A CLIMATE FOR KILLING. Black Crow Productions / Propaganda Films, 1991. John Beck, Katharine Ross, Steven Bauer, Mia Sara, Phil Brock. Written and directed by J. S. Cardone.

   I led a sheltered life through the 1990s. Before watching this movie, at the heart of which is a better-than-average murder mystery, I’d heard of only one of the members of the cast. Check the listing above, and you can probably tell which one that was. But between them all, they probably appeared in well over a hundred movies, many of them like this one, most of them without a lot of pretensions and with budgets, shall we say, on the skimpy side.

   The story. Found in the desert in Yuma County, Arizona, is the body of decapitated woman. Her hands have been removed as well, making it difficult if not impossible to identify her. Luckily Grace Hines, the local coroner (played by Katharine Ross), recognizes the birthmark on her thigh. Unluckily she can tell no one but Paul McCraw of the sheriff’s office (John Beck) since she saw the mark while performing an illegal abortion on the woman many years before.

   Which gets us to the core of the matter. Now the problem is the fact that the woman was presumed dead 15 years before. She was presumed murdered by her much older husband, who committed suicide later the same week in a fit of remorse. Written out like this, I think you may be able to put two and two together and get close to four faster than the investigators on the case manage to do, but it’s still an interesting challenge.

   Filling out the running time, though, is a subplot that arises when a young investigator (Steven Bauer) arrives at sheriff’s office tasked by a government office in Phoenix to “modernize” their operations there. Problem is that he’s a “by the books” kind of guy, and McCraw likes to work on “instinct.” Matters get even more complicated when the new guy starts taking out McCraw’s daughter.

   This part of the story is filler at best, but it does add another dimension to it. I watched the movie last week, but I recorded it from Cinemax on a VHS tape some 25 years ago. It has the ambience and basic ingredients of a made-for-TV movie, but it turns out it was not, as evidenced by a topless dancer in a local bar in one scene, and one rather graphic sex scene toward the end of the movie. Both gratuitous? Yes, of course they are.

MIKE BOND – The Last Savanna. Mandevilla Press, paperback, 2013.

   Mike Bond’s The Last Savanna more than satisfies two of my favorite genres, the African novel and the classic adventure story as pioneered by the likes of Buchan and brought to its high point in the Post War era by writers like Hammond Innes, Victor Canning, and Elleston Trevor.

   Bond has been writing for a while and producing books of classic adventure that are both modern in voice and story, and beautifully written in prose both as hard as the men he writes about and lyrical as his finely realized settings with titles like Killing Maine, Holy War, and House of Jaguar.

   At issue in this one are the horrors of post Colonial Africa, torn by poverty, war, terrorism, and uncertainty. The plot follows three people, McAdam, a former SAS soldier turned protector of wildlife and hunter of the poachers who are destroying the legacy of African wildlife and funding terrorism with the money they make. Rebecca is a white woman McAdam will encounter as the hunt for the poachers tightens, and one he falls in love for after years of a bitter loveless marriage. Finally there is Warwar, one of the poachers, a young African limited in his choices who becomes hunted and hunter as the harsh landscape turns the tables on the two sides.

   Set on the border between Kenya and Ethiopia, the novel is unrelenting in its portrait of the modern African reality, of what the continent faces and the struggle of human and wildlife to survive the increasingly few resources.

   Bond balances his lyricism with hard-boiled writing and an unbiased view of the world, of tough men doing tough jobs and sometimes becoming too hardened to them, of men making wrong choices both because they have to few chances and the lure of easy wealth. It isn’t an easy world or a reassuring one he writes of, and the results aren’t often pretty, but he writes the adventure novel as well as I have seen it written for a while.

LARS ANDERSON “The Domino Lady Collects.” Short story. Domino Lady #1. Originally published in Saucy Romantic Adventures, May 1936. Collected in Compliments of the Domino Lady (Bold Venture Press, 2004). Reprinted in The Big Book of Female Detectives, edited by Otto Penzler (Black Lizard, 2018).

   Not the first paragraph of the story, but close to the beginning, and introducing the first recorded adventure of The Domino Lady!

   Fairly tame stuff, by today’s standards, but while I don’t know for sure, I suspect that at a lot of newsstands in 1936, you had to ask if they carried copies of Saucy Romantic Adventures, and if you didn’t look like some kind of close-minded law enforcement officer, they might have been able to sell you one from under the counter.

   Copies of the magazine that have survived until today go for large amounts of money. Scarcity and high demand. Simple economics. It certainly can’t be great literature that buyers are looking for.

   In the Penzler edition, the story is only eight pages long, barely enough to introduce the character, describe what it is that motivate her to dress up in style but adding a domino mask to keep her real identity a secret. She also has a job she has been asked to do, which she does most efficiently (some indiscreet letters must be retrieved). She has vengeance on her mind, to avenge the killing of her father at the hands of the “state machine.” That the villain in this piece is not jailed or otherwise inconvenienced by her intrusion into his home may mean the story continues right on into the next one.

   It’s a mere trifle, nothing more, and when it comes down to it, the writing is nothing to get excited about, D-level at best. Lars Anderson may have been a house name. If he was a real person, nothing solid seems to be known about him, but that his semi-sexy tales are being reprinted — and that stories of the character he created continue to be written by other hands — does say something about his ability to capture the minds of readers still young at heart. A little nostalgia for days past doesn’t hurt either.

      The original Domino Lady series —

The Domino Lady Collects. Saucy Romantic Adventures, May 1936
The Domino Lady Doubles Back. Saucy Romantic Adventures, June 1936
The Domino Lady’s Handicap. Saucy Romantic Adventures, July 1936
Emeralds Aboard. Saucy Romantic Adventures, August 1936
Black Legion. Saucy Romantic Adventures, October 1936
The Domino Lady’s Double. Mystery Adventure Magazine, November 1936

THE WHITE TOWER. RKO, 1950. Glenn Ford, Alida Valli, Lloyd Bridges, Claude Rains, Oscar Homolka, Sir Cedric Hardwicke. Screenplay by Paul Jarrico, from the novel by James Ramsay Ullman. Art Direction by Ralph Berger. Directed by Ted Tetzlaff.

   A sparkling gem of a film, easy to watch and dazzling to behold.

   The story is of a disparate group of mountaineers who set out to climb a mountain known as the White Tower, each for his or her own reasons. Jarrico’s screenplay sketches them out capably, and in the hands of top-notch players (check out that cast) they come to life with subtle nuance. I particularly liked the way the characters each reacted differently to Lloyd Bridges as the able and indispensible member of the team who turns out to be an unreconstructed Nazi and a complete jerk besides.

   TOWER wastes a bit too much time getting them all started up the mountain, but the rich Technicolor imagery of the beautiful Alpine countryside — gorgeouser than which there is nothing — makes the time pass pleasantly And once they start the climb…

   Let me digress a bit: Director Ted Tetzlaff knew how to milk a story, as witness THE WINDOW (1949) but he was primarily a cinematographer, with impressive films like NOTORIOUS and THE ENCHANTED COTTAGE to his credit. His cinematographer here was Ray Rennahan, who could look back with pride on DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK, BLOOD AND SAND and DUEL IN THE SUN. And the sets (more on that later) were designed by Ralph Berger, who was responsible for the catchy visual backgrounds of WHITE ZOMBIE, THE LOST CITY, ON DANGEROUS GROUND and the first FLASH GORDON serial.

   Well, when three visual stylists like this get together, you can expect something special and they do not disappoint. The actual climbing is done in long shot by stunt doubles, but the way Tetzlaff and Rennahan capture the action, one never stops to think about that — at least this one didn’t; I was too busy gasping at the sight of them dangling from ledges and clawing at crevices to think about stunt doubles.

   When we see the stars in close-up on the mountain, it’s mostly in studio “exteriors” and it’s here where set-maker Berger really shines. I guess I knew on some level that Glenn Ford and Lloyd Bridges weren’t really hunkering down in a wind-lashed tent or clinging for their lives to fragile toe-holds in the snow, but that never occurred to me as I watched them doing it — the illusion is that good.

   WHITE TOWER ends as it started, with a bit too much Movie after the Story is over, but again there’s plenty of pretty pitchers to look at as you scrape the last husks of popcorn from your bag, and I can’t think of a better way to fill up the time.

CRIMSON TIDE. Buena Vista Pictures, 1995. Denzel Washington, Gene Hackman, Matt Craven, George Dzundza, Viggo Mortensen, James Gandolfini, Rocky Carroll. Director: Tony Scott.

   Postmodern inter-textual awareness is the name of the game in Crimson Tide, a Tony Scott-directed war movie set almost exclusively on board an American nuclear submarine. There’s dialogue early on in the film, due largely to uncredited rewrites by Quentin Tarantino, that deliberately makes the viewer sit up, pay attention, and acknowledge that they are watching not only a war movie, but a specific sub-genre within that genre: the submarine film.

   As members of the crew wait upon a bus ready to transport them to the submarine, they engage in casual banter about submarine movies, referencing not only Robert Mitchum and Curt Jurgens in The Enemy Below (1957), but also Cary Grant’s appearance in submarine films and Robert Wise’s Run Silent, Run Deep (1958) starring Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster.

   The question is, why? Why have characters draw attention to the fact that their mission parallels stories told in cinematic war classics? It’s not typical for an action film to consciously draw that much attention to itself. But in this case, it not only works, but it works extraordinarily well in giving the proceedings a real edge. It serves to tell the viewer that what they’re about to watch doesn’t stand alone, but is part of a larger tradition in American war cinema.

   That’s not say that the movie wouldn’t have worked without this pop culture postmodern awareness. Far from it. Stars Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington are both on the top of their game as officers on board the U.S.S. Alabama. The two men couldn’t be more different. Captain Frank Ramsey (Hackman) is a jaded, solitary man, his only friend in the world his dog. He sees the world as a dark, hostile place and believes it’s the duty of Naval officers to destroy the enemy before the enemy destroys you.

   Lieutenant Commander Ron Hunter (Washington) is younger, more cerebral, and a family man who believes that, in the nuclear age, the real enemy is war itself. When the crew is ordered to make preparations for a preemptive nuclear attack on a rogue Russian military base, it’s only a matter of time between the two men’s worldviews come into stark conflict.

   Well-directed and superbly acted, Crimson Tide also benefits immensely from a score by Hans Zimmer. Fans of The Sopranos and NCIS will appreciate seeing James Gandolfini and Rocky Carroll in supporting roles.

   As much as I enjoyed the movie – particularly the manner in which Hackman embodies his character with such gruff, stubborn conviction – I can’t say that it’s a film that necessitates repeated viewings. But for a fun, exciting ride, Crimson Tide delivers all the goods that one would want in an action film that doesn’t remotely insult the viewer’s intelligence.

BILL CRIDER – Dying Voices. Carl Burns #2. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1989. No paperback edition.

   A return visit with Carl Burns, English professor at Hartley Gorman College, somewhere in Texas. (Well, Pecan City, wherever that is.) He’s put in charge of a seminar honoring HGC’s most famous former faculty member, bestselling author Edward Street, a man hardly changed by the success he’s had since.

   He’s till as obnoxious as ever, that is, and he’s threatening to wrote another blockbuster novel, this one based on his days at HGC, truthfully or not. He’s found dead the next morning. The killer is easy to spot but the laugh on every page makes this one next to impossible to resist.

   I should warn you, though, that some of the jokes and stories are of a decidedly academic nature, and the one on page 117 is so technical that I confess I still haven’t been able to figure it out.

        The Carl Burns series —

1. One Dead Dean (1988)
2. Dying Voices (1989)
3. A Dangerous Thing (1994)
4. Dead Soldiers (2004)

JOHN ANGUS – The Monster Squad. Cat O’Neil #1. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1994. No paperback edition.

   Angus was born in Germany, has been a bartender and a security guard, and now is a computer programmer. Interesting background. This is his first novel.

   Caitllin (“Cat”) O’Neil was a LAPD vice cop for six years, until she shot a perp and then decked her Captain for making unwelcome advances. Now she’s a Deputy Sheriff in Madison, Oregon, and in charge of the Dog Shift, which is populated by a group of mixed miscreants known as “The Monster Squad.”

   After her time on the mean streets of L.A. she’s no shrinking violet, and that’s just as well — the group she’s supervising gives new meaning to the words “crude,” “vulgar,” “sexist,” and “tough.” Not long after she’s begun to try to whip them into some sort of shape, one of her crew is found murdered in his squad car, and links with him and a prostitution ring surface, Maybe L.A. Vice wasn’t so bad after all.

   Well, this was different. O’Neil is tough as a frozen corn cob and obscenities peg out around 1,000 on the nasty-talk scale. It’s not really a very nice book at all, dealing as it does with teenage prostitution and various other unsavory subjects.

   I’d call it macho is the lead weren’t female; macha, maybe? It’s well-written from a prose/packing standpoint, though there’s no lyrical prose (unless the f-, s-, p-, c-, etc. words strike you as lyrical, in which case it’s a whole songbook) and no characterization of any depth beyond O’Neil herself.

   Despite the fact of the lead being a strong female character, I can’t see this appealing much to women — but then, I’ve been wrong a few thousand times before about what women like.

Bibliographic Update:   This was the only book in the series, and in fact, John Angus’s single work of crime fiction.

UNDERCOVER GIRL. Butcher’s Films, UK, 1957. United Artists, US, 1958. Paul Carpenter, Kay Callard, Monica Grey, Bruce Seton, Jackie Collins, Maya Koumani. Director: Francis Searle.

   If you start watching this movie waiting for a girl to go under cover in any way, shape or form, you’re going to wait for a long, long time. There isn’t one. Don’t hold your breath. It never happens. Not even close.

   Now that I have that out of the way, let me ask (and answer) another question I had: Is this a forgotten film noir, as I was informed when I bought my strictly collector-to-collector at some long ago forgotten pulp or movie convention? In a word, no. It’s a black and white crime film, made in UK, and that’s all it is. And while it can hold your interest all the way through, if it had stayed forgotten, except by collectors who collect every movie even closely related to noir, no one would ever have reason to regret the fact.

   There is a skill, a technique, an art, if you will, in making a black and white film that is mostly lost today, and many of the crime films of this era, both US and UK, can display flashes of noir lighting, set design and so on without being noir films at all. Such is the case here.

   When the brother-in-law of Johnny Carter (Paul Carpenter), a journalist for a weekly news magazine, is murdered, it is assumed that it was because he was digging too deeply into the case he was working on. Carpenter is warned off the investigation by his editor, but does he heed the warning? Of course not, and his snooping around on his own turns up a gang of sophisticated blackmailers. By sheer coincidence one of their victims is the sister (Jackie Collins) of Carpenter’s very close lady friend (Kay Callard).

   The story is well told, but it’s a simple one and very slow moving. To fill out the full running time, just over an hour, a totally extraneous photo shoot with the reigning Miss Brazil is, well, interesting and fun to look at, but as I say, in no way is it essential to the tale.

THE STRANGER. RKO Radio Pictures, 1946. Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, Orson Welles, Philip Merivale, Richard Long. Director: Orson Welles.

   Orson Welles’ The Stranger, the auteur’s most commercially successful production, is a movie about evil. More specifically, it’s a film about the capacity of evil to mask itself in respectable bourgeois garb, to hide inconspicuously in plain sight.

   Although linear in its narrative, The Stranger makes ample use of unique camera movements and stylistic flourishes commonly associated with film noir. And as in films noir, Welles’s choice of non-traditional camera angles and use of shadows and lighting to convey impending menace serves to give the film a semi-nightmarish feeling, one that conveys to the viewer that there is something fundamentally not quite right with post-war American and its norms of surface level respectability.

   As an actor in the film, Welles is on less solid ground. While his portrayal of the Nazi war criminal Franz Kindler, now hiding in Connecticut under the name Charles Rankin, is captivating in its depiction of how seemingly ordinary men can be capable of committing atrocities, it’s also fundamentally flawed. Welles is just a bit too American in his mannerisms throughout as well as in his desperate fear of being caught by the Nazi hunter Wilson (Edward G. Robinson).

   This prevents him from fully disappearing into his character. To be fair, Welles was portraying a Nazi war criminal that was merely pretending to be nothing more than a respectable teacher at a New England boys’ school, one who married the daughter (Loretta Young) of one of the town’s leading public figures.

   There’s much more I could say about The Stranger, but I hesitate to say too much without viewing the film for a second, or even perhaps third, time. There’s a lot going on in the film, much more than I suspect movie audiences saw in 1946 or that I saw upon my first viewing of the Kino Classics DVD version.

   That said, two aspects of the film bear mentioning. The first is the scene in which there is a film within the film. It takes place in a typical upper class Connecticut home in which Mr. Wilson (Robinson) shows both the town judge and his daughter footage from the Nazi concentration camps. This was actual footage and was taken from Death Mills (1945), a documentary film on the Holocaust produced by director Billy Wilder, who himself lost his mother in Auschwitz. This was the first time actual footage of the Holocaust was utilized in Hollywood film.

   The second concerns a quirky aspect of Orson Welles’ character, namely his obsession with clocks. It’s a recurring theme throughout the film and one that Welles, as director, utilizes skillfully to dramatize the fact that as Nazi hunter Wilson closes in on him, time is running out for Franz Kindler and his perverted notion of restoring the Third Reich.

CLEVE F. ADAMS – Shady Lady. Rex McBride #6. Ace Double D-115, paperback original, 1955. Published back-to-back with One Got Away by Harry Whittington.

   [The first paragraph of this review, written back in 1994, consisted of some conjecture about the background of the book, when it was written and by whom. In the comments following Mike Nevins’ 1001 Midnights review of the book, posted here, Steve Mertz told of some correspondence he had with Mrs. Adams in the 1970s. in which she told him that “After Adams died, (Robert Leslie) Bellem and W. T. Ballard, who were collaborators, stepped in to help Mrs. Adams through a difficult time by expanding and selling as books the pulp stories that became No Wings on a Cop and Shady Lady.”

   [Following my review of No Wings on a Cop I posted here earlier this year, it was determined that the source material for the novel was “Help! Murder! Police!,” a three-part serial in Argosy beginning February 4, 1939. Shady Lady was an expanded/revised version of “Too Fair to Die!,” a novella that first appeared in Two Complete Detective Books, March 1951.]

   Is this an undiscovered classic? Not really. PI Rex McBride, hot on the trail of an embezzler, is sidetracked into a cutthroat gubernatorial race in Montana, along with a pair of sisters easy to fall in love with. A nice start, with some good scenes along the way, but it’s still rather ordinary.

   [At the end of the issue of Mystery*File this review first appeared in, I took some time to write up some additional thoughts about the book.]

   First of all, I don’t think Cleve F. Adams is any threat to Raymond Chandler or his work. He wasn’t when they were both alive and writing, and he isn’t now. I do think this is a better book than I left you to believe, however.

   The characters are the standard ones found is all good politically-based 1940s detective fiction: the free-lance PI on the prowl; the local operative with strong ties to whoever is politically on top at the moment; the suave politicians looking for the next convenient toehold to use against their opponents; the overtly corrupt police chief with a sadistic streak a mile wide; the philosophical taxi drivers who know more about what’s going on in their town than any reporter could possibly know. And the women. There are three categories of women in these novels: those ambitious for power; those ambitious for love; and those ambitious for money.

   There isn’t a one of them you haven’t met before, and yet, in this book Adams manages to bring them to an unruly sort of life just about as well as anyone. Toward the end of the review I also mentioned some scenes I thought were better than average. They must be, because I find myself still thinking about them. For example, in the mining town where much of the action takes place, there is a section where the night life goes on all night long. There is also the shanty town where the hunkies live, and that’s where the two sisters McBride is attracted to both have their roots.

   I don’t usually think that quoting excerpts from a book adds a great deal to the reviews I write — out of context, they never seem to have the same effect on someone else who’s reading them cold — but I’ll give it a try — an exception this time. This is an entire paragraph taken from pages 31-32. It has nothing to do with the mystery, but it seems to frame the story pretty well:

   One thing’s for certain. The book has been out of print for far too long, and it deserves a new edition.