DAN CUSHMAN – Jewel of the Java Sea. Gold Medal #142, paperback original, 1951. Cover artist: Barye Phillips. Two later printings. Expanded from the short story of the same title appearing in Adventure, October 1948. [See Comment #5.]

   Dan Cushman wrote a number of novels for Gold Medal in the 1950s, most of which were referred to by the publisher as “jungle thrillers.” The books were distinguished for their exotic settings in faraway lands. Jewel of the Java Sea, for example, begins in Borneo, moves to Singapore, and concludes in Sumatra.

   The story involves Frisco Dougherty, who has spent the last fifteen years in the tropics, hunting for a fortune in stolen diamonds. He obtains the first diamond easily because of his slightly shady reputation, and he knows there must be others. If he can find and sell them, he can return at long last to San Francisco and feel the cold fog in his face once more.

   The search is hampered by the presence of other hunters, including Deering, a murderous American, and his Sikh retainer. And of course, as in any good paperback of the time, there are three beautiful women of doubtful loyalties and morality.

   The pace is fast and the local color well done and convincing. The book is slowed somewhat by the dialogue, Dougherty being devoted to reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson and apparently having let his reading affect his speaking, and the relationship between Dougherty and one of the women is a little too spontaneous; but there is a fine treasure story (undoubtedly influenced by The Maltese Falcon), and the ending is satisfactory enough to make one forgive minor quibbles.

   Other Cushman “jungle books” include Savage Interlude (1952), Jungle She (1953), Port Orient (1955), and The Forbidden Land (1958).

     ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT “Stolen Star.” Short story. Joe Puma. First published in Manhunt, November 1957. Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg (Carrol & Graf, 1988). Collected in Marksman & Other Stories (Crippen & Landru, 2003).

   I may have this totally wrong, but even though PI Joe Puma’s home base is southern California, I don’t remember many of the novels and other fiction he was in involving Hollywood and the world of glamorous movie stars, beautiful starlets, and famous directors.

   I think of him rather as a blue-collar kind of guy, so my sense is that his brushes with the film industry were at the lower ends of it: chiseling movie producers at independent studios, conniving agents, and the like. Maybe I’m wrong, but at least in “Stolen Star” he gets to bump elbows (so to speak) with some of the major players in the industry which keeps all those millions if not billions of entertainment money flowing into the L.A. area.

   And even that may be an exaggeration: “Laura Spain had been kidnapped. Laura wasn’t the youngest star in the business, but she still had her figure and enough looks to pull all the men over thirty into any theatre showing one of her pictures. […] The thing had a bad odor right from the first ransom note.”

   Or in other words, maybe Laura thinks she’s slipping. That her career needs a boost, however sketchy the plan may be.

   Even though he smells something wrong, Puma agrees to be the go-between in getting the money to the kidnappers. And he’s right. Things do not work out well, and making what goes wrong as right as he can is the rest of the story. As always in these early stories, written just after the pulps died, Gault’s prose is snappy and smooth and goes down awfully easily.

   I do wish, though, that he had let the reader know more what Puma learns when he learned it, and even then, there’s a bit of jump between knowing it and knowing exactly who did it and why. I hope I don’t sound overly picky about this. It’s a very good story.

THE STAR OF INDIA. Eros Films, UK, 1954. United Artists, US, 1856. Cornell Wilde, Jean Wallace, Herbert Lom, Basil Sydney, Yvonne Sanson, John Slater, Walter Rilla. Screenplay: Herbert Dalmas, Denis Freeman (additional dialogue), John H, Kafka (uncredited). Directed by Arthur Lubin.

   Gorgeous color and the scenic haunting mystery-ridden landscape of the Languedoc region of France are among the highlights of this 17th century swashbuckler featuring Cornel Wilde as Pierre St. Laurent, a French officer recently returned from the wars in India (when the French and Dutch were still vying for an Indian Empire with the British) whose homecoming is spoiled when he finds his home has been sold for taxes and is now occupied by Katrina (Jean Wallace, Wilde’s wife), the widow of an older Count.

   When a visit to the ruthless and feline Royal Governor of the region Narbonne (Herbert Lom) yields no relief, Pierre returns to Katrina who informs him the Count sold a family jewel to Narbonne to pay for the estate and that if he will return the jewel, she will return his estates.

   That night when Pierre steals a statue of Shiva from Narbonne, he is forced to kill another thief who dies whispering the name of the king, and when the statue in turn houses only an empty compartment, Pierre is convinced Katrina’s story is about a family jewel is a lie — certainly when the jewel in the painting of her grandmother turns out to have been only recently added to the portrait and is a different shape than the hidden compartment in the statue.

   Spying on her, he learns that she is an agent of the Dutch government in the person of Van Horst (Walter Rilla), and the jewel is none other than the sacred sapphire known as the Star of India stolen by agents of Narbonne in India from a temple which the Dutch government wishes returned to India, where the jewels theft has stirred riots and unrest and death among native and colonists alike.

   Shades of The Moonstone and The Sign of the Four.

   Pierre manages to get himself invited to stay with Narbonne by returning the statue of Shiva, claiming to have stopped the thief he killed with a promise from Narbonne he can present his case to Louis XIV (Basil Sydney) himself. But he soon discovers that Louis, who is traveling with his Mistress Madame de Montespan (Yvonne Sanson), wants the jewel for her (and already sent the thief Pierre killed to steal it from Narbonne).

   Now Pierre must choose between his king, his conscience, and his growing love for Katrina if he can discover where Narbonne has hidden the jewel, steal it from under the eye of Narbonne, his man Emile (John Slater), and the greedy king (well played by Sydney).

   It’s a clever film with an attractive cast made even better by Wilde, a natural swashbucker (Bandit of Sherwood, At Sword’s Point, Forever Amber, Treasure of the Golden Condor, Sword of Lancelot) and a gifted swordsman (he qualified for the 1936 Olympic fencing team but never competed), who was as at ease as Errol Flynn in this type of role.

   There were always complaints about Wallace role in Wilde’s films, but while she was no great actress, she was photogenic and competent and certainly the films are better than those Hugo Haas put Cleo Moore in, and I would argue she is better than Sondra Locke in most of Clint Eastwood’s films and at least as good as Jill Ireland in Charles Bronson’s. As nepotism goes it seems a lesser sin.

   The film might have fared better with Maureen O’Hara or Rhonda Fleming, but Wallace is more than adequate, and between Wilde’s swashbuckling, Lom’s villainy, a smart script, capable direction by Lubin (Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves with Wilde and many Abbott and Costello films and later television), attractive sets, well staged action, and the too seldom seen Languedoc scenery, the film has more than enough going for it to compensate.

   If, like me, you like a good swashbuckler this one is relatively rare and quite worth the effort to see. I don’t know if it is available on DVD, but you can find it streaming on YouTube in English with not too distracting foreign subtitles in a decent enough print.

ELLERY QUEEN – The Devil to Pay. Stokes, hardcover, 1938. Pocket #270, paperback, 1944. Reprinted many times, including as one of the three novels in the omnibus volume The Hollywood Murders (J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, 1951). Also note: The Perfect Crime (Grosset & Dunlap, hardcover, 1942) was a novelization of the film Ellery Queen and the Perfect Crime (Columbia, 1941), which in turn was loosely based on this novel.

   Ellery, as Hilary “Scoop” King, the wildest type of parody of a newspaperman, solves the murder of a crooked financialist, Solly Spaeth. After disastrous floods in the Midwest, Ohippi hydroelectric project collapsed, leaving all other stockholders ruined, including Spaeth’s partner. There is also the matter of the correct will, so there are plenty of motives.

   A smooth, easy flow of words, a well-coordinated plot, and as “unlikely” but fairly obvious choice of murderer makes for enjoyable reading. However, there is nothing much to remember it by – I presumably have read it before, but nothing came back this time. Also included are Ellery’s experiences in trying to see an eccentric Hollywood producer.

Rating: ****

BILL PRONZINI – The Vanished.  Nameless PI #2. Random House, hardcover, 1973. Pocket, paperback, 1974. Foul Play Press, softcover, 1984.

   The second investigation by the nameless detective and the usual polished performance from Pronzini. The prose is a pleasure to read, and the story itself has you reaching for the next chapter.  “Nameless” is employed to find a Master Sergeant who has apparently vanished into thin air after returning to his native soil from a final spell of duty  in Europe.

   The detective interviews those of his friends and former comrades who might be able to help — and falls in love with Cheryl, the sister of one of them. The trail leads.from Oregon to Western, Germany, and from there to Northern California. Along the way Nameless picks up the pieces that eventually complete the jigsaw and uncover the vanished.

   The book’s one weakness (if such it be) is that the identity of the criminal can be deduced by reference, not to the clues, but to the inevitability of such a solution in the scheme of things for poor old Nameless.

JACK O’CONNELL – The Skin Palace. Quisigamond #3, Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1996. No paperback edition.

   O’Connell has written two of the strangest pieces of   crime fiction I’ve come across in the last few years, Box 9 and Wireless. Both set in the decaying Massachusetts town of Quinsigamond, each featured a cast of characters that could charitably be described as “strange”, and were written in a tone that approached the apocalyptic at times. I mostly liked them, but there’s been little discussion of them in the mystery press that I’ve seen.

   Here there is Sylvia, a strange young woman obsessed with celluloid images who has drifted from one phase of her life to another. Then, there’s Jakob, the son of a Polish immigrant gangster equally obsessed with film-making, who has trouble seeing the world through anything but a lens. There’s Schick, a porno film-maker with visions of cinematic grandeur. And there’s Propp, a mythical (?) photographer and cult figure. Like gas molecules in a pressure chamber, they heat and move and ricochet off each other until critical pressure is reached, and then . . .

   He’s written three strange ones now.  This really isn’t a book to try to review in a paragraph or so; either you just say “it’s strange,” or you should spend a page or two on it. It’s full of impossibilities, improbabilities. and off-center characters, and though you may wonder what it was  all about as much at the end as all the way through, it’s at least partially about taking pictures and making pictures, and ways of looking at life.

   It’s totally non-genre in its approach, and in the storytelling, and how much you like it will depend on how deeply you can immerse yourself in O’Connell’s flickering, out-of-focus world.  Easy read? No. Worthwhile for you? You won’t know until you’re done.

MICHAEL ARLEN – The Green Hat. Collins, hardcover, 1924. George H. Doran, US, hardcover, 1924. Reprinted numerous times.

   Few remember today, but in its time The Green Hat was ranked as a masterpiece, a best-seller, and — not incidentally — a steamy shocker that smoothed the road for The Great Gatsby (1925) and The Sun Also Rises (’27) where the antics of Daisy Buchanan and Lady Brett Ashley paled in comparison with the exploits of Hat’s Iris Storm.

   But what is so dull as last year’s scandal? The Green Hat has faded into obscurity, and that’s kind of a shame because it offers some dark, saturnine prose, and a twisty, half-hidden story line that seems driven by passion, but….

   But that would be telling. Let me just say that it starts very fittingly on a squalid street in London in the dead of night, when a mysterious woman in an expensive car calls on the narrator for help. It turns out she is the notoriously promiscuous Iris Storm, and she needs the author to let her in the apartment building he shares with her drunken brother. And to help her up the dark and treacherous stairway. And see if the brother is in any shape to receive company….

   He isn’t, and the two of them talk into the small hours of a new day, forging some sort of relationship, not love, but a mutual regard — this despite the fact that Iris has a reputation that would have shamed Lord Byron.

   The plot, such as it is, develops slowly, with many digressions along the way, but The Green Hat isn’t about Plot; it’s about Mood, and this one is like Huysman’s La Bas set to the beat of the Jazz Age and turned in upon itself.

   I mentioned Gatsby above, and I have to say that lovers of that novel (I’m one) may find Hat uncomfortably similar, even down to the scene where the lovers confront the forces of Convention, and one of them pushes too hard…

   But again, that would be telling. I’ll just note for the record that Fitzgerald submitted The Great Gatsby to his publisher in 1924, the year The Green Hat swept the book stalls, and was urged to re-write it. And I’ll add that if Fitzgerald “borrowed” from Arlen, he also improved what he took. Hat ends on a note of high melodrama that was an octave too high for my taste, but that doesn’t spoil the unique atmosphere of the work.

   And yes, this was the same Michael Arlen who created that mainstay of RKO’s B unit, The Falcon!

J. T. McINTOSH – Take a Pair of Private Eyes. Ambrose and Dominique Frayne #1. Frederick Muller, UK, hardcover, 1968. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1968.

   The most interesting thing about this book is that it’s a novelisation of a television play (BBC, 6 episodes, 1966; much broadcast, apparently, although I certainly never saw it) by Peter O’Donnell, creator of Modesty Blaise.

   The sleuths are the almost omniscient, omnipotent husband and wife team, Ambrose and Dominique Frayne, who together with Frayne senior, a retired master criminal, investigate the theft of the Mineptah Coffin, the biggest single chunk of gold in the world.

   Very much a caper type novel, there’s not a great deal of ratiocination but the action moves along at a fair old pace.

UPDATE: There was one followup adventure of the Fraynes, that being A Coat of Blackmail (Muller, 1970; Doubleday, 1971). This second does not seem to have been based on an O’Donnell work. McIntosh himself is much better known as an SF writer. These two books are his only entries in Hubin.

THE DROWNING POOL. Warner Brothers, 1975. Paul Newman (Lew Harper), Joanne Woodward, Tony Franciosa, Murray Hamilton, Gail Strickland, Melanie Griffith, Linda Haynes, Richard Jaeckel. Based on the novel by Ross Macdonald. Director: Stuart Rosenberg.

   Well, for one thing, they changed to location from sunny, hot southern California to sultry, swampy Louisiana, that much I know. I’m not sure, but I think the facility where the title scene takes place fit in better in the book. It seemed to me that came from nowhere in the movie, but I’d have to watch the movie again to state that as a fact. I watched this movie when it first came out, and I thought I remembered it, but the only scene that came back to me was the one in the pool, with the water rising and rising and still rising, with Harper and his lady companion trying to keep their heads above water.

   Harper is hired by a former girl friend, Iris Devereaux (Joanne Woodward), to find out who’s been blackmailing her about an affair she’s been having. It’s not her husband she’s worried about. It’s his mother who runs the estate where they live with an iron hand. When’s she found murdered, it’s the chauffeur who’s the immediate suspect. (He was also suspected of being the blackmailer.) A ruthless oil developer who wants the property is also involved.

   For a while after seeing this movie for the first time, I keep seeing Paul Newman as Lew Archer as I read the books. He’s very good in the role, but as time went on, the mental  image  I had of him gradually faded away. Joanne Woodward has a nothing part and makes very little of it. It was Melanie Griffith as her teenage sexpot daughter who made a bigger impression on me this time around.

   How much the story resembles the book I wish I could tell you, but I can’t. Considering it on its own, story-wise it doesn’t stack up all that much higher than many an episode of a PI show being shown on TV around the same time. It’s Paul Newman’s presence that makes it what is , though, and he’s quite good at it.
   

PAUL TEMPLE – The Tyler Mystery. Paul Temple #6. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1957. [In this case, author Paul Temple is the pseudonym of Francis Durbridge & James Douglas Rutherford McConnell.] Reprinted as by Francis Durbridge: Hodder, UK< paperback, 1960. Based on the radio serial Paul Temple and The Tyler Mystery by Francis Durbridge.

   This one happens to involve two writers not known as well on these shores as as they should be, Francis Durbridge was an international rival to Agatha Christie in the mystery genre whose radio and television plays have been adapted in multiple languages and countries and was best known here as the creator of mystery writer/detective Paul Temple and his ex-journalist wife Steve who adventured in sixteen radio serials on the BBC from the thirties on solving crimes in the Nick and Nora manner. Three films and a television series followed in England and several German television serials of the Temple adventures.

   The Temple films are available on the gray market, while most of the Temple radio serials are easily found on YouTube since they are still rebroadcast on BBC radio or can be purchased on DVD. The complete television series can be found easily but requires a multi region player.

   You can find the film of Durbridge’s novel and serial Portrait of Alison with Robert Beatty and Terry Moore fairly easily. A few Durbridge BBC serials are available on YouTube, and several German serials as well.

   Durbridge wrote numerous radio and television series, also creating reporter detective Tim Fraser in two books and a series as well as at least one German movie. Durbridge’s plays were hugely popular in Germany and other Western European countries, with Rossano Brazzi even starring in one Italian serial.

   Douglas Rutherford, who ghosted this Temple novel and East of Algiers for Durbridge is a top flight mystery adventure writer who has been called the Dick Francis of the Grand Prix circuit. His novels tend to be set against Formula 1 racing, Motorcross, and Motor Rally racing and often have drivers as the protagonists. His style is, like Dick Francis and John Anderson (who was to sailing small boats what Rutherford and Francis are to their fields), simple, accessible, and smoothly written featuring solid plotting, believable heroes, suspense, and colorful action.

   The Tyler Mystery opens with the body of a young woman found, the second in two weeks. Paul and Steve have just moved into their new flat with Steve fussing with the ambience of the new place when Sir Graham Forbes and Inspector Vosper show up consulting Temple about the murders. Sir Graham is Temple’s friend and connection to Scotland Yard who was even a suspect in Temple’s first adventure (Send for Paul Temple). Both he and Inspector Vosper have been known to consult with Temple before though reluctantly since there is no controlling him once he gets the scent.

   And Paul and Steve have hardly agreed to help before someone tries to run them off the road in their Humber.

   It all involves a mysterious conspiracy, a bit of smuggling, a horse doping scheme, and evasion of the Inland Revenue, the British tax system, before Temple uncovers the culprits in a classic gathering of the suspects.

   The Tyler Mystery is an entertaining read. Its serial origins can’t help but show, but the cliffhangers are often as not suspenseful and not physical and the joints don’t show too badly.

   Many of the original Temple serials were lost but recreated later for BBC broadcasts. Though Paul Coke was the longest running Paul Temple others included Barry Morse (Lt. Gerard of The Fugitive) and Howard Marion-Crawford (Dr. Watson to Ronald Howard’s Sherlock Holmes on television and Dr. Petrie in Christopher Lee’s Fu Manchu films). Francis Matthews was Temple on television and John Bentley in two of the three films.

   And as one mystery is solved Sir Graham admonishes Steve about their upcoming trip to Rome: “Haven’t you heard that the daughter of an Italian Cabinet Minister has just been kidnapped? I’m pretty sure if your husband goes to Rome…”

   â€œBy, Timothy” (Paul’s favorite exclamation), warm up the radio set. I hear the faint sound of Coronation Scot playing and variations on Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. Time to settle back with Paul and Steve Temple for another evening of thrills and mystery. It may not be great art, but audiences have been entertained since before the War and still are on radio, in print, on film, and on television.