CHARLES WILLIAMS – The Wrong Venus. New American Library, hardcover, 1966. Signet Signet T4158, paperback, 1970. Perennial Library, paperback, 1983. Film: Universal, 1967, as Don’t Just Stand There! (starring Mary Tyler Moore & Robert Wagner).

   Boarding a commuter from Geneva to London, Lawrence Colby, freelance fixer, is libidinally drawn to the seat next to leggy Martine Randall, a smoother operator than he.

   Slapstick hijinks ensue as hundreds of Colby’s smuggled self-winding Swiss watches, concealed in his multipocketed sweater, spontaneously self-wind via turbulence and start ticking like timebombs and tinkling their alarms.

   She helps him out of the jam, neutralizing the watch mechanisms by dipping them in a pool of crème de menthe clogged in the airplane bathroom basin.

   In exchange, he agrees to help her with a problem of her own.

   The world’s best-selling romance writer has finally had sex. Now she can’t write romance novels anymore. She thinks they’re silly.

   Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Miss Romance, her agent has embezzled her money and was counting on the big advance on the next novel to cover it up. So now he needs a ghost writer to write it.

   He’s hired a retired 30’s hardboiled pulpster, who’s completed the manuscript. But the sex writing is too terse for the romance spinster set. So a second ghostwriter has come in to fix it. A blonde bombshell PR pro who has disappears right before she finishes the edits.

   Bringing back the bombshell ain’t easy, as she’s kidnapped, chased by the mob, and is constitutionally anarchic, nonchalant, and impossible to control.

   The novel approaches postmodern territory when Charles Williams lay bare the writing process whereby the hardboiled manuscript is massaged into Harlequin romance before the reader’s very eyes.

   Very entertaining caper novel. Has anyone seen the movie?

ROBERT LESLIE BELLEM “Diamonds of Death.” Dan Turner #2. Published in Spicy Detective Stories, July 1934. Reprinted in Hollywood Detective, August 1950, and in The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg (Carrol & Graf, 1988).

   I think that the best way to review a Dan Turner story may also be the easiest. It could even reflect the only reason for anyone to read a Dan Turner story. Simply quote passages from the story, taken here and there at random. Like this:

   Me again. I submit to you that prose like this is the work of genius.

OPERATION DIPLOMAT. Nettlefold Films, UK, 1953. Guy Rolfe, Lisa Daniely, Patricia Dainton, Sydney Tafler, Ballard Berkeley. Story by Francis Durbridge. Director: John Guillermin.

   Surgeon Mark Fenton (Guy Rolfe) is leaving St. Matthew’s Hospital in London one evening when an ambulance pulls up and a nurse jumps out. Urgently, she tells him that there is a patient on board who needs his help, yet when he steps inside there is only an armed man (Sydney Tafler).

   Fenton is escorted to a secluded house where he is instructed to operate on an unknown male with the assistance of a disgraced doctor named Schröder (Anton Diffring) and a woman (Lisa Daniely) whose dark eyes peek bewitchingly over a surgical mask. The patient is half-conscious at first and mutters deliriously about a “golden valley”.  Afterwards, Fenton’s drink is spiked and he later awakes on a park bench.

   Determined to forget the incident, he returns to the hospital, where he encounters a woman with the same distinct eyes as the one who worked alongside him the night before. He demands she visit him at his flat that evening – yet she doesn’t turn up. Instead, within minutes of arriving home, he receives two other, separate visitors: Colonel Wyman of the Foreign Office (Eric Berry), who asks about Schröder, and then Schröder himself.

   Apparently, the patient was Sir Oliver Peters, the chairman of the United Western Defence Committee, known as “the man who knows all the secrets”. A bullet makes things even more alarming, yet Inspector Austin of Scotland Yard (Ballard Berkeley) is suspicious of Fenton and his tale of abduction, death, and disappearing diplomats, forcing the surgeon to mount his own investigation.

   The only clues are “the golden valley” and a brand of cigarettes which repeatedly appear, yet with the aid of colleague Sister Rogers (Patricia Dainton), Fenton follows a treacherous trail to the kidnapped Sir Oliver, all the while wondering just who could be behind such a sinister, international scheme…

   One of several British television serials of the 1950s to be remade as a feature, Operation Diplomat was originally penned by Francis Durbridge, the popular and prolific thriller writer best known for the Paul Temple radio series. The character of Mark Fenton had already appeared in another such effort, The Broken Horseshoe, in which Robert Beatty had played the part for cinemas.

   Here, the tall, tanned and almost skeletally gaunt Guy Rolfe leads, and he makes for a likeable, though somewhat saturnine, amateur sleuth trying desperately to keep track of events. The audience will sympathise, as the mystery in this one is particularly tangled. A couple of things could have been clarified, but all the information is mostly present (or at least can be intuited).

   The pace is the selling point, with compelling developments occurring every ten minutes or so, as may be expected from something adapted from a serial – particularly one from Durbridge, whose tried-and-tested tropes appear again in an every-man hero, a cryptic word clue, casual and quite accidental conversations which turn out to be crucial, and a culprit apparently picked at random from an unwieldy stock of suspects.

   The seventy minutes not only go by swiftly but the cast make it even better. Berkeley, later to become familiar to British audiences as the muddle-minded Major in John Cleese’s legendary sitcom Fawlty Towers, is on fine avuncular form as the inspector, while the ever-reliable Sydney Tafler is always a pleasure to see, and professional-foreigner Anton Diffring is briefly afforded something other than a sinister bad guy role. Look out, too, for Desmond Llewelyn (Q in the Bond films) as a silent extra at the end.

   Despite final dialogue teasing further adventures with the intrepid Mr Fenton, there was to be no other sequel. Durbridge wouldn’t create another recurring character until giving us TV’s Tim Frazer the following decade. A pity, as more fast-paced adventures would have been just what the doctor ordered.

Rating: ****

FREDERICK NEBEL “Hell’s Pay Check.” Cardigan. Novelette. Published in Dime Detective Magazine, December 1931. Reprinted in Hard-Boiled Detectives, edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz and Martin H. Greenberg (Gramercy, 1992). Collected in The Complete Casebook of Cardigan. Volume 1: 1931-1932. Altus Press, February 2012).

   From the second paragraph in this story, we learn that Cardigan is “a big, shaggy-headed man with a burry outdoor look,” getting off a train wearing “a wrinkled topcoat” and “a faded fedora that had seen better days.” He’s in Indianapolis on a case, but his home office, that of the Cosmos Detective Agency, is in New York. He comes with a reputation that the local cops are aware of, but it also helps to be working with an agency that has some clout. Local cops are not at all leery about pushing around independent operators.

   His job in “Hell’s Pay Check” is to help the mayor retrieve a check that he paid to a “notorious woman” on behalf of his son, a check that she didn’t cash at a bank; she seems to have gotten paid by another party who has kept the check. If it gets into the wrong hands, the mayor’s career is over.

   The story begins with a bang, and never stops moving. He’s picked up at the railroad station, but when he gets into the mayor’s car, he quickly realizes that the chauffeur is a phoney. A subsequent car chase through the back streets of the city leaves the driver dead, shot to death by his fellow gang members, who think he has turned on them.

   If you’re looking for a hard-boiled detective at work, you need not go much farther than any of Cardigan’s cases, and this is a prime example. He has a nose for trouble, and likewise trouble is never very far behind him. Nebel’s prose has a ferocity and drive to it that simply can’t be matched. Luckily for us,  all of his cases have now been published in total by Altus Press (now Steeger Books) in four thick handsome volumes.

AMANDA CROSS – In the Last Analysis. Macmillan, hardcover, 1964. Avon, paperback, 1966. Fawcett, paperback, 2001.

   Amanda Cross is a pseudonym of Carolyn Heilbrun, a professor of English at Columbia University, and the play on words in the title of this novel is just what a reader might expect from one in that academic field. In the Last Analysis refers both to the analysis of a murder and to the fact that the murder was committed on a psychiatrist’s couch.

   Cross’s heroine, Kate Fansler, is also an English professor, and these popular books have fostered an interest in what might be considered a subgenre: the academic mystery. Words are indeed important to the characters in the Fansler books:

   They consider their words; they choose them with care; they admire the skill of other speakers; they are witty; they toss in quotations from a variety of authors. Not only Kate but other characters have a quoting familiarity with literature, and these quotes and their sources can be clues. For anyone who enjoys literature and finds pleasure in the exquisite tum of phrase, the Fansler series is a treat.

   Kate Fansler is described as a young woman, but she has the assurance of a more mature individual. She is the only daughter of an old New York family, in which her much older brothers did the “respectable” thing and went into business while Kate — black-sheepishly  — opted for academia. In an even more rebellious manner, Kate has also opted for solving murders.

   In In the Last Analysis, Kate refers a young woman student to psychoanalyst Emanuel Bauer, who was once Kate’s lover before his marriage. The student is killed — on Bauer’s couch, in his soundproof consultation room. As the doctor’s office is in his home, not only he but also his family are suspect. As — for various reasons — is Kate.

   Her investigation includes forays into the private lives of the Bauer and Fansler families (members of the latter seem to be surrounded by a lot of heavy mahogany furniture), as wen as less upstanding members of the academic establishment.

   Kate’s investigation — and its tidy solution — is on a par with the others in this extremely literate series, which includes The James Joyce Murder (1967), Poetic Justice ( 1970), and The Question of Max (1976).

     ———
   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.

THE MEN FROM SHILOH. “The West vs. Colonel MacKenzie.” NBC, 16 September 1970. (Season 9, Episode 1, of The Virginian). Stewart Granger (Colonel Alan MacKenzie), Doug McClure (Trampas), James Drury (The Virginian), Lee Majors (screen credit only). Guest Cast: Elizabeth Ashley, Martha Hyer, Don DeFore, John Larch. Directors: Murray Golden & Jerry Hopper. Currently streaming on the Starz channel.

   When the TV series The Virginian began its ninth series, some changes were made, starting with the title. The new owner of the Shiloh ranch also showed up: Alan MacKenzie (Stewart Granger), a British army colonel, along with his former aide-de-camp, now a combination valet and butler. As the new owner, the intent was to give the show a new perspective, that of someone unfamiliar to the West, someone who must learn its new ways and how things are done. On the job training!

   When he arrives, both Trampas and the Virginian are ready to step aside, but by the end of this first episode, they have agreed to stay. Roy Tate, a new regular to be played by Lee Majors, does not yet appear.

   Col. MacKenzie does not have long to wait to get his first crisis under his belt, that of the hanging of a suspected rustler by a gang of vigilantes. His sister claims he was innocent, and MacKenzie is inclined to agree with her. This simple act puts him in direct opposition to the sheriff and the local Cattleman’s Association. Nothing like getting off on the wrong foot with the people in power in the country you’ve just moved into.

   Given the 90-minute format the series always had, there’s plenty of time to flesh out the story without feeling that there was padding to waste, at least this time around. While I found nothing amiss in having an Englishman in charge of the ranch, I did find Col. MacKenzie a little too kind and good to be true. But kindness and goodness sometimes win out, and not very surprisingly, they certainly do here.

HELEN McCLOY – Through a Glass, Darkly. Basil Willing #8. Random House, hardcover, 1950. Dell #519, paperback, mapback edition, [1951]. Dell, paperback, date?

   This is  the eighth novel featuring psychiatrist-detective Dr. Basil Willing, recently returned from Japan after completing his military service. Willing is alerted by his soon-to-be fiancée and wife Gisela von Hohenems to the strange happenings surrounding Faustina Crayle at Brereton, a school for girls where they are both teachers — Gisela in German and Faustina in Art.

   It would appear that Faustina has been seen bilocating more than once. When she is finally released from her teaching contract, Willing decides to investigate these “supernatural” appearances which he is convinced have. their roots in reality.

   He soon learns that Faustina had been discharged from her first teaching position for the same reason. Further probing suggests that it  is  not just Faustina’s reputation that someone is out to destroy, and there are two deaths  before a final confrontation.

   This is probably the best use of the Doppelganger theme since Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Image in the Mirror. The title taken from Cor1nthians is very cleverly used here, but its significance does not become clear until the denouement.

   The novel is an expansion of Miss McCloy’s 1948 short story of the same name which appeared in the September issue of EQMM.

MARCO PAGE – Fast Company. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1938. Pocket Books #222, paperback, 1943. Film: MGM, 1938, with Melvyn Douglas & Florence Rice as Joel & Garda Sloane.

   Dealers in rare books and manuscripts can be as crooked as anyone else; that’s the lesson Marco Page teaches. Joel Glass, book dealer himself, turns detective to find the murderer of a dealer who is as nasty a piece of work as anyone I’ve known killed off lately in books.

   A young man who recently got out of prison after serving a term for stealing some outstanding rarities from the dead man is the obvious suspect. He knows that he was framed. And Mr. Glass is sure that he was.

   The books have disappeared. Glass thinks the dead dealer had them stashed away some place. Since there are other possible murderers with a variety of motives, there is plenty of action. The solution is satisfying, but I’d hate to think that any of the book dealers I know are at all like the ones in this book.

CARROLL JOHN DALY “Not My Corpse.” Race Williams. Novella. First published in Thrilling Detective, June 1948. (Cover by Rudolph Belarski.) Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg (Carrol & Graf, 1988).

   Race Williams had a long career in the pulp magazines, ranging in time from 1923 to 1955, and he showed up in a few book-length adventures as well. He was a tough guy with both his fists and his guns, and he wasn’t afraid to show it. If Mickey Spillane didn’t read Race Williams’ adventures before coming up with the idea for Mike Hammer, I’d be awfully surprised.

   In his heyday, all through the 1920s and early 1930s, Carroll John Daly was one of the hottest PI writers around. By the time “Not My Corpse” appeared, in June 1948 issue of one of the lesser detective pulp magazines, his luster had faded considerably, and Race Williams’ antics had tamed down considerably – but not completely, and it’s still a cracking good yarn.

   After a series of young girls have been tortured and killed, Race decides that the common factor connecting them is that they inadvertently saw something they shouldn’t, and that the killer is tracking them down, one by one, going from one to the next. A solid tip suggests that one more girl is going to be the next victim, and Race is determined to stop him.

   There are flashes of good writing in this tale, with memorable turns of phrasing, and Race is his usual cocky, confidant self, which is all to the good. The plot is a little rickety, though, and there’s too much that’s never hinted at as to the killer’s actual motive; it takes a flood of details on his dying bed before the whole story is told.

   A mixed bag, in other words, but while Carroll John Daly is often given a bad rap today as a lousy writer, he wasn’t.