MERLE CONSTINER – Two Pistols South of Deadwood. Ace Double G-674, paperback original, 1967. Published back-to-back with No Man’s Brand, by William Vance.

   While writing for the pulps in the 1940s, Merle Constiner’s stories appeared primarily in the detective magazines. He had two long-running series about PIs, the first being the semi-scurrilous Dean Wardlow Rock, aka “The Dean,” whose many adventures were recorded in the pages of Dime Detective. The second was Memphis-based Luther McGavock, stories about whom showed up in Black Mask magazine on a regular basis.

   When the pulps started dying out, Constiner was one of the writers who successfully managed the transition over to novel-length fiction. As he did so, however, he made a sudden change of direction and decided to make his mark instead with westerns. In his entire career he wrote but one detective novel, that being Hearse of a Different Color, for the second- or third-rate and hardly prestigious Phoenix Press.

   Even so, many of his western novels had elements of detective fiction in them, some more than others. In Two Pistols South of Deadwood, for example, they show up only in a very minor way. When a bank is robbed in Hartsburg (somewhere south of Deadwood), all of trapper Kinney Lampson’s accumulated savings go with it, giving him no choice but to after the leader of the gang, a notorious outlaw named Lucas Gambrell, on his own.

   Along the trail he picks up a companion, a man who’s fast with a gun named Gatling. As it turns out, Gatling works for Gambrell, but a friendship between the two develops, eventually leading to a partnership of sorts, and they have several boisterous adventures on their way to the lawless town of Merriman, where Gambrell makes his headquarters.

   Kinney is one of those larger-than-life characters that populate western folklore, and Constiner’s sly understated sense of humor makes this book stand out from many other westerns of the era, all of which took themselves a lot more seriously.

   From page 25, Gatling happens to ask, hypothetically speaking:

   And what happened to Kinney’s money, and does he ever get it back? There are many stumbling blocks to overcome, and some intricate bits of misdirection by Gambrell, of all people, but yes, Kinney Lampson and his new comrade in arms are definitely up to the task.

THE WALDHEIM WALTZ. Ruth Beckermann Filmproduktion, Austria, 2018. Original title: Waldheims Walzer. Written, directed and narrated by Ruth Beckermann.

   The best documentaries are often those that sneak up on you, that don’t insult your intelligence or utilize inflammatory footage to get you momentarily agitated and angry. No. The best ones make their points slowly and carefully, meticulously building their case and allowing the viewer to play the role of juror. After all, it’s the job of the documentarian to document. The audience’s role is to deliver a verdict, so to speak, on both the film as a work of art and toward the subject matter of the project.

   And my verdict and that of the movie theater audience where I saw the film, as far as the subject matter of The Waldheim Waltz, is undoubtedly guilty. Guilty not necessarily of a specific action, but a sense of moral culpability, made even worse by decades of lying, obfuscation, and general aloofness and smugness masked by an urbane facade .

   Ruth Beckermann’s documentary skillfully interweaves footage from the Austrian street during an impassioned election season with international news reports to document the controversy surrounding Kurt Waldheim’s run for the Austrian presidency in 1985-86. The question posed by the film is this. Was this man, so admired in the world of international diplomacy and comfortable in Manhattan salons, really not who he said he was? Did the man who proclaimed that he spent much of the Second World War studying law in Vienna really spend those years working for a Nazi war criminal that oversaw the deportation of Salonika’s Jewish population to Auschwitz?

   The film works as a slow boil, steadily building up the heat, culminating in a fascinatingly surreal scene in Congress in which Congressman Tom Lantos, himself a Hungarian Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, tells Waldheim’s son that no one believes the absurd lies propagated by his father.

   But the question ultimately posed by the film isn’t whether anyone believes Waldheim’s fabrications and explanations. It’s whether Austrian voters did in 1986 when they ultimately decided to vote him into office. The film, while touching upon the international scope of the Waldheim Affair, is fundamentally a story about Austrian post-war society and Austrian identity.

   A compelling story, to be sure. But one that only barely scratched the surface of what was, to my mind, one of the most insidious aspects of Waldheim’s career. How was it that a former Nazi ended up not only in charge of the United Nations without anyone seriously looking into his biography, but utilized his position to legitimate Yasser Arafat and the PLO in the eyes of the world?

TOM CLANCY’S JACK RYAN. “Pilot.” Season 1, Episode 1. Streaming on Amazon Video, beginning on August 31, 2018. (All eight episodes were available on the same date.) Based on a character created by Tom Clancy. John Krasinski (Jack Ryan), Wendell Pierce (James Greer, Ryan’s boss at the CIA), Ali Suliman (Mousa Bin Suleiman), Dina Shihabi (Hanin Ali, Suleiman’s wife), Abbie Cornish (Cathy Mueller, Ryan’s girl friend). Director: Morten Tyldum.

   The place to see action thrillers such as this has definitely shifted from the movies to cable and streaming TV, no doubt about it. Previous versions of Jack Ryan stories have starred Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck and Chris Pine, but the point to emphasize is that they appeared in movies made for the big screen. This latest version is a solid indicator as to which way the future is going, if indeed it isn’t already there.

   I’ve seen only this first episode, but if anyone wanted to, all eight could have been watched in one long evening from the very beginning — all were available at the same time, which is just another way series TV is changing. Before our eyes, so to speak!

   If this were a comic book, this first episode would be considered Jack Ryan’s “origin story,” for it goes back to his early days at the CIA, where he’s a financial transactions analyst covering the Middle East. Boring, yes, but when he uncovers millions of dollars in funds accumulated covertly over a short period of time, it tells him him that another Osama bin Laden may be on his way — an Islamic terrorist named Suleiman — his life is, as they say, turned upside down.

   At first his new boss at the CIA, James Greer, disparages Ryan’s conclusions, but soon enough Ryan is hustled off to Yemen to help interrogate two suspects that have been picked up there on the basis of ordinary surveillance. At which point all hell, in terms of guns, bombs and every other kind of firepower you can think of, breaks loose.

   There is more to the story, of course, but I can’t tell you anything more, since this all I’ve seen. I’m sure most of the primary threads of the story line to come have already been planted, but no more than that. Everything is extremely well done. The locations look authentic, the acting is top notch, and the explosions and all are impressive as anything I’ve seen in the past, big screen or small.

   Maybe I have to sign up with Amazon. I’ll definitely start sampling more of their various series while I can, and see if I can’t finish this one. You might say I’m hooked, and all they need to do is reel me in.

      The Jack Ryan series —

The Hunt for Red October. Alec Baldwin. 1990.
Patriot Games. Harrison Ford. 1992.
Clear and Present Danger. Harrison Ford. 1994.
The Sum of All Fears. Ben Affleck. 2002.
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Chris Pine. 2014.
Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. John Krasinski. 2018.

RICHARD C. SMITH – A Secret Singing. James Maxfield Mallory #1. Dutton, hardcover, 1988. Signet AE5969, paperback, September 1989.

   The problem with this book is that there are too many lawyers in it. While its hero, John Maxfield Mallory, is a PI, he’s also a Harvard grad who went to law school for a year. His lady friend Julie is an up-and-coming corporate attorney. Some of his best contacts are lawyers. Even one of his prime suspects (a case of murder) is a lawyer.

   And it’s no wonder, since author Richard C. Smith is a lawyer himself, and the story he tells in A Secret Singing takes place a long way from Boston’s nastier streets. This urban, citified PI adventure hints at only a few of the upper class’s darkest secrets, however. Spenser has nothing to worry about.

Bibliographic Note:  Mallory’s second and final case outing was Wild Justice (St. Martin’s, 1990; no paperback edition).

THE PHANTOM SPEAKS. Republic, 1945. Richard Arlen, Stanley Ridges, Lynne Roberts, Tom Powers and Charlotte Wynters. Written by John K. Butler. Directed by John English.

THE MAN WITH TWO LIVES. Monogram, 1942. Edward Norris, Addison Richards, Marlo Dwyer, Eleanor Lawson, and Edward Keane. Written by Joseph Hoffman. Directed by Phil Rosen.

   Back in 1940, Universal made BLACK FRIDAY, which you may read about here. It’s about a gangster resurrected in the brain and body of a respectable professor (Stanley Ridges) and I have nothing to add to that review except that the story itself was resurrected twice by other studios.

   PHANTOM SPEAKS is the most obvious crib, with plot trajectory, minor details and characters lifted directly from the earlier film. More to the point, Stanley Ridges repeats his role as the gentle man of learning possessed by the spirit of a dead guy — increasing the eerie feeling of a movie come back to haunt us.

   In this case he’s rather asked for it, since he’s doing research into the paranormal and taken the logical (in spooky movies) step of contacting a killer on Death Row (Tom Powers, who was memorably offed by Fred MacMurray in DOUBLE INDEMNITY) and urging him to make contact from the beyond. Ridges makes himself receptive to Powers’ spirit, then finds the dead man’s will too strong to resist, sending us into BLACK FRIDAY territory, right up to a gritty ending back on Death Row, where the earlier film ended up as well.

   All this is directed with more energy and finesse that it deserves by John English, Republic’s serial ace, who throws in some noirish bits and keeps things moving, moving, moving, with the happy result of a film easier to watch & enjoy than you’d think.

   In between times, Monogram stuck in its tawdry oar with THE MAN WITH TWO LIVES, which is at once less polished and more interesting than either PHANTOM SPEAKS or BLACK FRIDAY.

   In this case, Edward Norris plays one of those bright young men you see in the movies, unfortunate enough to get run over by a car (another nod to BLACK FRIDAY) and killed outright. Fortunately for him and the story, his dad knows a doctor who has been experimenting with resuscitating dead animals, and he persuades his old buddy to have a go at sonny boy.

   The experiment succeeds, but just at that moment, a nasty gangster is executed for his crimes, and his spirit — well you figured that out. This Monogram film is a shabby take-off on BLACK FRIDAY, but considerably grittier, with Norris taking over the dead man’s gang, bedding his floozy and leading the boys on an abortive heist that turns deadly.

    There’s even a bit of intelligent writing and deft playing in a tense cat-and-mouse exchange, with Norris holding a gun on the police detective (Addison Richards) who has him surrounded, each trying to talk his way around the other with an eye out for the main chance.

   All of which does very little to dispel the feeling of cheap imitation that was a hallmark at Monogram: the sets are shabby, the camera work perfunctory, and the direction largely absent. Yet I find myself fascinated by the notion that BLACK FRIDAY, like its monster, never really died.
   

JEFFERY WILDS DEAVER – Hard News. Rune #3. Doubleday, hardcover, 1991. Bantam, paperback, June 1992.

   Rune, not her real name, but the name she goes by, is an aspiring photojournalist and filmmaker living in a houseboat on the Hudson River in Manhattan. She’s in her early 20s, and as taken from Jeffrey Deaver’s website, she’s “five feet two inches of slick repartee, near-purple hair, and poetic imagination” with “with more ambition than political savvy.”

   A description which doesn’t entirely do her justice, but it’s close enough. In Hard News, after watching a videotaped interview with him, she becomes convinced that a convict named Randy Boggs is actually innocent of the murder he claims he didn’t commit.

   Where does she take her story on him to prove his innocence? Directly to Piper Sutton, the news anchorwoman for Current Events, one of the mostly highly watched TV news programs on the air. Somehow she manages to persuade Sutton to go ahead with the project. (It may have something to do with the fact that the man murdered was the head of the network at the time.)

   All to the good. But do things go smoothly? In a word, no. She does manage to stir up a lot of trouble for both herself and the man in prison. Rune’s life style is, shall we say, somewhat unique, making for a story that’s a lot of fun to read. What makes it even more so is the fact she does all of the work on her project burdened down by a three-year-old girl whose mother abandoned her in Rune’s care.

   Even as early as this in his career Jeffery Deaver, well-known now as the author of a long list of books about quadriplegic detective Lincoln Rhyme, had a way with words, turns of phrases and twists in the tale he’s telling that titillates the reader’s mind and teases one’s brain. The story, while rushed in the ending, isn’t at all bad either.

Bibliographic Note: At the end of the paperback edition, which I’ve just read, the next Rune book was announced as being The Mystery of You, to be released in January 1993. The book was never published. I wonder if it was ever written.

       The Rune series —

Manhattan Is My Beat. Bantam 1989
Death of a Blue Movie Star. Bantam 1990
Hard News. Doubleday 1991

IONE SANDBERG SHRIBER – Pattern for Murder. Lt. Bill Grady #7. Farrar & Rinehart, hardcover, 1944. Detective Book Club, hardcover reprint, 3-in-1 edition. Armed Services Edition #798, paperback. Mercury Mystery #113, digest-sized paperback (slightly abridged).

   With all of the above options available, unfortunately I had to settle for the one that was abridged. I’ve never checked to see what kind of editing job was done by the people at Mercury and their line of mystery paperbacks, but I’m hoping I didn’t miss too much with this one. I don’t think so, but I’m saying that with my fingers crossed.

   And a word about Grady, the police detective on the case. He appeared in eight of of the eleven mysteries written by author Ione Sandberg Shriber between 1940 and 1953. In Pattern for Murder he’s almost always referred to only as Grady. His first name of Bill is used only once, as I recall. Once he’s called Major, never as Lt. Grady, but other sources all agree that that’s his proper title.

   The use of “Major” may have come from his Army days; he’s accompanied on his investigation in this one by a chap named Hemingway who lives with Grady and appears to be a sort of aide-de-camp. Readers of earlier books in the series may know more about both gentlemen, but this is not the kind of mystery novel that pays any attention to its detective’s background or personal life.

   And in fact he does not show up or is even mentioned until page 49 of the 126 page edition I read. It takes that long to set up the situation — one of those very, very dysfunctional that show up awfully often in 1930s and 40s mystery fiction — and believe it or not, I was looking at the page number, which just happened to be 47, when I was trying to decide whether to keep reading or not.

   I’m glad I did, though. This turned out to be quite a decent work of detective fiction, with lots of suspects, alibis, red herrings and so on. The story is largely told from the perspective of an outsider, Miss Katy Sturtevant, who comes to the home of an old college friend to be the maid of honor at her wedding.

   But her friend is not marrying the man Katy expects, but her guardian, who is many years only. The man Katy expected to be the groom is already married, as it turns out, and to the daughter of Shannon’s guardian. There are several other relatives on hand as well, including a sister, an aunt and a cousin, only the latter of whom seems to be leading a normal life, plus a ultra-fat gentleman who turns out to be the family lawyer, along with a nurse and a missionary to China in the US now trying to raise funds for a trip back.

   Once started, though, the focus is which one of these could be a killer. It’s enjoyable ride, albeit a very somewhat disjointed one. As an author, Shriber has an annoying habit of ending one chapter with what seems to be a major revelation, only to jump in time to begin the next one. It’s a bit disconcerting, that’s all, no more than that, I assure you. Fans of the books published by the late lamented Rue MOrgue Press will love this one.

       The Lt. Bill Grady series —

The Dark Arbor. Farrar 1940
Head Over Heels in Murder, Farrar 1940
Family Affair. Farrar 1941
Murder Well Done. Farrar 1941
A Body for Bill. Farrar 1942
Invitation to Murder. Farrar 1943
Pattern for Murder. Farrar 1944
The Last Straw. Rinehart 1946

  WENDI LEE – The Good Daughter. Angela Matelli #1. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1994; paperback, 1996.

   Lee is [at the time of this review] the Associate Editor of Mystery Scene, and is married to Terry Beatty. artist of the Max Allan Collins-written crime comic, Ms. Tree. This is her first novel, though she has published short stories featuring Angela Matelli.

   Matelli is an ex-Marine, member of an extended Italian family, and a brand-new PI hanging out her shingle in Boston. She has an ex-cop uncle (“No-Legs” Charley), and a mother and a good sister and a bad sister. Her first case comes to her on her first day through the auspices of the previously mentioned uncle — an ex-cop friend of his wants Angela to investigate a man his daughter is seeing, because he has a bad feeling about him. Something is wrong somewhere. because very quickly her client is killed and Angela herself is attacked.

   A brief aside, telling you that the client is killed is exactly the sort of plat point that I don’t like to see revealed in reviews, but the cover copy gives it away, so why not?Blurb writers are worse than reviewers, sometimes. Often.

   This wasn’t bad. It has the typical focus on family/friend relationships that’s part of almost every mystery write by women, and here they verge on being, but aren’t quite, the irritating kind that ruin so many of the current crop of crime books for me.

   Matelli is a nicely drawn and appealing character, and already stands out from the crowd by not falling for a cop or a suspect in her first book. Lee’s writing is competent and her pacing good, and if she doesn’t know Boston like the back of her hand, she fakes the hell out of it,

   The plot was decent except for one major hole: the client could gave easily done what Matelli did, which was go to a friend on the police and have the background on the suspect dug up. Overall I don’t think Lee is or has the potential to be a threat to any of the top-line PI writers, but she’s certainly better than some.

The Angela Matelli series —

   Novels:

The Good Daughter (1994)
Missing Eden (1996)
Deadbeat (1999)
He Who Dies (2000)
Habeas Campus (2002)

   Short stories:

“Salad Days” (Winter 1994, Noir)
“The Disappearance of Edna Guberman” (1994, Murder For Mother)
“Check Up” (1996, Lethal Ladies)
“The Other Woman” (1997, Vengeance Is Hers)

JAMES KIERAN – Come Murder Me. Gold Medal #150, paperback original, 1951; #419, 2nd printing, 1954.

   Whee-eew. Here’s the kind of story that simply takes your breath away, for sheer audacity of plot, if nothing else. A man with a split personality — the kind that kicks up on him whenever his lady friend walks out on him — blanks out and hires an unknown killer. The target: himself.

   There’s another girl in the story. She’s a witness to a cop killing in California, and she’s got a gunman on her trail, too. Guess whose apartment she takes refuge in? The tangled plot lines are told in a pulpy sort of fashion and are great fun, but I also have to add that there aren’t any great surprises either.

FOOTNOTE:   This is the same John Kieran who was the brother of Helen Reilly, and who is described in Barzun & Taylor as a journalist and radio star. This was his only crime novel. [He died the year after this book was published.] It might also be worth pointing out that two of Reilly’s daughters were Ursula Curtiss and Mary McMullen. I wonder what the family talked about at the breakfast table.

[UPDATE] 11/20/18.   Observant readers of this blog will immediately recognize that the basic plot line is the same as that of Paid to Kill, the movie reviewed just before this one. Believe it or not, this was almost entirely coincidental.