BILL CRIDER ‘Who Killed Cock Rogers?” Sheriff Dan Rhodes. First published in The Mysterious West, edited by Tony Hillerman (HarperCollins, 1994). Collected in The Blacklin County Files (Kindle edition, 2012).
Here are the first two paragraphs that slide us right into the story with infinite ease:
Mrs. Janelle Tabor, an attractive widow in her early forties, was spattered with cow manure. It was green, mostly, and it didn’t go well wit her yellow blouse. It didn’t smell good, either.
“And it’s all your fault, Sheriff Rhodes!” she said. wagging her finger in his face.
And here are the last three paragraphs, as the author winds up his tale:
“Too bad for ever’body,” Hack said. “Hard to believe all this was caused by a truckful of cows.”
“It wasn’t the cows,” Rhodes aid, “It was the manure.”
Hack chuckled. “Ain’t it always?” he said.
In between is a tale of murder, that of a radio host whose technique of choice was to boost his ratings by any controversial means he could. Bill’s way with a story stands out, as always: a hint of dry downhome Texas humor (well, more often than not, more than a hint) along with a serious crime to be solved, one that both he and Dan Rhodes take very seriously. This story is no exception.
COLLIER YOUNG – The Todd Dossier. Delacorte, hardcover, 1969. Dell, paperback, 1970.
The Todd Dossier by “Collier Young†— actually a pseudonym of Robert Bloch — is for the most part a fairly gripping and well-constructed medical mystery about a shady heart transplant and it’s slow unraveling… right up to the end, when Bloch throws the story away.
Having set up an ingenious crime and some very nasty bad guys, then whipped up a good amount of suspense over the fate of his doctor-detective, he decided for some reason to resolve it with a facile plot device from nowhere that goes unconvincingly against the grain of his characters.
Most of the time I was reading this, I wondered why Bloch put a pen name on it, but when I finished, it occurred to me if I’d written an ending like that I probably wouldn’t give my right name either.
Dossierdoes offer, though an insightful look back to another time, one that I hadn’t thought quite so distant. Fifty years ago, when this was written, heart transplants had just crossed the line from Sci-Fi to reality. It was the time of the Jarvic Heart, Baboon hearts in babies, and other faltering steps toward what is today routine surgery.
Bloch’s awe — expressed by his characters — about the dawn of a new biology, is as quaint in its way as the speeches in old war movies (Pick a war — any war) about the New and Better World that will surely follow once we kill these bastards. We also get an actual plot point about a couple whose marital bliss is threatened because the husband feels emasculated by his wife’s job — was this really just fifty years ago?
As I say, Todd Dossier is mostly taut and readable. I just never expected anything so antiquated “by the Author of Psycho.â€
REX BURNS “Dust Devil.” “Snake” Garrick #1. First published in The Mysterious West, edited by Tony Hillerman (HarperCollins, 1994). No record found of a later printing.
And likewise no record found of a subsequent appearance of Boulder-based PI “Snake” Garrick. The story is too short to get more than a general sense of who he is as a man, save for the description provided by his client in this story. She says to him:
“I thought private detectives were supposed to be big and tough. You don’t look no wider than a fence post. Not much taller, either.”
Snake may have been a lightweight in her eyes, but he’s smart enough to solve the case he agrees to take on in only eighteen pages. It seems as though the woman’s brother sold a horse named Devil Dust to a fellow rancher the day before he died in an auto accident. The woman cannot now find any trace of the transaction in the dead man’s papers, but the man who has now claimed the horse has a signed invoice for it.
The detective story is a minor one, but it’s well made up for by the the several picturesque passages Burns uses to describe the largely untrammeled grassland area in which the smallish city-town of Boulder. Colorado, is located. I’d like to read more about the cases Snake Garrick has worked on, but alas, this one’s all there is and probably will be.
THE LAST HIT MAN. Direct to video, 2008. Joe Mantegna, Elizabeth Whitmere, Romano Orzari, Michael Majeski, Victoria Snow. Written and directed by Christopher Warre Smets.
As I’m sure you could easily tell from the title without my telling you, The Last Hit Man is rated “R” for lots of gun-related violence, but if that isn’tanything that would stop you, if the movie is otherwise well done, here’s a movie I can recommend to you, and highly at that.
Joe Mantegna is perfectly cast as Harry Tremayne, the titular hit man, a fellow getting up in years after a long career of never failing on an assignment. Until, that is, he does. Not only does he begin to be filled with self doubt — is his body stating to fail him? — he realizes that the person who hired him is going to start wondering if it’s possible Harry has changed sides.
So Harry is ready when someone else comes gunning for him. Someone who fails. And whom Harry then hires to .. Well, I probably shouldn’t tell you, but it’s a neat twist (and even with as little of a hint that I can give you, you probably already know what I’m not telling you).
That’s the outer story. What I haven’t told you yet is that Harry has a partner. His young twenty-something daughter, Racquel, who is his electronics expert as well as his getaway driver. And more: she has a boy friend, an earnest young man who has no idea what the family business is that he just might be marrying into.
There is a lot of humor in this story, but it’s definitely understated — the kind that makes you smile rather than laugh out loud — and so you should definitely not take what I say to mean that The Last Hit Man is a comedy. It is not. It is rather a personal and down-to-earth family drama, and there is more to the story that I am definitely not telling you, and this time I mean it.
—
[Added later.] I was so impressed by Joe Mantegna’s performance in this film, I went looking for his resume. I knew he’d taken over for Robert Urich in two or three made-for-TV Spenser movies, and he was in several very good David Mamet films, but of his other work, not much else. It turns out that he’s had a substantial role in most of the fifteen year run that Criminal Minds recently closed up shop on.
Fifteen years? I’ve never watched it. Barely heard of it. Thought of it as a psychopath and/or serial killer of week kind of show. Psychopaths and/or serial killers don’t interest me. Is/was it more that? It would it seem to have to have been, for a TV series to be on that long.
STAGECOACH TO DANCERS’ ROCK. Universal Pictures. 1962. Warren Stevens, Martin Landau, Jody Lawrance, Don Wilbanks, Del Moore, Bob Anderson. Screenplay: Kenneth Darling , based on his own story (his only film credit). Director: Earl Bellamy.
Truth be told, I wasn’t expecting much from Stagecoach to Dancers’ Rock. Especially once the opening credits began rolling, along with a ridiculously outdated (even for 1962) theme song that basically explains the whole plot. Also, the movie starts off like any other somewhat lower budget Western of the time period. There’s a ragtag group of travelers heading into Apache territory. And among them, there’s Dade Coleman (Martin Landau), an outlaw recently released from jail.
The first twenty minutes or so are nothing you haven’t seen time and again. But things begin to get interesting when it turns out that one of the passengers – a Chinese woman on her way to San Francisco – may have smallpox. The myriad ways in which the characters react to that development could have carried the whole film, had the screenwriter wanted it to.
But instead, the film shifts into a half-baked subplot in which one of the stagecoach’s passengers named Jess Dollard (Warren Stevens) teams up with a gunman to rob the very coach he is riding. Why he does this and what lead him to this decision is never fleshed out. In fact, by the end of the movie, it’s almost all forgotten.
So why did I enjoy the second half of this movie so much? Martin Landau. That’s why. Stagecoach to Dancers’ Rock was one of his earliest screen roles. And he certainly was a much bigger presence in this production than he was in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959).
Here, he takes on the role of a psychotic Western outlaw with glee and with vigor. He smiles that mad smile he was capable of. His character quotes aphorisms and cackles with fiendish delight as succumbs to madness under the glare of the unforgiving hot desert sun.
You may never have heard of Dade Coleman as an infamous Western villain. But with Landau’s scenery-chewing performance, his name should be up there in the pantheon of villains who stand out from the pack.
Most of this rather well done mystery movie takes place in an “old dark house,” British style. Someone is killing off the members of a financial pact in which those still alive at the appointed date and time will share in each others’ fortunes over the length of the pact.
The local inspector (Basil Sydney) thinks he can handle the case without having to call Scotland Yard in, but can he handle the bubbling interference of a young female reporter (Judy Gunn) who always seems to be one step ahead of him? She’s as much of a challenge as solving the murders is.
Long time readers of detective stories will not be challenged all that much by the plot, but it’s still a lot of fun to see it played out as capably as it is here. And fans of one Alistair Sim will not want to miss him in this, his very first film. He plays the inspector’s sergeant and second-in-command on the case, a semi-comic role that doesn’t depend on him being a total nincompoop, either, as those in the same position in many US films of the same variety oh so often turn out to be.
The Inspector Lynley Mysteries. BBC/PBS, 12 March 2001 (Season 1, episode 1, with Nathaniel Parker & Sharon Small).
In recent years British mysteries seem to have evolved into books which everybody in them is so afflicted with such character flaws that the mysteries in them are overpowered. While George is not British, she’s got the same dour taste in her writing that it is as if she were.
Or in other words, even in this, her first book, she’s got it down pat. Investigating a hideous crime in northern England are aristocratic Insp. Lynley, the golden boy of Scotland Yard, and Sgt. Barbara Havers, plain and unattractive (to put it mildly). If you like P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, here’s another.
–Reprinted from Mystery*File #13, June 1989 (slightly revised).
NEWTON’S LAW “External Forces.” Australia, ABC TV. 60 minutes. 09 February 2017. Claudia Karvan (Josephine Newton), Toby Schmitz, Brett Tucker, Georgina Naidu, Sean Keenan. Original concept by Deb Cox and Fiona Eagger. Director: Jennifer Leacey.
Another country (Dicte, Denmark, and The Coroner, UK), and another divorced woman trying to make a go of it on her own in her chosen profession, all the while facing the challenges bringing up a teen-aged daughter. The one small difference this time is that the daughter is not into boy friends, but this may be something yet to come.
Claudia Karvan, a well-known Australian actress, plays Josephine Newton, a neighborhood solicitor who is forced to go back to back to work for a large prestigious law firm, much against her wishes. It seems that her storefront office was bombed out by a former and thoroughly disgruntled client she unsuccessfully defended on arson charges.
Her first case is kind of a set up one. She’s to defend the son of a client who is accused of pushing one of the partners of the firm off the top of their office building. Complicating matters is an eye witness, a nanny who saw the incident through the window of an apartment building across the way.
It is up to Jane to uncover what was in the dead man’s life that may have contributed to his death, if indeed something is there. Which she does with all of the good humor and charm that a woman (and actress) in her mid-40s can have. The mystery and detective work are both good too. The series lasted only eight episodes, but the basis of this first one, I won’t binge, but I will see if I can’t watch all of them in short order.
JONATHAN GASH – The Judas Pair. Lovejoy #1. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1977. Dell (Scene of the Crime #30), US, paperback, 1981. Published earlier in the UK by Collins Crime Club, hardcover., 1977. TV Adaptation: “The Judas Pair.” Lovejoy, BBC, UK, 07 Feb 1986 (season 1, episode 5) starring Ian McShane).
The Judas pair in is the thirteenth pair of flintlock dueling pistols made by a master craftsman named Durs. Their existence is purely a legend, or so believes Lovejoy, noted antiques dealer, until he’s commissioned to locate them by the brother of the man killed by one.
Those also afflicted by the mania known as collecting will best understand the killer’s motive and will watch with fascination as Lovejoy explains the world of antiques while methodically turning it upside down. The style is determinedly high-key, too much so for the long haul, and when the mood abruptly becomes serious, it leads to a melodramatic ending more notable for the many gaps in its wake.
–Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 2, No. 3, May 1978.
THE TALL T (AND OTHER WESTERN ADVENTURES) Avon #775, 1957, featuring: “The Tall T†(originally “The Captivesâ€) by Elmore Leonard, 1955; “The Man from Gant’s Place†by Steve Frazee, 1951; “The Twilighters†by Noel M Loomis, 1954.
THE TALL T. Columbia, 1957. Randolph Scott, Maureen O’Sullivan, Richard Boone, Henry Silva, Arthur Hunnicutt, Skip Homeier, and John Hubbard. Screenoplay by Burt Kennedy from the story by Elmore Leonard. Directed by Budd Boetticher.
Whathehell does that title mean?
But leave that be for now. Perhaps it will convey the quality of the book if I say that the Elmore Leonard story, while quite good, is the least of the three here.
Leonard’s tale is a tight-knit saga of a hold-up-turned-kidnapping, with Rancher Pat Brennan reluctantly along for the ride as three killers hold heiress Doretta Mims for ransom and send her husband — Willard Mims, the name says it all — to make arrangements. The characters are well defined, the action deftly done, but it all seems a bit too terse, as if there were a novel inside this story, yearning to break out.
I will add though that I saw the film before reading the book, and my judgement may be more critically impaired than usual. More on this anon. For now I’ll just say, as if it needed saying, that Elmore Leonard knew how to write action and move a story fast without seeming rushed.
And the book rounds off with one of the grimmest western stories I’ve ever read: “The Twilighters,†a narrative of dishonor among thieves filled with shocking brutality. Tough, scary and unforgettable.
I will add that the book is graced with a gaudy cover and loads of shots from the film, and conclude that it’s an attractive package indeed, and one worth seeking out.
***
As for the movie made from it, this is a minority opinion, but I’ve always felt that the first twenty minutes were a waste of film, and watching them was a wanton squandering of my precious youth. But the film proper truly takes off when the three bad guys ooze out of the darkened swing station, and from there on it attains a high level of tension and feeling until (SPOILER ALERT!) Randolph Scott flushes them back into the darkness from whence they oozed at film’s end.
I say “tension†because The Tall T reels at the edge of violence like a drunk at a wedding, with Henry Silva as a killer who enjoys his work entirely too much, Skip Homeier as an outlaw too dumb to be honest, and Richard Boone as their leader, who doesn’t really want to kill Scott but knows he will have to do it in the end.
All four actors seem so at home in their parts that one doesn’t even notice them acting, and Maureen O’Sullivan matches them as the homely prize they must fight over. Arthur Hunnicutt tosses off another of his pitch-perfect performances as himself, and even John Hubbard, the forgettable leading man of The Mummy’s Tomb, has moments of rare and well-done intensity.
Best of all, writer Burt Kennedy fleshes out the empty spaces in Elmore Leonard’s story with genuine sensitivity. When Boone and Scott talk quietly about ranching and outlawry, they’re really talking about life itself and why they ended up on opposite sides of it. Boone in particular seems trapped in his role no less than his captives, and his confabs with Scott are as much a struggle for escape as Scott will undertake when the chips go flying.
The Tall T is, in short, what poets and philosophers call “a must-see†and though I have yet to figure out what the title means, it’s a film I can watch again and again with pleasure.
Devoted to mystery and detective fiction — the books, the films, the authors, and those who read, watch, collect and make annotated lists of them. All uncredited posts are by me, Steve Lewis.
The Inspector Lynley Mysteries. BBC/PBS, 12 March 2001 (Season 1, episode 1, with Nathaniel Parker & Sharon Small).
