Black Lizard’s first mystery anthology included the [Harlan] Ellison Edgar winner, “Soft Monkey.” The Second Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction, edited by Ed Gorman (trade paperback, 1988), is 664 pages long with thirty-eight short stories and a full-length novel, Murder Me for Nickels, by Peter Rabe.
Most of the stories are reprints, but the list of authors reads like a Who’s Who of hardboiled detective fiction for the last thirty-five years, including Avallone, Max Allan Cdllins, Estleman, Gault, Hensley, Lutz, McBain, Pronzini, Spillane, Willeford, et al.
Of the book’s three new stories, I especially liked Jon Breen’s baseball mystery about a streaker (remember them?).
There is also a Hall of Fame quality to The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg (Carroll & Graf, trade paperback, 1988), which in its 592 pages offers stories about almost every important private eye, including Philip Marlowe in “Wrong Pigeon,” the last story Chandler wrote.
Only Hammett (readily available elsewhere) seems to be missing among the authors who include current masters like Hansen, both Collinses (Michael and Max Allan), Lutz, Pronzini, Muller, Estleman, and Grafton. The editors also dug out early work by Carroll John Daly, Robert Leslie Bellem, Fredrick Brown, Gault, McBain, and Prather, as well as rarities: a Paul Pine story by Howard Browne and a private eye story by Ed Hoch, who doesn’t usually write in that genre.
— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier,
Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter 1989.
Editorial Notes: A complete list of authors for the Black Lizard anthology is as follows: Stories by Michael Avallone, Timothy Banse, Robert Bloch, Lawrence Block, Ray Bradbury, Jon Breen, Max Allan Collins, William R. Cox, John Coyne, Wayne D. Dundee, Harlan Ellison, Loren D. Estleman, Fletcher Flora, Brian Garfield, William C. Gault, Barry Gifford, Joe Gores, Ed Gorman, Joe L. Hensley, Joe R. Lansdale, Richard Laymon, John Lutz, Ed McBain, Steve Mertz, Arthur Moore, Marcia Muller, William F. Nolan, Bill Pronzini, Ray Puechner, Peter Rabe, Robert Randisi, Daniel Ransom, Mickey Spillane, Donald Westlake, Harry Willeford, Will Wyckoff, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.
Contents for the “Mammoth” collection:
Raymond Chandler, ‘Wrong Pigeon’ [aka ‘The Pencil’] (1971: Philip Marlowe)
Carrol John Daly, ‘Not My Corpse’ (Race Williams)
Robert Leslie Bellem, ‘Diamonds of Death’ (Dan Turner)
Fredric Brown, ‘Before She Kills’ (1961: Ed and Am Hunter)
Howard Browne, ‘So Dark For April’ (1953: Paul Pine)
William Campbell Gault, ‘Stolen Star’ (1957: Joe Puma)
Ross Macdonald, ‘Guilt-Edged Blonde’ (1953: Lew Archer)
Henry Kane, ‘Suicide is Scandalous’ (1947: Peter Chambers)
Richard S. Prather, ‘Dead Giveaway’ (1957: Shell Scott)
Joseph Hansen, ‘Surf’ (1976: Dave Brandsetter)
Michael Collins, ‘A Reason To Die’ (1985: Dan Fortune)
Ed McBain, ‘Death Flight’ (1954: Milt Davis)
Stephen Marlowe, ‘Wanted — Dead and Alive’ (1963: Chester Drum)
Edward D. Hoch, ‘The Other Eye’ (1981: Al Darlan)
Stuart M. Kaminsky, ‘Busted Blossoms’ (1986: Toby Peters)
Lawrence Block, ‘Out of the Window’ (1977: Matt Scudder)
John Lutz, ‘Ride The Lightning’ (1985: Alo Nudger)
Sue Grafton, ‘She Didn’t Come Home’ (1986: Kinsey Millhone)
Edward Gorman, ‘The Reason Why’ (1988: Jack Dwyer)
Stephen Greenleaf, ‘Iris’ (1984: John Marshall Tanner)
Bill Pronzini, ‘Skeleton Rattle Your Mouldy Leg’ (1985: Nameless Detective)
Marcia Muller, ‘The Broken Men’ (1985: Sharon McCone)
Arthur Lyons, ‘Trouble in Paradise’ (1985: Jacob Asch)
Max Allan Collins, ‘The Strawberry Teardrop’ (1984: Nate Heller)
Robert J. Randisi, ‘The Nickel Derby’ (1987: Henry Po)
Loren D. Estleman Greektown’ (1983: Amos Walker)
WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT – Cat and Mouse. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1988. No paperback edition.
I have not been very enthusiastic about the products of septuagenarian William Campbell Gault’s return to the criminous arena, but Cat and Mouse is more like it.
Brock Callahan, retired (owing to a handsome inheritance) private eye, is back again, and this time involved in a case in which I can believe. A dead cat, deposited on Callahan’s front lawn, announces the arrival — and implies the murderous intentions — of the bald man with the scar.
Nameless he is, and nameless he stubbornly remains, probably arisen out of one of Brock’s old cases (but which?) and determined on a lingering revenge. How does he remain just out of reach, flitting here and there, leaving the odd body behind, when cops of several cities and all of Brock’s numerous friends and connections are on the lookout?
Quite pleasant.
— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier,
Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter 1989.
LEMORA, LADY DRACULA. Media Cinema Group, 1973. Originally released as Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural. Lesley Gilb, Cheryl Smith, William Whitton, Hy Pyke, Maxine Ballantyne, Steve Johnson, Parker West. Director: Richard Blackburn, also co-screenwriter.
Now that I have disposed of the romantic and realistic Damsels in Distress (DID) films, honesty obliges me to admit that there is one kind of DID film that I find not unappealing  the bizarre or the erotic.
A late-night film I saw recently qualifies, on both counts. Lemora, Lady Dracula is described in John Stanley’s Creature Features Movie Guide (privately printed, 1981) as an “offbeat, surrealistic vampire flick with heavy artistic overtones,†a fairly accurate, bite-sized summary.
The basic narrative concerns an adolescent girl who has been redeemed by a fundamentalist congregation from her worthless parents and trained as a singer to witness for the church. When she receives word that her father is dying and would like to see her, she runs away, traveling through a nightmare country inhabited by prostitutes and lascivious rustics until she is waylaid and carried off by monstrous, semi-human creatures looking like rejects from Dr. Moreau’s laboratory.
Escaping from the stone prison they lock her into, she is “rescued†by a tall, beautiful woman dressed in black with thick white makeup and given a robe to put on for a mysterious ceremony. Both Lemora and the fey children who attend her are vampires, and the girl’s father has become one of the Moreau-like creatures who had kidnapped her. The rest of the film is taken up with the girl’s flight from Lemora and her cohorts and the vampire’s eventual victory.
The film’s colors are predominantly black and red with glossy highlights, and there is a veneer of seductiveness and erotic titillation in almost every frame. (Even in the opening sequences in the church, the girl is dominated by a young, intense minister of whom we are immediately suspicious.)
The depiction of the vampire children is particularly effective, a ‘blend of the diabolic’ and the pathetic. Lemora, who seems to be an untrained actress and reads her lines stagily (she is better at leering than reading) is the Dark Lady of romantic legend and exudes a sensual quality that gives the film a rather lurid cast.
There is increasingly less distinction between the present and past, fantasy and reality, and the girl’s flight from seduction becomes a sexual odyssey that is often quite disturbing.
Although Lemora is clearly an exploitation film and sometimes borders on the ludicrous, its implicit content pre-dates the recent rash of summer-camp psycho films but, like them, charts adolescents’ ambivalent sexual feelings.
The most common situation is one in which young girls or women are pursued by murderous/sexually threatening men or women. The ambivalence of the spectator’s feelings toward the monster in the classic horror film (both admiration and fear) is exploited in a more troubling way.
The classic film monster was often a tormented being with some impulse toward good; now, he  or she  is as threatening as the unspecified taboos and mysteries of sex, a disquieting visualization of the adolescents’ deepest fears and instincts.
Another feature of these films is that very often the monster is not exorcised or destroyed. He lives again to spread havoc through one or more sequels. This was also true of the Universal Studio horror cycle, but there was usually some escape from the threat posed by the monster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQNmu4Cw72s
In this open-ended narrative one can see a reflection of the contemporary fondness for unresolved plots. Like the anti-detective novel, where the narrative gaps are left unresolved, the conventions of the horror film seem increasingly to function not to quiet anxieties but to intensify them and may reflect a fairly general feeling that there are no longer satisfactory solutions to any problems.
It may be a symptom of the disappearance of some of the traditional distinctions between elitist and popular art that popular art can feed contemporary anxieties, but that phenomenon, in itself, may be as disquieting as the fears it no longer mediates but intensifies.
— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier,
Vol. 7, No. 2, March-April 1983 (slightly revised).
Maigret and his wife are first seen driving along on a bright winter’s day. Their destination: Commissaire Maigret’s old home town.
His interest has been piqued by an anonymous letter which says that a crime will be committed in the church of Saint-Fiacre during Mass. Madame Maigret reminds her husband that the police ordinarily discard such missives, but Maigret presses on.
Attending an All Souls’ Day service the next day, Maigret and the congregation witness the Comtesse de Saint-Fiacre collapse and die in the church. The Comtesse and her late husband had been Maigret’s father’s employer when he was young — but like most teenagers Maigret couldn’t wait to escape small town life for the bright lights of the big city, which he did the first chance he got.
The jaded and sarcastic doctor certifies that the Comtesse has died of a heart attack, and informs a skeptical Maigret that it had been a chronic condition with her for years.
Nevertheless, Maigret senses something is amiss, especially when, belatedly, the Comtesse’s ne’er-do-well wastrel son shows up, characteristically broke and wanting money from her.
Other people also fall under Maigret’s suspicion: the Comtesse’s “secretary” (a euphemism for her boy toy), the estate’s steward and his banker son, the local priest, and the secretary’s lawyer. Through the steward and his son Maigret learns that the Comtesse was nearly broke.
Mysteriously, the missal (a prayer book) that the Comtesse had with her when she died disappears. In the event, this missing missal will prove not simply to be a CLUE to what Maigret is now convinced is a murder, he’s certain the innocent prayer book is actually the murder WEAPON….
I’d hate to be the French judge tasked with determining culpability in this case; a charge of Murder One would likely never be upheld.
It’s interesting that this story has the classic Golden Age gathering of all the suspects at the end, but differs in having someone else instead of the master detective doing the big reveal — but at Maigret’s direction, we hasten to add.
The character of Maigret stands in proud second place to Sherlock Holmes when it comes to the number of film adaptations using him.
The French-Czech Maigret series was originally scheduled to run to 104 fairly faithful-to-the-original stories, but the series’ star Bruno Cremer (1929-2010) fell ill roughly halfway through. Cremer, known in Europe for his tough guy roles, was cast against type as Maigret, but the public loved his portrayal. (Something similar has happened with Terence Hill, star of many violent spaghetti Westerns, who is currently playing a mild-mannered violence-averse Italian Father Brown-type in the Don Matteo series.)
Other film versions of this story include “Maigret on Home Ground” (1992, one of a 12-episode English language series starring Michael Gambon) and Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case (a 1959 movie with Jean Gabin).
CHASING DANGER. 20th Century Fox, 1939. Preston Foster, Lynn Bari, Wally Vernon, Henry Wilcoxon, Joan Woodbury, Harold Huber, Jody Gilbert. Director: Ricardo Cortez.
In Chasing Danger Preston Foster and Wally Vernon play a couple of world-traveling news photographers who stumble across the source of arms and ammunition for a group of Arab rebels in French Algeria. Of the two, Foster’s the brains of the pair, so to speak, while Vernon plays the dumb sidekick to near perfection. (He spends most the movie mooning over his fiancee back in Brooklyn, where their wedding is supposed to be taking place.)
Lynn Bari is the previously mentioned source. Her mother being Arabian, her sympathies are with the rebels, but her source of funds are questionable, the latter being a cache of jewels her accomplice in arms-running (Harold Huber) has in his possession, he being a crook who disappeared with them several months earlier while making a getaway flight across the Channel to England.
For a short movie (my copy runs only 50 minutes or so) the plot is both complicated and simple, once you’ve sorted it all out. It’s pretty much action (and a little leering) all the way, nothing more, nor nothing less.
Don’t go out of your way for this one, but it’s done with a certain amount of expertise that might surprise you. If it comes along and you’re a fan of this kind of semi-half-baked foreign adventure, I’d say give it a try.
LATER. After writing the comments above, I made a discovery that I couldn’t find an easy way to work into my review, so I’ll talk about it here instead. This is the second in a series of two movies to have featured this somewhat comedic pair of adventuresome cameramen.
The first one was Sharpshooters (1938), but it was Brian Donlevy who played the part of Steve Mitchell in that earlier one, not Preston Foster. (I always thought they looked something alike.)
Lynn Bari was in the first one also, but playing a different part. I’ve not been able to track down a copy, and I’d really like to. But getting back to Steve Mitchell, what’s kind of interesting about this is that’s the name of character played by Brian Donlevy in his 1950s TV espionage series, Dangerous Assignment.
RICHARD POWELL – Say It With Bullets. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1953. Graphic Books #93, paperback, 1954; hard Case Crime, paperback, 2006.
The fine cover of the Graphic edition of Say It With Bullets appears to be simply a stock image pulled from their files and slapped on at random, because it does’t depict any of the characters or situations in Richard Powell’s fast-paced story.
In fact, it doesn’t even convey the mood of the piece, which is an outdoorsy, scenic kind of thing about a guy on a guided bus tour of the West trying to find the guy who’s trying to kill him.
Just by way of background, sometime before our story started, Bill Wayne, the hero of the piece, was a flier for Nationalist China. When all that went South, he and his partners started air-ferrying refugees to safety in Hong Kong.
Then his partners (there were five of them) decided they’d rather fly stolen gold off the mainland, Bill objected, someone shot him in the back and all of them left him for dead. Now, as the book starts up, Wayne is back in the states, tracking his old “buddies” down and —
— and here’s where things get a little off-beat, because Bill has elected to join a package bus tour that will swing through the cities where his erstwhile partners live. The pretty young tour guide takes what is known as a shine to him, and Bill realizes out he’s being stalked himself. (But by who? we wonder as the plot coagulates.)
When Bill finally confronts the first of his ex-partners, he discovers he’s not the kind of guy who can shoot a man in cold blood, but that doesn’t matter much because it turns out whoever’s following Bill is more than happy to kill his old buddies and leave a trail of incriminating evidence right back to our hapless hero.
The repartee is genuinely witty, and Powell evokes the contemporary West (well, contemporary in 1953) with a writer’s eye for detail. There’s a nice bit where hero and heroine take a short cut on a back road that runs between Nevada and Yosemite National Park; I’ve driven this road myself, and it’s like riding a kicking jackass for three hours.
Powell evokes the experience with writing that brought back every sharp turn and pitching slope — pretty good for a book that is basically the literary equivalent of a dumb blonde.
REVIEWED BY MICHAEL SHONK:
HARRY O — Season 1, Part 2.
HARRY O. ABC / Warner Brothers. Season 1, Part 2. (January-March 1975). Cast: David Janssen as Harry Orwell, Anthony Zerbe as Lieutenant K.C. Trench, Paul Tulley as Sergeant Roberts. Created and executive consultant: Howard Rodman. Executive Producer: Jerry Thorpe. Producers: Buck Houghton and Robert Dozier. Associate Producer: Rita Dillon. Executive story consultant: Robert Dozier. Theme: Billy Goldenberg.
For anyone who may have missed them, previous portions of this multi-part coverage of the Harry O television series may be found here (Intro) and here (Season 1, Part 1).
The first half of the season was over and Harry O faced some changes. In Television Chronicles #10, executive producer Jerry Thorpe discussed the changes. To please ABC, the series tone was changed to more melodramatic. But Thorpe made a deal. He wanted the show to follow the path set by the first episode “Gertrude.†That meant more humor between the characters. Thorpe wanted to take advantage of Janssen’s untapped talent for humor.
In “The Last Heir,†we still have the same opening theme, but we soon see a hint of the changes to come. Harry is driving his car through the empty vast California desert … and the car makes it without a tow truck.
Harry is hired (he charges $100 a day plus expenses) by Jeff Mays (Clifford David), the nephew of rich, ill-tempered Letty (Jeanette Nolan) who lives alone in the middle of the desert. The nephew is worried she is crazy and will kill someone at the annual family meeting.
Once the entire family is there, their cars are disabled, stranding all in the desert waiting for the supply truck to make its weekly visit in six days. Then one by one, family members begins to die.
Next, “For Love Of Money†features a new musical arrangement of the series theme song with a more action feel. The visuals and graphics for the opening have been changed significantly. Gone are shots of Harry on the bus, walking, and sitting on his stranded boat. Now Harry is running, moving in chase scenes on foot, by boat and by car.
Harry travels to Los Angeles. A woman (Mariclare Costello) in Los Angeles needs help. Her family in San Diego hires Harry to act as go-between for her and her employer (Joe Silver).
Her boyfriend (Fred Beir) had convinced her to “borrow†$25,000 in bonds from her boss’ safe. She wants to return them but Harry finds the boyfriend and the bonds are gone. When the employer discovers half a million dollars of bonds are missing instead of just $25,000 he calls the cops.
While working on this case Harry rents an apartment in Santa Monica near the beach. His neighbor is a young beautiful stewardess Betsy (Katherine Baumann). Harry’s manners have not changed and he is blunt and grumpy around Betsy who mothers him. Betsy has a boyfriend Walter we will never see but enjoy Harry’s fear-inspired descriptions of him.
The mystery, as with most of this group of episodes, is unremarkable with more attention paid to action and characters than clues. The bullet in Harry’s back disappears allowing for more fights and chases.
This episode also introduces Harry (and us) to Lieutenant K.C. Trench and his quiet sidekick Sergeant Roberts (Paul Tulley). There is an on air chemistry between Janssen and Zerbe that is magic from the very beginning. The two feed off the other, not only as actors, but the characters do as well. It is obvious both respect, like and trust the other.
San Diego’s Lieutenant Manny Quinlain was played well by the talented Henry Darrow, but both the character and the actor’s style were too similar to Harry and Janssen. The conflict between Harry and Trench gave the series its humor and made the series more entertaining to watch.
Quinlain played straight man to Harry, while Trench had his own sense of humor. Trench was given this quality due to the underrated character of Sergeant Roberts. Roberts existed as a straight man for Harry and Trench, anchoring the scene as the PI and cop playfully had at it to the delight of the viewers.
In “Confetti People,†we watch Jack (John Rubinstein) shoot and kill his drunken artist brother (Scott McKay) who was beating his wife (Diana Hyland). Betsy finds Jack wandering on the beach and brings him to Harry, who is still in Santa Monica for some unknown reason, and convinces Harry to help Jack.
Harry calls the cops and takes Jack back to the murder scene only to find Jack’s sister –in-law and still alive brother denying anything happened. Jack had just been released from a mental hospital, so everyone writes it off except Harry who is worried about his client.
It is interesting to compare how this melodrama handled mental illness when compared to the nourish drama of the San Diego episode “Shadows At Noon.â€
Trench learns as we have, “Orwell, you have a way of getting involved with some pretty bizarre people.â€
“Sound Of Trumpets†gives Harry a reason to stay in Los Angeles. Harry learns they have torn down his San Diego home to put up a high-rise. He likes the people and the area so he follows Betsy and Walter and moves to a beach house in Santa Monica. Harry’s unfinished boat, “The Answer†joins him at the beach house. Harry finds a new mechanic, Clarence (Hal Williams) for his car.
Lovers of Jazz music will enjoy this story of a former great horn man Art Sully (Julius Harris) just out of prison with a secret someone doesn’t want him to live to tell.
Harry saves his life when Art falls off the pier. When Art disappears with Harry’s car, Harry is back using the bus and not happy about it. Some great jazz and R&B music highlight the episode that has a more active Harry fighting and chasing bad guys.
“Silent Kill†was an “issue†episode, but the heavy-handed new style of the series weakened the message. Harry agreed to help a deaf woman (Kathy Lloyd) clear her deaf mute husband (James Wainwright) of setting a fire that killed three people. Despite a script drowning in pathos, director Richard Lang effectively illustrated the struggles of the deaf by turning off the sound and forcing the viewer to see through the deaf mute’s eyes.
“Double Jeopardy†is another “issue†episode that would have worked better without the melodrama. Harry witnesses a murder and sees a young man, Tom (Kurt Russell) leaving the scene. Tom is arrested, but let go for lack of evidence.
In an ironic twist the female victim’s father (Will Kuluva) is an ex-mobster who was successful in San Diego for over twenty years before retiring to Los Angeles. The justice system he had manipulated to stay out of prison seems unfair to him now as he watches the man he believes killed his daughter go free. So he hires some men to kill Tom.
Harry believes Tom is innocent and tries to keep him alive long enough to find the real killer.
Exit Betsy and Walter to Hawaii as a married couple. Enter Harry’s most remembered neighbor, Sue Ingram (Farrah Fawcett-Majors) and her large dog Grover (who hates Harry).
“Lester†features our first meeting of Lester Hodges, wannabe criminologist and Harry Orwell fan boy, who would return in the second season. College student Lester notifies the police about a missing woman. His rich family learns of it and sends a lawyer to protect Lester.
The lawyer hires Harry. Every clue Harry finds points to Lester as the killer of the woman. The lawyer is not pleased, but Lester can’t stop smiling. The last scene between Harry and Lester is a Harry O classic.
In “Elegy For A Cop,†Manny travels to Los Angeles in secret to retrieve his niece (Kathy Lloyd) who is a drug addict. What happens next has Harry going after a drug broker (Sal Mineo) in one of the most dramatic stories of the entire first season.
Howard Rodman’s script and David Janssen’s talent were the reasons this episode worked despite the fact it was created for budget reasons and recycled several scenes from the original pilot Such Dust As Dreams Are Made On.
In this episode we learn both of Harry’s parents were dead and he has no brothers or sisters. All he has left is his friends.
WARNING: SPOILERS. FEEL FREE TO SKIP DOWN TO EPISODE “STREET GAMES.â€
The new local drug broker uses Manny’s niece to set him up as a dirty cop that gets killed in a payoff. The broker shoots Manny and leaves him for dead with “bribe†money in Manny’s pocket. Before he dies, Manny is able to mail the money to Harry.
According to the article in Television Chronicles #10, this episode was one of the first times a regular character on a TV series was killed off. The series Nichols (NBC, 71-72) had done it, and a month after this episode aired, Henry Blake would die in M*A*S*H.
Poor Manny, he had to die to get a backstory. He was 37 and married with children. Both of his parents were alive, as well as his brother Jesus, unknown number of sisters, and his niece.
END OF SPOILERS.
In “Street Games,†a waitress (Claudette Nevins) at a place Harry eats hires him to find her sixteen-year-old daughter (Maureen McCormick). Mom has reason to worry, as her daughter is a junkie and now on the run after witnessing the local dealer gun down her boyfriend. What follows is the expected twists and turns until we reach a happy ending.
Harry O’s first season offered a wide range of quality programs, from the comedy mystery of “Gertrude†to the nourish drama of “Eyewitness†to the character comedy of “Lester†to the emotional drama of “Elegy For A Cop.â€
Yet it would be the relationship between PI Harry Orwell and Santa Monica cop Lieutenant Trench that elevated this series to one of television’s most fondly remember shows.
The ratings for the second half increased from the first half of the season. Harry O ending the season tied for 38th place (out of 70).
So next: Season Two.
NOTE: Thanks to Randy Cox for a copy of Television Chronicles #10 and the article by Ed Robertson.
GEORGES SIMENON – The Strange Case of Peter the Lett. Covici Friede, US, hardcover, 1931. Hurst, UK, hardcover, 1933. Also published as Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett. Penguin, US/UK, paperback, 1963. Translation of Pietr-le-Letton (Paris, 1931).
Commissaire Jules Maigret is to French crime fiction what Sherlock Holmes is to British: the detective, the immortal. He has appeared in more than seventy novels and countless short stories and novelettes, translated into dozens of languages and turning their author, Belgian-born Georges Simenon, into not only the most famous of European novelists but the wealthiest.
In a very real sense, however, the Maigrets aren’t mystery fiction at all. They contain no clues and deductions and usually only the barest minimum of plot. The great-hearted bear of an inspector does not reason from data; instead, he enters a milieu, walks around in the rain, patiently sucks on his pipe, stops in the local brasserie for a beer or calvados, mingles with the people and absorbs atmosphere until he is so much at one with his environment that the truth is clear to him.
Simenon’s great strengths as a writer lie in the domains of character and setting. Already wealthy from the hundreds of books he wrote in the Twenties, Simenon created Maigret in 1929 while his bark Ostrogoth on which he was touring the canals of Europe was laid up for repairs at the Dutch port of Delfzijl.
The town has since erected a statue of Maigret to commemorate the occasion. He wrote a Maigret a month for the next year and a half. Those first eighteen Maigrets are ranked by many I connoisseurs as the finest Simenon ever wrote, although the first two are in some ways untypical.
In The Strange Case of Peter the Lett, the first Maigret to be written, Simenon borrows from contemporary British thrillers to such an extent that his first London publishers promoted him as the Edgar Wallace of France.
Maigret’s adversary in this debut novel is a chameleon-like mastermind with several identities and a wild scheme to organize the international gangster community. But Simenon uses this plot as he uses the domestic intrigues in his more typical Maigtets — as a screen on which to project the shadow play of character and atmosphere.
And even in his first Maigret, he draws people and milieu with breathtaking skill — from a tormented Latvian intellectual to a passionate female derelict, and from a snobbish Paris luxury hotel to a squalid fishing village.
More in the Maigret mainstream is M. Gallet Decede (1931). (Its first English translation was as The Death of Monsieur Gallet, Covici Friede, 1932, and Penguin has kept it in print for more than twenty years as Maigret Stonewalled.)
Here as usual the inspector probes a crime of private nature, the strange death and even stranger life of a petit bourgeois jewelry salesman who seems — like many of Simenon’s most compelling characters — to have had at least two identities.
Unlike most Maigrets, this one is modeled on the British deductive puzzles of the Golden Age, with a beautifully dovetailed plot, genuine clues, and a noble surprise ending.
Though filtered through translations that are sometimes terrible, Simenon’ s evocations of sight and sound and smell and feel bring places to life with such immediacy that readers who have never been to Europe are ready to swear they’ve seen the milieus he describes.
The same skills vivify the shorter Maigrets that Simenon wrote for French magazines in the middle and late 1930s. Two generous selections of these stories and novelettes are available in the collections Maigret’s Christmas (1977) and Maigret’s Pipe (1968).
NOTE: This and the following three books reviewed are part of this week’s tribute to author Georges Simenon on Patti Abbott’s blog and her ongoing Friday’s Forgotten Books series:
GEORGES SIMENON – Maigret’s Boyhood Friend. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, US, hardcover, 1970. Hamish Hamilton, UK, hardcover, 1970. Translation of L’Ami d’Enfance de Maigret (Paris, 1968).
Between 1933 and the end of World War II, Simenon all but abandoned Maigret and devoted himself to writing the grim social and psychological novels on which rests much of his critical reputation as a serious author.
After moving to the United States in 1946, he revived his immortal character; and until ill health forced him to stop writing fiction in 1972, he turned out from two to four books a year about the great inspector. Like the earlier cycle of Maigrets, these, too, stress character and milieu over plot.
What lingers in the memory is the sense of place: the sunny island of Porquerolles in The Methods of Maigret (1957); the seedy nightclubs of Inspector Maigret and the Strangled Stripper (1954); the world of young Nouvelle Vague filmmakers in Maigret’s Pickpocket (1968) and of disaffected Sorbonne students in Maigret and the Killer (1971).
Typical of the late Maigrets and better than many is Maigret Hesitates (1970), in which an anonymous letter warning of a future murder brings the inspector into the household of a brilliant Paris maritime lawyer who is haunted by the legal concept of criminal insanity.
The plot is simple as ever, but the sense of place is so vivid and the characterizations so rich (especially the haunted Parendon and his monstrous wife, a domestic pair that reflect the shattering of Simenon’ s second marriage) that the book simply runs rings around most conventional detective novels.
That novel was followed both in France and the English-speaking world by Maigret’s Boyhood Friend. The boyhood friend of the title is Florentin, a small-time hustler and habitual liar, who runs sniveling to Maigret for help when the woman who had been supporting him while being financed by four other lovers is shot to death in her apartment.
Declining to arrest the dissolute and insufferable Florentin even though all the evidence points in his direction, Maigret probes the lives of the dead woman’s lovers and the nature of her relationship to each. The characterizations and Parisian atmosphere are as fine as anything in late Simenon.
With Maigret and Monsieur Charles (1973), both the foremost European detective series and Simenon’s half-century of writing fiction came to an end. Since then he has written several books of autobiographical reminiscences, culminating in the huge and overpowering Intimate Memoirs (1984). However many years Simenon has left before his return to his beloved earth, Maigret, we can be sure, will survive as long as people read.
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by George Kelley & Marcia Muller
GEORGES SIMENON – The Blue Room and The Accomplices. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, hardcover, 1964. Published separately in UK by Hamish Hamilton, hardcovers, 1965/1966. Translations of Le Chambre Bleue (Paris, 1964) and Les Complices (Paris, 1955).
While Simenon is best known for his Maigret novels, his non-series works of psychological suspense are equally compelling. They express a kind of dark inevitability, a sense of events unwittingly set in motion by one’s actions and then gathering an uncontrollable momentum of their own. This volume presents two of the best of these novels.
In The Blue Room, Simenon explores the erotic — and ultimately disastrous — relationship of an innocent man and a woman who is as ruthless as she is passionate. Tony’s main interest in life is making love with his mistress, Andree.
Naive and trusting, he remains unaware of her evil nature until his wife and her husband are found dead of strychnine poisoning. Tony is arrested for the crimes, and the story of what went before is told in flashback as he is questioned by the police.
Even though we already know where the events are leading, we nevertheless fear for Tony as we watch Andree’s corruption overwhelm him; and their final encounter of the lovers at the trial is one of the more chilling in mystery fiction.
The Accomplices is completely different in tone and theme from The Blue Room, but equally haunting.
Joseph Lambert is married, the father of six children, and has another on the way. A fairly successful businessman, Lambert feels everything is going his way.
But then the unexpected happens: While Lambert is driving wildly down the road, engaged in an amorous dalliance with his secretary, he loses control of his car. A school bus filled with children swerves to avoid him, but crashes into a wall and bursts into flame; dozens of little children die in the accident.
Lambert moves quickly to cover up his guilt, but his unconscious proves to be his own prosecutor, judge, and jury. This is a fascinating novel of psychological torment and pressure, and has grave implications for modern society.
Devoted to mystery and detective fiction — the books, the films, the authors, and those who read, watch, collect and make annotated lists of them. All uncredited posts are by me, Steve Lewis.
