GHOST TOWN. Empire Pictures, 1988. Franc Luz, Catherine Hickland, Jimmie F. Skaggs, Penelope Windust, Bruce Glover. Director: Richard McCarthy.

   I’ve always been a fan of the Weird West, that sub-genre that blends elements of horror and the supernatural with Western themes. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to pull off a really cohesive mash-up of the horror and Western genres. There’s always something that just doesn’t quite gel the way it should.

   Maybe it’s because the “rules” of the Western genre are so rooted in human nature and, for the lack of a better term, reality. Maybe it’s because we associate horror with nighttime, rather than with the blazing hot sun. No matter what, I often come away from my excursions into the Weird West with a sense of what might have been, how the proverbial visit might have gone better.

   That’s basically how I felt after watching Ghost Town, a Charles Band production from 1988. Screened in very limited release, this horror Western is better than you might expect, but it’s hardly what you might categorize as a great Western.

   Lead actor Franc Luz, while solid in the part, doesn’t ever seem totally comfortable in his role as Deputy Sheriff Langley, a lawman tasked with locating a missing woman. This quest – the hero’s quest – mysteriously takes him out of the present and into an Old West netherworld, somewhere between heaven and hell.

   Apparently, an entire town is being held hostage from moving onto the afterlife by an undead outlaw named Devlin (the late Jimmie F. Skaggs in an standout role). Truth be told, there’s not a whole lot of logical coherence in the plot. This is unfortunate. It’s almost as if the filmmakers decided that because the supernatural was at work in the story, there need not be an internal logic that would explain how Devlin was able to stay alive past death and hold a whole town in a void.

   Yet, despite my criticisms, I have to admit that I enjoyed watching Ghost Town. The cinematography is quite good. Better than in many horror movies from the 1980s in fact. Most significantly, it’s a fun movie. Not a good movie. But an enjoyable one.

MOLLY THYNNE – He Dies And Makes No Sign. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover, 1933. Dean Street Press, UK, trade paperback, 2016.

   In the third and apparently final case of Dr. Constantine, he is asked to take steps to end the engagement of the son of the Duchess of Steynes. According to the Duchess, the young man has become engaged to a most unsuitable young woman, one who is an actress of sorts. Constantine meets her, finds her enchanting, and is then involved in the disappearance of her grandfather, a violinist. Unfortunately, when the grandfather turns up, he is in the unlucky circumstance of being a corpse.

   One can see why this was the last in the series. It is wretchedly dull, the villain is obvious, and none of the characters are the least bit interesting. What Constantine is a doctor of is left unmentioned in this novel. Perhaps Thynne thought readers of the third book would have read the first two, in which she may, though I doubt it, have provided more detail. All we learn here is that Constantine is not an M.D., that he has just returned from the Continent where he took part in a chess tournament, and that only a dedicated masochist would care to read about him and his investigations.

Bio-Bibliographic Notes:

      The Dr. Constantine series —

The Crime at the “Noah’s Ark”. Nelson, 1931.
Murder in the Dentist’s Chair. Hutchinson, 1932.
He Dies and Makes No Sign. Hutchinson, 1933.

      Non-series mysteries by Molly Thynne —

The Red Dwarf. Nelson, 1928.
The Murder on the “Enriqueta”. Nelson, 1929.
The Case of Sir Adam Braid. Nelson, 1930.

   All six have recently been reprinted by Dean Street Press, four for the first time in the US.

   For a long essay on the life of the author, go here on Curt Evans’ “Passing Tramp” blog. Highly recommended!

EDWARD D. HOCH – The Shattered Raven. Lancer 74-525, paperback original; 1st printing, 1969. Dale Books, paperback, 1978.

   Edward D. Hoch is crime fiction’s premier short-story writer. (He is also that rara avis, a writer who makes his living entirely from short fiction.) He has published more than 600 stories since his first professional sale in 1955, and has appeared in every issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for the past dozen years.

   He also has to his credit well over anthology appearances, including a score of selections for the prestigious annuals Best Detective Stories of the Year and Year’s Best Mystery & Suspense Stories (which he now edits).

   The Shattered Raven is Hoch’s first novel and one of only four published under his own name. It is also his only contemporary mystery — the other three books are detective stories with futuristic settings — and is something of a cult novel among aficionados, owing to the fact that it deals with murder most foul at the annual MWA Edgar Awards banquet in New York and makes use of several real writers in cameo roles.

   When TV commentator Ross Craigthorn is murdered on the dais while accepting MWA’s Mystery Reader of the Year Award (no small honor, past recipients having included Eleanor Roosevelt and Joey Adams), it is a particularly ingenious and nasty crime: He was shot in the face by means of a slender tube attached to the microphone, “an electrified, radio-controlled zip gun.”

   The task of s finding out who killed Craigthorn falls on the unwilling shoulders of MWA’s executive vice-president, Barney Hamet (no relation, of course, to the great Dashiell), and magazine writer Susan Veldt. Their search leads them to a dark secret in Craigthorn’s past, one that has its origins in the little town of June, Nebraska.

   Unlike Barney and Susan, the reader knows the identity of the murderer from the outset — one Victor Jones. But what the reader doesn’t know is just who Victor Jones is, for he is no longer using that name. Which of the suspects is really the deadly Mr. Jones should come as no surprise to most detective-story veterans, but that won’t spoil anyone’s enjoyment of this solid, well-clued, “insider’s” mystery.

   Hoch’s other three novels all feature the “Computer Cops,” a team of twenty-first century government investigators led by Carl Crader and Earl Jazine. The first, The Transvection Machine (1971), is probably the best — an expert blend of mystery, science fiction, and social commentary. The other two titles in the series are The Fellowship of the Hand (1973) and The Frankenstein Factory (1975).

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

[UPDATE]   At the time of Edward Hoch’s death at the age of 77 in 2008, the total count of short stories he had written had increased to well over 900, and his string of over 34 years’ worth of consecutive appearances in EQMM continued for several months after his passing, both records that will never be surpassed.

THIS MAN IS NEWS. 1938. Barry Barnes, Valerie Hobson, Alistair Sim, John Warwick, Philip Leaven, Edward Loxy, Garry Marsh. Screenplay by Ranald MacDougal, Basil Deardon, and Allan MacKinnon. Directed by David MacDonald.

   In the last few weeks I have found a good half dozen of a list of films I have been seeking since William Everson came out with The Detective in Film, lo those many years ago, and this one has long been near the top of my list, so don’t expect too much critical reserve. I was to happy to finally see it.

   The film was a massive hit in England when it came out, a British Thin Man with Barry Barnes and Valerie Hobson their very own Nick and Nora, Simon and Pat Drake. In addition, it is a fast moving, smart mouthed, and well plotted mystery thriller filled with wise cracks and action, and more than ably abetted by the presence of Alistair Sim as Macgregor, a Scottish editor for a London paper, whose brogue is as thick as his temper is short and his skull bald.

   Sim could steal any film, and comes close a few times here, but Barnes and Hobson really do shine as Simon and Pat.

   When Simon skips his assignment to cover the release of Brown, an informer who is on the hit list for betraying his gang, Macgregor blows his lid and fires him (again, it’s a running gag). Returning home his wife Pat is a pal and takes it well, even to the point of breaking out the champagne and going on a toot.

   They could give Nick and Nora, the Norths, and Duluths a race in that department.

   In the course of the evening Simon has a bright idea and calls up Macgregor claiming he is outside of Brown’s hideout, which he followed him to the day before, where Brown has just been murdered, accompanied by Pat popping a champagne cork he explains as his having just been shot by the gang. He then hangs up, his revenge complete.

   The hangover the next day is complete too when he sees the false headlines. He’s the hero of the day, for the moment, especially when, to his relief, it turns out Brown really was murdered by the gang. But the cloud proves to be minus any silver lining when Inspector Hollis and Sgt. Bright (Edward Loxy and Garry Marsh) show up to arrest him.

   Seems he called in the murder ninety minutes before it happened.

   And he’s fired again.

   Until Brown’s relative is shot in Simon’s apartment just after Pat alibis him out of jail.

   He’s free, but someone is trying to kill him. There is an informer at the paper keeping the mob tipped off to Simon’s movement, and Simon can’t recall what he might have seen that is worth killing him for. Worse he’s stuck with Hollis and the none too bright Bright.

   Pat proves somewhat more active and capable than Nora Charles, and is nearly killed herself when she sets their apartment on fire to frighten off the two men waiting to kill Simon, and things get even more complex when it turns out the man Simon saw is the notorious ‘Harelip’ Murphy (Philip Leaven) who we have only seen from the nose down as the mastermind who enjoys white mice scampering from his pockets (someone read their Wilkie Collins, shades of Count Fosco).

   The thrills and spills are reminiscent of a radio serial despite this being an original screenplay, and no, it can’t compare with MGM and William Powell and Myrna Loy, but it is fast, smart, furious, and witty in the proper proportions and comes to a bang-up finale in the newsroom when Simon finally gets the killers, his job back, and his by-line — This Man is News.

   A sequel followed the next year, This Man in Paris. IMDb says it isn’t as good as the first, but I hope eventually to see for myself. Meanwhile This Man is News is available on YouTube in a decent print.

   It’s a fast-paced fun outing less dated than most, thanks to a clever script and a sure hand by the director, the screwball comedy mystery British style.

   Love it or hate it, you can’t say it ever drags.

From this jazz singer and five-time Grammy nominee’s album Wild for You, released in 2004. I think you’ll recognize the song, one of my favorites:

   Last month I talked about some of the correspondence between Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, and Harry Stephen Keeler, creator of the craziest characters — not to mention the books that housed them! — ever conjured up on land or sea. But I had no space to say anything about the one Keeler book in which ESG is mentioned. THE GALLOWS WAITS, MY LORD! was written in 1953, the year Harry’s last novel to appear in English in his lifetime came out, and was published nowhere, not even in Spain, which continued to put out books of his until shortly before his death in 1967.

   Thanks to that rogue publisher Ramble House, GALLOWS has been available in Keeler’s native tongue — which is not to be confused with English! — since 2003, and it can still be found on the Web. The setting is the mythical banana republic of San do Mar and the plot has to do with the frantic attempts of a Yank who bears the un-Yankish name Kedrick Merijohn to escape hanging, by order of Presidente Doctor Don Carlos Foxardo — whose crack-brained treatise is the required text in every hospital in the country, not to mention its med school! — for the poisoning murder of a stranger while the stranger was trying to poison him. It doesn’t help Merijohn’s case that he inexplicably changed shoes with the corpse after the fatal incident.

   Very late in the book we join British diplomat Sir Clyde Kenwoody in Hollywood where he meets Detective Sergeant Pete O’Swin, who’s wearing a purple derby and a rainbow-hued plaid jacket.

   This paragraph, which no one else living or dead could have written, not only reveals how HSK made use of ESG — and why whenever I write about our Harry I tend to insert clauses like this one, which invariably end with an exclamation point! — but perhaps will explain to readers who have been spared any acquaintanceship with his immortal works why I call him the wackiest wackadoodle who ever wore out a typewriter ribbon.

   Keeler sometimes played the wack for the game’s sake, sometimes to make a point, and occasionally he did both at once, as witness a passage one chapter later when the same O’Swin expounds on one of Harry’s loony laws while also reminding us that his creator was something of a Socialist.

   When the issue is raised that perhaps the actions of O’Swin and Sir Clyde are unconstitutional, the diplomat points out that “if you’re taken over there [to the police station], and start to set forth your constitutional rights and prerogatives, you’ll only wake up a few hours later lying on a cold cement floor of an isolated cell, with an aching — more probably broken — jaw….” To which O’Swin adds: “Well … we have evoluted certain interestin’ methods t’ cope with the Bill o’ Rights and the Constitution.” This is precisely how matters stood until a number of years later when the Supreme Court began applying federal Bill of Rights protections to criminal defendants in state courts.

   In another recent column I devoted an item to the strange case of Georges Simenon’s stand-alone crime novel STRANGERS IN THE HOUSE, which was published in Nazi-occupied France in 1940 as LES INCONNUS DANS LA MAISON and made into a French movie of the same name the following year but wasn’t translated into English until after World War II. The translation, by Geoffrey Sainsbury, appeared in England in 1951 and in the U.S. three years later.

   It’s the same translation both times, right? Wrong!!! In the English version as reprinted in 2006 by the New York Review of Books with a new introduction by P.D. James, we find on page 70 a passage where the protagonist Hector Loursat ponders whether there are any similarities between him and any of the strangers in his house. “Yet there was no connection. Not even a resemblance. He hadn’t been poor like Emile Manu or a Jew like Luska….”

   In the American version this becomes: “There was no connection. No resemblance. He hadn’t been poor like Manu, or an Armenian like Luska….” Incidentally, Manu’s first name in the American version is Robert, not Emile. The first alteration is understandable, and exactly what Anthony Boucher had done several years before when translating for EQMM a Simenon story with a Jewish villain. But why the second change? And, if we were to compare the two versions line by line, how many more alterations would we discover?

   It’s not connected with anything else in this column, but I feel compelled to bring up a recent death. Colin Dexter, creator of the immortal Inspector Morse, died on March 21, age 86. I met him once, when he was on a book tour with a St. Louis stop, and was smart enough to bring with me the only Morse novel I then had in first edition, LAST SEEN WEARING (1976), which he signed for me.

   The earliest entries among his thirteen novels didn’t make much of an impression, but once the Morse TV movie series was launched, John Thaw’s superb performance as the brilliant but flawed Oxford sleuth caused Dexter’s sales to climb into the stratosphere. The series lasted for 33 episodes, each approximately two hours long. Ten of them, including my favorites — “The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn” and “Service of All the Dead” — are based on his novels.

   The other three novels — THE RIDDLE OF THE THIRD MILE (1983), THE SECRET OF ANNEXE 3 (1986) and THE JEWEL THAT WAS OURS (1991) — were never officially filmed. Three early episodes were based on ideas or other material by Dexter, and when he turned them into the novels above, they were not remade. (The respective telefilm titles for the trio are “The Last Enemy,” “The Secret of Bay 5B” and “The Wolvercote Tongue.”)

   In Dexter’s final novel, THE REMORSEFUL DAY (2000), which was also the source of the last Morse TV movie, the Inspector dies — not at the hands of a murderer but because, as Dexter explained, he drank too much, smoked too much and almost never exercised. Well, he may have died physically, but I strongly suspect he and his creator will live on for many decades to come.

CLIFFORD D. SIMAK – Shakespeare’s Planet. Berkley/Putnam, hardcover, 1976. Berkley, paperback; 1st printing, May 1977. Del Rey, paperback, 1982.

   Back in my teens and 20s when I was reading SF by the armload, two of my favorites were, of course, Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. I say “of course” because those were the two authors that my SF-reading friends were also reading (all two of them).

   But as time went on and I started reading Astounding and Galaxy and some of the other magazines that came out around then, I started finding other authors that appealed to me even more than the big two. (I won’t go into who the “Big Three” might be.)

   As you may have guessed by now, this is when I discovered Clifford D. Simak. He wrote simple stories about some not so simple ideas, and what’s more he made them sound simple. I grew up in a small town in the Midwest (Michigan), and Simak was if nothing else a master of small town ideas and values, and of creating characters who believed in them, no matter how far out in time or space they happened to be.

   Shakespeare’s Planet is a prime example. It begins with Carter Horton waking up on an expeditionary spaceship as the only survivor of four humans on board. His only companions, if you will, being a robot named Nicodemus and a ship named Ship, controlled by the minds of three people who gave up their bodies for the voyage: a monk, a scientist and a grande dame.

   The planet the ship has found is inhabited, as it turns out, by an alien creature named Carnivore. Recently deceased is a human dubbed Shakespeare from the book of plays he owned. Tunnels in space have led to this world, but something has gone awry, as they function only in one direction: in, not out.

   And the ship cannot return to Earth, which is now 1000 years away. One new arrival to the planet after Horton is Elayne, a female explorer of the tunnels through space. She is also trapped with the others. But there are other beings on the planet, each more fantastic than the next, nor do they get along as well as those already described.

   Before the book ends there is a lot of discussion of life, the universe, and the role of humanity in it. Some of this discussion may be dismissed by some as being on the level of sophomores living in a college dormitory, but Simak has a way of making it seem a whole lot more than that — he works with a canvas the size of the entire cosmos –and if I could explain what he does any better than that, I’d be writing SF instead of only reading it.

LES SAVAGE, JR. – Return to Warbow. Dell First Edition #65, paperback original; 1st printing, 1955.

RETURN TO WARBOW . Columbia, 1958. Philip Carey, Catherine McLeod, Andrew Duggan, William Leslie, Robert Wilke, James Griffith and Jay Silverheels. Written by Les Savage Jr from his novel. Directed by Ray Nazzaro.

   I was mildly impressed by Les Savage’s novel for the efforts it took to be a bit different; the film he wrote from it impressed me too, but for all the wrong reasons.

   To start with the novel — well actually, before the novel starts, a small-time rancher named Elliot Hollister needed money for his sick wife, but he was already deep in debt and the only friends he had in the town of Warbow were the drifters and low-lifes he met in saloons where he drank to drown his troubles.

   One of these reprobates roped him in on a stagecoach heist, but a third party horned in, killed Elliot’s partner and a popular local businessman and left Elliot holding the bag — but not the loot. So as the story starts, Elliot has served his time and returns to Warbow, where he is universally reviled and suspected of having stashed the haul, and he means to figure out who the killer really was.

   Got all that? Well pay it no mind, because the central character here is Clay Hollister, Elliot’s adult son who has grown up, got out from under the onus of his father, built up the ranch, and bids fair to marry the daughter of the man his daddy is thought to have killed. When his father hits town Clay feels compelled to take him in and the two begin an uneasy relationship punctuated by violent encounters with the locals who still hate Elliot for that killing he never done, plus those who think he can lead them to a fortune in stolen gold, and the mysterious third man, who simply wants him silenced in the surest way possible.

   Savage gives the thing a bit of emotional complexity, particularly as some of Elliot’s persecutors see the results of their work and waver a bit, and he sets the tale in the nasty midst of a Montana blizzard, lending a welcome edge of realism. None of this makes Warbow a great novel, but it does lift it a bit out of the ordinary.

   You can imagine my surprise then, when I watched the film version, also written by Les Savage Jr., and found he had leeched out just about everything that made the book worthwhile.

   The film eschews the wintry setting of the book in favor of that perpetual sunny summertime of just about every other Western ever made. And in this version there’s no Elliot; Clay Hollister (Phil Carey) is an unrepentant robber who breaks from a chain gang with a couple of other bad guys and returns to his home town to recover the loot he left with his weakling brother (a fine performance from James Griffith).

   There are the usual complications: Hollister’s new partners want more than their share of the loot (a wrinkle that recalls Big House U.S.A., reviewed here not long ago) his ex-girlfriend has married upstanding Andre Duggan, and they are raising his son as their own; there’s a posse on his trail; and that brother of his is awfully evasive about where he hid the dough.

   Which is pretty much where things just stop and pot around for awhile. Everyone chases everyone else around the Columbia Western Town set and the familiar environs of Simi Valley. We get a few fights, a bit of shooting, and no real sense that anything’s going anyplace very much. Ray Nazarro was always a competent director, but that’s all he was, and he never enlivens the rather stale proceedings.

   As for the script, well I have never seen an author trash his own work so completely, and I just hope Savage got well paid for it.

SIMON NASH – Dead Woman’s Ditch. Geoffrey Bles, UK, hardcover, 1964. Roy, US, hardcover, 1966. Perennial Library PL777, US, paperback; 1st printing, 1985.

   Most of this adventure of Adam Ludlow takes place in and around a small English hotel in remote Somerset at the end of September, and for some reason, all of the rooms are filled. What it takes a while for the police to realize, after one of the guests has been murdered, and unpleasant man by the name of Silas Taker, is that each of the others has a motive, that of blackmail.

   Scotland Yard is called in, and back in the days when they could still so things ike that, they call upon Ludlow for assistance themselves. Ludlow is what you might call a literary academician, an amateur dabbling in crime, and in this one he gets a (brief) taste of impending personal violence as well.

   There are obviously lots of suspects in the case, plus lots of clues and false trails, and it’s still a puzzle to me why the naming of the killer seems to fall as flat as it does. Barzun and Taylor [in A Catalogue of Crime] feel that this is one of Ludlow’s weaker adventures. Since it’s the first I’ve ever read, I wouldn’t know, but while I enjoyed the book, I guess what I was expecting was a stronger finale.

Bio-Bibliographic Notes:   Simon Nash was the pseudonym of Raymond Chapman, 1924-2013, a Professor of English at London University and an Anglican priest. There are no books in Hubin under his own name.

       The Adam Ludlow series [each also features Inspector Montero] —

Dead of a Counterplot, 1962.
Killed by Scandal, 1962.
Death Over Deep Water. 1963.
Dead Woman’s Ditch, 1964.
Unhallowed Murder, 1966