PAT FRANK – Forbidden Area. J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, 1956. Bantam A1553, paperback, January 1957. Harper Perennial, trade paperback, December 2016. Published in the UK as Seven Days to Never (Constable, hardcover, 1957).

   If Pat Frank is remembered at all today by modern readers it is likely for two mainstream bestselling science fiction works, the satiric Mr. Adam, about the last fertile man in the world, and the post-nuclear holocaust novel Alas, Babylon.

   That is only a small part of his output though, that included the Korean war novel (also a film with John Payne) Hold Back the Dawn, and this Cold War novel of spies, sabotage, detection, and nuclear brinksmanship.

   The Cold War novel had its real precedents in the popular future war genre from the late 19th Century in which writers like William Le Queux wrote speculative, but ground in somewhat realistic terms, novels “warning” British readers of the threat from outside invasion, often the Germans, sometimes the French (Napoleon was a not so distant memory), the Russians, or the “yellow perils” of Asia.

   Writers like M. P. Shiel, Le Queux, H. G. Wells, and even Arthur Conan Doyle (Danger!) contributed to the genre, and eventually it would produce one prophetic classic, Erskine Childer’s The Riddle of the Sands.

   In the period between the wars the subject was mostly reserved for the pulps, with heroes like the Spider, Operator #5, and G-Man Dan Fowler repelling wave after wave of foreign and domestic threats, and surely the inspiration for John Creasey’s Dr. Palfrey series. Thrillers indulged as well with books like Oppenheim’s Matorini’s Vineyard (which I reviewed here) and The Spy Paramount.

   With the advent of the atomic bomb in 1945 the genre got a big boost. National paranoia (some of it wholly justified) combined with the very real fear of nuclear war inspired a new wave of writers, and while some were well within genre boundaries like Will Jenkins (Murray Leinster’s) Murder of the U.S.A. and Sterling Noel’s I Killed Stalin, more mainstream writers took up the gauntlet, adding the fear of accidental nuclear war to the mix as well.

   These include novels such as Philip Wylie’s Triumph, Eugene Burdick’s Fail Safe, Paul Stanton’s Village of Stars, Nevil Shute’s On The Beach, The Bedford Incident, Ice Station Zebra, and Peter Bryant’s (nee Peter George) Red Alert, which became the basis for Dr. Strangelove.

   The genre had once again leaped from the pulps and pages of thrillers to the bestseller list.

   Forbidden Area falls into the latter category and opens off the (then) lonely Florida coast where two wooing teens see a Russian submarine disgorge a landing craft containing a small car and a team of men in black.

   Afraid of the girl’s father, the two keep silent, and thereby as the saying goes, hangs the tale. When a B29 is stolen shortly after a team of seven people are drawn together as the investigation proceeds and more B29’s, all part of the Strategic Air Command, are lost or sabotaged. The seven people come to realize the Soviet Union is preparing for a first strike against the U.S., but can they find evidence and prove it before it is too late?

   The book shows its age today, but it still manages to generate suspense and considering the growing new Cold War it is more relevant than it might have been even a year ago although the threat is different and the methods today less primitive.

   How the Soviet Union is foiled and nuclear war averted makes for some excitement even today, and if the characters all fit a bit too neatly into certain clichés, it isn’t to the detriment of the story. Frank was a fairly clearheaded writer not given to distracting from the plot at hand by going off on tangents.

   Forbidden Area is a relic of another era, but not without some virtues in terms of story and plot. It offers nothing new to the genre, but it does it with a compactness and straight forward line of suspense worth noting, and is a reminder the more things change the more they stay the sam

MARGARET YORKE – Cast for Death. Dr. Patrick Grant #5. Walker, US, hardcover, 1976. Bantam, US, paperback, October 1982. First published in the UK by Hutchinson, hardcover, 1976.

   Author Margaret Yorke was the author of close to 40 works of crime fiction, but only five of them seem to have been detective stories, all featuring Oxford don Patrick Grant as their leading protagonist. The rest appear to to be novels of suspense — whether romantic or psychological, I hesitate to say.

   But on the basis of this, the first of her books that I’ve read, I’d have to say that detective fiction was not among her strong points. (I’m speaking here of the traditional kind, with clues, alibis and all kinds of red herrings.)

   The general background is fine — that of the then-current Shakespearean season in the small cities and towns near Oxford. Dead, found floating in a river — presumably a suicide — is an actor who never showed up for his final performance. But as a work of detective fiction, the resulting case is a shambles. An observant man, Grant seems to have a special ability to jump to (correct) conclusions by instinct only.

   And by sheer coincidence. A dog he accidentally runs over on a highway belongs to a woman who also has just died, also assumed to be a suicide, but her life — would you believe — is somehow connected with the first one. Grant puts two and two together by noting a canister of Earl Grey tea in both their lodgings.

   More interesting is Grant’s off-and-on lukewarm romance with his long-time acquaintance Liz. He sees her on occasion only, but a chance kiss turns into a longer one than either one of them expects, and they both step back and tacitly decide not to say anything about it. But when a visiting policeman from Crete begins to show interest in Liz, feelings of what? could it be jealousy? shakes Grant to his core.

    Not that by book’s end does he do anything about it, and to the frustration of this reader, at least, this was the last book in the series. From here, though, we are allowed our imagination.

      The Patrick Grant series —

1. Dead in the Morning (1970)

2. Silent Witness (1972)
3. Grave Matters (1973)
4. Mortal Remains (1974)
5. Cast for Death (1976)

JONATHAN E. LEWIS, Editor – Strange Island Stories. Stark House Press, trade paperback. Published today!

              CONTENTS:

Introduction

          GHOSTS AND SHAPE SHIFTERS

“Monos and Daimonos” by Edward Bulwer (New Monthly Magazine, May 1830; The Student: A Series of Papers, 1835)

“Hugenin’s Wife” by M.P. Shiel (The Pale Ape and Other Pulses, 1911)

“The Far Islands” by John Buchan (Blackwood’s Magazine, November 1899; The Watcher by the Threshold and Other Tales, 1902)

“The Ship That Saw a Ghost” by Frank Norris (A Deal in Wheat and Other Tales of the New and Old West, 1903)

“The Gray Wolf” by George MacDonald (Works of Fantasy and Imagination, 1871)

“The Camp of the Dog” by Algernon Blackwood (John Silence: Physician Extraordinary, 1908)

“Island of Ghosts” by Julian Hawthorne (All Story Weekly, April 13, 1918)

          BIZARRE CREATURES AND FANTASTIC REALMS

“The Fiend of the Cooperage” by Arthur Conan Doyle (The Manchester Weekly Times, October 1st 1897; Round the Fire Stories, 1908)

“Spirit Island” by Henry Toke Munn (Chambers Journal, November 1922)

“The Purple Terror” by Fred M. White (The Strand Magazine, September 1899)

“Friend Island” by Francis Stevens (All-Story Weekly, September 7, 1918; Fantastic Novels Magazine, September 1950)

“In the Land of Tomorrow” by Epes Winthrop Sargent (The Ocean, December 1907 and January 1908)

“The Isle of Voices” by Robert Louis Stevenson (Island Night’s Entertainment, 1893)

“Dagon” by H. P. Lovecraft (The Vagrant, November 1919; The Outsider and Others, 1939)

“The People of Pan” by Henry S. Whitehead (Weird Tales, March 1929; West India Lights, 1946)

          HUMAN HORRORS

“The Sixth Gargoyle” by David Eynon (Weird Tales, January 1951)

“Three Skeleton Key” by George G. Toudouze (Esquire, January 1937)

“Good-by Jack” by Jack London (The House of Pride and Other Tales of Hawaii, 1912)

“The Isle of Doom” by James Francis Dwyer (The Popular Magazine, April 15 1910)

“An Adriatic Awakening” by Jonathan E. Lewis

Notes for Further Reading

Back in the 60s this was music I’d heard nothing like before. A statement that was probably true for almost every one else at the time:

DARK INTRUDER. Made-for-TV movie, NBC/Universal, 1965. Pilot for a failed television series to have been called The Black Cloak. Released theatrically when deemed too violent for TV. Leslie Nielsen (Brett Kingsford), Mark Richman, Judi Meredith, Gilbert Green, Charles Bolender, Werner Klemperer, Vaughn Taylor, Peter Brocco. Screenplay by Barré Lyndon. Music by Lalo Schifrin. Director: Harvey Hart.

   Brett Kingsford (played admirably by Leslie Neilsen) is an expert on the supernatural in this failed TV pilot, and while nobody asked me at the time, I think the series that would have ensued if things had worked out differently could have been a good one.

   The story takes place in San Francisco in 1890, and Kingsford is called in by the police when a baffling series of Jack the Ripper style killings begins to take place. The victims have all been clawed to death, and left at the scene of each killing is an ivory ancient Sumerian figurine.

   When a friend of his, Robert Vandenburg (Mark Richman), begins to think he may be the one responsible, Kingsford has an additional reason to be involved in the case, along with his dwarf assistant Nikola (Charles Boldender).

   The copy of this short 59 minute film I watched was a very dark print, but even so it matched the mood of the proceeding perfectly, and the movie does have a few quite scary moments. Too scary for TV in 1965? I’d have to agree.

   But it was very well done, with well above average production values and a large supporting cast. To my untrained eye, the director knew what he was doing too, with the camera moving fluidly with lots of well constructed overhead shots.

   And, in case you were wondering, while Leslie Neilsen’s sideburns looked as false as they probably were, he had the presence to carry off the rest of his role very well. I also liked the wink and nod between him and his assistant at the end when they talk about all of the strange things they’ve seen together, with a hint of more to come. Alas, it was not to be.

         BRETT: Ah, Nicola, if only the rest of the world knew what we know.

         NICOLA: If they did, sir, nobody would get a decent night’s sleep.

LAURENCE SHAMES – Sunburn. Joey Goldman #3. Hyperion, hardcover, 1994; paperback, 1995.

   I panned Shames’ [first novel], Florida Straits, but hope springs eternal,just like down-and-dirty Florida books seem to.

   Joey Goldman is still in Key West, and doing well in real estate. His natural father, the New York Godfather Vinny Delgado, is visiting him and his wife, and from this visit are going to come Bad Things.

   Vinnie is feeling the weight of his years and sins, and the burden of all the secrets he’s got locked in his head. A chance meeting with a reporter friend of Joey’s leads to the idea of a book to be published after his death. Not surprisingly, there are those who if they knew would think this very poor idea. Even less surprisingly, some of these find out. The FBI wants to hang a fresh New York murder on Vinny. the paisons just want to hang him up.

   Well, once again I demonstrate that I’m no slave to foolish consistency. Though this features basically the same cast of characters as the earlier book, I liked it. Somehow Shames had done a better job of making his criminals sympathetic in a believable fashion, or maybe I was in a different mood.

   He’s a good storyteller, and has a good ear for dialogue. He also does a good job of sketching in the Key West ambiance without a lot of purple prose and excess verbiage. The characters make the book, however, and though I’m still a little uncomfortable with some of the shadings, I liked them.

   
Bibliographic Note:   #2 in the series of incidents in the life of Joey Goldman was Scavenger Reef (1994). He may have appeared in later books — Shames now has 17 books in his “Key West” series — but if so, I do not know about it.

The lead singer for this multi-genre band founded in Boston is Rachel Price. She’s featured in this video:

WATUSI. MGM, 1959. George Montgomery, Taina Elg, David Farrar, Rex Ingram, Dan Seymour. Screenwriter: James Clavell, based on the novel King Solomon’s Mines, by H. Rider Haggard. Director: Kurt Neumann.

   Twelve year old me would have absolutely loved Watusi, an MGM production with a script by James Clavell. The sense of adventure in an exotic locale, the footage of African wildlife, and the quest for treasure — all would have appealed to my sensibilities and childhood sense of wonder.

   But I’m not twelve years old anymore and I can see just how flawed a movie Watusi really is. In many ways, it’s just talky and boring. And a lot of that great footage that I just alluded to is stock footage, some from MGM’s King Solomon’s Mines (1950). The constant switch back and forth between the film proper and stock footage is distracting and does little to give the viewer confidence that MGM had much faith in the project.

   That said, I do like George Montgomery, although I know him mainly from his presence in Westerns. Here he portrays Harry Quatermain, Allan Quartermain’s son from Canada.

   He’s come to Africa to continue his father’s project to find and to acquire the diamonds ensconced in King Solomon’s Mines. Along the way, he must face down a hostile tribe, fight off wild animals, and overcome malaria.

   Quatermain also must come to terms with his own personal demons, including a deep-seated hatred for Germans, whom he collectively blames for his sister’s death during World War I. As luck – and the script – would have it, he ends up saving the daughter of a German missionary from a violent warlord. She, along with his father’s friend Englishman Rick Cobb (David Farrar) becomes his travel companion on the proverbial road to King Solomon’s Mines.

   But Rick’s got a secret. He was born in Germany and is ethnically German. It’s only at the end of the movie that the “message” of the whole film is delivered: prejudice against any ethnic group is wrong. It’s all very trite and forced.

   Honestly, that’s about it. The plot doesn’t have much in the way of thrills, and the characters don’t have all that much depth. Kurt Neumann, who also collaborated with screenwriter James Clavell on The Fly (1958), provides competent direction. But it’s not enough to make this action-adventure film anything more than a minor curiosity. A great soundtrack would have helped immensely. For an adventure film, Watusi is notably lacking fanfare. Still, I would have loved it when I was twelve.

   As I mentioned in my recent post about writing Richard Matheson on Screen, several of the more obscure Matheson-related television episodes continue to elude me to this day. They include “Iron Mike Benedict” (The D.A.’s Man, 2/14/59), “Act of Faith” (Buckskin, 3/23/59), “Time of Flight” (Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre, 9/21/66), “No Such Thing as a Vampire” (Late Night Horror, 4/19/68), and “L’Esame” (The Test; Racconti di Fantascienza [Tales of Fantasy], 1/31/79).

   But even more frustratingly, while he recalled contributing to them in some capacity, I’ve never turned up any information regarding his involvement with two P.I. series, Richard Diamond, Private Detective and Philip Marlowe.

   So how’s about it, Mystery*File readers/writers? Anybody knowledgeable enough about them to shed some light on this real-life mystery or, by some miracle, able to provide me with copies of any of these mini-Grails? You never know, there may be a second edition!

THAT MAN FROM RIO. Les Films Ariane, France, 1964. Lopert Pictures Corporation, US, 1964 (subtitled). Original title: L’homme de Rio. Jean-Paul Belmondo, Francoise Dorleac, Jean Servais and Adolpho Celi. Written by Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Ariane Mnouchkine, Daniel Boulanger, and Philippe de Broca. Directed by Philippe de Broca.

   The first thing I noticed was that this movie had four writers, just like the old-time movie serials it resembles. The second thing was that it’s fun, funny and compulsively watchable.

   Steven Spielberg said those old serials were the inspiration for Raiders of the Lost Ark, but this seems the more likely antecedent, starting with the theft of an ancient relic in Paris, the kidnapping of a scientist’s lovely daughter (Dorleac) and the whole rest of the movie, spent in a cliff-hanging pursuit to a lost temple in the jungle filled with priceless treasure etc. etc …..

   De Broca & Co handle all this with speed and good humor, tossing a few laugh-out-loud moments into a stew of fights, chases and amusing stunt work by Belmondo himself, who insists on keeping his ugly mug to the camera so we can see that it is he who is dangling from skyscrapers, clinging to the wing of an airplane, swinging through jungles and getting knocked about in a spectacular barroom brawl.

   Jean Servais and Adolpho Celi lend some fine villainy to the proceedings, and Ms Dorleac is spirited, lovely, and a far better actress than most serial queens. As for Belmondo, he makes a perfect heroic Everyguy: bemused, bothered, and beleaguered, as he tromps through one peril and the next with a patient shrug and a wry smile, not taking any of this more seriously than we do.

   I should add that towards the end there’s a very thoughtful and sobering split-second. A plot twist I wasn’t expecting that seems like a grim augury of things to come — things we weren’t paying much attention to in 1964 — but it’s soon over, and we’re back to the light-hearted comedy.

   Funny, though: I’ll remember this movie with affection, but I suspect I’ll remember that dark moment a lot longer….