ALICE KIMBERLY – The Ghost and the Dead Man’s Library. Penelope Thorton-McClure & PI Jack Shepard #3. Berkley, paperback original; 1st printing, September 2006.

   Even though this was both written and published for the “cozy mystery” market, there are a few things going on that might attract the attention of male readers as well. It did me. For one thing, Penelope McClure owns and operates an independent bookstore in a small town in Rhode Island. For seconds, the entire plot revolves about an obscure set of the collected work of Edgar Allan Poe — and even better, there’s a strong hint that there’s a code to a unknown treasure hidden within their pages.

   But wait, wait, as they say, there’s more. The bookstore is haunted. The ghost of a private detective named Jack Shepard, who died in the 1940s, can only be seen and heard by Pen, however, and yet they communicate well enough for him to be her assistant of sorts whenever she gets involved with a case of murder, which seems to occur fairly often.

   Shepard’s way of speaking comes straight from the second or third tier of detective pulps. The quotes from the stories at the beginning of each chapter come from the better pulps of the same era, however, and these fit in very well, often to perfection.

   But as in all the cozies I’ve read or know about, Pen has other problems. Besides the death of the frail old man who gave her the books to sell for him, Pen also has to keep her store going, deal with customers and the like, and as a major subplot, her 10-year-old son’s being bullied at school.

   Even with Jack’s help, Pen’s attempt to solve the mystery is quite amateurish, which in all honesty, is exactly how it should be. The secret behind Jack’s murder, which occurred in the bookstore in 1949, is left to be revealed in later books, perhaps. Altogether, an interesting concept for a series, but for me — not a member of its primary target audience — this particular entry promised quite a bit more than it was able to deliver.

Bio-Bibliograhical Notes:   Alice Kimberly is the joint pen name of a husband and wife writing team (Marc Cerasini and Alice Alfonsi) who also write a series of “Coffeehouse Mystery” novels as Cleo Coyle.

       The Haunted Bookshop series —

The Ghost and Mrs. McClure. 2004

The Ghost and the Dead Deb. 2005
The Ghost and the Dead Man’s Library. 2006
The Ghost and the Femme Fatale. 2008
The Ghost and the Haunted Mansion. 2009
The Ghost and the Bogus Bestseller, as by Cleo Coyle. 2018

FIRECREEK. Warner Brothers/Seven Arts, 1968. James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Inger Stevens, Gary Lockwood, Dean Jagger, Ed Begley, Jay C. Flippen, Jack Elam, James Best, Barbara Luna, Jacqueline Scott, Brooke Bundy. Screenplay: Calvin Clements. Director: Vincent McEveety.

   You can see the rage in his eyes. Burning, passionate, unbridled rage – the type of rage that makes a decent man able to kill. That’s what you see in Jimmy Stewart’s eyes in the latter part of Firecreek, a slightly better than average Western from Warner Brothers-Seven Arts.

   Stewart portrays everyman Johnny Cobb, a farmer and part-time sheriff who, when pushed to the emotional breaking point by a gang of outlaws who have holed up in his small town, turns tough as nails and determined as hell to uproot the criminality that has taken root in his midst.

   Henry Fonda portrays the film’s villain, Bob Larkin. But Larkin’s not so much evil as he is a victim of circumstance, a passive actor in life who has become the brains of a mercenary outfit. When Larkin and his crew arrive in the small town of Firecreek, it’s not long before they discover they can have their way with the town. A town that Cobb eventually thinks is worth fighting for.

   But he’s fairly alone in that sentiment. Even the town’s shopkeeper, a former lawyer by the name of Whittier (Dean Jagger) thinks the town is filled with losers, himself among them. And truth be told, he’s got a point. There are quite a few social misfits and outcasts in Firecreek, including an Indian woman with a white baby and an overly flirtatious blonde girl living with her cruel, vindictive mother.

   Much like Gary Cooper in High Noon (1952), Stewart finds that the townsfolk are reluctant to stand up to the evil that is slowing eroding the social fabric of their community. But unlike that classic work of cinema, Firecreek aims for a greatness that it is unable to achieve.

   Part of this is due to the overly obtrusive score by Alfred Newman, one that was surely meant to heighten the emotional sentiment of certain scenes, but ends up overwhelming them in a saccharine haze. Furthermore, the movie, particularly for the first hour, feels more like an extended television melodrama than a feature film.

   A final note: Firecreek was released in 1968. It’s not that it’s a bad movie – Stewart and Fonda are such fine actors that they can carry nearly any vehicle – but that the movie appeared in theaters at a time that America and American cinema were rapidly changing. There’s something very 1950s about the whole production and most of all with Stewart’s character’s moral purity.

   Read one way, his character may have been (unintentionally or otherwise) meant to represent the old order standing up to a wild and out of control counterculture that didn’t respect traditional bourgeois values. After all, the following year, audiences watched Henry Fonda’s son Peter cruise the American road with Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider (1969). Johnny Cobb may have won the battle in Firecreek, but by the 1970s, American cinema wasn’t too keen on showcasing the simple, morally pure Johnny Cobbs of the world.

Nancy Sue Wilson (February 20, 1937 – December 13, 2018)

DIAMOND MEN. Lions Gate, 2000. Robert Forster, Donnie Wahlberg, Bess Armstrong, Jasmine Guy. Screenwriter-director: Dan Cohen.

   This a movie with a lot of facets to it, and I can’t think of a better word to use. What it is at the beginning, is a road film. After having had a heart attack and no longer insurable, a long time diamond salesman by the name of Eddie Miller (Robert Forster) is forced to show his replacement, Bobby Walker, the ropes (Donnie Wahlberg).

   It does not go well. Forster is in his mid-50s, laid back, likes jazz and quiet motels at night. Bobby is young, brash (ultra brash) and likes a lot of night life (girls picked up in bars).

   But then, not too surprisingly, it turns into a buddy film. If two men sit next to each other in the front seat of a car for miles on end, taking the same sales route through central Pennsylvania over and over again, they begin to talk to each other and reveal things about themselves, no matter how opposite in personality they are. Things they certainly wouldn’t bring up on their first day together, which goes disastrously bad.

   Eddie’s wife died several years ago. They had a happy marriage, and Eddie has not had a date with a woman since. Bobby decides to do something about that. This does not go well, but Bobby persists, and the film now transforms itself from a raunchy-ish sex film to a romantic one. What Eddie does not know, though, is that Katie (Bess Armstrong), the woman Bobby has found for him has a — shall we say — past.

   At which point the movie decides to go in a totally different direction, one that I won’t tell you about because I have to leave something for you to see on your own. And while this is a very minor film, by Hollywood blockbuster standards, I think you should. See it yourself, that is.

   And one of the major reasons why is the presence of Robert Forster in this film. He has one of those faces that looks lived in, with the ability to make you know what he’s thinking by simply watching his face, maybe even more than by the words he’s saying. I don’t know how it does it, but he does.

   Singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile has been around for a while — her first album came out in 2005 — but while she’s had critical success, only a small number of dedicated fans have been following her career. That all changed last Friday when she was nominated for six Grammy awards in 2019.

   Here she is in May of last year, live at the Boston Calling Music Festival at Harvard University. I’m convinced. She’s going to sell a lot of her music from now on. See what you think.

ROBERT GALBRAITH – Lethal White. Cormoran Strike #4. Mulholland Books, hardcover, September 2018.

   That’s the question Robin Ellacott, secretary and operative of Cormoran Strike’s small detective agency asks herself on her wedding night when she learns her former boss wants her back after they have made national news capturing the Shakewell Ripper in the previous novel, Career of Evil.

   Her relationship with her wounded war veteran boss, Strike, is complicated at best, the two a team reliant on each other, but dancing around the other issues coming from their relationship, him dealing with his missing leg and painful stump and she with anxiety attacks after nearly being killed by the Shakewell Ripper.

   A year later things are still at loggerheads when an emotionally and mentally disturbed boy named Billy shows up in Strike’s office with a story of a crime he witnessed as a child: “Ages, I was a kid … Little Girl it was, but after they said it was a little boy. Jimmy was there, he says I never saw it, but I did. I saw him do it, Strangled. I saw it.”. Billy’s memory is inexact, but Strike believes him and takes up the case.

   His new found fame makes it harder to keep a low profile though. People expect him to be delving into something major and clam up. Meanwhile he and Robin, the latter only a year into a marriage she still questions, have to navigate their increasingly difficult relationship and her less than perfect marriage.

   The unlikely murder of a little girl, or was it a little boy, takes Strike and Robin from the back streets of London to the secret sanctums of Parliament, to a grand manor house in the country, with one obstruction and red herring after another thrown in their path as they try to uncover the truth behind a confused boy’s memory of a crime no one believes he witnessed and a tie to a priceless painting hiding in plain sight and worth killing for.

    Lethal White is a long book, in fact, it weighs in at over six hundred pages, but then it is written by someone known for writing densely plotted long books readers plunge into willingly. Perhaps the remarkable thing about this series and Galbraith (which has inspired television adaptations, too) is that you won’t find a single mention in the hardcover edition of this book that Robert Galbraith is the pseudonym of one of the most popular and successful writers of the last few decades, J. K, Rowiling of Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts fame.

   Fairly compared to the best of Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, and Peter Robinson, Robert Galbraith deserves all the attention and accolades even without knowing who lies behind the pseudonym. Cormoran Strike and Robin are believable characters, flawed and human, and among the most attractive and intriguing sleuths currently around.

   I know many of you aren’t great fans of these dense long books and wonder how the writer can call anything that long suspense or maintain the mystery element, but I can only say in this one case it feels effortless, and unlike many writers who work at this length, the attractive detectives are on stage for all the action, always at the center of things, in a book that mixes hard-boiled, classical, satire, and romance in a heady mix.

   Writing like that makes taking on six hundred plus pages a pleasure.

  ALFRED COPPEL “The Last Two Alive!” Short novel. First published in Planet Stories, November 1950. Reprinted with Out of Time’s Abyss, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, as half of Armchair Fiction Double Novel #D-169, paperback, 2015.

   If you all you want is a whopping good old-fashioned space opera story without a lot of either depth or characterization, this may be the story for you. Aram Jerrold is accused and convicted of conspiring against the ruling Tetarchy of the Thirty Suns, based on the testimony of Deve Jennet, a girl Aram thought he had a future with.

   But once sent to the prison planet Atmion IV for execution, Aram is pleasantly surprised (to say the least) to find that Deve is a member of group of rebels against both the Tetarchy and Satane, the despot ruler of the Kaidor planetary system. Planning to revolt and take over the Tetarchy, the latter has developed a biological weapon that wipes out the memories of its victims and turns them into howling beasts.

   Well, sir, what can a band of only a handful of rebels do — the one Aram is now a member of? They do their best, and realistically, the outcome is all but inevitable. The story is told in picturesque fashion, however, and it doesn’t slow down for a minute, exactly how you’d expect from a tale first published in a magazine called Planet Stories.

   [WARNING: PLOT ALERT AHEAD] As it so happens, this is one of those big-scale stories in which humanity completely wipes itself out, leaving only two survivors. Aram [Jerrold] and Deve [Jennet] become the progenitors of a new human race, and over the years, their names become corrupted to … can you guess?

A. A. FAIR – The Bigger They Come. Donald Lam & Bertha Cool #1. William Morrow, hardcover, 1939. Pocket #228, paperback; 1st printing, September 1943.

   In this, the first book Erle Stanley Gardner wrote under this name, we learn the following: how Donald Lam happened to get hired by the Bertha Cool Detective Agency, that that may or may not be his real name, some details about Bertha’s life with the late Mr. Cool …

   And how to commit a murder and not be punished for it. If this is not a hard-boiled novel, it is the toughest next thing to it. You can also always count on legal shenanigans in a Gardner book — and more puzzle in the plot than in all of the mysteries written last year, combined.

VIGILANTES OF BOOMTOWN. Republic, 1947. Alan Lane (as Red Ryder), Robert Blake, Roy Barcroft, Peggy Stewart, George Cheseboro, Ted Adams and John Dehner. Screenplay by Earl Snell, based on characters created by Fred Harman. Directed by R.G. Springsteen.

CITY OF BAD MEN Fox, 1953. Jeanne Crain, Dale Robertson, Richard Boone, Lloyd Bridges, Rodolfo Acosta, John Doucette, Frank Ferguson, Percy Helton, Leo Gordon, Harry Hines and Don Haggerty. Writtten by George W. George and George Slavin. Directed by Harmon Jones.

   Something prompted me to watch a double bill of VIGILANTES OF BOOMTOWN (Republic, 1947) and CITY OF BAD MEN (Fox,1953) two undistinguished but very enjoyable B-westerns centered around the Corbett-Fitzsimmons prizefight in Carson City Nevada in 1897.

   VIGILANTES is a classic Red Ryder flick from Republic, with Alan Lane as the cowboy hero deputized to keep order in Carson City during the fight, young Robert Blake as Little Beaver, his Indian pal (and alleged comic relief) veteran Nasty Roy Barcroft as – well – as the veteran nasty who means to steal the gate receipts, and John Dehner, of all people, as Fitzsimmons. It’s a modest time-killer, but fast and unpretentious enough to make it fun.

   Republic was losing interest in Red Ryder about this time, and it shows. Crowd scenes are sparse, sets are familiar, and the action, while up to Republic’s usual high standard, somehow seems a bit blasé. What carries it through is the novelty of the idea and the professionalism of the players. Alan Lane, on the verge of getting his own series, is as stoically heroic as ever, Roy Barcroft flashes his evil grin with practiced malevolence, and when they square off for yet another fight, it’s with all the enthusiasm of yet another battle between Right and Wrong.

   CITY OF BAD MEN is slightly more ambitious, filmed in color with lots of extras and a characters a bit more shaded: Dale Robertson as an embittered soldier of fortune, deputized to keep order in Carson City during the fight, a young Lloyd Bridges (looking eerily like Randy Quaid!) as his edgy kid brother, and aspiring nasty Richard Boone as Johnny Ringo, who means to steal the gate receipts. I will also call attention here to Don Haggerty, an actor who had a long and mostly-uncredited career, as another rival owlhoot; the script doesn’t give him much to do, but he does it well.

   Again, it’s all pretty fast-paced and helped along considerably by Charles G. Clarke’s photography. Clarke was an old hand around Hollywood, whose credits include TARZAN AND HIS MATE, and he makes the thing very pleasing to the eye. Harmon Jones keeps things moving swiftly, with a sure hand on the action scenes.

   Both films, though, overlooked a ploy I would have thought almost obligatory: they both feature a struggle between the hero and the heavy while the prizefight is in progress, but apparently neither director thought to inter-cut the good-guys/bad-guys battle in the dust with the prize-fighters in the ring.

   Or maybe they did, and just figured it’d be too obvious. Whatever the case, both movies got along just fine without my help.

  ROBERT J. RANDISI – Stand-Up. Miles Jacoby #6. Walker, hardcover, 1994. Perfect Crime, softcover, 2012.

   Miles Jacoby is at a crossroads in his PI career. One of the best PI’s in New York is offering him a partnership, and he’s tempted. Before he can finalize a decision, though, two cases pop us. One involves a stand-up comedian who thinks someone has stolen all his jokes, and the other a strongarm friend who’s involved in some way in a gangster’s murder. Jacoby finds himself bouncing back and forth between them, and both of them generate bodies and blood.

   Before I say anything more, let me say this: I wish to hell that crime writers would either quit trying to use microcomputers as part of their plots, or get someone who knows something about them to check the manuscripts. I am so tired of their fuck-ups I could just scream. Don’t they realize that there are enough people out there now who are computer-literate that they can’t get away with it? Pfui. Bah.

   Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I can say that this was a typical Randisi book — breezy, facile, competent, lots of snappy dialogue, fast-moving. I like Jacoby as a character, and the supporting cast too. The plot has a pulpy feel to it this time; not that that’s necessarily bad, you understand, but I seem to remember earlier books having a little more depth.

   Easy, pleasant reading, but it’s nothing you’ll remember a week later. I always have the feeling Randisi could do a lot better if he’s just take the time.

      The Miles Jacoby novels —

Eye in the Ring (1982)
The Steinway Collection (1983)
Full Contact (1984)
Separate Cases (1990)
Hard Look (1993)
Stand Up (1994)