Happy New Year! Over the nearly two decades I’ve been writing these columns, I’ve always tried to make sure I knew what I was talking about. This time I know very little about my subject, but no one else seems to know more.

   Recently I found myself getting interested in an over sixty year old TV detective series which, when it was running, I never watched. Nor, it seems, did the overwhelming majority of Americans. THE INVESTIGATORS aired on CBS from early October till late December of 1961, a total of thirteen 60-minute episodes. James Franciscus, James Philbrook and Mary Murphy starred as three detectives specializing in insurance cases. Most episodes featured one well-known movie star — Claire Trevor, Miriam Hopkins, Jane Wyman and Mickey Rooney, just to name four.

   The Internet Movie Database provides cast lists for each episode but no plot summaries, which I dug out from my TV Guide collection. What mainly sparked my interest was that, according to the IMDb, every one of the thirteen hour-long episodes was directed by the same man, whom I happened to know well and who in fact was the subject of one of my books.

   The director in question was Joseph H. Lewis (1907-2000), on whose boat the Buena Vista I taped the conversations that became the raw material for the only book about him published in his lifetime. In 1937, after a few years as a film editor, Joe had become a director and made some superb 60-minute Westerns, usually starring Bill Elliott, Charles Starrett or Johnny Mack Brown, each of them brimming with visual excitement; pictures that earned him the moniker of “Wagon Wheel Joe,” thanks to his habit of shooting scenes through the spokes of guess what.

   After World War II he became involved with what would soon become known as film noir, helming pictures like MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS (1945), SO DARK THE NIGHT (1946) and, best known of all, the classics GUN CRAZY (1949) and THE BIG COMBO (1955).

   In the early 1950s he suffered a major heart attack and was unable to work for a year. Near the end of that decade he moved from the big screen to the small, signing a generous long-term contract with Four Star, one of the top TV series production companies, whose executives wanted him to concentrate on THE RIFLEMAN (ABC, 1958-63), the iconic Western series created by Sam Peckinpah and starring Chuck Connors.

   â€œThey wanted me to direct every show in the series. I said ‘Hell no, I won’t do that!’” The compromise they reached was that he’d work one week a month preparing and shooting an episode of THE RIFLEMAN or some other Four Star series. The rest of the time he’d relax on his boat. Under this arrangement he helmed 51 RIFLEMAN episodes over five years, plus two segments of THE DETECTIVES (ABC, 1958-61; NBC, 1961-62), a cop show starring Robert Taylor, and one story for Four Star’s anthology series ALCOA THEATRE.

   There’s no question that, on loan-out from Four Star, he did some work on THE INVESTIGATORS. “I wanted to do a close-up shot of [James] Franciscus’s hands,” Joe told me, “and I couldn’t do it because of the awful way his fingernails looked. He was a nail-biter.” But would he have agreed to direct an hour-long episode every week when just three years earlier his heart attack had led him to refuse to do more than one 30-minute show a month? In the immortal words of Eliza Doolittle, not bloody likely.

   If only we could check the credits on the 13 episodes of THE INVESTIGATORS, we’d know who directed them, but we can’t. Apparently the only segment that survives is “The Oracle” (12 October 1961), guest-starring Lee Marvin as a religious cult leader, which exists only in a truncated form, minus credits.

   But from what I’ve dug up it seems to have been an interesting little series. Its main claim to historical importance is that one of the three protagonists, played by Mary Murphy, was apparently the first licensed female PI character to star in a TV series.

   For devotees of Cornell Woolrich a further attraction is that two episodes seem to be rooted in the work of that dark angel of suspense. In “I Thee Kill” (26 October 1961) the investigators set out to clear a man (Mickey Rooney) who was in the crowd outside a church when the fellow who was about to marry the suspect’s girlfriend was shot dead. Doesn’t that sound just a bit like a variant on Woolrich’s THE BRIDE WORE BLACK?

   More clearly borrowed from a Woolrich premise is “Death Leaves a Tip” (30 November 1961), in which Franciscus and Murphy recruit a shy young waitress to serve as bait to trap a serial killer who’s preying on members of her profession. Unmistakably this is Woolrich’s 1938 classic “Dime a Dance,” also known as “The Dancing Detective,” with a different female job specialty. The guest star in this one was Jane Wyman, one of whose earliest credited movie roles was as the female lead in THE SPY RING (1938), an espionage drama directed by (can you guess?) Joseph H. Lewis, but this is hardly evidence that Joe helmed her episode of THE INVESTIGATORS.

   I touched base with an old friend who has one of the world’s largest collections of TV episodes from the Fifties and Sixties on video and he told me he had never even heard of THE INVESTIGATORS. I exchanged emails with a man whose biography of Joe Lewis will probably be published this year and he knew nothing more about the series than I did. Dead end. Game over. Case closed.

   I had hoped that this column would take me on a voyage of discovery that I could share, but the ship seems to have gotten itself grounded. Luckily I made another discovery late last year, and this is a genuine find. While fumbling around YouTube I came across a composition by my beloved Bernard Herrmann that I’d never heard before, a very early piece written when he was around 22 and never published or performed until after his death.

   What’s most fascinating about his Sinfonietta for String Orchestra (1936) is that it sounds very much as if it were a 15-minute excerpt from his score for PSYCHO, a quarter century later, that Hitchcock never used. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: No one does ominous like Herrmann does ominous. Check out the Sinfonietta and hear for yourself:
   

E. X. FERRARS – Experiment with Death. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1981, as by Elizabeth Ferrars. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1981. Bantam, US, paperback, 1982.

   A rough count I just made of the detective novels written by E. X. Ferrars came to over 70 of them, written between 1940 and 1995. I’ve sampled only a few of them, so it’s not possible for me even start to generalize, but off the top of my head, I’d say that of all of the authors over the years who’ve been compared to Agatha Christie in terms of cluing and twisty fair-play endings, Ferrars comes the closest.

   A number of her book have series characters; unfortunately none of them are very memorable and that doesn’t help in keeping her name alive among mystery fans, even those who are well read. If you were to ask me about mystery writers whose work ought to be reprinted in a uniform series of books, I’d say she should be at the top of list, rather than obscure writers whose books have been so done,  but whose books aren’t nearly as satisfying.

   Experiment in Death is a standalone, and it’s a good one. It takes place in a pseudo-academic setting, which is to say a research institute whose specialty is the study of apples. There are no students involved, that is to say, but the usual petty grievances and jealousies that always seem to exist in academic-oriented mysteries are very much in play.

   Dead is the director of the facility. He wasn’t unliked, but he seemed always to find pleasure in pitting faculty members against each other. Doing most of the detective work is the middle-aged Dr. Emma Ritchie, and even though she never seems to have ever run across a case of murder again, she does good work here, in a situation where alibis are crucial, as well a timetable consisting of statements of who was where when.

   Complimenting matters is the fact that the time had been changed on many of the clocks found in rooms along the hallway where the dead man had his office. I love mysteries involving complications such as this. It doesn’t hurt that all of the characters with motives are real people with real fears and real concerns. I consider that as the bonus it so very much is, and you should too.

CONFLICT. “The Man from 1997.” ABC/Warner Brothers, 17 November 1956 (Season 1, Episode 6). 60m. Jacques Sernas, Charlie Ruggles, Gloria Talbott, James Garner, Stacy Harris. Screenplay: James Gunn, based on the story “Of Time and Third Avenue” by Alfred Bester (F&SF, October 1951). [See comment #2.] Producer: Roy Huggins. Director: Roy Del Ruth.

   Conflict was an anthology series for ABC that generally provided straight dramatic shows featuring characters in “conflict,” for lack of a better word. One of these shows, however, was something special, at least for science fiction readers: a time-travel story that covers all of the tropes of that particular subgenre rather well, particularly when you consider how poorly SF stories were generally presented on TV back in 1956.

   The story begins as a young janitor (Jacques Sernas), only two months in this country, buys several large books in a used book shop, hoping they will help him learn English. When he returns to his basement apartment is that one of them is a comprehensive almanac for the year 1997. (A book published over 40 years in the future, I hasten to add.)

   He’s no dummy. He looks up to see which horse will win a race the following day, and he asks the brother (James Garner) of the girl of his dreams (Gloria Talbott) to place a ten dollar bet on the winner for him.

   Thinking that this is throwing money away, the brother bets on the favorite instead, which animal of course loses. But all this attracts the bookie’s attention, not one of the more savory of gentlemen in the world.

   In the meantime a mysterious man dressed all in white (Charlie Ruggles) is frantically trying the locate the book, naturally afraid that in the wrong hands, the future could easily be drastically altered.

   Since the episode is available on YouTube, you can watch it yourself from here. In your own time machine, in other words, without changing the past or present one iota. This is the thrust of the story, though: how to persuade the young couple to give up their dream of making a fortune from the book and do the right thing.

   Besides being a still entertaining relic from the past, also of note is the fact that seeing James Garner in this episode led producer Roy Huggins into casting him the very next year as Maverick, and the rest, as they say, is history.

   
   
UPDATE: David Pringle reminds me that “…the James Gunn who wrote the script is *not* James Gunn the sf writer, as some people might expect to be the case.

   “J. E. Gunn the screenwriter was born in 1920 and died in 1966, whereas J. E. Gunn the sf guy was born in 1923 and died, as many of us may remember, at the age of 97 in 2020.”

ARCHER MAYOR – The Dark Root. Joe Gunther #6. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1995; paperback, 1996.

   Mayor is one of the best of the latest wave of writers, to my eye.  I thought  so from his first book, Open Season, and I thought that his last, Fruits of the Poisonous Tree, was his best to date. He’s overdue for an award in my opinion.

   An Asian family is brutalized, and won’t talk to the police. A local gangster is tortured, then killed. What began as an Asian-style “home invasion” is becoming a town invasion, and Lieutenant Joe Gunther of the Brattleboro, Vermont police finds himself immersed in a form of crime and gang warfare new to him. Other deaths follow, and Joe must join forces with much larger agencies to find the killers.

   This was in one sense and perhaps the primary one a police procedural, and a damned good one, maybe even superb. I haven’t read a more realistic-seeming description of a large-scale, multi-jurisdiction operation. It’s also a portrait of how Asian gangs operate in this country, and again, a very realistic seeming one. (I’m often amused by reviewers, myself unfortunately included, who use the stand-alone “realistic” in contexts in which they haven’t the foggiest idea of what reality consists of.)

   Where Mayor’s last book dealt heavily with Gunther and his lover’s emotions — while at the same time also being an excellent procedural — this is the story of a hunt, and the “personal” material is kept to a very proper minimum. Mayor is a fine narrative storyteller, and his pacing here is excellent. Of the male writers to appear in the last few years, I’d place him second only to Connelly, and not that far back.

HENRY CECIL – A Woman Named Anne.   Michael Joseph, UK, hardcover, 1967. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1967. Academy Chicago, US, trade paperback, 2005. House of Stratus, UK, softcover, 2008.

   The whole of this book revolves around a divorce case. Most of the action takes place in court and deals with the questioning of various witnesses in the case or Amberley v. Amberley. The cross examination is mainly directed (by Charles Coventry, Q.C., one of the most brilliant of his calling) at very attractive Mrs. Anne Preston, as he seeks to trap her into admitting that she did commit adultery with the defendant, Michael Amberley.

   Not much or a plot for a mystery novel, you might suppose. But you would be wrong. The dialogue alone is well worth twice the price of admission., and just when, towards the end, you think that the truth  has finally emerged., the author applies another, final, deft twist, and bowls you over.

   Quite the most enjoyable book I’ve read in months.

STEVE FISHER “You’ll Always Remember Me.” Short story. First published in Black Mask, March 1938. Reprinted in Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy & Otto Penzler (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).

   When you think of “juvenile delinquents,” what probably comes to your mind first (well, it does mine) are the gangs of young hoodlums who obsessed the country everywhere in the 1950s, largely in big cities but small towns in the middle of nowhere as well.

   Well, what this this story does is to remind you that kids could be bad in earlier time periods as well, but maybe only without the accompanying gangs. The young 14-year-old narrator of “You’ll Always Remember Me” is, for example,  as bad as they come.

   It seems that the older brother of the girl that Martin Thorpe is seeing is about to be hanged for the killing of their father, and he’s run out of appeals. It won’t matter if I tell you that it won’t long for you to decide who really did it. The only question is, is he going to get away with it?

   You’d think that another mysterious, unexplained death would be enough for one story that’s only 18 pages long (in the hardcover reprint anthology), but what I found really chilling was the death of a very sick kitten. I guess it’s all in perspective. One thing’s for sure. The title is absolutely right on.

JOHN CROWE – Bloodwater. Buena Costa County #3. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1974. No paperback edition.

   John Crowe is one of Dennis Lynds’ several pseudonyms — others include William Arden, Michael Collins, Mark Sadler — and his Buena Costa County is fictional, a synthesis of many of the places and characteristics of Lynds’ home state of California. That, however, is as far as unreality figures in these excellent novels. The characters are deeply and well drawn, the procedure is accurate, the plots are plausible and logical.

   A prominent citizen of Monteverde, one of the county’s elegant suburbs, is found dead of gunshot wounds in a seedy motel room. The gun is his own; the name he registered under is not. Detective Sergeant Harry Wood of the Monteverde Police Department has a special interest in the case, since he and the dead man, Sam Gamet, were both on the force together before Garnet climbed through the ranks of the security department to the vice-presidency of a local corporation.

   Wood’s investigation takes him into the homes of the rich and socially prominent of the area; into the offices of powerful corporation executives; and into the past of a family that is desperately attempting to conceal a secret. The satisfying solution links diverse aspects of the case, both from the past and the immediate present.

   Other titles in this series: Another Way to Die (1972), A Touch of Darkness ( 1972 ), Crooked Shadows ( 1975), When They Kill Your Wife (1977), and Close to Death (1979).

     ———
   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.

FREDERICK C. DAVIS – Deep Lay the Dead. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1942. Thriller Novel Classic #26, digest paperback, circa 1946.

   When he wrote for the hardcovers, Davis had two different sets of series characters: first, a psychology professor named Cyrus Hatch (eight books) and then the private eye team of Schyler Cole and Luke Speare (six books). The others (several dozen) were standalones (not counting those he wrote under other names). This is one of the latter.

   But before getting to Deep Lay the Dead, I should also mention that Davis was one of the more prolific of pulp writers, with his career for the detective pulps extending from 1921 all the way to 1956, publishing several hundred stories along the way. Among the series characters he came up with for the pulps were the never-to-be-forgotten Moon Man, who solved crimes wearing a fish bowl on his head (I may be exaggerating, or am I?), and Bill Brent, a newspaper reporter who’s forced to write an advice to the lovelorn column under a female alias.

   Deep Lay the Dead was his fifth hardcover mystery, and while its hero, a young math whiz named Rigby Webb might well have appeared up a second time, this seems to have been his only case. Forced under semi-duress to work for an expert in codes and ciphers in an isolated house in rural Pennsylvania, he discovers that the latter is trying to create an unbreakable code to help in the war effort; Webb’s job: see if it can be broken.

   The problem is, a courier is expected from Washington, but the house is completely snowed in. The power is out, and someone has cut the phone lines. The long-delayed agent finally makes his way in by foot, but as he is seen approaching the house, the same unknown someone shoots him with a rifle from inside. The house is filled with weekend guests. Which of them is the killer?

   Davis tells the story cleanly and smoothly, with no particular flourishes, but the tale can be read in long gulps at a time. And before writing the book, Davis obviously boned up on the basics of codes and how to break them, using info dumps of jargon used by those in the trade to make his story as authentic as possible. (It all sounded good to me.)

   The basic framework of the tale is that of a detective story, so I was a bit disappointed in the ending, which turns out to be more an action thriller than a mystery with clues, fair play and all that. There is also more than a soupçon of romance in the mix. Something for everyone, in other words, and none the worse for it. I liked this one.

CHARLES WILLIAMS – The Wrong Venus. New American Library, hardcover, 1966. Signet Signet T4158, paperback, 1970. Perennial Library, paperback, 1983. Film: Universal, 1967, as Don’t Just Stand There! (starring Mary Tyler Moore & Robert Wagner).

   Boarding a commuter from Geneva to London, Lawrence Colby, freelance fixer, is libidinally drawn to the seat next to leggy Martine Randall, a smoother operator than he.

   Slapstick hijinks ensue as hundreds of Colby’s smuggled self-winding Swiss watches, concealed in his multipocketed sweater, spontaneously self-wind via turbulence and start ticking like timebombs and tinkling their alarms.

   She helps him out of the jam, neutralizing the watch mechanisms by dipping them in a pool of crème de menthe clogged in the airplane bathroom basin.

   In exchange, he agrees to help her with a problem of her own.

   The world’s best-selling romance writer has finally had sex. Now she can’t write romance novels anymore. She thinks they’re silly.

   Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Miss Romance, her agent has embezzled her money and was counting on the big advance on the next novel to cover it up. So now he needs a ghost writer to write it.

   He’s hired a retired 30’s hardboiled pulpster, who’s completed the manuscript. But the sex writing is too terse for the romance spinster set. So a second ghostwriter has come in to fix it. A blonde bombshell PR pro who has disappears right before she finishes the edits.

   Bringing back the bombshell ain’t easy, as she’s kidnapped, chased by the mob, and is constitutionally anarchic, nonchalant, and impossible to control.

   The novel approaches postmodern territory when Charles Williams lay bare the writing process whereby the hardboiled manuscript is massaged into Harlequin romance before the reader’s very eyes.

   Very entertaining caper novel. Has anyone seen the movie?

ROBERT LESLIE BELLEM “Diamonds of Death.” Dan Turner #2. Published in Spicy Detective Stories, July 1934. Reprinted in Hollywood Detective, August 1950, and in The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg (Carrol & Graf, 1988).

   I think that the best way to review a Dan Turner story may also be the easiest. It could even reflect the only reason for anyone to read a Dan Turner story. Simply quote passages from the story, taken here and there at random. Like this:

   Me again. I submit to you that prose like this is the work of genius.