DONALD BARR CHIDSEY “Flight to Singapore.” Short novel. Argosy, 3 August 1940. Available online here.

   Pick up any issue of the major pulps like Adventure, Argosy, Blue Book, Popular, or the like and you could be guaranteed to find at least one stem winder of a story inside, that would at least have made a first rate B-film and maybe more.

   The names that graced those pages include the famous of course like Burroughs, Brand, Merritt, Woolrich, Mundy, Lamb, and such, but also half-forgotten names that once guaranteed a headlong tale well told and usually much more, names like Robert Carse, Georges Surdez, H. Bedford-Jones, George F. Worts, Gordon Young, and the prolific and popular Donald Barr Chidsey.

   Some, like Chidsey, Carse, and Surdez even had post-pulp careers in hardcover for a time, but it is their pulp work that resonates today.

   The story “Flight to Singapore” by Donald Barr Chidsey, is one of those tales, one in a series about Prince Mike of Kammorirri and his bodyguard/pal George Marlin, who finds himself a beat cop and insurance tec now Captain of the Guard, Chief of Police, and head of the Army of the small principality of Kammorirri in Southeast Asia, where Prince Mike’s father, the Sultan, fights to keep his little nation free of being “protected” by the Western powers by keeping almost all contact with the outside world at bay.

   Not an easy task when his heir and pride is Prince Mikuud, Phni Luangha, late of Princeton, a most modern young man who flies his own plane and fights his own fights with the help of his friend George Marlin, who struggles to call him Your Highness when they visit the outside world.

   It starts as George is escorting a rare wanted visitor out of the country and encounters an eager missionary, a type the Sultan especially loathes, but in the pulp world these things can move fast and soon the “Missionary” has drawn a gun and had it shot out of his hand by George and the jungle is hot with gunfire.

   Three men, Langford (the phony Missionary), Kelt (the pilot), and a brutal Australian named Claessens, have found rubies in Kammorirri, the last thing the Sultan needs as the palace drips of them and such treasure would inevitably be an invitation by some Western nation to protect the hell out of the small principality.

   How Prince Mike, with George Marlin’s fast gun and fists, outwits the bad guys, avoids the crisis in treasure by convincing the outside world the rubies are worthless, and cleans up the mess is the crux of a fast moving and entertainingly told tale that encompasses pitched jungle battles, fancy flying, lost temples, well meaning Europeans who have to be protected and held at bay, and just about everything but a romantic interest.

   I don’t know how many of these Chidsey wrote. I do know of at least one other, that being “Run, Tiger!” which appeared in the August 9, 1941 issue of Argosy, and there may be more. “Flight to Singapore” is an entertaining take on the Westernized modern Asian trope that had begun appearing alongside the Yellow Peril several decades earlier, where Number 1 Son and Mr. Moto are both the lead and the brains of the operation, and the plot and action move along at a pace and in high style.

   It’s a shame Prince Mike and George Marlin never got a full length novel adventure. One was well deserved.

CHRISTOPHER FOWLER – Bryant & May: Wild Chamber. Bryant & May #14. Bantam, US, hardcover, December 2017.

First Sentence: On a desolate rain-battered London midnight, the members of the Peculiar Crimes Unit went looking for a killer.

   London has many private gardens, accessible only to the residents who live around them. The gardener also has a key but doesn’t expect to find the body of a woman who’d taken her dog for a walk. She has been strangled and neatly laid out on the path, her dog missing, and the garden locked before the gardener’s arrival. A second such body is found in a public park. At risk are more murders, the city’s parks being closed to the public, and the PUC disbanded. The clock is ticking.

   An aerial chase, a traffic jam, a boy’s death and a man whose life implodes. This is an opening which catches one’s attention.

   That Fowler uses a memo to provide a cast of characters is both helpful and clever. That the list includes “Crippen, staff cat,” and the subsequent memo brings readers up to date on the situation at the aptly-named Peculiar Crimes Unit truly sets the tone for what follows. Fowler’s books are not one’s normal police procedural, as the characters, particularly those of Arthur Bryant and John May, are anything but what one would normally find. Fowler gives us something unique with present day crimes overlain with an education into obscure historical facts and writing which increases one’s vocabulary. But never fear; this book is anything but dry or boring.

   Fowler is skilled at juxtaposing historic London over that of the present day in a way that contributes to the plot. Part of that is an explanation as to how Bryant became a detective. Fowler creates evocative descriptions— “The wind was high in the trees, breathing secrets through the branches.” —and observations— “Looking down on King’s Cross you’d have noticed an odd phenomenon: Every other roof was covered in white frost, forming a patchwork quilt, an indicator of which properties were owned by overseas investors and which had warm families inside.” But yes, unfortunately, there are also quite a few completely unnecessarily portents.

   It is hard to say which is more enjoyable; the cast of strange and fascinating characters of Bryant’s acquaintance, the vast abundance of arcane and historical information — who knew it was Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan, who wrote the music to “Onward Christian Soldiers”? — the members of the PUC itself, of the plot which brings all these facets together into a perfect gem of a book with a well-done plot twist. We are even given a definition as to what is a murder mystery— “’A murder mystery,’ she told Bryant, ‘is an intellectual exercise, a game between reader and writer in which a problem is precisely stated, elaborately described, and surprisingly solved.’” —and Fowler does just that.

   Bryant & May: Wild Chamber is a murder mystery in the best sense. All the clues are given, if we but see them. The best part of the book is the very last line, but that everyone will have to read for themselves.

       The Bryant and May series —

1. Full Dark House (2003)

2. The Water Room (2004)
3. Seventy-Seven Clocks (2005)
4. Ten Second Staircase (2006)
5. White Corridor (2007)

6. The Victoria Vanishes (2008)
7. On the Loose (2009)
8. Off the Rails (2010)
9. The Memory of Blood (2011)
10. The Invisible Code (2012)
11. The Bleeding Heart (2012)
12. The Burning Man (2015)

13. Strange Tide (2016)
14. Wild Chamber (2017)
15. Hall of Mirrors (2018)

RICHARD WORMSER – The Body Looks Familiar. Dell First Edition A156; paperback original; 1st printing, March 1958. A shorter version previously appeared in the September 1957 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine as “The Frame.” Also: Stark House Press, trade paperback, 2017, combined with The Late Mrs. Five, also by Wormser; introduction by Bill Crider.

   After reading I don’t know how many thousands of mystery novels in my lifetime, it seems strange to say this, but all of them have been different in some way from the others. Sometimes in very minor ways, sometimes more. Sometimes a lot more. Like this one.

   In fact, I’m inclined to say that the story line in this one is unique. Absolutely. You can tell me if I’m wrong or not by keeping on reading.

   The problem is, if I tell you what the story line is, it may tell you more than you want to know. For once, the blurbs inside the front cover and on the back cover are rather vague about it. On the other hand, the factor that makes it unique takes place in Chapter One, so if you were to start reading the book yourself, you’d find out soon enough anyway.

   But maybe you’d like to learn what it is that I’m talking about on your own. Hence the following

          SPOILER ALERT

   Reading any further will reveal essential plot elements that you may not wish to know about in advance.

   What happens in Chapter One? Well, now I’ll tell you. The assistant D.A. for an unnamed city kills the mistress girl friend of the city’s chief of police in the apartment he keeps for her and frames the murder on him. He shoots her right in front of him, taking the chief’s gun away from him by surprise and using it for the deed.

   What’s his motive? Revenge. James Latson, fast on his feet both in the political arena as well as in the bedroom, had taken Dave Corday’s wife away from him. She later committed suicide when she was dumped by Latson, and Corday could not bear the shame of taking her back.

   Whew! With an opening like that, you (the reader) have no way of knowing which way the story is going from there. Of course you’ve got to believe that Corday’s plan has any chance at all of working, and Richard Wormser as the author has his job cut out for him.

   For the most part he’s up to the task, but I have to admit that reading this particular work of crime fiction was like reading a science fiction novel, one for which the “willing suspension of disbelief” is a required element of what the reader has to bring along to the task.

   It’s not a classic, far from it, but it’s not as though reading this book really was a task. It only took a very enjoyable couple of hours, mostly spent in guessing which way the story was going to go next — and usually being wrong about it.

   Richard Wormser, by the way, was born in 1908 and wrote a couple of hardcover detective novels in the mid-1930s before switching to writing for the pulps and slick magazines through the 1940s. Westerns, adventure, mysteries, the whole gamut.

   Mostly he’s remembered, if at all, for the paperback originals, including movie tie-in’s, he did from the late 1950s on to early 1970s. He died in 1977.

[FOOTNOTE] Also shown are the covers for:

The Communist’s Corpse. Smith & Haas, hc, 1935. Series character: Sgt. Jocelyn “Joe” Dixon.

Argosy. April 6, 1940. Includes the story “Detour, Mr. Darwin,” by Richard Wormser. (His name should be discernible in the upper right corner.)

[UPDATE.]   This review was first posted on this blog on November 18, 2008. I’ve reposted it without any changes except for the information about the recent Stark House reprint. I started reading it today, and I said to myself, “This sounds familiar.” It was.

   A new year, a new month, a new column. A few days after anyone reads this I’ll enter the fourth and no doubt final quarter century of my life. What ho.

   For reasons I’ll explain later, a few weeks ago I began to think about the year 1930. A sad year in one respect for those of us who love crime and detective fiction, since it saw the death of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but a banner year in other respects since it also saw the debut of John Dickson Carr (IT WALKS BY NIGHT), the second novel of Ellery Queen (THE FRENCH POWDER MYSTERY), the third of Dashiell Hammett (THE MALTESE FALCON), and the beginnings of the long careers of two writers not in the same league with the Big Three but, I decided, worth a few paragraphs today. The first novels of both authors were published by the Doubleday Crime Club and, minus dust jackets, look like twins on my shelves.

   Helen Reilly (1891-1962) is not much read today, but in her time she ranked with Mary Roberts Rinehart, Mignon G. Eberhart and Leslie Ford as one of the best known American women writing whodunits. Her first two novels, THE THIRTY-FIRST BULLFINCH and THE DIAMOND FEATHER, were both published in 1930. Several Web sources list the latter as her first book but I’ve checked the Copyright Office online catalog and found that BULLFINCH has an earlier registration date (June 20, as opposed to October 31 for FEATHER) and an earlier number in the copyright system.

   Whether it’s a better novel than its successor I don’t know but I must confess I didn’t find it terribly engrossing. The setting is a privately owned island off the New England coast and the detective is a shrewd country sheriff named Tilden who apparently never returned for an encore. Our viewpoint character is not, as one might suspect after reading later Reillys, a beautiful woman in peril. Cliff Shaver, junior attorney in a top New York law firm, is sent to the island by his senior partner to find out why utilities tycoon John Bedford has torn up his will, which leaves most of his estate to his 19-year-old granddaughter, and what the old tyrant plans to do with his fortune now.

   He arrives at the island just ahead of a monster storm and is introduced to the dramatis personae: old John, who’s confined to a palatial suite in the house, his son Mark, Mark’s second wife Claire, his daughter by his deceased first wife (the teenager who was to have become an heiress), his 4-year-old son by his second marriage, Claire’s ancient mother, two resident doctors and an enigmatic butler. Late on the night of his arrival Shaver visits the elder Bedford’s quarters for a legal conference and finds him dead.

   It soon transpires that he was poisoned by hydrocyanic acid in the barley water he always drank before going to bed. But the rare bullfinch he kept in his room, and to whom he always gave a late snack of a cracker moistened with his barley water, is alive and well and chirping as usual. What gives here? Sheriff Tilden somehow makes his way through the storm to the crime scene and begins to investigate.

   Shaver and the sheriff are convinced there may be a lead in Bedford’s locked wall safe, to which no one seems to have the combination. Tilden happens to have all the skills of a professional safecracker but the hidey-hole yields nothing to help solve the murder. Neither does anything else. Meanwhile all the suspects—well, all except the 4-year-old—take up endless pages doing suspicious things which aren’t worth the effort to itemize, and the crime is solved when Shaver enters the wrong room at the wrong time and—but I’d be a toad if I said more.

   This novel definitely dates from a long way back. The teen-age girl is called Miss Anne and a man’s pajamas are referred to as a sleeping suit. Prohibition is still in force but the Bedfords apparently have a bootlegger and the family cocktail-mixer tells Shaver: “[W]e’ve got everything in the shaker except Father’s Ed Pinaud’s.” Anyone know what that is? It’s a popular brand of mustache wax. (Not that I ever had a mustache but my late brother did and I once saw a can of the stuff at his house.) I see that someone on eBay wants over $300 for a first edition. My advice to any potential buyer: save your money.

   Our other 1930 debutant was the once quite popular but now long forgotten F. Van Wyck Mason. Most of the print and Web sources I’ve consulted give the year of his birth as 1901 but one or two date him back to 1897. Everyone seems to agree that his middle name was pronounced Van Wike. His birthplace was Boston but he spent most of his early years in Berlin and Paris (where his grandfather was U.S. Consul General) and didn’t learn English until he was in his teens.

   After graduating from Harvard in 1924 he started his own importing business and traveled the world purchasing antique rugs and other objets d’art.

   As a fiction writer he debuted in 1928, appearing in many pulps but most often in Argosy, which published several of his historical adventure serials with titles like CAPTAIN NEMESIS, CAPTAIN JUDAS, CAPTAIN RENEGADE, CAPTAIN REDSPURS and CAPTAIN LONG KNIFE. As these titles unsubtly suggest, he was a military kind of guy, serving in Squadron A of the New York National Guard and later in the Maryland National Guard. He was also something of an athlete, his favorite sport being polo, a subject which crops up in many of his novels and stories.

   During World War II he put his writing career on hold and returned to the military, rising to the rank of Colonel and the position of chief historian on General Eisenhower’s staff. After the war he returned to fiction writing and eventually moved to Bermuda, where in 1978 he drowned.

   He was probably best known for a string of gargantuan historical adventure novels, beginning with THREE HARBOURS (1938), STARS ON THE SEA (1940) and RIVERS OF GLORY (1942), but here we are interested in his crime fiction. His first novel, SEEDS OF MURDER, is set in late July of 1929, the last full year of Conan Doyle’s life, and introduces his series character Captain Hugh North, an officer in Army Intelligence but never seen in uniform and obviously intended as an American Sherlock Holmes since in the first few pages of his first exploit he’s called “probably the best detective this side of Scotland Yard” and “that prince of detectives….”

   Appropriately enough for a sleuth modeled on Holmes, he has a Watson and, I kid you not, another medical man, a doctor named Walter Allan who vanished after his second appearance in the series. North is visiting with Allan at Hempstead, Long Island, when both men are invited to dinner at the palatial home of Royal Delancey, a former Philippine plantation owner who made a fortune during World War I and afterwards returned to the U.S. and bought into a firm of stockbrokers.

   If I mention that a house party is in progress there, can you avoid thinking that this already sounds like a traditional English country-house mystery? As in THE THIRTY-FIRST BULLFINCH, the premises are besieged by a savage storm. Before dinner can be served, one of the party guests, who is also Delancey’s brokerage partner, is found dead in his bathroom, seemingly having strangled himself with a strong chain. But why was his apparent suicide note written on a piece of paper a quarter-inch shorter than the other sheets on his desk, and how could he have reached the hook on which the chain was hung by standing on a wire-and-enamel wastebasket too flimsy to support his weight?

   Even stranger, why were three mysterious seeds found on the bathroom floor, arranged in a precise triangle? North keeps his counsel and doesn’t dispute the police verdict of suicide, but before dawn the next morning Delancey himself is stabbed to death with an exotic dagger in his bedroom, and three more of those triangularly arranged seeds are lying beneath his chair.

   Among the chief suspects is a former neighbor of Delancey’s who thanks to investing with the dead man had lost the fortune he’d made as a henequin planter in the Philippines, but there are a number of others: Delancey’s mistress, his abused young wife and her brother (both of whom are also near broke after having entrusted him with their money), and a sinister Filipino butler who perpetrates lines like “‘Scuse if I speak slow. Me no spik English ver’ well.”

   At times the novel veers close to silent-movie melodrama, especially at the action climax where North disguises himself as a gypsy and sets a trap for the murderer in front of a disused Russian Orthodox church. But, unlike most of the subsequent books in the long series, this one is a genuine detective novel, rife with complexities, clues, conundrums, the works. Mason seems to know his Philippine background and datura seeds but ridiculous is the best word for his notion of an inquest, held in the Delancey living room and culminating with the coroner’s jury indicting two suspects.

   The novel isn’t as scrupulously fair as, say, an early Ellery Queen, and its politically incorrect portrayal of Filipinos and gypsies—oops, my bad, we’re required today to call them Roma — make it an unlikely candidate for revival in the 21st century. In later novels North was promoted to Major and then to Colonel (somehow leapfrogging over the rank of Lieutenant Colonel) and his exploits stressed international intrigue in exotic locales rather than detection, turning him into something of a prototype for James Bond and perhaps for James Atlee Phillips’ American secret agent Joe Gall. Personally I wish he’d remained a Captain and a Holmes-like sleuth, at least for a little longer.

   So what sparked my interest in the year 1930? A thought that recently crossed my mind: that year marked not only the death of Conan Doyle but the birth of a man whom, like Doyle, I discovered in my teens but who may never have been mentioned before alongside the creator of Holmes. I refer, if you haven’t already guessed, to Clint Eastwood, whose new Euro-thriller THE 15:17 TO PARIS will be released this February. He’ll turn 88 in a few months. If and when we reach that age, will any of us enjoy the creativity and vigor Eastwood still has today?

DESTINY. Universal, 1944. Gloria Jean, Alan Curtis, Frank Craven, Frank Fenton, and Minna Gomebell, who doesn’t have a big part — I just like writing “Minna Gombell.” Written by Ernest Pascal and Roy Chanslor. Directed by Julien Duvivier and Reginald Le Borg.

   A true oddity of a B-movie with an oft-told back story which I will try to summarize briefly:

   In 1943, Julien Duvivier made Flesh and Fantasy, an all-star three-story portmanteau for Universal Studios, with Barbara Stanwyck, Charles Boyer, Edward. G. Robinson, Bob Cummings and Betty Field. There was originally supposed to be a fourth part with John Garfield and Gloria Jean, but Garfield balked at being loaned out to Universal and was replaced by contract player Alan Curtis. Then, when the movie was judged to be too long, this part was cut out altogether.

   With the wisdom and penury of their breed, the studio heads at Universal decided to salvage the footage and build a new movie around it. Roy William Neill was assigned to produce, with Reginald Le Borg (of The Mummy’s Ghost and Sins of JezebeL infamy) directing, and Roy Chanslor (Johnny Guitar) tasked with creating a story to fit the stuff already filmed.

   Well they did it, and it ain’t awful. In fact, considering the strictures of the project, it turned out surprisingly well. Some might even give it that overworked accolade “noir.” But before I get to that, there’s another thread to the story:

   â€œDestiny” was an all-purpose title the execs at Universal slapped on any work in progress while they searched for a more marketable moniker. At various times, The Wolf Man, Son of Dracula, and Ma & Pa Kettle in the Ozarks were all temporarily titled Destiny, and I suspect in this case they just didn’t bother to change it.

   Okay, moving on to the story itself, it starts with our hero (Alan Curtis)on the run from the Law, then flashes back to how he got drawn into a robbery, duped by a night club chantoosie and slammed into prison for three years …. only to get innocently involved in another robbery after his release. Which would all be very noir indeed, if done by anybody but Le Borg, who films it in his usual fast and anonymous style.

   Anyway, Curtis eventually wanders into a rural community called Paradise Valley, where the Duvivier footage comes in as he meets one of those blind girls unique to the movies (Gloria Jean) who lives with her aging father (Frank Craven) and has a strange affinity with nature: wild animals flock to her side and even the flowers seem to nod as she passes.

   All this should be way too cutesy, but Duvivier manages not to wallow in it by focusing on Curtis, whose character has changed markedly from the Le Borg footage. We’re supposed to think he’s been embittered by his experiences, but actually he seems something of a rotter, hoping to force his company on poor Gloria, even if it means killing her dad.

   Which leads us into the high point of the film, and one of the best few minutes of a great director: a tour de force sequence of Curtis chasing Gloria Jean through a storm-lashed forest. As they run, branches, vines and underbrush magically part to let her through, then snap back to pummel and ensnare the pursuer … and it’s convincing! A real nightmare scenario, with fluid camera, striking compositions and everything else that makes movies memorable.

   There’s more to Destiny after this, but why go into it? I’d only have to use words like facile, clichéd, contrived and crap and I hate to apply terms like that to a film that like I say, ain’t all that bad. And if you can take it for what it is, you can enjoy this Destiny.

JANE DENTINGER – First Hit of the Season. Jocelyn O’Rourke #2. Doubleday, hardcover, 1984. Dell, paperback, October 1985.

   Jocelyn O’Rourke is a young actress and acting coach who knows her way around the Broadway theater thoroughly , both on- and off-, and her insight into the people involved — producers, directors, other actors, even critics — gives her boy friend, homicide detective Phillip Gerrard, plenty of additional meat to chew on while solving a case.

   Which in this case involves the death by poisoning of a Broadway critic with a vicious pen — a little too vicious for one of his victims, perhaps.

   Author Jane Dentinger, who herself at the time was in much the same profession as her leading lady, is very, very good when it comes to characters, personal relationships between them, backstage gossip and witty repartee. In this book, though, she is not as good when it comes down to clues and describing actual detective work. She knows the setting of this flavorful Broadway concoction like the palm of her hand, however, and while your opinion may vary, this goes a long way toward mitigating any weaknesses you also may find in the crime solving that’s involved.
   

      The Jocelyn O’Roarke series —

1. Murder on Cue (1983)
2. First Hit of the Season (1984)
3. Death Mask (1988)
4. Dead Pan (1992)
5. The Queen is Dead (1994)
6. Who Dropped Peter Pan? (1995)

RATTLERS. Boxoffice International Pictures, 1976. Sam Chew, Elisabeth Chauvet, Dan Priest, Ron Gold, Al Dunlap, Dan Balentine. Director: John McCauley.

   Schlock and awe is the name of the game in Rattlers, a low budget when-animals-attack movie from the 1970s. And yes, it’s a very 1970s movie. There’s a subplot about feminism and equal rights and some absolutely beautiful shots of vintage (from today’s perspective, that is) cop cars being driven around the California desert. And then there are the snakes. Although there’s nothing particularly 70s about them. To be honest, not all of them are rattlesnakes and it’s not even clear how close the actors got to them.

   But that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that, despite its obviously low budget nature, the film doesn’t come off as an amateur production. I know now it’s trendy to poke fun at these types of films and, on some level, I get it. There are some unintentionally comedic moments to be found in Rattlers. But it’s not aiming to be high art either. It’s meant as escapist entertainment and was part of the zeitgeist. How many when- animals-attack films were there in the mid- to late 1970s? How many were inspired by the success of Spielberg’s Jaws (1975)?

   Sam Chew, who went on to become the narrator of Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, portrays University of California herpetologist Dr. Tom Parkinson. He’s asked by a sheriff in the Mojave Desert to investigate a string of bizarre deaths. This is not the work of a serial killer, however. The culprits in this case couldn’t hold a knife to save their ophidian lives.

   Parkinson teams up with the very single and very feminist war photographer Ann Bradley (Elisabeth Chauvet) to investigate what is causing these snakes to attack humans in such a brutal manner. This leads them both to a local military facility where a megalomaniac officer is conducting illegal research on nerve agents. I think you can put two and two together.

   Laugh at Rattlers if you must, but unlike a lot of contemporary quickie low budget horror films that are little more than joyless gore fests, this one was actually attempting to be socially conscious and to say something.

C. C. WADDELL & CARROLL JOHN DALY – Two-Gun Gerta. Chelsea House, hardcover, 1926. Serialized in four parts in People’s Magazine, October 1 through November 15, 1923. Available as a PDF download from Vintage Library, a possibly censored version.

   That is the authentic voice of Roger Francis ‘Red’ Connors, ex-Hollywood stunt man and cowboy star (“You want to remember that I’d had two years’ experience dare-deviling for the films under Milt Leffingwell. As a matter of fact, I’d worked almost the same stunt in one of my ‘Reckless Rudolph’ pictures, as you’ll recall if you’ve ever saw ‘The Pit of Perdition.’), and all around tough guy come South for adventure and about to be up to his neck in it when he encounters the beautiful and fiery green eyed hellion, ranch owner Gerta O’Bierne: “She had a couple of heavy Colts strapped about her waist; and for all her sweet-sixteen look and her quiet manner, I figured that they weren’t just a bluff. Give her half a chance, and she’d use ’em.“

   He has hardly ridden into Yavisa when he spies beautiful Gerta pinned by local bandit and mustache twirler Colonel Manuel Esteban, old Crooked Mouth: “Half Mexican and half something else, I took him to be, but all murder. He looked like the bad man in the movies, only more real. A yellow, splotchy face under his broad-brimmed sombrero, with eyes as cold and deadly as a rattlesnake’s, and a cruel, crooked mouth that ran halfway up his cheek on one side as the result of an old knife scar.”

   In short order Red has saved Gerta and is hired as foreman on her ranch, but it is hardly smooth sailing from there, as soon Gerta is kidnapped, and even once he rescues her Red has to face her jealousy over saloon girl Rosita.

    But with the help of his horse, “El Flivver!…EL Hennery Ford! The devil caballo!” and his Colt .45 automatic, Red is a match for just about anything the Old West or Old Mexico can throw at him save perhaps Gerta.

   But it takes more than a squeeze of that sort to decompose Red Connors:

   Red, of course, gets the girl and the horse, and at one point has a two way conversation with Henry Ford the likes of which you never encountered in Zane Grey, and it is all insane and mad fun written in the indomitable style of the much maligned Carroll John Daly, who for my money is one of the most sheerly entertaining bad writers to ever hunt and peck deathless prose onto the written page.

   Exactly what C. C. Waddell contributes is hard to guess, because Two-Gun Gerta reads like pure Daly, and Red Connors, like Three Gun Terry Mack, is just a rehearsal for the urban gunfighter/private eye Race Williams soon to emerge from Daly’s white hot imagination.

   It is pure pulp, and Red, Henry Ford, and Gerta are all well worth meeting: ”She’d been heaven and hell. But through it all, she’d been Gerta. And there wasn’t nobody like her.”

   There “wasn’t nobody” like Daly either, or this B Western of a two fisted adventure novel out of Tom Mix by way of Mickey Spillane.

Note: This book is important to the development of the hard-boiled genre for three reasons. Most obviously it is an early work of Carroll John Daly, who, whatever your feelings about his work, is the onlie beggetor (to borrow a Kiplingesque term from O. F. Snelling), of the modern hard-boiled private eye.

   Next, historically this book is further evidence of the ties between the Western and the hard-boiled school of writing where the former genre’s penchant for colorful language, fast action, and smart independent noble heroes with guns was transplanted to the Urban canyons of the Big City, while the quieter pleasures of the detective novel were supplanted by gangsters, floozies, femme fatales, gunmen, gamblers, crooked politicians, and corrupt cops.

   Hammett and Chandler both touch on distinctly Western settings at least once each in their work, and Gardner actually wrote mysteries with Western settings, while Black Mask as often as not included one Western in many issues..

   Finally, Red Connors is only a breath away from Daly’s first two private eyes, Three Gun Terry Mack and Race Williams. Hard going as this book may be for some readers, it is historically important to the genre.

BACK DOOR TO HELL. Lippert Pictures / 20th Century Fox, 1964. Jimmie Rodgers, Jack Nicholson, John Hackett, Annabelle Huggins, Conrad Maga, Johnny Monteiro. Director: Monte Hellman.

   For a low-budget combat film that doesn’t have a particularly compelling plot, Back Door to Hell is nevertheless worth a look. Directed by auteur Monte Hellman, the movie features a young Jack Nicholson in a starring role as one of three soldiers sent to the World War II-era Philippines for a reconnaissance mission.

   Nicholson, along with popular music singer Jimmie Rodgers and actor John Hackett, portray a diverse trio forged in fear as much as in valor. The three soldiers team up with a war weary Filipino guerrilla leader named Paco in a quest to free captives from the Japanese occupying forces. They also go on a daring mission to radio the American forces vital intelligence necessary to prepare for the forthcoming battle against the Japanese.

   Back Door to Hell, which was filmed on location in the Philippines, was made on a rather modest budget. And it shows. But with Hellman at the helm, it’s a far more stylish product than his mentor Roger Corman’s 1960 film Ski Troop Attack (reviewed here ).

   Indeed, there are some sequences that reminded me quite a bit of Anthony Mann’s work with James Stewart in the Western genre. In 1964, Hellman was a little known Hollywood director without a cult following. But that was all to change in the years ahead with the release of Ride the Whirlwind (released on television in 1968) and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). As for Jack Nicholson, he went on to a pretty good career as well.

LESLIE CHARTERIS “The National Debt.” Simon Templar “The Saint.” Novella. First published as a non-Saint story in The Thriller, UK, 06 April 1929, as “The Secret of Beacon Inn.” Reprinted in All Star Detective Stories, US, March 1931. Rewritten and collected as a Saint story in the book Alias the Saint (Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, May 1931) and in the US as part of the larger compilation Wanted for Murder by the Doubleday Crime Club in 1931. Reprinted many times in several collections and formats. TV adaptation: As “The Crime of the Century,” The Saint, starring Roger Moore (Season 3, Episode 22; 1965.)

   The history of The Saint over the years is a highly complicated one, and if any of the information above is incorrect, please set me straight. I read this particular story in a paperback entitled Alias the Saint published by Charter in the 1980s, I believe, but as an overall collection, it contains only two of the three stories originally published under that title in the UK in 1931.

   That this was not originally a Saint story, but was cobbled into one when the character proved to be so popular in other stories, helps explains why the Saint spends quite a bit of his tine doing his crime-solving duties under the name of Ramses Smith, as the leading character was so named in the Thriller version.

   Specifics of how he gets onto the trail of a trio of miscreants is not gone into. Suffice it here to say that the three have grandiose plans of some kind, but definitely criminous. To that end they have forced a young female chemist to work on their project with them. How? By drugging her with a doped cigarette, then killing a detective from Scotland Yard and making her believe she did it.

   Enter the Saint. He barges into the inn of the original title where the villains have set up a laboratory for the kidnapped girl to work in. Proving that the direct approach works, and delightfully so, Templar drives up, and improvising as he goes, declares that he’s working for Scotland Yard and if they don’t serve him a meal, he will arrest them all and take them in.

   This is not a whodunit by any means. For the Saint it’s only a matter of “what are they up to?” Before the story ends, he has found out, escaped from a cellar room filled with a deadly gas, and (of course) rescued the girl, all in Leslie Charteris’s usual breezy fashion, glossing over messy details as he goes. The story’s so much fun to read, though, that only nitpickers like me would even bring them up.