FALLON EVANS – Pistols and Pedagogues. Sheed & Ward, hardcover, 1963.

   A placid town, at least on the surface, is Stratford, home of Saint Felicitas, a small Catholic college for girls. About the biggest thing that has happened there is the recent ostensible elopement of a professor with one of the students, the daughter of a Chicago gangster.

   Into this placidity comes Red Withers, professional student and sponger. Withers has been invited to temporarily give up racking balls in a billiard parlor and lecture on James Whitcomb Riley at the college.

   The invitation has come about through the good offices of a friend, who should have known better. The lecture doesn’t go well, though the reader will enjoy it, Withers is mistaken for the eloping professor by the gangster and for a flasher by the police, finds himself under attack by all sides, discovers a murder, and has to clean up the town’s drug element.

   Withers is five foot three in his elevator shoes, when he has them. He also has a scraggly red beard, without which he looks like a wizened juvenile. People think that he is trying to conceal something with the beard, and he is: all that wizen.

   This is an amusing picaresque novel, with a rogue who does not laugh in the face of death but who can joke about it afterwards. [Hubin says the setting is Chicago, but Stratford is half a day’s journey from Chicago by train.]

Bibliographic Data:   This is my nominee (so far) for the most obscure detective novel to be reviewed on this blog this month. It was the author’s only work of detective fiction. Evans’ other novel, The Trouble with Turlow (Doubleday, 1961), is described by one online bookseller as “A light-hearted spoof on life and the education system.”

   If this might lead you to believe that Evans real-llife profession was in the realm of academia, you would in all likelihood be correct. A “Fallon Evans” was the editor of the Twentieth Century Literature: a Scholarly and Critical Journal in the late 1960s and early 70s. Although the online WhitePages site finds 13 Fallon Evans in the US, the name is still relatively uncommon, and one can easily assume the two to be one and the same. [Perhaps the Fallon Evans described on one website as being “a professor of English at Loyola Marymount University” in the mid-1980s.]

   Also note that Hubin’s current edition of Crime Fiction IV has updated the setting of the novel to Illinois.

NO MAN OF HER OWN. Paramount Pictures, 1932. Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Dorothy Mackaill, Grant Mitchell, Elizabeth Patterson, J. Farrell MacDonald, Paul Ellis. Director: Wesley Ruggles.

   One big reason this pre-Code movie is worthy of note is that this was the first and only onscreen pairing of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, later one of the most famous of married couples in Hollywood. A good second reason, though — if that’s possible — is that No Man of Her Own a pre-Code movie; in fact, it may have been one of the tipping points that caused the Code to go into effect.

   Clark Gable, sans mustache, plays a card shark and con man who fairly obviously makes a good living at it. But when the heat is on, he heads out of Manhattan in a hurry. Picking a destination at random, he ends up in the small upstate town of Glendale, NY. Being the ladies’ man that he is, and is he ever, Babe Stewart’s eyes falls almost immediately upon Connie Randall, Carol Lombard’s character, one of the town’s librarians.

   It is lust at first sight. Connie is about to burst from boredom. Glendale is far too small for her. But she knows better than to be too easy, although Babe is awfully hard to resist.

The scene that takes place in the stacks in the back of the library is one of the more famous ones in early cinematic history.

   But a later scene that takes place in a cabin up at the lake, in which Connie is seen clad only in bra and panties, is also well worth a second look. Add in a couple of shower scenes, albeit separately, and (in another vein) the scene following the one which ends with Babe saying, “See you in church,” and you have the beginning of a humdoozer of a movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J733OtRwgw

   Alas and alack, once the two are married, all there’s left to do is for Babe to reform, if Connie can accomplish it, and the last third of the movie limps to one dull thud of an ending. “Is that all there is?” you may ask yourself. But it’s the getting there that’s the attraction, and it’s why this movie is lot less likely to be forgotten than most of the others made in 1932.

  RICHARD & FRANCES LOCKRIDGE – Murder Comes First. Pocket, paperback reprint, July 1982. Originally published by J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, 1951. Also: Avon #434, paperback, 1952.

   There is simply no mistaking a Mr. & Mrs. North mystery novel, and it is great to have [some of] them back in print again. Why hasn’t anybody thought of it sooner? The warm, comfortable sounds of their adventures together have been sorely missed.

   In this one of two just reprinted by Pocket, three of Pam’s maiden aunts from Cleveland have come to the big city for a visit. Disaster strikes when another friend they are calling on mysteriously dies of poison. While Pam’s Aunt Thelma may be as unlikely a murder suspect as you can imagine, that doesn’t stop Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley from thinking he can wrap it up quickly.

   The inspector, Bill Wiegand admits to Pam, likes things simple. Sergeant Mullins, of course, knows better. “I should have known,” he says. “It’s begun to go screwy.”

   Part of the screwiness is that the FBI eventually gets involved, for reasons somewhat pertinent to the date of the story. (It was first published in 1951.) Even so, in spite of this worn-out bit of misbehavior at the core, this is still as bright and irresistible a work of entertainment as it ever was. More!

Rating:    B

[UPDATE] 07-11-12.   According to my records, which are, I’m afraid, woefully incomplete, Pocket published at least eight of the North’s adventures between 1982 and 1983. There were in total something like 26 of them in all, so they fell way short of doing the complete series. I don’t think many of them, if any, have been in print ever since.

JULIE. MGM, 1956. Doris Day, Louis Jourdan, Barry Sullivan, Frank Lovejoy, Jack Kelly, Ann Robinson, Barney Phillips, Jack Kruschen, John Gallaudet, Carleton Young. Screenwriter-director: Andrew L. Stone.

   I must admit that I have never been fond of those damsel-in-distress films in which an anxious heroine (her brow is usually creased), married to a homicidal maniac, is so enamoured of her prospective murderer that she can’t bear to take the most elementary precautions to protect herself.

   A typical example of this genus horribilis is Julie, starring Doris Day, Louis Jourdan, and Barry Sullivan. Day plays an airline stewardess who loses her bearings when she’s on the ground and marries handsome psycho Jourdan after her first husband dies under circumstances which are only mysterious to her.

   Barry Sullivan plays the attentive other man hovering protectively around Julie with little success in persuading her that her husband is up to no good, again. Eventually, Julie is alone in an apartment to which Jourdan has traced her and when I unexpectedly had to leave the room, she was pacing nervously while the camera cut frequently to shots of Jourdan closing in.

   When I returned, to my surprise I found that Julie, with grim but plucky determination, was attempting to land a very large plane. The pilot was nowhere to be seen, the co-pilot kept lapsing into a coma from which an attentive man (not Barry Sullivan) kept reviving him, and a phalanx of air controllers was giving landing directions from the flight tower of an airport which she was probably in imminent danger of demolishing.

   In line with my policy of not revealing endings. I will draw a discreet curtain over the remaining action.

THE CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS. Galassia Cinematografica, Italian, 1972. Original title: Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer? (or What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood Doing on Jennifer’s Body?). Edwige Fenech, George Hilton, Annabella Incontrera, Paola Quattrini, Giampiero Albertini, Franco Agostini, Carla Brait. Director: Giuliano Carnimeo.

   First impression: Beautifully photographed in sharp, colorful detail from many clever and unusual angles – a visual delight, smashingly so.

   The story: a unknown and unseen killer is stalking the tenants of an upscale apartment house, with many of the victims being terrifically good-looking women with large expressive eyes. It passes enough muster to keep your mind entertained, but you can’t help be aware of all the cliches of the crime thriller genre that went into putting this film together, even as you’re watching.

   The police act sincerely but they talk better than they perform, having a largely carefree attitude toward the deaths. Giampiero Albertini as Commissioner Enci spends as much time on adding to his stamp collection, while his hapless assistant (Franco Agostini) fumbles his way around while doing the actual legwork.

   Two of the good-looking women, Edwige Fenech and Paola Quattrini, roommates who move into the apartment of the second women to be killed, pay only lip service to the idea that maybe that’s not such a good idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1Foq9SfAyM

   There are a lot of suspects – it’s a tall apartment complex, complete with subcellar with lots of spooky (and deadly) machinery to be trapped in – and hints at motive, but when the killer is a madman (or woman), motive is the last thing that matters.

   A small masterpiece of its type (a genre called “Giallo,” as if you hadn’t deduced that on your own by now), humorous and chilling in turn, atmospheric and colorful, and entertaining from beginning to end. Bloody but not gory, and almost tastefully so. (But if Philo Vance is your idea of the ultimate in detective work, this may not be to your taste at all. In fact, I almost guarantee it.)

NOTE:   I wrote this review back in December, but I lost track of it until I was reminded of it last week when I read Sergio Angelini’s review of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) on his blog. I’m far from an expert on Giallo films, so I found his detailed comments on the film to be very informative.

   The movie is available on DVD either by itself or in a box set with three films of the same vintage.

EARL W. EMERSON – Deviant Behavior. William Morrow & Co., hardcover, 1988. Ballantine, paperback, 1991.

   The latest case for Thomas Black, Seattle private eye, is Deviant Behavior by Earl W. Emerson. This is an impressive tale, with emphatic characterizations and a sinewy plot.

   The wealthy Steebs, Dudley and Faith, hire Black to find their missing adopted son Elmore, age seventeen. Thomas traces Elmore to an abandoned hotel, the building from which Elmore’s uncle (and Dudley’s business partner) leaped to his death six years earlier.

   Elmore is carrying unaccountably large sums of money, has given his girlfriend an expensive ring. The trail also leads to a retired film director, now a sort of guru to the local young, and his actress wife. But then the trail goes dead, very dead….

    The Thomas Black series —

1. The Rainy City (1984)

2. Poverty Bay (1985)
3. Nervous Laughter (1985)
4. Fat Tuesday (1987)

5. Deviant Behavior (1988)
6. Yellow Dog Party (1991)

7. The Portland Laugher (1994)
8. The Vanishing Smile (1995)     Shamus Award Best Novel nominee (1996).
9. The Million-Dollar Tattoo (1996)
10. Deception Pass (1997)     Shamus and Anthony Awards Best novel nominee (1998).

11. Catfish Cafe (1998)
12. Cape Disappointment (2009)

  JOHN CREASEY – The Toff on the Farm. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1958. Walker, US, hardcover, 1964; Popular Library, paperback, 1972. Also published as Terror for the Toff, Pyramid, paperback, 1965.

   The Toff, aka Richard Rollison, is a character I’ve never really become attracted to, but I read one of his adventures every once in a while. He’s a combination/imitation in many way of the Saint and an American-style pulp hero. The British do this kind of derring-do adventure hero best, though, and if you don’t have one of Leslie Charteris’s Simon Templar novels handy, the Toff will do as second best.

   In this particular case Rollison is asked by a friend to intercede on the behalf of two friends of his, a man and his sister who are trying to sell their farm, but are unable to, due to an old tenant farmer who refuses to give up rights to his home.

   Before the Toff can reach the scene, the girl is suddenly deluged with offers, up to three times what the farm is worth, and before the story is over, two men are dead, and Rollison is forced to wonder how badly he could have misjudged a man whom Scotland Yard considers to be a notorious American gangster.

   As with any good pulp fiction, this reads very quickly, pulling you into a tales with so many crooked angles you are puzzled how any sense can ever be made of it. And as usual, the ending is not up to the end of the story. Discovering how simple the plot actually was is part of it, but learning that it was mostly jiggery-pokery on the part of the author is another.

   And the more I think about it, trying to see if there is any way I could tell you more about what I mean than that, the more I am convinced that “jiggery-pokery” is exactly the right word, and we can leave it at that.

[UPDATE] 07-08-12.   My opinion of the Toff books has varied considerably over the years, being not much interested in them when I first encountered them, but gradually warming to them to the point of actually enjoying them. I still think the Saint books are better, but so do a lot of people.

   Earlier reviews on this blog:

The Toff Among the Millions.
Double for the Toff.
A Rocket for the Toff.

IT HAPPENED IN FLATBUSH. 20th Century-Fox, 1942. Lloyd Nolan, Carole Landis, Sara Allgood, William Frawley, Robert Armstrong, Jane Darwell, George Holmes, Scotty Beckett, with Vivian Blaine in her uncredited debut. Director: Ray McCarey.

   From Wikipedia: “Flatbush Avenue is the main thoroughfare through the Borough of Brooklyn.” And if you’re of a certain age, what do you think of first when someone mentions Brooklyn? Baseball, of course, and the Brooklyn Dodgers.

   They apparently didn’t get the rights to use the team’s name in this movie, since the team that Lloyd Nolan’s character is the manager of is called only the “Brooklyn team,” or simply “Brooklyn” for short, but the team is the Dodgers, all right, no doubt about it. Nolan plays Frank “Butterfingers” Maguire to perfection. He fits the uniform as if he born to do so.

   But how did he get the nickname Butterfingers? It turns out he was run out of town as a shortstop several years ago, having committed an crucial error in the field that cost the team the pennant. Against all the advice she’s been given, including that of the general manager (played by William Frawley, who looks exactly the same here as he did in the 1950s playing Lucy’s landlord and neighbor, Fred Mertz), the elderly lady owner (Sara Allgood) brings him back to manage the team.

   Upon which point the lady owner ups and dies, leaving the ownership of the team in the hands of relatives, including society dish Kathryn Baker, played of course by pretty dark-haired Carole Landis. None of the new owners know anything about baseball, nor do they care to know, so it’s up to Nolan not only to guide the team, but to persuade Kate to spring real money for some real players.

   Persuasion turns to romance, and new players mean a run for the pennant. Can Nolan escape his history of buckling under pressure to be successful at doing both? Well, if Real Life baseball manager Leo Durocher could marry movie star Laraine Day, also back in the 1940s, anything’s possible in Category 1, and as for Category 2, nothing that happens in a sports-oriented comedy could be more surprising than what happens in Real Life.

   A fun if slightly fanciful movie, and of course I could watch the always charming Carole Landis in anything, even as the owner of a baseball team who ends up watching the final game of the season in the dugout.

Note: Two more short clips from this movie can be found here.

   In my view, the vast majority of cover illustrations for present-day crime novels are boring or even ugly, and that includes all subgenres. Worst of all are the uninspired photographic covers with images of a pistol or a knife, a house or a street, one or more people, especially if these have nothing whatsoever to do with the plot of the crime story.

   There is not much point in pining for times past, when covers were still drawn or painted and suggested significant scenes of the crime story. It would seem to be the wrong approach to simply imitate the style of the cover illustrations of the 1950s, for example; and this is also wrong even if the old crime novels are reissued.

   For instance, I hesitate to buy the recently published book containing the collected stories of the Black Mask author Paul Cain (The Complete Slayers), as I feel put off by the much-praised illustration by Ron Lesser on the cover. It shows a scantily clothed, sexy young woman with a cigarette and a gun, with which she appears to have just killed a man.

   My distaste for this cover illustration has nothing to do with “political correctness” or even prudery, but rather with historical consciousness. I would have preferred it if original cover illustrations from old Black Mask editions had been used for the cover of the book, for example as parts of a collage.

   It’s not as if I do not also enjoy so-called “GGA” (Good Girl Art), but only when it originates from the same period as the publication of the books. Back then it was something new, a daring venture that only just escaped the censors. Nowadays one is practically bombarded with pictures of more or less naked people everywhere. Relying on sexploitation to create cover art is dull and annoying.

   Taking a historical view, I can even appreciate such an extreme and infamous, frequently reproduced cover image as Rudolph Belarski’s The Doll’s Trunk Murder by Helen Reilly (Popular Library, # 211) from 1949. It is so bizarre and surreal that even any misogynist tendencies that might exist are neutralised aesthetically.

   The picture shows a pretty young woman tied to a chair. Her mouth is sealed with adhesive tape. Her blouse is open, revealing much of one breast. A male hand holding a knife approaches the woman. The observer cannot tell whether the intended use of the knife is to abuse the woman, to kill her, or to cut through her fetters. The picture has a thrilling, explosive effect.

   Such an image would have quite a different impact on me if it were painted and published now, in 2012. As mentioned, I am not talking about “political correctness” here, which is sensibly applied to political speeches, news and similar statements, but which has no place in artistic products, even if they are merely lurid entertainment.

   What I mean is a contemporary taste. A relatively good solution to the problem was found by Black Lizard Books in designing the newly reissued, old noir crime novels. The cover illustrations by Kirwan capture the sinister atmosphere of these crime stories without imitating the original covers, as is sadly the case with some of the covers in the Hard Case Crime series.

   Here is a link to Kirwan’s covers he did for Black Lizard. I do not like them all equally, as I find some of them too surreal, but most of them are well done. One I think is very good is the one he did for Black Friday, by David Goodis. The atmosphere is so hopeless and the colours are so cold that the picture suits the story.

   A complete collection of the Hard Case Crime covers may be found here. An example of one I consider bad is the picture of Lawrence Block’s 69 Barrow Street. It is rather unimaginative to put just a nude in the middle of the cover, not exciting at all.

   Much better is the cover art of No House Limit by Steve Fisher. These big dice in front of the picture symbolize chance in life and are significant for the novel.

   Perhaps the publishers’ art directors should look around at some comic artists in order to find new visual forms of expression that might suit crime novels. Admittedly, it costs more to pay these artists for their work (which should also require that they read the crime novel in question) than it would to simply use a more or less suitable picture from a photo archive, or to plunder one from the masterpieces of art history.

   It involves more effort and expense to create a new picture than to select one that already exists. By the way, it is only acceptable to use a painting by Caravaggio on the cover of a crime novel that is published now if the story deals with the robbery of such a painting, or is set during Caravaggio’s time.

   It might well be that I have suffered a surfeit of crime novel cover art and am therefore hypercritical. I know of no ideal solution. Perhaps some other crime lovers have better suggestions.

  STEVE JACKSON – The Judas. Harper, UK, paperback original (*), 2007.

   Well, “ha ha” on me, you might say. After carrying on a short while ago about reading the third book in a trilogy without reading the first two first — and being miffed when it didn’t turn out all that well — here it is, that same short while later, and I’ve done it again. Kind of.

   What’s different is that there’s only one book in this series before this one, The Mentor (Harper, 2006), and I knew about before starting this one. But the blurb on the back cover didn’t bring it up, and usually, you know, you can read a crime novel without reading the one before it, and even if the story line does depend a bit on the previous one, you can usually pick it up as you go along.

   Except when you can’t, of course, as that previous example goes a long way to prove.

   But that’s not the problem. I was OK with all that on this one. I was able to fill in what I’d missed without all that much difficulty. It turns out, though, that the end of the previous book wasn’t the end, after all. When The Judas begins, MI6 agent Paul Aston’s former mentor is in jail for the crimes he committed in the previous book.

   He got caught, and he’s about to go on trial, a fact that doesn’t immediately connect up to the story that The Judas is nominally about, but if you were to guess, I think you’d agree that it is highly likely that it will.

   In The Judas, someone is killing off a short list of retired agents in Europe, and Aston is assigned the case, along with George Strauss, who happens to be female, and who has worked with Aston before. (All agents have to have female colleagues with whom they work on cases together on in recent years, or hadn’t you noticed?)

   There is a lot more to tell – there are nearly 500 pages in The Judas – but here is where the “ha ha” on me comes in. The story does not end at the end of The Judas. It is only the second of three.

   Or at least there was supposed to have been three. Things are in a bad way at the end of this one, leaving lots of loose ends to be gathered up in book three, The Watcher, which was supposedly to appear in 2008. The author’s website was last updated in 2009, and here it is three years later, and the book still isn’t out.

   Ha ha, indeed. And it isn’t as though I found The Judas particularly well written. The characters are one-dimensional, the story is padded (necessarily so with almost 500 pages to fill), and the writing seldom exceeds what is high school level in the US. The story is not uninteresting, but even so, a book without an ending? I don’t know what happened, but at the moment, you’re better off not starting this one — not at least without being warned.

(*) FOOTNOTE:   My copy is a paperback, and it definitely says “paperback original” inside. On the other hand, there are hardcover editions you can purchase on ABE and from Amazon-UK, so I may be in error about this. Perhaps you should not believe all you read.