BORREGO. Saban Films, 2022. Lucy Hale, Leynar Gomez, Jorge E. Jimenez, Nicholas Gonzalez, Olivia Trujillo. Written & directed by Jesse Harris. Currently streaming on Netflix.

   The opening is exceedingly promising. Working alone in the empty desert under the hot California sun, botanist Elly (Lucy Hale) is both focused and distracted. While she is squarely devoted to her botanical survey, she’s also lost in her own thoughts and mourning the loss of her younger sister. But the desert has its own plans for her.

   Unbeknownst to her, she’s not the only one who is toiling in semi-solitude in the great emptiness of eastern San Diego County. Also out there is Guillermo (Jorge E. Jimenez), an enforcer for an unnamed Mexican drug cartel and father-and-daughter duo, local sheriff Jose (Nicholas Gonzalez) and Alex (Olivia Trujillo).

   The inciting event that interrupts Elly’s solitude is the type of thing that happens mostly in the movies: a plane crash. While out in the desert examining local flora, she bears witness to a small plane going down in the desert. The pilot – the only one on board – survives. But he’s not an innocent traveler. Far from it. Rather, he is also working for the drug cartel and is ferrying highly dangerous fentanyl across the California-Mexico border.

   The movie thus changes course and the narrative thrust comes into focus. Tomas (Leynar Gomez), the pilot, takes Elly hostage and demands she take him and the remaining pills to the Salton Sea in Imperial County. What follows is a survival thriller that runs out of steam well before the movie ends. While Elly and Tomas bond over their shared life struggles and tragedies, Guillermo seeks to retrieve the drugs and to kill all who get in his way. And the sheriff is trying to stop any further bloodshed. It’s all rather predictable and formulaic and doesn’t really offer the viewer anything refreshingly new.

   The best parts of the movie are those that utilize the stunningly empty landscapes of the California desert. The cinematography, especially in the first thirty minutes or so, is quite good and the movie is effective in transporting the viewer to a land that is equally enchanting as it is dangerous. Like Budd Boetticher’s minimalist westerns with Randolph Scott, the landscape is as much as character as any of those portrayed by the actors.

   But unlike Boetticher’s films, the characters in Borrego aren’t complex, multilayered, or particularly compelling. This new release, at its best, is a decent adventure yarn. At its worst, it’s a socially conscious message film that doesn’t seem to have anything more compelling to say other than drugs are bad and that they will not only ruin your life, but the lives of those you love.
   

RICHARD SALE – For the President’s Eyes Only. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1971. Bantam, paperback, 1972. British title: The Man Who Raised Hell (Cassell, hardcover, 1971).

   Sam Carson, ex U.S. Navy genius electronics expert an, part Sioux Indian, currently working at McMurdo Station helping communications studies done on Weddell seals is surprised when Air Force One shows up on the landing strip bearing Admiral John Jeremiah McCabe, acting chief of the National Security Agency and looking for him. It’s his own dead leopard on the runway and even when it is explained to him it doesn’t quite make sense.

   Intelligence has uncovered something called Keyhole, a Club that deals in extortion, blackmail, murder, and high level espionage and Carson is the only man who can help, not because he is Sam Carson, but because he is a physical match for 6’ 3” inch wealthy playboy, rakehell, and alcoholic half Crow Simon Kincade, and Kincade is the kind of target Keyhole likes. He’s also dead, but so far as the world knows is only missing.

   When he is “rescued,” he will come back as Sam Carson whose job is to get himself blackmailed by the murderous Keyhole operation.

   Keyhole has already killed, and a wealthy but shady Australian named Charlie Ravensmith is a key but too obvious suspect. A wider trail of possibly linked kills makes it imperative Keyhole be uncovered, and not surprisingly it’s invaluable blackmail information made available to Western Intelligence agencies.

   They aren’t half as interested in exposing Keyhole as managing it.

   The President of the United States himself is interested in this one.

   In short order Carson finds himself going under the knife to make him closer to Kincade (James Bond never had his appendix removed for king and country) and introduced to his wife, Melisande Kincade, who he falls in love with while he has surgery and prepares for the mission in the Fiji islands in a savage kind of paradise.

   Newly rescued and back on a rampage, Simon Kincade shows up in Nairobi with his entourage, mistreated wife Melisande, and Carson’s old friend now bodyguard full blood Shoshoni Willie Littlesky about to go on safari.

   From that point on the plot moves swiftly with more twists and turns than an Agatha Christie novel, coming to one stunning climax in Africa on safari before moving to England for an even more shocking turn as Carson/Kincade and Littlesky dig deeper into the secrets of Keyhole, the duplicitous Charlie Ravensmith, and a curious group known as the Seven Needles, a cartel with offices around the world and in a gambling club called the Montebank in London.

   Lady Darla Henley, code name Stitch is Chairman of the board, a randy and eccentric beauty; Dickerson a former New York newspaper columnist is code named Dart; Monty Wyndham a ghostly Canadian known as Scissor; Vittorio Tarantella, a former body guard for Lucky Luciano who runs the casino and is known as Seam; a phony French designer named Henri Dieu known as Hem with his killer lover Bane; Ninji Fukimora a lesbian half American half Japanese woman code named Tuck; and, Buffy Pristine, a black woman who may have murdered her wealthy Arab husband, code named Gore.

   Stitch, Dart, Scissor, Seam, Hem, Bane, Tuck, and Gore. As Carson says, “Like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

   Not satisfied to do a mean Ian Fleming, Sale also does a mean Hemingway and Robert Ruark in the African sections all the while keeping his cards firmly up his sleeve with a bit of Richard Condon and James Michener thrown in the mix while the reader never quite knows which way the plot will twist and who, if anyone, can be trusted.

   Even the writer is an unreliable narrator in this one.

   Sale, of course, was a successful pulp writer (creator of Daffy Dill and Major Deen, the Cobra) turned mystery novelist, bestselling writer, screenwriter, film director, producer, and bestselling writer again. He directed and produced movies and television, and was married to Mary Loos, niece of the legendary Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes).

   He was also an entertaining writer who penned at least three classic mystery novels, the scewball Lazarus #7 that James Sandoe called a “gay Hollywoodian gambol” (read it anyway the twist ending is a doozy), Passing Strange, and Benefit Performance. His mainstream novels include Not Too Narrow Not Too Deep, The Oscar, and White Buffalo, all made into films.

   I don’t usually quote from other reviews, but The New York Times summed this one up pretty well:

   That should tell you everything you could possibly need to know about this wild ride of a spy novel that is by turns, wry, witty, thrilling, smart, sophisticated, and tragic. Best of all it is all these globe trotting adventures are done tongue in cheek without ever laughing at itself or the reader but still keeping it clear that nothing is to be taken too seriously.

   It is not particularly politically correct, though it pales before the likes of Joe Gall pr Matt Helm in general attitudes.

   Now that I’ve re-read all of the stories in Ron Goulart’s anthology The Hardboiled Dicks, and posted reviews of each of them on this blog, I’ve decided to rank them, not in terms of how much I liked them, but in terms of their relative hardboiledness, if such were really a word. Your opinion may vary:

LESTER DENT “Angelfish.”
NORBERT DAVIS “Don’t Give Your Right Name.”
FREDERICK NEBEL “Winter Kill.”
RAOUL WHITFIELD “China Man.”
JOHN K. BUTLER “The Saint in Silver.”
FRANK GRUBER “Death on Eagle’s Crag.”
RICHARD SALE “A Nose for News.”
ERLE STANLEY GARDNER “The Bird in the Hand.”

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER “The Bird in the Hand.” Lester Leith n#33. First published in Detective Fiction Weekly, April 5, 1932. Reprinted in The Hardboiled Dicks, edited by Ron Goulart (Sherbourne Press, 1965).

   Outwardly Lester Leith appears to be nothing more than a wealthy man of leisure, complete with a man servant he derisively calls Scuttle. Fully known to him is that Scuttle is in reality an undercover operative named Edward Beaver who works for the New York City Police Department.

   Why? Because while not a crook, exactly, Lester Leith takes great delight in reading about various crimes in the newspaper and finding exceedingly clever ways to relieve the real crooks of their ill-gotten gains.

   And always right under the watchful eyes of Beaver and his superior officer, the very irascible Sgt. Ackley. Boiling over, in fact, the latter is, at the end of every story, having been fooled again, and badly. He never learns, to the delight of the thousands of Gardner’s readers.

   In “Bird in the Hand,” the question is, what happened to a murdered man’s trunk, which has completely disappeared from his hotel room, along with five expensive pieces of stolen jewelry – the dead man known to have been a notorious fence and having had the gems in his possession.

   Among the items Leith gathers together to obtain the jewelry for himself is a skilled female pickpocket and a large cage containing a bird he describes as a “Peruvian bloodhound-canary.”

   The Lester Leith stories are wickedly clever, and this one is one of the better ones. One can only wonder how Gardner was able to come up with so many plots for them all – over 70 of them. I have read enough of them to think of them as formulaic, but the formula is a doozie of one.

Note: I first wrote a review of this story in 1967, and I posted it on this blog a few weeks ago. Follow the link and you can read it here.

LESTER DENT “Angelfish.” Oscar Sail #2. First published in Black Mask, December 1936. Reprinted in The Hardboiled Dicks, edited by Ron Goulart (Sherbourne Press, 1965).

   Miami-based PI Oscar Sail thinks his latest case is a screwy one, and it surely is. His client is a pretty girl named Nan Moberly who needs him to fake an attack on her, complete with gunfire, phony blood and a doctor who’s ready to swear she’s been shot. Sail complies, but stunts like this one seldom work out as planned.

   What follows is a complicated melange of stolen aerial photos, lots of bad guys after them, a cab driver with a wooden leg named John Silver, several deaths, Nan’s kidnapping, and a race by small boat through the wind-raged fringes of a hurricane to save her – one of the most detailed such voyages I’ve ever read.

   This is by far the most hardboiled story in all of Ron Goulart’s anthology. Dent always had a way with words, and he’s at his absolute best in this one. The ending in particular is as chilling a conclusion to a story you will read anywhere. It really is a shame hat he wrote only the two tales of Oscar Sail.

Note: I first wrote a review of this story in 1967, and I posted it on this blog a few weeks ago. Follow the link and you can read it here.

RICHARD SALE – Benefit Performance. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1946. Dell #252, mapback edition, 1948.

   So, what it is, is a hardboiled Prince and the Pauper. I’m surprised I’ve never seen it before. It’s quite ingenious. Ingenuous? Maybe. But totally ingenious.

   Kerry Garth, a well-known B-actor, is pooped. Just finished the wrap on three features in a row, two of which filmed simultaneously. The man needs a break.

   But there’s the stupid premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. No freakin’ way.

   Fortunately, Kerry’s got a spot-on stand-in: Joshua Barnes.

   Pretty much an identical brother from another mother. Physically, anyway. A bit younger, but nothing a bit of Grecian Formula can’t fix.

   For a C note, Barnes agrees to stand-in for Garth at the premier. As long as no one gets too close, no one will be the wiser.

   At the premier, though, the unthinkable: Kerry Garth is assassinated! Assailant unknown!

   Of course, the reader and Kerry know that it wasn’t the REAL Kerry Garth that got assassinated. But pretty much no one else knows!

   Someone is trying to kill Kerry Garth–but Kerry has no idea who or why. He has no enemies that he knows of.

   But one thing’s for sure. Being Kerry Garth ain’t too good for your health.

   So Kerry’s only choice is to assume the identity of his stand-in: Barnes.

   Unfortunately, Barnes turns out to be quite the unsavory character. The role isn’t too fun. And it’s unpaid. Hence, a ‘benefit performance’.

   And Barnes turns out to be murder suspect #1 in the murder of Kerry Garth! So now the cops are after Kerry Garth for his own murder!!

   Can he prove he’s really the prince and not the pauper? Or will he fry for a suicide he didn’t commit?

   The book is slick, fast, fun and fabulous. The words just hum. Seamlessly. No seams.

   Richard Sale and the best of the other hardboiled writers of the 20’s to 50’s were able to take language of ordinary working class Americans and make it sing.

   Because I’m a pretentious bastard I’ll go on, though I need not, I am sure, to belabor the point I mean to belabor. And to accentuate my pretentiousness I’ll quote Wordsworth, who says of colloquial speech: “[T]he greatest Poet … must, in liveliness and truth, fall far short of that which is uttered by men in real life, under the actual pressure of those passions”. And Moliere: “These forty years now I’ve been speaking in prose without knowing it!”

   Hardboiled writers like Sale streamlined ordinary speech patterns in this zenith of American culture to create an architecture of thought and story with crisp lines, moral clarity, and, most of all, sheer joy.

   It’s a time machine to better times. Don’t miss it.

   Some alternate takes:

         https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=43471

         https://davycrockettsalmanack.blogspot.com/2014/01/forgotten-books-benefit-performance-by.html

         https://prettysinister.blogspot.com/2012/01/ffb-benefit-performance-richard-sale.html

● JACK HIGGINS – The Wrath of God. Originally published as by James Graham (Macmillan, UK, hardcover, 1971; Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1971; Dell, US, paperback, 1974).

● THE WRATH OF GOD. (1972) Robert Mitchum, Ke.n Hurchinson, Victor Buono, Frank Langella, Rita Hayworth. Director: Ralph Nelson.

   I may shock some here who know what a fan of the British adventure/thriller genre I am, but I stopped reading Jack Higgins after The Eagle Has Landed, his breakthrough bestseller and never went back. I dipped my toes in once in a while, but honestly I just was not interested. To me he was always the least of the major names in the genre, not in the same class as MacLean, Lyall, or Bagley and certainly not Innes, Household, and Canning.

   Some of those later books I found nearly unreadable. Major bestselling writer, hugely popular, films, mini-series, but I had moved on. He just did not interest me anymore. I don’t even like Eagle, or the movie based on it.

   As a writer, Higgins simply was not a good enough to get me to pull for German commandos trying to assassinate Churchill and their traitorous charismatic IRA helper. I’m just not sophisticated enough to enjoy an entertainment when I’m pulling for the main characters to be shot as soon as possible, not unless the writer is a hell of a lot more skilled than Jack Higgins was.

   But noting his recent death I thought I would look at my favorite Higgins novel, because once upon a time I read him faithfully and had high hopes for him.

   Higgins, real name Harry Patterson, was a school teacher who decided writing was more fun and paid better and went about it with a vengeance unseen since the heyday of the pulps. He had to manufacture multiple names to keep up with his output, mostly in around sixty thousand to seventy thousand word novels that moved fast, had attractive narrators, and exotic locations.

   Those are far and away his most entertaining books, Night Judgment on Sinos, Year of the Tiger, A Game of Heroes, East of Desolation (my first), The Run to Morning, and Khufra Run are among the ones I would particularly single out from his his pre-Eagle output. They are not only good books, I’ve reread some of them recently and enjoyed them again.

   Along the way he decided that it was more effort to churn out these fast moving short thrillers than to try for something bigger, and one of the names he experimented with in that endeavor was James Graham under which he wrote the fine flying adventure The Last Place God Made and this book, The Wrath of God.

   Made has echoes of Nevil Shute, God of Graham Greene. The latter only just edges out the former in my estimation only because I like the fairly cheesy film based on it which I won’t really go into other than to say Robert Mitchum has fun as the phony priest who falls for his own con and Victor Buono gets what may be the only semi heroic role of his career.

   I will not kid you it is a good movie, only that it is, for me anyway, a fun one despite the sad figure Rita Hayworth cuts in it as her failing health and mental state were becoming obvious.

   The place is Central America and the time is the 1920’s. The narrator is young ex-IRA gunmen Emmett Keogh for whom the world has become too small and the backwaters of hell seem a good place to lie low. At least they do until he meets Mr. Janos, a fat shady businessman with an ivory headed cane and Father, Oliver Van Horne, a charming American priest. Neither is what they seem. Janos sells illegal arms and Van Horne has a Tommy gun under his cassock and alternates between con artist and bank robber.

   All three have run out of places in the world to be.

   Which is how the three of them end up under arrest and blackmailed by Colonel Bonilla of the Army into helping topple a mad land owner turned warlord in the small village of Mojada and the surrounding region which is held in the grip of terror by Tomas la Plata, revolutionary, outlaw, madman, and would be dictator.

   An army couldn’t pry him out of the region, but maybe a phony priest with a machine gun, an arms dealer, and an IRA gunman/sniper can.

   It’s a fairly simple set up that goes back away, the good bad men vs the worse bad men. Arcs of redemption are put into action, tough seasoned hard cases are softened by decent people, love, and the plight of the innocent, and before it is over bloody hell will break out.

   But it is written with brio and conviction, the narrator, Keogh, convincingly cynical, tough, and caught up in Oliver Van Horne’s greatest con and his own lingering shreds of idealism.

   Writing a book using central casting isn’t always a bad idea.

   You can guess every turn of the plot well before it happens. There are no surprises here. Our “heroes” will consider stealing the silver hidden in Mojada and double crossing Bonilla, and of course end up doing the right thing while cursing themselves for doing it. Keogh, the youngest, will find love with a local girl.

   I’ll go farther and point out that one of the delights of reading Higgins was how much he embraced the more obvious tropes of the genre. He wasn’t one for great invention of plot or character, he instead gave the reader what they wanted in the most straightforward manner possible moving so fast you couldn’t really complain that it was a good sandwich and not a filling meal.

   His downfall came when he tried to convince readers it was a multiple course meal and he just didn’t deliver.

   Frankly, when I stopped reading him was when he tried to do a bit more and I just didn’t think he really had the chops for it. This and The Last Place God Made are as far as he was really able to stretch himself in more serious terms, and truthfully he only just makes it, but credit where deserved in the end he does pull it off.

   Maybe there wasn’t greatness there, but there was something more than the too slick bestselling writer he became. I would highly recommend every book I have mentioned here but The Eagle Has Landed, granting that most of you will probably disagree and may only know Higgins from his later better known works.
   

RICHARD SALE “A Nose for News.”  Daffy Dill #2. First published in Detective Fiction Weekly, December 1, 1934. Reprinted in The Hardboiled Dicks, edited by Ron Goulart (Sherbourne Press, 1965).

   In this early entry in Richard Sale’s long-running series about newspaper reporter Daffy Dill, he loses his job at the Chronicle because of a revival reporter’s malfeasance: he managed to change the word “cook” in one of Daffy’s by-lined stories to ‘crook,” and the cook in question is boiling mad. Daffy’s editor at the paper has to let him go, but with promise that if he comes up with a story big enough, he’ll hire him back.

   Top stories are hard to come by, of course, but after doing a favor for a young lady whose brother has gotten into trouble with gambling debts, she returns the favor by telling Daffy she’s going to falsely arrange a kidnapping story for herself in which Daffy will be required to be the go-between.

   And of course you as the reader will immediately know that she will somehow end up being kidnapped for real. I don’t imagine that any such scenario would ever happen in real life, but I also think that any reader who has gotten this far into the story will go along with the gag and continue on anyway, sitting back and see just how Richard Sale gets Daffy Dill out of this particular jam.

   Sale went on to wrote several dozen stories about Daffy Dill, mostly for Detective Fiction Weekly, but more than that he went on to become big name as a both a screenwriter and director. You can check out his Wikipedia page here.

Note: I first wrote a review of this story in 1967, and I posted it on this blog a few weeks ago. Follow the link and you can read it here.

S. J. TUDOR – The Burning Girls. Ballantine Books, hardcover, February 2021. Penguin, softcover, September 2021Setting: Sussex, England; contemporary.

First Sentence: “It’s an unfortunate situation.”

   Reverend Jack Brooks and 14-year-old daughter Flo have been transferred to Chapel Croft in Sussex. A community with a very dark past including the burning of martyrs, disappearance of two girls, and the suicide of a priest. With no one being who they seem and not knowing who to trust, can Jack and Flo survive while exposing closely-guarded secrets?

   The best books grab you from page one and don’t let go. This book does just that. One thing to know; there are a lot of bodies; new, old, spectral, and real. The story is more suspense than mystery, and never boring.

   Tudor has a compelling voice. It’s engaging and conversational in both outward dialogue and internal thoughts. Jack and daughter Flo hold one’s attention and curiosity to know more. It’s nice that Flo acts appropriately for her age. However, both occasionally suffer from going into danger alone, yet both are also smart, brave and interesting.

   Beyond the elements of voice and character, there are a plethora of memorable passages: another indication of a great author. Tudor makes one stop and think— “We all have our hiding places. Not just physical ones. Places deep inside where we put away the things we don’t want other to see.”

   Rather than having an unreliable narrator, this is the case of “trust no one” in the best possible way. No one is who they seem and everyone has secrets.

   There are an abundance of very effective plot twists and revelations from beginning to end. Some of them scare, some cause one to gasp, all of them surprise.

   It’s hard to say much about the plot without saying too much and spoiling the suspense and the fun of reading it. The only problems were a couple silly, editing issues. Ignore them.

   The Burning Girls is a great, escapist read, especially for those who like a bit of dark, eepy-creepy. There is a supernatural element, but doesn’t stop an enjoying an engrossing, page-turning book that keeps one reading way too late into the night, but one may want to leave the light on. The story holds one’s attention from first page to last and makes one happy Tudor has more books to read.

Rating: VG Plus.

FRANK GRUBER “Death on Eagle’s Crag.” Oliver Quade #8. First published in Black Mask, December 1937. Reprinted in The Hardboiled Dicks, edited by Ron Goulart (Sherbourne Press, 1965).

   At the beginning of this fanciful, not to mention far-fetched tale, Oliver Quade, also known as The Human Encyclopedia, has somehow found his way to an isolated resort located at the top of a mountain, doing what he does best: trying to sell the owner a set of encyclopedias. She may be better at resisting, though, than he isat selling them when one of the guests is found dead along a walking path.

   Remains of a bashed-up rattlesnake are found beside him, with vicious bite marks on his leg, but Quade quickly deduces it was a well-planned murder. The resort’s handyman is about to head down to notify the authorities when a car full of gangsters, escapees from a local prison, comes driving up the hill. Coincidences pile up quickly. The dead man, as it turns out, was a thief,and once the gang of crooks realize he must have hidden eighty grand worth of stolen cash on the grounds, they decide to stick around and keep all of the real guests hostage while they look for it.

   Even while it incorporates a small token of goofiness, making the story is quite a bit of fun to read, it is amazing how Gruber manages to turn the story around on itself as he does, making it perhaps the most violent one in The Hardboiled Dicks, the anthology of stories from the detective pulps Ron Goulart put together in the mid-sixties. There’s nothing very deep to this one, but somehow I’ve managed to remember the basic plot, all these many years later.

   Oliver Quade, who manages to find the money while under a lot duress in this one, was in 15 stories in the pulps. He wasn’t quite as inventive as MacGyver was in using his head to get out of jams, but selling encyclopedias for a living obviously gave him a decided edge over a lot of tough bad guys in his day.

Note: I first wrote a review of this story in 1967, and I posted it on this blog a few weeks ago. Follow the link and you can read it here.