Music from Mike Hammer, the 1957-59 TV series, starring Darren McGavin:

I EAT YOUR SKIN. Cinemation Industries, 1971. William Joyce, Heather Hewitt, Walter Coy, Dan Stapleton, Betty Hyatt Linton, Robert Stanton. Screenwriter-Director: Del Tenney.

   Forget the title because it has almost nothing to do with the movie itself. There’s no skin eating, let alone full-on cannibalism in this low budget independent horror film. Originally titled Zombie Bloodbath and then later Voodoo Blood Bath, I Eat Your Skin wasn’t released to theaters until several years after it was made and then only under a title meant to allure drive in theater moviegoers. Paired on a double bill with the gory grindhouse feature I Drink Your Blood (1971), this was the rather tepid, clunky one that apparently disappointed those seeking the same intensity as the main feature.

   For that reason, along with a title that suggests it’s something other than what it is, I Eat Your Skin has received a bad rap. Now don’t allow me to give you the impression that it’s somehow a neglected gem or a great horror movie just waiting to be rediscovered. It’s neither of those things.

   But it’s an actually fun, almost innocently so, mid-1960s horror movie that never takes itself too seriously and has a great calypso vibe.

   Think of it as a throwback to the zombie movies of the 1930s and 1940s wherein an intrepid protagonist seeks to investigate the strange things happening on a remote island. The special effects are lousy and the dialogue isn’t memorable, but there’s everything you would expect in such a movie including a madman employing a scientist to create an army of the living dead.

   As a late night – make that a very late night – feature movie, this one isn’t half bad. Definitely recommended for zombie fans.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – The Eight of Swords. Dr. Gideon Fell #3. Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1934. Paperback reprints include: Detective Novel Classic #32, digest-sized, circa 1942; Berkley G-48, 1957; Collier AS466V, 1962; Zebra, August 1986.

   This early Carr novel seems to show the author still trying to find his voice, and not quite succeeding. Even though it has a deliciously complicated puzzle plots, I don’t consider this to be one of his better ones.

   It starts out in broad farce, with a house party being remembered by all those present with the sight of a bishop sliding down a banister and a poltergeist popping a vicar in the eye with a bottle in ink, and ends in a much darker mood with what Carr believes to be authentic American gangsters having a shootout on the same estate in the dead of night.

   The dead man (for there is one) was a reclusive gent who tried his best to fit into proper British society, but never quite did. There is no locked room in this story, but the circumstances surrounding his murder is so complicated it takes a whole crew of detectives to sort it all out.

   There is Fell himself, of course, as both a shabby, comic figure and the most brilliant man in the room; the bishop, an amateur criminologist par excellence, at least in his own mind; his son, whom he sent to Columbia University to learn criminology but who never attended a class; and a mystery writer named Henry Morgan, who along with his charming wife decides that solving a real life crime may be as much fun as writing one.

   There is also a ginch involved, a term invented (I believe) by none other than John Dickson Carr, an absolutely delectable girl the bishop’s son falls in love with at first sight. She has very little to do with the story, but every one of Carr’s heroes needs a ginch on hand to keep bth the romantic aspects covered and his mind otherwise occupied.

   But any of Carr’s tales, no matter how he tells them, depends on the solution, and this one’s a doozy. It takes 19 pages to explain this one, and I have to admit I was nowhere close to figuring this one out. Stories relying on too may people doing too many unusual things on the same night as they do in this book could never happen in real life, but if you can get over that not insignificant hurdle, final chapters like this ought to be remembered forever.

Jennifer Rush is an American pop singer who has been based in part in Germany. “The Power of Love,” which she co-wrote and recorded in 1984, is her most well-known song, hitting number one in many countries and covered by many other singers and groups, including Air Supply, Laura Branigan and Celine Dion.

BENJAMIN SCHUTZ – A Fistful of Empty. Leo Haggerty #5. Viking, hardcover, 1991. No paperback edition.

   I missed this when it came out, and I think it must have gone out of print in two weeks. I’ve been hunting a copy for over a year, and finally found one.

   Leo Haggerty chooses to honor an obligation to help his bounty-hunter buddy, Arnie Kendall, bring in a particularly repellent skinhead felon, instead of meeting his love as she asks him to do, even though she says it’s important. When he finally gets home, he finds her raped and brutally beaten, and the home and office trashed. He calls Arnie for help, only to find that he has been murdered.

   His quest to find out who, and why, and to exact revenge, make up the story. I’s also about Haggerty learning who he is, and who he can and cannot be. Hard lessons, tough exam.

   This is heavy, grim stuff. The Haggerty books have been among the more violent of the current PI crop, and this is no exception. Schutz is a good writer, and tells a fast-moving and gripping story. If you like ’em dark and mean, you could do much worse than this. If you don’t, pass.

      The Leo Haggerty series —

Embrace the Wolf (1985)

All the Old Bargains (1985)
A Tax in Blood (1987)
The Things We Do For Love (1989)

A Fistful of Empty (1991)
Mexico Is Forever (1994)
Mary, Mary, Shut the Door (2005). (Collection: includes three Haggerty stories, a “Sean and Matt Ellis” story, plus a Philip Marlowe pastiche, “The Black-Eyed Blonde.”)

BRADLEY SPINELLI – The Painted Gun. Akashic Books, trade paperback, March 2017.

   The author’s previous book, Killing Williamsburg, was called by someone, “… the first visionary neo-Romantic novel of the twenty-first century,” and there’s the problem right there.

   This one is a surreal take on Chandler with an overabundance of plot and almost no understanding of what Chandler, Hammett, and the original Hard Boiled school of writers were trying to do in the first place, the equivalent of trying to write the great New York novel and setting it in Manhattan, Kansas.

   What we have, is David “Itchy” Crane, a knebbish who runs an information consultancy business, not exactly likely to crack the Fortune 400 since it is 1997 and the age of the Internet has begun. Alcoholic ex-reporter Itchy gets an offer of $50,000 dollars from a shady eye to find a missing girl named Ashley who painted a portrait of Itchy having never met him.

   So far so good. Itchy starts on the trail and of course the cops try to scare him off, goons beat him up, and he’s framed — none too believably — for the murders of a Guatemalan hitman. Itchy has to get tough then and find the girl and clear his name.

   The problem is Itchy is never for a moment believable. Despite the fact that Spinelli can write, and there are good bits in the book, he makes the mistake of most writers with no grasp of what Chandler and Hammett were trying to do with the language of the crime novel — he concentrates on what the words say, and not whether they sound authentic..

   He almost lost me on page one with this overheated bit of sophistry disguised as a metaphor:

   â€œBy 4:19 the cigarette was burning out in the brown glass ashtray, sending a lone last tendril of smoke in a sacred mission to the ceiling.”

   â€œSacred mission”? What the hell is he talking about? And so it goes, by turns a fair dinkum Chandler imitation then turning into once of Eliot Paul’s absurdist Dadaesque mysteries, then gaudy pulpese, and too arty by half, then … well some of it I can’t describe.

   I didn’t and don’t dislike the book, only that despite one blurb calling the plot a “Swiss watch” that “explodes like an RPG.” It’s simply too much and too little at the same time.

   Of Ashley’s artist biography, It “… read like a ransom note from another dimension.”

   It doesn’t help it’s 1997, and Itchy sounds as if he fell out of bus in 1950 and cracked his noggin open absorbing a slightly distorted version of Spillanese.

   â€œHis face was a pinched melon of embarrassment …” Again, what the hell does that mean?

   â€œâ€¦Al wasn’t a cautious kind of guy. He threw the door open and, not seeing anyone, stuck his fat face out. I shoved my .45 into his pug nose.”

   â€œâ€¦ a plump blonde was waiting, wearing glasses with the geeky black-plastic birth-control frames that had inexplicably come into fashion forty years after never having been fashionable in the first place ..” Who works that hard for a metaphor and a wise crack? At times I could swear Spinelli is trying out for a chapter in a third volume of Bill Pronzini’s Gun in Cheek series.

   Other times he reverts to a stream of consciousness that makes no sense, as this one while he is having sex in a parked car: “Better times, before the alcoholism began to take its crippling toll, when I still fantasized about winning a Pulitzer, when Herb Caen was still alive and kicking, on the page and off, before he died and I wasn’t even invited to the wake.” That isn’t even a sentence really.

   Thomas Pynchon did this better, so did Thomas Berger and Jonathan Lethem, and they managed surreal and absurdist without prose that stops you dead on the page like a grammatical stubbed toe.

   There are good things about the book. Itchy had potential as the protagonist, the essential mystery when you get down to it makes more sense than many of Chandler’s, there is a pretty good ending, and surprisingly he is good on dialogue. I just wish he hadn’t made me work so hard getting there. All I could think reading it was, this is why Thomas Wolfe needed Maxwell Perkins.

   And they aren’t all misfires:

   â€œThere are always birds chirping in the trees, strange, alien birdsongs, and on the rocks, near the lake, the sporadic skitter of lizards.”

   You can believe the man that wrote that read his Chandler and maybe his Macdonald as well.

ROBERT BLOCH – The King of Terrors. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1977. No paperback edition.

   Robert Bloch has long been recognized as the patriarch macabre fiction writers, having made his first professional sale half a century ago (to Weird Tales in 1934, at tender age of seventeen). But he has also written extensively in the criminous field, with several novels, hundreds of short stories. and five major collections.

   The King of Terrors, subtitled “Tales of Madness and Death,” collects the best of his many short works on the theme of psychopathology. “Throughout man’s history,” Bloch says in his introduction, “I suppose death was the King of Terrors. The ultimate threat to our egos is the thought of their extinction. Now we have recently come to learn that mental illness can also destroy the ego, rob s of our self-awareness and, thus, identity. In a word — living death, the King of Terrors’ tortured twin.”

   That tortured twin makes for some truly fearful and fear-filled tales. “The Real Bad Friend,” for instance, which covers some of the same psychopathological ground as Bloch’s classic novel Psycho and predates the book by two years; “Water’s Edge,” a deceptively simple story about an excon and a woman’s horrifying retribution against him; and a pair of beautifully understated shockers- “Home Away from Home,” about a young woman’s ill-advised visit to her psychiatrist uncle in a remote section England, and “Terror in the Night,” about a young man’s escape from an insane asylum. Not all the stories here are first-rate-Bloch — but all are enjoyable and the best ones are truly shuddersome.

   Bloch’s other criminous collections are also recommended. (It should be noted, however, that there is considerable duplication of stories among them.) They are Terror in the Night and Other Stories (1958), Blood Runs Cold (1961), Cold Chills (1977), and Out of the Mouths of Graves (1978).

         ———
   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.

ROBERT BLOCH “The Chaney Legacy.” First published in Night Cry, Fall 1986. Reprinted many times, including Witches & Warlocks, edited by Marvin Kaye (SF Book Club, hardcover, 1990).

   How does an actor become a monster? What method does an actor have to utilize, what magic must they conjure up in order to become a cinematic fiend? Bela Lugosi didn’t just portray Dracula; he became Dracula. What about Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre? How did they become the characters they portrayed? And what of Lon Chaney, the famed silent film star who portrayed monsters, grotesque villains and strange looking men?

   That’s the obsession plaguing a character named Dale in Robert Bloch’s gripping and creepy little tale, “The Chaney Legacy.” Dale, a researcher of Hollywood lore, is faced with a choice: does he decide to live in a Hollywood Hills bungalow once inhabited by Chaney or does he maintain his romantic relationship with a local broadcaster named Debbie Curzon. True to his obsession with Chaney and the late actor’s films, Dale chooses the house.

   As any fable reminds us, it can be dangerous to pursue a question and a line of inquiry to its rightful conclusion. In his obsessive quest to understand how Chaney became the characters he portrayed, Dale stumbles upon a secret that would have better been left in the past. The secret comes in the form of a makeup kit with a mirror, the very makeup kit that Chaney apparently utilized to “become” the characters he portrayed in the silent films.

   But as any good student of horror fiction knows, sometimes secrets are dangerous. That’s definitely the case in this sublimely bizarre short story by Robert Bloch. Recommended for horror fiction and film fans alike.

GEORGE BAXT – The Neon Graveyard. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1979. Intl. Polygonics Ltd., paperback, 1989.

   This is Baxt’s first mystery novel in some time, and the title fits perfectly. It’s flashy, it’s rotten to the core, and it’s terribly depressing. What the title actually refers to is the city of Hollywood, USA, and maybe you’re way ahead of me.

   As a novel of the utterly bizarre, it comes equipped with all the essentials, including a clonish retread of Mae West, a gorilla who acts as her bodyguard, and a castle of orgies so vile that even federal investigators are forced to sit up and take notice.

   The not-so-surprising lesson to be learned from all this is that decadence per se can carry a mystery story only so far. The humor may be called biting and sardonic by some, but the truth of the matter is that while detective story readers are given a lot to swallow here, there’s really no way they can avoid starving to death on the food for thought that Baxt totally fails to provide.

Note:   There was a seven year gap between Baxt’s previous mystery novel, Burning Sappho, and The Neon Graveyard, and it was another five years before he wrote The Dorothy Parker Murder Case, the first of a series of many “movie star” mysteries, all of which I believe I can safely recommend over this one.

THE BROKEN STAR. United Artists, 1956. Howard Duff, Lita Baron, Bill Williams, Douglas Fowley, Henry Calvin, Addison Richards, Joel Ashley, John Pickard, Joe Dominguez. Written by John C. Higgins. Directed by Lesley Selander.

   Back in the late 1940s, John C. Higgins wrote some memorable film noir scripts turned into riveting movies by Anthony Mann: T-Men, Raw Deal, Railroaded and Border Incident, as well as He Walked by Night. In the 50s, his output became more variable with things like Shield for Murder, The Black Sleep and Untamed Youth, capped off in the mid-60s by Robinson Crusoe on Mars. And somewhere in and among these he recycled his Shield for Murder script into a Western called The Broken Star.

   This opens with Deputy Sheriff Howard Duff scoping out an illicit money drop used by the local cattle baron to store his ill-gotten goodies; which, it seems, are also ill-guarded by a lone Mexican who passes quickly and noisily out of the story when Duff guns him down and makes it look like self-defense.

   But when Duff stashes the loot and gives his story to his boss (Addison Richards) he’s met with professional skepticism. Richards sends Deputy Bill Williams out to investigate the scene, where he (Wiliams) runs into two goons — excuse me: owlhoots — in the employ of the Cattle Baron, who wants his ill-guarded gains gotten back.

   Meanwhile Duff has his own problems with the murdered man’s sister: a fiery Mexican Maiden who sings in the local saloon and does a specialty number with a whip. (We’ve all had relationships like that, haven’t we?) The kind of girl I used to date in college. Before long, the hired goons/owlhoots have summoned Duff to a meeting with Mister Big/Cattle Baron, a genial and unsavory sort who reminds one of Sydney Greenstreet or perhaps Robert Emhardt in Underworld USA, squeezing the local ranchers in between hosting barbecues and making threats while calling the steps at a square dance. And when he smiles and tells Howie he wants his money back, we know the jig is up.

   What follows however is a bit of a mess. The goons kidnap Lita, Howard fights them, Deputy Bill fights them, they kidnap Litas again, Bill fights them again, Howard fights Bill, Howard tries to grab the loot and hit the trail and the whole thing ends up pretty much as we knew it would. In a proper film noir our doomed protagonist would have ended up bleeding in a gutter desperately groping for escape, but here we get a rather protracted shoot-out in an abandoned mine, with everyone jockeying for position and the loot.

   Director Lesley Selander helmed some fine shoot-’em-ups in his day, including some of the best of the Hopalong Cassidy series, but he has little feel for this sort of thing, and it shows. Douglas Fowley does what he can as a ratty little double-crosser (a specialty of his) but beyond that and an elaborate saloon fight, the action seems a bit perfunctory, the sense of fatality that’s so much a part of noir is totally lacking, and a film that could have been a fine successor to movies like Ramrod and Pursued just sort of wastes its time — and ours.

   By the way, Mister Big/the Cattle Baron here seemed awfully familiar to me, sort of a nasty Jonathan Winters type, and it took me a while but I finally placed the actor who portrays him; it’s Henry Calvin, best remembered by viewers my age as Sergeant Garcia in Disney’s TV show Zorro.