Three months ago, while writing the column in which I said farewell to my old friend Don Yates, I hinted that one of these days I hoped to devote some attention to H.C. Branson, who lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan and befriended Don when he was growing up in that city. The time has come to realize that hope.

   Henry Clay Branson (1904-1981) was born in Battle Creek, Michigan. He read the Sherlock Holmes stories as a boy, was educated at Princeton and the University of Michigan, and spent a few years in Paris and elsewhere in Europe, reading Philo Vance novels and trying without success to become an expatriate literary figure, before he settled in Ann Arbor.

   According to Don’s entry on him in 20th CENTURY CRIME AND MYSTERY WRITERS (3rd ed. 1991), he “was one of the most familiar of card-holders at the Ann Arbor Public Library, where he withdrew and consumed hundreds of mystery stories.” Whether he was independently wealthy or had a day job I haven’t been able to determine. Once a highly regarded and fairly prominent detective novelist, he’s remembered today, if at all, for having also befriended a young academic born Kenneth Millar but best known as Ross Macdonald.

   According to Tom Nolan’s 1999 biography, Macdonald and Branson remained in touch and exchanged letters regularly until Branson’s death, two years before Macdonald’s own. Our concern here however is not with Macdonald, who’s been the subject of a number of books, but with Branson’s seven detective novels, published between 1941 and 1953 and featuring a bearded, sophisticated former physician and free-lance criminal investigator named John Bent.

   The character never made it to the movies but if he had, for my money the ideal actor to play him would have been Vincent Price—not as he looked in the Forties and early Fifties when the novels first came out but the more mature Price, before he descended into hamminess and schlock horror pictures.

   As we’ll see shortly, Anthony Boucher reviewed most of Branson’s whodunits, first for the San Francisco Chronicle and later for the New York Times, and always praised them to the skies. On whether they’re worth reading and reviving today, opinions differ. Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor in A CATALOGUE OF CRIME (2nd ed. 1989) have positive things to say about all seven. William Deeck concurs in his reviews of several Branson titles for Mystery*File. But Bill Pronzini in 1001 MIDNIGHTS (1986) is nowhere near so enthusiastic, saying: “Branson wrote literate, meticulously plotted (but flawed) novels in which the emphasis is on deep-seated conflicts that have their roots in the dark past.”

   Might the later Lew Archer novels of Ross Macdonald, whom Branson had befriended when both men lived in Ann Arbor, owe their emphasis on the same kinds of conflicts to Branson’s books of the Forties? Perhaps, says Pronzini, but he leaves no doubt about which of the two authors is superior. “There’s a good deal of passion among the characters [but] Bent is a virtual cipher….The writing, while well crafted, is so detached and emotionless that the reader tends to lose interest….Had Branson…been able to make Bent more human and sympathetic, had he injected some passion and vividness into his work, he might have become an important figure in the mystery field.”

   Branson had no desire to explore a different setting in every novel, but on the other hand he couldn’t allow his master criminologist to keep returning to the same part of Michigan in every case. That, said Don Yates, is why “[o]ne is never precisely sure where the action [in a particular novel] is taking place. In his mind, Branson sees all of his stories laid out in and around Battle Creek, Jackson, and Kalamazoo, Michigan.” Sometimes however, as we’ll see, he unintentionally indicates a setting that can’t possibly be the area around Ann Arbor.

   The Branson septet contains certain family resemblances which some might call gaffes and others quirks. The off-trail clues we might have expected from reading early Ellery Queen and writers like Anthony Boucher who were strongly influenced by Queen are conspicuous by their absence, replaced by lengthy speculations about possibilities. The word “perfectly” recurs almost as often as does “replied” in the novels of John Rhode/Miles Burton.

   A host of other characters, sometimes two in the same book, happen to share Bent’s first name. Bent and virtually every other character except the occasional child consume huge quantities of liquor and tobacco. They also smile incessantly, and shrug their shoulders. (That latter phrase always irritated Fred Dannay. “What else can they shrug?” he’d demand to know.) Any music played in the course of a Branson novel is invariably classical chamber music — Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, most of the household names — and there are some nice incidental scenes involving the 78 rpm sets on which such music was bought and played in people’s homes 70-odd years ago.

   The murderer almost invariably escapes facing a judge and jury, either because he (or she) commits suicide, dies accidentally, or is killed in turn. Each of these resemblances pops up several times as we make our way through the seven novels.

   The first pages of I’LL EAT YOU LAST (1941) find Bent driving around the shore of beautiful Lake Badenoch on his way to the area’s Toad Hall, the home of former Senator James Maitland, who is a toad of the first water, having amassed in his decades in the seats of power a fortune of between 50 and 55 million dollars. (In today’s money that would probably make him a billionaire.)

   Maitland has sent for the great investigator because several of his closest relatives — first his sister and her entire family, then his brother, most recently his much younger and promiscuous wife — have suffered apparently accidental deaths within a few months of each other. The old senator has come to be afraid that at least some of the deaths may be part of an elaborate scheme to channel his fortune in certain directions, and that he’s next on the death list.

   Events prove him a true prophet: on the evening of Bent’s arrival, Maitland is fatally shot by a slug from a .22 rifle fired through the window of his lordly library. Bent is a total outsider, but thanks to his reputation as a criminologist he immediately becomes unofficial head of the police team assigned to the murder; another family resemblance in Branson’s novels.

   Among the suspects are Maitland’s few surviving relatives — his intellectual nephew, his distant cousin and factotum, the daughter of a predeceased cousin — and various non-relatives like the odious college president and the members of a fanatical religious cult whose Vatican City is adjacent to the Maitland property. Bent spends most of his time drinking, smoking, and teasing out various possibilities without benefit of substantive clues. Unfortunately the labyrinthine plot he exposes at the climax is vitiated by a radical mistake of law which any interested reader who doesn’t mind my revealing who done it can learn about by clicking here.

   At the end of the first chapter of THE PRICKING THUMB (1942) we are told that the date is Monday, November 24. This is irrelevant to the plot but is still significant for two reasons. First, on the reasonable assumption that the year is 1941, we are less than two weeks away from Sunday, December 7, the day Pearl Harbor was attacked. You’ll find no hint of that earth-shaking event anywhere in the novel.

   Second, the Thursday following the 24th has to be Thanksgiving Day, although Branson treats it as a day just like any other, with nobody even having a turkey dinner. Late in the afternoon of the 24th Bent in his home city receives a visit from old friend Marina Holland, whose much older husband Gouvion has been suffering from some strange illness and has recently had a violent argument with his 20-year-old son by his first marriage.

   The next evening Bent drives from his never identified home base to the town of New Paget and discovers Gouvion shot to death in his study, apparently a suicide. Gouvion’s younger brother arrives at the Holland house and announces that he’s just come from the nearby home of Dr. Brian Calvert, the Holland family physician, with whom according to local gossip Marina was having an affair, and found two more dead bodies: that of Dr. Calvert and Marina herself.

   Apparently Gouvion had shot the other two, then returned to his house and taken his own life. Bent isn’t satisfied and, as is his wont, commandeers the local authorities and takes over the investigation. There are virtually no tangible clues, which is pretty much par for the course in Branson, but by the end of the week Bent has exposed a particularly brutal murderer and scheme. Anthony Boucher left the verb out of the key sentence in his review for the San Francisco Chronicle (20 December 1942) but left no doubt that he was pleased: “Quietly convincing detective and unusually interesting murderer in a solid and rewarding work rare in the American mystery.”

         (To Be Continued)

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER “Cold Clews.” Lester Leith #22. Published in Detective Fiction Weekly, January 24, 1931. At one time apparently scheduled to be reprinted (??) in Hot Cash and Cold Clews: The Exploits of Lester Leith by Erle Stanley Gardner, edited by Jeffrey Marks, Crippen & Landru, Fall 2016.

   Lester Leith was but one of many characters that Erle Stanley Gardner created for the pulp magazines well before he came up with a certain Perry Mason (in 1933) and become rich in doing so. To my mind, though, the Leith stories were a lot more fun — and dare I say — even more inventive than the cases that Perry, Della and Paul found themselves involved in.

   Gardner wrote over 60 Leith stories between 1929 and 1943, mostly for Detective Fiction Weekly, and I can well imagine most were featured on the front covers, the character was that popular. I don’t know if Leith ever had a real occupation, but he was rich and lived in style, complete with a valet he chooses to call Scuttle, a stalwart chap who is really working uncover in Leith’s household on behalf of the police department, and Sgt. Ackley in particular.

   Ackley, you see, suspects — but is never able to prove — that Leith has a way of horning in on local crimes and taking a cut of the loot or insurance/reward money before the cops can even start to make sense of the case.

   And, case in point. In “Cold Clews” Leith takes interest in a valuable stolen necklace, stolen at gunpoint from a jewelry store in broad daylight. Although nearly nabbed while filling up his getaway car at a gasoline station, the thief seems to have eluded the police completely.

   The police are baffled. Lester Leith is not. To his own mysterious ends, he asks Scuttle to obtain the following for him: a fierce bulldog, a cast iron stove, twenty-eight dice, a yard of silk cord, a small vise, a portable drill, and a small emery wheel.

   The police are even more baffled, and equally most of the fun for the reader is reading along to find out what on earth Leith is going to do with this hodgepodge of items. Which he does is fine fashion — and of course he comes out on top once again.

   You probably can’t read too many Leith stories in one sitting. They’re quite long, for one thing, novelette length at least, and rather repetitious in nature as well. But spread out over a period of time, great stuff indeed.

CBS SUMMER PLAYHOUSE “The Saint in Manhattan.” CBS, 12 June 1987. Season 1, Episode 1. Andrew Clarke (Simon Templar), George Rose, Kevin Tighe (Insp John Fernack), Liliana Komorowska, Holland Taylor, Caitlin Clarke, Michael Lombard. Based on the character created by Lesllie Charteris. Director: James Frawley.

   One way that CBS found to get some mileage out of pilots for TV shows that failed to find a home there was to play them as an anthology series over the summer when they assumed that no one was watching anyway. The Playhouse lasted for three years, but the basis of watching only this one, I’m going to say that it may have been one of the better ones.

   I hadn’t heard of its star, Andrew Clarke, before watching, and in fact this may be one of the few times this Australian actor may have appeared on US TV. He may also have been the only actor with a mustache (a bushy one) to have played the Saint, but I could easily be wrong about that. He also had a wide brash smile with lots of teeth.

   As the title indicated, the would-be series was to have taken place in New York City, with the Saint constantly bedeviling Inspector Fernack as they clash heads while solving murder cases together (in a matter of speaking). In this one, though, it is the theft of a valuable tiara from the head of the lead ballerina during a dance recital that brings the old foes together. Someone has framed Simon Templar for the job!

   The production values are very good, and Clarke, although initially far from my idea of what the Saint looks like, gradually became easier to watch in the role.

Much of the story line is played for light comedy — to the detriment of any fair play detective work, which is hinted at but never quite delivered upon. If I’d known about it at the time, however, I’d definitely have watched this pilot. — and the series as well, if there had been one.

BRANDON DEBOIS – Hard Aground. Lewis Cole #11. Pegasus Crime, hardcover, April 2018.

First Sentence:   From the vantage point of my bed, I looked out the near window to a cluster of rocks and boulders, which had been tossed and turned over the years by storms and long-ago glaciers.

   Recovering from surgery, magazine journalist Lewis Cole is housebound and in pain. When a couple show up on his doorstep wanting to tour the inside of his home for its historical significance as a former coast guard station and a housing facility for Navy corpsmen during the Korean War, it is initially annoying, but their persistent visits escalate.

   Cole believes he hears someone in his house at night but can’t find evidence of it during the day. Lewis’ friend Felix Tinios had taken a silver bowl to Maggie Tyler Branch, a descendant of the town’s founder, for her to appraise. When Maggie is murdered and the bowl missing, Felix Is committed to finding both his bowl and the killer.

   Dubois’ opening is twinge-worthy. It is also informational. The author does a nice job of introducing the protagonist and providing new readers with his background as well as reminding series readers as to why he is in his present situation. Felix is one of those wonderful characters you’re almost glad isn’t the primary protagonist as that would remove some of the mystique about him. He is also someone one would be glad to have as a friend, particularly if he’d cook for you— “Dinner is fettuccini Alfredo with lobster and salad…,” –and would never want as an enemy.

   Dubois does write characters who are interesting and believable. The women are smart, strong, and very capable; journalist Paula Woods, Cole’s lover, and Det. Sgt. Diane Woods who is about to marry her partner, Kara.

   There are delightful touches of humor— “Fortune sometimes favors the brave, the lucky, and those too dumb to know what they have.” —but also moments which touch your emotions— “Alice moved in with a niece over in Worcester…and got Alzheimer’s, that nasty bitch of a disease. Suffered with that for years, and died two years back. By then, it was a mercy.” Lewis has experienced his own tragedy. Anyone who has lost someone they truly loved can associate with Lewis.

   Dubois’ writing captures people, places and emotions well. There is one very effective scene which serves to remind us that everyone is a human, and everyone has their own story and problems. On the negative side, there are also some really annoying portents. The third, which is late in the book, is not only completely unnecessary — after all, it’s not as though one wouldn’t keep reading at this point — but it vastly diminished the suspense of what was to follow.

   Hard Aground with a protagonist unable to leave his house is clever and engrossing. There are twists, suspense, a wonderful rescue, and an all-round excellent ending.

      The Lewis Cole series —

1. Dead Sand (1994)
2. Black Tide (1995)
3. The Shattered Shell (1999)
4. Killer Waves (2002)
5. Buried Dreams (2004)
6. Primary Storm (2006)
7. Deadly Cove (2011)
8. Fatal Harbor (2014)
9. Blood Foam (2015)
10. Storm Cell (2016)
11. Hard Aground (2018)

REGINALD HILL – Blood Sympathy. Joe Sixsmaith #1. St. Martin’s, US, hardcover, 1994. Worldwide Library, US, paperback, 1996. First published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1993.

   Hill has long been one of my favorite authors with the Dalziel & Pascoe books, and I think he’s one of the finest crime writers now practicing. His new series looked to be a big departure for him, and I approached it with mixed anticipation.

   Joe Sixsmith is short, black, balding and a made-redundant lathe operator turned PI in Luton, Bedfordshire, but not a wildly successful one, mind you. He’s single, too, with an odd aunt determined to change that state. His troubles start when a man comes to him with the story of a dream wherein he finds his family murdered; then the family is murdered, just so. They intensify when an effort to help an Indian lady lands him in trouble with both the drug cops and the drug dealers. And there’s a little episode with a millionaire businessman who’s also a witch. Mix it all together and Joe has a busy book.

   It’s a real change of pace for Hill, and how well you like it will depend on how well you like the type; it goes almost without saying that Hill does it very competently. It’s a cozy kind of story, light for all its subject matter, and with little of Hill’s customary bite. Sixsmith is a likable character, though I have some trouble anytime a white man attempts to write from a black’s viewpoint, and particularly so when he makes him as impervious to racial slurs and slights as Hill does Sixsmith.

   There were a few too many plot threads for me to maintain real focus, too. It’s not really my kind of book, well done or not, and I hope Hill doesn’t take too much time away from Dalziel and Pascoe to write more of them.

       The Joe Sixsmith series —

Blood Sympathy (1993)
Born Guilty (1995)
Killing the Lawyers (1997)
Singing the Sadness (1999)
The Roar of the Butterflies (2008)

BANDIT QUEEN. Lippert Pictures, 1950. Barbara Britton, Willard Parker, Phillip Reed, Barton MacLane, Martin Garralaga, Angelo Rossitto (as Angie). Director: William Berke.

   I know Barbara Britton almost exclusively for her role as Pam North in the Mr. & Mrs. North TV series on 1952-54, but she was in a long list of movies before that, most of which I have never seen. Champagne for Caesar is one exception, but to be honest, I don’t even remember her role in it.

   Those earlier movies included comedies, pirate movies, and surprisingly (to me) quite a few westerns. Her role in Bandit Queen, in other words, was not the anomaly I thought it was when I placed the DVD into the player and sat down to watch.

   She plays Zara Montalvo in this film, a young woman who comes to visit her parents in Spanish California around the time of the Gold Rush, only to watch a gang of ruthless outlaws murder them in front of her eyes for their land and money.

   Revenge being the order of the day as far as she is concerned, she is taught how to crack a whip by none other than the infamous rebel leader Joaquin Murietta, blandly played by Phillip Reed. She lives in a Spanish mission under the name Lola Belmont (from Detroit); he is incognito as Carlos Del Rio. Neither knows who the other is, but once Zara’s name becomes known as a Robin Hood-style bandit, he catches on more quickly than she does.

   A better-than-average Lippert film, but that’s a distinction that makes this no more than a run-of-the-mill western. Save for our daring heroine, the bad guys are by far the better actors. (Not more interesting, just better actors.) As for the story, there’s nothing more to it that I haven’t already alluded to.

Live from Austin City Limits:

THIS SIDE OF THE LAW Warners, 1950. Viveca Lindfors, Kent Smith, Janis Paige, Robert Douglas and John Alvin. Written by Richard Sale and Russell S. Hughes. Directed by Richard L. Bare.

   Another bonus disc thrown in by a generous dealer, a film I didn’t know I had, and one I never heard of before. Turned out to be a Warners B movie made in 1948 but not released till 1950.

   Top-billed Viveca Lindfors actually has little to do here except look pretty and puzzled while Kent Smith carries the bulk of the plot as a down & out drifter hired to impersonate a lookalike millionaire who has been missing for almost seven years and about to be declared legally dead.

   Smith is recruited by the dead man’s lawyer (played by that perennial movie schemer Robert Douglas) for reasons of his own. And I think I’ve mentioned before that in the movies when you assume someone else’s identity, it’s always a flying leap from the frying pan. In this case, it turns out that the ancestral manse is a hotbed of domestic intrigue, including the fetching Ms. Lindfors as his bewildered and broken-hearted wife, John Alvin as a resentful weakling brother, and Janis Paige as his sister-in-law, a femme fatale in the Audrey Totter /Ann Savage mode.

   One of these characters may have murdered the missing man, and it turns out the lawyer wants Smith to find out which one – or does he?

   It’s all handled efficiently, but by 1948 they were making some films noirs by rote, and this is a good example. It’s told in flashback, with lots of shadows and shady characters, but they all seem a bit perfunctory, without the resonance that typifies contemporaries like The Big Clock and Cry of the City.

   Richard Sale, the author of the piece, wrote the brilliant metaphysical novel Not Too Narrow, Not Too Deep, which became the movie Strange Cargo. He also wrote a whole lot of sub-standard pulp fiction and forgettable screenplays, which always puzzled me. I mean, I can almost understand someone like Harper Lee or J.D. Salinger writing a remarkable book and then leaving it alone, but how anyone can turn out a single great book smack in the middle of a career devoted to mediocrity mystifies my mind—much more than this movie did.

   Similarly, director Richard Bare was a low-level fixture at Warners, doing shorts and occasional B features. When Warners went into Television in the 50s, Bare went along, lending his trademark anonymity to just about every Western and PI show Warners produced in those days. And so much for him.

   Janis Paige got tired of nothing parts in Hollywood, and went to Broadway where she became a big star, then returned to the movies for an occasional character part, like the Hollywood Star making a musical version of “War and Peace” in Silk Stockings, where she gets a great number with Fred Astaire.

   As for This Side of the Law, it’s painless & watchable, done with the Warners polish of the 1940s, and while I won’t go so far as to recommend it, I will admit it made for a pleasant evening.

   Well anyway, you could do worse.

A. S. FLEISCHMAN – Counterspy Express. Ace Double D-57. paperback original, 1954. Bound back-to-back with Treachery in Trieste. by Charles L. Leonard.

   A matter of a defecting Russian scientist, temporarily missing somewhere in Italy, Austria or France, with CIA agent Victor Welles (aka Jim Cabot) on his trail. There is a girl involved, or more precisely, two, as well as a slew of various Communist agents.

   A minor affair, easily read, easily forgotten, I amused myself by wondering if I could make a movie out of it, and I can. My version would star none other than Alan Ladd, Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, Sydney Greenstreet and Orson Welles. How’s that?

PostScript:   I’d have to do some rewriting though, if I’d like to avoid some of the more obvious cliches of the trade. Such as, why on earth does every hard-nosed agent you come across (or every cheap imitation hard-boiled PI, which is very nearly the same thing) in every book that every instinct should warn him against, but whom he falls in love with anyway?

   “Cabot” is even warned by the advance agent on the scene. The man is dying or severely wounded by shots fired from the taxi that sped around the fountain in the center of the piazza, but he manages to get these words out: “Don’t get mixed up with a woman. My mistake.” Does Cabot pay any attention? Are you kidding? Is the Pope Polish?