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.

HENRY KANE. “Suicide Is Scandalous.” Novelette. Peter Chambers. First appeared in Esquire, June 1948. Collected in Report for a Corpse (Simon & Schuster, 1948). Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg (Carrol & Graf, 1988).

   It’s only my opinion – I have no stats to back this up – but as an author of any number of crime novels, and in particular, the creator of New York City-based PI Peter Chamber, Henry Kane has largely been forgotten in recent years. One exception is, of course, Mike Nevins’ covered his early years in one of the monthly columns he does for this blog. One of the stories covered, in fact, is this very one. Go here.

   This is one of the longest excerpts I’ve ever inflicted upon readers of this blog. Bear with me. A little old lady is sitting in Peter Chambers’ office on the other side of his desk. Bear with me. Here goes:

   Now either you find that an extraordinarily fine piece of writing, or you don’t. Kane’s prose, at least in this story, I’d place on the spectrum somewhere between Raymond Chandler and the Dan Turner stories by Robert Leslie Bellem, but closer to Chandler than the out-and-out wackiness of a Dan Turner story:

   So, OK. What’s the story about? Chambers’ client, the little old lady from the first except above, does not believe her daughter committed suicide. The police are convinced; that’s why she’s hired Chambers. But besides suicide being scandalous, there is a small matter of a will. The dead girl was rich. Her will leaves half to her mother, half to her sister. If it was murder, and the sister did it, who gets all the money?

   Besides being an above average PI story in and of itself, “Suicide Is Scandalous” ends with a lot of detective work going on. There was, in fact, so much detective work going on that I found it confusing. Oh well. You can’t have everything.

K. C. CONSTANTINE – Good Sons. Rocksburg [not Mario Balzic] #12. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1996; paperback, 1997.

   I had heard Constantine was calling it quits, but not so. Not only do we have this, but a Reliable Source tells me that there will be another Balzic to follow it. I also thought Constantine had said everything he had to say (and repeated a damned good portion of it), but I guess not-either that, or he needed the money.

   Detective Sergeant Ruggiero (“Ruggs”) Carlucci is more or less in charge of the Rocksburg, Pennsylvania police department since the retirement of Mario Balzic, and he thinks/is afraid that he may be in line for the Chief’s job. He’s got a lot of internal and external problems, and isn’t sure he wants it. His mind gets focused on another set of problems when a woman is found at a local business, horribly raped and mortally battered. The case will tell him a lot about himself, and what he can and wants to do and be.

   First, let me say that this is more of a mystery/crime novel than either of his last two books have been, not that it would take much more than a bigtime case of jaywalking to make that true. Carlucci isn’t as appealing a character to me as Balzac; I guess his problems don’t match up well enough with my own for me to relate well to his.

   I really don’t relate to Constantine at all any more, though on the basis of his earlier work I’m more than willing to concede that he’s earned his reputation. He preaches and speeches too much for me now, and though his blue-collar Everymen-and-women may be realistic, they just don’t interest me that much.

  MARKHAM. “Coffin for Cinderella.” CBS, 04 February 1960 (Season 2, Episode 34.) Ray Milland (Roy Markham). Guest Cast: Gloria Talbott, J. Pat O’Malley. Screenwriter: Jonathan Latimer. Director: John Rich. Currently available on YouTube.

   Oh, for the life of a private eye. Taking a business trip by train from New York to Florida, Markham is surprised by a young girl (Gloria Talbot) coming into his compartment with a porter and greeting him with a kiss and announcing herself as his wife. Maybe I don’t take trains often enough, but such a thing never happened to me, and if you were to tell me it’s happened to you, I wouldn’t believe you.

   It turns out that (a) she’s just inherited $33,000,000, (b) someone’s tried to kill her in her bedroom while sleeping, (c) she’s on her way to stay with her uncle for safety, and (d) two men are following her. All good reasons for Markham to take her on as a client until he finds out who’s behind all this. It doesn’t hurt that this Cinderella heiress is also very attractive and just a little  flirty.

   Markham the TV show was on CBS for two seasons. Markham the character was one of those PI’s who are independently wealthy and could take (or turn down) cases at his own choosing. In spite of a well-known mystery writer coming up with this week’s story line, at only 30 minutes long, there aren’t enough characters to choose from as being the one behind the attacks on Markham’s client, and the crucial clue is truthfully a bit of a stretch.

   On the other hand, I can always watch anything with Gloria Talbot in it (last seen by me in an episode of Conflict and reviewed here).

RUNNING BLIND. BBC Scotland, 1979. Stuart Wilson, Ragenheidur Stendor, George Sewell, Vladek Sheybal. Teleplay by Jack Gerson, based on the novel by Desmond Bagley. Directed by William Brayne.

   This co-produced British and Icelandic television adaptation of Desmond Bagley’s thriller Running Blind, was originally released as a mini-series and re-released as a feature that appeared on PBS, and that is just about the last time anyone saw it until recently. To say it has been elusive is an understatement.

   It’s now available on YouTube.

   Alan Stewart (Stuart Wilson) a retired British (or as he insists, Scottish, he even carries a skean dubh, a Scottish dagger) agent for an unnamed department is approached by his old boss Slade (George Sewell) who once had Stewart execute a old friend turned suspected traitor. Stewart naturally wants nothing to do with Slade and the Department, but the job in question is in Iceland where Stewart’s girlfriend Elin (Ragenheidur Stendor) lives and is as simple as delivering a small package for a lot of money.

   Slade also dangles that he might be more inclined to protect Stewart and Elin from the Russian masterspy Kennikin (Vladek Sheybal) who was emasculated by a missed shot Stewart made in attempting to kill him.

   A little added incentive.

   As you might imagine, nothing is that simple. Almost from the moment he sets foot on Icelandic soil, it becomes clear that the Russians are onto Stewart and that his own side is less than forthcoming.

   Contacting Elin, who doesn’t suspect who or what Stewart is, he uses her to misdirect the men following him and finds he is on the run from both the Russians, the British, and soon the CIA.

   Just what is he carrying, and who is on whose side?

   Running Blind was one of Bagley’s best novels, and that’s quite a compliment for the South African actor turned thriller writer whose work includes High Citadel, The Vivero Letter, Freedom Trap (filmed as John Huston’s The MacIntosh Man), Tightrope Man, The Spoilers, Snow Tiger, and more.

   Bagley would become a bestselling thriller writer whose work bridged the gap between the earlier generation of British thriller writers like Geoffrey Household, Hammond Innes, and Victor Canning, and the newer breed represented by Alistair MacLean, Gavin Lyall, and Duncan Kyle. He had Innes’ eye for detail, Household’s grasp of rough country, Lyall’s uncanny research skills, Canning’s cynical view of the Security Services and MacLean’s gift for twisting plot and hard action.

   Unlike most writers of his era he almost never repeats himself, and his protagonists are distinct and easy to identify,

   Action is the by-word of the print version of Running Blind, and it is perhaps only natural that the mini-series format is a poor one to convey that. Though the structure of the film is close to the book, the first third seems mostly Stewart looking over his shoulder against the rather bleak Icelandic volcanic landscape, and the lack of directorial style and a good score means everything depends on the actors and the scenery, and both are almost good enough to carry it, particularly Wilson.

   About a third of the way through things pick up considerably, and if you will keep tuned in until the point when Stewart and Elin are stalked by an assassin with a high powered rifle while camped out, you will probably stay for the entire story which falls in the category of films that seem much better in retrospect than while you are trying to get into them.

   That change is notable. The scenery becomes more dramatic, the action comes faster, the suspense is greater, and the twists come more frequently.

   Running Blind is not a completely successful translation of Bagley’s fast paced hard pounding novel, but it is entertaining if you stick through a slow first third. Valdek Sheybal (From Russia With Love, Billion Dollar Brain, The Wind and the Lion, and on television in mini series like QB VII and Shogun) picks things up considerably playing the KGB spy master Kenniken with a mix of suave professionalism and barely disguised fury at Stewart. That tension between the complete professional and the angry man gives the quiet scenes between him and Stewart real (and much needed) power.

   Most of the cast is unfamiliar, or at best faces you have seen but don’t really connect a name with. Lead Stuart Wilson is much more familiar now than his younger face in films like The Mask of Zorro, Hot Fuzz, Lethal Weapon 3, and Enemy of the State and on television in Dinotopia, MI-5, and Prime Suspect. More often than not today he plays a bearded villain not unlike Sheybal in this.

   Running Blind is mostly a curiosity. If you have read or enjoyed Bagley’s fine novels this is a bit more, but I admit it isn’t fully successful and it’s a book that deserves a big action movie done right and not a small half-hearted mini-series.

   I can see where they saw the minimal sets and Icelandic setting and thought they could get away with it, they just don’t quite pull it off, though I like it more than it probably deserves. The chance you might too makes it worth investigating.

ROSS MACDONALD. “Guilt-Edged Blonde.” Lew Archer. Short story. First appeared in Manhunt, January 1954, as by John Ross Macdonald. Reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February 1974. Collected in The Name Is Archer (Bantam, paperback, 1955), also as by John Ross Macdonald. Two stories were added to the collection when it was reprinted by Mysterious Press as Lew Archer: Private Investigator in 1977 under the name Ross Macdonald. Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg (Carrol & Graf, 1988), and in Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini & Jack Adrian (Oxford Press, 1995). Film: Le loup de la côte ouest (The Wolf of the West Coast), France, 2002. [James Faulkner played protagonist “Lew Millar.”]

   PI Lew Archer is hired for a six day job as a bodyguard for a man who is afraid to leave his house after receiving a phone call that morning. He’s met at the airport by the man’s brother, but the job doesn’t last all that long. When they reach the house, they find his client shot and dying outside on the lawn and a blonde-haired girl driving away in a hurry.

   After Archer persuades the brother to pay him to stay on the case, he learns that the dead man had a past. He’d been a treasurer for the mob in his younger days, and it’s apparent that his past had finally caught up with him. The brother, though, is also clearly trying to cover up for the girl.

   After tracking down the girl and learning what she tells him, Archer finds himself unlucky with a client a second time. He’s also been shot, and Archer finds him dying outside his home. I won’t go into details, but this is an early version of the stories involving dysfunctional families and their secrets that Ross Macdonald became famous for, and even as short as it is, it’s one told well.

ISAAC ASIMOV – Casebook of the Black Widowers.  Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1980. Fawcett Crest, paperback, 1981.

   After three books about the Black Widowers, containing 36 stories (and no indication that the series is nearing its end), it’s time to pay tribute to Isaac Asimov’s accomplishment. Though the stories are often compared with Baroness Orczy’s The Old Man in the Corner, they seem to me to belong in a different area of the so-called mystery story.

   The Old Man is fundamentally a detective, though an intuitive one who is seldom interested in evidence. Henry, who solves the problems in the Black Widowers stories, interprets word-plays, conundrums, anagrams, without worrying about crimes or indeed rarely about anything more significant than the word-play itself.

   Perhaps this point will become clearer if I do two things which The Poisoned Pen has always rightly abhorred: I shall become dryly academic while at the same time, grossly oversimplifying a complex matter.

   To pontificate: There is a continuum of types of fiction dealing with the unravelling of a problem:

               Riddleâž” Puzzleâž” Mysteryâž” Detection

   A Riddle is limited to elucidating a single point, often related to how a word is used, or how a single object or an event can be viewed from an unexpected angle. A Puzzle normally involves more than one occurrence or one word, but it is still usually limited to a small part of the characters’ lives. The Puzzle story shades almost imperceptibly into the Mystery,  the main distinct:ton being the significance of the problem to be resolved. Unlike the Puzzle, a Mystery involves most aspects of the characters’ lives, at least as reflected in the story. A Mystery becomes Detection when one character gathers evidence in a systematic (and normally, though not always, active) way.

   End of lecture.

   Back to the point: The Black Widowers stories are almost always riddles, occasionally puzzles, and never mysteries or detection. As such they fit into the grand line of tales going back to Anglo-Saxon riddles (and probably earlier), and they should not be criticized for being gimmicky or based on tiny points.

   When Barzun and Taylor said that the Black Widowers tales are “something of a stunt” (The Armchair Detective, January  1978), they were entirely accurate — but in making such a statement a negative criticism, they were judging riddle stories by the-wrong standard. Asimov’s work should be judged on two· grounds: First, how good a riddle is posed; second, how convincing or entertaining are the surrounding parts of the tale.

   To take the latter point first: Asimov’s male-chauvinist club is very well handled. The various characters are well-delineated. The conversations are · not only fascinating for themselves but they often set the tone for the problems; note especially the first Black Widowers volume in which The Iliad is retold in limericks and other lively topics are introduced.

   On the other hand, the stories as stories (rather than merely as riddles) are rather static. Despite the presence of a different guest in each tale, the stories vary little and seem rather remote  from human worries and from human activities.

   Asimov might be wise in future tales to vary the setting or make the riddles more immediate to the Widowers. (But Asimov would probably rightly retort that such  changes would produce something entirely different from a riddle story.)

   It is in the first point, the riddles themselves, that Asimov shines. The stories are filled with delicious puns and word-twists. The strongest tales are based on new ways of looking at familiar objects.· At times, as with “None So Blind,” the reader should reach the answer before Henry. At other times, as with “The Cross of Lorraine,” “The Missing Item,” and “To the Barest,” the answer is a surprise yet perfectly fair  and, once it is revealed, perfectly obvious.

   The Black Widowers tales are the best series of riddle-stories now being produced, and perhaps the best ever produced. Long may they continue.

       The Black Widowers series —

1. Tales of the Black Widowers (1974)
2. More Tales of the Black Widowers (1976)
3. The Casebook of the Black Widowers (1981)
4. Banquets of The Black Widowers (1984)
5. Puzzles of the Black Widowers (1989)
6. The Return of the Black Widowers (2003)

JANE HADDAM – Not a Creature Was Stirring. Gregor Demarkian #1. Bantam, paperback original, 1990. Doubleday, hardcover, 1993.

First Sentence: “Listen,” Myra said, as soon as the phone was picked up, without waiting to find out who had answered it.

   Gregor Demarkian, a retired profiler for the FBI “…the most Irish Catholic organization in the U.S. government” is asked for a special favor by his good friend, Father Tibor. Philadelphia Main Line millionaire Robert Hannaford has offered the priest $100,000 for his crumbling church if Gregor will have Christmas dinner at “Engine House,” the Hannaford estate.

   What Gregor finds is a house with every inch decorated for Christmas; a group of siblings who don’t like themselves or one another, some of whom are in financial and or legal trouble, and a matriarch crippled with Muscular Sclerosis who never leaves her room. Shortly after arriving, Hanniford is found in his den where a marble bust accidentally fell, killing him. Was it an accident? Gregor doesn’t think so.

   Haddam’s voice is one that captivates. With a heading of “PART ONE SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18-SATURDAY DECEMBER 24 THE FIRST MURDER,” it’s clear there’s an interesting story ahead. And it is nice that a floor plan of the house is included at the beginning of the book. The story is filled with subtle, often dialogue-driven humor. There is a cynicism and sharpness to her voice that causes frequent chuckles— “No intelligent psychopath had to murder a dozen little old ladies to get his kicks. He would wreak far more havoc by going into government work.”

   After that, it is the character of Gregor and his friend Father Tibor who are the hook. We learn of Gregor’s past and about life within an Armenian community. As for the family/victims, they are a mess. It is hard to work up a whole lot of sympathy for them. It makes one glad to not be wealthy, or at least, overly entitled.

   As for the plot, in the end, aren’t all motives really quite basic? The family Gregor is investigating is filled with unpleasant characters, and none more so than the father. As the investigation proceeds, it is understandable why he was murdered.

   One point of interest is that each of Haddam’s 30 books, is set against the background of a holiday. This somehow truly fits with her sense of humor.

   Not a Creature was Stirring is a familial version of Agatha Christie’s And Then There None. It has a strange, obscure plot of even stranger, mainly unsympathetic people other than those surrounding Gregor. However, what it really has is a delightful voice, eminently quotable lines, and a lot of smoking: one forgets how prevalent smoking was in 1990.

   This was one of those books where you feel as though you should have figured it out, but didn’t. It’s also a book that makes one really want to continue the series.

Rating: Good.

   CARTER DICKSON  “The Footprint in the Sky.” Short story. Colonel March. First published in The Strand, January 1940, as “Clue in the Snow.” Collected in The Department of Queer Complaints (Morrow, hardcover, 1940). Also collected in Merrivale, March and Murder (IPL, hardcover, 1991) as by John Dickson Carr. Reprinted in Murder in Spades, edited by Ellery Queen (Pyramid, paperback, 1969), also as by Carr.

   Strictly speaking, perhaps, not a locked room mystery, but an impossible crime, once you accept the fact that the young girl framed for the crime is innocent, a premise hard to believe, given the facts. A woman living in the house next door, separated by a tall hedge, has been clubbed several times on the head and robbed. It has snowed overnight and the only footprints going back and forth between the two houses are hers. She has size four shoes and the bottoms of hers are soaking wet.

   Carr’s books and stories are always permeated with eerie settings and backgrounds, and this one is no exception. The girl is known for sleepwalking and waking up having no idea what she may have done while doing so. For all she knows, she may have done it. Only Colonel March, head of Scotland Yard’s Department of Queer Complaints, believes her story at once, as soon as he’s on the scene.

   Carr was also known for playing “fair” with the reader, and again this one is no exception, but only once the reader, as soon as the rather outrageous solution is revealed, says, “Hey! What?” (quoting me exactly) and goes back into the story to discover what it was the March used to base his deductions on. Sure enough, it’s there. Right in plain sight, but totally buried in a paragraph used quite innocuously to describe a room.

   Note my use of the word “outrageous” in the paragraph above. I still don’t believe what he says happened could actually be done, but I guess I’d have to grant you that it *could* have.

QUILLER. “The Price of Violence.” BBC, 60 minutes. 29 August 1975. (Season 1, Episode 1.) Michael Jayston (Quiller), Moray Watson (Angus Kinloch). Guest Cast: Sinéad Cusack, Ed Bishop. Screenplay: Michael J. Bird, based on the character created by Adam Hall (Elleston Trevor). Director: Peter Graham Scott. Currently available on YouTube.

   It’s been over five years since the greatly missed Michael Shonk reviewed Adam Hall’s Tango Briefing, the fifth adventure of the master spy known only as Quiller. Along with that review he discussed the BBC TV series based on the books. At that time, only three of the episodes were known to have survived. Lo and behold, the whole season has recently turned up, easily found by doing a search for them on YouTube. I only wish that Michael were still with us to see them.

   There is much to like in “The Price of Violence,” the very first episode, but something I found as awfully rough going was that there is no dialogue at all in the first nine minutes, only scenes of some of the usual Mideast violence in Israel and Lebanon. Without knowing who any of the characters are, or — truthfully — no idea of what is happening, it all goes by too vaguely and with no particular context or meaning, then only to be forgotten once the story itself begins.

   Which has Quiller home in disgrace, his mission in the war zone a failure. As a penance, he’s not cashiered outright, nor put in a desk job, but put into a state of semi-limbo instead, a situation to which he does not take kindly. But his immediate superior (played impeccably well by Moray Watson), as well as the director of the totally secret “Bureau,” have other plans for him, and he’s ever so subtly nudged into becoming the bodyguard of the head of the World Food Commission, a totally innocuous man who otherwise has no play in the proceedings.

   Involved, however, is the man’s legal advisor, played to perfection by Sinéad Cusack, and sparks between Quiller and herself fly immediately. (She was to turn up again in two later episodes.) Quiller is a loner and a cynic, but as a man deeply involved in the spy business, never carries a gun. The sad but steely-eyed Michael Jayston was made for the part. George Segal, who played Quiller in the movies, was not.

   The series lasted for only one season of thirteen episodes, all now available, at least for the time being.