BIG HOUSE, U.S.A. Bel-Air/United Artists, 1955. Ralph Meeker, Broderick Crawford, Lon Chaney Jr, William Talman, Felicia Farr, Reed Hadley and Charles Bronson. Written by John C. Higgins. Directed by Howard W. Koch.

   Despite the title, this isn’t really a prison movie. It’s a film that could have been agreeably subversive, in the manner of Kiss Me Deadly, but instead it settles for being merely unpleasant.

   Ralph Meeker stars as Jerry Barker, who seems at first to be just a guy out for a walk in the woods who stops to help a lost child. But this is Ralph at his nastiest, in a role that makes his Mike Hammer look like Saint Francis by comparison.

   Things get disagreeable pretty quickly, and what seemed at first to be an act of kindness turns into extortion. Ralph almost comes out of those woods with $200,000 and a guilty secret. I won’t go into details, but it was all pretty grim, even for a seasoned old movie-watcher like me.

   I said Ralph “almost” comes out of the woods with the money. Turns out he hid most of it back in the timber (at Royal Gorge National Park, where most of this was filmed) and when he’s picked up he only has a few thousand on him — enough to get nailed for extortion and draw a one-to-five-year sentence; with good behavior he can expect to get out in a few months and go back to claim his loot.

   But things take an interesting turn when Ralph gets thrown in a cell full of cult-movie bad guys: Broderick Crawford, William Talman, Lon Chaney and Charles Bronson. And there’s another fun twist when Ralph’s cell-mates plan to bust out and take him with them… to lead them to his loot.

   Like I say, this could have been enjoyably loathsome — like The Lineup or The Killers (the 1964 remake) with a writer and director attuned to its noir potential. But the folks in charge here decided to go for a Dragnet-style approach; Reed Hadley comes on as an FBI agent, complete with voice-over narration, and everything gets filmed at arm’s-length, in a near-documentary style, but without the sense of gritty realism.

   Even the most harrowing moments — and there are quite a few here — are shot with a detachment that seems almost uncaring. And when everyone gets their comeuppance, we get no sense of things coming together or falling apart. All we get is the sad conviction that with this story hook and those actors, this could have been a lot better.

From their LP Spanky & Our Gang Live. Recorded at the Gaslight Club South in Coconut Grove, Florida, early 1967. The album was released December 1970. Shown on the cover are original members Elaine “Spanky” McFarlane, Nigel Pickering, Paul “Oz” Bach and Malcolm Hale:

  LEIGH BRACKETT – The Tiger Among Us. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1957. Also published as 13 West Street: Bantam J2323, paperback, 1962. Reprinted in the UK as Fear No Evil (Corgi, paperback, 1960).

   This is Leigh Brackett’s best crime novel — a simple, straightforward, consistently gripping, and powerful story of one man’s nightmare encounter with random teenage violence. Walter Sherris, an average family man and a white-collar employee of a company in an Ohio mill town, takes a walk along a dark road one night and is brutally beaten by five young “tigers” out looking for thrills.

   But that is only the beginning of his ordeal. When Sherris is finally released from the hospital, he sets out to do what the police haven’t been able to: learn the identities of his attackers and see justice done. It isn’t long, however, before he is again the hunted — and his family along with him. For the five boys, continuing their random attacks, have gone too far with another of their victims: They are already murderers and stand ready to kill again. Even if Sherris learns to wear the stripes of the tiger himself, even if he survives this second assault, he knows his life will never be the same.

   Fine writing and some genuinely harrowing scenes make The Tiger Among Us one of the best of the spate of Fifties novels dealing with juvenile delinquency. In the forcefulness of its message, in fact, it is second only to Evan Hunter’s mainstream novel The Blackboard Jungle. An effective screen version appeared under the title 13 West Street in 1962, starring Alan Ladd and Rod Steiger.

   Brackett’s other crime novels are An Eye for an Eye (1957) and Silent Partner (1969). She also ghosted a mystery for actor George Sanders, Stranger at Home (1946).

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   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.

EVAN HUNTER – Criminal Conversations. Warner Books, hardcover, 1994; paperback, 1995. Pocket, paperback, 2002.

   Is there anyone who doesn’t know that Evan Hunter, nee Salvatore Lombino, is also Ed McBain? No, I didn’t think so. This is his first novel under the Hunter byline in 10 years.

   Michael Welles is an Assistant DA heading up an organized crime unit. He has a beautiful wife, Sarah, and an adorable daughter, Molly. Sarah Welles is a fine and dedicated school teacher with an adoring husband, Michael, along with Molly. Andrew Faviola is a bright young man with a gruff old father, Anthony, who is serving five concurrent life sentences. Andrew has an extended family, too. Some people call it the Mafia. Michael wants Andrew — in jail. Andrew wants Sarah — in bed. Andrew’s extended family wants a lot of things, but mainly to get richer and stay out of jail. What we may have here is a set of irreconcilable goals.

   Well, I’d say what Hunter may have here is a winner. There are cops, and robbers, and lovers, and sex, and violence, and even a cute kid. There are a lot of characters, all of whom ring true, and the writing is as expert as you expect out of an old pro like Hunter, and haven’t always gotten of late from his alter ego, McBain.

   You can tell this one is written for a different audience than are the 87th Precinct books the first time you come to a four-page sex scene with lots of dirty talk. It’s a good book of its kind, which I’d call a “big” crime novel, and maybe a very good one. At the very worst it’s an entertaining read.

  DESIRE AND HELL AT SUNSET MOTEL. Two Moon Releasing, 1991. Sherilyn Fenn, Whip Hubley, David Hewlett, David Johansen, Kenneth Tobey. Screenwriter-director: Alien Castle.

   An unhappily married couple, a toy salesman and his bored wife, check into a 1950s hotel four miles from Disneyland. He hires a friend to spy on his wife; she asks her lover to kill her husband.

   This was described somewhere as “comedy noir,” but unless you have a high tolerance for ennui, forget it. It’s arch and snooty, and on a low budget in a cheap motel, that won’t even buy you a vanilla phosphate.

NINE LIVES ARE NOT ENOUGH. Warner Brothers, 1941. Ronald Reagan, Joan Perry, James Gleason, Howard da Silva, Faye Emerson , Edward Brophy, Peter Whitney, Charles Drake. Based on the novel by Jerome Odlum. Director: A. Edward Sutherland.

   You can call me confused if you want, but the leading character in this film is a brash young reporter named Matt Sawyer, while the Kirkus review for the book says the reporter’s name is Johnny O’Sullivan, and Al Hubin in Crime Fiction IV says the leading character is somebody called John Steele, a fellow that in a review Kirkus did of another of Odlum’s books they call a PI. There is no PI in the movie.

   No matter. Maybe someone can straighten me out on this, even though Jerome Odlum as a mystery writer is all but unknown today. I’ll stick to the film in the rest of the review, and I’ll bet you’ve already matched a young brash Ronald Reagan with the Matt Sawyer fellow I mentioned up there in the first paragraph.

   Sawyer is the kind of guy who when he calls in a story he gets a small detail wrong, and when the detail (murder vs suicide) somehow gets into the headline of the paper he’s working for, it doesn’t make his editor (Howard da Silva) very happy at all.

   Sawyer does have a point, however. The dead man is supposed to have shot himself, but the body is found with his hands in his pockets. But what is the coroner to think when the door is locked and the windows shut tight? It has to be suicide.

   Sawyer has to depend on to a pair of agreeable cops (one of whom is played of course by James Gleason) to help him out of the jam he’s in. That he also falls immediately in love with the dead man’s daughter (Joan Perry) causes some complications.

   Much of the film is played for laughs. The second cop always seems to have his tongue hanging out for his next cold brew, for example, and Peter Whitney (his film debut) plays a hulk of a boy-man with limited (shall we say) mental capabilities.

   As always seems the case in movies like this, the first half plays better than the second. When the producer and director are forced to realize that they also have to solve the case, they also start to get serious. Well, at least a little. They can always fill in any gaps in the plot with a lot of action. They locked room aspect, for example, is covered in one throwaway line. Blink for a moment and you’ve missed it.

   I enjoyed this one, though. You may, too, if you allow your sense of humor to prevail. It won’t make much of any other kind of sense, but it’s still a movie that’s fun to watch.

CHARLIE JANE ANDERS “A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime.” First published in Cosmic Powers, edited by John Joseph Adams (Saga Press, trade paperback; 1st printing, April 2017).

    Browsing at Barnes & Noble yesterday, a brand new science fiction anthology called Cosmic Powers caught my eye. I bought it almost immediately, brought it home, and I’m already three stories and 70 pages into it. The overall theme, according to the editor, John Joseph Adams, in his introduction are “stories of larger than life heroes battling menacing force, in far-flung galaxies, with the fate of the universe at stake.”

   Well, yippee! As long as the authors don’t go all early Edmond Hamilton on us, or E. E. Smith, Ph.D., this is the kind of science fiction I’m always on the lookout for, and so far, I’m happy to tell you, they haven’t. The stories are huge in scope, but up close and personal in scale. (I hope that makes sense.)

   The first story in the book, “A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime,” by Hugo award-winner Charlie Jane Anders, is a pretty good example. In fact, compared to the deadly dull military SF being published (what I’ve seen of it), it could be faulted in going too far in the other direction; that is to say, making too light of the affair — which in this case consists entering the realm of a huge blob of existence called The Vastness, escaping with a device called a hypernautic synchrotrix on a spaceship called the Spicy Meatball, one of the two perpetrators thereof (one male and one female) being someone who calls on a pair of gods totally new to me (“Thank Hall and Oates!”), and all this in only the first eight pages, with 26 more to go.

   I enjoyed this one. I think the author manages to keep both feet on the right side of fun versus slapstick, but this may very well be one of those situations where simply said, your mileage may vary.

Mint Tattoo was an offshoot of the hard rock band Blue Cheer, with some of the same members. Their only LP, self-titled, was released in 1969.

EDGAR BOX –
       Death in the Fifth Position, E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1952. Signet #1036, paperback, 1953.
       Death Before Bedtime. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1953. Signet #1093, paperback, 1954.
       Death Likes it Hot. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1954. Signet #1217, paperback, 1955.
     – All three books have been reprinted several times, including one hardcover omnibus edition: Boxed In (Mystery Guild, 2011).

   Gore Vidal a mystery writer? Yes indeed, although the mystery in his three detective novels is much inferior to the writing. In the early 1950s, at the end of his first period as a mainstream novelist and the beginning of his career as a writer of live TV drama, Vidal took up the pseudonym of Edgar Box and spent about three weeks turning out a whodunit trilogy whose amateur sleuth is Peter Cutler Sargeant II, a thirtyish, pleasantly pig-faced public-relations consultant and (exclusively hetero) sexual gymnast. Although they’re not noteworthy as detective novels. Vidal’s guided tours through the worlds of art, politics, and high society entertain royally with countless gleefully sardonic jabs at every target in sight.

   The series opens with Death in the Fifth Position, in which Peter is retained to provide good PR for the Grand St. Petersburg Ballet. The dance group is feeling the pinch of McCarthyism, courtesy of a right-wing veterans’ organization (Motto: “In a true democracy there is no place for a difference of opinion on great issues”) incensed at the group’s having hired a “Communist” choreographer, Jed Wilbur.

   At the climax of Wilbur’s new ballet, its star is supposed to ascend into the wings in triumph. But on opening night, the wire cable snaps and the prima ballerina falls to her death before the eyes of thousands. Vidal then treats us to many pages of satire about professional dancers and their hangers-on and tedious speculation about homicidal motives, interspersed with two more gruesome deaths, before Peter unveils his surprising but unfair solution.

    Death Before Bedtime finds Peter in Washington as advisor to ultraconservative Senator Leander Rhodes and bedmate to Rhodes’s nymphomaniac daughter. Rhodes’ ambitions to be his party’s next presidential candidate come to an abrupt end when he’s blown to bits by a gunpowder charge in his fireplace. The investigation, long on speculation and short on substance, is interrupted in its stately progress toward nowhere by (surprise!) another murder, after which Peter uses a mix of guesswork and bluff to expose the guilty party.Once again a lackluster plot is saved by Vidal’s mocking gibes at politics, journalism sex, and society.

   In his third and last case, Death Likes It Hot, Peter is invited to a weekend house party at a Long Island – beachfront mansion and encounters tangled emotions and murder among a cast of ludicrous plutocrats and talentless pseudoartists. Its fairly complex plot, a few deft clues, and a dramatic climax make this the best mystery of the trio, but again it’s the pungent satire that brings the book to life.

   Clever deductions, fair play with the reader, and the Christie-Queen bag of tricks are not Vidal’s strong points. But his mastery of the language permeates even these mysteries that he himself shrugs off as potboilers cranked out for money, and his tone of cynical, good-humored tolerance toward an America populated exclusively by crooks, opportunists, and buffoons is as close to the true spirit of H. L. Mencken as mystery fiction is ever likely to see.

   It appears that Vidal had a good time with mysteries, and his pleasure is conveyed to the reader. He must have especially enjoyed himself when he got to write the following, surprisingly accurate, blurb which appeared on the covers of the paperback editions of his three mysteries. “The work that Dr. Kinsey began with statistics, Edgar Box has completed with wit in the mystery novel.”

   Though Spillane and others had already broken down the barriers against writing about sex in the detective story, Vidal went further than anyone else, but he also did it with more humor.

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   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.

BRIDGET McKENNA – Murder Beach. Diamond, paperback original; 1st printing, December 1993.

   There’s been a recent wave of new female PI’s in recent months, in case you haven’t noticed. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much to distinguish this first case of PI Caley Burke from the ones most of the others have been having.

   She’s divorced, more or less on firendly terms with her ex-husband, has been apprenticed to an older, male PI before trying to crack a case on her own, has red hair, and she’s personally involved in the case before she’s even hired. This time it’s the grandfather of two close friends from high school days who’s been accused of murder, and the cop on the case is someone Caley had an off-and-on romance with about the same time.

   There’s a tricky balance that exists between competent mystery writing and mediocre, and my only other observation is that Bridget McKenna seems to be walking that line with no problem at all.

[UPDATE] 04-20-17. There were only three books in the Caley Burke series. I read and reviewed the third one, Caught Dead, back in February; you can read my comments here. I liked it better than I seem to have cared for this one, calling it better than average. Someday I may come across a copy of the second book in the series. I almost never read the books in a series in the proper order.