ED McBAIN – Mary, Mary. Matthew Hope #10. Warner Books, hardcover, 1993; paperback, May 1994.

   Matthew Hope, hero of McBain’s “second” series, is a criminal lawyer in Calusa, Florida. He is asked to defend a retired schoolteacher by a British former student of hers in a particularly heinous crime involving the killing, mutilation, and burial in her garden of three young girls. The accused is a prickly, callous, foul-mouthed soul completely at odds with the image her past would indicate, and denies everything. Hope believes her (he won’t defend people believes guilty) and takes the case.

   I was disappointed. I was unable to believe in a number of the characters, very much including quite contrary Mary, the schoolmarm, whose transition from caring teacher to her present persona wasn’t convincingly explained. There were too many things let unestablished for the denouement to be credible, and I thought the many, many courtroom scenes were egregiously padded.

   Did I like anything? Well, McBain still writes competent, spare prose, at least when he’s not filling ten pages in a row with one line paragraphs of courtroom testimony. And that’s all. If you’re a Hope fan, you will probably want to try it for yourself. Otherwise, abandon Hope, all ye who enter here.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Lazy Lover. William Morrow & Co, hardcover, October 1947. Pocket #909, paperback, 1952. Reprinted by Pocket many times. Later reprinted by Ballantine, paperback, 1981.

   My reaction to this mid-career entry in the Perry Mason series was, I have to say, decidedly mixed. As usual Gardner starts the tale with a huge mysterious come-on for the reader, with Mason receiving two checks in the mail from the same person in the same amounts ($2500) but from two different banks.

   Presumably it’s from a prospective client, female and unknown to either Perry or Della, but there’s no letter with either check, and further investigation comes up with an even bigger surprise: one of the checks has been forged.

   The mystery deepens. The husband of the woman who sent the checks comes into the office to tell Perry that she, his wife, has run off with his assistant. That’s not his big concern, however. Since the assistant is going to be an important witness in an upcoming lawsuit, the husband needs to get in touch with him, and fast.

   This all happens in the first 16 pages. When the husband turns up dead, it is all but certain that either the wife or the assistant is responsible. Getting all of the ensuing relevant information into the story is a tough job, and even though Gardner specialized in plots as tangled as they could be, there was a point in this particular story, about halfway through, that the going was getting awfully slow. That’s when I almost gave up, thinking that not even he could pull all of the threads of the story together again.

   If you were ever to read this book and you find yourself in the same situation, my advice to you would be to persevere. I did, and I’m glad I did. I do not remember ever seeing a map in one of Perry Mason’s adventures before, but this one does, and you’d better look at it extremely carefully, as the solution depends 100% on it.

   The problem with the solution, though, while more than satisfactory, is that there is no way whatsoever that any scenario such as this one would ever take place in the real world. None at all. Stories in which one of the main characters claims to have amnesia tend to be that way.

   And the business with the two checks? Easily explained, in a couple of lines at the end. The real story is the question of who was in the the car the dead man was in, and when.

ROBERT BLOCH – The Scarf. Dial Press,. hardcover, 1947. Avon #211, paperback, as The Scarf of Passion, 1949. Gold Medal d1727, paperback, 1966.

   Movie-makers aren’t the only ones who commit violence on books. Toward the end of October I was reading a 1966 reprint of Robert Bloch’s first novel, The Scarf. It’s a first-person serial-killer tale, and it’s creepy enough that it probably worried Bloch’s friends and family at the time and still packs a chill or two. And while I was reading this late-40s novel, I came upon a reference to Bob Dylan.

   That got me curious, so I looked up the passage in an earlier edition, and found it had been considerably re-written, either by Bloch himself or by some talented hack at Fawcett who could ape his style. And so it goes throughout the 1966 edition: a train trip becomes a plane ride, a radio is rewritten as a stereo, and there’s even a reference to dancing the Frug. (Ah, who could forget the Frug?) All of which were no doubt intended to make The Scarf pass for a contemporary novel in ’66, but now seem oddly quaint.

THE MECHANIC. United Artists, 1972. Charles Bronson, Jan-Michael Vincent, Keenan Wynn, Jill Ireland, Linda Ridgeway, Frank DeKova. Director: Michael Winner.

   For the first sixteen minutes, there is no dialogue. None. Just a sequence in which we see Charles Bronson or, more accurately, a character portrayed by him, plan and execute an assassination of an older man living in a rundown Los Angeles hotel room. But there’s music accompanying the action, a score composed by Jerry Fielding. Unfortunately, the music overwhelms everything else, making it more obtrusive than artistic.

   In many ways, this initial sequence is indicative of the film as a whole. It tries to be artistic and deep, but fails nearly on every level. And the overwhelming, out of place soundtrack doesn’t help matters, either.

   Now, some may see this criticism as overly harsh. After all, what’s not to like about the pairing of Charles Bronson and a youthful Jan-Michael Vincent as a skilled hitman and his apprentice? Both are good actors for the genre, and there’s actually some personal chemistry between the two (an earlier version of the script apparently hinted at a forbidden romance between these two men who live outside societal norms).

   But it’s not the acting, nor the script per se that makes this a rather dreary affair. It’s the fact that The Mechanic tries so hard, so very hard, to say something profound about what it must be like to be a hitman that it verges into self-parody. Bronson’s character, the titular mechanic, is a brooding, philosophical sort who lives alone in a giant Hollywood Hills home and who has a penchant for martial arts and seemingly little connections with other people, aside from a girlfriend portrayed by Bronson’s wife Jill Ireland. By trying too hard to make a statement, The Mechanic ends up saying very little.

DOUGLAS McLEISH – The Valentine Victim. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1969. Popular Library, paperback reprint, no date stated [1970?].

   While Lori Weston is at the office of the Ontario Provincial Police detachment in Farnham on Valentine’s Day reporting a possible molester as well as an aborted break-in of her home, her stepdaughter Aileen, readying herself for the Valentine’s dance, is shot six times by an exceptionally brutal murderer.

   Was the murderer the threatening figure her stepdaughters had seen, or did one daughter kill the other? Or was it possibly one of the step-daughters’ fiancés or a former boyfriend with monetary gain in mind? What is one to make of the astounding coincidence of the time of the murder, with Lori Weston provided a wonderful alibi by the police?

   While the Canadian setting isn’t particularly recognizable — the murder could have taken place anywhere in North America — that would be the only criticism I have of this novel. The investigation by Inspector John Rodericks, a fully realized character, is an excellent one. As both police procedural and fair-play novel, this one excels.

Bio-Bibliographic Notes:   Dougal McLeish, the pen name of Donald James Goodspeed (1919-1990), wrote one other mystery, that being The Traitor Game (Houghton, 1968) in which the Canadian prime minister is assassinated. Inspector Rodericks apparently does not appear. Goodspeed, a lieutenant-colonel in the Canadian Armed Forces, and Senior Historian in the Canadian Defence Force’s Historical section, also wrote several books on Canadian history.

Jonathan & Leigh were a male-female folksinging duo consisting of Jonathan Alden and Sandy Roepken. Third and Main was their only LP, released by Vanguard in 1967.

THE PHANTOM OF CRESTWOOD. RKO Radio Pictures, 1932. Ricardo Cortez, Karen Morley, Anita Louise, Pauline Frederick, H. B. Warner, Mary Duncan, Sam Hardy, Tom Douglas, Richard ‘Skeets’ Gallagher, Aileen Pringle. Director: J. Walter Ruben.

   There have been old “dark and stormy night” movies before and since, complete with spooky mansions with a group of assorted people trapped inside with an unknown killer, but Crestwood, I believe, is a benchmark for others to compare with, if not an out and out classic.

   This film has the added cachet of providing the solution to a series of radio programs that told the same story as dramatized here, but leaving the listeners to provide their own endings. There are plenty of suspects to choose from. The leading lady of the film is Jenny Wren, played by Karen Morley, beautiful and appropriately slinky. She is also a blackmailer, with the real goods on a number of gentlemen (married or about to be) with whom she has had brief but now profitable affairs, or so she hopes.

   She calls them all together, as well as their wives, to give them her demands. Planning on retiring from the gold digger business, she instead ends up dead. I don’t imagine that this will come as any surprise to anyone watching this film. Adding to the mystery, there are luminescent faces in the dark, passageways behind walls, plus plenty of thunder and lightning, a cliff at the edge of land behind the mansion, and of course at the appropriate time, the lights go out.

   Besides having plenty of suspects with obvious motives, there are those on hand with motives yet to come to light. Doing the detective work — and this is different — is Ricardo Cortez, a gangster who along with members of his gang knows full well they will be blamed for the killing if caught at the scene. (He is on hand to retrieve some letters in Jenny’s possession.)

   It’s difficult to go wrong in watching this type of movie, and when it’s done with a decent budget and some pizzazz, as this one is, it makes it a lot of fun to watch.

NICHOLAS BLAKE – The Beast Must Die. Harper, hardcover, 1938. US paperback editions include: Crestwood / Black Cat Detective Series #7, digest-sized, 1943; Dell D227, Great Mystery Library #15, 1958; Berkley F971, 1964; Perennial Library, 1978. First published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1938.

   British Poet Laureate (1968-72) and novelist Cecil Day Lewis, writing as Nicholas Blake, published a score of popular detective and suspense novels from 1935 to 1968, all but four of which feature an urbane amateur sleuth named Nigel Strangeways. For the most part, the Blake novels are fair-play deductive mysteries in the classic mold and are chock-full of literary references and involved digressions, which makes for rather slow pacing. But they are also full of well-drawn characters and unusual incidents, and offer a wide variety of settings and information on such diverse topics as sailing, academia, the British publishing industry, and the cold war.

   The Beast Must Die is considered by some to be Blake’s finest work and a crime-fiction classic. When the young son of mystery novelist Felix Cairnes (a.k.a. Felix Lane) is killed by a hit-and-run driver, Lane, who doted on the boy, vows to track down and kill the man responsible. A trail of clues leads him to a film star named Lena Lawson, who was a passenger in the death car, and finally to its driver, George Rafferty, the obnoxious part owner of a Gloucestershire garage.

   Lane insinuates himself into Rafferty’s household as Lena’s new lover, and makes preparations to exact his revenge via a sailing “accident.” But things don’t quite go as he (or the reader) anticipates. And when murder finally does strike, it does so in a wholly unexpected fashion.

   The plot is tricky and ingeniously constructed: the first third is told first-person in the form of Felix Lane’s diary; there is a brief middle section, called “Set Piece on a River,” which is done third-person from Lane’s point of view; and the last half is a straightforward, third-person narrative that introduces Nigel Strangeways (and his wife, Georgia, and Inspector Blount of Scotland Yard) and follows Strangeways as he unravels a tangled web of hatreds and unpleasantries. Blake builds the suspense nicely in the first half, makes good use of a subplot involving Lane’s affection for Rafferty’s own son, Phil, and even spices his narrative with a little sex — an unusual ingredient for mystery novels during the Golden Age.

   But The Beast Must Die also has its share of flaws. The manner in which Lane tracks down Rafferty — and the ease with which he is able to meet and seduce a popular actress seem both convenient and contrived; once Strangeways (who is something of a colorless and priggish sort, at least in this novel) arrives on the scene, the narrative becomes talky and slow, diluting suspense; a physical attack on Strangeways is poorly motivated; and the final revelations, intended as a stunning surprise, are neither stunning nor particularly surprising.

   This is a good novel, certainly, one worth reading — but it’s not a mystery classic.

   A film version of The Beast Must Die was produced in France in 1969 under the title This Man Must Die. Directed by Claude Chabrol, it is faithful to the novel except in one major (and curious) point: It excludes Nigel Strangeways completely and tells the tale as a straightforward thriller.

         ———
   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.

W. GLENN DUNCAN – Rafferty: Wrong Place, Wrong Time. Fawcett Gold Medal, paperback original; 1st printing, July 1989.

   This is the fourth of six recorded adventures of a Dallas-based PI named Rafferty, all published by Gold Medal in the late 80s and early 90s. There is some similarity in the stories to another PI based in Boston in that he is a rather macho guy, has a steady girl friend with whom he gets along very well, including lots of friendly banter, and a buddy named Cowboy (with all that that implies) whom he calls on whenever he gets himself into a jam and needs help.

   It is also a book that is fun to read for most of its way — until, that is, you start getting the “is that all there is?” feeling about two-thirds of the way through. Both of the cases Rafferty is working on turn out to be very light ones, even though the first results in a case of murder almost immediately: a guy posing as a bounty hunter hires Rafferty to distract his intended victim, and succeeds.

   The second, that of an elderly gentleman being harassed by neighbor kids, is amusing but nothing more, even if the older man, who starts out being a devout curmudgeon, turns out to have had a life well worth living, much to Rafferty’s pleasure.

   I mentioned earlier the existence of another PI working the Boston area, and the similarities between the two sets of characters. Echoes of the other series with this one are obvious, but to tell you the truth, I think I heard Robert Urich’s voice in the first person commentary than I did the other fellow’s. Not that that’s entirely a bad thing, you understand, but your mileage may vary.

       The Rafferty series —

1. Rafferty’s Rules (1987)
2. Last Seen Alive (1987)
3. Poor Dead Cricket (1988)
4. Wrong Place, Wrong Time (1989)
5. Cannon’s Mouth (1990)
6. Fatal Sisters (1990)