W. R. BURNETT – Romelle. Alfred A. Knopf, US, hardcover, 1946. Wm. Heinemann, UK, hc, 1947. Reprint paperback: Bantam #942, US, 1951. French reprint: Rivages Noir n° 36, 1987.

   In a surprising turn from a hard-boiled writer, W. R. Burnett’s Romelle sits firmly in that sub-genre of Romantic Suspense about a pretty young thing swept into marriage by some guy with a dark secret: there’s the requisite mansion, the obligatory hints of some sinister past, the mandatory mid-night rambles in her nightie and all the other standard features of the Gothic.

   Of course, since this is a book by the author of Little Caesar, the heroine is a nightclub chantoosie on the skids and the Byronic hero hides a dark past that includes robbery, blackmail, and a neat bit of kinkiness you don’t often see in gothics or hard-boiled, all served up very ably, thank you, by a writer who knew how to get it down on paper.

   Romelle will never be anyone’s idea of a classic, but it’s a fun read, and if you’re in the mood for off-beat Had-I-but-known’s, this will do nicely.

BAYNARD KENDRICK – The Whistling Hangman. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1937. Robert Hale, UK, hardcover, 1959. Reprint paperback: Dell #113, US, mapback edition, 1946.

   The staff of a large hotel in New York City is preparing for the arrival of an Australian millionaire who hasn’t seen his American family for twenty years. Murder swiftly ensues. Although this is a similar premise to A. A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery (1922), Kendrick’s novel has nothing else in common with Milne’s.

   Baynard Kendrick’s The Whistling Hangman is a largely straightforward whodunit, with a mysterious murder solved by a detective. This pure whodunit structure makes it different from some of Kendrick’s other works, which can combine mystery with thriller elements. The detective here is Kendrick’s famous blind private investigator, Captain Duncan Maclain.

   The murder method in The Whistling Hangman is itself a mystery. It is an example of the howdunit: a crime committed by a mysterious method, one that has to be figured out by the sleuth. Making it more complex than most howdunits: the crime is actually partly witnessed, by two different people. What they see and hear is itself baffling, and does not explain the killing.

   Like several other howdunits, the murder in The Whistling Hangman is a borderline impossible crime. It does not seem to have any plausible explanation.

   Like other Golden Age novels, Kendrick includes several subsidiary mysteries along the way. The focus is kept steadily on the unraveling of these mysteries. The book never stops dead in its tracks for soap opera passages or other filler. Each chapter usually brings new revelations about the tale’s mysterious events. We do learn a lot about the suspects’ personal lives — but this is all carefully interwoven with attempts to uncover those characters’ mysterious pasts.

   I was able to figure out whodunit. But this is because I noticed some (but not all) of the numerous fair play clues to the killer Kendrick sprinkled through the book.

   As in Kendrick’s later The Odor of Violets (1941), there are some Had I But Known (HIBK) elements:

       ● A viewpoint character through much of the novel is a woman, the hotel’s housekeeper.

       ● She has to enter some dark and frightening rooms.

       ● There are secrets about the characters’ past personal lives: also a HIBK staple.

   It is rare for a male author like Kendrick to employ HIBK features. The book is not pure HIBK — the HIBK elements are mixed in with other tones and approaches.

   The Whistling Hangman resembles in its settings Helen Reilly’s The Line-Up (1934). Both are principally set at lavish New York City residential hotels, occupied by wealthy families.

   Both novels also have a secondary setting, which is similar in both books. That setting is a surprise, sprung in later chapters. I have no idea if these common settings are just a coincidence, or a sign of influence. The Whistling Hangman differs in that it concentrates on the hotel and its staff as a whole, while The Line-Up mainly looks at one family’s domicile within the hotel.

   The luxury hotel in The Whistling Hangman and its elite staff anticipate Hugh Pentecost’s Pierre Chambrun series.

   We learn a fair amount about the architecture of the hotel: an example of the Golden Age interest in architecture.

   There are some technological ideas in The Whistling Hangman. Oddly, these involve not so much the murder or mystery plot, as some suspense passages in the finale. In these last chapters, Kendrick explores some of the technological features of a 1937 hotel.

GIL BREWER – The Red Scarf.

Crest 310; paperback reprint, July 1959. Cover art: Robert McGinnis. Hardcover: Mystery House, 1958. First published in Mercury Mystery Book-Magazine, November 1955 (quite likely in shortened form).

   Gil Brewer was a prolific paperback writer in the 50s, 60s and 70s, as well as the author of many stories in Manhunt, Trapped, Guilty, Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine and other magazines in the same time period, including some western pulps. Only two of his books ever came out in hardcover, and this is one of them. (The other was The Angry Dream, also by Mystery House in 1957; reprinted in paperback by Zenith Books in 1958 as The Girl from Hateville.)

   The paperback edition from Crest is only 128 pages long, and even though the print is small, you can read it in less than a couple of hours, easily. In fact, there are times when — I challenge you — your eyes will be going as fast as they can and you’ll be swallowing up whole paragraphs in single gulps — the pace will be that intense.

   There were loads of paperbacks in the 50s in which the male lead falls completely under the spell of a tempting woman and/or a briefcase full of money, and that’s the kind of book this is, exactly. Roy Nichols is the guy who needs the money for his failing Florida motel. Vivian is the girl with a bag full of mob money, tied up with a lucky red scarf. Bess is Roy’s wife, anxious to help, but with Roy not talking and Vivian holed up in cabin number six, she doesn’t know what to think.

   Vivian’s partner in crime, thought dead, isn’t. And the mob is not about to chalk off the missing money as operating expenses, nor can Gant, the local police detective, figure out why Roy seems to be making up answers as he goes along.

   Those are the ingredients. I’m sure you’re thinking you could put a pretty good story together and take over from here, and you probably could. Brewer does an ace-high job of it, though, and you can relax: he beat you to it, and you don’t have to.

   I think the following excerpt, taken from pages 66-67, sums things up very nicely:

   You might start wondering about some of the more unlikely aspects of the story afterward, but I’ll bet you’ll never think of a single one of them while the pages are going. For the price of a mere quarter — then, at the time, a copy of the book will set you back a whole lot more now — what you got was your money’s worth. I kid you not.

CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM EATER. Alllied Artists, 1962. Vincent Price, Linda Ho, Richard Loo, June Kim, Philip Ahn, Victor Sen Yung. Screenplay: Robert Hill, based on the novel Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincy. Director: Albert Zugsmith.

   De Quincy was Thomas de Quincy, an English decadent who is best remembered for his books Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, and Confessions of an Opium Eater, works that graced many a Victorian library shelf and were read under many a blanket by young boys. Not very promising material for a film of high adventure.

   The place is mid-nineteenth century San Francisco’s Chinatown, that dark haven of mystery and low adventure celebrated in a thousand pulp tales (and little relation to the the real thing).

   Into this cauldron of the exotic and erotic swaggers our two-fisted sailor hero, Gilbert de Quincy, a man who knows his way around a brawl, a broad, and a bottle — Vincent Price.

   Did I mention this is a very odd little film?

   Vincent is in Chinatown to find his old friend Richard Loo, but before you can say Kung Pao Chicken, he is up to his neck in the sex-slavery racket of Chinese girls imported from the mainland and sold as concubines and prostitutes to wealthy and ruthless men. Loo is out to smash the racket, and Vincent finds himself reluctantly part of the crusade when a few innocent inquiries nearly get him killed. He’s walked right into a hornet’s nest.

   And what a hornet’s nest. Pretty girls in chains, exotic dances, Oriental finery, secret passages, trap doors, a collection of S&M gear that would make de Sade salivate, a mouthy Chinese midget concubine in a golden cage, and a full blown sex auction beneath the dark and narrow streets of old Chinatown — just a few of the elements of this one. The scenes of Price imprisoned in a bamboo cage suspended off the floor are worth the price of admission alone.

   There are also innocent young women thrown overboard in chains whenever another ship gets too close to the smugglers, bodies washed up on the beach, tong hatchet men, and of course the obligatory psychedelic trip for Vincent on the ‘smoke of dreams.’

   This is sheer melodrama, a barn-burner as the Brits used to call them, with hammy performances, fortune cookie dialogue, and enough angst for a dozen soap operas. It’s nice to see Loo get to play a hero for once, and if you ever wondered how Vincent Price would do in a role better suited to John Wayne, now you know.

   The movie does at times have a nice claustrophobic feel of the alien and the strange about it, and the cheap sets and curious camera work sometimes manage to convey the feeling you are watching this entire movie in someone else’s opium-fevered dream. During one or two of the fights you half expect the entire place to come down like the great earthquake, and whether deliberately or not, Price’s sheer size gives his character a bull in a China shop feel that adds to the alienation and foreignness of his surroundings.

   Confessions is only a little less politically incorrect than say, a Fu Manchu movie, but at least there is some effort made to present some of the Asian characters as people and not just stereotypes. Not much, but some.

   Silly, stupid, and ridiculous as this one is, it is also undeniably fun to watch in the same guilty pleasure way of reading or watching old “Yellow Peril” pulp fiction from yesteryear.

   Price clearly knows the level of material he has to work with here, but to his credit he has some fun with it, and seems to enjoy playing the two-fisted adventurer while fully aware how miscast he is in the role.

   No one embarrasses themselves or their careers in this movie, and in one like this one, that’s almost the best they can hope for.

   That said, after watching this one you might want to go out for Italian or Mexican instead. Too much MSG can give you an awful headache.

   Note:  It’s been a while since I read de Quincy, but I don’t think his opium dreams yielded anything quite like this. Just as well Coleridge, Poe, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire never smoked what this movie is selling.

GIL BREWER – The Girl from Hateville. Zenith ZB-7, paperback reprint, 1958. Originally published in hardcover as The Angry Dream: Mystery House, 1957.

   Originally one of the star-crossed Brewer’s few hardcovers, this one is not set in Florida but rather in a rural community at the cusp of winter. A young man whose father committed suicide after embezzling all the money from the local bank returns home to make some kind of peace.

   He’s threatened by the locals who go so far as to literally nail a dog to the wall to run him out of town, but he perseveres in his attempts to learn the truth. There are several women, an antagonistic father figure, an ambiguous cop, excellent atmosphere and the nagging question of whatever happened to all that money.

   Brewer’s pacing is more measured than usual for a good chunk of the book, but then he speeds up things at the end — did he have a tight deadline? — and he mashes together an ending featuring three elements every Brewer aficionado will recognize: insanity, a bagful of money and fire.

GIL BREWER – Satan Is a Woman. Gold Medal #169; paperback original; 1st printing 1951. Cover art: Barye Phillips.

   This is the perfect title for a Brewer novel and one that sums up the plot of so many Brewer outings.

   Larry Cole’s a young man with difficulties: he runs a barely functioning beachfront bar on Florida’s Gulf Coast and his older brother is doing prison time for murder. Larry would like to find the money to get a high-powered lawyer who could spring his brother, but he doesn’t know how he’ll get the money.

   Enter Joan Taylor, a sweet young thing with a yen for Larry and ideas of her own. Larry falls hard for Joan, but he’s confused by her behavior: stealing a wallet, stabbing a drifter in the throat and badgering Larry to burgle the nearby yacht club.

   Lots of familiar Brewer set pieces here, including the extended disposal of an unwanted body, but also some well-wrought descriptions of the Florida milieu and an attractive if credulous protagonist in Larry.

   An alert reader will figure out the twists in plenty of time, but the only weak spot is a denouement that relies too much on two characters verbalizing information they already know and have no need to say aloud.

Editorial Comment:  A profile of Gil Brewer, the man and the author, can be found here on the primary M*F website. Written by Bill Pronzini, the piece definitely doesn’t pull any punches. If you haven’t read it already, you should.

   Following the article, lower down on the same page, you can find a definitive bibliography for Gil Brewer, compiled by Lynn Monroe, a long time collector of Brewer’s work both under his own name and all his pseudonyms.

OCTAVUS ROY COHEN – Romance in the First Degree.

Popular Library 88; no date stated [1946]. Hardcover edition: Macmillan, 1944.

   The copyright date is 1943, which led me to a quick investigation and discovery that this very enjoyable detective novel first appeared in several installments as a four-part serial in Collier’s beginning on December 11th of that year.

   I don’t collect Collier’s, even though I’m often tempted to, as there’s quite a bit of genre fiction to be found in the magazine, including both mysteries and westerns. But just as it is with The Saturday Evening Post, the oversized format makes it both awkward to read and to store, and so (so far) I’ve been able to resist.

   At any rate (sometimes I do digress) this book would come in Cohen’s later period His early period has been covered by Jon Breen in a short article he did on the primary M*F website a few years ago. If you follow the link, you will also find a comprehensive bibliography of Cohen’s crime fiction.

   His first book appeared in 1917. The character he may be most remembered for was the African-American detective (and far from politically correct) Florian Slappey, but Jon found considerable merit in five books with David Carroll and Jim Hanvey as their primary sleuths.

   Unfortunately, while I’ve meant to, I still haven’t read any of the ones Jon reported on yet. In fact, Romance in the First Degree is the first and only book by Cohen I remember reading, but based on the pleasure I found in doing so, you can believe it won’t be my last.

   The opening premise is rather strange. Straight out of the army with a now-healed war wound (but with several missing toes), Jerry Anthony is hired by Warren Cameron, the man he used to work for, as an unofficial investigator to find out what kind of trouble Cameron’s son and new wife have somehow gotten themselves into. Since Jerry needs a place to stay, there is no better place than the Cameron apartment, where Alan, Linda and their baby are also living.

   That’s not the unusual part. Cameron is also the father of Rita, the girl Jerry was supposed to marry, but who jilted him while he was overseas. Now engaged to someone else, she still lives at home, as does Sandy, the youngest daughter, who has been in love with Jerry since she was 16. (She is only a few years older than that now.)

   It’s quite an arrangement. You might think that this is going to be one of those upper class mysteries common in 1940s mystery fiction, one involving the Park Avenue set, but No Sir or Ma’am, this is something else altogether. Following Alan and Linda one night to a desolate road house on Long Island, Jerry enters after they have left to find a dead man inside, at which moment he (Jerry) is clunked on the head.

   From which point on, when he wakes up, the mob is involved — the dead man being a close associate of head mobster Leo North — and so is (hold on) the dead man’s girl friend; another mobster in love with the girl friend; a somewhat unsavory private eye named Dave Larric who somehow seems to know too much and somehow not enough; and a vivacious young Broadway star named Holly Hamilton.

   While Jerry knows he did not do the killing, he is not too sure about Alan and Linda, but even though they are not talking, he figures that it is part of his job to protect them. How everyone else fits in, he has no idea. This is one of those cases that gets screwier and screwier one chapter to the next, nor in the meantime is there any shortage of death and skullduggery at almost any level you can think of.

   Assisting Jerry in sorting through the facts and the clues is Rita’s younger sister Sandy, and if you don’t grasp onto the fact that some romantic (and only slightly sappy) fireworks are going to go off in that regard, you simply have not read enough fiction, young sir or lady. As for Rita, she is sort of steamed about this, and before I forget, here is Jerry’s description of the older sister when he first sees her for the first time in this country after their broken engagement (from page 21):

   Besides doing descriptions very well, Cohen has a good hand with dialogue as well, not only here, but throughout the book. Eventually, after Jerry has filled his eyes to the brim, a paragraph or two later his brain seems to take over again.

   This hasn’t anything to do with the mystery, but byplay like this surely makes the tale Cohen tells go down more smoothly, not that it needs a whole lot of help. Surprisingly enough, all of the clues eventually fit and make a coherent whole out of what seemed to have been an impossible tangled mass of events and unknown motives and relationships. It is all choreographed so beautifully that…

   Um. Perhaps I should not get carried away quite so enthusiastically. This is all relatively speaking, you understand. It is not Tchaikovsky I am talking about here, but perhaps you know what I mean without requiring me to finish the sentence above.

   And let me not forget the private eye whose presence is both peripheral and essential to the story, Dave Larric. In terms of doing down-to-earth detective work, Jerry Anthony is only an amateur. Larric is the professional, straight from the pulp magazines. Although as a result he may be as stereotypical as they come in being so, I wonder (and would really like to know) if he ever appeared in any other of Cohen’s novels.

THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT. Warner Brothers-First National (UK), 1938. Emlyn Williams, Shorty Matthews, Ernest Thesiger, Anna Konstam, Allan Jeayes, Anthony Holles. Based on the book by James Curtis, who also wrote the screenplay. Director: Arthur B. Woods. Shown at Cinevent 19, Columbus OH, May 1987.

   Film historian William Everson was very much in evidence at the convention, and his interest in the British mellers was responsible for the appearance of They Drive by Night on the program.

   (Only the title made its way across the Atlantic. The American film of the same name was based on the A. I. Bezzerides novel Long Haul.)

   In the first half of the film, Emlyn Williams is a recently released convict trying to evade the police, who believe he has murdered his former girl friend. Much of this is shot at night, in the rain, and is a taut chase in the Fritz Lang vein.

   In the second half of the film, Williams and a new girl friend set a trap for the real “mad sex killer” (in Everson’s pithy description) who is played by Ernest Thesiger, the unforgettable Dr. Pretorious of James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein.

   The style clashes irreconcilably in the two sections of the film, but the casting and a nicely designed and staged scene in a period dance hall give the film some interest.

HE KILLS COPPERS. ITV (UK), 2008. Mel Raido, Liam Garrigan, Rafe Spall, Frank Taylor, Steven Robertson, Tim Woodward, Kelly Reilly. Based on the book by Jake Arnott. Director: Adrian Shergold.

   This was an adaptation of the book He Kills Coppers by Jake Arnott (Sceptre, 2001), and shown in three one-hour (no adverts) parts. It starts in 1966 during the euphoria of England winning the World Cup as two young policeman friends are making their way up the ranks.

   When one routinely stops a car and is fatally shot along with two colleagues, his friend feels morally bound to pursue the killer, but although his accomplices are soon caught, he just escapes at the last minute.

   Meanwhile a reporter takes on the investigation by wheedling his way into the life of the killer’s mother, and we see both his and the policeman’s investigations becoming closer.

   The story moves forward to 1975 and another near thing before the denouement in 1980 as the two investigations finally converge and the killer, journalist and policemen come together.

   This production drew rather favourable reviews from the British press (at least the bits I read) and, although much of it is rather on the bleak side — we see a lot of the sleaze, and most of the characters, including the police, are out for what they can get — I quite enjoyed it.

TWO OF A KIND. Columbia Pictures, 1951. Edmond O’Brien, Lizabeth Scott, Terry Moore, Alexander Knox, Griff Barnett. Co-screenwriters: James Edward Grant, James Gunn, Lawrence Kimble. Director: Henry Levin.

   I can’t tell you why it took three writers to get this movie made, but I think the results show it. Or at least that was my opinion before I even knew who the screenwriters were, and how many. One of them is James Gunn, the hard-boiled mystery writer, by the way, not the science fiction writer James Gunn.

    “Our” James Gunn has only one major entry in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, that being Deadlier Than the Male (Duell, 1942), which was later the basis of the movie Born to Kill, the one with Lawrence Tierney and Claire Trevor — you know the one.

   In any case, this movie starts out like gangbusters, with the hauntingly beautiful Lizabeth Scott tracking down — for reasons unknown — an orphan born in the Chicago area by the name of Michael Farrell (Edmond O’Brien). It turns out that she has a pretty good swindle in mind, along with a steadily unscrupulous lawyer, played by Alexander Knox.

   It turns out that a wealthy couple have been trying to find their son who’s been missing since he was three years old. Farrell might be a very good match, except for one small detail. The boy, if he’s still alive, would lack the tip of the little finger on his left hand.

   Luckily they didn’t invent car doors for nothing.

   But if you’re looking for a good solid noir movie, it’s downhill from here. But don’t get me wrong. If you’re looking for a good solid crime story, albeit a semi-softhearted one, built around an even better con game, complicated by an attempted murder and other good features, waste no time in looking further.

   Edmond O’Brien’s easy mannerisms do him well in ingratiating himself with the missing boy’s parents, to the consternation of the lawyer, who also isn’t terribly pleased with how he also seems to get along very well with Brandy Kirby (the previously mentioned Lizabeth Scott).

   Did I mention that it took all of Brandy Kirby’s feminine wiles to convince Farrell that he really didn’t need that tip of his finger? I should have. The money, running to a share of millions of dollars, wouldn’t have done it, not by itself alone. Being a law-obeying kind of guy myself, I don’t know whether or not I’d go for the combo (Brandy plus the money), but it would be an awfully close call.

   And if you were wondering, the “two of a kind” in the title are Mike Farrell and Brandy Kirby. Terry Moore’s character comes into it for a while — she plays a semi-loopy teen-aged girl who falls for Farrell briefly herself — but this is Lizabeth Scott’s movie all the way, and when she wants something, look out.