Palmer and Hilary Aidan St. George Saunders), best remembered today for the novel The House of Dr. Edwardes, filmed as Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, and a fine mystery suspense serial killer novel Death Walks in Eastrepps.

   In their lifetime, though, they were known as one of the most popular and purveyors of the novel of adventure and international intrigue. Along with the likes of Valentine Williams, they were authors of many stand alone novels (The Norwich Victims, The 2 Undertakers, Eleven Were Brave, The Five Flamboys, The Six Walkers, The Twelve Disguises, The Three Fishers, Nine Waxed Faces — if you note a theme here …) as well as the Colonel Alistair Granby series.

   This is the first novel in the shorter Professor Kreutzemark series, and a good introduction to the pleasures of Beeding in thriller mode. Like their rival Valentine Williams, the team has some decided skills as a writers of this sort of thing, an eye for drama (keep in mind the plot devices that seem so familiar now were still pretty fresh then), and they probably knew the European scene as well as any British writers until Eric Ambler, especially Switzerland and the international environs around Geneva.

   In short order Tom finds himself calling on his ‘grandmother’ who proves to be a a German Professor (He had a fine silky beard, neatly trimmed and of a bright gold, a broad forehead and well-set eyes, a straight nose, and a complexion almost feminine in its delicacy. At the first view he suggested an intelligent and sensitive philanthropist, reclusive in temperament.), and two other Germans (Uncle Ulrich and Uncle Fritz), and has killed a man in self defense.

   It’s clear the three have mistaken Tom for someone else, and equally clear they are up to something shady involving German resurgence after the war and with the mysterious Seven Sleepers of the title financing their scheme.

   Escapes and hurried journeys, near run things, dual identities, trusted allies (a refreshingly international lot in this case), betrayal, sudden set-backs, and a plot to attack London and Paris with the Professor’s nasty X-3 gas that could “…destroy all forms of vegetable or animal life within a radius of 400 square kilometres” are all the elements expertly handled by Beeding.

   (As Richard Usborne points out in his study of popular fiction between the wars The Clubland Heroes, a good paper could be written on the use of deadly gas in the post War era, so great were the memories of its horrors, Bulldog Drummond and the Saint both encountering the nasty stuff along with just about every other hero.)

   Old fashioned, true (…that fate should have permitted me to assist in foiling the powers of malice and disorder which in every age must be encountered and freshly overcome if men are to keep and to increase their inheritance), but half the fun lies in the familiar elements in these books and the skills with which the writer deploys them.

   Though hardly in a class with Buchan or Yates, Beeding is still an entertaining read with a moment or two of the kind of ‘fine writing’ John Buchan’s literate thrillers instilled in the genre, with only an occasional need to wince at attitudes of another age, and superior plot spinning and settings. The boys knew their Europe both geographically and politically.    (*)

   Professor Kreutzemark, the silky bearded one, of course lives to scheme another day, and indeed Thomas Preston and he cross swords again in The Hidden Kingdom for the last time. No really good villain should be expected to give up the ghost that easy, and there isn’t much doubt that Beeding had a success as great as Valentine Williams Adolph Von Grundt, Clubfoot, in mind even if it eluded him for the Professor, only to find it with the clever and heroic Colonel Granby. Too bad, because Kreutzemark had his moments as mad German professors go, and a bit of style is appreciated in any field, perhaps especially villainy.

   (*) One has to wonder that any reader of popular British thriller fiction was at all taken by surprise by the rise of Hitler and the rebirth of a dangerous Germany. The fiction of the era barely let the poison gas clear from the trenches before imagining fellows in Prussian haircuts, mad doctors, armaments dealers, and shady fellows in high finance plotting the next war, certainly after the mid twenties when Mussolini raised his ugly shaved head.

Granted, most writers were more subtle with Germany never quite spelled out, and Russia and the Reds came in for no small amount of plotting themselves (Sapper was about evenly divided between Germans and Russians sometimes rather remarkably managing to have both working together, but then politics was not his strong point), but it does seem at times as if anyone who bothered to crack a book would have been well advised to invest in a bomb shelter or leave the continent.

  ROSS MACDONALD – The Goodbye Look. Lew Archer #15. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, April 1969. Bantam, paperback; 1st printing, June 1970. Reprinted many times since, in both hardcover and soft.

   Published toward the end of the Lew Archer series, The Goodbye Look had a strong feeling of weariness to it when I read it this past week, that and a sense of déjà vu, as if Macdonald were repeating in it many of the same themes he’d already gone through several times before.

   It begins when Archer is hired by a lawyer to find an old gold box that has just been stolen from the family of one of his long time clients. His family and theirs are close — so close, in fact, that not only do they live across the street from each other, but the lawyer’s daughter is engaged to be married to the son of the couple for whom he’s been working for so long.

   One strong suspect is the son, a college student who is a very emotionally disturbed young man, and one possibly important factor is that he has recently been taking up with an older woman. A private detective has also been seen in town looking for someone, and when Archer finds his dead body in a car on the beach, the case begins in earnest.

   And as is always true in Lew Archer’s cases, the problems that exist in the present have long-standing roots in the past. Lost loves and lost lives, intricately interlaced with relationships known and unknown between (in this case) three if not four families.

   I always get a pervasive feeling of melancholy, of dark clouds above, whenever I read one of Macdonald’s books, no matter how sunny the Southern California sky may be. The Goodbye Look is no exception. Archer may make his way from San Diego to Pasadena and back several times in this book, but the case itself he always has with him. It is part of him, and he won’t let go.

THE FRIGHTENED CITY. Anglo-Amalgamated Films, UK. 1961; Allied Artists, US, 1962. Herbert Lom, John Gregson, Sean Connery, Alfred Marks, Yvonne Romain, Olive McFarland. Director: John Lemont.

   A black-and-white British gangster film that the number three cast member takes over and makes his own. Sean Connery plays Paddy Damion in The Frightened City, a petty crook who is roped into the protection rackets covering all of London by the smooth-talking Harry Foulcher (Alfred Marks) who is secretly working for a malevolent crime boss by the name of Waldo Zhernikov (Herbert Lom).

   It is the latter’s idea to form an association of all the local mobsters in the same racket and make the entire city cry out for help. It is Paddy’s job to help keep everyone in line. Until, that is, one of the head gangsters objects to Zhernikov’s plans to escalate their criminous activities, and unknowingly to Paddy, he is the one who is chosen to help eliminate him.

   Even at this early stage of his career, and even though he’s on the wrong side of the law, Sean Connery is both cool and urbane, with a unmistakable eye for the ladies. He’s also the absolute focus of attention whenever whenever he’s on the screen. Solidly if not slickly produced, The Frightened City has the look of having had a bigger budget than usual for British crime films of the same era — no Hammer quickie this.

Recently found in a local California record shop: The Sunset Bombers’ self-titled LP was a one-off album project for guitarist Doug Fieger before he formed the rock band The Knack. As a member of the latter group he co-wrote “My Sharona,” the biggest hit song in the US in 1979. “I Can’t Control Myself” is a cover of a song first performed by The Troggs.

ERIC AMBLER – Journey Into Fear. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1940. Alfred A. Knopf, US, hardcover, 1940. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and paperback. Movie: RKO, 1943. Also: New World, 1975. TV adaptation: Climax!. Season 3, Episode 2, 11 October 1956.

JOURNEY INTO FEAR. RKO, 1943. Joseph Cotten, Dolores Del Rio, Ruth Warrick, Agnes Moorehead, Jack Durant, Everett Sloane, Orson Welles. Screenplay: Joseph Cotten (and Orson Welles, Richard Collins & Ben Hecht uncredited), based on the novel by Eric Ambler. Directors: Directed by Norman Foster & Orson Welles (the latter uncredited).

   With a plot featuring a regular man caught up in a high stakes game of international espionage, Journey Into Fear remains a classic of the spy fiction genre. And for good reason. It gives the reader with a protagonist that most readers can sympathize with, a British naval engineer named Graham. It also provides a recognizable and formidable foe in Nazi Germany. Because Graham has been hired by the neutral Turks to bolster their naval forces, he has come to the attention of the leadership in Berlin.

   Not wanting Turkey to enter the war on the side of the Allies, the Nazis dispatch a pair of killers to neutralize Graham and to delay the possible Turkish entry into the Second World War. All Graham wants to do is return from his work in Istanbul back to his native England in safety.

   What makes Journey Into Fear work so extraordinarily well is that the novel in actuality features two stories, one external and one internal. The external story follows Graham as he descends into the seedy world of Istanbul nightlife, into a Turkish police station where he comes face to face with the head of the Turkish secret police, and aboard a freighter bound to Genoa. Much as in a locked door mystery, the coterie of strange characters along for the ride provides imaginative readers with plenty to grapple with intellectually. Who might be a Nazi agent? Who might be looking after Graham on behalf of the Turks who want to see him return to England in one piece?

   Graham’s internal journey, the one that takes him deep into his innermost fears is the more compelling one. Here’s one example of how Ambler’s utilization of close third person narration allows the reader to get a glimpse of Graham’s particular way of thinking. This is from the latter portion of the novel when he faces down the very real possibility that his death at the hands of Nazi agents is imminent:

   It is this aspect of Graham, the psychological one, that fails to make its way into the 1943 RKO cinematic adaptation. In the movie, Graham, rather than a Brit, is an American and he is portrayed as a rather cowardly and charmless doofus by Joseph Cotten. A far cry from his role as the complex, multilayered Eugene Morgan in Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Cotten plays Graham as a rather bland, one dimensional everyman.

   True, he is able to summon up the courage to face down his opponents when it becomes absolutely necessary. But Cotten’s Graham is hardly the stuff that the best spy films are made of. Neither a doomed protagonist in the film noir sense of the term, nor an average man forced to do extraordinary things to survive (think: Cary Grant in North by Northwest), the cinematic Graham is somewhere in the vast middle. This makes him a far less compelling character than the psychologically tormented Graham that the reader identifies with in the novel.

   The greatest pleasure in reading Ambler’s masterwork in espionage fiction may not necessarily found in the story, compelling though it may be. Rather, it is in Ambler’s sparse but descriptive prose that one can easily lose oneself. Ambler’s prose flows naturally, with each sentence logically progressing from the previous one.

   Perhaps it was his training as an engineer which allowed him to map out his paragraphs as if they were each small blueprints for a much larger project. This is not to imply that his language is mechanical in the pejorative sense of the term. Rather, it is to highlight how fine tuned his prose actually is. It neither meanders nor muddles. It just flows. Brilliantly.

MARGERY ALLINGHAM – Police at the Funeral. Albert Campion #4. William Heinemann, UK, hardcover, 1931. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1932. Paperback reprints include Bantam, US, TV tie-in, 1989. TV adaptation: Mystery!: Campion “Police at the Funeral, Parts 1 and 2,” Season 1, Episodes 3 & 4, February 5 & 12, 1989.

   In the book immediately following The Gyrth Chalice Mystery (published in the UK as Look to the Lady), Mr. Campion has become, if not a full-fledged PI, at least in his own words, a “Deputy Adventurer.” Here he’s asked to help investigate a series of deaths befalling the Faraday family.

   All of whom are elderly and a bit more than eccentric in their behavior, and the murders are equally bizarre. If you completely ignore the role that coincidence plays in this one, you should have a good tie trying to match wits with Campion in this one.

       —

FOOTNOTE:   As a bit of warning, however, I think the book is starting to show both its age and its trans-Atlantic origins. There were a couple od short passages that were so determinedly British that I could have used a footnote or two to help with a translation.

   But have you seen the TV version of Albert Campion on public TV? I can’t help but think that Peter Davison is nothing but perfect in the role. His blend of blank vacuousness with obvious underlying intelligence is absolutely unnerving.