JOSEPH MONCURE – The Wild Party. [Narrative poem.] Pascal Covici, Inc. hardcover, 1926/1928, banned in Boston. Covici Friede, hardcover, 1929. Citadel Prss, hardcover, 1949. Award, paperback, 1975 (novelization by Terence O’Neill of film produced that same year based on the book). Pantheon, hardcover. 1994 (drawings by Art Spiegelman.) Many/most/all? reprint editions as by Joseph Moncure March. Film: AIP, 1975 (director: James Ivory; starring James Coco, Raquel Welch, Perry King). Two stage musicals, NYC, 1999-2000.

   Queenie and Burrs are a couple. A sodden, soiled couple of handsome gutter rats, dressed to the nines.

   Burrs, most folks agreed “in language without much lace

   They’d like to break his god-damned face”

   â€œOh, yes—Burrs was a charming fellow:

   Brutal with women, and proportionately yellow”

   â€œ[One victim’s] brother had great fun

   Looking for Burrs with a snub-nosed gun”

   Queenie, hungover, pleads:

   â€œBurrsie! pour out a cup for me!

   Said she”

   Burrs, ever the gentleman:

   â€œThe hell I will, you lazy slut!

   Do you think you’re the prince of wales, or what?

   â€¦You rotten bitch!

   I’ll fix you yet!

   She grabbed a knife from the kitchenette

   Her face was white as through newly plastered.

   You touch me—

   I’ll kill you, you filthy bastard!”

   They decide what they need is a wild party to cure the doldrums.

   â€œA grand piano stood in the corner

   With the air of a coffin waiting for a mourner”

   Queenie gets all dolled up:

   â€œMy god, Queenie; you’re looking swell!

   Quoth Queenie:

   I’m feeling slick as hell!”

   Queenie decides to find a replacement man at the party. And finds a suitable suitor, named Mr. Black.

   â€œBlack said nothing, but he thought hard…

   So she lived with Burrs!

   He was somewhat jarred

   He looked Burrs over, and he liked his looks

   About as well as a fish likes hooks…

   His smile grew knowing:

   His drink grew small:

   Just a good-looking harlot, after all!”

   Burrs gets a bit jealous of Queenie and Black:

   â€œYou’re jealous!

   Jealous?

   He gave her a glittering stare:

   You’re crazy!

   What the hell do I care!”

   â€œThe bed was a slowly moving tangle

   Of legs and bodies at every angle”

   â€œWho yer laughin’ at, you tart!

   I’ll break yer god-damned face apart!”

   â€œHis face began to twitch:

   I’ll fix you plenty, you son of a bitch!”

“Some love is fire: some love is rust

   But the fiercest, cleanest love is lust.”

   Burrs catches Queenie and Black in In flagrante delicto.

   â€œThe gun flashed—

   Crashed!

   Staccato, and vicious it spoke.

   Silence.

   Darkness.

   The air smelled sharp with smoke.”

   â€œJes’s Christ!—I’ve hurt my shin—

   The door sprang open

   And the cops rushed in.”
         —-

   It’s alright. No need to run out and get a copy or anything. But it is an interesting document of its times and shows that the hardboiled style knows no bounds, poetry being a perfectly fine setting for a street vernacular told tale of alcohol, sex and vengeance.

   A copy of the book is currently available online here:

      https://musicalstagecompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/The-Wild-Party-March.pdf/
   

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE – A Study in Scarlet. Ward, Lock & Co., July 1888. Lippincott, US, 1890. First appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887 (eleven copies are known to still exist). Reprinted numerous times. Adapted to radio, TV and the movies perhaps even more countless times.

   The question must be asked at once: Would A Study in Scarlet be remembered and read today if there had been no other Sherlock Holmes novels or stories to follow it? Certainly it would be read, to the extent that Doyle’s White Company and Lost World are read, but it’s doubtful the book would have anything approaching its present popularity. A Study in Scarlet owes its status as a cornerstone to the fact that it introduced the world to Sherlock Holmes.

   However, the book is not without merit of its own. Doyle’s clear achievement in creating the character of Sherlock Holmes,complete and full-blown, is nothing short of masterful. The case he investigates certainly has its points of interest, and the surprising arrest of the killer at the end of part one is a scene that would not be matched in mystery fiction until the equally surprising arrest at the conclusion of Ellery Queen’s Tragedy of X.

   The first half of the novel deals with the meeting of Holmes and Watson, their taking rooms together in Baker Street, and Holmes’s investigation of the Lauriston Garden mystery, in which two men named Drebber and Stangerson are found murdered. each with the German word for revenge written in blood on the wall above the bodies. Holmes traps the killer at the book’s halfway point. and part two is devoted to a lengthy flashback to the early Mormon settlement of Utah, and the crimes that prompted the revenge slayings half a world away.

   Though the Mormon portion of the book is interesting enough on its own. one longs to return to Holmes, and this same sort of flaw marks The Valley of Fear and to some extent The Sign of the Four. Only in The Hound of the Baskervilles is the narrative maintained without the final flashback. Still. no study of Holmes is complete without A Study in Scarlet.

   Of the other novels, The Valley of Fear (1915) is far superior to The Sign of he Four (1890), in part because its flashback portion tells a fascinating story of labor unrest in the Pennsylvania coal fields of a secret society called the Scowrers, obviously patterned after the Molly Maguires. The other three short-story collections — The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905), His Last Bow (1917), and The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927) — all have their high spots, and all should be explored by the dedicated mystery reader.

         ———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
   

ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE – July 1967. Overall rating: ***½

CHARLOTTE ARMSTRONG “The Second Commandment.” Short novel. A minister’s wife falls to her death while answering a “call of nature” along the highway. Afterward the minister discovers he can no longer love all his neighbors. Fine personal point of view, but fails as a mystery story. (4)

AGATHA CHRISTIE “At the Stroke of Twelve.” First appeared in The Sketch, 10 OctobeR 1923, as “The Kidnapping of Johnnie Waverly.” Poirot deduces a man has kidnapped his own son, but then he has all the clues. (3)

JOHN DICKSON CARR “The Lion’s Paw.” First appeared in The Strand Magazine. July 1938, as “Error at Daybreak” by Carter Dickson. Colonel March. A fake suicide attempt is mistaken for a mysterious murder on a deserted hearth. (3)

CORNELL WOOLRICH “Divorce – New York Style.” Serial, part 2 of 2. The girl in a staged hotel room bit dies in the bed, end of Part 1. Scene two in the police station is disappointing. (3)

DENNIS M. DUBIN “Elroy Quinn’s Last Case.” First story. Elroy stops a plot designed to disrupt international relations. Clever! (5) [Note: the author’s only work of short crime fiction.]

ELLERY QUEEN “The President Regrets.” Puzzle story with presidential names. (2)

SHIRLEY WALLACE “The Tiger’s Cub. First story. A man defends his son. (3) [Note: The author’s only work of short crime fiction.]

CELIA FREMLIN “The Special Gift.” An amateur authors’ club meets a man with a strange deadly dream (3)

GUY CULLINGFORD “Something to Get at Quick.” Juvenile delinquency and a stabbing in London. (4)

MIRIAM ALLEN deFORD “The Impersonation Murder Case.” An actor discovers that he is the fall guy in a murder investigation. Sorry, I don’t Believe It. (3)

JOAN RICHTER “Intruder in the Maize.” An arrogant man in Africa should not deal with poison. One bad flaw. (2)

BRIAN HAYES “Security Risk.” First appeared in The (London) Evening News, 19 April 1961. A test works beautifully. (4)

LAWRENCE TREAT “B As in Burglary.” Bankhart of the Homicide Squad is led to the stolen jewels by the murderer’s daughter, and the romance is over. (4)

PAUL CAIN – Fast One. Doubleday Doran, hardcover, 1933. Originally published serially in Black Mask magazine. Reprint editions include: Bonded Mystery #10, 1946. Avon #178, paperback, 1948. Southern Illinois University Press, hardcover, 1978. Popular Library, paperback, 1978. Black Lizard, paperback, 1987.

   Gerry Kells is a retired gunman living in L.A. He’s now a gentleman gambler. Or at least a gambler. Whose bets are rarely gambles at all, since the fix is almost always in. That’s what he thinks.

   L.A. is wide open, and various gangs are battling for control. Kells wants none of it. He thinks he can stay out of the fray by staying neutral.

   But one by one, each of the mob bosses arrange a meeting, to hire his gun, to make him an offer he can’t refuse.

   I’m quits, he repeats. Time and time again. I’m done. I don’t even carry a gun.

   But no one believes him. They figure if he’s not with them, he’s against them. And they try to take him out.

   And one by one, they lose. Yes, he’s just one man. But he’s plenty tough and a fast one with a piece.

   The mobs keep pulling fast ones on him, only he’s faster. And before he knows it, he finds himself in a pretty good spot to take over L.A. himself. With a little luck, and some help from his moll Granquist and a couple of friends, he gives it a shot. Or however many shots he can, ’til the ammo runs out.

   It reminds me a fair bit of Red Harvest — another open city Poisonville, but from a gunman’s perspective. And like the Continental OP, Kells is constrained in his violence by a sense of justice and fair play missing from his adversaries. So while he’s no knight errant, he’s motivated as much by greed as revenge in the service of justice. Which he extracts, exactingly.

   The prose is Hammer-like. But don’t be fooled into reading it quickly. While my edition was under 150 pages, the action is dense. He doesn’t belabor the action. With spartan description: Double and triple crosses occur in an eye’s wink, and if you don’t take your time in reading and re-reading the lines as they come at you, you’ll find yourself lost. There’s lots of players and more action than you can shake a gat at. No time to flick off the safety. Be ready. It’s coming at you at the speed of birdshot.

   This is my third time reading it in the span of maybe twenty-five years. There’s so much action that I remembered very few of the details going into it. The sheer amount and speed of the action gives the book a level of re-readability seldom found. And I enjoyed it more and understood it better this time than ever before.

   I’d put it in the pre-1933 hardboiled canon, with the other cannonballs being Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest, Glass Key, Green Ice, Death in a Bowl, You Can’t Win, Louis Beretti, Young Lonigan, Sanctuary, Daughter of Earth, Georgia Nigger, the writings of Jim Tully and Hemingway, Life in the Iron Mills, and precious little else.

   Highest possible praise for this groundbreaking hardboiled novel.

ZELDA POPKIN – Death Wears a White Gardenia. Mary Carner #1. J.B. Lippincott Co, hardcover, 1938. Dell #13, paperback (mapback edition), circa 1943.

   Although she may come close to being a PI (see comment #1), when it comes down to it, Mary Carner probably shouldn’t really be tagged as one. As Death ears a Gardenia begins, she’s the assistant to the on-staff detective at a major department store in the center of Manhattan, and her expertise is not wayward spouses nor missing heirs. It is instead shoplifters and shoplifting, a profession and occupation that’s been around as long as there have been department stores.

   But when murder occurs during a giant anniversary sale, she’s on hand throughout, offering opinions and interviewing suspects right along with the police. She’s slim and pretty, but tough-minded, and her opinions and questions are right on target, as if she’s been doing it all her life.

   Dead is the store’s credit manager, and Zelda Popkin, the author, must have had some experience working behind the scenes in such an establishment is described in picturesque detail, and is a solid part of the tale’s background. Personal relationships, and the secrets the employees have from each other and (they hope) the world as well are revealed to all in the course of the investigation.

   Popkin was a very good writer, with good insight as to how real people think and behave, but in this first book in the series, she doesn’t seem to have gotten the hang of portraying a book-length investigation and keeping things moving. The middle portion of the book deals with the ups and downs of the building’s elevators the night before, details of which are, well, boring. More attention should have been spent on the gardenia in the dead man’s hand. (Not a floor manager’s carnation.) This is what’s really important, and if they’d only asked the poor flower seller outside the store what she knew a lot earlier, the book would have been over in a third of the time, if not less.

Rating (on my well-tested HB Hardboiled scale): 2.5 (out of 10).
   

      The Mary Carner series —

Death Wears a White Gardenia (1938)
Time Off for Murder (1940)
Murder in the Mist (1940)
Dead Man’s Gift (1941)
No Crime for a Lady (1942)

WILLIAM L. DeANDREA – Killed in the Fog.  Matt Cobb #8. Simon & Schuster,  hardcover, 1996. No paperback edition.

   DeAndrea is really cranking them out lately. He’s got three series going {Cobb, Niccolo Beneditti, and the new one set in the Wild West with Quinn Booker & Lobo Blacke), plus odds and ends like the Encyclopedia Mysteriosa. I don’t think any of his fiction will make anyone’s “100 Best” list, but he’s been consistently smooth and entertaining, imho.

   Matt Cobb, network v-p in charge of special projects, is on a sabbatical in London with his true love, who also happens to be the network’s biggest stockholder. He stops by the headquarters of one of the network’s subsidiaries just to be visiting, agrees to do the manager a favor, and finds himself involved in a murder and slapped in jail. Different country, business as usual,

   This, like the last Cobb I read, is a lesser effort by De.Andrea. Cobb is still a likable lead, and DeAndrea’s prose still reads effortlessly, but the story simply didn’t engage me. I’m not sure why, and that makes me think that the problem might be with me rather than with the author.

   Whoever’s problem it was, though,  I didn’t get a hell of a lot out of this one.

GLENDON SWARTHOUT – The Shootist. Doubleday, hardcover, 1975. Bantam, paperback, 1976. Signet, paperback, 1986. Berkley Books, paperback, 1998. University of Nebraska Press, softcover, 2011. Film: 1976. Directed by Don Siegel; starring John Wayne (his last movie) and Lauren Bacall.

   J. B. Books, 51 years old, of Creede, Colorado, is the last of the legendary gunfighters. It’s 1901. John Wesley Hardin? Dead. Billy the Kidd? Dead. The James brothers? Dead. Wild Bill Hickok? Same. The time of the gunfighters is gone. But Books remains, a dinosaur that survived the asteroid.

   He’s been feeling pretty run down lately, so he sees a doctor. The doctor tells him he’s dying of prostate cancer. But he doesn’t believe him.

   There’s only one doctor he’ll believe: Dr. Hostetler of El Paso, Texas, who saved Books’s life 11 years prior, expertly extracting a bullet from his liver and sewing him up before he could bleed out.

   So he rides horseback 10 days straight to El Paso on his bloated, contorted underside, comforted only by “a soft pillow of crimson velvet trimmed with golden tassels” he’d stolen from a whorehouse.

   Dr. Hostetler confirms the worst. He’s got about 6 weeks to live — if he wants to die in bed, screeching in pain, unable to move, soiled in filth and wretched incapacity. But, Dr. Hostetler suggests, perhaps that’s not the way he’d prefer to go out.

   The e.e. cummings epigraph is the best summary of the story:

            We doctors know
            a hopeless case if — listen: there’s a hell
            of a good universe next door: let’s go

   So Books decides to go. But go his own way.

   Books asks the town Marshall for the names of the baddest gunmen in town. The Marshall gives him 3:

   1: Jack Pulford: “Runs the faro layout at Keating’s….straightest shot I’ve ever seen, and cool as a cucumber. Couple years back he got off one round here, under fire, through the heart, and they measured. Eighty-four feet. Through the heart.”

   2: Serrano: “El Tuerto they call him, ‘Cross-eye.’ He’ll rustle a bunch of cattle over the river, sell ’em on this side, then rustle ’em back and sell ’em to the same outfit he rustled ’em from in the first place. A real cutthroat. I wouldn’t turn my back on him in church.”

   3: Jay Cobb: “Cobb’s only twenty or so, but I’ll hang him before he’s thirty, or somebody will. Gun crazy–been toting one since he was big enough to lift it.”

   Books invites all three to meet him at 4:00 p.m. at the nicest tavern in town. May the best man win.

   “They were like actors on an empty stage….The curtain had risen, the hour come. But they had no audience, save for one another, and even more bewildering, they had no play. They were assembled to take roles for which no lines had yet been written, to participate in a tragedy behind which there was no clear creative intent, to impose upon senselessness some sort of deadly order.”

   The deadly order comes, but comes too pat for my tastes. It’ll smack you right between your thousand-yard stare.

   It’s a good concept for a story. But at the end of the day, it didn’t do anything for me. You can tell by the last line that Swarthout thinks he’s written a freaking masterpiece. A tour de force of the first magnitude. Self-congratulations are clearly in order. Just no congratulations from me.
   

         A TV/Cinema Question from Lazy Georgenby:

   You all know how Dick Powell –- as Phil Marlowe –- is lounging in his office one night, sipping scotch, gazing out his window at the lights of Los Angeles. He’s got no active cases. No dough coming in.

   It’s all part of the opening sequence in Murder My Sweet. Suddenly –behind him –the ghastly face of Moose Malone (Mike Mazurki) looms over him in the darkness, reflected by the neons winking on his windowpane. Powell sits up and turns around.

   So far so good? Okay so, I’m talking to someone lately who wants to know whether there is any crime, mystery, noir, hard-boiled detective movie-or-TV-series which incarnates the archetype above: keeping everything exactly the same as the above, except that ‘the detective turns around’ because of a knock at his door. He bids the visitor to enter and the newcomer is a beautiful femme fatale in need of his help. Via voice-over, his mental patter is the usual, “…she looked like trouble right from the start…” or words to this effect.

   He swears this is the opening scene in a classic crime flick. I’ve racked my brains trying to pin this down. A lot of candidates were easily eliminated; I’m fairly sure that it’s not the opening scene in any of the really famous P.I. movies.

   Currently, I’m hunting through old episodes of Mike Hammer on TV (Darren McGavin’s run), Lloyd Nolan’s Mike Shayne movies, the early Spillane movies like Girl Hunters, and even the Bob Hope parody movies like My Favorite Brunette.

   The maddening aspect of it all, is that this ‘trope’ could literally be from anywhere: TV commercials, graphic novels, SNL skits, cartoons. It might not have ever been filmed at all. Could be found only in homages or pastiches. Might not even be from the majors era, could be something from the ’70s.

   So as a last resort, I am throwing myself on the mercy of this court. What say ye? Thx thx thx!

   In Rex Stout’s Might as Well Be Dead (1956), James R. Herold hires Nero Wolfe to find his son after learning that he had wrongly accused Paul — who has been sending birthday cards to his mother and sisters, postmarked New York, for 11 years — of stealing $26,000 from his Omaha hardware wholesale business. Because people often select an alias using the same initials, Wolfe places an ad directed at “P.H.,” only to have it widely assumed as a reference to Peter Hays, on trial for first-degree murder. This seems like a coincidence, until attorney Albert Freyer pops in and reveals that he knows nothing of his client’s past, and while headed down to the courtroom for a look, Archie realizes he is being followed.

   Freyer disbelieves that they have no interest in Hays when he sees Archie, who becomes certain that he matches Paul’s graduation photo by his defiant look after the guilty verdict is announced, which Freyer says is inconsistent with a despairing view that “he might as well be dead.” Convinced that Hays was framed, he gets Archie in to see him, and Hays begs them not to tell his father; since Archie’s tail suggests that someone is threatened by the possibility of his being cleared, Wolfe agrees to postpone informing Herold as Freyer starts the appeal process and he investigates the murder. The advertising copywriter had allegedly killed real-estate broker Michael M. Molloy because he loved his wife, Selma.

   Hays denied shooting him, but offered no explanation for the key to their building and the pistol — both found on him — or anything else, while Selma testified that the abusive Mike falsely accused her of infidelity, refusing to grant a divorce. Freyer reports Hays’s claim that he found Mike dead after an anonymous caller said he was beating her, opining that he is shielding Selma, who has an alibi that may not be airtight but in turns believes Hays guilty. Giving the ’teers and occasional operative Johnny Keems various jobs, Wolfe has Archie pump Delia Brandt, Selma’s successsor as Mike’s secretary, for information, with the pretext of gathering material on his last days, for an article to appear under her byline.

   Mike rented a safe-deposit box as “Richard Randall” and died intestate, but Selma refuses to be his administrator; she proposes his friend Patrick A. Degan, head of the Mechanics Alliance Welfare Association, and accepts Wolfe’s suggestion of Nathaniel Parker as her lawyer. As the conference is winding up, Stebbins calls to tell them Johnny was killed by a stolen car while investigating Selma’s theater companions that night, Thomas L. Irwin and Jerome and Rita Arkoff. She’d been asked to fill in for Fanny Irwin, benched with a headache, and Wolfe thinks that the killer not only knew she’d be out of the way but also may have engineered her absence, yet what Johnny might have learned is not yet known.

   Selma asks the couples to come to Wolfe’s, noting that Rita — also a former model, who wed TV producer Jerry — thought Fanny and Pat “were snatching a snuggle,” and Tom’s company did printing for MAWA; they are preceded by Delia’s fiancé, William Lesser, whom Archie assures they can vet the article before publication. Johnny saw all four of them, and Rita reports that she had asked Selma at the suggestion of Tom, but Fanny says the idea was originally hers, “because I could trust him with her.” They leave Wolfe with “no gleam anywhere,” and are followed by Cramer, who provides a list of the contents of Johnny’s pockets, missing the $100 given him for expenses, presumably used for a bribe.

   Watched by Archie, Parker, and an agent of the New York State Tax Commission, Degan finds $327,640 in cash in the safe-deposit box, and agrees to try to learn its source. Saul tentatively i.d.’s the body found bludgeoned behind a lumber pile on 140th Street as Ella Reyes, the Irwins’ maid and the likely bribee; Archie has Selma confirm that — which she does under an alias without alerting Donovan, the morgue desk sergeant from The Black Mountain (1954) — and stay with them for safety. Cramer arrives, “fed up,” unwilling to concede Hays’s innocence, and deduced to have led Lieut. Murphy of Missing Persons to spill the beans about his true identity to Herold, who briefly fired and then rehired Wolfe.

   Mike had invited Delia on a “business trip” to South America, and since Archie intuited that she’d been receptive, which she denied, he and Saul go to her apartment in search of anything he might have stashed there, finding it rifled and, on her strangled body, the key to a Grand Central locker. Documents from the suitcase therein cause Wolfe to convene the interested parties and finger Degan, who’d conspired to embezzle funds from MAWA with Mike, and killed him to forestall his betrayal. Johnny and, in turn, Ella died because she told him Fanny did not develop her “headache” until after a call from Pat, suggesting that she forego seeing Julie Harris in The Lark, ostensibly to discuss some private matter.

   Directed by series mainstay George McCowan, “Might as Well Be Dead” (2/13/81) was the only episode of NBC’s Nero Wolfe series featuring William Conrad to be scripted by Seeleg Lester, a longtime writer-producer on Perry Mason. Natalie Wood’s sister, Lana, who played Plenty O’Toole in Diamonds Are Forever (1971), guest-starred as Delia, with John de Lancie, best known as Q in the Star Trek franchise, as Tom. It simplifies the plot by establishing Hays (A.C. Weary) as innocent from the outset, as the audience actually sees him get the anonymous call, hear shots from outside the apartment, find Mike dead with no sign of his wife, Maggie (Gail Youngs), and pocket the gun before he is caught.

   Lester efficiently interpolates exposition by dramatizing testimony in the trial, and before they meet with Herold (Stephen Elliott), news vendor Charlie (Ralph Manza) tells Archie (Lee Horsley) that Hays, refusing to take the stand in his own defense, must be guilty. In looking at the front-page story, Wolfe immediately notices a similarity in the photos, the identical initials, and the fact that Paul refused to defend himself of embezzlement, all of which he terms “synchronicity.” Stymied by Hays’s lack of cooperation, Freyer (Michael Currie) gives Archie a transcript of the trial and thinks Wolfe could help; streamlining the plot yet again, Pat (Bruce Gray) had been Mike’s lawyer and agrees to serve as Maggie’s.

   The Arkoffs are now Jerry (John Findlater) and Tina Nelson (Deborah Tranelli), and with Saul out of town, Johnny (Herb Braha) is assigned to investigate them, Tom, and Fanny (Karen Montgomery). The death of a recurring character dating to the second book, The League of Frightened Men (1935), lacks resonance with his televised appearances limited to two quick scenes here. After Ella is killed, Cramer (Allan Miller) brings a warrant for Maggie, whom he believes Hays is shielding; Lester borrows an incident — mentioned by Purley in the novel — from The Rubber Band (1936), as Wolfe conceals her in the plant rooms, hidden underneath some seedlings he and Theodore (Robert Coote) are spraying.

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: “Immune to Murder”

Edition cited: Might as Well Be Dead in Seven Complete Nero Wolfe Novels: Avenel (1983)

Online source [link mislabeled as “Blue Ribbon Hostage”]

NANCY DREW… TROUBLE SHOOTER. Warner Brothers, 1939. Bonita Granville Bonita Granville (Nancy Drew), Frankie Thomas (Ted Nickerson), John Litel (Carson Drew), Aldrich Bowker. Charlotte Wynters. Based on the girls’ novels written by Carolyn Keene. Director: William Clemens. Currently streaming on You Tube (see below).

   This was the third in a series of four Nancy Drew movies produced by Warner Brothers, and while this is the only one I’ve  ever seen (so far), I think there should have been more. (After all, how many Andy Hardy movies were there?) I have no idea how fans of the series would rank Troubleshooter, but let me warn you (if you need warning), that this is a movie that’s as much a comedy as it is a detective story.

   Nancy and her father go up in the country in this one in order for Carson Drew, a lawyer by profession, to represent a old friend of the family who’s been accused of murder, and the sheriff and all his buddies aren’t budging an inch.

   Complicating things, as far as Nancy is concerned, is that her father is making eyes at their new neighbor, and when she calls on her boy friend Ted Nickerson for help in that regard, he starts making moon-eyes at her as well. (By some strange coincidence, Ted and his family are on hand as well.) Determined to show her father she can do the cooking for their dinner, Nancy is confounded by the difference between a wood stove and a gas one, and several minutes are spent (though not wasted) watching her make like Lucy Ricardo in the kitchen.

   The whole thing hangs on coincidence, if you ask me, what with the murder victim found buried under a tropical flower Nancy happens to spot growing in a field, and then asking handyman Apollo Johnson (Willie Best) to dig it up for her.

   Oops. Full apologies for telling you more than you want to know, and I haven’t even gotten to the best part, with Nancy and Ted up in the air in a crop-dusting plane at the end of the film with no pilot. No matter how silly all this may sounds, the players pull it off with plenty of panache, and Bonita Granville displays just the right amount of perkiness and young girl confidence to make the whole affair a most entertaining one.