MARY McMULLEN – A Country Kind of Death. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1975. Jove, paperback reprint, April 1988.

   I have a small prejudice against small children appearing in mystery novels. They’re either pests or small nuisances, or they’re victims. While children as victims is something we should read about — ignoring the .problem doesn’t make it go away — it’s not something I want to read about, if you see what I mean. Children (ideally) should be innocent and charming, and innocent and charming is not exactly what detective fiction is about.

   For a while, I thought we might have an exception to this loose and sloppy rule. Kit is seven, her father writes mysteries for a living, and on page 3, Kit is described as having “read Philip’s most recent book, in manuscript, and had guessed by page 60 who the murderer was, which at the time had nettled her father considerably.”

   But as good as that line is, the rest of Mary McMullen’s book shows that there is as much malice alive and well in the sweet-smelling country lanes as there is in the stench of any city’s streets. One could coin the phrase “Malice Domestic,” to describe this book, and it would fit perfectly.

   Most of the life in the Keane household is a normal, everyday muddle, but when Kit’s mother Mag leaves for a short vacation, bringing her sister, Aunt Therese, in to keep things running while she’s gone, the muddle becomes nasty.

   Don’t misunderstand. Therese is an innocent bystander. And it’s the neighbor lady, Mrs. Mint, who dies, drowned in the fishpond, and either Kit knows too much, or (could it be?) she’s the one who nudged her in.

   This is not a detective story. Not really. There is a crime, a serious one, or maybe there isn’t one at all. She could have just fallen, you see. But don’t take the kindly prose of Mary McMullen too lightly. There’s viciousness hiding in the organdy, the wild geraniums, and the crisp-smelling sheets, and her characters are not always very nice…

MAX BRAND – Dogs of the Captain. Five Star, hardcover, March 2006. Leisure, paperback, 2007. First appeared as a six-part serial in Western Story Magazine, January 2 through February 6, 1932.

   There are moments in this book, especially in the first half, when you may have the feeling that Max Brand was writing the great American novel, Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn style. The portrayal of a small 12-year-old boy in a small town finding his way among his peers by breaking into the universally feared Captain Slocum’s property to steal a watermelon, then on a later night, climbing the side of the house to the uppermost tower to investigate the general belief that a ghost is in permanent residence there — why that is the stuff that dreams are made of.

   What Don Grier, shaking in his — not boots, as he is barefoot — does not reckon on is that when he is caught, the captain will take a liking to him, and will eventually ask Don’s Aunt Lizzie if he may adopt him. All would be well, except that Aunt Lizzie, before letting go, lets slip that Don’s father was hanged — and for the offense of killing his brother.

   Don’s uncle, it seems, was shot to death several years before in a mining camp called Chalmer’s Creek, somewhere out in the untamed West. Don will hear of nothing but leaving at once to salvage the name of his father, and the captain agrees.

   Obviously this is a rite-of-passage story, and what Max Brand does is take the basic material and does his best to shape into a small epic of legendary proportions. While the resulting novel is not an easy one to put down, he doesn’t quite succeed. Characters and characterization seem to slip away from him more often than once, and when much is made of a surprising reappearance of Aunt Lizzie into the story, she just as quickly disappears, never to be heard of again.

WILLIAM DIEHL – Primal Fear. Martin Vail #1. Villard, hardcover, 1993. Ballantine, paperback, 1994. Film: Paramount, 1996 (with Richard Gere as Martin Vail).

   Diehl has written a number of successful novels, the best known of which are probably Sharkey’s Machine and Thai Horse. This is the first in what will be a series of at least two about superstar Chicago defense attorney Marty Vail. I think we’ve got a winner here, folks.

   The book opens with the bloody and brutal murder of Chicago’s most prominent Catholic clergyman, and then shifts to Vail winning a multi-million dollar settlement from the City and County on a police brutality suit by a gangster. They are not pleased. To show their displeasure, the power structure insures that Vail is handed the pro bono defense of the youth charged with the clergyman’s murder. As the police believe they have a cod-lock cinch case, it is almost certain that Vail’s reputation will suffer; which, of course, is the point of it all.

   Diehl is a polished writer and a consummate storyteller. There’s a many a twist and turn in the plot, which has a lot to offer fans of both psychiatry and courtroom drama, but I’ll let you discover them for yourself. The story is told from shifting viewpoints to good advantage, and suspense is maintained to the end; if you see it all coming you’re a good deal more perceptive than I am.

   Vail is an intriguing if not wholly admirable character, and his supporting cast hardly less so — intriguing, that is. I think there is room for both him and his henchmen-and-women to grow, and I look forward to reading more about them.

   I didn’t come away from Primal Fear with any gripes at all, and that happens damned seldom. This is a good story with interesting characters, excellently told, and I highly recommend it.

      The Martin Vail series —

1. Primal Fear (1992)
2. Show Of Evil (1995)
3. Reign in Hell (1997)

If there is (or was) such a thing as an “acid folk” band, Michaelangelo may have been it. They released One Voice Many, their one and only LP, in 1971 for Columbia, but the album received no promotion and the group disbanded soon thereafter. It is now a collectors’ item, of course.

ADVENTURE IN SAHARA. Columbia Pictures, 1938. Paul Kelly, C. Henry Gordon, Lorna Gray, Robert Fiske, Marc Lawrence, Dwight Frye. Screenplay by Maxwell Shane; story: Samuel Fuller. Director: D. Ross Lederman.

   With a story written by Samuel Fuller, who went on to far bigger and better things, Adventure in Sahara is more of an historical curiosity than anything else. A surprisingly gritty programmer, the film features Paul Kelly as an American who joins the French Foreign Legion to avenge his brother’s death at the hands of the sadistic Captain Savatt (C. Henry Gordon).

   Kelly isn’t exactly Gary Cooper, but he gets the job done. Gordon’s character, Savatt, borders on the cartoonish. I imagine he’s sort of what American filmgoers might have expected a cruel French officer to act like; nothing more, nothing less.

   When the desert sun sets, however, Adventure in Sahara remains remarkably forgettable. There’s no particularly captivating dialogue and the characters are never fully fleshed out. But that’s not to say that it’s not watchable, if mindless escapism.

   Personally, I’ve always enjoyed films involving France’s role in the world, particularly in North Africa and the Middle East. Granted, I’m part of a niche audience that could probably have meetings in a phone booth (not that they really exist anymore), but films like these serve more as time capsules than anything else. After all, how many people would choose to make — let alone rush to see — a movie about the French Foreign Legion today?

MARTIN EDWARDS, Editor – Motives for Murder: A Celebration of Peter Lovesey on His 80th Birthday by Members of the Detection Club. Crippen & Landru, November 2016. Introduction by Martin Edwards. Foreword by Len Deighton. Afterword by Peter Lovesey.

   Popular crime fiction writer Peter Lovesey recently turned eighty, a notable achievement in itself, and twenty of his friends at the Detection Club got together to produce this Festschrift in his honor. Editor Martin Edwards’ choice of selections is worthy of commendation, while Douglas Greene at Crippen & Landru has done his usual fine job assembling it all into a coherent whole.

   Some of the resulting stories knowingly reflect the milieus and characters that Lovesey has developed and explored over the years, the town of Bath and his historical mysteries especially so. Other tales by established authors, however, feature their own characters and settings, with sub-types running the gamut from domestic suspense to pure detection.

   As varied as the stories are, though, there isn’t a clunker in the bunch. As instances, we can point to Catherine Aird’s “The Walrus and the Spy,” which involves espionage and the solution of a knotty cipher; L. C. Tyler’s “The Trials of Margaret” is a black comedy pure and simple; Martin Edwards’ “Murder and Its Motives” centers on bibliographical criminality; Michael Jecks’ “Alive or Dead” plays with narrative time; John Malcolm’s “The Marquis Wellington Jug” explores Lovejoy territory while Michael Ridpath’s “The Super Recogniser of Vik” wanders poleward into Nordic Noir; Susan Moody’s “A Village Affair” echoes Miss Marple, just as Kate Charles’ “A Question of Identity” reflects Hitchcock.

   For devotees of the Sage of Baker Street there’s David Stuart Davies’ featherweight “The Adventure of the Marie Antoinette Necklace: A Case for Sherlock Holmes”; while for fans of Peter Lovesey’s Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray there are David Roberts’ inconclusive “Unfinished Business” and, better still, Kate Ellis’s “The Mole Catcher’s Daughter,” with Thackeray’s nephew performing some simple but effective sleuthing; and finally our favorite, Andrew Taylor’s unpredictable “The False Inspector Lovesey,” with its delightfully spunky narrator leading us down the garden path.

THOMAS H. STONE – Black Death. New English Library, UK, paperback original; 1st printing, July 1973.

   Here’s a PI missed by most lists of PI’s, whether online or not, no matter how thorough they may be: mulatto detective Chester Fortune. For completists, here’s a list of his first four adventures: Dead Set (1972), One Horse Race (1972), Stopover for Murder (1973), and Black Death (1973).

   Thomas H. Stone is a pseudonym of Terry Harknett, who wrote a slew of other British mysteries and spy adventures under both his own name and several others. He later became rich or famous by writing hard-edged and violent western series, including the Edge and Adam Steele books, both as George G. Gilman, and the Apache series, as William M. James.

   Following in a long (and mostly unrich) tradition, while the Chester Fortune books were published and appeared only in Britain, the character works out of Los Angeles (the alternative world LA that has kerbs, tyres and is populated in part by coloured folk). In this particular adventure, however, Fortune has temporarily stopped over in New Orleans, home of hot jazz and black beautiful women.

   One of whom takes him along on a midnight picnic alongside a lake, but just as things begin to heat up, all Helsinki breaks loose. Fortune is beaten up, robbed, his gun is missing, and so is April. When her body is found, the local cops (“racialists” all) need look no further than Mr. Fortune.

   Fortune also has the (mis)fortune of meeting a local gang of butch dykes (the latter term also the source of a lot of bad jokes) and under circumstances that Chester least expects, his father, whom he’s never seen.

   It is difficult to know what to make of all of this. It is not a world recognizable as ever having existed in any dimension within several stops from ours, but as Fortune points out about the town of Masterson – a white town scrubbed shiny clean, and from which hapless blacks who wander in are quickly escorted to the city limits by the police force in nothing flat — ” get below the neat veneer and you see a lot of slime underneath” — there is an imagery here that stands clear and tall.

   Stone is not a word stylist, and there is the unmistakable smell of unmanageable coincidence hanging high over the tale he tells (and it is even worse if I understand the rather enigmatic ending completely). But, as crude as he is, the story is forceful and compelling, and as appealing as an alternate world story that’s just slightly jumped the tracks. (The mystery involved is strictly a bonus.)

Released on Blue Note Records in 1958. Personnel: Miles Davis, trumpet; Cannonball Adderley, alto saxophone; Hank Jones, piano; Sam Jones, bass; Art Blakey, drums.

WOMAN ON THE RUN. Universal Pictures, 1950. Ann Sheridan, Dennis O’Keefe, Robert Keith, John Qualen, Frank Jenks, Ross Elliott, Joan Fulton, J. Farrell MacDonald, Steven Geray, Victor Sen Yung. Screenplay: Alan Campbell and Norman Foster, based on the short story “Man on the Run” by Sylvia Tate (American Magazine, April 1948). Director: Norman Foster.

   This is the best movie I’ve seen so far this year. And I have a feeling that when the end of December comes around, there’s a good chance I’ll still be able to say that. I’m sure it will be in the Top Ten. Just wait and see.

   While Ann Sheridan is the woman on the run that the title says this movie is about, it is really her husband, Tom Johnson (Ross Elliott), who’s on the run, and it is her job to find him, if only the police wouldn’t keep getting in the way. It seems that he was the sole witness to a gangland killing, and once he realizes that his life is in danger, off he goes, no matter how much protection the police say they will give him.

   It is a puzzle at first when Mrs. Johnson does not seem at all heart-broken over her husband’s disappearance. She is cold, bitter and cynical, all in one. It turns out that their marriage was not a happy one, but egged on by an eager newspaper reporter (Dennis O’Keefe), who promises her a sizable cash reward for the story, she avoids the police and goes on her husband’s trail.

   It should come as no surprise that she learns about her husband surprises her, and she soon begins to follow the path he has left for her in earnest. This was a good part for Ann Sheridan, and she makes the most of it, even though (once again) the movie is in black-and-white, and she is almost always wearing a trenchcoat (feminine style).

   I rather wish that the killer who’s on the husband’s trail wasn’t revealed so soon, just past halfway through, but this is still a tense, near edge-of-the-seat kind of story, filmed on location in downtown San Francisco, Fisherman’s Wharf, and the Santa Monica Pier. (The scenes on and around the roller coaster are wonderful.) And Ann Sheridan’s transformation from a hard-boiled not-much-of-a wife to an woman who sees at last who her husband really is, is well worth the price of admission.

DAY OF THE OUTLAW. United Artists, 1959. Robert Ryan, Burl Ives, Tina Louise, Alan Marshal, Venetia Stevenson, David Nelson, Nehemiah Persoff, Jack Lambert, Frank deKova, Lance Fuller, Elisha Cook Jr., Dabbs Greer. Screenplay by Philip Yordan, based on a novel by Lee E. Wells. Director: André De Toth.

   What begins as a routine story of homesteaders vs. the local cattle baron (Robert Ryan) in Day of the Outlaw shifts without warning (unless you’ve read a review like this one) to another tale altogether. Before going any further, let me add this. There is something that suggests that if not interrupted, the initial plot may have gone somewhere else very interesting: the wife of the leader of the farmers (Tina Louise) has had an affair with the cattle baron.

   From this point on, you have a decision to make. Read on and learn more about the story than I had any idea about before I watched this film, or stop right here with my telling you that this one of the bleakest black-and-white westerns I have ever seen. It ends with a 30 minute trek through a mountain pass that may not exist, with snow up to the saddles on the horses, the leader of the men dying from a bullet wound, but all of them have run out of other options.

   In between, what happened? A gang of seven men who come to town, led by former army officer Jack Bruhn, the stentorian-voiced Burl Ives, the Cavalry hard on their trail, held up only by the weather. It is the middle of winter Only by Bruhn’s firm command of his band of outlaws are they kept from completely destroying the town, in all likelihood killing the men and raping the women.

   Bruhn’s men are brutish, sadistic killers — all but one — and to watch them dance wildly with little restraint with the town’s women later that evening — the only entertainment that Bruhn will allow them — is a sight to behold.

   It is up to Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan), tough as they come but weary-faced and tired, but who is damned if he will allow the town he helped create be destroyed, to avert disaster. How he does it is the crux of this fascinating small gem of a movie.