IRA LEVIN – The Boys from Brazil. Random House, hardcover, 1976. Dell, paperback, 1977. Reprinted several times since.

THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL. 20th Century Fox, 1978. Gregory Peck (Dr. Josef Mengele), Laurence Olivier, James Mason, Lilli Palmer, Uta Hagen, Steven Guttenberg, Denholm Elliott, Rosemary Harris, John Dehner, John Rubinstein, Anne Meara, Jeremy Black. Based on the book by Ira Levin. Director: Franklin J. Schaffner.

   What makes Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil such a compelling read is that it seamlessly situates a compelling mystery within the context of an international thriller and blends it with elements of science fiction and horror. Although nominally a story about a Nazi hunter investigating a postwar plot initiated by Dr. Josef Mengele in which the sadistic doctor has targeted some ninety-four civil servants and middle class men for murder, Levin’s work also incorporates aspects found more commonly in the paperback medical thrillers that flooded the market in the 1970s.

   Given Mengele’s notoriety for experimenting on twins in Auschwitz, it’s no surprise that the key to the plot involves his desire to utilize his scientific training to promote his vision of a pure Aryan race. But how? That’s for Yakov Liebermann (played by Laurence Olivier in the film as Ezra Liebermann) to find out. A Simon Wiesenthal-like Nazi hunter and Holocaust survivor living in Vienna, Liebermann has built his reputation on his ability to find Nazis hiding in plain, or not so plain, sight and have them extradited for trial. Among them is Frieda Maloney, a former camp guard who later became an American citizen. As in any good thriller, Levin makes sure that seemingly unrelated stories intersect in a meaningful way. For Maloney’s work at an adoption agency in New York ends up being what allows Liebermann to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

   As the title of the work indicates, there are boys – children – and they are from Brazil. But they aren’t just any ordinary children. Here’s where the creepiness of medical horror and science fiction enter into the story. Without giving too much away, let me just say that what Liebermann discovers is both horrifying and somewhat ludicrous. But that doesn’t stop The Boys from Brazil from being a deeply original work, one that clearly was meant both to entertain and to raise provocative questions about the nature of evil and how it might manifest itself in one’s very genes.

   The film adaptation of Levin’s work, while nominated for several Academy Awards, benefits greatly from Gregory Peck’s portrayal of Mengele but alternatively suffers from Sir Laurence Olivier’s role as Liebermann. Apparently enough people found it Oscar worthy. I didn’t. From his faux German or Yiddish accent to his over-animated mannerisms, Olivier is clearly acting in a manner that prevented me from fully seeing his screen time as anything other than a performance. Peck became Mengele. Olivier was simply unable to disappear into the role. I thought the same thing when I watched him portray a cantor in The Jazz Singer (1980).

   There are some good moments, but overall the film, apart from a memorable score from Jerry Goldsmith, is rather lackluster. It certainly doesn’t hold up nearly as well as Marathon Man (1976), in which Olivier played a Nazi fugitive from South America who has traveled to Manhattan to claim his diamonds.

   But do look for a young Steve Guttenberg (billed as Steven Guttenberg) in a supporting role as an intrepid Jewish political activist who travels to Paraguay to track down and to photograph Nazi war criminals hiding there. I watched a copy on BluRay from Shout Factory. It looks great.

ROBERT SILVERBERG “Double Dare.” Short story. Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1956. Reprinted in The Fifth Galaxy Reader (1961). Collected in The Cube Root of Uncertainty (1970), among others.

   While published before I discovered science fiction magazines at the local newsstand, which would have been a couple of years later, this is the kind of SF story I enjoyed immensely when I did, and which I don’t come across all that frequently any more.

   Which is to say a “nuts and bolts” kind of SF story, in which either a Terran scientist or a pair of engineers from Earth — as in “Double Dare” — are given a problem to be solved, and whatever their motivation, they go ahead and do it.

   In this case, the stakes are raised about as high as they can go, starting with a bet in bar about which of two races, Earth’s or the alien Domerangi, is the better at solving technological problems. To settle the question, a team of two experts from Earth are sent to the Domerangi home planet, where they are presented with three engineering or physics problems to solve, with two of the Domerangi doing the same back on Earth.

   The first two tasks are easy, but the third is a tough one: to build a perpetual motion machine. Given the right incentive — and on a personal level it is to be able to go back home again — the two from Earth … but telling more would spoil the point of the story. Suffice to say that everything works out in very fine fashion, and with a added twist to the tale as well.

   Stories such as this one are built on cheery optimism, I grant you, but they’re also a lot of fun to read.

   Once upon a time, when the occupant of the White House was a bald guy known as Ike, there was a popular CBS TV program on Sunday nights known as WHAT’S MY LINE?, in which the regular panelists had to guess the occupations of the special guests who appeared each week. The guests of course couldn’t be household names or the game would be pointless.

   One week in May 1958 the guests included a mystery writer: not a Carr or Queen or Christie of course, but someone who’d been banging out whodunits for decades without ever acquiring a name or much of a following. Subsequently the program used her photograph in promotional ads: “This sweet little elderly lady writes blood-curdling murder mysteries!”

   She’d been doing so since 1919, all but one featuring the same character. Her name was Lee Thayer — Emma Redington Lee Thayer if you want to be complete about it — and her sleuth was a red-headed young man of vaguely Holmesian cast named Peter Clancy. Thayer had at least two distinctions; she appeared on national TV and she continued writing Clancy novels until around age 92. (She died in 1973, a few months short of her 100th birthday.)

   Over the decades I’ve acquired a fair number of Thayers, and read a lot of them too. Frankly, they’re awful. Characters thinner than onion-skin paper, dime-novel prose, murder methods straight out of wackadoodledom — she had it all. Maybe that’s why I keep revisiting her. Maybe I just have a masochistic streak. Anyway, I recently decided to devote a column to a randomly selected trio of her works. Happy holidays, gang!

   Q.E.D. (1922) was her fourth novel, and if I liked it a bit more than most of her books, perhaps it’s because of the total absence of Wiggar, Clancy’s valet, an insufferable parody of English menservants whose coruscating bons mots like “Oh, Mr. Peter, sir!” make me feel as if my fingernails are being ripped out of me with pliers.

   Also it’s one of her simpler and more workpersonlike plots. In the wilds of northwestern New Jersey where Clancy and some friends are about to go off trout fishing, a total stranger is found outside the house of one of the group, only his own footprints visible in the thin coating of snow, a pistol in his pocket, his throat slit as if with a razor blade and his neck broken as if by a ju-jitsu expert, of which there happen to be three among the dramatis personae.

   The murderer is fairly obvious 100 pages before the climax but the denouement is Thayer at her purest, featuring a race against the clock and a howling thunderstorm. “The sky…was now riven by sharp swords of blinding light. The wind was rising in deep, sighing exhalations. In the lightning flash…were revealed high flung masses of cloud, lurid and awful, towering into the zenith….”

    The murderer runs for his life “at a mad pace through the blinding storm…” and there’s “a great roar as of the thundering voice of God” as a tree limb miraculously falls onto an overhead trolley wire and our villain is electrocuted. If you read Thayer, denouements of this sort, complete with Bible quotations, come with the territory.

   Remember, this book was written almost 100 years ago. Prohibition is in force, the movie industry has not yet completely uprooted itself from the East Coast, the police don’t seem to have any cameras, and there are so few automobiles on the streets of Manhattan that the cops let Clancy’s car defy all speed limits because of “the intelligent law that a man may drive as fast as he likes as long as he does not jeopardize others….” What I wouldn’t give for a proper legal citation of that law!

   It’s hard to believe that with local trains and a ferry you could travel from northwestern New Jersey across the Hudson to the heart of Manhattan in about 90 minutes, but there were large numbers of small commuter lines back then whereas today there’s only New Jersey Transit, which has no connections at all between northwest Jersey and New York.

   You also have to remember how old this book is when you encounter the racism. The face of a Japanese butler is likened to a “yellow mask” as are the faces of “all other Japs,” a sentiment which is followed by the cheerful humming of a mercifully forgotten tune: “All coons look alike to me.” Indeed we have come a long way.

    On a much more positive note are the fishing sequences, which strongly suggest that Thayer must have been a passionate angler of (dare I say it?) the first water, well versed in the ways of rods, reels, leaders, flies and the like. “[M]ost of the joy of fishing is fishing — messing around in the water—hearing the birds and the quietness — and watching the scenery go by.” How bucolic. Except for the fish.

   Q.E.D. is probably the earliest American detective novel I’ve ever read. (Previously the reigning champ was S.S. Van Dine’s 1926 THE BENSON MURDER CASE.) With our next Clancy we’re in familiar territory if we’re whodunit buffs, with Prohibition abolished and the Depression in full swing, financially devastating a huge number of people.

   HELL-GATE TIDES (1933) takes place entirely in Manhattan and mainly in a single two-story apartment in a high-rise tower on Gracie Place, just east of 81st Street and Carl Schurz Park and next to the East River, a building so luxurious it boasts a private dock for the use of yacht-owning tenants back from long excursions.

   A doctor friend sends one of his patients to consult with Clancy, a handsome young aristo named Alan McLeod who came within an inch of death thanks to strychnine administered in one of the items of his usual breakfast — coffee, a boiled egg, buttered toast and an orange.

   Calling himself Peter Carteret so as not to have to discard any of his personal items with monograms, Clancy and the intolerable Wiggar visit the McLeod mansion in the sky and find it occupied by Alan’s fiancée Gloria Kirby (who is near broke but concealing it well), an enigmatic housekeeper, an old family friend who loves to explore obscure corners of the world, and a flock of servants, the most suspicious being a tattooed Englishman named Bunce who is likely to remind you, if you grew up watching B Westerns, of that hulking Brit Harry Cording.

   There’s also a macaw, sometimes called a parrot, that only Bunce can induce to speak. Soon the party is joined by McLeod’s uncle and nearest relative, Russell Fahnestock, just back from a yacht trip. There’s no violence until about halfway through the book when, during a social gathering, Fahnestock steps out onto the balcony just off the huge living-room, apparently has intimate conversations with first Gloria Kirby and then Alan McLeod, and is never seen again until his body is found floating in the East River below, his neck broken and “a deep purplish mark encircling his throat….”

   The bird claims that Alan murdered his uncle. Clancy solves the crime only because the real killer carelessly left a fingerprint on Fahnestock’s cigarette lighter, which the police don’t find but Clancy does. This time Thayer eschews her signature apocalyptic ending but allows the killer — whose method is as wacko as that of the murderer in Q.E.D. — to dive out of an apartment window and drown himself in the book’s titular tides.

   Without consulting an expert I would take with several shakers of salt the criminological dogma that is advanced at least four times in the course of this novel. Clancy: “….[T]he criminal mind follows a pattern. A gun-man, for instance, will never use a knife, or vice versa.” (127) “A poisoner rarely carries a gun.” (262)

   Detective Captain Jake Kerrigan: “A poisoner is one kind of a man. A strangler is another. The two don’t blend.” (209) “A poisoner poisons. Get me? He doesn’t strangle.” (290) But perhaps the strangest scene takes place when beside the East River Wiggar encounters and befriends a homeless boy with dreams of being first a “detectuff” and then the next Will Rogers. A beat cop finds the two on a park bench with the Englishman’s arm cuddled around the kid and thinks nothing of it. In more recent times he’d probably suspect Wiggar was a priest.

   The most recent and by far the least interesting of the Thayer trio I’ve chosen for this column is DEAD END STREET (1936). The murders this time are incidental — a beat cop who saw too much, two professional burglars who learned too much about the masked mastermind behind their gang — and the main problem for Clancy is to determine who or what is driving to the brink of madness or suicide a young aristo named Arthur Madison, just returned to New York after having lived most of his life in China with his recently deceased father.

   The family mansion is at the extreme northern tip of Manhattan in an area which, judging by contemporary maps, looks very different today from the way it looked 80-odd years ago. (Thayer drew the dust jackets for all but the last few of her books but it would have been helpful if she’d drawn some maps for them too.)

   While looking into a series of jewel robberies from stately homes that have nothing in common except that each of them backs onto a waterway connected with the East River, Clancy and his buddy Captain Kerrigan happen to run into two women who are servants at the Madison mansion, a daughter and widowed mother fallen on hard times since the death of the head of the house — a doctor who as chance would have it once saved Kerrigan’s life — and are actually managing to save a little money working as housemaid and cook for $60 a month apiece plus meals. (My, how the value of the dollar has changed!)

   Already suspecting that the jewel thieves he’s hunting are based in the neighborhood, Clancy arranges for himself and Wiggar to be hired by wealthy old Henrietta Madison Ross and her crippled husband Leon Ross (at least once mistakenly called Nelson) respectively as chauffeur and butler, and in due course they discover that the attempts to drive Henrietta’s nephew Arthur into the looney bin are connected not only with the jewel thefts but also with the three incidental murders that happened nearby.

   Thayer provides enough secret rooms, underground passages and concealed tunnels for a year’s worth of silent serials, and this time the criminal mastermind is actually taken alive. The same dogma repeated so often in HELL-GATE TIDES pops up here too as Clancy informs us that “a crook sticks to tried and true methods. A knife is quick and quiet. The man that uses one…wouldn’t be risking the noise of a gun….” I am probably not revealing too much about the wacky plot to drive Arthur insane when I say that the Madison family fortune is based on the business of importing glass.

   Thayer thought of herself as a book designer and illustrator rather than an author, saying of her 60-odd novels “some are worse than others.” True enough! Both I and mystery writer/critic Jon L. Breen, who has probably read more Thayers than I have, agree that the best of her books that we’ve both read is EVIL ROOT (1949).

   No one will ever call her the peer of Christie, Sayers and P.D. James, but she put in close to half a century at the trade in which her achievements were at best modest, and she deserves a bit more than to be totally forgotten.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER “The Silver Mask Murders.” The Man in the Silver Mask #3. Novelette. Detective Fiction Weekly, 23 November 1935.

   In the years during which Erle Stanley Gardner was one of the most prolific pulp writers around, he tried his hand not only at mysteries — tons of them — but westerns, adventure stories and even science fiction (collected in The Human Zero: The Science Fiction Stories of Erle Stanley Gardner, 1981). Given the undeniable fact of the latter, it should come as no surprise that he dabbled in the equivalent of the hero pulps as well.

   The most famous of the latter were The Shadow, The Spider, Operator #5 and so on. Most were the primary occupants of their own magazines. Gardner’s contributions to the genre consisted of only three long stories in the pages of Detective Fiction Weekly, all in 1935. Having read only this, the third and last of them, I don’t know if the hero in these stories was ever given a name. He seems to have been known only as The Man in the Silver Mask.

   You can probably guess why, but to confirm your suspicion, the cover of the magazine his third adventure appeared in will illustrate as well as words could do. Besides his general anonymity, nothing also is known about his background, nor why he feels to need to keep his identity a secret. All we know for sure is his fierce determination to fight crime.

   Assisting him in these endeavors are a hunchbacked Chinese mute servant by the name of Ah Wong, and a female secretary/assistant named Norma Lorne and described as “a rather slender, willowy young blonde,” who aids The Masked Man outside the office as well as in.

   In “The Silver Mask Murders” this vigilante on the side of justice comes up against a powerful nemesis named Thornton Acker, a lawyer whose clientele consists solely of other criminals who can afford his steep fees ($250,000 this time around) to help them get out of jams they can’t manage to do on their own.

   Acker’s task in this one is to make sure that a man in prison doesn’t testify against his boss in court, which he does in spectacular fashion. But the Man in the Silver Mask is working on the other side, that of law and order, and Acker’s meticulous planning soon begins to go further and further awry.

   For the most part, this is routine stuff, with a lot more violence, I suspect, than ever appeared in any other Erle Stanley Gardner story. One scene sticks out, though, one in which Silver Mask is threatening a hoodlum he’s holding captive with physical torture at the hands of his Chinese assistant. When asked later by Norma Lorne whether or not he was bluffing, Silver Mask confesses that he doesn’t know.

   The story ends with many underlings dead or in jail, but with Acker still at large. A blurb at the end of the story advertises that the next installment of the series would be coming soon, but it never did. The world of mystery fiction never noticed.

   The Man in the Silver Mask series —

The Man in the Silver Mask. Detective Fiction Weekly, July 13 1935

The Man Who Talked. Detective Fiction Weekly, September 7, 1935

The Silver Mask Murders, Detective Fiction Weekly, November 23, 1935

JERRY KENNEALY – Beggar’s Choice. Nick Polo #9. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1994. No mass market paperback edition.

   One of the cover blurbs calls this an “underrated series,” and I’d have to agree. Almost none of the books have made it to paperback, which is dismaying when you think about the large amount of trash that does. Kennealy is, like his character, a San Francisco PI.

   Polo and his lady friend are doing a regular stint of volunteer work in a soup kitchen when one of the homeless regulars asks Nick to check a couple of license plate numbers. He says they belong to people who’ve been generous to him, but Nick has doubts about that. He has even more doubts when they turn out ti belong to a Tong lord and a wealthy businessman, but before he can find out anything else, the homeless man is dead, victim of a somewhat suspicious hit-and-run. He decides to check into it a little further, and the hornets stat buzzing about the proverbial nest.

   The Polo books aren’t Edgar material but they are enjoyable, solid examples of standard PI fare without a lot of breast-beating, angst, and Significant Social Issues. Polo is a likable and well-developed character, as is his current lady, reporter Jane Tobin.

   Kennealy’s prose is competent though not flashy, and he tells a reasonably fast-moving, well-constructed story. Though he doesn’t overwhelm you with ambiance, he obviously knows San Francisco [and overall, what he’s doing].

       The Nick Polo series —

   NOVELS

Polo Solo (1987)
Polo Anyone? (1988)
Polo’s Ponies (1988)
Polo in the Rough (1989)
Polo’s Wild Card (1990)
Green With Envy (1991)
Special Delivery (1992)
Vintage Polo (1993)
Beggar’s Choice (1994)
All That Glitters (1997)
Long Shot (2017)

   SHORT STORIES

“Polo at the Ritz” (May 1993, New Mystery; also 1999, First Cases 3)
“Reluctant Witness” (2000, The Shamus Game)
“Carole on Lombard” (2001, Mystery Street)
“Love for Bail” (2015, Fifty Shades of Grey Fedora)

LURED. United Artists, 1947. George Sanders, Lucille Ball, Charles Coburn, Boris Karloff, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Joseph Calleia, Alan Mowbray, George Zucco, Robert Coote, Alan Napier, Tanis Chandler.
   Screenplay by Leo Rosten, based on Robert Siodmak’s 1939 French film Pieges (titled Personal Column in the United States). Screenplay of the earlier film by Jacques Companéez and Ernst Neubach. Director: Douglas Sirk.

   The title is appropriate. I was lured into watching this film under false pretenses. From the title and what I knew about the story line it was my general impression that this was a film noir movie. Ah, very much not so. I began to suspect something was wrong when I saw the director’s credit. I tried to reassure myself by saying that while I don’t know much about his career, the extravigant Hollywood melodramas Douglas Sirk is best known for didn’t come along until the 1950s.

   True enough that Lured is a black-and-white crime film centered on a serial killer responsible for the disappearances and deaths of a number of young women in London, each preceded by a poem sent to Scotland Yard based on the work of Charles Baudelaire. Lucille Ball is an American chorus girl stranded in England. Working at would be called a “dime a dance” hall in the US, one of her co-workers and a close friend goes missing.

   So far, so good. This is the part of the movie in which the noirish aspects are the greatest, and in 1947 Lucille Ball had the perfect face for films noir. (To my mind, however, she didn’t have the earthiness of an Audrey Totter, Marie Windsor or Gloria Grahame, but she was quite a beauty, no doubt about it.)

   But in any case, off she goes to Scotland Yard, where a totally miscast Charles Coburn as a very non-British inspector persuades her to work for him and act as bait to catch the killer. Besides being a very questionable proposition on the face of it, he hands her a gun for her to protect herself if need be.

   It didn’t make any sense to me, then or now as I’m typing this. Worse though, is the change of direction the story takes soon after, as Ball’s character meets and definitely attracts the attention of a nightclub owner played by George Sanders.

   And all of a suden the story turns into a sappy romance between two would-be lovers who have no chemistry together. Opinions may vary on this, but I can only report on what I saw.

   Which in the end, was neither solid enough to recommend as a mystery (the villain is obvious way too soon) or as a romance, the latter jerry-rigged out of nothing at all.

CAPTAIN APACHE. Scotia-Barber, Spain-UK, 1971. Lee Van Cleef (Capt. Apache), Carroll Baker, Stuart Whitman, Percy Herbert, Elisa Montes, Tony Vogel. Director: Alexander Singer.

   The thing I won’t forget about Captain Apache is undoubtedly the film’s theme song as it’s sung – spoken, really – by Lee Van Cleef, who portrays this quirky acid western’s titular hero, an Apache in the U.S. Calvary.

   Investigating the enigmatic last words of a dying Indian Commissioner, he finds hemself caught in a web of deception as he begins to uncover a conspiracy to assassinate the President Ulysses S. Grant, who is traveling through Arizona on his way to California. As he proceeds with his investigation, Captain Apache encounters a witch who piles him with hallucinogens, a motley crew of Mexican bandits, and an urbane scoundrel played to the hilt by a scene-chewing Stuart Whitman who also wants to know what the cryptic phrase “April Morning” means.

   There’s a lot of humor in Captain Apache, much of it goofy and borderline juvenile, one that surely was designed to elicit guffaws from European teenagers. It works for a while, but it soon wears out its welcome, making the scenes in which humor is employed less and less compelling as the movie begins to repeat itself. While there is a final sequence on a train that’s admittedly worth waiting for, it pales in comparison to so many other train scenes in so many other westerns, Spaghetti or not.

   I wouldn’t recommend anyone go out of their way to catch this one, but fans of Lee Van Cleef might appreciate seeing him in a starring role, one that apparently required that he shave off his trademark mustache and give his vocal cords a nice workout.

—

JOHN STEPHEN STRANGE – The Clue of the Second Murder. Van Dusen Ormsberry #2. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1929. Grosset & Dunlap, hardcover reprint (cover shown).

   When this book was written (60 years ago!), Philo Vance was all the rage, and in the same pattern is fastidious gentleman detective Van Dusen Ormsberry, whose second recorded case this is. Assisting him is his 13-year-old protégé, the freckle-faced Bill Adams.

   While the book is readable, the telling is flawed, and Ormsberry does very little in the way of detecting. He is a bad judge of character, and allowing young Bill to assist leads to an even greater error on his part. His career was over after only one more book.

        The Van Dusen Ormsberry series —

The Man Who Killed Fortescue. Doubleday 1928
The Clue of the Second Murder. Doubleday 1929
Murder on the Ten-Yard Line. Doubleday 1931

[UPDATE] 11-28-18.   Time does not stand still. It’s now been almost 90 years since this book was written, very near a relic — but not a forgotten one. There is currently a POD edition published by lulu.com, apparently from a source in the UK. I don’t know if how interested anyone (including myself) would be after reading review above, but as a note to myself, I did say it was readable.

   I did not say much about the plot, so I went looking, and I found this description of the book online:

THE LINEUP. Pajemer/Columbia, 1958. Eli Wallach, Robert Keith, Richard Jaeckel, Mary LaRoche, Emile Meyer, Marshall Reed and Vaughn Taylor. Written by Stirling Silliphant. Directed by Don Siegel.

MURDER BY CONTRACT. Orbit/Columbia, 1958. Vince Edwards, Herschel Bernardi, Philip Pine and Caprice Toriel. Written by Ben Simcoe. Directed by Irving Lerner.

   Two remarkably similar films from the same studio, released within months of each other.

   THE LINEUP is the more polished and less compelling of the two, largely because it’s a spin-off from a TV series and is therefore obliged to spend some time with the familiar cast plodding through familiar paces — and when I say “plod,” I’m being charitable. After a slam-bang opening, things slog through quicksand, as detectives Meyer and Reed patiently interview witnesses, quietly await lab results, placidly look over crime scenes and impassively conduct the obligatory Line-Up.

   Then, twenty minutes into the film, the stillness is broken by the arrival of Eli Wallach and Robert Keith as hit-men hired to retrieve smuggled heroin from three passengers who have carried it concealed in knick-knacks from abroad. And from here on, THE LINEUP becomes a different film altogether: perverse, violent, and non-stop action.

   Action yes, but the real interest of THE LINEUP derives from the interplay of the characters: Richard Jaeckel as a cocky driver, Robert Keith as the erudite overseer of the operation (who collects the last words of their victims) and most of all Eli Wallach as the barely-controlled psychopath who does the killings.

   Wallach is quite good here, moving with staccato grace (His character is appropriately named “Dancer.”) and darting knife-sharp glances at his potential targets like a bomb looking for an excuse to explode. But the character wouldn’t be nearly as effective without the interaction between him and his cohorts, skillfully laid out with Silliphant’s dialogue and knowingly evoked by Don Siegels’s economic direction.

   If you take THE LINEUP, slash the budget and cut out the dull parts, you’ve got MURDER BY CONTRACT, a lean, mean and artful 80 minutes of down-and-dirty crime drama.

   The structure and characters here are pretty much the same as in the earlier film: Vince Edwards is Claude, a creepily emotionless hit-man brought out to L.A. for an important contract and given two wheelman/watchers: Herschel Bernardi as the older, thoughtful type, and Philip Pine, immature and loud-mouthed.

   And again, it’s the relationships between the principals that livens the story, even as Ben Simcoe’s screenplay zips things along. Like THE LINE-UP, CONTRACT breaks the story down into three segments, as Edwards & Co. make tries on their target, with deadly results.

   But where THE LINEUP gets mired in detail, MURDER BY CONTRACT will have none of that — maybe because it was made for roots & berries. Whatever the case, CONTRACT cuts the narrative down to its bare bones, with elliptical editing, cramped sets and spare background music by Perry Botkin that literally underscores the killer’s alienation.

   And when, like Dancer in THE LINEUP, Claude finds himself alone, his physical solitude is a mere formality. He always was an outcast.
   

FLORENCE M. PETTEE – The Exploits of Beau Quicksilver. Altus Press, 2018. Story collection; reprinted from Argosy All-Story Weekly, February 24 through April 7, 1923.

   Before there was Philo Vance there was Beau Quicksilver, who adventured in seven consecutive issues of Argosy under the guiding hand of mystery writer and pulpster Florence M. Pettee, his rare adventures reprinted for the first time by Altus Press.

   We open as Chief Cartman leaps into a car to race to Quicksilver’s home, where his servant Shunta guards his privacy, to hopefully offer him a case he can’t resist, and of course he can’t because there is no story if he does. Still we share in Cartman’s discomfort having heard his description of our sleuth: …a real tiger when in one of his moods. Yet again he would weep at the mere sound of pathetic music. An obtuse riddle, Quicksilver! A regular Sphinx at times, and then affably human. Nobody ever knew where to find him next.

   Yet all Beau has to hear is that Carl Whitney has been found slain at the Whitney mansion and he literally leaps to his feet from his lethargy and responds with boundless energy. Quicksilver temperament indeed. Beau could give Prince Zaleski a run in the languorous department and Sherlock Holmes a cocaine-spiked energy high when he is fully engaged.

   Carl Whitney has been shot while eating his midnight repast and Beau’s attention is drawn to the imprint of a bicuspid in a piece of cheese. There are no shortage of suspects, including a gambler, a jewel thief known as the Falcon and his gluttonous associate Peter Scarlet.

   Alas, Beau doesn’t so much solve the crime as simply know and then provide a more or less ridiculous solution involving a falling out between thieves and a false pair of dentures used to frame a suspect.

   Wilfrid Huntington Wright’s rules of Detection are not in play here, the Detection Club would not be amused, and even Sexton Blake might be taken aback by the rapidity with which Beau leaps to his brilliant conclusions, past both logic and detection and seemingly being personally connected to every criminal extant.

   No lost classics of detective fiction here. Beau Quicksilver may act like Philo Vance, but he detects more like Lamont Cranston or Richard Curtis Van Loan, which is not to say the stories aren’t written in a curious but readable style so breathless you may need oxygen reading them. Come to think of it the Cranston connection isn’t entirely out of place.

   At best Beau Quicksilver is a footnote in both the field of detectives and pulp heroes, but not an uninteresting one, more at home in Gun in Cheek than Haycraft, but not unentertaining for that.

   â€œThe Hand of the Hyena” is the best of the lot for my money:

   In the true spirit of the pulps it is hard not to keep reading at that point. Philo Vance never got mail like that.

      The stories:

Tooth For a Tooth. Argosy All-Story Weekly, February 24, 1923
Eye For an Eye. March 3, 1923
Claws of the Weasel. March 10, 1923
The Hand of the Hyena. March 17, 1923
The Green Rajah. March 24, 1923
Blistering Tongues. March 31, 1923
Murder Ingognito. April 7, 1923