JAMES HADLEY CHASE – We’ll Share a Double Funeral. Robert Hale, UK, hardcover, 1982. Corgi, UK, paperback, 1983 & 1988 (the latter shown). No US edition.
It’s a great title, and more than that, it’s appropriate too. It comes up in the course of the book more than once. The cover is very nice, too, not that it has anything much to do with the story, but when did that stop a paperback publisher from doing whatever they could to catch a would-be buyer’s eye?
As for the book itself, Chase was no wordsmith, there’s no doubt about that, but as always he’s as direct and single-minded in telling a story as he needs to be to keep the pages turning, and there’s nothing more complimentary I can say about an author than that.
The main protagonist inDouble Funeralis Chet Logan, as ferocious a killer when he’s cornered as a rabid animal, and by the time he’s finally tracked down and killed in the final chapter, he’s taken nearly a dozen others with him. Taken as a hostage in a Florida fishing lodge is Perry Weston, a big-time screenplay writer for the movies who’s come down from New York City to get away from his much younger wife who’s been cheating on him, and who decides to come down herself to make up.
One paragraph is all it takes to sum it up, but when you finished reading all 176 pages of the paperback edition, you’ll know you’ve read the most hard-boiled book you’ve sped your way through all day. I guarantee it.
EDMUND CRISPIN – Buried for Pleasure. Lippincott, US, hardcover, 1949. First published by Gollancz, UK, hardcover, 1948. US paperback reprints include: Bestseller Mystery #187, digest-sized, 1949; Pyramid X1937, 1969; Perennial Library, 1980; Felony & Mayhem, trade paperback, 2009.
Faute de mieux, Professor Gervase Fen decides to run for Parliament as an Independent. It’s an odd constituency, but Fen, of course, is even odder: “He was haunted … by a growing fear that he might actually be elected…. A whole-time preoccupation with democratic politics, he rapidly discovered, is not easily imposed on a humane and civilised mind. In no very long time the gorge rises and the stomach turns.”
Luckily for Fen, as something to take his mind off his own problem, a woman in the area who was being blackmailed has been murdered and then another murder occurs. As Fen campaigns and investigates, he must deal with Elphinstone the lunatic who thinks he is Woodrow Wilson, the non-doing pig, a most peculiar poltergeist, a not very competent psychiatrist named Boysenberry, assorted eccentrics, and, of course, his would-be constituents.
Marvelously amusing. Fen’s final speech of the campaign with all its home truths should not be missed. Oh, it’s a fair-play mystery, too, but you should be too busy laughing to figure it out.
GEOFFREY NORMAN – Blue Chipper. Morgan Hunt #2. Morrow, hardcover, 1992. Avon, paperback, 1994.
Let’s get one thing out of the way. The publicity material describes Norman as “…a worthy successor to John D. MacDonald.” Not. Norman is a competent writer, but light-years away from MacDonald in both depth and style. Nor, as intimated, is Morgan Hunt a reincarnation of Travis McGee. None of which is to say, mind you, that this isn’t a good book, and Hunt not an engaging character.
Hunt is an ex-con, now pardoned, who made a pot of money playing the commodities market while in jail. A licensed private investigator, he works occasionally for a Pensacola lawyer, more for something to do than anything else. In Chipper, a black friend who is a sheriff’s deputy asks his help. A young black who has no redeeming qualities has been arrested for a drug-related murder; no problem there. The problem is that his brother is the best basketball player ever to come out of Florida, and that within an hour of the arrest a white man shows up at their mother’s house offering to get the murder charge reduced — if the basketball star will sign with the state university.
Hunt calls his lawyer friend (who has represented the miscreant before, and they begin a chase which leads them deep into the world of major college athletics.
I enjoyed the book, as I did the first Hunt opus, Sweetwater Ranch. Norman writes in a spare, lean style with a lot of well-done dialogue, and has a feel for the look and smells of the Florida Panhandle. His characters are well realized and appealing, particularly Hunt’s lady, the Cajun Jessie Beaudreaux. Hunt himself is laconically competent, and overly given to introspection.
My only cavil was with the plot. I am quite cognizant of and devoutly opposed to the hypocrisy and avarice with which major college athletics are saturated, but I think Norman may have made it all a little too evil — assuming that’s possible.
— Reprinted from Fireman, Fireman, Save My Books #5, January 1993.
Bibliographic Note: There were only two more books in the Morgan Hunt series: Deep End (1994) and Blue Light (1995).
DON VON ELSNER – Just Not Making Mayhem Like They Used To. Signet S2040, paperback original, 1961.
It’s not often I review a book I haven’t actually finished but here goes. And I warn you at the outset that there may be SPOILERS lurking in the shadows here.
I bought this because the title seemed clever, and as I got into it, it looked fast, fun and forgettable… well it turned out to be two out of three. In fact, it starts off pretty well, with a particularly nasty blackmail racket, run by a team of ruthless professionals. We get a terse opening as they ply their trade, and then…
Then the scene shifts to our hero, Colonel David Danning, retired from the military and working, when he chooses, as a high-powered attorney-cum-investigator with a specialty in arrogance directed at those whose problems don’t interest him. Author Von Elsner surrounds Danning with the usual entourage: loyal and shapely secretary; brilliant and beautiful love-interest; bungling admirer…. Sort of like the Doc Savage Gang slanted a bit toward James Bond for the swinging ‘60s.
Danning grudgingly agrees to look into a surprising spike in suicide claims for an insurance conglomerate, then becomes intrigued as he finds the common link among them, which of course is the nasty blackmailers.
Mayhem moves too fast for all this to get tiresome however, and I zipped easily through it until I got to the penultimate chapter, when Danning explains everything to the Bewildered Cops and sundry bystanders. But when he got to the part about Transvestite Acrobats I could take no more. I mean, really: Transvestite acrobats? Really?
Von Elsner may have written something meaningful and significant in the last few pages, but I shall never know; I threw the book into my “Sell This Book†pile, sadly aware that I had squandered those hours of my precious youth. I recommend you save yourself the effort.
THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR. Warner Brothers, 1975. Yul Brynner, Max von Sydow, Joanna Miles, William Smith, Richard Kelton, Stephen McHattie. Screenwriter and director: Robert Clouse.
As much as I wanted to like this 1970s science fiction movie, I have to admit that The Ultimate Warrior was an ultimate letdown. Directed by Robert Clouse, the film opens with significant promise. The year is 2012 and New York City has been decimated by a plague/nuclear holocaust (it’s never revealed what actually happened). Yet, the Twin Towers are still standing, looming large above a city ravaged by death and hopelessness. It’s even creepier, since we know from the vantage point of 2016 that New York City is thriving, but the Towers are gone.
As it turns out, there’s a commune somewhere in midtown Manhattan led by an erudite man known simply as the Baron (Max von Sydow). He and his followers are carving out an existence for themselves in the midst of chaos and decay. Their immediate threat, however, is a gang of violent street people led by a man simply known as Carrot (William Smith). Why does Carrot hate Baron’s people so much? Is he an evil man or just a rival? Unfortunately, we never learn much about him other than that he’s a bad dude.
And if there’s a bad dude, there needs to be a good dude to counter him. In this film, Yul Brynner’s character fulfills that role. Carson is a fighter who sells his skills to the highest bidder and eventually takes up employ in Baron’s commune. Soon, he’s tasked with not only protecting the inhabitants, but also with guiding Baron’s pregnant daughter to a protected haven off the coast of North Carolina.
Sounds like an interesting premise, right?
Unfortunately, the movie never develops the characters to any great extent. They are more or less the same people the moment they appear on the screen as when they leave. And without any substantial changes in their personalities, wants, or desires, they end up one-dimensional caricatures. Baron = the erudite scientist. Carrot = the bad guy. Carson = the good guy. Just because stuff happens in the movie does not mean that there’s actually much of a story.
PHILIP MACDONALD – The Polferry Riddle. First published as The Choice (Collins, UK, hardcover, 1931). Reprinted as The Polferry Mystery (Collins, UK, hardcover, 1932). Reprinted under this title by Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1931. Also: Vintage Books, US, paperback, September 1983.
This one starts out as an ace number one detective puzzler, complete with a dark and stormy night, two visitors to the mansion rescued from the river, then sudden death, with the young wife of the home’s owner found with her throat slashed some time during the night in her bedroom. No weapon can be found.
The three men give each other solid alibis. Each of four others asleep upstairs could have done it, but none of them have a motive. The house was locked tight. An outsider could not have done it. Even Colonel Anthony Gethryn is stumped. With no leads and no evidence the case is put on hold until two of the four members of the household meet with fatal accidents — or are they?
A good chunk of the middle of the story basically becomes a thriller, as Gethryn and his friends from Scotland Yard make a frenzied chase halfway across England to avert the murder of a young woman who was also one of the four.
What each of the “accidents” also does is narrow down the list of possible suspects to the original killing, one at a time, and still the police are stumped. No one could have done it, and with no weapon in the room, it could not have been suicide.
But with Anthony Gethryn on the case, not all is lost, of course. I think the ending is a cheat, though, and I say this reluctantly, since until then, this was a highly readable example of the Golden Age of detective fiction. When it comes down to it, though, I don’t think Gethryn’s logic holds up, nor was I happy when the vital clue was found at nearly the very last moment. Why the police didn’t find it in their original investigation, when they claimed they scoured the house from top to bottom, I have no idea. Put this one solidly in the “Disappointing” category.
A classic case of a movie that doesn’t know what it wants to be. The opening scene, as gangster hit man Jack Palance offs Milburn Stone in his hotel room suggests that this is the beginning of a fine film solidly in the noir category. But the bulk of the middle of the film is both a travelogue filmed in at fiesta time in beautiful downtown Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico, and a romantic drama that’s as dull as dishwater.
Linda Darnell is, as it turns out, a mobster’s ex-girl friend on the run from the aforementioned Palance. As fate would have it, she finds a soulmate in all-but-burned-out boxer Robert Mitchum, and the cure for her run-away-from-it all blues. The ending, though, eventually, especially for those with their 3-D glasses on, as they did during the film’s initial release, is a spectacular thriller set on a stranded cable car stranded hundreds of feet above a rockier terrain than you can ever imagine.
You have to wait a long time before the ending, though, or at least so it seemed that way. Mitchum is Mitchum, as always, and that’s all to the good, but Linda Darnell, who was only 30 when she made this film, looks 10 years older, and believe it or not, utterly matronly. But I also hasten to add that even going up cobbled streets in high heels, she’s a better runner than Jack Palance is, and no, I didn’t believe it either.
BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT. Syndicated, 1939-1940. Associated Recorded Program Service (part of Associated Music Publishing Inc). 15 minutes; 3 x weekly. Cast: Nick Dawson as Steven Moore
This radio series about defense attorney Steven Moore is so forgotten I have been unable to find any mention of it at any current OTR radio research or any other research site or book dedicated to old time radio. There are a few sites than have two episodes available to hear, but none has much information and those even get the year for the episodes wrong.
Moore was the typical defense attorney, brilliant, quick witted, the enemy of authorities, and willing to save the guilty for a fee. The announcer informed us the series stories were based on some of the “most dramatic criminal cases of the past decade.â€
The New York lawyer was assisted by his “man-of-all-work†(think Runt in the Boston Blackie films), loyal devoted ex-con sidekick, that Moore had gotten out of Sing Sing prison. Without any written record available the actor who played the character sadly must remain uncredited. My ears can’t be sure what the character was called in the episodes (Cuba?) but feel free to add your guesses in the comments below.
The series was a murder mystery serial with each episode 15 minutes long minus about a minute or so of organ music in the beginning and end. I believe the following episode “Meet Steven Moore†was the series’ first episode.
MEET STEVEN MOORE. Written and directed by William N. Robson. Star: Nick Dawson. *** After getting another not guilty verdict for yet one more man all thought was guilty, Moore learns the D.A. and others are working to get him disbarred.
So he is less than thrilled to find a beautiful woman wearing a bloody coat hiding in his apartment. Of course he decides to represent her, even if as he says she is guilty.
The episode sets up the premise and characters well. It was the fall of 1939, and this must have seemed a fresher idea than it does now. Fans of old time radio are probably surprised to hear William N. Robson wrote and directed this. The script holds up; there are a few minor flaws, but this was 1939 and radio was still young and developing.
William N. Robson would become one of the top director/producers in radio history. In a career spanning four decades he won six Peabody awards and worked on such series as Escape, Suspense, The Man Behind the Gun and Voice of America (with Edward R. Murrow). By this time he was all ready well known for his work on Columbia Radio Workshop, one of the best radio shows of the 1930s. He had returned from England where he had produced some radio shows for the BBC (“Broadcasting†February 1, 1939). Soon he would be the director and producer of popular radio seriesBig Townwith Edward G. Robinson. I can’t find any mention of how long he stayed with Beyond Reasonable Doubt. I can’t even find the series listed on any of his bios.
The next episode’s credits mention only star Nick Dawson. The announcer set up the series premise, main character, and story. Then he introduced Nick Dawson who as character Steven Moore talked to the audience, recapping the last episode.
THE WOMAN IN THE BEDROOM. A rich playboy has been murdered in his penthouse apartment and the woman last seen with him has escaped. That woman is now hiding in defense attorney Moore’s bedroom. Homicide detective and the victim’s hotel doorman have trailed the woman from the murder scene to Moore’s apartment.
Clues for this murder story drop in as Moore constantly outsmarts and out talks the Homicide Detective and witness. After his fun Moore heads to his bedroom to turn the girl over to the frustrated cop. But it is not that easy for Moore and he found himself facing a possible charge of accessory after the fact to murder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_UwBzt6d0s
The acting here was nothing special. Dawson failed to make lawyer Moore likable and seemed to drift in and out of a Clarence Darrow impression.
Nick Dawson (George Coleman Dawson) was a famous radio writer/producer/actor during the 1930s. He had begun in early radio with CBS as a programmer then began to produce his own shows. He was best known for his work with Elsie Hitz as one of radio’s most popular romantic serial couples starring in series such as Follow the Moon, Magic Voice and Dangerous Paradise.
In “Broadcasting†(September 25, 1939) there was news of Vicks Chemical Co. (Vick’s VapoRub) plans to sponsor Beyond Reasonable Doubt, a fifteen-minute series that would air three times a week on six California stations. William N Robson would direct. The October 1st issue of “Broadcasting†added more information. Seven NBC-Pacific Blue stations would carry Beyond Reasonable Doubt beginning October 4, 1939. The transcribed serial was scheduled to air on Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday at 6-6:15pm (PST). Duncan Coffee Company supported the series on seven Texas stations beginning October 2, 1939.
Starting January 2, 1940 Vicks moved Beyond Reasonable Doubt to a new time, 9-9:15 pm (PST) on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Vicks carried the series on eleven NBC-Pacific Blue stations (“Broadcasting†December 15, 1939).
In an ad for the series in “Broadcasting†(January 1, 1940) strong ratings (C.A.B. – Crossley) for Beyond Reasonable Doubt at three California stations was highlighted as with news Vicks had renewed the series for another thirteen weeks.
“Broadcasting†(April 15, 1940) reported series production company AMP Recording Studio had sold the transcribed serial to stations in St. Louis, Dayton, and in Australia and New Zealand. Meanwhile, Vicks stopped its sponsorship of Beyond Reasonable Doubt with the March 29, 1940 broadcast at 78 episodes.
I have been unable to determine whether the series went beyond 78 episodes but I doubt it. While the series is somewhat dated Beyond Reasonable Doubt deserves some attention, if only as a forgotten series in the career of William N. Robson.
Devoted to mystery and detective fiction — the books, the films, the authors, and those who read, watch, collect and make annotated lists of them. All uncredited posts are by me, Steve Lewis.
