This song is from their CD The Mountain, released in 1999. Joining in on this track are Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, Marty Stuart and Cowboy Jack Clement, among others.

CHARLES N. HECKLEMAN – Return to Arapahoe. Fawcett Popular Library, paperback original; 1st printing, August 1980.

   When Pace Barnes returns home from chasing Indians with the army, he finds his brother dead and their home in the hands of one Grady Chambers, a ruthless rancher responsible for a good deal of other trouble there in the foothills of the Rincons.

   Heckelman’s prose is reminiscent of the type found in the type found in the adventures of the Hardy Boys, the 1930s version, to pick an example that comes most easily to mind, but overcoming all — or most — hurdles, it’s a kind of prose that nevertheless seems to suffice.

   Here’s a tale that could easily be fashioned into an old-fashioned B-western movie, in other words, but (mercifully) without the usual comical sidekick.

PostScript:   My brief hesitation there in the second paragraph goes along very well with my observation in the third. It concerns the absolute worst Western cliché in western-adventure books and movies ever. When I was ten years old, I thought it was a stinker, and I still do. It happens when two bad guys have the good guy trapped in a room, both of them with guns on him, and one ornery owlhoot says to the other, “All right, Lumpy, shoot him and let’s get it over with.” And the other says, “Hey, boss, not yet. I’ve got a better idea.”

Bibliographic Notes:   Charles N. Heckelman (1913-2005) is not a big name as far as well-known western writers are concerned. I found a total of nine western novels offered for sale under his name online, one (Lawless Range) published as early as 1946, and there may be others. This led me to check out whether he may have written for the pulp magazines, and yes, it turns out he did: over eighty stories in the Western Fiction index, ranging in years from 1937 to 1955.

FRONTIER CIRCUS. “Depths of Fear.” CBS-TV; 5 October 1961. (Season 1, Episode 1.) Chill Wills, John Derek, Richard Jaeckel. Guest Cast: Aldo Ray, James Gregory, Bethel Leslie. Creator: Samuel A. Peeples. Director: William Witney.

   The concept of this series is both twofold and obvious from the title. It’s a western series with the setting and trappings of circus-related stories. Either that, or it’s a circus series taking place in the Old West. On the basis of watching only this one episode, I’m inclined to go with the latter. Just as in Wagon Train, to use the example that comes to mind almost immediately, it’s the people and their stories that make for the conflicts and the drama, not so much the setting.

   Chill Wills (as Colonel Casey Thompson) is a partner in the T and T Circus with John Derek (Ben Travis), with Richard Jaeckel as their traveling scout and assistant. And every week for 26 weeks, a whole flock of middle- to high-level guest stars came on to have their fictional stories told. Among them: Sammy Davis Jr., Elizabeth Montgomery, Gilbert Roland, Irene Dunne, Don “Red” Barry, Dan Duryea, Vera Miles, Stella Stevens, Rip Torn, Claude Akins and many more.

   The conflict in this first episode is a three-way one, between James Gregory, a martinet of a lion tamer as well as a wife-abuser; his wife, Bethel Leslie, who would leave him if she dared; and Aldo Ray, a drunken bum picked up the circus who was once also a lion tamer, but one who has lost his nerve because of a past incident in his life.

   The story is fairly predictable one, but between the script and Wiliam Witney’s direction, the 50 minutes or so of running time go by very quickly, and the continuing members of the cast are sharp on their toes to jump right in whenever needed in support.

   It’s an unusual combination of genres, and but with a good cast and guest stars, it’s no wonder that the series lasted a full year. In a way, though, it’s also no surprise that it wasn’t picked up for a second season. The confines of a circus just wouldn’t seem to allow for such a wide range of stories as was possible on the much longer-running (and aforementioned) Wagon Train series.

WILD WOMEN. Norman Dawn Productions, 1952. Re-released as Bowanga Bowanga and White Sirens of Africa. Lewis Wilson, Dana Wilson, Mort Thompson and Don Orlando. Written and directed by Norman Dawn. (Note: Not to be confused with Wild Women of Wongo, Captive Women or Mesa of Lost Women. Beware of substitutes!)

   A modestly enjoyable bad film if you’re in that kind of mood, but if you’re not, I recommend you stay away from this preposterous collage of mismatched stock footage and cheap-jack filmmaking.

   Mort Thompson and Don Orlando start out the film as Bwanas of a rather threadbare safari, who run across a wandering explorer (Lewis Wilson, the screen’s first Batman) who recounts how he came to be wandering.

   Whereupon we flash back to his childhood, and it seems he must have grown up in the 1920s because this part is taken from an old silent film (possibly one of Director Dawn’s early efforts; he was a pioneer of the silent film, introducing technical innovations like rear projection and matte shots) with something about an abusive jungle dad and a grass hut besieged by lions. There’s also some newer footage of a woman clad in animal skins, sometimes accompanied by a guy in a gorilla suit, but the ersatz ape is apparently just dropping by for a Guest Spot, as he has no further part in the story.

   A couple of flashbacks later, Thompson, Orlando and Wilson are off in search of the lost tribe of wild women, and shortly thereafter they all get caught by the vanished vixens and dragged off to a part of Africa that looks suspiciously like Bronson Canyon, the stomping grounds for generations of cheap movies, from the silent days to Robot Monster.

   I’d like to tell you more of the plot, but there isn’t any. The girls dance a lot, they take turns fighting over the guys, sometimes they fight the guys for a change, and sometimes we just look at mismatched stock shots of jungle animals, including a moose who seems to have wandered into this picture by mistake.

   Well, I never said it was a classic, but everyone keeps a straight face throughout and the actresses even put a bit of energy into the dancin’ and fightin’ parts. I had to admire their commitment, even while shaking my head at the silliness of it all.

STEPHEN GREENLEAF – Blood Type. John Marshall Tanner #8. William Morrow, hardcover, 1992. Bantam, paperback; 1st printing, October 1993.

   In this, his latest adventure, PI John Marshall Tanner doesn’t have a client for quite a while. A drinking buddy having marital trouble is dead, and Tanner doesn’t accept the common belief that it was suicide. There is a lot of emotional baggage that’s lugged around in this rather lengthy detective tale, and most of it is eventually opened for all to see.

   Unfortunately, somewhere along the line Tanner’s investigation gets sidetracked, and the story transforms itself into a massive, full-fledged medical thriller. And somehow, not so coincidentally, my interest in the proceedings faded, flickered and all but went out.

   I’m going to call this the Reverse Villainy Syndrome. The more gigantic the plot, the less meaningful the solution to the original crime becomes. I also know that Greenleaf realized this, too, since he makes just about the same point somewhere around halfway through.

   The ending is also a huge disappointment. Tanner is good at guessing, no doubt about it. He has most of the solution wrong most of the way through, and then, just as he finally seems to get it right, the story stops, and suddenly it’s over. Left behind are only a few little questions, the kind asked by inquiring little minds (like mine) and never really answered.

   There are a lot of memorable characters brought to life in this book, but the bottom line is that Tanner doesn’t really do any detecting in this book, and it was the ending that I especially didn’t care for.

THE TRAIN. United Artists, 1964. Burt Lancaster, Paul Scofield, Jeanne Moreau. Director: John Frankenheimer.

JANE HADDAM – Bleeding Hearts. Gregor Demarkian #9. Bantam, hardcover, 1994; paperback, 1995.

   Nobody’s ever admitted to me they like these, but this is the ninth so I know somebody besides me reads them. This is the Valentine’s Day entry in her “holiday” series.

   Gregor Demarkian is the retired head of the FBI “serial killer” branch, now living back in the Armenian neighborhood of Philadelphia where he grew up. One of the neighborhood ladies, a plain woman in her late fifties, meets and gets giddy over a once-noted psychologist who four years ago was tried for the murder of his wife and found innocent. Things get a bit sticky at a party she throws for him when his ex-mistress shows up, sending Demarkian’s friend to her room in tears.

   The psychologist follows her, and shortly thereafter he is found stabbed to death on the floor, and her standing over him with a dagger in her hand — the same dagger that was found by the body of his wife.

   The Demarkian books are predictably formulaic in their structure. First there’s the introduction of the players who’ll be the murdered, murderer, and suspects, then the crime, then the investigation and eventual solving of the crime by Demarkian, “the Armenian Hercule Poirot.”

   I like them because the cast is usually interesting and I enjoy Haddam’s leisurely, multi-viewpoint way of telling the story. Like the previous books it’s nothing major, but enjoyable; reading one is sort of like putting on a comfortable old shoe that you’re a little ashamed of.

   
Bibliographic Note:   There have been so far twenty more Demarkian books. The most recent one was Fighting Chance, published in 2014.

   
   I can hardly believe it but we are less than six months away from the 60th anniversary of the debut of Perry Mason the TV series. It was a Saturday evening, September 21, 1957, and among the millions of viewers whose sets were tuned to CBS at 7:30 P.M. Eastern time was a bookish 14-year-old, just beginning his second year of high school, who had discovered and gotten hooked on Erle Stanley Gardner’s Mason novels several months earlier.

      For the next few years I watched the program religiously, catching most of the finest episodes and almost all of those that were at least nominally based on Gardner’s novels. By the time I began dating on Saturday nights the series had become humdrum and routine, at least to my taste, but it remained in prime time for an amazing nine seasons, and countless viewers still identify Gardner’s characters with their TV incarnations: Raymond Burr (Mason), Barbara Hale (his secretary Della Street), William Hopper (private detective Paul Drake), William Talman (DA Hamilton Burger), and Ray Collins (Lt. Tragg).

   To mark the occasion, if a bit prematurely, I’m going to devote most of this column to the first episode aired and the book it was taken from.

   First, the book. The Case of the Restless Redhead (1954) opens with Mason happening upon a trial for larceny in suburban Riverside. Evelyn Bagby, a near-broke waitress with Hollywood dreams, is accused of having stolen $40,000 in jewelry from the trunk of Irene Keith, a wealthy businesswoman on her way to Las Vegas to be bridesmaid at the wedding of movie star Helene Chaney and boat manufacturer Mervyn Aldrich.

   Seeing that assigned defense counsel Frank Neely is out of his depth cross-examining the witness who claims to have seen Bagby open the trunk, Mason over lunch offers the young man a few pointers. That afternoon Neely demolishes the prosecution witness and wins a verdict of acquittal. Bagby comes to Los Angeles to thank Mason and they discuss whether she’s entitled to compensation from Keith, who signed the complaint against her.

   Bagby suggests that she might have been framed for the jewel theft because she’d recognized a newspaper photo of Chaney’s former husband as the phony drama coach who had swindled her out of her inheritance several years before and whom she had called, demanding restitution. Mason gets her a job as waitress at the Crowncrest Inn, which is on a mountaintop connected with the metro area by a narrow and desolate road.

   That evening Bagby calls Mason and claims to have found a .38 Colt Cobra with a 2-inch barrel planted in her room at the Inn. Mason tells her to meet him at a certain restaurant, bringing the gun. When they get together she says she was attacked on the mountain road by a man wearing a pillowcase mask, at whom she fired two shots with the .38. Mason reports to the authorities. When he, Della, Bagby and an officer visit the scene of the incident, they find a wrecked car and inside it a dead man, shot in the head and wearing a pillowcase mask.

   When it’s discovered that the mask came from the Crowncrest Inn, and that the dead man was in fact the fake drama coach who had cheated her, Bagby like all Mason’s clients gets charged with murder. Much of the rest of the novel takes place at the preliminary hearing where Mason defends her.

   Looking at the plot through a microscope reveals flaws here and there. As the hearing begins, the decedent’s body is identified not by the police or a medical examiner but by one of the characters, who isn’t needed as a witness but whom Gardner needs in the courtroom later.

   At the end of the book Mason “deduces” a good bit of the plot without a shred of evidence to go on. There are other holes too but they didn’t faze Anthony Boucher and I didn’t let them bother me much either. Boucher in the Times Book Review (7 November 1954) said: “Some intricate defensive maneuvers to confuse the ballistic evidence may baffle not only the judge and the prosecution but also the reader; you’ll have to keep your mind as sharp and devious as Mason’s own to follow this one, but it’s a wonderful roller-coaster ride.”

   For the sake of those who don’t want to have the novel spoiled by my saying too much about the plot, I’ll let the cat out of the bag in a paragraph which will remain hidden unless you click on it. Here, kitty!

   The telefilm with which the Mason series debuted keeps the ballistic maneuvers pretty much intact but simplifies the novel in almost every other way imaginable. Irene Keith is dropped, as are fledgling lawyer Frank Neely and his fiancée and the whole larceny trial with which the book opens. The rationale for the titular adjective, that Bagby likes to keep moving from one place to another, winds up on the cutting-room floor, leaving us with nothing but alliteration for its own sake.

   Bagby’s bullets, which in the novel complicate the plot by striking certain objects, on the small screen hit nothing. The ballistic testimony which dominates several chapters of the novel is cut to the bone. But with something like 52 minutes of air time to do justice to a full-length book, what option other than cutting was available?

   All in all, adapter Russell S. Hughes did a creditable job. It was the only teleplay he wrote for the series. Before the first season’s end, he had died. Age 48. Cause unknown.

   Raymond Burr as Mason is spectacularly slender, having reportedly lost between 60 and 100 pounds while preparing for the part, and smokes up a storm, as do several other characters including his client, who is seen finding the planted .38 in her cigarette box. The client was played by lovely Whitney Blake (1926-2002), who will also pop up later in this column.

   Prominent in the cast were Ralph Clanton (Mervyn Aldrich), Gloria Henry (Helene Chaney) and Vaughn Taylor (Louis Boles). The first several minutes could be mistaken in dim light for film noir, thanks especially to ominous background music by the never-credited Ren Garriguenc (1908-1998), whose talent (when he wanted to exercise it) for sounding like his CBS colleague Bernard Herrmann has fooled experts. Bits and pieces of Herrmann music are heard here and there but they are few and far between.

   About the director, William D. Russell (1908-1968), not a great deal is known. He began making movies after World War II at Paramount, where he helmed several “heartwarming” comedies. During a pit stop at RKO he made Best of the Badmen (1951), a Western starring Robert Ryan, Claire Trevor, Robert Preston and Walter Brennan, which can be seen complete on YouTube.

   Like so many directors of his generation who saw their careers crumbling thanks to TV, he embraced the new medium and began specializing in situation comedies, directing 61 episodes of Father Knows Best before moving to CBS. There he took up more serious fare, notably a few early episodes of Gunsmoke and 28 of Perry Mason.

Afterwards he went back to the sitcom, directing 48 segments of Dennis the Menace and 128 of the 154 episodes of Hazel (1961-66), starring Shirley Booth as live-in housekeeper for an affluent family, the female head of which was played by — I told you she’d pop up again! — Whitney Blake. (Whether she arranged for Russell to come aboard, or vice versa, or whether it’s just a coincidence, remains what Russell concentrated on for a few years and then dropped: a mystery.) Less than two years after the series was cancelled — which happened the same year Mason was cancelled— Russell died. Age 59. Cause unknown.

   On top of all his novels and stories and travel books and Court of Last Resort pro bono work on behalf of the wrongfully convicted, Erle Stanley Gardner kept up a gargantuan correspondence. One of his correspondents was Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967), the wackiest wackadoodle who ever sat down to a typewriter. Several of Harry’s multi-colored “Walter Keyhole” newsletters, assembled and arranged by me in The Keeler Keyhold Collection (2005), include quotations from ESG’s letters to him.

   In one of them, probably dating from the late Fifties or early Sixties, Gardner alluded to the fact that both his mother and Keeler’s happened to have the same first name; an odd one to say the least. “Now ‘Adelma’ [Keeler wrote] is not a recognized name….Name experts say that it is undoubtedly an artificial synthesis, or fusion, of the names ‘Adeline’ and ‘Thelma’.”

   Why not Adelaide, or Selma? After comparing notes, the two discovered “that a grandfather of each had been in the Civil War” (presumably on the same side) and concluded that “over some camp fire their grandfathers must have met, and talking of possible ‘odd’ names for girl-children, agreed…to name their first daughters ‘Adelma’.” Well, maybe. Anyway it’s a good story.

THE FALCON IN HOLLYWOOD. RKO Radio Pictures,1944. Tom Conway, Barbara Hale, Veda Ann Borg, Sheldon Leonard, Frank Jenks, Joan Brooks, Rita Corday. Based upon the character created by Michael Arlen. Director: Gordon Douglas.

   Tom Lawrence, also known as The Falcon, thinks he’s going on vacation in California, but he should have known better. With the able assistance of a very shapely taxi driver (Veda Ann Borg), he makes quick work of this case of murder on the movie set.

   It’s hopeless to criticize the brainlessness of the plot, or at least what passes for detective work in the solution of which, but it takes only three little words to explain why this movie is worth watching, and I think I’ll repeat them:

   Veda Ann Borg.

NOTE:   Is it possible that this was the highlight of her [Veda Ann Borg’s] career? Here are some of the other movies she made: Accomplice (1946), Big Jim McLain (1952), Big Town (1947), Blonde Savage (1947), and Revenge of the Zombies (1943). Since I’ve seen only one of these, I can’t give you a definitive answer to the question, but from the titles, I’m inclined to say yes.

THE SHIP OF MONSTERS. Producciones Sotomayor, Mexico, 1960. Columbia Pictures, US, 1961. Originally released as La Nave de los Monstruos. Eulailio González, Ana Bertha Lepe, Lorena Velázquez, Manuel Alvarado. Directed by Rogelio A. González.

   From the land of robot-fighting Aztec Mummies, and monster-battling masked wrestlers, comes their strangest contribution to cinema yet, Ship of Monsters, a UFO, alien monster invasion, Western, singing and dancing cowboy and alien, Mariachi-singing robot and computer console, kid and his robot pal, science fiction adventure.

   Let’s just say if it didn’t exist, Mystery Science Theatre 3000 would have had to invent it. There used to be a Science Fiction Western comic book from Charlton, but it was never this weird.

   It all starts when Gamma (Ana Bertha Lepe) and Beta (Lorena Velázquez) land on Earth with a ship load of monsters who escape and have to be rounded up with the help of their robot Tor. Unknown to them they are observed by Lauranio (Eulailio González) a singing and dancing, fast on the draw cowboy who no one in the local cantina will listen to about his UFO sighting. Well, he does drink a little, so they can be excused.

   So of course Lauranio goes back out and runs into Gamma and Beta, gorgeous flimsily clad redhead and blonde, and agrees to help them round up the escaped monsters, enlisting the young Rupert who soon becomes pals with Tor.

   As if that wasn’t enough, Beta becomes jealous of Gamma and Lauranio and turns evil, sending the monsters out to capture or kill Gamma and Rupert. Lauranio then has to seduce Beta, singing and dancing seductively with her in the monster’s cave, while Rupert sneaks on the ship and saves Gamma. It is easily the most awkward dance scene in the history of film with Beta resembling nothing so much as a cheap Burlesque Queen and Lauranio looking more like he is fighting a bull than seducing a beautiful blonde alien.

   Beta discovers, as all must, monsters can’t be controlled, leaving Lauranio, Gamma, and Rupert to stop the monsters, and the film comes to a romantic end as Gamma decides to stay on Earth with Lauranio and Rupert while Tor pilots the monsters back home singing a Mariachi duet with a mobile female computer console he has a crush on.

   I kid you not.

   You can watch it in Spanish on YouTube if you want. In its own insane way it is entertaining, however strange, but you have to wonder at the mind that came up with it and try not to boggle your mind wondering what Roy Rogers and Gene Autry would have done with this one. Compared to it Gene’s Phantom Empire serial is downright tame: none of his robots even hummed.