MARGERY ALLINGHAM — Mr Campion and Others. Penguin, paperback, 1950. Previously published in hardcover by William Heinemann (UK) with slightly differing contents. Reprinted many times.

    Some mystery authors have made their detectives as eccentric as possible (and sometimes beyond possibility) — Sherlock Holmes and Sir Henry Merrivale come immediately to mind — while other authors have gone entirely the other way, e.g., Father Brown. With Albert Campion, Margery Allingham seems deliberately to have created a character to rival Chesterton’s sleuth in the area of non-descriptness but still possessing exceptional intelligence.

    Albert Campion seems amphibious, equally at home among the very rich and the riffraff; like Clark Kent he moves among the throng, always ready to hop into the nearest phone booth when an emergency arises.

    His character is also comparable to certain fish species: Most of the time he is a remora, cruising with the sharks and on the lookout for whatever scraps of information or acquaintances that could prove useful in future enquiries; very seldom, he is himself a shark, when he must force a resolution to an issue of great personal or social importance. (In only one of the stories in this collection is he seen with a gun, and even then he doesn’t use it.)

    To his many high society friends, he is instantly trustworthy; even a person who has just met him feels that way: “… a great many people do take you into their confidence, I believe?” To which he responds: “I’m as secret as the grave.”

    Margery Allingham’s style, at least in these stories, is at or above average for the period (and considerably above average for today). She is literate without being literary, in the pejorative sense of that word.

    In contrast with Mr. Campion, many of her minor characters are well described and memorable; her powers of description of places frequently find expression in some passages of what these days is referred to as “fine writing,” but they do not in any way impede the narrative flow — rather, they enhance the story by being relevant to the action.

I. “The Widow” (The Strand, April 1937)

    It begins: “The second prettiest girl in Mayfair was thanking Superintendent Stanislaus Oates for the recovery of her diamond bracelet and the ring with the square-cut emerald in it, and Mr. Campion, who had accompanied her to the ceremony, was admiring her technique.”

    Funny how one thing can lead to another, isn’t it? First, Mr. Campion is using his refined palate to sample rare wines on behalf of his godson; then he is enlisted by Mr. Thistledown, a venerable vintner, to travel incognito to a “cold and sleepy village” on the Norfolk coast to watch “an experiment” being given by a man of “odd, Mephistophelean appearance.”

    Next, after witnessing what must be a scientific miracle, Campion twigs on to a brilliant scam; and, in so doing, he also solves the subsidiary mystery of a newspaper ad seeking the services of a children’s entertainer.

    In vino veritas, indeed! But there is one unresolved mystery: If Miss Peterhouse-Vaughn is the second prettiest girl in Mayfair, then who is the first?

II. “The Name on the Wrapper” (The Strand, March 1938;  EQMM, November 1947)

    It begins: “Mr. Albert Campion was one of those useful if at times exasperating people who remain interested in the world in general at three o’clock on a chilly winter’s morning. When he saw the overturned car, dark and unattended by the grass verge, therefore, he pulled up his own saloon and climbed out on to the road, whose frosty surface was glistening like a thousand diamonds.”

    Returning home from a dinner party, Mr. Campion comes across the aforementioned automobile and a jewel-encrusted ring, not realizing he has encountered the aftermath of a major crime perpetrated among the very rich set. Superintendent Oates is on the case, and he calls for Campion; after all, he says, “You’re our Society expert.”

    So, after some trolling among the haut monde, the “expert” snags a reluctant debutante whose appealing lack of guile eventually leads him to the thief, a Raffles wannabe with the skills, but not the good luck, to pull it off. The search is not without its rigors for Campion, however:

    “He paused. The alarm had died out of her eyes and she even looked wanly amused. He was relieved. Idiotic conversation, although invaluable, was not a luxury which he often permitted himself now that the thirty-five-year-old landmark was passed.”

III. “The Hat Trick” (The Strand, October 1938;   EQMM, January 1946 as “The Magic Hat”)

    It begins: “Mr. Campion received the hat as a sentimental tribute. Mrs. Wynyard pressed it into his hand at her farewell party at the Braganza on the night before she sailed home to New York.”

    Peter Herrick is gobsmacked with Prudence Burns, and she is inclined to reciprocate; but then there is Norman Whitman, whose influence with Prudence’s father is enormous and who is much too willing to serve as Mr. Burns’ entree into the glittering world of high society.

    Furthermore, consider Mr. Campion’s silly little hat which, to his surprise, exercises an influence on Mr. Burns and restaurant waiters that is all out of proportion to its apparent charm. It isn’t long before Campion must admit: “… I’m afraid we’ve stumbled on the great forefather of all confidence tricks.”

IV. “The Question Mark” (The Strand, January 1938;  EQMM, Fall 1941)

    It begins: “When Miss Chloe Pleyell became engaged to Sir Matthew Pearing, K.C., Mr. Albert Campion crossed her name off his private list entitled ‘Elegant Young Persons Whom I Ought to Take to Lunch’ and wrote it in neatly at the foot of his ‘People I Must Send Christmas Cards to’ folder.”

    Chloe Pleyell — “She was beautiful and she was charming and at heart a dear, he reflected, but unfortunately hardly safe out” — inadvertently creates something of a dust-up when she hires a “private enquiry agent” to “enquire” about her fiance; what he turns up could put somebody in prison, if the physical evidence is to be believed.

    Mr. Campion comes to the rescue and nails a master thief (“The Question Mark”) when he sorts out “161” from “191.”

V. “The Old Man in the Window” (The Strand, October 1936)

    It begins: “Newly appointed Superintendent Stanislaus Oates was by no means intoxicated, but he was cheerful, as became a man celebrating an important advance in a distinguished career, and Mr. Campion, who sat opposite him at the small table in the corner of the chop-house, surveyed the change in his usually taciturn friend with interest.”

    Mr. Campion and the new superintendent are at dinner one evening and together witness the usual results of a love triangle, as Denise Warren breaks up with her fiance, Arthur March, when she arrives with Rupert Fielding, a young surgeon. Six weeks later a very senior member of Campion’s club, the Junior Greys, is found dead in his usual chair at that establishment.

    Are the two events somehow related? Indeed, they are: “… where’s the crime?” asks Oates; “Well, it’s murder, you know,” replies Campion as they stand over the corpse. But more eyebrows than just Mr. Campion’s are raised when the victim decides to come back from the dead ….

VI. “The White Elephant” (The Strand, August 1936)

    It begins: “Mr. Campion, piloting his companion through the crowded courtyard at Burlington House, became aware of the old lady in the Daimler, partly because her chauffeur almost ran over him and partly because she gave him a stare of such vigorous and personal disapproval that he felt she must either know him very well indeed or have mistaken him for someone else entirely.”

    Chief Detective-Inspector Stanislaus Oates tells Campion, “Some society bit is mixed up in this somewhere, I’m sure of it.” The “society bit” to whom Oates ignorantly refers is Juliet Fysher-Sprigge, a good friend of Mr. Campion; “this” concerns a series of jewel robberies that the police are convinced were pulled off by The Sparrow, “a sleek, handsome chap with an insufferable manner.”

    But surely Lady Florence, Dowager Countess of Marle, “the old lady in the Daimler,” also couldn’t be mixed up in a smuggling ring with her White Elephant Society charity, could she? Before this case is closed, Campion must not only decode the clue of common British Christian names but also survive a shoot out: “A bullet took Mr. Campion’s hat from his head … the darkness was streaked with fire ….”

VII. “The Frenchman’s Gloves” (The Strand July 1938;  EQMM August 1947 as “The Case of the Frenchman’s Gloves”)

    It begins: “Mr. Albert Campion was considering the hundred and fifteenth unintelligible oil painting under the muslin-shaded lights of the Excelsior Gallery’s stuffiest room, and wondered if it was honest reaction or merely age which made him yearn for an occasional pair of gluey-eyed, human-faced dogs by old Mr. Landseer. A pathetic sigh at his shoulder recalled him to his duty as a nursemaid. He glanced at Felicity apologetically.”

    What if Shakespeare had had old Capulet, Juliet’s father, go missing at the end of Act I of his famous play? There is certainly friction between this Capulet (M. Edmond Gerard of Vaux, France) and these Montagues (the Roundels of Cornwall) when Madeleine Gerard and Henry Roundel express a desire to wed, so a conciliatory luncheon is arranged; but when the elder Gerard, a dealer in precious stones and a man renowned for his reclusiveness, checks into his London hotel, it’s virtually the last anyone sees of him — except, that is, for the visit he pays to a branch office to commune with some rubies…

    Mr. Campion and Superintendent Oates smash a jewelry theft ring when Campion tumbles to the significance of one glove being dirty while the other is clean — and immeasurable assistance is provided by The Elephant with two legs.

VIII. “The Longer View” (The Strand, August 1938;   EQMM, October 1946 as “The Crimson Letters”)

    It begins: “On the day that the entrancing Beatrix Lea married her famous leading man, Mr. Albert Campion took Mr. Lance Feering to re-visit the happy scenes of Mr. Feering’s youth. The expedition was purely remedial.”

    While nosing about an old flat that Lance Feering had lived in during his salad days, Lance and Mr. Campion come across something remarkable: inside a cupboard they find, in six-inch-high crimson letters, the words “O let me out let me out let me out let me out” and a name, “Janey”; Campion discovers that the writing was done in lipstick less than forty-eight hours previously.

    It’s enough to start him on a trail that will ultimately lead to a gang of kidnappers and one “tough” little girl.

IX. “Safe as Houses” (The Strand , January 1940;  EQMM, March 1944)

    It begins: “Mr. Albert Campion came gingerly down the steep staircase of the White Lion Inn at Little Chittering in Sussex with two important queries occupying his mind. One was the comparatively simple question, where was the bar, and the other a more philosophical matter concerning the Blood Tie, or how much need the average man endure for his relations before he is entitled to sneak quietly home to London and go to earth in his club?”

    For Mr. Campion it seems to be just a wild goose chase — no, make that a wild peacock chase. His formidable Great Aunt Charlotte is convinced that an interloper has invaded her sanctum, her drawing-room, and left unmistakable traces of his incursion: “There was the mark of a glass on my walnut lowboy,” she said at last, her voice dropping at the enormity of the crime. “An odious white ring; I saw it at once. Then there was the cigarette ash in the coal scuttle and of course the notepaper…” — notepaper inscribed with an address: “Grey Peacocks, Little Chittering.”

    So here he is, one hundred and forty miles from home; but the locals have never heard of a house called the Grey Peacocks, and the investigation is going nowhere when Mr. Campion encounters “one of the prettiest girls he had ever seen in a long and by no means misspent youth” who is also looking for the same mythical residence — and isn’t that enough of a reason to revive Campion’s flagging interest in this seemingly trivial and tiresome mystery?

    For not only is there more than meets the eye in it, but also considerably less.

X. “The Definite Article” (The Strand, October 1937;  EQMM, November 1942)

    It begins: “‘My dear man,’ said Old Lady Laradine, her remarkable voice penetrating the roar of the Bond Street traffic with easy mastery, ‘don’t you think you’re going to get away from me once I’ve settled down to a gossip. Come back here at once. Dorothea has got her girl safely engaged to Lord Petering, I see. You know him, don’t you? Tell me, do you approve?'”

    Mr. Campion has scarcely evaded gossipy Old Lady Laradine when he falls into the clutches of Superintendent Oates. A young New York socialite has apparently committed suicide, and the American feds think her blackmailer — if indeed she was being blackmailed — could be in England.

    “I’ll tell ’em I’ve put a Society expert on the job,” Oates said, grinning. “That’ll please ’em and keep ’em quiet for a bit. There you are. You came in here looking for something to do and now you’ve got it. There’s a little miracle for you. Pull that off.”

    Oh, Campion pulls off the little miracle, all right; but first he must endure another harrowing encounter with Lady Laradine, divine the actions of a sinister psychometrist, and correctly explain the absence of one of the smallest words in the English language — the definite article.

XI. “The Meaning of the Act” (The Strand, September 1939;  EQMM, May 1945)

    It begins: “‘Trivial, vulgar, pettifogging, puerile, footling. At times even dirty,’ said Lance Feering, taking up his glass. ‘I don’t want to be hypercritical old boy, but that’s how I see this life of yours. It repels me. My stomach turns at it. I gag … You see what I mean?'”

    “‘The light is filtering through,’ agreed Mr. Albert Campion affably, as he flattened himself against the ornate tiles behind him. ‘Criminology does not appeal to you tonight.'”

    Marguerite Tiffin is concerned about her septuagenarian father, Dr. Clement Tiffin, “a distinguished bird, you know … a recluse, a famous man, an Egyptologist of world renown.” So when he starts “sneaking out of the house like an adolescent and trotting off to music halls alone, all up and down the country, performance after performance,” she could be forgiven for thinking that he’s at long last entered his dotage.

    She prevails on her good friend Lance Feering, who in turn prevails on his good friend Mr. Campion. Soon the old professor is assaulted — but why would someone object so violently to an old guy ogling an exotic dancer doing her performance on a public stage?

    Campion finally comes to understand why Dr. Tiffin’s name reminds him of crossword puzzles (it has to do with Room OB 40, naturally); paradoxically, Mr. Campion has far less difficulty understanding a man who says things like, “I caught a shice and did a carpet in the spring. Had to come to town without a coal. But a denar here and a denar there soon mounts up, you know, and I’m in clover. By the way, this is my monkery, so who’s your party?”

XII. “A Matter of Form” (The Strand , May 1940;  EQMM, January 1945)

    It begins: “‘The trouble with crime to-day,’ remarked Superintendent Stanislaus Oates seriously, ‘is that one almost gets too much of it, if you see what I mean.’

    “‘Absolutely,’ murmured his companion with solemn, not to say owlish, gravity. ‘The word you’re searching for is “common,” isn’t it?'”

    Brian Green is enamored of Miss Susan Chad; Susan, in turn, is enamored of brains — something, poor child, she seems bereft of. Small wonder she becomes the victim of a criminal who, in Mr. Campion’s words, has “more brains than average”, a thief who, with a little more self-control and energy, could prove unstoppable — but the frog who would a-wooing go should really beware of the fine fat duck with a set of handcuffs ….

XIII. “The Danger Point” (The Strand, June 1937;  EQMM, May 1948)

    It begins: “Mr. Albert Campion glanced round the dinner table with the very fashionable if somewhat disconcerting mirror top and wondering vaguely why he had been asked, and afterwards, a little wistfully, why he had come.”

    Mr. Campion attends a posh dinner party attended by the brother of an old friend, Geoffrey Painter-Dell; by a young lady Geoffrey has warm feelings for, Petronella Andrews; and Leo Seazon, who “was a natural intriguer and had a finger in every pie.”

    At the time, Campion doesn’t recognize what Petronella has hung around her neck: an elegant pearl necklace that had been stolen seven years ago from Geoffrey’s current employer, Lady (Cinderella) Lamartine. The fact that Petronella is in possession of stolen property could result in ruinous scandal for the two young lovers, something that isn’t lost on the treacherous Leo Seazon.

    To further complicate matters, the necklace is stolen yet again; it’s up to Mr. Campion to quash the whole unwholesome affair before Cinderella gets on the ball.

   American Gothic (1974) about a series of murders-for-profit set in Chicago of 1893, is supposedly true, but that don’t make it much good. The characters and cliff-hangings are all fairly standard, and the ending looks to have been swiped from Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). Pretty disappointing from the Master of Menace.

   It was a younger, hungrier and harder-working Bloch who turned out Shooting Star / Terror in the Night (Ace Double, 1958). Night collects Bloch stories, mostly from Manhunt and other mystery mags from the 1950s, dealing with creepy crime and poetic justice, and if the poetry is usually just doggerel, the crime is creepy enough.

   Shooting Star is a more memorable effort, a standard PI yarn, maybe, but done with shrewd insight into the vagaries of Hollywood deal-making and the marketing of fame.

   The protagonist, Sam Clayburn, is a once-successful agent, now down on his luck, eking out a living writing True Crime stories, who gets hired to investigate the scandalous case of a murdered cowboy star (this was written in 1958, remember) whose old movies can’t be sold to TV because his death was linked to Marijuana (1958, remember).

   There’s nothing very remarkable here, nor very creepy either, but Bloch deals the hard-boiled cards very ably, turning up the requisite hands of mysterious warnings, dangerous blondes, shots in the dark, beatings, cops, et al, set in a milieu of nervous celebrities and phony glamour (as opposed to real glamour, I guess).

   Lines like “Keep your nose clean — before someone taps it with a spade.” and “Her pajamas tended to gape. So did I.” — help things along to their predestined end, and left me wishing Bloch had done more in the standard PI line

      Bibliographic Data:

American Gothic. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1974. Paperback reprints: Fawcett Crest P2391, 1975; Tor, 1987; I Books, 2004.

Shooting Star. Ace Double D-265, paperback original, 1958. Hard Case Crime, pb reprint, 2008, bound with Spiderweb.

Terror in the Night and Other Stories. Ace Double D-265, paperback original, 1958. Story collection:
     ● A Good Imagination.  Suspect Detective Stories, January 1956.
     ● Luck Is No Lady.  Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, August 1957.
     ● Man with a Hobby.  Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, March 1957.
     ● The Real Bad Friend.  Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, February 1957.
     ● String of Pearls.  The Saint Detective Magazine, August 1956.
     ● Terror in the Night.  Manhunt, February 1956.
     ● Water’s Edge.  Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, September 1956.

BIG BROWN EYES. Paramount, 1936. Cary Grant, Joan Bennett, Walter Pidgeon, Lloyd Nolan, Alan Baxter. Screenplay: Bert Hanlon. Story: James Edward Grant. Director: Raoul Walsh

   This relatively short comedy mystery is as close to a B-programmer as Cary Grant ever made, and despite being a disposable example of the fast-paced fast-talking comedy mystery of the era, is well worth seeing.

   Mildly screwball and played much in the vein of the “Thin Man” films, this is a minor film, and until recently hard to find, but there are several points of interest.

   Grant is Danny Barr a detective sergeant whose girl friend Eve (Bennett) is a manicurist with a nose for news. As the movie opens Danny is in pursuit of gangster Russ Cortig (Nolan) who heads a gang of jewel thieves and who fired a stray shot in a police chase that killed an infant. A bit grim for one of these ‘light’ romantic crime comedies, but fortunately played for as little pathos as possible.

   Eve gets her dream job on a newspaper, Cortig gets off thanks to a slick lawyer, and Danny quits the force and turns private eye to get Cortig on his own.

   Meanwhile the wise cracks spark like fireworks and the pace and patter never falter long enough to ask any serious questions.

   Eve leaves her dream job when her paper turns on Danny and goes back to her manicurist job, and it’s there she stumbles on the clue that turns the whole thing upside down. We cut to the chase and Grant closes in on Cortig and his gang for the big finale and the final clench.

   This sort of thing lives or dies on the capability of the cast, and Grant and Bennett are more than capable of the kind of sparks needed to keep this going.

   This is a slight film, and Bert Hanlon’s script could be better, but the cast and director push through, and the result is worth 77 minutes of your time.

   It’s far from Walsh’s best work, but it’s interesting to see Grant more or less playing a private eye, especially considering Raymond Chandler once suggested he would have been the ideal screen Philip Marlowe. If nothing else it’s interesting to see an early version of Cary in the kind of role he played in films like Notorious and Charade.

   Bennett, Pidgeon, and Nolan are all old pros and a cast of familiar faces rounds out the rest.

   I suppose you could complain that with that cast it should be better, but instead just enjoy it for what it is, a painless little preview of better things everyone involved would do.

   Nolan in particular is an interesting case, as his career had an unusual arc, playing a mix of villains. heroes, sidekicks, and good cops, fathers, and doctors well into the television age, with hardly a break in his screen appearances.

   If you watch this or any Nolan performance a second time, you might take note of the fact he was profoundly deaf, and as a result pays particular attention to his fellow actors looking for the visual clues to when his character is to act or speak.

   His Michael Shayne series offers an early look at the classic private eye persona on the screen well before the noir era.

   Pidgeon’s notable career was just starting, having come from a major hit on Broadway in the production of Ayn Rand’s tricky Night of January 16th.

   At this point the studios didn’t quite know what to make of him and he was often cast as slick lawyers, reporters, or even gangsters (the role he played in the Rand play). His stalwart leading man stereotype was still a few years ahead of him.

   Bennett had been around since 1929’s Bulldog Drummond with Ronald Colman and would be one of the actresses considered to play Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With The Wind, but her best work would come in film noir, notably in Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street opposite Edward G. Robinson, as one of the screens most ruthless femme fatales. Later, of course, she ended her career with a continuing role on the cult soap opera Dark Shadows.

Note: The big brown eyes of the title are Grant’s, but it’s still an odd title for a mystery, even a comedy mystery.

MARK BURNELL – Chameleon. Avon; reprint paperback, March 2003. HarperCollins hardcover, 2002.

   A spy thriller about a female assassin, the best in the business that there is. She’s Stephanie Patrick a/k/a Stephanie Schneider a/k/a Petra Reuter and quite a few others as the book goes on, and at the beginning of this 400-plus page novel, she’s burned out, in hiding from her British overseers, and (more significantly) from herself.

   This retreat may be caused in large part, by events, in an earlier novel, The Rhythm Section, but since I seem to have missed the book completely, that’s only a strong conjecture.

   But adding to a theory I’m still in the process of developing, there’s something I’ve decided to call the Heinz test. The precise numerical value is still subject to empirical study, and hence revision, but at the present time it goes something like this. If after reading 57 pages, and nothing in the book has happened that makes you really want to keep reading, why should you?

   On page 57 Stephanie is the midst of being involuntarily rehabilitated, being fitted up for service again. And even though the problem she’s being groomed to tackle, something to do with plutonium being smuggled out of somewhere into somewhere, was moderately non-interesting, the reclamation project she’s being forced to undergo was engaging and challenging enough for me to give the book a tentative and conditional go-ahead.

   There’s a re-evaluation stage that comes next, and I’ll call this one the Dalmatian test. When I got to this point, I stopped, and I stalled out again. If I may, I’ll quote for you a paragraph from page 101:

   There’s more immediately following, three or more paragaphs in a similar vein. Information dumps like these occur far too often. Every minor character seems to have his or her own long history, and in turgid detail. Also making the book unappealing is that it’s also difficult to root for an assassin, whether she’s on “our side” or not. A writer like Donald Westlake can pull it off, a lesser author can not.

   (Note to self: It’s obviously time to put Westlake on the to-be-read list, and maybe Eric Ambler too. See below.)

   Ambler’s early heroes were ordinary people, as I recall, caught up in events beyond their control, and managing somehow to still survive. Stephanie has too many contacts, too much money, and even with all the psychological baggage she carries with her, and the love affair that’s all-too-apparently going nowhere, she’s far too competent at what she does for the reader to care.

   Not this reader, at least. Not this time.

          Bibliographic Data:

      The Stephanie Patrick series:

The Rhythm Section. HarperCollins, UK, hc, 1999. HarperCollins, US, hc, 2000; Avon, pb, 2000.

Chameleon. HarperCollins, UK, hc, 2002. HarperCollins, US, hc, 2002; Avon, pb, 2003.

Gemini. HarperCollins, UK, pb, 2003.

The Third Woman. HarperCollins, UK, hc, 2005.

DEAD HEAT ON A MERRY-GO-ROUND. Columbia, 1966. James Coburn, Camilla Sparv, Robert Webber, Aldo Ray, Nina Wayne, Rose Marie, with Harrison Ford (uncredited). Screenwriter-director: Bernard Girard.

   After watching several movies recently in black-and-white, it was quite a pleasure to see one in color, especially one in which the choice of colors used was so expertly done, along with a wide variety of clever camera shots and angles.

   I’ll go out on a limb here, and say that a sizable chunk of the credit goes to cinematographer Lionel Lindon, who received an Oscar for Around the World in Eighty Days and was nominated two other times. Not a shabby resume.

   Other than the camera work, though, I really have to apologize that I can find little else in this movie that’s worthy of a recommendation to you. It’s a bank caper story, one that takes place at the same time a Russian bigwig is landing at the L.A. airport, using up all of the LAPD’s manpower, but the story makes very use of that, nor any of the other plot devices I kept making up in my head as I was watching along.

   The story’s disjointed, there’s no characterization — save (in a way) for the criminal mastermind himself, Eli Kotch, played by James Coburn, and I’ll return to him in a minute — and believe it or not, there’s no suspense, not a single iota of excitement. Not once, not ever.

   Personally, I find James Coburn as an actor to be brashly if not insufferably smug and self-centered. Perhaps not in all of his films, but in Dead Heat, he turns up the arrogance a notch or two. Don’t get me wrong, I can deal with it if the story’s got my attention, but in this movie, it’s James Coburn you get, or nothing at all.

   Maybe I’m just jealous? In this movie, at least, all he has to do is smile, and women simply fall in love (and into bed) with him. Good-looking, most of them — you needn’t ask. Poor Camilla Sparv, as one of his victims, who goes so far as to marry him and unwittingly aid his cause — that of robbing a bank, in case it’s slipped your mind.

   When she’s of no further use to him, she’s gone, all but out of mind and forgotten. And there’s where he makes his first (and only) mistake. Perhaps not in the way you might expect — nor me, either, since as a payoff, when it finally came, I threw up my hands and said, that’s it??

   As for Harrison Ford, and his first film appearance. Blink, and you’ll miss him. I did.

STUART PALMER – Cold Poison. M. S. Mill Co./William Morrow, hardcover, 1954. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club [3-in-1 edition], June 1954. Pyramid R-1040, paperback, 1964.

   Miss Hildegarde Withers is the definitive little-old-lady sleuth upon whom many future spinster, schoolmarm, and librarian sleuths were based.

   Her prominence on the mystery scene was ensured by a 1932 film based on her first adventure, The Penguin Pool Murder, starring Edna May Oliver; and the ensuing fourteen novels and short-story collections in which she is featured brought her even greater recognition.

   Five other films, with a variety of female stars, reinforced the much-loved image of a snoopy, highly intelligent, eccentric woman who helps the police in their investigations.

   In Cold Poison, Miss Withers has semi-retired (from her teaching position) to California, but old habits die hard — especially when the production manager of Miracle-Paradox Studios asks her to investigate the four un-comic, Penguin-decorated valentines promising death that have been received in the cartoon department where Peter Penguin’s Barn Dance is being animated.

   Using the subterfuge of chaperoning Tallyrand, her French poodle who is modeling for the artists, Hildegarde starts by going to see the one practical joker among the suspects. She finds him dead of what turns out to be poison-ivy poison.

   When she calls her old policeman friend, Inspector Oscar Piper, in New York, Oscar realizes that this case could very well tie in with one he couldn’t solve in New York four years before, so he flies to the Coast to assist.

   He and Hildegarde become familiar with the world of cartooning and the various characters and their jobs — which takes up a good part of the book. When all clues are assembled, Hildegarde sets up a final confrontation in the screening room at the studio, even though she lacks the final clue necessary to confirm her suspicions.

   During this showing of the valentines and Hildegarde’s attempt to compare them to sketches by members of the cartooning staff, an attempt is made to poison her coffee — and a little-known fact arises that helps her solve the case.

   This entertaining case was Hildegarde’s next to last; her final appearance was in Miss Withers Makes the Scene (1969), which was begun by Palmer and completed by Fletcher Flora after Palmer’s death.

         ———
   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.

STUART PALMER – The Penguin Pool Murder. Brentano’s, hardcover, 1931. John Long, UK, hc, 1932. US softcover reprints: Bantam, 1986; International Polygonics, 1991; Rue Morgue Press, 2007. Film: RKO, 1932, with Edna May Oliver as Miss Hildegarde Withers and James Gleason as Police Inspector Oscar Piper.

   In this novel, which introduced Hildegarde Withers to the mystery-reading public, Miss Withers takes her grade school class to the New York Aquarium, where one of her students sees a body floating in the penguin pool.

   As soon as the police arrive, Hildegarde begins making suggestions; and after having another teacher take the students back to school, she insists on helping Inspector Oscar Piper by taking notes in shorthand (which she has studied as part of her hoped-for avocation as police assistant). Hildegarde takes time off from teaching to run around New York with Oscar until, with her guidance, the baffling case is solved.

   This is a low-key introduction to one of the genre’s more likable investigative pairs. Hildegarde is typical old-maid schoolteacher: austere, sensible, and entirely out of patience with what she considers the police’s inefficient and bumbling ways.

   Oscar, on the other hand, is your typical cigar-smoking cop: tough on the outside but thoroughly cowed by what he would never admit is a formidable woman. The friendship and affection that develops while they are investigating the strange death among the penguins — with Oscar doing the legwork and Hildegarde supplying insight — is one that continues throughout the thirteen-book series and numerous short stories.

   (Hildegarde acts on the theory that years of dealing with children in the classroom make her an expert on devious behavior patterns in adults, too — and Oscar is eventually forced to admit she is right.)

   At the end of this first adventure, Hildegarde and Oscar go off hand in hand to the marriage-license bureau; however, they must have changed their minds on the way, because they remain platonic — albeit fond — friends throughout the rest of the series.

   Outstanding among the other Hildegarde Withers novels are The Puzzle of the Red Stallion (1936), Miss Withers Regrets (1947), and The Green Ace (1950).

   Hildegarde’s shorter cases can be found in such collections as The Riddles of Hildegarde Withers (1947) and The Monkey Murder, and Other Hildegarde Withers Stories (1950), both of which are digest-size paperback originals published by Mercury Press.

   A later series character, Howie Rock, is an obese, middle-aged former newspaperman who appears in Unhappy Hooligan (1956) and Rook Takes Knight (1968). The first of these novels makes use of Palmer’s unusual background as a circus clown for Ringling Brothers.

         ———
   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.

Bibliographic Update:  Another collection of Miss Withers stories has been published since 1001 Midnights first appeared, and it’s one well worth your attention: Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles, Crippen & Landru, 2002.

STUART PALMER – The Puzzle of the Red Stallion. Bantam, paperback reprint; 1st printing, February 1987. Hardcover edition: Doubleday Crime Club, 1936; hc reprint: Sun Dial Press, date unknown (cover shown). British title: The Puzzle of the Briar Pipe. Collins, 1936. Film: RKO, 1936, as Murder on a Bridle Path (with Helen Broderick as Hildegarde Withers & James Gleason as Police Inspector Oscar Piper).

   I’ve not seen the movie recently, which means not within the past 40 years or more, but the synopsis and the various comments on IMDB makes it sound as though the book was translated into film, amazingly enough, about as closely as it could be done.

   When a young woman riding her horse through New York City’s Central Park is found dead on the ground, it is presumed at first that her horse threw her, but when schoolteacher Miss Withers finds a spot of blood on the horse’s upper leg, even Inspector Piper has to agree that something suspicious has happened.

   And when more clues prove conclusively that the woman was murdered, there no shortage of suspects, including an ex-husband whom she had jailed for non-payment of alimony; her ex’s father; the stablehand whom advances she spurned; another fast-living type named Eddie for which the same goes; the obnoxious stable owner who’d love to get her hands on the titular horse; that lady’s meekish sort of husband; and more.

   This is a good but far from great example of the 1930s concept of the comic crime novel, and no, you should not expect anything resembling good professional procedure on the part of the police and medical experts who are called in. In fact, quite oppositely, both are fairly inept at what they are supposed to do.

   But what can you expect when the police allow an old maid, a spinster, if you will, to follow the head of homicide around on his cases, picking up and stashing away clues at her own discretion, running interference for him when he?s about to go off in wrong directions, and generally being in charge of the case, albeit of course strictly unofficially?

   Comedy is a matter of taste, and in this case, it worked only intermittently for me. The was the sixth novel Hildegarde Withers was in, and by this time I think Stuart Palmer simply fired up the plot and let things cruise along on automatic.

   There is some good detective involving pipes and the people who smoke them, and there is also the reddest of red herrings. You get the good with all of the pleasure of watching an author work up a fine case of deductive reasoning, and you take the bad with a small grimace of my goodness, did he really do that?

   He does, and he did.

DANTE’S INFERNO. Fox Film Corporation Production, 1924. Lawson Butt, Howard Gaye, Ralph Lewis, Pauline Starke, Josef Swickard, Gloria Grey. Written by Edmund Goulding and Cyrus Wood; cinematography by Joseph August. Director: Henry Otto. Shown at Cinevent 41, Columbus OH, May 2009.

   This is one of those moral dramas that were so popular in the silent film era, which seemed to take special delight in appealing to audiences’ interest in the artistically tasteful depiction of sexual excess, this time portrayed in a tour through Dante’s Inferno with the poet guided by his Roman predecessor, Virgil.

   The really interesting part of the film, the guided tour that shows the horrified Dante the sufferings of the damned (with a great deal of what appears to be actual or very well simulated nudity), is embedded in a modern morality play, whose simple treatment of good and evil needn’t detain us here.

   As for the programmers at Cinevent, I suspect they scheduled the film rather less for its artistic merit than as a lead-in to Josef van Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture, a modern take on the eternal question of good and evil that may be less classically graphic but is a much more powerful treatment of the subject.

Editorial Comments: Be watching for Walter’s review of The Shanghai Gesture. It’ll show up here soon.

   And while it isn’t certain that the photo below is from the 1924 silent version of Dante’s Inferno, there is a long sequence in the 1935 film with Spencer Tracy and Claire Trevor which used stock footage from the earlier one. Since that may be where this rather horrific scene came from, I’ll include it on a provisional basis, and delete it later if it shouldn’t be here at all:

            

GEORGE GENTLY. BBC1, 2008. Martin Shaw [Inspector Gently], Lee Ingleby [DS John Bacchus], Simon Hubbard [PC Taylor]. Based on the novels and characters created by Alan Hunter. Screenwriter: Peter Flannery.

   Following the pilot episode “Gently Go Man” (8 April 2007), we recently have had two more stories (each 90 minutes, no adverts) both based on the Gently series by Alan Hunter:

    “The Burning Man” (13 July 2008) based on Gently Where the Roads Go (1962) and “Bomber’s Moon” (20 July 2008) based on the book of the same title (1994).

   The Gently books (of which I’ve only read one, Gently With Love (1974), which didn’t do much for me) ran from 1955 to 1999 and were mainly set in East Anglia, which is where I was brought up. (Indeed I keep meaning to read the second in the series, Gently by The Shore (1956), since it is set in the fictitious “Starmouth” which I believe is the actual Great Yarmouth where I was living in 1956, aged eleven.)

   Hunter himself ran a second hand bookshop in Norwich (some 20 miles away) and may well have been the man who found me a copy of Sax Fohmer’s second Fu Manchu book, The Devil Doctor around that time.

   Anyway back to the series, which is set in the sixties (so we have the strange situation of a 1994 book being set back some 30 years) and in the North East of England (far away from East Anglia in both distance and character).

   I have to say that I didn’t find these stories particularly interesting and the characters of Gently (played by Martin Shaw) and ambitious young sidekick DS John Bacchus (Lee Ingleby) were rather marred for me as they both came over as unlikeable, though I’m not sure that was the intention.

   Overall a disappointing outcome for a series that I was hoping would be better.