THE ADVENTURES OF JANE. Eros Films, UK, 1949. Christobel Leighton-Porter, Michael Hogsworth, Peter Butterworth, Sonya O’Shea, Ian Colin, Stanelli, Sebastian Cabot. Screenplay by Alf Goulding, E. J. Whiting and Con West, based on the comic strip “Jane” created by Norman Pett. Directed by E. J. Whiting and (uncredited) by Alfred Goulding and Norman Pett. TV series: BBC, UK, 1982-84 (reviewed by Michael Shonk here ).

   Jane, that grown up Little Orphan Annie in and out of lingerie, wasn’t the first glamor girl to strip down in the comic strips on either side of the Atlantic, but her predecessors like Fritzi Ritz, Dixie Dugan, Blondie (before marrying Dagwood), and Frank Godwin’s Connie were modest in comparison to the British Gypsy Rose Lee of the news kiosk.

   Jane lost more clothes, showed more skin, and outlasted the best of them. She has hardly been out of the papers since her creation and even managed two movie outings over forty years apart.

   That’s not bad for a lass and her pet dachshund Fritz, especially since Jane’s chief talent was a gift for getting caught out after spectacular costume failures.

   Jane put the strip in comic strip.

   She was created by artist Norman Pett as a morale booster, a bit along the lines of Milton Caniff’s “Male Call,” but Jane ran in the daily papers and fairly soon, unsatisfied with simply finding ways for Jane to lose her clothes, Pett decided there should be a bit of plot to go with all that skin, so Jane got involved with smugglers, spies, saboteurs (certainly a fifth column was involved in sabotaging her costumes), and kidnappers. Across her career she would veer into a soap opera for a while and even acquire a daughter just as prone to losing her clothes as Maman.

   There is a whole school of British comic strip inspired by Jane and Pett, including Romeo Brown by Peter O’Donnell and Jim Holdway, who soon got more serious with Modesty Blaise.

   Here we have the original Jane, Christobel Leighton-Parker, in the flesh, the model whose photos often accompanied Pett’s annuals and collections of Jane’s adventures, cast as Jane, a show girl who gets involved with smugglers when a seeming nice old man, Sneyd (the name should have been a clue) gives her a fake diamond bracelet.

   It’s all part of a dastardly plot to get past British customs with the stolen Bulawayo Diamond by the handsome criminal Cap, but bound to be foiled by Fritz and Jane’s less than bright policeman boyfriend Tom, and Jane herself, because Jane is never just a victim to be rescued by a man.

   That’s it folks. There is a swimsuit contest Jane judges, Jane shuts doors, and other things, on her clothes and loses her skirt while only wearing scanties, Jane changes her clothes, Jayne wears lingerie, a comic drunk climbs in bed with Fritz in her room, Jane goes to sea, gets wet and changes out of her wet clothes… It pretty much is the same formula as the comic strip in action.

   A young Sebastian Cabot even shows up in a comic bit about a Frenchman going through British customs.

   If you haven’t guessed how The End flashes on screen you aren’t trying.

   But it is fun in the same way as the strip was, plus under the titles we get to see Pett drawing his most famous Jane picture as Leighton-Porter and Fritz pose. You can catch it in two parts on YouTube if you want, and it is currently on Amazon Prime.

   It’s all fun and tease, and Jane, for all her innocence of her various states of undress, is a surprisingly smart and capable heroine who as often as not rescues herself. It’s no wonder she has survived the ravages of time and changes of custom.

   Jane is a force to reckon with.

   A naked force at that.

   

THE MONSTER AND THE GIRL. Paramount, 1941. Ellen Drew, Philip Terry, George Zucco and Rod Cameron. Written by Stuart Anthony. Directed by Stuart Heisler.

   A unique mix of True Confession, Gangster Film and Monster Movie, done with a patina of Paramount gloss — perhaps too much so.

   Ellen Drew starts off the story telling us how she was lured into a life of shame, and how her brother (Philip Terry) got framed for murder trying to redeem her honor. There’s a bit too much of this, including a lengthy flashback to wholesome brother-and-sister life back in Grover’s Corners or wherever, where he’s the Church Organist and she’s eager to go out and make it in the Big City.

   Eventually Ellen heads for the bright lights, and we get a bit more romantic drama as she meets a nice young man (Robert Paige), falls in love, and marries him. And about the time an astute viewer starts asking “Where the hell’s the monster?” there’s a nice bit where the kindly old man who marries them shows a shoulder holster.

   At which point we segue into Gangster Film territory. It seems this romance has all been part of elaborate and somewhat unlikely scheme to lure our Ellen into prostitution –only hinted at here, but very broadly hinted.

   Well we’ve all; had relationships like that, haven’t we? Anyhow, her brother Phillip Terry (remember him?) gets wind of the whole shameful thing, quits pounding the organ and comes after the rat who done her wrong.

   But he’s up against a cold deck because the gang here includes Paul Lukas, Joseph Calleia, Marc Lawrence and Gerald Mohr, and the astute viewer (remember him?) won’t be surprised to see them quickly rub out a gangland rival, callously pin the crime on Phil, and swiftly get him railroaded to the Chair by DA-for-hire Onslow Stevens.

   That’s when George Zucco comes on — and high time, too — as a benign (for him) Mad Doctor who wants to advance Science by transplanting a human brain into a gorilla. Okay, if that’s what the kids are doing these days, that’s fine. There’s a nice brain-transplant scene, and finally we get to the Monster Movie as the gorilla-with-Phil’s-brain escapes to wreak vengeance on the bad guys.

   Any Monster-Lover who has lasted this long should enjoy a last twenty minutes or so of creepy menace and building tension as the bad guys get their brutal comeuppance. To his credit, director Stuart Heisler gets a lot of visual interest out of the ape prowling about the city rooftops and fire escapes, and it never looks as silly as it should. Then too, George Barrows’ gorilla mask seems unusually expressive here, evincing sorrow, alarm and rage from appropriate camera angles.

   But basically what you get here is about a third of a monster movie, and a long wait for it. The Monster parts make satisfying viewing, but what it takes to get there…. Well maybe that’s why God gave us Fast-Forward.

   The first series of Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels ended with a book titled simply MAIGRET (original U.S. title MAIGRET RETURNS), which was written in 1933 and first published in France a year later. In the English-speaking world it was long believed that Simenon then took a sabbatical of a dozen years or so before resurrecting the titan of the Quai des Orfèvres shortly after World War II.

   Thanks to some meticulously detailed French websites we now know that Maigret’s vacation, if we want to call it that, lasted only two years. The final months of 1936 saw his reappearance in short stories published first in the French weekly magazine Paris-Soir-Dimanche, then in the obviously interconnected weeklies Police-Film, Police-Roman and Police-Film/Police-Roman. The last of them was published late in July 1939, shortly before Hitler launched World War II.

   These and a few more written during the war years, when much of France was under German occupation, were collected in LES NOUVELLES ENQUITES DE MAIGRET (Gallimard, 1944). A few Maigret shorts, translated by Anthony Boucher or Lawrence G. Blochman, appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine beginning in 1949 and were collected in THE SHORT CASES OF INSPECTOR MAIGRET (Doubleday, 1959), but most of them didn’t see print in EQMM until the late 1960s and ‘70s.

   For reasons we’ll explore below, a couple of them never appeared in the magazine at all, although they were included in the collections MAIGRET’S CHRISTMAS (Hamish Hamilton 1976, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1977) and MAIGRET’S PIPE (Hamish Hamilton 1977, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1977). Simenon wrote too many Maigret short stories to deal with in a single column but I’m sure there’s room for all the truly short ones.

   The first nine were written in a single month, October 1936, and began to appear late that same month in >Paris-Soir-Dimanche. The earliest to be published is “L’affaire du Boulevard Beaumarchais” (25 October 1936), first collected in LES NOUVELLES ENQU TES DE MAIGRET like all the others discussed here, and included in MAIGRET’S PIPE as “The Mysterious Affair in the Boulevard Beaumarchais.”

   The entire story takes place in and just outside Maigret’s office and most of it deals with his interrogation of the two suspects in the poisoning death of 26-year-old Louise Voivin: her 37-year-old husband Ferdinand and her 18-year-old sister Nicole, who was having an affair with her brother-in-law. The sexual sordidness, plus the fact that the wormy Ferdinand—how shall I put it?—soils his trousers under Maigret’s questioning, probably explain why Fred Dannay chose not to run this one in EQMM.

   The next five followed in Paris-Soir-Dimanche at the rate of one a week. “La Péniche aux Deux Pendus” (1 November 1936) appeared in EQMM, June 1967, as “Inspector Maigret Thinks” and was collected in MAIGRET’S PIPE as “Two Bodies on a Barge.” The story was republished in EQMM for June 1990. According to my web search a péniche is “a steel motorized inland waterway barge of up to 350 tonnes” but the vessel in the story, on which the bodies of the hanged couple (the “Deux Pendus” of the title) are found, is a much more primitive affair: “It was an old barge without a motor, a ‘stable-boat’ as they call those barges that travel along canals with their horses on board.”

    Like several other Maigret novels and stories, this tale takes place beside one of the locks along the Seine. Old Arthur Aerts, who was reputed to have hoarded away 100,000 francs, and his second and much younger wife Emma are found dead in their cabin while the boat is docked overnight at the lock, Arthur hanged with a dog’s chain and Emma with a sheet.

   Apparently the only suspect is a young tough named Emile Gradut, the stoker on “a small tug from the Upper Seine” that was docked beside the Aerts’ barge, who was sleeping with Emma and ran away into the nearby forest of Rougeau before the crimes were discovered. Maigret exposes the truth by reasoning of sorts but I doubt if any reader could beat him to the solution.

   We are back in Paris for “La Fenêtre Ouverte” (8 November 1936), which can be found in EQMM for June 1977 as “Inspector Maigret Smokes His Pipe” and was collected in MAIGRET’S PIPE under the correct title “The Open Window.”

   An arrest warrant in his pocket, Maigret goes to the office of shady financier Oscar Laget in the rue Montmartre only to find him shot, apparently a suicide. Since these stories run only about a dozen pages apiece, there are just two suspects besides Laget himself: his wife and his office manager. This murderer’s plot is actually a bit ingenious but of course no match for Maigret.

   There’s no need to discuss here the fourth story in the series, “Peine de Mort” (15 November 1936)—which appeared in EQMM, October 1968, as “Inspector Maigret’s War of Nerves” and in MAIGRET’S PIPE as “Death Penalty,” an accurate translation of the French title—because I talked about it at length more than two years ago. If you missed that column, or aren’t blessed with a photographic memory, you can access what I said by clicking here.

   Over the next tale’s French title, “Les Larmes de Bougie” (22 November 1936), I scratched my head for a while, and so must its translators have done. Larmes, from the Latin lacrimae, means tears, and bougieq means candle. The tears of the candle? Small wonder the title as it appeared in Lawrence G. Blochman’s translation for EQMM (June 1956) was “Journey into Time,” changed to “Journey Backward into Time” for its first hardcover appearance in THE SHORT CASES OF INSPECTOR MAIGRET. In MAIGRET’S PIPE it’s called “Death of a Woodlander.”

   This is one of the early short cases of Simenon’s protagonist that somewhat resembles a detective story, with Maigret traveling to a tiny village deep in the forest of Orléans to investigate the murder of 62-year-old Marguerite Potru, who had been found in the bedroom she shared with her older sister Amélie “with three stab wounds in her chest; her right cheek and her eye had been savagely slashed.”

   Amélie is alive but has suffered eleven stab wounds, almost all of them on her shoulder and her right side, and either can’t or won’t speak. The women were rumored to have hidden a lot of valuable securities in their grim and ancient house, although none were found when the police searched. The prime suspect is Marguerite’s illegitimate son Marcel, a young tough cut from the same cloth as Emile Gradut in “La Péniche aux Deux Pendus.”

   The French title refers to drips of candle wax found in the Potrus’ coach house, and these are the clues which lead Maigret to the truth and the missing securities.

   In “Rue Pigalle” (29 November 1936), which appeared in EQMM for June 1968 as “Inspector Maigret Investigates” and in MAIGRET’S PIPE as “In the Rue Pigalle,” we are back in Paris and, for the first time in these short stories, in the underworld milieu familiar from novels like MAIGRET/MAIGRET RETURNS.

   On a cold and gloomy morning Maigret visits a modest bistro in the titular street after receiving an anonymous tip that something violent happened in the place the previous night. He finds no sign of violence except two gangsters who have spent the night sleeping in the joint and a bar mirror damaged by a bullet but in due course he finds a third gangster, the body of a fourth, and the answer to his murder, which isn’t of much interest although Eleanor Sullivan, who succeeded as EQMM editor after Fred Dannay’s death, thought enough of the story to reprint it (May 1985).

   There seems to have been a three weeks’ pause before the next Maigret short appeared in Paris-Soir-Dimanche. The first U.S. appearance of “Monsieur Lundi” (20 December 1936) was in EQMM for May 1969 as “Inspector Maigret Hesitates,” which in MAIGRET’S PIPE is called “Mr. Monday.”

   The commissaire visits the house of Dr. Armand Barion, a prosperous physician whose ménage includes a wife, three kids, a man-of-all-work and, until recently, an 18-year-old girl of peasant origins named Olga Boulanger, who was found both dead and more than four months pregnant. An autopsy has revealed that she was killed by a gruesome method unknown in France but common in Malaya and the New Hebrides: she was “induced to swallow a certain number of those slender beards, as sharp as needles, that grow on ears of various cereals, including rye….These beards remain in the bowel, the lining of which they eventually pierce….”

   Both Barion and his factotum had had sex with the girl, “a gawky little thing with a freckled face,” and are therefore prime suspects, but the story is just beginning. It seems that a wandering beggar comes to the Barion house every Monday afternoon and receives a portion of the family lunch, in return for which he offers two cream cakes known as religieuses which he is given earlier every Monday at a neighborhood pâtisserie.

   Dr. Barion has forbidden his kids to eat the cakes, which he’s afraid are stale, and apparently the unlucky Olga gobbled them up. So who put those beards in the cream cakes, and who was the intended target? This tale, my favorite among the ones discussed here, is no longer than any other in the first series of Maigret shorts but somehow seems almost a novel in miniature. In addition to presenting a host of characters, many of them glimpsed or talked about rather than seen or interacted with, Simenon shows us Maigret moving around the neighborhood and absorbing the atmosphere almost as if he had a hundred pages or so to find the truth.

   After another short hiatus came “Une Erreur de Maigret” (3 January 1937), which is translated in MAIGRET’S PIPE as “Maigret’s Mistake.” Like “L’affaire du Boulevard Beaumarchais” this one never appeared in EQMM, for reasons which become clear after one reads the story.

   If nothing else, the tale boasts unity of time and place and only two onstage characters, Maigret himself and Eugène Labri, a fat unctuous toad who owns a pornographic bookshop in the rue Saint-Denis, “between a pork butcher’s and a hairdresser’s….” What brings Maigret to this place with its “revoltingly scented basement” is that Labri’s assistant, Mlle. Emilienne, has been found dead there, apparently from an overdose of sleeping tablets.

   The unremittingly sleazy atmosphere, plus the fact that Maigret socks the slimy Labri at the story’s end (which is no less than he deserves) and that the plot requires a mature woman—a Frenchwoman no less!—to be totally ignorant of the facts of life, seem to me quite enough to explain why Fred Dannay passed on this one for EQMM.

   The ninth and last story to be discussed here is “Jeumont, 51 minutes d’arrêt!,” a title which refers to the stop of almost an hour’s length at the French train station just across the border from Belgium. We know from the superlative website www.trussel.com that the tale was written in October 1936, the same month as the eight tales covered above. And since it’s also the same length as those eight, most likely it first appeared in Paris-Soir-Dimanche, perhaps during that mysterious three-week hiatus we saw a few paragraphs ago.

   Along with the other eight, it was first collected in France in LES NOUVELLES ENQUITES DE MAIGRET (Gallimard, 1944), but it wasn’t included in either MAIGRET’S CHRISTMAS or MAIGRET’S PIPE although it did appear in EQMM (November 1966) and in Bill Pronzini’s anthology MIDNIGHT SPECIALS (Bobbs-Merrill, 1977) as “Inspector Maigret Deduces.”

   The train referred to in the French title is bound from Warsaw to Berlin to Li ge in Belgium (Simenon’s birthplace) to Erquelinnes, which is in Belgium just across from the border, to Jeumont, which is the first stop in France after leaving Belgium. Its final destination is Paris but on this trip a wealthy German banker named Otto Bauer, one of the six passengers in a particular compartment, is found dead in his seat at Jeumont.

   Called in by his railroad-detective nephew, Maigret gets in touch with his Berlin counterparts and learns that Bauer was forced out of the banking business “after the National Socialist revolution, but gave an undertaking of loyalty to the Government, and has never been disturbed….” and also that he’s “[c]ontributed one million marks to party funds.” Despite his name, Bauer was obviously a Jew, and was desperately trying to escape Nazi Germany with whatever money he could salvage. That element is what makes this tale unique in the Maigret canon. At least in translation there’s not a word of sympathy for the victim, not a word of disgust for the regime he was fleeing.

   For Maigret, and for Simenon I fear, it’s just another factor in another case. Does this explain why the story wasn’t included in either of the major Maigret collections? It just might.

APACHE TRAIL. MGM, 1942. Lloyd Nolan, Donna Reed, William Lundigan, Ann Ayars, Connie Gilchrist, Chill Wills, Ray Teal, Grant Withers, Fuzzy Knight, Trevor Bardett. Based on the short story “Stage Station” by Ernest Haycox (Collier’s, 22 April 1939). Director: Richard Thorpe.

   Lloyd Nolan is miscast as a no good rascally outlaw in MGM’s Apache Trail, a surprisingly effective, if not overly memorable, programmer. Directed by Richard Thorpe, who had a long career at the studio, the film stars William Lundigan as Tom Folliard, a stagecoach station manager who must contend not only with his criminal brother Trigger (Nolan), but also Apaches on the warpath. Given how much of a scoundrel Trigger is, it comes as no real surprise to him that the Apache uprising is due, at least in large part, to Trigger’s subterfuge.

   There’s also a romantic subplot that revolves around the unrequited love that Rosalia (Donna Reed), a Spanish employee at the station has for Tom. Her competition is war widow Constance Selden (Ann Ayars), who is guarding a secret about her late husband’s death. Then there’s a small amount of comic relief and music thanks to Chill Wills who portrays a worker at the station.

   All told, Apache Trail isn’t anything that one need to go seeking out. But it’s a decent enough Western, albeit one that features a formulaic plot about white people trapped inside a station in the Southwest with marauding Indians on the outside, one that would be repeated time and again throughout the next two decades. But with Thorpe’s craftsmanlike direction and a decent soundtrack courtesy of Sol Kaplan, Apache Trail works well for what it is. Still, one wonders who made the decision to cast Lundigan and Nolan as brothers?

GEORGE GOODCHILD – McLean Investigates. Inspector McLean #3. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, 1930. No US edition.

   This is a collection of short stories featuring the investigations of Inspector McLean of Scotland Yard, who, unless I missed it somewhere, seems to lack a first name.

   A few of the stories have some rather good detection, but for the most part McLean relies on “narks” — much as do the real police — and extraordinary coincidence. In one case an informer tells him he might find someone he is looking in a certain nightclub. McLean goes there and observes four men working over a map; fortuitously, the men are plotting the assassination that McLean is trying to prevent.

   Nevertheless, as I said, there is also good detection. McLean in one case discovers the guilty party by testing how difficult it was to crank start a car. (Remember the publication date, dear reader! And for those whose memory of cars with cranks doesn’t exist, that was the way car motors were started before the self-starter was invented. Think of how for example, the typical gasoline lawnmower is started, and you will have some, but not much, idea of how a car was started by a crank.)

   Of course, the car had been immersed in a pool in a disused quarry for more than a month, and this might have had something to do with the difficulty — indeed, I am astonished that McLean got it started, no matter how much effort he put into it — but McLean is above such petty details.

   McLean is also extremely lucky. In his investigation of someone who arranges assassinations, McLean approaches the person, and how he is still with us only the author knows:

   Lots of things happel1 in the stories “like lightning,” though I think Goodchild means “rapidly.” My favorite description, however, is the one of the chap who moves around a lot; he is described as “illusive.”

   The driving of McClean’s Sergeant, Brook, who also appears not to have been Christened anything in particular, can raise some thrills, at least in those whose grasp of English isn’t all that it should be:

   Ah, those nasty hair-breadth skids!

Bibliographic Notes:   This was the third of over 60 novels and story collections featuring Inspector McLean in a career extending from 1929 to 1967. He seems to have been referred to as “Dandy” McLean at times, but otherwise Bill appears to have been correct in surmising that the character had no known first name.

   As for the author himself, here is an edited version of the first paragraph of his Wikipedia page:

JACKSON GILLIS – Chain Saw. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1988; paperback, August 1990.

   Sometimes I think a writer spends so much time polishing up Chapter One of his or her book that it ends up so overwritten as to be almost unreadable. I exaggerate, but it did happen again here, and I almost quit reading, which would have been a serious mistake, as I very much liked a lot of what came later.

   Former LA policeman Jonas Duncan is hired in this book to discover if a young orphan making a claim on an elderly lumberwoman’s fortune is for real or not. I’m not sure why this was published by St. Martin’s in paperback under their “Mean Streets” imprint. The phrase implies “urban streets” to me, and this particular tale, which also includes an authentic portrayal of a lumber industry which is slowly dying out, is as rural and outdoorsy as they come.

   There is also a decent mystery involved, with plenty of twists and false trails. Skip Twin Peaks and read this instead.

Bio-Bibliograhic Notes:   This was Jonas Duncan’s only appearance in printed form. Author Jackson Gillis wrote one other detective novel included in Hubin: The Killers of Starfish (Lippincott, 1977) which also took place in Washington State, but that is the only connection between the two.

   His name may, however, be more familiar to some of you for a couple of other reasons. According to his Wikipedia page, Gillis was “an American radio and television scriptwriter whose career spanned more than 40 years and encompassed a wide range of genres.”

   Some of the radio shows he wrote for: The Whistler and Let George Do It. For TV: Perry Mason, Lost in Space, and Hawaii Five-O. He died in 2010 athe age of 93.

CRIME OF PASSION. United Artists, 1957. Barbara Stanwyck, Sterling Hayden, Raymond Burr, Fay Wray, Virginia Grey, Royal Dano. Original story and screenplay: Jo Eisinger. Director: Gerd Oswald.

   Call it what you will: a crime film, a film noir, or a proto-feminist melodrama. But make no mistake about it. Crime of Passion is most definitely a Barbara Stanwyck vehicle. So much so that one could say that Stanwyck, who is front and center throughout the proceedings, is the auteur of this United Artists release. Directed by craftsman Gerd Oswald, this somewhat average black and white thriller also benefits from the presence of co-stars and supporting cast members including Sterling Hayden, Raymond Burr, and a young Robert Quarry as a newsroom worker.

   Stanwyck portrays Kathy Ferguson, a tough as nails San Francisco newspaper columnist. She’s a career woman with no desire to marry and settle down. Not until she meets visiting Los Angeles detective Lieutenant Bill Doyle (Hayden), who is up north searching for a Southern California woman accused of killing her husband. Soon enough, Kathy and Bill are married and living a seemingly idyllic suburban existence in the San Fernando Valley. But soon suburban dinner parties and boredom get to Kathy. It’s clear that she wants more in life. Both for herself and for Bill, whom she thinks is deserving of a better position in the police force.

   Enter Bill’s superior at the LAPD. When Kathy meets Inspector Tony Pope (Burr), she takes an immediate interest in his passion for solving difficult cases. Soon, however, the passion between the two takes a more sordid turn, with Kathy and Tony sharing a night together. When Tony decides that it was all a mistake, Kathy is despondent. And never underestimate a character portrayed by Barbara Stanwyck, especially when she has access to a gun.

   Despite Stanwyck’s formidable screen presence, Crime of Passion never quite gels as a movie. Yes, there are a few plot holes and implausibilities. But those aren’t what end up making this movie an interesting but not particularly memorable affair. No. It’s the fact that, while the plot may have worked well enough on paper, the movie’s story — the radical transformation of Kathy from a tough single newspaperwoman into a helplessly in love housewife and then into a scheming and impassioned killer — feels too forced. It’s this artificiality that makes this particular Stanwyck film a pale imitation of so many of her other works.

PAUL HARDING – Red Slayer. Brother Athelstan #2. William Morrow, US, hardcover, 1994. Avon, US, paperback, 1995. First published in the UK as The House of the Red Slayer (Headline, hardcover, 1992).

   Unless I’m mistaken, Harding writes historical mysteries under a number of different names, P. C. Doherty among them. However, when I tried to find something to substantiate all this, I couldn’t put my hands on anything, so I may be wrong. I don’t think so, though.

   Brother Athelstan (a friar, not a monk) is parosh priest of Saint Erconwald’s, a church in Southwick in London of the mid-fourteenth century. He is also cleric to the City Coroner (a very important person in that time and place), Sir John Cranston. Just before Christmas in the fierce winter of 1377 they are called to the Tower of London, where the Constable of the Tower has been found in a locked bedroom in the Tower’s upper reaches, throat cut from ear to ear.

   It develops that while the Constable was not a well-liked person at all in the present, his past (he was once a mercenary knight in Egypt) might hold the secret to the murder. To round out the story, Sir John has wife problems and someone is robbing corpses from the cemetery at Brother Athlestan’s church.

   One book from so prolific a writer is far too small a sample from which to generalize, so I won’t I’ll just say that I didn’t find this particular book quite up to the level of, say, the historical mysteries of Peters, Marston, Tourney, et al. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy it. Harding is at pains to provide a vivid historical background, and tells his story well enough.

   I suppose my reservations were in the natter of the leads. Sir John in particular seemed to be somewhat of a one-note character with his constant wine-bibbing and bellowing, and Athelstan never came quite to life for me. I also got tired of reading “he slurred” every time one of the drinking characters spoke. Nevertheless, I’ll try Harding again.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC UPDATE:  Barry was quite correct in stating that Paul Harding was one of several pen names of P. C. (Paul) Doherty. Other bylines he has used are Vanessa Alexander, Anna Apostolou, Michael Clynes, Ann Dukthas, and C L Grace. To this date (2017) there are 18 books in his Brother Athelstan series, the last eleven of them under his own name.

BOILEAU-NARCEJAC – She Who Was No More. Pushkin Vertigo, trade paperback, 2015. Translation by Geoffrey Sainsbury. First published by Éditions Denoël (France) in 1952 as Celle qui n’était plus. Reprinted by Rinehart, US, hardcover, 1954. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover, as The Woman Who Was, 1954. Films: Diaboliques (France, 1955; director: Henri-Georges Clouzot); House of Secrets (US, 1993; made for TV); Diabolique (US, 1996).

   The collaboration between French authors Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac is perhaps most famous for producing, among several other works of well-regarded crime fiction, The Living and the Dead (D’entre les Morts, 1954), the basis for the movie Vertigo, considered by many to be the best of Alfred Hitchcock’s many films.

   Unfortunately, of the the ten titles included in Hubin, only three have been published in the US. She Who Was No More is one of them, and it’s good to have it back in print again, after a long wait of over 60 years. The story is both easy and not so easy to describe. A man’s mistress helps a man kill his wife. They do it in such a way as to make it seem to be an accident which happened while both have solid alibis. Yet when the husband goes to “discover” her body, it has vanished. Disappeared.

   Worse, he begins to find notes from her saying that she’s gone away but will be home again soon. More. His brother-in-law in Paris claims that she has stopped by to see him, even after she is supposed to be dead.

   What is difficult to explain is what a feverish nightmare of a novel this is, a pure noir fantasy, if you will. A combination of a guilty conscience with a belief in ghosts floods Ferdnand Ravinel’s very being — and perhaps the reader’s, too. What is also difficult is to write a review without saying more, or even without a hint of saying more.

   So I won’t. I will say that I enjoyed this oe immensely — but more than that, no. But it is frustrating!

   One of old time radio’s (OTR) characters most fondly remembered is the series host/announcer. Radio programs needed a way to introduce the series and episode to the listener. Limited to just words and sounds radio created the host role.

   Perhaps one of the appeals of listening to radio drama was how often the fourth wall was ignored. It began with the host/announcer who would talk directly to the listener. It gave the program and the listener at home a personal connection, as if the story was being told directly to you.

   There were several basic types of host/announcer. It could be an announcer or famous celebrity or a fictional character. He or she could exist separate from the story or be a fictional character narrating the story or a real celebrity who introduces the story and at times joins the cast and performs as one of the characters in the story, or in rare cases a real announcer could interact with the fictional characters (usually to promote the sponsor).

   One of the earliest radio series to have a fictional character as host was the 1930 CBS anthology DETECTIVE STORY HOUR. The character with the strange eerie voice was The Shadow, a character that has had a long successful career. For those who wish to learn more about the pulp/radio icon I recommend the book SHADOW SCRAPBOOK by the character’s creator Walter B. Gibson (with Anthony Tollin).

   Here is the first episode from the Mutual Network version of THE SHADOW. “Death House Blues” aired September 26, 1937 and introduced him to the Mutual audience. In the story The Shadow played by Orson Welles works to save an innocent man from the electric chair.

   Characters such as Philip Marlowe, Rocky Jordan, and Archie Goodwin for Nero Wolfe would break the fourth wall to talk to the audience, set the mood and begin narrating the story.

   LIVES OF HARRY LIME was a BBC production and syndicated in America, airing various places including Mutual radio network. The series was based on the character from the film THE THIRD MAN, star Orson Welles would return to play Harry Lime in this prequel to the 1949 British film.

THE LIVES OF HARRY LIME “Too Many Crooks” (Mutual, August 3, 1951), It begins when Harry receives a letter asking for his help rob a bank in Budapest. As zither music sets the proper THIRD MAN mood, Harry profits from the plans of some very untrustworthy bank robbers.

   The Shadow’s spooky voice fit radio well for establishing mood. Hosts for series such as LIGHTS OUT began to warn the listeners of the terrors to come. Some of the more entertaining hosts would go beyond the spooky voice to the rantings of an insane lunatic. Among the better ones were GUEST OF DOOM, DARKNESS, WITCH’S TALE, STRANGE DR WEIRD, WEIRD CIRCLE, HERMIT’S CAVE, and BLACK CHAPEL.

   Forgotten BLACK CASTLE remains one of the best examples of the madman host. BLACK CASTLE featured host The Wizard and his pet raven Diablo. Don Douglas not only played the host but he also did all of the voices.

   A warning about the episode “Jungle Adventure,” it was done during WWII and has a un-PC attitude about the Japanese and island natives.

BLACK CASTLE “Jungle Adventure” (Mutual, September 25, 1943). Two American airmen crash on a small Pacific island.

   Some hosts could be downright judgmental towards the fictional characters in the story (THE WHISTLER) or some hosts were notably uncaring to what happened to the people of the story (THE CLOCK, DEVIL’S SCRAPBOOK and THE CROUPIER).

   One who was judgmental and uncaring was Fate in DIARY OF FATE, played by Herbert Lytton.

DIARY OF FATE “The Entry of Tyler White” (ABC, April 6, 1948). Tyler White is about to be executed for a murder he did not commit.

   Not all hosts were scary some were quite friendly such as in WORLD ADVENTURERS CLUB, and THE CASEBOOKS OF GREGORY HOOD.

   The CRIME CLUB host The Librarian (Barry Thomson) was always eager to help us with that book or manuscript we wanted. Many of the stories were adaptations of actual books published by Doubleday’s Crime Club imprint .

CRIME CLUB “Mr. Smith’s Hat” (Mutual, January 22, 1947). Gilbert Shannon calls Inspector McKee to report his own murder. A few moments after he hangs up the Inspector gets a call from Shannon’s daughter who has discovered her father’s dead body. Witty dialog highlights the story based on a book by Helen Reilly and adapted by Stedman Coles.

   Celebrities were popular choices to host drama anthologies, such as radio producer Arch Oboler (LIGHTS OUT), writers such as John Dickson Carr (MURDER BY EXPERTS) and actors such as Peter Lorre (MURDER IN THE AIR).

   CREEPS BY NIGHT aired on the Blue network with Boris Karloff as host and actor. The series was done on the West coast. When the series moved to the East coast with episode #13 “The Walking Dead (May 16, 1944) Karloff stayed behind and the mysterious Dr. X took over as host. The name of the actor who played Dr. X was never revealed.

CREEPS BY NIGHT “The Final Reckoning” (Blue network, May 2, 1944). George Miller is out of prison after serving 20 years for a murder he did not commit. George feels his life has been wasted and is obsessed with revenge against the man who framed him.

   One of the most important roles for the host/announcer was to promote the sponsor. Series such as MYSTERY HOUSE would take a comment made by the characters to remind everyone about the sponsor. INNER SANCTUM Mr. Host enjoyed his creaking door and pun filled introductions but then he would turn to Mary to discuss the perfection and joy the sponsor’s product would bring to the listener’s life.

   But no host/announcer was more interested in the sponsor than the host of a kid’s show, radio serials such as CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT, JACK ARMSTRONG ALL AMERICAN BOY, DICK TRACY, and endless others push their promos like maps and code rings and nagged kids to get their Mom or Dad to buy the sponsor’s product.

TOM MIX RALSTON STRAIGHT SHOOTERS “The Green Man” (Mutual, June 30, 1944). A swami arrives and tries to buy Longwind Wilson house that keeps disappearing because of a former cactus now anti-social Green Man. Not the most PC but still fun. In this episode Tom Mix was played by Joe “Curley” Bradley.

   Not all serials were aimed at kids and their parents’ bank account. There would be soap operas for Mom (ROMANCES OF HELEN TRENT and BACKSTAGE WIFE), adventure (ADVENTURES BY MORSE and SHADOWS OF FU MANCHU), mysteries (CHARLIE CHAN and I LOVE A MYSTERY), and spies (ANN OF THE AIRLINES).

   But no matter the type of radio serial all of them needed the host/announcer to keep the audience up to date on the continuing story that usually aired three to five times a week.

   Here is an episode from PERRY MASON, a radio series that would evolve into TV soap opera EDGE OF NIGHT.

PERRY MASON “The Case of the Puzzled Suitor’ (CBS, June 7, 1944). A rich scientist wants Mason to write his will, but a woman had early warned Mason that the scientist was being coerced.

   One of the things the Internet has given us is access to the past unlike ever before. You can listen to OTR at YouTube, Internet Archive (archive.org) and various other places on the Internet. Whether you remember when the shows first aired or you are listening for the first time, OTR offers a variety of wonderful entertainment, shows more often than not introduced by a host/announcer.

SOURCES::

RadioGOLDINdex     http://radiogoldindex.com/

ON THE AIR THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF OLD-TIME RADIO (Oxford University
Press, 1998) by John Dunning