E. BAKER QUINN – One Man’s Muddle. Heinemann, UK, hardcover, 1936. Macmillan, US, hardcover, 1937.

   Two years before Raymond Chandler introduced us to Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1939), E. Baker Quinn, a British writer, anticipated both his voice and his attempt to do something more serious with the detective novel with her first novel about former Scotland Yard sleuth James Strange, an accomplishment noted by critic James Sandoe in his famous list of notable hard-boiled writers.

   When we first meet her sleuth James Strange, he has fled to a “… tu’penny ha’penny inn a hundred miles from nowhere,” to escape his past. But he knows it’s hopeless. “Do a bunk to the jungles of Africa and ten to one you’ll meet your mother-in-law’s char coming around the first bush …”

   And for Strange it is much worse than his mother-in-law’s charwoman. He’s runs smack into the former Mrs. Boynton, now Mrs. Geoffrey Wharton, a former London snowbird, an addict, who knows all about Scotland Yard’s former bright young thing who has just completed four years in the pen for possession of illegal drugs.

   And of course Mrs. Wharton is promptly murdered, and Strange finds himself forced to help her husband cover up her past while trying to cover up his own and keep the police from finding the .32 caliber automatic hidden in his luggage, the gun he used in a manslaughter case he was acquitted in — but would rather not bring up again — and coincidentally, the same caliber Mrs. Wharton was shot with …

   His attempts to keep his head above water push him deeper into the mess, and force him back to his ex-fiancee in London and to Ratchet, the partner who ratted on him and testified against him as King’s evidence.

   That’s the set up for a novel that anticipates the style and voice of Chandler’s novels:

   Before it is over Strange will solve the case, but find himself facing another two years in prison.

   In later books Strange gets out of prison and goes to work as a private eye with his despised ex-partner Ratchet. The voice continues in the Chandler vein.

   Who Quinn was, and how she came to discover a voice and subject matter so close to Chandler is a mystery in itself. But her books are worth discovering and reading, and Strange a curious compliment to Marlowe and his world.

   Here are a few samples of Quinn and Strange:

   One Man’s Muddle and its sequels are an interesting look at a Marlowe that might have been, one of those curious side roads that sometime run parallel to a more successful track. And well worth reading and discovering as first rate mysteries by a writer who deserved more recognition than she got.

         Bibliographic data: [From the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin]

QUINN, E(LEANOR) BAKER

       One Man’s Muddle (n.) Heinemann 1936. Macmillan, 1937. [James Strange]
       The Dead Harm No One (n.) Heinemann 1938.    (**)
       Death Is a Restless Sleeper (n.) Heinemann 1940. Mystery House, 1941. [James Strange]

(**) While it seems likely that he is, it is not known whether James Strange is in this book or not.

    Peeking ahead at next November’s schedule, I found a bonanza of “Falcon” movies coming up on Turner Classic Movies. Synchronize your calendars!

      Friday November 20

6:00 AM Gay Falcon, The (1942)
   A society sleuth tries to break up an insurance scam. Cast: George Sanders, Wendy Barrie, Gladys Cooper. Dir: Irving Reis. BW-67 mins, TV-G, CC

7:15 AM Date With The Falcon, A (1941)
   The gentleman detective postpones his wedding to find a cache of stolen diamonds. Cast: George Sanders, Wendy Barrie, James Gleason. Dir: Irving Reis. BW-63 mins, TV-G

8:30 AM Falcon Takes Over, The (1942)
   A society sleuth and a lady reporter try to track down a murderous thug’s lost girlfriend. Cast: George Sanders, Lynn Bari, Ward Bond. Dir: Irving Reis. BW-63 mins, TV-G

9:45 AM Falcon’s Brother, The (1942)
   A gentlemanly detective calls on his brother to help him stop the Nazis from assassinating a key diplomat. Cast: George Sanders, Tom Conway, Jane Randolph. Dir: Stanley Logan. BW-63 mins, TV-G. [Screenplay by Craig Rice and Stuart Palmer.]

11:00 AM Falcon Strikes Back, The (1943)
   A society sleuth is framed for murder by criminals running a war-bond racket. Cast: Tom Conway, Harriet Hilliard, Edgar Kennedy. Dir: Edward Dmytryk. BW-66 mins, TV-G

12:15 PM Falcon In Danger, The (1943)
   A society sleuth tracks a lost plane carrying $100,000. Cast: Tom Conway, Jean Brooks, Elaine Shepard. Dir: William Clemens. BW-70 mins, TV-G

1:30 PM Falcon And The Co-Eds, The (1944)
   A society sleuth investigates murder at a girls’ school. Cast: Tom Conway, Jean Brooks, Isabel Jewell. Dir: William Clemens. BW-68 mins, TV-G

2:45 PM Falcon Out West, The (1944)
   A society sleuth turns cowboy to investigate a Texas murder. Cast: Tom Conway, Carole Gallagher, Barbara Hale. Dir: William Clemens. BW-64 mins.

4:00 PM Falcon In Mexico, The (1944)
   A society sleuth travels South of the border to investigate an art dealer’s murder. Cast: Tom Conway, Mona Maris, Martha MacVicar. Dir: William Berke. BW-70 mins, TV-G

5:15 PM Falcon In Hollywood, The (1944)
   A society sleuth tours the movie capital, where he uncovers an actor’s murder. Cast: Tom Conway, Barbara Hale, Sheldon Leonard. Dir: Gordon Douglas. BW-67 mins, TV-G, CC

6:30 PM Falcon In San Francisco, The (1945)
   A society sleuth enlists a little girl’s help in nabbing a mob of silk smugglers. Cast: Tom Conway, Rita Corday, Sharyn Moffett. Dir: Joseph H. Lewis. BW-66 mins, TV-G.

             —

   These, of course, have played many times over on TCM, but if you’ve never seen or taped them before, here’s a great chance to obtain them all at once. There are two more in which Conway appeared, followed by three starring John Calvert. You may have to hunt a while on the collector’s market for some or all of these.

THE FALCON’S ALIBI. (1946, RKO) Tom Conway, Elisha Cook, Jr.

THE FALCON’S ADVENTURE. (1946, RKO) Tom Conway.

THE DEVIL’S CARGO. (1948, Film Classics) John Calvert, Rochelle Hudson, Roscoe Karns, Lyle Talbot, Tom Kennedy, Theodore Van Eltz, Paul Regan

APPOINTMENT WITH MURDER. (1948, Film Classics) John Calvert, Catherine Craig, Lyle Talbot, Jack Reitzzen, Peter Brocco

SEARCH FOR DANGER. (1949, Film Classics) John Calvert, Albert Dekker, Myrna Dell, Douglas Fowley, Ben Welden

DIPLOMAT – Murder in the State Department. Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, US, hardcover, 1930.

   John Franklin Carter wrote books on a variety of subjects under several pen names, including Unofficial Observer and Jay Franklin. But when in 1930 he began a series of detective novels about a diplomat-detective, Dennis Tyler, he chose his pen name, Diplomat, with malice aforethought.

   Many of the titles of his books about Tyler suggest a political setting — for example, in addition to the above, Carter wrote Murder in the Embassy, The Corpse on the White House Lawn, Death in the Senate, and Slow Death at Geneva.

   Carter’s interest in politics and diplomacy is also apparent in his nonfiction books under the Jay Franklin pseudonym — for example, he wrote a biography of La Guardia.

   A recent reading of Murder in the State Department suggested that Carter’s detective fiction might be worthy of rediscovery. Undersecretary Harrison Howard is found with a steel filing spike in his chest, and Dennis Tyler, Chief of the Bureau of Current Political Intelligence, jauntily arrives on the scene. Tyler, who affects a Harvard accent and abundant sassy repartee (for which I must confess a weakness), puts his career on the line in his effort to solve the crime.

   The case involves, among other things, an undersecretary seen flying down the nocturnal halls of the State Department with no visible means of support, the latest discovery by the Chemical Warfare Service, and finally a sinister plot by a national pacifist leader to take over the country (shades of Fu Manchu!).

   The book is weakened by an unsatisfying ending, but the author’s style is brisk and the action incessant.

   As long as credibility is not required, Murder in the State Department makes very entertaining reading and I look forward to investigating other Diplomat books in my library.

[UPDATE] 08-12-09.   From the second issue of TAD [January 1968] is the following News Note, signed by AJH  [Al Hubin] —

    In the first issue of The Armchair Detective a novel by John Franklin Carter was reviewed, and it was suggested that Carter’s detective fiction, written in the 1930′ s under the pseudonym Diplomat, was worthy of rediscovery. Mr. Carter died November 27 at the age of 70, and thanks to Charles Shibuk I am in possession of obituary notices from the New York Times and the New York Post.

   Mr. Carter was born in 1897, one of a family of 7 children of Rev. John Franklin Carter, an Episcopal clergyman, and his wite. Weakened health due to a serious childhood infection caused him to learn to write “in self-defense against a world which is, among children at least, thoroughly contemptuous of weaklings.”

   He was occupied in various phases of newspaper work during his twenties, and then, beginning in 1928 when he moved to Washington, concerned himself with politics and government service for the rest of his lite. He held posts in the Departments of State and Agriculture, and commented on political life on radio programs and in newspaper columns for many years. Most of his more than 30 books dealt with politics, but it is interesting to note that although considerable space was devoted in the newspapers (especially the Times, on whose staff Carter served for some 5 years) and in Time Magazine to his obituary none of these publications said one word about his detective fiction.

WHITMAN CHAMBERS – Dead Men Leave No Fingerprints.

Doubleday, hardcover, 1935. Hardcover reprint: Caxton House, 1939. Paperback reprint: Detective Novel Classic #28, circa 1943.

   Danish film star and sexpot Hilda Haan hires private detective Stanton Lake to get her out of the clutches of a man who threatens to tell her studio about her “moral turpitude” unless she marries him. Lake says he’ll get her out of the mess if he has to kill the man to do it.

   That turns out to be unnecessary. Someone else does the job for him while preparations are being made for a seance at the residence of Rufus Raybourne, a real-estate magnate now suffering hard times. The victim is killed with a poker that has on it the fingerprints of an enemy of Raybourne’s.

   Yet this enemy died more than a year earlier in prison. Or did he? Lake plays ghoul and finds an empty grave. Two more murders take place. After each one, the same fingerprints are found.

   An unusual motive, a cunning — well, he or she would have been if the killings hadn’t continued once Lake’s identity was revealed — murderer, and an interesting character in Lake.

   The writing level is the ’30s standard: Passable.

R. D. ROSEN – Strike Three, You’re Dead. Walker, 1984. Signet, pb, 1986. Walker, trade pb, 2001.

   Harvey Blissberg, the hero of Strike Three, You’re Dead, is a baseball player recently traded from the Boston Red Sox to a new American League expansion team, the Providence Jewels.

   Called “Professor” by his younger teammates for his reading habits and off-diamond attire, Blissberg is stumped for a motive to the murder of his roommate, Rudy, and begins looking for the murderer out of a combination of curiosity and guilt.

   Discouraged by management, teammates, and police, Blissberg gets support from his girlfriend, a local TV sportscaster, and his brother, a baseball fanatic, as he tries to determine why his best friend on the team wound up drowned in the team whirlpool. His quest for the murderer takes on a new urgency when he, too, becomes a target.

   Baseball statisticians will have a very slight edge in solving the murder, but such avidity is not needed. Rosen’s clever plotting, quick wit, and subtle understatement makes this book both entertaining and easy to read.

   In the second book in this series, Fadeaway (1985), Blissberg has retired to become a professional detective and is called in to solve the murder of two NBA basketball stars.

   Strike Three, You’re Dead was named one of the seven best mysteries of the year by the New York Times, and won a Best First Novel Edgar. Rosen is also the author of two nonfiction books and numerous essays, criticisms, and articles on sports and humor.

         ———
   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.

RICHARD ROSEN – Fadeaway. Harper & Row, 1986. Paperback reprint: Onyx, July 1989.

   Robert B. Parker may not be the best private eye writer of the eighties but surely he’s the most influential, as witness the horde of newcomers to the field who have used his pretentious, wildly overrated, consistently best-selling series about the Boston PI Spenser as their takeoff point.

   Richard Rosen, winner of the Mystery Writers of America Edgar award for the best first crime novel of 1985, deserves another prize for. using Parker most creatively.

   The main character both in Fadeaway and in Rosen’s prizewinning Strike Three You’re Dead is a sort of Jewish Spenser, at least in the sense that each man is a smart-mouthed jock from Boston with a liberated live-in lady and a snootful of angst.

   Harvey Blissberg has turned hesitantly to the PI game after the early end of his career as a major-league outfielder, but he’s not very good at his new line of work and all his cases seem to come to him from his sports world connections. In Fadeaway he’s hired simultaneously by the Boston Celtics and the Washington Bullets to find out why a basketball star from each team vanished from Logan Airport within forty-eight hours of one another.

   When both players are found shot to death, Harvey follows the trail into the seamy world of college sports recruiting, and his hunch that the murders are tied in with the seven-year-old “accidental” death of a high school basketball champ in a dark bus tunnel stirs up the usual hornet’s nest of corruption.

   If Ross Macdonald had written this book, the plot would have been so convoluted you’d need a chart to sort out who did what to whom. Rosen goes to the opposite extreme, leaving out complexity and surprise almost entirely.

   If Parker had written the book, there would have been a violent confrontation in every chapter. Rosen avoids action scenes almost entirely, too. But he’s an excellent stylist, with the ability to describe an American city (in this case Providence, Rhode Island) and the inner world of desperately lonely people as well as any PI novelist now at work.

   What sets Rosen apart from everyone else in the field, however, is his gift for shifting without effort from the film noir gear into another mode entirely. Here for example is Harvey anguishing over the case with his girlfriend, Mickey:

   Jock though he’s supposed to be, Harvey is the only PI in the literature who cries out to be played by Woody Allen.

    Fadeaway is crammed with scenes which are not only hilarious in their own right, but marvelous as parodies of the tiresome philosophic shticks in the Spenser novels. It’s light on action and complexity, but the first-rate dialogue and characterizations and the rich anti-Parker subtext make this one a joy to read.

    Bibliography — Expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

ROSEN, R(ichard) D(ean), 1949- . SC: Harvey Blissberg, in all titles.

      Strike Three You’re Dead. Walker, hc, 1984. Signet, pb, 1986. Walker, trade pb, 2001.

      Fadeaway. Harper & Row, hc, 1986; Onyx, pb, 1989.

      Saturday Night Dead. Viking, hc, 1988; Onyx, pb, 1989.

      World of Hurt. Walker, hc, 1994.

      Dead Ball. Walker, hc, 2001.

BRUCE ALEXANDER – Rules of Engagement.

Berkley, paperback; 1st printing, February 2006. Hardcover edition: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, March 2005.

   This is the first of Bruce Alexander’s “Sir John Fielding” detective novels that I’ve read, and no, I didn’t realize it until after I’d picked it out to read that this is also the last one that Alexander ever wrote. And as perhaps you already knew, Bruce Alexander was the pen name of Bruce Cook, 1932-2003, who wrote eleven mysteries under that name. Under his own name, he had five earlier ones, four of them with Antonio “Chico” Cervantes as the leading character.

   Now it gets interesting. (I’ll get back to Antonio “Chico” Cervantes in a minute.) Cook also was at least in part responsible for writing William J. Coughlin’s last book after he (Coughlin) died, The Judgment (St. Martin’s, 1997). I’m quoting from Al Hubin in Crime Fiction IV now: “Apparently written by Bruce Cook from a beginning by Coughlin, then finished and polished by widow Ruth Coughlin.”

   The reason is that this is interesting, is that this is precisely how Rules of Engagement got written. From the back cover, and quoting again: “He (Bruce Cook) died in 2003, having completed most of Rules of Engagement, and left notes on how the rest of the story unfolded. John Shannon, author of the highly praised Jack Liffey series, most recently Dangerous Games, completed the novel with Bruce’s wife, Joan Alexander.”

   As coincidences go, it would be rather minor, but was it a coincidence? Probably not. The idea was there, and the Bruce Cook and his wife simply carried it out in the same way it had been done before. And as you can easily imagine, there are both pluses and minuses in doing so.

   But before getting into that, and to Sir John Fielding and what the book (and the series) is about, I promised to tell you something about Chico Cervantes. This Thrilling Detective link will tell you more, but perhaps it suffices to say that Cervantes was a Mexican-American ex-LA cop turned private eye whose stomping grounds were (as you probably already guessed) Southern California.

   His four recorded cases, published between 1988 and 1994, did not seem to turn the mystery fiction world on fire, and in fact, only one of the four, the first, Mexican Standoff, was ever published in paperback, the other three only in hardcover.

   For whatever that tells you. In any case (no pun intended) the year the last Cervantes book came out, 1994, was the same year that Blind Justice, the first Sir John Fielding novel appeared. Cook, as Alexander, at the age of 62, had hit the equivalent of pay dirt.

   I’ll append a complete list of the highly popular Fielding books at the end of this review. (I have them all. They are, unfortunately, still in the TBR (To Be Read) portion of the basement.)

   Sir John Fielding, as I hasten now to tell you (at last), was the blind English magistrate who was the real-life founder of London’s first true police force, the Bow Street Runners, in the mid-to-late 1700s.

   What’s interesting about one of Alexander’s Fielding books, An Experiment in Treason, Benjamin Franklin makes an appearance. Unlike Robert Lee Hall’s series of books of the latter’s London adventures, though, in Treason Franklin is a suspect, not the detective, while in Hall’s books, Fielding is only a (relatively) minor character.

   In the books by Bruce Alexander, Fielding’s household and close-knit circle of friends and close acquaintances takes center stage, filled to abundance with family, servants, many of which (if not most) are fictional. Especial note should be made of the narrator of the tales, one Jeremy Proctor, Fielding’s protege with him throughout the series, an orphan taken under his wing as a dogsbody, now in Rules of Engagement all of eighteen and Sir John’s clerk at the Bow Street Court.

   The title comes in part from the fact that Jeremy is engaged to be married to Clarissa Roundtree, the other orphan taken in by the Fieldings: Clarissa as Lady Fielding’s general factotum, and as the book begins, he (Jeremy) is beginning to wonder greatly about his future. (On page 241 there is another context in which “rules of engagement” come into play.)

   The mystery is extremely slight, but of course it needs to be mentioned. It concerns the strange death of Lord Lammermoor, who has recently jumped to his death from a bridge while crossing the Thames alone.

   Several chapters later (or to be precise, in Chapter Three) the case is all but solved when Fielding and his entourage are entertained at the theater by a practitioner of “animal magnetism” and/or “mesmerism.” The only question that remains (to the reader, that is) is who is responsible, and while I cannot reveal his/her name, you will know as soon as he/she enters the story. (Ventriloquy is also an important factor, but my telling you that will neither enlighten you further, or less.)

   One hopes for more, but more there is not, save 200 pages in which a great happens, but very little of any consequence. All in all, what the authors in combination have provided is nothing less than a worthy attempt to tie up some loose ends for the readers who followed the series and the characters from early on — but not all of them (the loose ends, that is). Life happens, and that is what is left for the reader to contemplate. This is one of the aforementioned pluses.

   For someone expecting a detective story with some solid, down-to-earth detective work going on, either Mr. Alexander did not have one in mind, or if he did, neither his wife nor John Shannon were able to build one out of the notes that he left them. This is one of the aforementioned minuses.

   For the record, the pluses outweigh the minuses, but personally, coming in at the end as I did, I left with a feeling of disappointment that I sincerely wished I hadn’t — come in at the end, that is.

   If you’d like to call my verdict “mixed,” you’d certainly be right. I wouldn’t deny it at all.

      The Sir John Fielding novels by Bruce Alexander:

   All were published in hardcover by Putnam and in paperback by Berkley. The dates are of the hardcover editions; the paperback generally appeared a year later.

Blind Justice. 1994.

Murder in Grub Street. 1995.

Watery Grave. 1996.

Person or Persons Unknown. 1997.

Jack, Knave and Fool. 1998.

Death of a Colonial. 1999.

The Color of Death. 2000.

Smuggler’s Moon. 2001.

An Experiment in Treason. 2002.

The Price of Murder. 2003.

Rules of Engagement. 2005.

RUSSELL KIRK – Old House of Fear. Fleet, US, hardcover, 1961. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, October 1961. Paperback reprint: Avon G-1134, 1961. Trade paperback: Eerdmans, April 2007.

   This unblushing Gothick tale by conservative economist Russell Kirk is a grand thriller with echoes of Buchan, Bram Stoker, and Daphne Du Maurier, and contains one of the great villains in the literature, the magnificent Dr. Jackman.

   Hugh Logan, an American lawyer and veteran born in Edinburgh is dispatched by industrialist Duncan MacAskival to purchase his ancestral home on the wild Scottish island of Carnglass. “Old House of Fear, I like the names. You’re to buy Carnglass for me, cliffs and clachans and deer-forest and Old House and all: and price is no object.”

   The MacAskival castle, a gray mass of stone and disparate architecture is known as the Old House of Fear, and in Gaelic, fear or “fir” means man.

   Almost from the minute he sets foot on Carnglass Logan finds himself facing intimations of danger. Lady MacAskival who owns the castle is a tough old bird under the dire influence of the mysterious Dr. Jackman, who has manned the place with IRA thugs and filled the cellars with explosives.

   Jackman, a Marxist, was a torturer for the party during the Spanish Civil War and later did something so horrible in Rumania that he was driven out by his masters:

   Jackman wants the Old House of Fear for himself and the hand of young Mary MacAskival for her money, so he is less than happy when Logan shows up posing as her fiance, a bank teller from Edinburgh, as his only way to get into the armed fortress Jackman has made of the house.

   As Kirk piles incident on incident and raises the atmosphere to the highest level, Jackman and his men, led by the soulless killer Royal, are pitted against Logan, Mary, Mac MacAskival the young heir, and a handful of villagers from the far side of the island, with the simple giant Angus, who Jackman has tortured, a question mark in the dangerous game that is rapidly coming to a head.

   Meanwhile Kirk draws the characters in three dimensions, none of them existing only for the purpose of the book, but all fully drawn characters, none more so than Jackman, a man who has come to relish evil:

   Kirk was well known for his tales of the supernatural, but in the true tradition of the gothic, Old House of Fear deals with human evil however much the setting intimates dark forces operating just beyond the reach of man. Romantic and powerful, like its gothic ancestors the weather and setting play a powerful role in the atmosphere of the tale:

   Like Manderlay in Du Maurier or Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, the Old House itself becomes a character, at once malignant and threatening and yet beautiful and welcoming depending on whose eyes it is seen from, and in the final conflict open combat breaks out, and Jackman meets his fate on the stormy wind swept cliffs of Carnglass and the fate and future of the Old House is decided.

   Kirk is an extremely literate writer but never sacrifices mood or suspense for that literacy. Old House of Fear is a thriller of the first water, a novel of suspense, adventure, and romance in the grand manner, and one of the best novels of its kind ever written, its hauntings ripped from the human psyche and the depths of the human soul rather than the rarified atmosphere of the supernatural.

   Read it, but be warned, once you have you’ll want to find all of Kirk’s supernatural tales. He is a wonderful writer, and Old House of Fear a once in a lifetime read, published in its time to rave reviews and now a classic of the form.

   As Kirk himself writes in the dedication Old House of Fear is, “a Gothick tale, in unblushing line of direct descent from The Castle of Otranto …” Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, Monk Lewis, Mary Shelly, and Poe would all welcome this one with open arms. It is indeed an unblushing ‘Gothick’ tale as well as a first class thriller, suspense novel, adventure story, and mystery.

THE SHANGHAI GESTURE. United Artists, 1941. Gene Tierney, Walter Huston, Victor Mature, Ona Munson, Phyllis Brooks, Albert Bassermann, Maria Ouspenskaya, Eric Blore, Marcel Dalia. Screenplay (by von Sternberg and three other writers) from a play of the same name by John Colton (produced in New York in 1926). Cinematography by Paul Ivana. Mural in Mother Gin Sling’s apartment by Keye Luke. Director: Josef von Sternberg. Shown at Cinevent 41, Columbus OH, May 2009.

   If Dante’s Inferno [reviewed here ] literally takes the viewer into the various levels of Hell where damned souls writhe in eternal agony, von Sternberg’s mesmerizing drama set in a gambling casino in Shanghai’s Red Light district takes a metaphorical spin on the nether region that is infinitely more terrifying than the silent film’s version.

   Colton, author of the play on which the film was based, was also the author of Miss Sadie Thompson, which first made it to the screen in 1928 as Rain.

   If the earlier play posed problems for the Hollywood censors in the pre-code era, The Shanghai Gesture was even more problematic, with a central character (Mother Goddam) the proprietor of a notorious establishment, who introduces her daughter (Poppy) to drugs and prostitution as revenge on her English father.

   The result was considered unfilmable in a more lenient Hollywood, and only made it to the screen with a much watered down but still pungent screenplay years after the installation of the restrictive Production Code.

   Ona Munson, who memorably played Belle Watley, an Atlanta madam, in Gone with the Wind, was persuaded with great difficulty by the director to take on a part that, even with the prostitution element eliminated, could not help but remind audiences of her celebrated role.

   Von Sternberg surrounded the newly christened Mother Gin Sling with a first-rate cast, with her daughter played by the young, promising Gene Tierney, her ex-husband by the notable Walter Huston, and a supporting cast of seasoned character actors, some playing against type (as in the case of Eric Blore), others (like Victor Mature, early in his career) etching indelible portraits of the employees and habitues of the gambling house.

   The movie has languished in obscurity in recent years, but with a fair amount of notoriety connected to it. The overhead shots of the gambling den that spirals down like steps toward Hell are brilliantly realized, while the great scene at Mother Gin Sling’s climactic dinner party beginning as an elegantly orchestrated party of revenge, quickly unravels as the revelation of old truths, long buried, leads to the violent, tragic conclusion of this disturbing film.

         

MARGERY ALLINGHAM – Death of a Ghost. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1934. Previously published in the UK by William Heinemann, hc, 1934. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and paperback, including Penguin #503, pb,1942, in dust jacket; Penguin C379, pb, 6th pr., 1966; Bantam, pb, 5th pr., 1989 (all shown).

   Margery Allingham was one of the three major Englishwomen mystery writers of the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction” — the other two, of course, being Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.

   High literary quality marks her books, some of which have been compared to mainstream novels. Her plots are varied and interesting, portraying such subcultures of the time as the publishing industry, high-fashion houses, the world of the theater, and the life of the aesthete.

   Allingham’s plots are not based on razor-sharp surprises, as Christie’s are, but rather are known for their eccentricity. Unlike Sayers, Allingham produced a literate story without precious excesses, without intellectual showing off. Her characters are human, if upper class, and even the minor ones are fully drawn.

   Allingham’s consummate creation is the suave sleuth Albert Campion. He comes with a mysterious background of royalty, or at least nobility, but he is “an amateur who never used his real name and title.” Campion confronts international criminal conspiracies, greedy friends and relations, overweening egos turned to madness, and spy threats against his beloved England.

   Ultimately, though, Allingham’s best books depend on the investigation and deduction of human motives and psychology for their solutions. Very early tales present Albert Campion as the action-adventurer, popular at that time. In Death of a Ghost, he becomes more the suave dilettante who senses the subtle psychology in suspense situations.

   Campion is notable for having no outstanding eccentricities (in contrast to many other Golden Age detectives). He has a vacant face with horn-rimmed spectacles that give him “owlish gravity.” A sign of deep emotion is his taking off his glasses.

   In this novel the plot concerns an odd will left by an artist who died years before. The artist, John Lafeadio, considered himself the foremost painter of his age. He left behind a tangled menage of wife, Belle; family; and sycophants. The will provides that each year a painting be taken from a secret cache and exhibited at an exclusive art show in order to maintain Lafcadio’s artistic immortality.

   During the current exhibit, the lights fail, and when they’re turned back on, another painter is found a corpse. A short time later, another minor member of the menage is also killed.

   Campion wades through the art group’s murky crosscurrents of emotion and suspicion, exploring alibis and evasions. The police are represented by Inspector Stanislaus Oates, “the shrewdest and at the same time most kindly member of the Yard.”

   Official and amateur come to agree on the killer, but getting the proof means Campion must face a final, ingenious attempt on his own life.

         ———
   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.