FINGERPRINTS DON’T LIE. Spartan Productions / Lippert Pictures, 1951. Richard Travis, Sheila Ryan, Sid Melton, Tom Neal, Margia Dean, Lyle Talbot, Michael Whalen, Karl Davis. Director: Sam Newfield.

   Early this year an old childhood buddy of mine gifted me with a box of perfectly-chosen DVDs: no classics, just a lot of stuff I kinda wanted to see but didn’t want to spend much money on. So far, the gem of the set has been Fingerprints Don’t Lie (Spartan Productions, 1951) an enjoyably bad film that passes too quickly for its deficiencies to grow irksome.

   Yeah, this is listed as “A Spartan Production,” and Spartan it is, but “Cheapo” might have caught the spirit better, as it was produced by Sigmund Neufeld and directed by Sam Newfield, the driving talents (for want of a better word) behind PRC, which has been widely celebrated as the most penurious studio in Hollywood. Fingerprints carries nobly on in the PRC tradition, with tacky sets, perfunctory acting, and a screenplay that seems more interested in killing time than actually getting anyplace.

   What makes it fun to watch, though (for me anyway) is the amusingly slip-shod nature of the thing. Instead of background music we get an organ soloist, just like in the old-time soaps, bridging scenes and setting moods with a turgid melancholia that broke me up every time.

   Then, late in the film, we get one of those cinematic conventions that normally go unnoticed: two characters talk about checking out a suspect’s apartment on the sixth floor of the Metropolitan Hotel, and we cut to an exterior shot of the Metropolitan, the camera sweeps up to the sixth floor, and we cut to the two characters walking into the apartment.

   It’s the kind of movie-shorthand you’ve probably seen dozens of times and never noticed. Only in this case they couldn’t afford to send a cameraman out for an exterior shot, so they simply panned up a photograph of the hotel —- which might have worked except that no one noticed the photo was printed backwards and we see the words LETOH NATILOPORTEM in mirror-image!

   Still later, the gaffes come fast and funny as the Police close in on the Crime Boss and his Moll in a rather economical–looking suite. When they tell the baddie he’s going Downtown, the obliging Moll opens her purse, ostensibly for lipstick, but holds it up what seems like an eternity as he sees the gun inside and they exchange significant glances. At some length.

   Much later (it seems) he reaches inside the purse and fumbles around for several seconds before finally pulling the gun out — upside down! Whereupon he spends several more seconds getting it pointed at the cops, who promptly register surprise. Now that’s acting!

   Following a bit of stand-off, the Crime Boss eventually shoots a cop, who bends sharply forward, as if hit in the stomach, then apparently remembers some long-ago instruction from the director, straightens up and grabs his supposedly-wounded shoulder. Bullets fly (or rather, bullet-type noises fill the soundtrack) till our bad guy (WARNING!) “falls” out a window.

   Actually, we see him slide out the window-set, lie down on a not-quite-hidden platform and roll out of view. Which at least gets him mercifully out of this turkey.

   I should perhaps add that the unfortunate actors in this thing at least carry on manfully, ignoring the paucity of their surroundings and the deficiencies in the script. In one scene, the prosecutor is played by Tom Neal, who would soon be facing a prosecutor himself. An actor named Sid Melton gamely struggles to apply comic relief as a newspaper photographer who can’t work a camera, and Karl “Killer” Davis makes a rather effective Hood. Altogether a game bunch, and it’s just a pity they had so little to work with.

Editorial Comments:   This film, if you would like to obtain a copy, is easily available on DVD, as part of a two-for-one “Forgotten Noir” pair of offerings. See the image above. I’ll Get You, with George Raft and Sally Gray, is the main feature, with Fingerprints getting only second billing (in very small print).

   Also worth noting, as Dan has already pointed out in a comment following Michael Shonk’s recent review of Philo Vance, Detective, this is one of the movies that was re-titled (as Fingerprints) and edited down to less than thirty minutes in a syndicated package of films sold to TV stations in the early 1950s.

ANN CLEEVES – Sea Fever. Fawcett Gold Medal, paperback original, 1st printing, October 1991. Macmillan, UK, hardcover, 1993.

   This is the fifth mystery novel in which inveterate birdwatcher George Palmer-Jones has become involved with a case of murder. It shouldn’t be too surprising: even though he’s now actually a retired civil servant, he and his wife Molly have become partners in an “enquiry agency” as a means to keeping themselves busy in their declining years.

   George hates the term “private detective,” but there is no escaping it: whether “enquiry agent” or PI, that’s the kind of work they do. (*) George has birds on his mind most of the time, though, and if it weren’t for Molly to push him, I think his investigative business would be nothing at all, in no time flat.

   In Sea Fever they’re hired to trace a wayward son who refuses to come home, or to acknowledge the existence of his worried parents in any way. That he’s also an ardent birdwatcher makes the Palmer-Joneses the ideal couple to track him down. They catch up to him momentarily on a sea cruise/birdwatching expedition, but they lose him again almost as quickly at the hands of a killer.

   Murder at sea means a limited number of suspects, and this is classical detection at very nearly its highest level and its most overwrought, boosted by little annoying hints of what is yet to come and a (female) police inspector who finds her own life close to exploding out of control.

   Don’t get me wrong, though. While this may not be the equivalent of John Dickson Carr in plot complexity, it is a pleasant voyage through waters charted several times or more. Every time I take the trip, I enjoy it just about as much as the time before, and that’s the kind of book this is.

(*)   I’ve just checked John Conquest’s Trouble Is Their Business (Garland, 1990), a superb compendium of just about every other fictional PI you could name, and as it happens, he misses these two. They’re borderline, I’d say, but by Conquest’s own definition, they’re PI’s, and they should be in there.

[UPDATE]. 09-05-12. And for what it’s worth, the Palmer-Joneses are not included on Kevin Burton Smith’s Thrilling Detective website either. Kevin doesn’t miss many, but this is one pair of PI’s I think he he has. A lengthy profile of the author by Martin Edwards can be found here, along with a long list of all her mysteries. (She’s done more than just this one series.)

       The George & Molly Palmer-Jones series —

A Bird in the Hand. 1986.

Come Death and High Water. 1987.
Murder in Paradise. 1988.
A Prey to Murder. 1989.

Sea Fever. 1991.
Another Man’s Poison, 1992.
The Mill on the Shore. 1994.

High Island Blues. 1996.

PHILO VANCE, DETECTIVE. Official Films, 18 minutes. (Originally Philo Vance’s Secret Mission, PRC, 1947; 58 minutes). Cast: Alan Curtis, Sheila Ryan, Tala Birell, Frank Jenkins, James Bell, and Frank Fenton.

   Philo Vance, Detective did not include any onscreen credits except for the actors listed above. (The actor listed as Frank Jenks in all the databases is credited on screen as Frank Jenkins.) According to the TCM (Turner Classic Movies) database and imdb.com, the original film was written by Lawrence Edmund Taylor and directed by Reginald LeBorg. S. S. Van Dine received no screen credit.

   In 1947 PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation) made three Philo Vance theatrical films: Philo Vance’s Secret Mission, Philo Vance’s Gamble, and Philo Vance Returns. Both Secret Mission and Gamble featured Alan Curtis as Philo with his assistant Ernie Clark played by Frank Jenkins. In Returns Philo was played by William Wright (without Jenkins).

   The PRC version of Philo Vance resembled the generic detective hero of the average 1940s Poverty Row studio film series more than S. S. Van Dine’s creation.

   By the 1950s television had become the gluttonous beast with an insatiable appetite for content that it remains today. When the networks were unable to fill the needs of the TV stations, the stations turned to syndicated producers such as Ziv, CBS TV-Films and Official Films. Distributors such as MPTV (Motion Pictured for Television) acquired the rights to B-movies, cartoons and short films such as Philo Vance’s Secret Mission and sold them to the hungry hungry hippos aka the local TV stations.

   One of the major problems facing MPTV and others was local stations taking a dull ax and editing programs to suit the local station needs. This could be the cause for a 58-minute theatrical film to exist in a renamed TV version suitable for a half hour time slot. More likely, Official Films, one of the top syndication companies at the time, did the editing and sold it in a package of half-hour mysteries.

   Fortunately, the TCM database has a complete synopsis full of spoilers and credits for the 58-minute film short.

   Jamison (Paul Maxey), co-publisher of pulp magazines, has invited writer Philo Vance to his office to discuss the possibility of Vance writing a mystery based on Jamison’s former partner’s murder seven years ago. With his assistant Ernie Clark and a woman who is not introduced, says nothing and no one says anything to her during the long scene (she is Vance’s secretary Mona), Vance meets the suspects.

   Mona (Sheila Ryan) will be in nearly every scene of Philo Vance, Detective, while most of the rest in this scene will end up victims of the missing forty minutes and not be seen again.

   Jamison’s other partner is upset over the idea of leaving pulps to publish “books.” The company’s two main writers also hate the idea of mystery books (there are too many of them now). When Jamison announces he had solved the murder of the dead partner, office secretary and victim’s wife (Tala Birell) faints. Jamison invites Vance to his house that night to discuss the case.

   Vance and Mona arrive to meet Jamison. They hear gunshots and a cry for help. The two break into Jamison’s home to find blood on the floor but no body (just like the earlier murder). They call and wait for the sheriff.

   â€œI think I am going to faint,” says Mona, half seriously.

   â€œWhy don’t you wait until the police come and I’ll catch you in my arms,” suggests Philo, who is busy on the phone.

   Vance and Mona leave but a motorcycle cop chases them down. The murdered man’s body is in Vance’s car trunk. Next we see a cop using the police radio informing all police cars to look out for an armed and dangerous killer, and the cop is nice enough to add Philo “and girl companion” have been released.

   Now the editing becomes noticeable. We miss all the scenes with the suspects, clues to motive, where the murder weapon came from, and information about the first murder. One entire character, Joe the cover photographer, ends up on the editing floor.

   Instead we jump to Vance and Mona driving to the first victim widow’s home. They are followed and shot at. Vance fights with the bad guy who runs away unseen in the dark. Vance rushes to the widow afraid she would be next. Instead he finds her packing for a cruise where she plans to marry her finance.

   More scenes vanish including (according to the TCM synopsis) the denouncement scene where Vance names his girl friend Mona as the killer (that I would need to see to believe).

   But it was all a ruse to trap the killer. At the cruise ship the killer is revealed, Vance suggests he and Mona take a cruise together, but then he heads for the exit when she suggests they get married at sea. She stops him with a long kiss.

   It would be unfair to judge the cast and production with forty minutes missing from the 58-minute film, but the story holds up considering. There are times the viewer is confused by what is going on such as why does Vance think the widow is in danger. But while the editor of this television version has removed the mystery, the story barely survives to find a home in the crime genre with the relationship between Vance and girl friend Mona providing most of the entertainment.

Sources: TCM.com database, IMDb.com, Billboard. If you wish to avoid spoilers you can read Steve’s review of the original film here. I need to find a copy of the original, if only to see Sheila Ryan posing for a pulp cover.

I’m doing much better. I was hoping to get something posted this evening, but after spending some time trying to catch up with emails and not quite succeeding, I decided to play it cautious and not push myself when I shouldn’t. Look for something new tomorrow, though, or if not, Wednesday for sure.

Coming soon are a review by Michael Shonk of an unusual Philo Vance appearance on TV, a long installment of Mike Nevin’s usual monthly column, Dan Stumpf’s opinion of a movie you probably never heard of, Fingerprints Don’t Lie (1951), and as I’m often fond of saying, much more.

The surgery of week before last went well, but I had a step backward yesterday. Not a big deal, according to my doctor, but I’ll have to slow down for a few days. I’ve been thinking about this. I’m going to take his advice — that goes without saying — and go a step further and stop posting here until after Labor Day.

I’ve taken an End of Summer break before. It’s always good to take some time off to deal with things that haven’t managed to get done over the summer — nothing too physical this time! — and that’s what I’ll be doing over the next few days.

Best wishes to those of you in the path of Hurricane Isaac. I’ll be watching news reports and thinking about you. Stay safe!

[UPDATE] 08-30-12. Thanks for all the get well notes, especially Randy’s, which gave me a much needed smile yesterday.

I’m on the mend at last, but I still have to take it easy for a few more days.

There is a post on the EQMM site that I’d like to call your attention to, especially if you’re a pulp fan and Black Mask magazine in particular. It’s written by Keith Alan Deutsch and it’s entitled “Black Mask Magazine, Steve Fisher, and The Noir Revolution.” In it he gives a small salute to Fanny Ellsworth, the editor of the magazine who took over from much more well known Joseph Shaw in 1936.

The changes she made to the magazine have never been given much attention before, and the article is well worth your reading:

http://somethingisgoingtohappen.net/2012/08/29/black-mask-magazine-steve-fisher-and-the-noir-revolution-by-keith-alan-deutsch/

CHARTER PILOT. 20th Century Fox, 1940. Lloyd Nolan, Lynn Bari, Arleen Whelan, George Montgomery, Hobart Cavanaugh, Henry Victor, Etta McDaniel. Director: Eugene Forde.

   In spite of the fact that a couple of my favorite B-movie stars are in this one, I found myself disappointed for most of the movie’s running time.

   The opening scene showed some promise. Lynn Bari is the scriptwriter for a radio show based on the fictional exploits of air ace King Morgan, played by Lloyd Nolan. In reality, and far from fiction, Morgan is indeed a pilot, but for a commercial airline whose more prosaic tasks include bringing a load of soft-shelled crabs up from Galveston to LA.

   OK. So far, so good, but it turns out that there are romantic complications between the two, and for maybe next 50 minutes or so the movie turns into a comedy of most mundane proportions. He proposes, she refuses until he gives up flying, he gives up flying and goes to work behind a desk, which doesn’t work, in great detail which I shan’t bore you with, but if you were expecting a comedy, you might find this portion of the film amusing, if not out and out funny.

   It also turns out, though, eventually, that there is a bad guy in the background, and the next to final scene, with King Morgan and aforesaid bad guy kicking, wrestling and fist-fighting in the cramped space of a cockpit of a small airplane over the jungles of Honduras, with Lynn Bari screaming behind the controls while live on the air – well, at last the film was worth the money I paid to see it. On a homemade DVD, of course, as almost goes without saying.

   Lynn Bari, of course, is as beautiful as ever, and Lloyd Nolan, while far from beautiful, is, as usual, one of the finer actors ever to be a B-movie star. Watching him rehearse his prepared proposal speech, while working out a whole gamut of ways to present his lines, is like attending a master class in acting, and he does it with ease.

J. P. HAILEY – The Baxter Trust. Donald I. Fine, hardcover, 1988; Lynx, paperback, 1989.

   J. P. Hailey, “a pseudonym for a bestselling author of crime novels featuring a well-known detective,” introduces Steve Winslow in The Baxter Trust. Winslow is an intriguing chap, and his excellent debut has given me a thirst for more.

   He’s a failed actor who went to law school, passed the bar, joined a conservative law firm, and was immediately fired for his unconservative tactics. Now he advertises his freelance legal services (takers in one year = 0) while driving a cab for a living.

   Until Sheila Benton calls. She’s been charged with murder and picked Winslow (trial experience = 0) out of the yellow pages. Trouble is the D.A. has an ironclad case. And Sheila lies to everyone (including Steve).

   And Sheila has no way to pay Steve: the twenty million dollar trust she’s scheduled to inherit in eleven years won’t allow payments to defend her, and if her various peccadilloes were to become known (as they are almost certain to), she’ll be disinherited anyway.

   Lovely case for Winslow to get his law practice started on. A fresh and polished narrative.

Editorial Comments:   My review of The Anonymous Client, the second in the series, can be found here. (I agree wholeheartedly with Al’s assessment.) Included with that review is a complete list of the books in the series, along with the ID of the author’s real name, Parnell Hall, apparently unknown at the time of Al’s comments.

DARK SHADOWS. NBC; January 13-14 1991. Premiere of TV series: 4-hour mini-series. Ben Cross, Joanna Going, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jim Fyfe, Barbara Steele, Ron Thinnes, Barbara Blackburn, Jean Simmons. Director: Dan Curtis.

   Part Two of the continuing saga of Barnabas Collins, the 200-year-old vampire whose release from a coffin chains means dire things for the village of Collinsport, Maine. I only occasionally watched the previous TV serial, not making much heads or tails of it when it was on originally. Picking the story up in the middle tends to do that to you.

   Coincidentally, if you remember reading my review of Barbara Hambly’s SF-Fantasy novel, Those Who Hunt the Night, which was posted here on this blog a short while ago, you will recall that the basic premise is the same: that vampirism is a blood disorder that might be curable. Ben Cross plays Barnabas to the hilt, agonized and tortured (and possibly sensuous, but I have seen anything romantic about vampires), while former Italian horror movie starlet Barbara Steele is Dr. Julia Hoffman, the physician who thinks she can cure him. (It looks as though she speaks through clenched teeth.)

   The other major plot thread (there are a few other minor ones, mostly of sexual affairs and liaisons yet to come) is the budding romance between Barnabas and the new governess to the mansion, Victoria Winters, played by Joanna Going, who is beautiful, innocent and charming.

   There is a lot of blood — “Where did it all go? If she lost all that blood, where did it go?” — there is at least one stake to the heart, lots of moody atmosphere — caused by lots of fog — and spooky music. Or in other words, the works.

   If released as a theatrical movie, this new series would probably be given a PG rating, but it’s not impossible it would be given a PG-13. This may be why, when the series itself started [the following week], it was switched at the last moment to ten o’clock instead of nine. Which is why I missed it, and so (missing an episode) why I probably won’t be watching it on a continuing basis.

   (Network shows are losing viewers left and right, and it’s really no wonder, when you consider that with all the stunting around, no one knows when anything is on for sure.)

   A brief word on the behalf of Jim Fyfe, who plays the semi-demented handyman Willie Loomis. You have never seen a more perfect example of small-town inbreeding, straight from an H. P. Lovecraft novel, perhaps.

   By the way, in case you’re interested, the mini-series is not complete in itself. If the people in charge have their way, the series may never end. I enjoyed it for the two nights it was on, and I may sample the series now and then, but for now, it simply left me — shall I say it? — hanging.

[UPDATE] 08-25-12. I have been trying to match up the comments I wrote at the time with the episode list found on IMDB. I think what NBC did was to show the two-hour pilot on January 13th, then combined episodes #2 and 3 and aired them on January 14th.

   The series itself began on January 18th. Interest in the series seems to have faded quickly. There were only 12 episodes in all, including the three that were shown as part of this introductory mini-series. The final one was shown on March 22, 1991.

  KENNETH FOWLER – Jackals’ Gold. Doubleday, hardcover, 1980. Dell, reprint paperback, June 1981.

   I have a few of Fowler’s westerns in paperback, but until I started to do some research about him before writing this review, I did not realize how even more prolific he was writing short stories for the pulps in the 1940s, mostly for titles such as Dime Western, Star Western, New Western, .44 Western, and so on. Of special note in that regard, he was the editor for the first two of these magazines between 1944 and 1946.

   He seems to have written only ten western novels, though, two under the pen name Clark Brooker. The first was Outcast of Murder Mesa, a Gold Medal paperback original under his own name in 1954. Jackals’ Gold was his final novel, published when he was 80, though perhaps it was written earlier, as there is no sign of age at the helm of the rough and tumble western adventure it is.

   It begins as the story of Rachel Carr, who poses as the widow of Brad Gamble, a prospector who hit it rich then died, leaving his wife a small fortune in gold. Unknown to her, however, is that the dead man had two partners, two men whom he pulled a fast one on, and two men who want the gold back.

   Gold, according to the author — and who am I to disagree? — does strange things to people. Added to the mix are several other mysterious riders who follow Rachel and her two “guardians” as they head back to Salt Lake City in a small wagon, or who sniff out their hidden cache along the way.

   It’s a tough trip, and Fowler tells it well, even as the major point of view changes to that of Caine Joritt, one of the dead man’s two former partners — see above — who finds himself keeping a much closer eye on Rachel than he expected. Fist fights, gun shots in the night, crashing rivers and sudden violent death are the order of the day, with little to no dialogue to slow things down even an inch in most of the book’s final eighty pages. Good stuff, and interesting characters, too.

KATHLEEN MOORE KNIGHT – Terror by Twilight. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1942.

   A little background first [keeping in mind that this review was first written in 1991]. Doubleday has been publishing “Crime Club” mysteries since 1928, and they’re still producing them [as of] today, making them the longest running line of books published under one specialized logo by any one publisher.

   Several years ago I attempted the rather foolhardy task of collecting them all. (At three or four a month for well over 60 years, that’s several thousand books.) I was doing pretty well when I began to lose interest — too many titles and authors I realized I never intended to read — and I began to break up the collection I had at its peak.

   I still have a large portion of the ones I’d managed to accumulate, but the Edgar Wallace’s are gone, to pick one significant example, but everything I intended to read, I kept, and every once in a while I do, as you’ve seen in these pages, and will again.

   But my good friend Ellen Nehr has decided to do something even more foolhardy, and that’s to write a book that will list and annotate all of the Crime Club ever published over the years. We were talking about it over the phone the other night, discussing authors and so on — I think we’ve decided that Aaron Marc Stein (aka George Bagby) [may have] had the most books published in the line, and that Leslie Charteris’s books were published over the longest span of time — and we began to bring up other authors who must have been very popular in their day, and who are all but forgotten today.

   Which is a long introduction to Terror by Twilight, by Kathleen Moore Knight, and how I recently happened to pick this one out to read. It’s the third of four Margot Blair books — Knight had other series and other characters as well, over 30 books in all — and I think it’s a prime example of a “second tier” detective puzzler, from back in the days when the puzzle was the primary reason of existence for mystery stories. The Golden Age, if you will.

   Margot Blair was a partner in the public relations firm of Norman and Blair, unmarried, and in her late 30s. In the course of her job, working for specific clients, she apparently ran into murder on several occasions, and the firm began to act more and more as personal inquiry agents, if not private detectives.

   In this particular case, she has been hired to buy clothes for a wealthy man’s granddaughter, which she’s been doing for over a period of several years, but never meeting the girl in person until shortly after the man’s death.

   The reason the girl has been so carefully sequestered is that she has been suspected of homicidal tendencies, going into almost trance-like states and waking to find small pets killed or other children attacked.

   And when her grandfather is discovered to have been poisoned, suspicion immediately points to her. Luckily Margot is on the scene — in a house crowded with other suspects — and she does not believe for a minute that her client is guilty.

   Lots of suspects, lots of motive, lots of hidden agendas, and they all have to be sorted out. This is all the novel consists of. The only characterization is that which is needed to keep the story going. The puzzle is everything, and I have to confess that Kathleen Moore Knight fooled me rather badly. It’s not exactly fair-play detection — what Margot learns on page 270 is kept from the reader until much later, for example — but there are plenty of other indications as to the killer’s identity before then, and I still didn’t catch on.

   Barzun & Taylor continue to amaze me. They call the Knight stories “feminine” and Margot Blair “featureless,” with no other indication they might actually have read one of them. After the “front tier” of Christie, Queen and John Dickson Carr, there were many detective writers of the 30s and 40s who are still very much readable today, and Kathleen Moore Knight is one I’m glad to recommend to you. It’s too bad that only Ellen and I ever read her any more.

[UPDATE] 08-23-12.   It was quite a task, but Ellen persevered and the book I mentioned at the beginning of this review, Doubleday Crime Club Compendium 1928-1991, was published in hardcover by Offspring Press in 1992. Over 700 pages long, it also included several pages in color of some of the best of the covers. For more, read J. F. Norris’s fine review of the book here on his blog.