A little late, but the wishes are still good:

THE TELLTALE CLUE. CBS. July 18, 1954 to September 23, 1954. CBS Television / Charles E. Martin Productions. Cast: Anthony Ross as Detective Captain Richard Hale, Chuck Webster as Sgt. Kohler, and Nat Frey as Sgt. Riley. Produced and directed by Charles Martin.

   As with many early television series, the roots of THE TELLTALE CLUE trace back to radio. In 1934 NBC radio aired a program entitled JOHNNY PRESENTS. Johnny was Johnny Roventini, a midget who played a hotel bellhop with a unique cry of “Call for Philip Morris” that would open and close various Philip Morris shows on radio and TV (you will see a sample in the first video below).

   Philip Morris was one of radio and early television biggest sponsors. In its beginning radio’s JOHNNY PRESENTS featured fifteen minutes of orchestra music followed by various fifteen-minute dramatic programs.

   JOHNNY PRESENTS would switch networks to CBS in 1937. In September 1938 JOHNNY PRESENTS added the fifteen-minute drama called THE PERFECT CRIME (Philip Morris & Co. through agency Biow Co. New York.) The program ran through March 1941. JOHNNY PRESENTS returned to NBC November 4, 1941. THE PERFECT CRIME returned May 26, 1942.

   â€œTHE PERFECT CRIME, a series of detective episodes, with action taking place at the morning lineup at police headquarters…Listeners are given time to figure out the correct solution of the crime towards the end of the program before the case is explained.” (Broadcasting, May 25, 1942)

   A review by “Trau” of Weekly Variety (July 14, 1954) states that: “TELLTALE CLUE stemmed from the old radio series THE PERFECT CRIME.” It also supplies a good deal of information about the series.

   It was the summer of 1954, and Philip Morris needed to find a summer replacement to take over PUBLIC DEFENDER time slot, as CBS and Philip Morris moved PUBLIC DEFENDER to Monday to give I LOVE LUCY a summer break. Charles Martin had been involved in radio’s JOHNNY PRESENTS and PHILIP MORRIS PLAYHOUSE. Martin had produced the TV version of PHILIP MORRIS PLAYHOUSE for Biow agency, Philip Morris and CBS the summer before and was returning with TELLTALE CLUE.

   The Weekly Variety reviewer found the first episode “The Armitage Case” to possess “good production trappings and a know-how cast.” He described star Anthony Ross as “always reliable legit hand.” The episode itself he found routine, and described the audience invited to solve the case with the Detective “an OK though hardly unprecedented participation gimmick.”

   As criminologist detective Captain Richard Hale tells us, there is always a telltale clue that solves the mystery. Each episode opens as we watch the crime take place. Then we are at Hale’s office as the character breaks the fourth wall offering the viewer a chance to follow along to see if they can find the telltale clue and solve the case. This procedural crime series featured nearly all forms of detective work from legwork to forensics.

   â€œThe Case of the Talking Garden.” (July 15, 1954) Written by Haskel Frankel. GUEST CAST: Darren McGavin, Phyllis Hill, Pat Breslin and Frank Campanella. *** A mugging that leaves a man’s wife dead may not be what it seems.

   This second episode of the series is not very good. The mystery is weak, focusing not on whodunit but what clue would catch the killer. Written by Haskel Frankel this would be his only credit listed at IMDb. According to his obit in the New York Times (November 10, 1999), he would become a successful author (as Frank Haskel), ghostwriter, and theatre critic in New York.

   Pat (Patricia) Breslin (PEOPLE’S CHOICE) portrayal of the tramp’s daughter was noticeably flawed from a common problem of this era of live New York TV drama. TV was new and the actors were just learning the difference between acting on stage and reaching the back row and acting on television with its close-ups and camera angles.

   Experienced actor of film and TV Darren McGavin (KOLCHAK THE NIGHT STALKER) hammed up his part, especially the early scenes. Three months after this role he was performing on Broadway in the original run of RAINMAKER (he played Bill Starbuck).

   Charles Martin’s direction was fine for the time, but the camera occasionally stayed too long in the Master shot (the angle including all in the scene) and contributed to the stagy feel of the TV mystery.

   The production for the series was fine, considering the limitations of the time. Today the production shows its age and is too studio bound.

   The Weekly Variety review favorably examined Charles Martin role as long-time Biow agency and Philip Morris producer, and noted the writers for the series would include Harry W. Junkin (THE SAINT), Alvin Sapinsley (HAWAII FIVE-O), Sid Edelstein (no credit at IMDb), and Gore Vidal (JANET DEAN, REGISTERED NURSE). Wait, Gore Vidal wrote for this forgotten TV series?

   A site examining Gore Vidal early TV and radio work has a detailed look at Vidal’s teleplays. It also was where I found the Weekly Variety review.

   While it is believed that Vidal wrote two episodes, the site found proof at the Guide to Harvard Library holdings of Gore Vidal’s papers of only one, “Case of the Dying Accusation” (July 29. 1954). No copy of that episode is known to have survived.

   The Gore Vidal Teleplays page quotes Vidal in “The Art of Fiction, No. 50″ in THE PARIS REVIEW, 1974-07. “Absence of money is a bad thing because you end up writing THE TELLTALE CLUE for television – which I did.” Vidal claimed he used a pseudonym he could not remember, but I doubt it as the Weekly Variety review named him. And the link above has Vidal’s contract dated June 30, 1954 with Charles E. Martin Productions, Inc, producer and copyright owner of THE TELLTALE CLUE saying, “You agree that in the event we use the said script, which we are not required to do, we have the option of making use of your name, if we so desire.”

   Episode five offers a much better mystery, a good fair-play whodunit with enough twists to keep even the modern audience interested. Writer James P. Cavanagh would win an Emmy for his teleplay “Fog Closing In” (ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS October 7, 1956). He also was the writer for the 1963 film MURDER AT THE GALLOP (Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple).

“The Case of the Hit and Run.” (August 5, 1954) Written by James P. Cavanagh. Produced and Directed by Charles Martin. GUEST CAST: Peg Hillias, Patricia Smith, Joseph Sweeney and House Jameson. *** A man is run down in the street by a hit and run driver but it was no accident, it was murder.

   THE TELLTALE CLUE starred Anthony Ross, best remembered for his work on the stage (Tennessee Williams’ GLASS MENAGRIE and ARSENIC AND OLD LACE) and in films (KISS OF DEATH and ON DANGEROUS GROUND). His work in television was mainly in anthologies such as SUSPENSE and THE FORD THEATRE HOUR.

   After the series ended in September 1954 Ross returned to Broadway in the role of The Professor in BUS STOP. After the October 26, 1955 evening performance Ross returned home and died of a heart attack in his sleep. He was 46 years old.

   THE TELLTALE CLUE aired on Thursday night at 10pm. The thirty-minute mystery aired opposite the last half-hour of ABC’s KRAFT TELEVISION THEATRE and the first half-hour of NBC’s LUX VIDEO THEATRE. The still alive Dumont network did not schedule any network programming for that time slot.

   Today these are the only two of THE TELLTALE CLUE’s thirteen episodes that are known to survive.

      ADDITIONAL SOURCE:

(ON THE AIR: THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF OLD-TIME RADIO by John Dunning (Oxford University Press, 1998)

THE GIRL FROM MEXICO. RKO Radio Pictures, 1939. Lupe Velez, Donald Woods, Leon Errol, Linda Hayes, Donald MacBride. Ward Bond. Director: Leslie Goodwins.

   Although not intended to be the first in a series, this movie turned out to be such a big hit that RKO decided to make seven more “Mexican Spitfire” movies. The name is apt. Lupe Velez, as the singer a talent agent named Dennis Lindsay (Donald Woods) finds and brings back from Mexico, is exactly that: a spitfire, a pepper pot, a firecracker.

   And who she has her eyes on is no other than her Denny. Trouble is, he’s already engaged to a society girl his aunt approves of highly. His uncle (Leon Errol) not so much, and when Denny is tied up with work or wedding plans, he starts taking Carmelita out on the town: to a baseball game, a wrestling match, a nine-day bicycle race, and even eventually a night club.

   Complications arise, as perhaps you can imagine, albeit rather tamely today. Lupe Velez, while not a true exotic beauty, must have attracted men in the audience immensely with her torrid and uninhibited Mexican ways, her rapid fire way of speaking, and her deliciously foreign and refreshingly charming personality. Donald Woods’ character certainly is — attracted, that is — as much as he tries to fight it. What women thought of this movie and the seven sequels, I do not know.

   I probably won’t seek out the others in the series, but in spite of its very meager plot, I enjoyed this one.

JANET EVANOVICH & LEE GOLDBERG – The Chase. Fox & O’Hare #2. Bantam, hardcover, February 2014; paperback, November 2014.

   The second outing in this series by bestselling Stephanie Plum creator Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg, who penned the Monk television series novels, features con artist Nicholas Fox and FBI agent Kate O’Hare out to take down one Carter Grove, a former White House Chief of Staff, now owner of a ruthless private security organization, who is suspected of stealing a rare artifact from the Smithsonian.

   The artifact must be found and returned before the Chinese government finds out it is missing to avert an international scandal, and who better to achieve just that than Fox and O’Hare (Fox and Hare for anyone not paying attention), if they can learn to trust each other, and in his case, that is no easy matter.

   The action opens with a big car chase staged to round up an adventure already in motion (the pre-credits sequence), and then we are off from New York to Shanghai and Montreal on a chase aided by Fox’s criminal associates and by a group of AARP card carrying mercenaries led by Kate’s father.

   So, yes, this is the kind of movie of the week, tired old episodic television business we have seen a thousand times, Moonlighting and Remington Steele country, with the hero and heroine panting heavily and not quite resolving the central question of when the big romance will get to be too much for them, and who will betray whom at what point.

   It just so happens it is very well done, by writers in complete control of the material, it comes in at just about the ideal length for this sort of business — enough to resolve the plot and not enough for overstuffed seams to show — and at the end, which is where the reader of any mystery or crime entertainment is headed, it is satisfying enough you want more. It may not be a very dry vodka martini in the Ian Fleming sense, but it is more than a flat beer and a bag of stale chips.

   If you are in the mood for a palette cleanser or a light dessert these books are ideal, and that is what they aspire to be, mystery, action, romance, served crisp and cool for a summer distraction,

       The Fox and O’Hare series —

1. The Heist (2013)     Reviewed here.
2. The Chase (2014)
3, The Job (2014)
4. The Scam (2015)
5. The Pursuit (2016)

PETER DICKINSON – The Yellow Room Conspiracy. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1994; paperback, 1995. First published in the UK: Little Brown, hardcover, 1994.

   Dickinson is one of the few writers in the field who can be counted on to furnish a really different book with almost every outing. About all one can count on is that it will be literate and well crafted; which, come to think of it, is not too shabby a promise to keep.

   Thirty-six years ago a man died in a fire and explosion. Now, two aging lovers, one slowly dying, decide that it is time to uncover all the things that have been hidden. Each has believed over the decades that the other had murdered the man who died, and now that they know that neither did, decide to recreate the past that led up to the tragedy.

   The story ranges from the playing fields of Eton to the movers and shakers of post-WWII Britain, and centers around the five beautiful Vereker sisters, of whom the dying woman was one.

   The publicity material describes this as “complex, clever, and absolutely chilling,” and yet again I am amazed at the I-hope-not-willful inaccuracy of the people who write these … things. Complex and clever, yes, but nothing here is even remotely chilling.

   It is a mystery — in a sense — and the mystery is solved — after a fashion — but more than anything else it’s a re-creation of a time and way of life now vanished, told in a literate and leisurely fashion. Dickinson is a superb prose stylist, and a master at the creation of characters who are memorable. I’m reminded again that although the lines between genre and non- often blur, sometimes the distinction is clear. This is a novel, and a very good one.

KISS ME A KILLER. Concorde-New Horizons, 1991. Julie Carmen, Robert Beltran, Ramon Franco, Charles Boswell, Sam Vlahos. Director: Marcus DeLeon.

   This late night attraction on one of the pay channels we’ve just signed up for is the first I’ve taped that turned out to be more than I was hoping for. You may or may not believe me, but what this is is an authentic, down-to-earth throwback to the noir movies of of the 1940s, done semi-salsa style.

   It takes place in L.A., where the middle-aged (and white) owner of a bar has a good-looking but bored younger wife, and when he hires a new Latino singer for the house band, fireworks begin to happen.

   In spite of a list of actors who’ve been around but who are still pretty much unknown (at least to me), the acting is top-drawer, if not quite top notch, the music is fine, the pace is fast, and the story makes sense. Julie Carmen, a sultry brunette with a voice so husky it could pull an Alaskan dog sled, as the saying goes, I would not mind seeing again either. This one’s a keeper, that’s for sure.

  ROBERT SILVERBERG “Passengers.” First appeared in Orbit 4, edited by Damon Knight (Putnam, hardcover, 1968; Berkley, paperback, August 1969). First collected in in The Cube Root of Uncertainty (Macmillan, hardcover, 1970) and in Moonferns and Starsongs (Ballantine, paperback, June 1971). Reprinted elsewhere many times.

   At some time in the near future, “near” in the relatively speaking sense, since this story first appeared in 1968 but takes place in 1987, aliens have landed on Earth, and I mean aliens. No one has seen them, no one knows what they want, but whenever they want, they take over a human being’s body and do what they want with it for as long as they want. And when they leave, the person they have ridden with does not remember anything about the trip.

   Except for maybe this time. A man named Charles wakes up after haven been ridden for three days, and this time he remembers that he was with a girl, a girl named Helen. What’s more by some freak of luck, he meets her. Helen, that is. Does she remember him? No. But Charles is attracted to her, and he persists.

   It was no freak of luck. The aliens, whoever they are, like to play games, and sometimes their games are mean.

   It is difficult to say how it is possible for a story that could have been novel length to be compressed in the space of only 18 pages, but with spare prose, minimal exposition, a heap of fatalism, and best of all, a wryly tragic ending, that is exactly what Robert Silverberg does with this tale.

   The story was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1970, and won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1969.

   Ever heard of Stanislas-André Steeman? Thought not. In Anglo-American crime fiction his name is all but unknown, but in Europe and especially France he’s considered one of the most important exponents of the roman policier. Like his far better known older contemporary Georges Simenon, he was Belgian by birth, born in Liège in 1908, five years after the creator of Maigret.

   Simenon launched the Maigret series early in life, but Steeman’s first books, written in collaboration with Hermann Sartini (whose nom de plume was Sintair) were published in 1928, a year before the first Maigrets and when Steeman was 20 years old at most, maybe even 19. After five novels the partnership broke up, and from then on Steeman was on his own, turning out more than 30 policiers before his death in 1970 at age 62.

   Only two of his novels made it across the Atlantic, with the 1931 SIX HOMMES MORTS translated (by the wife of poet Stephen Vincent Benét) as SIX DEAD MEN (Farrar & Rinehart, 1932) and 1932’s LA NUIT DU 12 AU 13 appearing in English as THE NIGHT OF THE 12th-13th (Lippincott, 1933). After that he became a nonentity in English but he was already a celebrity in France, having won the Grand Prix du Roman d’Aventures for SIX HOMMES MORTS.

   Steeman’s principal detective character was Inspector Wenceslas Vorobeitchik (the Russian word for sparrow), usually called Monsieur Wens, but on the basis of what I’ve found on the Web, it’s impossible to determine how many of Steeman’s novels he appeared in. Most of what we in the U.S. know about his work we owe to Xavier Lechard’s superlative “At the Villa Rose” website, which I highly recommend. Lechard calls Steeman “one of the greatest authors of the French Golden Age, and arguably one of the greatest mystery writers of all times….”

   Unlike Simenon, whose goal was to go beyond the conventions of classical detective fiction, Steeman loved them and loved even more to play with them. SIX DEAD MEN for example is a Tontine story of the sort we tend to associate with Ellery Queen. The fatal six agree that whoever outlives the others will inherit most of the men’s money, then the group starts dying off.

   A few years after its appearance in English translation, this novel was the basis of a low-budget “quota quickie” movie, THE RIVERSIDE MURDER (Fox British, 1935), directed by Albert Parker, with Basil Sydney starring as Inspector Philip Winton (obviously the Brit counterpart of Monsieur Wens) and, in one of his earliest film roles, Alastair Sim playing his sergeant. Featured in the cast are Ian Fleming (no, not that Ian Fleming) and Tom Helmore, who more than twenty years later played the Iago figure in Hitchcock’s VERTIGO.

   Thanks to my friend Tony Williams and his forthcoming essay on French film noir during the years of Nazi occupation, I know more about Steeman’s involvement with the movie industry of his adopted country than can be learned on the Web.

   The French version of the same Steeman novel, LE DERNIER DES SIX (1941) was directed by Georges Lacombe from a screenplay by Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977), who went on to become a director himself and indeed to become celebrated as the Hitchcock of France. I don’t know whether the Monsieur Wens of Steeman’s novel or the Inspector Winton of the 1935 British film had a sex partner, but in this version as played by Pierre Fresnay he has a mistress, portrayed by Suzy Delair, who was Clouzot’s mistress at the time, and according to Tony Williams, the pair operate as a sort of Nick-and-Nora couple.

   The movie must have been a hit with French audiences of the Occupation era, for it was soon followed up by Clouzot’s first film as a director, L’ASSASSIN HABITE AU 21 (1942), again starring Fresnay and Delair and with a screenplay by Clouzot and Steeman, whose 1939 novel of the same name was never translated into English, but it takes place in London and involves a serial killer who murders his victims in the fog, leaving behind a calling card in the name of “Mr. Smith.”

   Since England in 1942 was at war with the Nazis, Clouzot inserted Fresnay and Delair from LE DERNIER DES SIX as Wens and his mistress Mila Malou and shifted the locale to France and the killer’s nom de guerre to Monsieur Durand. According to Tony Williams, the serial killer in the film turns out to be three men, former schoolmates each of whom believes himself to be a sort of Raskolnikov.

   At the end of the film, says Williams, “all three master criminals have their hands in the air when they are surrounded by the police.” Wens stands opposite the ringleader of the three and, in order to strike a match on his neck, has him lower his right hand, while his left remains in the air as if he’s giving the traditional Nazi salute. How could Hitler’s censors have missed this zinger? If L’ASSASSIN sounds like a serious film noir, Williams insists that this time Fresnay and Delair form “an even more excessive screwball comedic partnership” than in LE DERNIER DES SIX.

   The end of World War II did not end the connection between Steeman and Clouzot. The only new Steeman novel published during the war had been LEGITIME DEFENSE (1942). A few years after the liberation of France, Clouzot took this novel as the basis for his film QUAI DES ORFEVRES (1947), which Xavier Lechard describes as “arguably the best adaptation of Steeman’s work and one of the summits of French cinema.”

   Steeman wasn’t pleased with the result, principally because Clouzot “changed the guilty party….” Having worked on the screenplay, perhaps he was better satisfied with MYSTERE A SHANGHAI (1950), directed by Roger Blanc and based on the second and last Steeman novel to be translated into English, LA NUIT DE 12 AU 13.

   Steeman continued to write crime novels until his death but apparently they were far removed from his earlier books. Monsieur Wens returned in POKER D’ENFER (HELL’S POKER, 1955) and SIX HOMMES À TUER (SIX MEN TO KILL, 1956) but as a sort of shape-shifter, with the principal puzzle being which character in the story is he. Steeman’s final novel, AUTOPSIE D’UN VIOL (AUTOPSY OF A RAPE, 1971), is described by Lechard as “a courtroom mystery set in the United States” and displaying “a grim worldview with none of the author’s previous flippantness.”

   Although I’ve read a lot of Simenon and most of the Swedish team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö and some of Friedrich Duerrenmatt and a few others, most of the mysteries I’ve consumed in the 60-odd years since I discovered Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan have been written in English. I’ve never read Steeman but what I’ve learned about him while researching this column leads me to think I might have missed a bet. Perhaps we all have.

MOZAMBIQUE. Towers of London / British Lion Films, UK, 1964. Steve Cochran, Hildegarde Neff, Paul Hubschmid, Vivi Bach, Martin Benson. Director: Robert Lynn.

   At least the outdoor scenery is good. That’s basically my assessment of this Harry Alan Towers production about organized crime in Portuguese Africa. Filmed on location, Mozambique is a spy thriller that simply falls flat in producing any sense of intrigue or excitement.

   Even the film’s premise – a Lisbon colonial police inspector enlists Brad Webster (Cochran), a down and out airline pilot, to infiltrate a criminal enterprise in Portugal’s African colony – comes across as contrived. It’s as if someone wanted to film a movie in Mozambique and then came up with a rationale to do so. There are some beautiful women singing in a nightclub, a midget assassin who hides in a suitcase, a lecherous Arab sheik, and various Portuguese and European schemers afoot. But none of it adds up to very much. It’s not altogether without its charms, but it’s hardly a James Bond movie.

   There is one notable aspect to this rather middling affair that is worth mentioning. And that’s Steve Cochran, who appeared in such crime films as White Heat (1949) and Storm Warning (1951) (reviewed here ). Mozambique not only was one of the few films in which Cochran was billed as the leading man, it was also his final film. Cochran, who was also known for his dalliance with Hollywood women such as Mamie van Doran, died on his yacht off the coast of Guatemala the same year the film was released.

77 SUNSET STRIP “Legend of Crystal Dart.” ABC, 15 April 1960 (Season 2, Episode 28.) Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Roger Smith, Marilyn Maxwell, William Schallert, Kurt Kreuger, Jacqueline Beer, Patricia Michon. Teleplay: Gloria Elmore. Director: Montgomery Pittman.

   While the series has not yet officially released on DVD — and why not, I don’t know — scattered episodes of 77 Sunset Strip are being shown on a cable channel called MeTV, which is how I managed to see this one, the first episode I’ve seen since it was first on the air. (Complete seasons are available on the collectors’ market, but in absymal picture quality, even as advertised.)

   Unfortunately, I had no choice as to which one came up first, and this one was it. It’s not representative, I don’t believe. Roger Smith, as Jeff Spencer, co-partner in the firm, shows up in the office only at the beginning and at the end. Kookie (Edd Byrnes) isn’t in this one at all. It’s up to Stu Bailey (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) to work this case completely on his own.

   He’s hired by a former famous French entertainer named Crystal Dart (a very buxom Marilyn Maxwell) to serve an eviction notice to her soon-to-be ex-husband in their isolated mountain lodge up in the mountains. Trapped in a snowstorm with them (as it turns out) are the ghostwriter for her memoirs, his wife, and the nurse/girl friend of Miss Dart’s wheelchair-bound husband.

   Sizzling resentments and vicious arguments quickly break out, some dealing with secrets from the past. Miss Dart has not a friend among them, or so it seems. Bailey is mostly content to sit back with his pipe and casual sweater wear, watching as he does in bemused fashion. It takes a while for a murder to occur, but surprisingly enough, it is not Miss Dart who is the victim.

   Some mild detective work takes place, that plus Stu Bailey’s obvious growing attraction to Miss Dart. In spite of the classic setting, that of an isolated snowbound haven from the elements, the slow pace manages to eliminate all but the smallest hint of suspense. Not the best example to begin with, I suspect.