ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The D. A. Breaks a Seal. Doug Selby #7. William Morrow, hardcover, 1946. Previously serialized in The Saturday Evening Post in seven part between December 1, 1945, and January 12, 1946.  Pocket Book #869, paperback, 1952. Cardinal C-292, paperback, 1958.

   Thanks to HBO if not the long-running TV series in the 1950s and 60s, everyone in the know knows about famed defense attorney Perry Mason. Not so many have heard about Gardner’s series character who plied his trade on the other side of the aisle, Doug Selby, the District Attorney for Madison County, California, some small distance from the bright lights of L. A., Madison City being a small blip in the larger scheme of things.

   But to be honest, Selby is a major in the U. S. Army all through The D. A. Breaks a Seal. He’s on leave and heading for his next assignment when decides to hop off the train and see how the folks he left behind. Rex Brandon is still the sheriff, and Selby’s nemesis, defense attorney A. B. Carr is still making headlines, both in LA and in Madison City. There’s a new D.A in town, of course, but he’s having a tough time making people forget Doug Selby.

   The story begins with two people getting off the same train that Selby arrives on, standing out first by the simple fact they’re wearing white gardenias, then by A. B. Carr showing up and obviously seeking them out. Selby’s lady friend Sylvia Martin, a reporter, senses a story, and she’s right. Soon after, a man is found dead in a local hotel room under strange circumstances, and somehow A. B. Carr is involved in that, too – as well in a local legal case about a contested will.

   Lots of detective work ensues, unofficially by Selby, and courtroom drama as well, this time officially. The legal matters are, as always in Gardner’s work, supremely complicated, but he, as usual, makes me believe I know what’s going on all the way through.

   There’s even a hint of romance in the air – Sylvia is not the only woman in town who remembers Doug with fondness — and Gardner even takes the time to talk about what the country should be like after the war.

   There’s lots to like with this one.

THEODORE STURGEON. “Agnes, Accent and Access.” Short story. First published in Galaxy SF, October 1973. Reprinted in The Best from Galaxy, Volume II, edited anonymously by Ejler Jakobsson. Collected in Case and the Dreamer, Volume XIII: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (North Atlantic Books, 2010).

   This is the second of three short stories in this issue of Galaxy that I’ve been reading, ignoring the two long serial installments by James White and Arthur C. Clarke that take up a full two-thirds of the magazine. As far as ISFDb knows, the story has appeared in only two other places, which seems strange to me, as it’s a good one.

   When a company who stock in trade is the information retrieval business, it seems strange that they have to hire an outside consultant when problems arrive internally: requests from departments of the firm are being replied to with very incorrect responses. His way of investigating: to sit outside the president’s office ostensibly waiting for an appointment but in reality watching the very efficient secretary, named Agnes, working at her desk throughout the day.

   This story was written in 1973, long before Siri and Alexa came along, but if science fiction could ever have been said to predict the future, and the describe the problems that come along with it, this is a story that fits the bill to perfection. Adding even more to the enjoyment of the tale is the fact that Theodore Sturgeon was a flows along.

   Examples. This one line sentence, a mere throwaway in fact, sums up a fact that you might not of thought of yourself, but once read, you say, “Of course.”

   Or how about this longer passage, describing only the office itself where the consultant is waiting and observing:

THE STEEL KEY. Eros Films, UK, 1953. Terence Morgan, Joan Rice, Raymond Lovell, Dianne Foster. Director: Robert S. Baker.

   International playboy and thief Johnny O’Flynn (Terence Morgan) tries to prevent criminals from stealing a secret formula for processing hardened steel, called the Steel Key, and discovers that one of the scientists involved has been murdered while another, Professor Newman (Esmond Knight) has died of apparently natural causes.

   His investigation leads him to a sanatorium, run by one Dr Crabtree (Colin Tapley), and a captured scientist forced to reproduce the formula. On the way, Johnny meets Newman’s glamorous, younger wife Sylvia (Dianne Foster) and rescues pretty nurse Doreen (Joan Rice), after the kidnappers try to kill her. Inspector Forsythe of Scotland Yard (Raymond Lovell) is also on the scent, but is intent on arresting Johnny for the crime.

   This British second-feature is a great deal of fun and one of my favourites from the era. It has much in common with other adventure-thrillers featuring a suave and witty hero. This may have been deliberate as it was originally intended to involve The Saint, but producers Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman could not secure the rights to the character. (They would eventually, of course, make a phenomenally successful television series with Roger Moore in the role.)

   Its Saintly beginnings, however, remain obvious to all as O’Flynn is considered to be a thief who claims a reward for any boodle he recovers and spars wryly with a portly inspector who would love to put him behind bars. It’s basically Simon and Inspector Teal, with all the hi-jinks that implies.

   With his chiselled features, slick dark hair and mischievous glint in his eye, actor Terrence Morgan makes for a likeable and charismatic hero as Johnny O’Flynn. Amid all the action, there are some good dollops of humour in here too. There is, of course, the constant cat-and-mouse game with the police, but there are also moments which border on farce (never a bad thing, in my book) as Johnny pretends to be one of the scientists involved with Newman. Indeed, nurse Doreen never discovers his real name and it is uttered only a handful of times in the whole film.

   The finger of accusation moves frequently from one suspect to another, but this a pacey adventure and not a drawing room whodunit, though the revelation does come as a surprise. The only criticism I would make is the inclusion of three scientists (one who is only referred to), which seems a bit messy to me.

   Morgan’s career started out promisingly with roles in Olivier’s Hamlet and Captain Horatio Hornblower with Gregory Peck, but he quickly slid into B-films and became typecast as villains, and though a switch to television with The Adventures of Francis Drake was successful, it did not last. Fortunately, there does not seem to have been an unhappy ending for Morgan, as he left acting to run a hotel on the South-East coast of England for many years before becoming a property developer. He died in 2005 at the age of 83.

Rating: *****

   I’ve heard this song sung many times before, but never as powerfully or beautifully as this:

HARLAN ELLISON “Cold Friend.” First published in Galaxy SF, October 1973. Reprinted in The Best from Galaxy, Volume II, edited anonymously by Ejler Jakobsson. Collected in Approaching Oblivion: Road Signs on the Treadmill Toward Tomorrow (Walker, hardcover, 1974).

   A man who has died on cancer wakes up and finds that except for a chunk of land surrounding the hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire, perhaps only three blocks in radius, the rest of the world has disappeared. Electricity is still on, and food is always stocked in the stores. At the edge of his world, things dangle from underneath, cables, water linesand the like.

   He is the only one there, except at first strange barbarians from all eras from Earth’s past, who ride through then vanish over the edge. Until, finally, a young girl from Boston shows up. She is very pale and is wearing only a translucent dress. She is also very cold to the touch. She claims to have been responsible for the situation they are in, but Eugene Harrison (that’s his name), is not so sure.

   There is a little more to the story, but not a lot. (I have glossed over the finer details.) Readers who want solid endings to their reading matter may not like this one, but it’s told in such a way, — as if Eugene Harrison is telling us his story in words an ordinary person would use (or if Harlan Ellison, in proxy, was leaving an audio recording for us to listen to) — you may not mind at all either.

PostScript: You may be able to discern from the cover of Galaxy SF above that this was a special issue, the 23rd Anniversary issue, with quite a few name authors in it. If I’d bought this issue from the newsstand, and I probably did, I might have been disappointed. One chunk of 50 pages is the first part of a serial by James White (“The Dream Millennium”), and another chunk of almost 70 pages is the end of a serial by Arthur C. Clarke (“Rendezvous with Rama”).

   That’s 120 pages of a 180 page magazine. This leaves space for only a one page poem by Ray Bradbury, and three short stories. The other two are by Theodore Sturgeon and Ursula K. LeGuin. If you skip the serial installments, that’s not a lot of reading for 75 cents.

ELLERY QUEEN – The Four of Hearts. Stokes, hardcover, 1938. Pocket Books #245, paperback, 1943. Reprinted many times, including as one of the three novels in the omnibus volume The Hollywood Murders (J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, 1951).

   The producer, not quite as eccentric as previously pictured (*) puts Ellery to work on a screenplay of the life stories of a famous actress and as equally famous actor. When they decide to patch up their feud which kept them apart for thirty years and finally marry, they are poisoned during their honeymoon flight. Ellery tried to keep the son and daughter apart but fails. The murderer plunges to his death as he tries to stop their wedding too.

   An interesting interpretation of Hollywood types, and not only includes the two wild Hollywood weddings, but the double funeral is also extravagantly Hollywood. Ellery falls in love with Paula Paris, a columnist who will not leave her home, but who is able to provide him with clues to solve the case.

   Good detection, a nicely complicated plot, with lots of detection and, even more, a book that’s fun to read — one of EQ’s best.

Rating: *****

   
(*) I assume but am not sure that this refers to the same producer Ellery worked for in The Devil to Pay, the previous “Hollywood” mystery and reviewed here.

IRONSIDE. “The Leaf in the Forest.” NBC, 21 September 1967 (Season One, Episode Two). Raymond Burr (Robert T. Ironside), Don Galloway (Det. Sgt. Ed Brown), Barbara Anderson (Officer Eve Whitfield), Don Mitchell (Mark Sanger). Guest Cast: John Larch, Edward Andrews, Barbara Barrie, John Rubinstein, Bert Freed. Director: Leo Penn. Currently available online.

   The basic setup for the series was established, in a TV movie entitled Ironside (March 28, 1967), but I’ve not seen that since it first aired, so I can’t provide any details beyond the following: Robert Ironside was a member of San Francisco Police Department until was crippled in an accident and confined to a wheelchair. Not wanting his expertise go to waste, he was hired as a consultant and given two liaison officers (Eve Whitfield and Ed Brown) to work for him, along with a personal driver (of a custom-fitted armored car).

   The title of this episode comes from an old “Persian” saying along the lines of “The best place to hide a book is in a library, to hide a man is in a city, and to hide a leaf is in a forest.” Ironside quotes this to his crew when the death of an old woman in her apartment appears to be the sixth victim of a serial killer menacing the serial. The m.o. appears to be the same, but Ironside sees some crucial differences.

   Raymond Burr was of course fresh from a long run as TV’s Perry Mason, and his popularity easily continued on to this series, which lasted eight seasons. As Robert Ironside, he was extremely observant and made an obvious effort to push his assistants to think the way he did, and not much succeeding, at least in this episode. Perhaps they got better.

   In any case, by challenging them with the clues, he was doing the same for the benefit of the viewer, but without calling the members of his TV audience “children,” as he does on a couple of occasions, with some exasperation.

   All in all, it’s a fairly easy case to solve, but it’s fun to see the cast as they start to come to grips with their roles. Of the guest stars, Barbara Barrie stood out way ahead of the others, as a wife faced with the hard decision to give her husband [PLOT WARNING!] an alibi for the killing or not.

MORRIS WEST – Summer of the Red Wolf. Morrow, hardcover, 1971. Pocket, paperback, 1972.

   The unnamed narrator of Summer of the Red Wolf is a writer facing the most extreme kind of ennui. He is fed up with civilization, sick of the world; “I was engulfed in black despair.”

   Maybe it is fate he meets Alistair Morrison. Morrison is one of those fictional deus ex machina the hero of this kind of book encounters at just the right moment, a semi-mystical philosopher/gadfly who plunges our narrator into a life devoid of all the pretense of civilization.

   For our hero the “place of unknowing” is beyond the isle of Skye, “and may Saint Donan be between you and harm.”

   On the way to his remote fate our hero meets Dr. Kathleen McNeil, a dark haired long legged Scot he will soon fall in love with, and the man who will change his life, Red Ruarri Matheson, master of the ship Mactire (Celtic for wolf), a bearded Viking of a man, “…he had the watchful sidelong glance of the commando,” a dangerous man, a gun runner, and more, friend, enemy, antagonist, and killer. Ruarri the Mactire.

   The writer, who Rurarri calls sennachie, or storyteller, sees himself in the shadow of the Red Wolf, but unconsciously matches him as an adventurer. This is the classic form of the adventure novel, David Balfour meeting Alan Breck, Jim Hawkins first encountering Long John Silver, the narrator of The Third Man meeting Harry Lime, Marlow and Kurtz, the opposites that not only attract, but that are strangely mirror images…

   Morris L. West cut his teeth writing adventure fiction and thrillers in his native Australia before he turned to bestseller-dom with books like The Daughters of Silence, The Ambassador, and eventually The Shoes of the Fisherman, Harlequin, The Navigator, and The Salamander. Eventually Hollywood came calling too with movies and mini-series and his works topped the New York Times Bestseller List regularly.

   Eventually Red Ruarri, wild Ruarri, Ruarri the Red Wolf goes too far and the sennachie has to challenge him, a demonstration of fencing with a saber with Ruarri out to do real harm, and the narrator recognizing he can only save himself and Ruarri by besting him.

   There is murder at the heart of the story, and a surprising twist in the dynamic between the man of letters and the man of action that comes at the books emotional climax.

   This is Buchan and Stevenson country with hints of Conrad’s complexity and depth, a kind of poetry of adventure and far places on the edge of civilization as most of us know it. It is the poetry of the wild wet wind off the sea, of rocky coasts, and ice driven breezes, of life lived at a different pace closer perhaps to the both the elements and the ever present shadow of death. West was the most literary of the major bestselling writers of his time and something more than just a name on the bestseller list, and this, I suspect, his most personal novel.

   If it is not great literature it is a kind of literary experience that I have always savored, and will, I hope continue to for as long as I read and write. Those “places of unknowing” call the armchair adventurer in all of us, and to be fair it is a damn site more comfortable than the actual icy blast of the North Sea and the wind rattling the shutters as the wild thunder rolls and heavy waves erode the shore.

   Summer of the Red Wolf is as good a choice to curl up in a good chair with a snoring cat in your lap or dog beside you, a glass of good whiskey at hand. and settle in for a long read as I can imagine, and for me that in itself may be my highest recommendation. The Sennachie and Ruarri the Mactire will linger in your imagination long after you have turned the last page and laid the book aside.

WATERLOO ROAD. Gainsborough, UK, 1945. John Mills, Stewart Granger, Alastair Sim, Joy Shelton, and Alison Leggatt. Written & directed by Sidney Gilliat. Currently available on YouTube.

   Sidney Gilliat’s credits include thrillers like The Lady Vanishes, Bulldog Jack, Night Train to Munich, The Green Man and many others, so with him at the helm this promises to be a witty, fast-paced and suspenseful yarn. It doesn’t disappoint. Waterloo Road (set in 1941 at the height of the Blitz) crackles with movement and tension, even though there’s very little actual criminal activity, mostly done by the hero of the piece.

   Said hero is Private Jim Colton, ably played by John Mills in his usual unassuming way, albeit a bit handier with his fists than usual. When Colton hears that his wife Tillie (Joy Shelton) has been running around with spiv Ted Purvis (a slick job by rising star Stewart Granger) he goes AWOL in London to check things out for himself.

   That’s not a terribly promising start for a thriller, but Gilliat fills the slender tale with fast-paced foot chases as Colton eludes the MPs, tense encounters with Purvis’ thuggish associates, and he backs it up with some colorful smaller parts, ably written and played: Alastair Sim fits in quite suitably as the moral anchor of the tale, and Joy Shelton conveys the complexity of a lonely woman missing her husband and sorely tempted by Granger’s patently phony charm as Gilliat cross-cuts neatly between Colton’s search for Purvis and Purvis’ simultaneous moves on the Missus, each building suspense in its own way. And when the pay-off scene finally arrives it’s handled perfectly, with the most savage fight scene in British Cinema until Sean Connery and Robert Shaw went at it in From Russia with Love.

   Oddly though, what stays in the mind is the emotional resonance of the moment, as feelings are conveyed by a glance, hearts broken and mended with a meaningful gesture, and Colton’s fury is unleashed not by Purvis’s attempted seduction, but when the rejected spiv insults his wife. The delicate emotional balance lends dramatic contrast to the violence that ensues, and the result is one of those truly memorable movie moments in a film well worth seeking out.

JAMES M. CAIN – Serenade. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1937. US Paperback editions include: Penguin Books #621, 1947; Signet 1153, 1954; Bantam S-3864, 1968; Vintage, 1978. Film: Warner Brothers, 1956, with Mario Lanza and Joan Fontaine.

   First person narrative of a self-hating, closeted, gay opera singer. He falls in love with a rich gay conductor in Europe but feels so guilty about his homosexuality he has a nervous breakdown and can no longer sing worth a damn.

   He runs away.

   Relegated to the worst opera circuit in the world, in Acapulco, he quits and finds himself with his last three pesos, drunk, in a slummy bar.

   A really hot prostitute walks in and fawns on a local hero bullfighter.

   The gay opera guy feels something in his libido awaken in the presence of the prostitute.

   So he gives the bullfighter the staredown. The bullfighter comes up to him and asks what his problem is. Mr. Closet says: let’s gamble for the girl. They do. Mr. Closet loses a fixed lottery game.

   The prostitute drops him her address, and he looks her up.

   He gets drunk with her at her little whorehouse, and it looks like things are going swell, when he sings her a gay serenade.

   She senses the homosexual tendencies in his castrato, and cuts him off (figuratively–not Bobbit-like), and he trudges on home.

   A week later she wins a little lottery money and seeks him out—thinking a gay dude would be the perfect pimp for a whorehouse she wants to start up in Mexico City with her ‘seed money’.

   En route to Mexico city in a little red convertible ford they hit a massive thunderstorm. The roads flood. There’s nowhere to go. They come to a church. The church door is locked. So he rams the car thru the locked church doors and they wait out the storm.

   They’re soaked so they take off their clothes.

   Aroused by her naked figure praying at the alter asking forgiveness, he rapes her.

   Enraptured by his hetero rapist cajones, he turns to the window and sings opera with a depth, vigor and confidence he’d never known. His voice was back and better than ever.

   For some reason, the whore now loves him. He’s shown her he’s a ‘real man’ or something.

   He takes her back to the States with him, and becomes a huge Hollywood star. Then he leaves Hollywood and becomes a huge opera star with the Met.

   Then disaster strikes as his old beau, the rich gay conductor, tracks him down, stalks him, pulls him back into his orbit.

   Things come to head when the old beau calls immigration on the prostitute. She waves her cape like a toreador, and she sticks him like a bull.

   Things get pretty crazy from there as our protagonist can’t quit her. He finds himself falling for another man. He can’t believe it–‘I’m not one of those….am I?’. He feels that she’s his only hope to save him from his own gay lust.

   But the warrant’s out for her, murder one. He can’t let her get the chair.

   He’s gotten so famous he can no longer sing, lest he risk the whore whose musk summons hetero urges to his lust.

   As ridiculous as it all sounds, the book is really great. Mexico is palpably rendered. And Cain really knows opera. The dialogue is as good as anything Cain ever wrote. Which says a lot. Since Cain is as good as any hardboiled writer. And for me, that means he’s as good as anybody. Ever.

   So if you can let go of the bizarre self-hating gay machismo of a bygone era, and accept the fact that bizarre self-hating gay machismo is and was a real thing, as worthy of acknowledgement as dinosaurs, dead stars and moonbeams, then have yourself a treat and check it out. It’s really good.

   Previously reviewed here by Max Allen Collins. The film panned here by David Vineyard.