JAMES A. LAWSON “Hard Guy.” Short story. “Hard Guy” Dallas Duane #1. First published in Spicy Western Stories, March 1937. Collected in Dying Comes Hard (Black Dog Books, softcover, 2015) under the author’s real name, James P. Olsen. Introduction by James Reasoner.

   â€œHard Guy” Dallas Duane was an oil range troubleshooter in the 1930s, a fact that fully qualifies him as a PI. His adventures took him all over Oklahoma and Texas, often working undercover. And under the covers, too, which you will have already recognized for yourself if you saw that this first one was published in Spicy Western, a pulp magazine which took its title very very seriously.

   This first of 20 adventures has Hard Guy tracking down the killer of the local county attorney, all the while beating himself up for being tricked into being in the arms of very friendly saloon singer by the name of Nancy. Then follows ten pages of non-stop action, punctuated by the stops to wonder over the pulchritudinous delights of both Nancy and another girl named Kate, both of whom look very good, even with their clothes off, and even while less frequently with them on.

   Great literature this is not, as a wise man once told me, but if that wise man never read this story, I’m one up on him. I just did! And note this: the Black Dog collection collects all twenty of Hard Guy’s recorded adventures.

ANNE MORICE – Scared to Death. Tessa Chrichton #11. Macmillan, UK, hardcover, 1977. St. Martin’s, US, 1978. Detective Book Club 3-in-1 edition, hardcover. Bantam, US, paperback, 1986.

   All but two of Anne Morice’s 25 mystery novels featured actress-amateur sleuth Tessa Chrichton and were strictly in the Golden Age of Detection traditions, albeit in solid contemporary (1970s-80s) surroundings. (You can find out a lot more about her on Curtis Evans’ blog here. He has been writing about her quite extensively lately.)

   Spurred by his reviews of her books, Scared to Death was the easiest for me to find. It was one of the three books in the Detective Book Club edition on the top of the bookshelf next to me as I type this. (You cannot make up coincidences such as this.) Unfortunately, let me put it this way, maybe I should have started with another one.

   This one begins as a elderly, eccentric, rich and quite controlling acquaintance of Tessa becomes strangely haunted by a doppelgänger of herself wherever she goes, and each time she sees her, her health takes another turn for the worst. No one else manages to see this double, so it is passed off as a curious fantasy on her part. Until, that is, she is completely bedridden and dies.

   No one thinks more of it but Tessa, whose inquisitive nature wants to know more. The police do not take part in any of her secret undercover investigation, which involves a boatload of relatives and close friends, a will that there may or may be the current one, and a fictionalized diary the dead woman was in the process of writing.

   There are a number of witty lines in the telling, but there aren’t enough of them to make up for the fact that the tale just isn’t all that interesting, nor are any of the possible suspects. The story goes from slow to slower and then even slower.

   Morice’s way of hiding clues is to hide them in a disorienting mix of clouds and confusion, which is not Agatha Christie’s usual method of operation: which is to leave right out in the open and dare you to spot them, which I almost never have. Even a table that matched up names in the diary with their real-life counterparts did nothing to brighten up Tessa’s explanation of how she solved the case.

   The end may prove worthy of the journey, but overall quite the disappointment, then. Your opinion may vary.

GOODBYE PARADISE. Australia, 1982. Ray Barrett, Robyn Nevin, Guy Doleman, Lex Marinos, Paul Chubb, Janet Scrivener, and Carole Skinner. Written by Bob Ellis and Denny Lawrence. Directed by Carl Schultz. Released on DVD in Australia (Region 0.)

   Okay, drop what you’re doing, put down your book, stop watching whatever’s on TV and go out and find this. Watch it. Then watch it again. It’s that good.

   Ray Barrett (Australia’s Pat O’Brien) stars as a boozy ex-cop-turned-writer, on the verge of a major exposé when his book contract is pulled out from under him under pressure from above. Minutes later he’s summoned to the estate of an old friend, now a senator, who wants him to chase after his runaway daughter.

   What follows is a gaudy Technicolor echo of THE BIG SLEEP, THE GLASS KEY, FAREWELL MY LOVELY and DOUBLE INDEMNITY, with touches of BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN tossed in. And it works. Beautifully. Schultz’s graceful camera work is backed up by Ellis’ and Lawrence’s Chandleresque voice-over narration, read by Barrett with a wry shrug in his voice:

   Even better is the sense of feeling Schultz and his actors evoke. When Barrett meets up with an old friend or an ex-lover (as he does about every ten minutes) one gets the impression that they really care for each other, and the effect is to draw us even closer to the character and his goofball style.

   Schultz & co even extend this to the bad guys. Barrett finds an old buddy getting rich as a Hefner-style guru, bullshitting teenagers for a living, and the look he gives his old friend speaks a mega-series. Third-billed Guy Doleman turns up about two-thirds of the way through as a punctilious military type, and when his ramrod spine bends for a moment in reminiscence, the character achieves dimensions that make his later misdeeds somehow even more depraved.

   Throw in an icy doctor-for-hire, a few greedy politicians and brutal cops, some young space-cadets and a tour-guide pornographer and you have a cast as diverse and exotic as a Russian novel.

   And let me spoil one big surprise here. No, I’m not going to throw in a (SPOILER ALERT!) because this is too good not to share. There’s a moment here where a helpful suspect tells Barrett to come back tomorrow for a vital piece of evidence. And when Barrett does come back tomorrow, the helpful suspect is STILL ALIVE!

   This is ground-breaking!

TUCKER COE – Don’t Lie to Me. Mitch Tobin #5. Random House, hardcover, 1972. Charter, paperback, [date?]. Five Star, hardcover, 2001.

   “Tucker Coe” is one of several pseudonyms used by Donald E. Westlake. And Mitchell Tobin, the narrator of Don’t Lie to Me and of four other novels published under the Coe name, is in many ways Westlake’s most fascinating creation.

   Tobin is an ex-New York City cop who was thrown off the force in disgrace when his partner was shot down while covering for him: Tobin at the time was in bed with a woman named Linda Campbell, another man’s wife. Unable to reconcile his guilt, Tobin has withdrawn to the point where little matters in his life except the high wall he is building in the back yard of his Queens home – a continuing project that symbolizes his self-imposed prison and isolation. His forgiving wife Kate and his teen-age son are unable to penetrate those internal walls: no one can, it seems.

   Occasionally, however, someone from his past or his present manages to persuade him to do this or that “simple” job, thus creating circumstances which force Tobin to utilize his detective’s training. The combined result of these cases, as critic Francis M. Nevins has noted, is that Tobin “builds up a store of therapeutic experiences from which he slowly comes to realize that he is not unique in his isolation and guilt, and slowly begins to accept himself and return to the real world.”

   Don’t Lie to Me is the last of the five Tobin novels, the final stage of his mental rehabilitation. He has been given a private investigator’s license and is working as a night watchman in Manhattan’s Museum of American Graphic Art, and before long Linda Campbell, his former lover, about whom he has ambivalent feelings, reappears in his life. Tobin then discovers the naked body of an unidentified murder victim in one of the museum rooms. Further complications include pressure from hostile cops and from a group of small-time hoodlums with a grudge against Tobin.

   Against his will, he is forced to pursue his own investigation into the murder and eventually to reconcile his feeling, toward Linda Campbell – and toward himself. The ending is violent, powerful, ironic, and appropriate.

   The other four Tobin novels are Kinds of Love. Kinds of Death (1966), Murder Among Children (1968), Wax Apple (1970), and A Jade in Aries (1971). It is tempting to say that more Tobin novels would have been welcome, but this is not really the case. Westlake said everything there is to say about Mitch Tobin in these live books, what amounts to a perfect quintology; any additional novels would have seem contrived to capitalize on an established series character.

———
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
   

(1) MACK REYNOLDS – The Rival Rigelians. #3 in his “United Planets” series. Paperback original, 1967. A shorter novella version entitled “Adaptation” appeared in Analog SF, August 1960. Published separately by Wildside Press, trade paperback, July 2020.

   A political lecture in fictionalized form. A team of eighteen is sent to Rigel’s two planets having been given fifty years to bring the abandoned colonies here back to civilization and eventual union with the Galactic Commonwealth. They split into two forces to settle their argument over the optimal plan of action, capitalism or communism.

   This might be a valid premise for a story, except (page 25) Earth has had world government for some time, implying that some political wisdom must have been gained since the present time. The local leaders even realize this and unite to force their unwanted visitors to depart in favor of proper ambassadors.

   â€œPower corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and Reynolds pulls every trick in the book to make this obvious. He needn’t have tried so hard. The faults of current political systems are obvious enough, without the lecture.

Rating: 2½ stars

Comment: From the online Science Fiction Encyclopedia: “The United Planets Organization [worked] in the cause of socioeconomic progress in the often-eccentric Ultima Thule colony worlds of a Galactic Empire.”

(2) A. BERTRAM CHANDLER – Nebula Alert. Empress Irene #3. Paperback original, 1967.

   Ex-empress Irene and the crew of her ship Wanderer enter the Alternate Universe of the Rim Confederacy after being pursued through the Horsehead Nebula. Their cargo consists of two dozen (somehow later twenty-six) Iralian embassy personnel. But the Iralians are capable of transmitting knowledge by heredity and hence are extremely desirable as slaves.

   Thus begins a tale of chase and fast action, but the plot becomes more and more tangled up in itself and fails to be resolved by an ending which comes from nowhere. Possibly OK if read as an adventure story only, but what a waste of undeveloped ideas!

Rating: 2 stars

Comment: Once Irene and her crew pass through the Horsehead Nebula they meet Chandler’s major series character, John Grimes. This is the last Irene story. It was preceded by Empress of Outer Space (1965) and Space Mercenaries (1965).

PANIC IN THE CITY. Feature Film Corp. of America, 1968. Howard Duff, Linda Cristal, Stephen McNally, Nehemiah Persoff, Anne Jeffreys, Dennis Hopper. Director: Eddie Davis.

    Just because a movie isn’t good, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be interesting. Case in point: Panic in the City, a late 1960s Cold War thriller that you’ve probably never heard of, let alone seen. By all normal standards, it’s not a particularly well-crafted film. The plot, in which a federal agent tracks down a rogue Eastern Bloc agent aiming to detonate a nuclear device in Los Angeles, is essentially something that could just have been done better in an episode of Mission: Impossible. As for the cinematic quality of the film, it is practically non-existent. Indeed, the movie really feels more like a made-for-TV pilot episode of a mid-tier detective show than something one would pay to see in a theater.

    What makes the movie worth a look, however, are a couple things. First, there are two performances in the film that stand out. Although he is only in the movie for less than thirty minutes, Dennis Hopper has a memorable turn as Goff, a thug for hire. He’s signed up to work for rogue communist agent August Best (Nehemiah Persoff) and engages in murder for hire job before the tables are turned and he is himself murdered. The late 1960s, of course, would be a turning point in Hopper’s career. For much of the 1950s and early 1960s, Hopper was primarily a guest star or supporting actor in television shows. All that would change in 1969 – one year after Panic in the City – with the release of Easy Rider (1969).

    As for the aforementioned Persoff, his role in this film is, like nearly all of his performances, acutely memorable. A student of Elia Kazan, discussed here, Persoff never achieved the fame of many of his contemporaries and never really became a leading man. Nevertheless, he had many roles in both television and film. For those interested, you can view part of his performance as a mob boss in an episode of Hawaii Five-O, one that also features John Ritter, here.

    Another aspect of Panic in the City that makes it a bit more interesting than would be expected is that (SPOILER ALERT!!) the lead character, federal agent Dave Pomeroy (Howard Duff) dies at the end. In a nuclear blast no less. There is no optimistic Hollywood ending here. Just a death in a mushroom cloud and a lonely woman walking the streets alone. You can watch the entire film here, with ads unfortunately.

HUGH PENTECOST – Death After Breakfast. Pierre Chambrun #13. Dell / Scene of the Crime #6, paperback, 1980. Previously published in hardcover by Dodd Mead, 1978.

   I’m sure that everyone with an interest in paperbacks at all has seen this new series of Murder Ink/Scene of the Crime mysteries from Dell. Chosen by the respective proprietresses of two of the country’s first specialized mystery bookshops, so far the series has emphasized detective novels of a recent vintage over Golden Age reprints. Even so, there have been a few of the latter included among the ones I have received so far, notably Anthony Berkeley’s The Poisoned Chocolates Case and A. A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery.

   Of the others I’m familiar with, those which are reprints of recent hardcover mysteries, there seems to have been a noticeable attempt on the part of their authors to add a sizeable amount of characterization to their work – and in some cases, like The Brandenburg Hotel, by Pauline Glen Winslow, and McGarr and the Sienese Conspiracy, by Bartholomew Gill, this seems to have been done at the expense of the plot, unfortunately.

   This one is a Scene of the Crime selection, and I missed it when it came out in hardcover. What else can I say? Everyone should read a Pierre Chambrun novel sometime, but other than that there seems to be no reason at all why anyone would want to read more than one.

   Even when he turns up missing, as he does in the first half of this one, the Hotel Beaumont (of which he is the manager) might go on running as smoothly as ever for a while, but that’s only another measure of how completely his personality dominates the scene.

   In his absence, the nymphomaniac chairwoman of the Cancer Fund Ball is found brutally murdered in her room, and a bomb threat is taken very seriously.

   Pentecost is, if nothing else, always smooth and easy to read. The greatest handicap he faces in continuing the Chambrun series, of which there are a great number already, is the enormous effort and amount of maneuvering required to get all the principals in his coolly-calculated melodramas together under one roof, even one as large as the Beaumont’s.

Rating: C

UPDATE: There were in all 22 in the Chambrun series, the last being Murder Goes Round and Round (1988).

The 25 selections are:

1. “Suspense” (1913)
2. “Kid Auto Races at Venice” (1914)
3. “Bread” (1918)
4. “The Battle of the Century” (1927)
5. “With Car and Camera Around the World” (1929)
6. “Cabin in the Sky” (1943)
7. “Outrage” (1950)
8. “The Man with the Golden Arm” (1955)
9. “Lilies of the Field” (1963)
10. “A Clockwork Orange” (1971)
11. “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” (1971)
12. “Wattstax” (1973)
13. “Grease” (1978)
14. “The Blues Brothers” (1980)
15. “Losing Ground” (1982)
16. “Illusions” (1982)
17. “The Joy Luck Club” (1993)
18. “The Devil Never Sleeps” (1994)
19. “Buena Vista Social Club” (1999)
20. “The Ground” (1993-2001)
21. “Shrek” (2001)
22. “Mauna Kea: Temple Under Siege” (2006)
23.”The Hurt Locker” (2008)
24. “The Dark Knight” (2008)
25. “Freedom Riders” (2010)

      Here’s a question left as a comment on a long-ago post:

   “These are pieces of the story of a movie I caught only a bit of, and missed the title and cast…. 1930s-1940s, B&W, etc. Genre like a Its a Wonderful Life, etc…

   “A gentleman in a small American town leave friends a bar, is mugged by the tracks, wakes up with no memory and wearing his assailant’s clothing. For all appearances he is a hobo, and he believes as much and moves on, leaves town for several years…. and around Christmastime, appears back in the same town, remembering nothing about it or his old self. A Ward Bond-ish cop mushes him off a snowy park bench at nighttime — in a respectable neighborhood, and as he is ready to comply and leave, he is espied by a younger man at the front door of what had been the elder gentleman’s home; then his wife — the young man’s mother — and he appeal to the old vagabond (without a good look at his face in the darkness) to join them as it is Christmas, after all (this is hugely climatic and heart-swelling). BUT, the kindly gent evidently does not want to impose on the family’s Christmas party and moves on.

   “The End and then the credits rolled… unread by me, dagnabbit!!

   “Please, it’s been 30 years that I have attempted to connect with this film. Not one person I have asked has heard of it, not a wit.”

TWO O’CLOCK COURAGE. RKO Radio Pictures, 1945. Tom Conway, Ann Rutherford, Richard Lane, Lester Matthews, Roland Drew, Emory Parnell, Bettejane Greer, Jean Brooks. Based on the novel of the same title by Gelett Burgess. Previously filmed as Two in the Dark (1936). Director: Anthony Mann. Available on DVD and  streaming here on the Internet Archive.

   There are three good movies all wrapped up in this one and struggling to get out. Unfortunately with only just over 60 minutes of running time, not one of them manages to prevail. The result is a totally entertaining but still disappointing film that could have been so much better if the people behind this one had chosen one of the three and stuck to it.

(A) Noir. A man staggers out into a foggy street and a cab manages to stop from hitting him only in the nick of time. The driver of the cab, female, lends a sympathetic ear when she discovers that he is bleeding from a wound on his head, and cannot remember who he is or why he’s there on the street. I was reminded immediately of Cornell Woolrich and many of his stories at this point.

(B) Screwball comedy. Trying to discover who he is, the pair run across a murder, a dopey cop, a wise aleck reporter and a butler who didn’t do it. They also find themselves rubbing elbows with the high class elite of the city, all dressed up in night club finery, including the cab driver (Ann Rutherford, who never looked finer).

(C) A serious detective mystery, centered around the manuscript of a successful play, but the name on the manuscript is not the same as the person who’s taking credit for it. As far as I was concerned, here’s where I decided to sit back and simply enjoy the movie, since none of this made any sense.

   Quite a mishmash indeed, is what I’m trying to say. Tom Conway, as the amnesiac, which I see I have neglected to mention before, is perfect in his role: suitably bewildered but still obviously a gentleman of some refinement. I do see I have mentioned Ann Rutherford already. She is worth mentioning twice. And did you see Jane Greer in the credits? A small part, I grant you, but she’s just another reason for watching this one. An indubitable bonus, if you will.