Dated but fun is Robert Sylvester’s The Big Boodle (Random House, 1954; Permabook M-3022, 1955) set in pre-Castro Cuba and dealing with PI Ned Sherwood’s efforts to disentangle himself from an elaborate counterfeit scheme involving Mexican film stars, Cuban hit-men, ex-revolutionaries and corrupt officials.

   There’s a lot of foreshadowing in the early pages — so much that I nearly gave up on this after Sherwood said for the umpteenth time that he’s too smart to get mixed up in etc.etc — and I saw the plot resolution come marching down Main Street from a long ways away, but Sylvester creates some interesting characters, handles them effectively, and throws in enough action (also very well-handled) to make a worthwhile read. His hero also has a cute habit of comparing himself to Philip Marlowe, Nero Wolfe and other fictional PIs, sometimes very cleverly.

   This was, incidentally, turned into one of those lackluster films of Errol Flynn’s later years (UA, 1957) of which I am so morbidly fond. It offers some fine Cuban locations (Unlike We Were Strangers, reviewed here, Flynn appears to be actually filming in them.) and Pedro Armendarez appears once again as a cop, but aside from this it bears little relation to Sylvester’s work.

   Directed by Richard Wilson and written by Jo (House of the 7 Hawks) Eisinger, it changes Ned Sherwood into a world-weary croupier, handed a stack of counterfeit money by a mysterious femme you-guessed-it and subsequently beaten, shot at, picked up by the police and generally chased around Havana until they run out of picturesque locations, whereupon, having lumbered up to a respectable running time, things wrap up without too much fanfare.

   Critics at the time remarked that by now Flynn was good at looking world-weary, but he seems more movie-weary than anything, visibly sucking in his gut and trying to focus his bleary eyes as he reads lines to the other actors mired in front of him. And aside from the location shooting, little care seems to have been taken with The Big Boodle; in one fight scene, Flynn’s part is taken by a stunt double who looks so little like him that I actually re-wound to see if I’d missed a part where someone else comes into the room.

   This is must-see for fans of the late actor, but anyone else would be well-advised (as Flynn himself should have been) to steer clear of it.

RON GOULART – Big Bang. DAW, paperback original, 1982.

   If you go by the odds, they’re over a thousand to one that you’11 find this latest work by Ron Goulart, a wacky wordsmith in the tradition of no one but himself, over in the science fiction of your favorite B. Dalton Bookstore, and not in with the mysteries at all. If it were to come down to it, I guess that’s where I’d put it, too, but if you care for your detective-story reading served to you a la a combination of Craig Rice and Crazy Guggenheim, why not step across an aisle or two and give yourself a real treat?

   The proprietors of Odd Jobs, Inc., are Jake and Hildy Pace, who are assisted at times by their tipsy attorney, John J. Pilgrim, and an electronic eavesdropper named Steranko. Their specialties are cases “normaI agencies won’t go near, cases even our government has given up on.” The year is 2003, in case you were wondering, and the President are a pair of Siamese twins named Ike and Mike, joined together at the funny bone.

   The case is a fairly ordinary one, all things considered: a series of huge explosions is wiping out important world figures, as well as anyone else in the general vicinity. The Paces suspect stock manipulators at work, rather than your standard, every-day sort of terrorist type of person. Rex Sackler, Luther McGavock, Ed Jenkins, and Race Williams (among others) have already failed on the case. (Goulart is a notorious name-dropper, isn’t he?)

   His work is also filled with hilariously funny glimpses into today’s media-conscious society, stirred up thoroughly and served here as a fast-paced (extremely), no-nonsense (well, maybe just a little) detective novel. I mean, what other mystery story have you read recently that requires the use of a Captain Texas secret decoder device as an essential part of the solution?

    Rating:   B

    The Jake & Hildy Pace series —

Odd Job No. 101, and other future crimes and intrigues (collection). Scribner, 1975.
Calling Dr. Patchwork. DAW, 1978.
Hail Hibbler. DAW, 1980.
Big Bang. DAW, 1983.
Brainz, Inc. DAW, 1985.

   We Were Strangers (Signet #716, 1949) is an interesting book with an interesting story behind it. The author (Robert Sylvester) wrote the novel Rough Sketch (Dial Press, 1948), parts of which deal with the Cuban Revolution (referred to in To Have and Have Not) of the 1930s. Then when it was filmed as We Were Strangers he re-organized (but did not re-write) the chapters to conform to the movie. It might be fun some time to look up Rough Sketch and see how it differs, but for now Strangers offers entertainment enough.

   The story starts off unpromisingly — a result of the chapter-shuffling? — with an off-putting stretch about a bunch of sycophants spending a weekend on a rich man’s island, but after about 50 pages things shift radically to the Cuban thing, with some really fine background, interesting characters (including a tough street girl named China Valdes) and details of a regime so casually brutal as to seem all the more chilling — embodied in Ariete, a murderous cop and one of the Great Bad Guys of Literature. Really. Every time you see him even referred to in the book, somebody dies or disappears, and the scenes where he stalks the Valdes girl are like something out of Night of the Hunter.

   This gradually morphs into a plot to kill the dictator, engineered by Tony Fenner, a Cuban-American hustler who appeared in other work by Sylvester. We get some taut business with clandestine meetings, phony deals, and a lot of sweaty work as the conspirators dig a tunnel to plant a bomb. It’s good stuff, intercut with scenes of Ariete harassing China Valdes as he closes in on them, all culminating in an ironic conclusion that… that would be spoiling things to reveal. Suffice it to say it’s a suspenseful and emotionally riveting ride.

   But the end of the story isn’t the end of the book, which moves on to a rather unexpected and haunting conclusion. Suddenly the characters get caught up in real life, with truly poignant results. And I have to say that when I think back on Strangers, I’m going to remember this ending and the bittersweet feel Sylvester imparts to it as the characters realize that the life-and-death struggle that brought them so close is now just a finished chapter in a story that has to move on.

   Like I said, there was a movie made of this (Columbia, 1949) and I can see why the themes of struggle and irony in Rough Sketch appealed to John Huston, who directed and co-wrote the film We Were Strangers.

   Huston wisely jettisoned the sycophants on the island and (less wisely) replaced the sadder-but-wiser ending of the book with a blood-and-guts shoot-out. But his sure hand at directing the actors and action got severely undercut by budget constraints, or possibly just laziness; the stars never appear on any authentic Cuban locations, but only in unconvincing back-projection shots that make the whole thing look phony as a fast shuffle.

   If you can get past that (and I couldn’t) the rest of the film has its moments. There are fine turns by Pedro Armendariz as Ariete, and Gilbert Roland in a supporting role that he credited with reviving his career. Jennifer Jones would probably be convincing as China Valdes if you could forget that she’s Jennifer Jones, but John Garfield just looks tired and bloated—perhaps understandable since he died just three years later. In all, I’d say We Were Strangers may be well-intentioned, but we know where the road paved with Good Intentions goes, don’t we?

PARIS 7000. ABC, 1970; Universal Television. Created by Richard J. Michaels and Gene L. Coon. Executive Producer: Richard Caffey. Cast: George Hamilton as Jack Brennan and Jacques Aubuchon as Lt. Jules Maurois. Theme by Michel Colombier.

   The story of PARIS 7000 began with Lana Turner and Harold Robbins. In September 1969 ABC premiered a PEYTON PLACE wannabe called THE SURVIVORS on Monday at 9pm. Based on an idea by Harold Robbins and starring Lana Turner, Kevin McCartney and George Hamilton, the series had a budget of $250,000 episode. ABC had given Universal TV a commitment for 26 episodes.

   The series was a failure on every level. After its premiere the ratings were bad. The reviews were negative. There were production problems including personality clashes with star Lana Turner that reportedly got three producers fired.

   The November 10, 1969 issue of “Broadcasting” reported ABC’s midseason plans. THE SURVIVORS would move to Thursday at 10pm.

   A week later “Broadcasting” added, “ABC, committed to full season of THE SURVIVORS from Universal TV despite weak ratings and disastrous reviews, is expected to announce drastic change in format for series starting at midseason. Reportedly key ingredient to be held over would be series co-star George Hamilton. Lana Turner and Kevin McCarthy will be dropped.”

   On December 8, 1969, “Broadcasting” reported that the producers and Hamilton would move from THE SURVIVORS to a completely new program.

   That new program was PARIS 7000. George Hamilton played Jack Brennan, a diplomat working at the American embassy in Paris. Any American in trouble would call the embassy’s phone number Paris 7000 and Brennan would come to their aid. The series was called an action drama but the episode I have seen (“Call Me Ellen”) was a mystery sadly burdened by its soap opera melodrama beginnings.

   PARIS 7000 first aired January 22, 1970 on ABC opposite CBS THURSDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES and NBC’s DEAN MARTIN SHOW. Ratings were better than its parent THE SURVIVORS, but the show was cancelled at the end of the season.

   â€œCall Me Ellen” was the tenth episode and was a return to an earlier episode, “Call Me Lee” (episode three that aired February 5, 1970).

   TV Guide‘s Cleveland Amory review of PARIS 7000 mentioned the episode “Call Me Lee”:

      http://www.chezgrae.com/ShowInfo/Paris7000.html

   The original episode had Jack fall in love with Leona (Lee), a blonde stewardess played by Barbara Anderson. Leona would die and her role in a smuggling ring would be revealed. Brennan would identify her body.

   Seven episodes later and the series final episode, “Call Me Ellen” would feature a surprising twist to Leona’s story. Considering the series soap opera past I wonder if Jack’s mourning over the death of Leona had been a running subplot. Even if not this was a creative twist on the BONANZA curse, the death of a female love interest of the week so the regular character could continue to fall in love in future episodes.

“Call Me Ellen.” March 26,1970. Written by Richard Bluel; directed by Jeannot Szwarc. Produced by Harry Tatelman. Guest Cast: Barbara Anderson, Paul Henreid and Brenda Benet. *** While making his monthly visit to San Remo and the grave of the woman he still loves, Jack sees her double getting into a taxi.

   Despite Jack seeing the brunette version of blonde Leona leaving a graveyard, Barbara Anderson looked too good to be a zombie, so who was she?

   The acting makes one think of zombies, and to push the edge of bad acting even further there were endless flashbacks and characters silently staring off to nowhere as they were supposedly lost in memories and/or deep in thought.

   But the most unforgivable flaw of PARIS 7000 was the over the top melodrama left over from its THE SURVIVORS roots. Jack stared at Leona’s headstone silently lost in his memories and/or deep in thought, a huge Christian cross loomed behind him, as we listened to Barbara Anderson voice over, “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my Jack to keep. If I should die before I wake. Remember me. Remember me.”

   Jack confronted the brunette who says she knows nothing about Leona. Her name was Ellen. She ran a local hotel and was a single mother of a young handicapped boy who after many expensive operations would soon be able to walk. Jack, who still hadn’t accepted Leona’s death, now had his hopes or confusion rise (it was hard to tell which). He checked into the hotel and began to seduce the beautiful widow and mom.

   Meanwhile, a bad guy, who had been following Jack all the way from Paris, called his Boss and told him that Jack had found her. The Boss tells his henchman to kill the woman.

   Who this woman was and what her secrets were would have made an interesting TV mystery, but the flawed script made it difficult to tell the difference between a clue (the son) and a plot hole (why was she at the graveyard). In addition, the melodrama of the romance overwhelmed the story in typical bad TV fashion. Jack and Ellen fell in love. She became upset because he was in love with Leona not her, Ellen. But of course she couldn’t resist the romantic powers of George Hamilton and sacrificed it all for him in the end.

   PARIS 7000 never had much of a chance of surviving. Most likely it was considered the simplest alternative to fill the twenty-six episodes order of THE SURVIVORS (which lasted fifteen episodes). The lack of time to develop a series remains a common cause of bad TV. This May next fall’s TV series will be announced, that gives the producers around four months (plus the time spent on the pilot) to find out what works and what doesn’t. There was less than two months from when ABC’s decided not to change THE SURVIVORS but to instead create a new series with new characters and when the first episode PARIS 7000 aired. It is a wonder this wasn’t worse.

   If the series had toned down the soap opera melodrama a notch to romantic suspense this series might have been watchable. But considering its past, the results are understandable.

JAMES R. BENN – Billy Boyle. Soho Press, hardcover, 2006; softcover,2007.

Genre:   Historical mystery. Leading character:   Billy Boyle, 1st in series. Setting:   England; 1942/World War II.

First Sentence:   I typed the date under my name: Lieutenant William Boyle, August 6, 1942.

   Former Boston Irish Cop, from a family of Boston Irish Cops, Billy Boyle was a newly-made detective and is now a Lieutenant in the US Army. In spite of thinking he wouldn’t be assigned to Europe, his distant cousin manages to get him a staff job — in England assigned to the staff of General Dwight D. Eisenhower as his personal investigator. His first assignment is to catch a spy who may have been planted at Beardsley Hall, English home for the exiled Norwegian government.

   There are eight primary elements for which I look when starting any new book and Benn really managed to tick all the boxes. Let’s start with “hook”. The book has an excellent opening with a style that addresses the reader in a let-me-tell-you-a-story style. His voice is engaging and humor, natural. There is also an honesty in the way he writes emotion.

   Benn establishes a solid sense of place. Admittedly, the descriptions of London and Boston may have resonated more strongly with me than they may for others as I know both places. However, even when he moved the story away from those locations, there was always a clear feeling for the location.

   The characters are fully drawn. Billy is the focus and the voice, but even with Kas, the Polish baron, and Daphne, proper English daughter of a knight, you know their backgrounds and who they are.

   One of the most interesting aspects is Billy’s perspective on the war, as an American amongst the English and Norwegians. I particularly appreciated the way in which Benn intertwined the events of Billy’s present with memories from his past, as well as his understanding of people and level of caring.

   There is a lot of fascinating historical detail embedded within the plot, much of which I had never known. Still, it is a mystery and I enjoyed Billy taking control of his first crime scene which also provided interesting information on forensics.

   Billy Boyle was an absolutely treat to read. Although I wonder why I hadn’t discovered him sooner, I’m delighted to know there is a whole series ahead of me.

Rating:   Very Good Plus.

       The Billy Boyle World War II mystery series —

1. Billy Boyle (2006)
2. The First Wave (2007)

3. Blood Alone (2008)
4. Evil for Evil (2009)
5. Rag and Bone (2010)
6. A Mortal Terror (2011)
7. Death’s Door (2012)
8. A Blind Goddess (2013)

ERIC AMBLER – The Dark Frontier. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1936. Mysterious Press, US, hardcover, 1990; reprint paperback, 1991.

   Eric Ambler’s first novel, The Dark Frontier from 1936, has taken until now to find a publisher in this country: Mysterious Press. Ambler argues fervently in his contemporary introduction that this is parody, and in truth it was hard for me for much of the narrative to regard it as anything else, till at last the story drew me in.

   But I wonder if a youthful Ambler thought at the time it was parody he was writing. In any event, a tiny Balkan kingdom, Ixania, is full of starving peasants and little else — except a brilliant scientist who has invented something that might be used for great good or evil, something that sounds a good bit like atomic energy.

   An earnest academic, Professor Barstow, is somehow transformed into the intrepid agent Conway Carruthers, who is determined to save an unready mankind by obliterating all record of the invention. Others, of course, have rather different things in mind for it.

   This story is not persuasive for the first half and not particularly memorable of character or plot throughout, but it’s a pleasant enough diversion and good to have to complete the Ambler oeuvre in the U.S.

   I really wanted to like THE POETICS OF MURDER (1983), edited by Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe, an Edgar-nominated collection of essays from Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich in hardcover and trade paperback. Good writing about mystery is always in short supply. Unfortunately, this is an anthology of pretentious essays, written from an academic viewpoint, and boring as hell.

   One essay argues that the “…intense curiosity aroused by the detective story derives from its association with the primal scene, a psychoanalytic term reference to a child’s first observation, either real or imagined, of sexual intercourse between his or her parents.” Other essays deal wih “The Detective Novel and Its Social Mission;” “Delay and the Hermenautic Sentence;” “From Semiotics to Heremneutics: Modes of Detection in Doyle and Chandler;” “Metaphysical Detective Stories in Postwar Fiction.”

   An East German writer, Ernst Kaemmel, claims that the detective story is the child of capitalism, its crimes involve attacks on private property. He celebrates the absence of detective stories in Socialist countries but has missed the main reason. It is that the idea of finding truth, so essential to the detedcteive story as we know it, was not accepted in Nazi Germany, nor currently in East Germany or the USSR.

   Professor David Grossvogel, reasoning along similar lines, finds the detective story bad because, by providing fictional mysteries to solve, it distracts readers from the real mysteries (and problems) of life. I wonder what, if anything, Professor Grossvogel does for escape.

   In POETICS OF MURDER mysteries are repeatedly compared to “literature.” Opinions are tossed off, as if sacred, with no explanation, e,g., “Certain works are easily rejected, however. I have trouble reading Edgar Wallace and Ellery Queen, though I have tried several times.” Almost every article has a publish or perish quality to it, with never a feel for the fun in reading the mystery.

   Now, if you want a really good book of essays about mystery fiction, pick Howard Haycraft’s classic THE ART OF THE MYSTERY STORY (1946), just reprinted in trade paperback by Carroll & Graf. The editor and his contributors are just as erudite and insightful, but they have written for people who read and love mysteries, and the differences show both in quality and variety.

   We have serious but non-pedantic, pieces by Chesterton, Chandler, Knox, Gardner, Sandoe, Carr, and many others. There’s also humor, including Rex Stout poking his tongue in his cheek to prove that Watson was a woman. We have Edmund Wilson deriding the form, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd” and its proponents, writers like Nicholas Blake, Anthony Boucher, and Joseph Wood Krutch, giving a different viewpoint.

   There are lists of great books, classic introductions by Sayers and Van Dine, reviews by Dashiell Hammett, etc. If ever an anthology deserved to be called “great,” THE ART OF THE MYSTERY STORY does.

   However, one need not go back to 1946 to find a good book about the mystery. A fine recent book is THE CRAFT OF CRIME (1983) by John C. Carr from Houghton, Mifflin in hardcover. Carr provides interviews with twelve of the most popular mystery writers around and by adroit questioning and selection of articulae subjects, he has given us an interesting book which also increases our knowledge of the field.

   The writers selected are Kendell, Lovesey, McBain, Francis,Langton, Gregory Mcdonald, Mark Smith, Robert B. Parker, Van de Watering, June Thomson, McClure, and Lathen. Mr. Carr is a good questioner with only occasional lapses when he is in too obvious awe of his subject. Otherwise, the Q and A technique works quite well, with the exception of a bias against William Faulkner which Carr betrays in several questions.

   Most of the time we get probing questions which permit these writers to demonstrate how interesting and witty they are. There are differences in quality as is inevitable in a collection of this type, but not a bad interview in the lot. My favorites are those with Parker and the two women who write as as Emma Lathen.

   Parker has some trenchant things to say about academic life which he was able to leave in 1979 for full-time writing. His description of his priorities in life make us feel as if we really know him, though I’m not sure about liking him. Parker provides a neat summary of the difference between old-style mysteries and the kind he writes, claiming that the world is “no longer amenable to logical deduction.”

   He’s probably right in that regard, but he misses the point that it is exactly for that reason that many of us look for escape reading in which intellect does triumph. As long as writers write (and the public buys) mysteries like Parker’s which are often resolved by fist fights or gun battles, rather than by brains, we shall have a case of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

   Meet Boston Blackie (Columbia, 1941) was a zippy 60 minutes, with the crisp direction of Robert Florey making the difference here. Rochelle Hudson was a luscious treat as the female lead, and Chester Morris and Richard Lane sparred amiably as Blackie and his sympathetic nemesis, Inspector Faraday.

   Even better was Raffles (Hyclass Producing Co., 1917; George Irving, director). John Barrymore was a charming and stylish Amateur Cracksman, his performance fully justifying the curtain line delivered by the detective: “I’m delighted he’s escaped! He’s really splendid!” (Frank Morgan plays Raffles’ friend, Bunny Manders, an early appearance for the future MGM contract player.)

   As Meet Boston Blackie demonstrated, B-films can be the most enjoyable and dependable of film viewings. I was. therefore, depressed by the lackluster Mr. Moto Takes a Chance (2Oth Century Fox, 1938) and by the dreadful The Lone Wolf Strikes (Columbla, 1940).

   Peter Lorre couldn’t salvage the back-lot jungle melodrama of the Moto film, and Warren William, Eric Blore and Montagu Love brought only momentary life to the Lone Wolf’s dead-at-the-starting-gate caper. The pacing of the Lone Wolf film was funereal, and I am convinced that the director (Sidney Salkow) told his actors to count to three before delivering a line.

SIMON TROY [THURMAN WARRINER] – Cease Upon the Midnight. Macmillan, US, hardcover, 1965. Previously published in the UK: Gollancz, hardcover, 1964.

   The coroner’s jury, sitting on the death of Dr. Bewlay from an overdose of sleeping tablets, leaves open whether it was accidental or intentional. Inspector Smith, too, has not made a decision. Did Bewlay’s fiancee, or his ne’er-do-well actor brother Raymond, or both give him an overdose, and how could it have been done? Certainly Bewlay was not a man likely to kill himself.

   Acting on the invitation of Robert Neil, who runs an advanced girls’ school on the island of Grenezy, where both the fiancee and Raymond have gone, though separately, Smith travels to the island, discovers much about the participants, and nearly doesn’t make it back.

   While the murderer is known early and may be surmised even earlier, the interest here is in Smith — whose superintendent can’t decide whether he is Machiavellian, naive, or dim — and his investigation, which is first class. The bright but still dumb heroine — “There was no risk,” she contends, “you came just in time” — has a tendency to fall in and out of love with considerable dispatch, and the villain is just a bit too villainous.

   These flaws, if flaws they are, weren’t noticed during the reading, only in the reflection afterwards.

PETER RABE – The Out Is Death. Gold Medal #657, paperback original, 1957. Black Lizard, softcover, 1988.

   On a positive note, I recently finished The Out Is Death by Peter Rabe, and am once more impressed by the talent of one of the less-remembered two-bit novelists of the 50s.

   Those who sing the praise of Thompson, Goodis et al., should take a look at this tough, sentimental tale of a broken-down safe-cracker and the friend who tries to save him from a sadistic hood coercing him out of retirement.

   The action is fast, the plot tight, but it’s Rabe’s feel for the characters, even the minor ones, that lifts this out of the ordinary. Try it.