VINCENT STARRETT – The Case Book of Jimmie Lavender. Gold Label, hardcover, 1944. Hardcover reprint: Bookfinger, 1973.

   Comprising about a fourth of the published cases of Jimmie Lavender, the only sleuth in mystery fiction named for a major-league baseball player, these twelve tales from the Twenties and Thirties are representative examples of the now mostly forgotten detective short stories of Vincent Starrett, better known today as the biographer of Lavender’ s inspiration, Sherlock Holmes.

   By modern standards, none is of the first rank, but most are well-plotted puzzles cast in the classic mold, with a nice blend of cerebral deduction and physical action, and even fifty years and more later they have their attractions.

   Several of the victims in the ten episodes concerned with murder are dispatched in picturesque ways and in a variety of interesting settings. Among the latter: a nightclub, a cruise ship, a golf course, a hospital, a university campus not far from the grounds of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, and even an airplane cockpit.

   In one of the tales, a house “vanishes”; in another, the scene of the crime itself disappears; in a third — a locked-room homicide — the case is solved twenty years before it occurs. And every so often the proceedings are enlivened with some typical Chicago-style gunplay.

   Though not as fully realized or memorably limned as some of his more celebrated Golden Age contemporaries, Lavender himself is an engaging protagonist, warm and whimsical throughout, though perhaps a bit too omniscient at times. He is aided in his investigations by his equally likable companion and chronicler, “Gilly” Gilruth, a refreshingly able Watson.

   Taken in small doses, their adventures are still fun to read, both for their own sake and as pleasantly nostalgic reminders of a more innocent era in the history of the crime-fiction genre.

   Starrett also published a number of mystery novels, none of which is particularly distinguished. Three of these feature a detective with the unlikely name of Walter Ghost: Murder on “B” Deck (1929), Dead Man Inside (1931), and The End of Mr. Garment (1932).

   Starrett’s best novel, however, is probably Murder in Peking (1946), which has a nicely evoked Chinese background. Other of Starrett’s criminous short stories can be found in Coffins for Two (1924) and The Blue Door (1930); two of the stories in the later volume feature Jimmie Lavender.

         ———
   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.

CHARLES G. BOOTH – Murder at High Tide.

William Morrow & Co., hardcover, 1930. UK edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1930.

   This story of a domestic tyrant who’s found murdered in his library has a lot of what attracted me to mysteries in the first place.

   Even so, while fun to read, an honest appraisal would have to rank it only a notch or so above the Hardy Boys. And as in a vintage Charlie Chan movie, the dead man’s mansion is full of suspects at each other’s throats, with wild accusations and amazing discoveries coming at every moment.

   The hero is a young antiques dealer, in his own words, an ass with women. (No further comment.) The detective is Anatole Flique, a comically suave French policeman, although the murder does take place on an island just off the California coast. In his own words, he’s the cleverest on the Paris Surete. He’s also greatly given to twirling his mustaches and busily polishing the top of his head, all the while contemplating life’s little mysteries.

   There are tons of false evidence, most of it leading to dead ends, but I think that the killer, in spite of his or her alibi, should be spotted at once. The style is not John Dickson Carr’s, but it is his kind of story. If there’s no locked room, it’s only because then there wouldn’t have been quite so much fun with alibi-breaking, which in Murder at High Tide is the name of this particular game.

[UPDATE] 01-14-09.  One of the revisions I made was to add the name of the French detective who worked on this case. Obviously I had no idea that he appeared in more than one book, but he did. From the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here’s his complete dossier:

FLIQUE, ANATOLE [Charles G. Booth]
       o Murder at High Tide (n.) Morrow 1930 [California]
       o The Cat and the Clock (n.) Doubleday 1935 [Los Angeles, CA]
       o Kings Die Hard (n.) Hammond 1949 [California; 1929]

   This last book never had a US edition. It came out in 1949, the same year that the author died. According to Wikipedia, Charles G. Booth was “a British-born writer who settled in America and wrote several classic Hollywood stories, including The General Died at Dawn (1936) and Sundown (1941). He won an Academy Award for Best Story for The House on 92nd Street in 1945. […] He also penned the source story for Paul Mazursky’s 1988 film Moon Over Parador.”

   I’d never realized until now that Booth was originally from England. Besides the fiction he wrote in novel form, I know his name from many stories he wrote for Black Mask, the quintessential hard-boiled American detective pulp magazine.

   In fact, he has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the three authors whose stories were deleted from the paperback edition of The Hard-Boiled Omnibus (Simon & Schuster, 1946), edited by Joseph T. Shaw. This is a great reason why you should own the hardcover edition, not just the one reprinted by Pocket (1952).

FATAL MISSION. 1990; aka Enemy. Peter Fonda, Tia Carrere, Mako, James Mitchum, Ted Markland. Co-screenwriter: Peter Fonda (*). Director: George Rowe.

   Ninety percent of this movie reminded me of a book in a poor man’s Edward S. Aarons “Assignment” series. Peter Fonda, as the CIA agent who assassinates a North Vietnamese general and tries to get away with it, with a little more prompting might make a fairly decent Sam Durell, but in the end he’s undone by the ending itself.

   I’ll get to that in a minute, but let me mention a couple of other things first. (1) Tia Ferrare may be an exotic-looking beauty, but to my eye she really doesn’t look Chinese, and that’s what she’s supposed to be in this movie, as the ChiCom who first chases Fonda to ground, then becomes his prisoner and finally his guide to freedom.

   As for (2), what do you suppose happens to Fonda’s first guide, a man who tells him “Once I get you back in one piece, I get ticket to USA…” ? (If this were a quiz, I can’t imagine anybody getting this one wrong.)

   The scenery is very nice, and the small little plot twist is acceptably nasty, but the ending is not so much downbeat as it is flat. Downbeat (I grant you) is par for the course in spy stories, as well as for Vietnam movies in general, but this ending is so meaningless as to make the movie that preceded it barely worth watching.

   I imagine you could make the point that the ending has as much meaning as the war itself. That could be, but I’d be hard pressed to say that there’s any reason for watching this movie a second time. (On the other hand, I’d have to agree with the basic premise that’s at work here: there isn’t any reason for redoing that foolish war either.)

      ____

    (*) Along with four other people, if you can imagine that. Each one must have been in charge of twelve lines of dialogue. This is an Action Picture.

[UPDATE] 01-14-09.   I remember nothing about this movie at all — nothing more than the review above, which I assume I wrote soon after I watched it. The revisions I did were only to improve the sentence structure now and there.

   I can’t even speak to what I felt was a major point of the film, but if the basic premise is what I seem to have suggested it is, then I certainly wish somebody had been listening (and learning) when it was important to listen.

[LATER]  I’ve just watched a trailer for the movie on YouTube. I still don’t remember the movie, and the trailer instills in me no great desire to rummage around for my copy of it on VHS.

MARY DAHEIM – Just Desserts.

Avon, paperback original; 1st printing, July 1991. Reprinted many times; a later cover is shown.

   Another first novel, so far as I know [it was], and like Gloria White’s Murder on the Run (reviewed here earlier), one that takes place in contemporary California. Other than that, the difference between this book and the other is nearly without measure.

   So that you should not get me wrong, each book has a heroine rather than a hero, but where PI Ronnie Ventura is almost as tough as the guys she hangs out with, Judith Grover McGonigle is a widow trying to make ends meet with a newly established Bed-and-Breakfast in her home, and she and her cousin Renie are both as suburbanly house-wifey as they come.

   And when a family of wacky eccentrics descends on her house (while their own is being fumigated), and when the murder of a charlatan fortune-teller occurs the same evening the contents of a will are going to be disclosed, and when the investigating officer turns out to be Joe Flynn, an old beau who mysteriously disappeared on Judith 25 years ago, why then, you might get the idea you’ve read all this before.

   The clutter and clamor do not die down for an instant. Everybody seems to have known or have been related to the dead woman some time or another, and everyone appears to have a motive. None of it seems to matter, though. Nobody seems to care very much, though they say they do, or maybe it was just me.

   I also found it difficult enough to keep all the names straight, much less worry about small things like why the police let everyone roam all around the house, inside and out, and how the neighbors manage to pop in and out with important evidence without anyone being aware of it.

   There is a small mystery about Joe Flynn’s marriage and impending annulment, and somewhere between pages 101 and 102 something seems to have gotten terribly garbled, as though somebody left out several pages of text. In all the confusion that is supposed to pass for mysterious happenings, I guess not even whoever was supposed to have edited this book happened to notice.

   Let me leave you with this small quote from the end of the book (page 203). It will tell you as best as I could otherwise where a sizable part of Judith McGonigle’s mind is really at:

[UPDATE] 01-13-09. From 1983 through 1992, Mary Daheim wrote historical romances, seven in all, but her career as a writer didn’t really begin until she switched to writing mysteries in 1991 with Just Desserts.

In spite of my reservations about the book, it has struck a chord with a sizable segment of the mystery reading population. There are now 25 books in the series, either published or forthcoming

   That’s more than a book a year, on the average — work out the math — but in the same time period, Mary Daheim has written 21 books in yet another series, this one the Emma Lord mysteries, beginning with The Alpine Advocate in 1992. (The title refers to the newspaper that Emma Lord publishes and edits in a small town in Washington state.)

   But getting back to Judith McGonigle, rather than put the inevitable off any longer, by Dune to Death, the fourth book in the series, she’d married Joe Flynn, and all of their subsequent adventures were as husband and wife. (Seeing that she had a good thing going, she didn’t give up the Bed-and-Breakfast, though.)

   That Ellery Queen’s International Case Book is not included in Hubin’s Bibliography gives credence to what is only implied in the book itself — these short accounts are of true occurrences.

   If correct, several of these criminal cases deserve more detailed and less dramatised presentation than given here in what were originally articles for a Sunday supplement.

   Particularly interesting are the bank robber who, posing as a health officer, poisoned all the employees of a bank so that he could gather and carry off his loot unimpeded; the mistress who had her lover blinded so that she could care for him for years and thereby be permitted to obtain respectability through marrying him; and the banker who dismembered and disfigured his laborer rival, hired a sculptor to make for the police a representation of the deceased as the banker to convince them the wrong man died, but was caught because he couldn’t permit the calloused hands to be found.

   And yet, as elsewhere, one regrets the slipshod artistic integrity of the later Queen in the presentation of these cases.

         * * * * * * * *

   Recently I was stranded nearly bookless and erroneously chose John Dickson Carr’s Captain Cut-Throat over a couple of unappetizing offerings by Marsh and Lathen. I realized, part way through it, that I had read it twice before and, by the time I finished, that it is the worst mystery I’ve read.

   I think Carr was writing for Hollywood, and he achieved the almost impossible of under-estimating producers’ intelligence. The less said about this book, the better.

      Bibliographic data:

ELLERY QUEEN – Ellery Queen’s International Case Book. Dell 2260, paperback original, 1964.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – Captain Cut-Throat. Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1955. UK edition: Hamish Hamilton, hc, 1955 (shown). Paperback reprints (US): Bantam A1472, 1956; F2708, 1963; Charter, 1980, Carroll & Graf, 1998.

       From the two Bantam editions:

    “The roistering novel of swashbuckling men and gallant ladies in the desperate days when Napoleon held his armies poised like a lance at the heart of England.”

        and

    “He killed by night — without reason, without mercy, without leaving a trace. A novel of murder, menace and desperate revenge.”

   Re: Charles Starrett. He holds the record for most starring Westerns made by one star at the same studio: 131, for Columbia Pictures, produced and released over a 17-year period. He played the Durango Kid in half of them, all but the first released between 1945 and 1952.

   Although the Durangos are very fondly remembered by aging Western fans who saw them in Saturday-matinee engagements, they’re generally cheap, shoddy productions with cookie-cutter plots and puerile comic relief.

   Starrett’s earlier Westerns — especially the 1937-40 pictures in which his regular leading lady was Iris Meredith (the subject of a recent M*F thread) and his sidekicks the Sons of the Pioneers — were his best.

   I met Starrett twice and spoke to him at length about his career. His favorite among those early Westerns was also mine: Outlaws of the Prairie (1938, based on a Harry F. Olmsted story originally published in Dime Western), which cast him as a deadly “fanner” who has spent his entire adult life looking for the renegade who killed his father and cut off his trigger fingers.

   Starrett was also very fond of a short-lived series — also based on pulp stories — casting him as Dr. Steven Monroe, aka The Medico, a frontier doctor who occasionally used his guns in defense of the law.

ANGELA AMATO & JOE SHARKEY – Lady Gold. St. Martin’s, reprint paperback; 1st printing, October 1999. Hardcover edition: August 1998.

   From reading the biographical information about Angela Amato inside the back cover, one could easily get the impression (I did) that the story in Lady Gold could in large part be autobiographical. Her life story, in the guise of that of NYPD police detective Gerry Conte, could easily be “as told to” Joe Sharkey, a columnist for the New York Times, at least at the time this paperback edition came out.

   Angelo Amato, we are told, was an officer and a detective for the NYPD for over a decade. See above. Now a criminal defense attorney, she is in private practice in New York and Florida. In Lady Gold, Gerry Conte is in her last semester of law school. And the book reads like one of the most authentic police procedurals I’ve had in my hands in quite a while.

   Gerry’s primary function is babysitting a CI — a Confidential Informant — who’s the nephew of one Anthony Rossi, an underboss in the New York City Mafia. Trapped on some minor charges, Eugene Rossi has agreed to help get the goods on Tony, who in turn may help nab the real target, the top guy himself, Sal Messina.

   Working undercover like this is slow and often unproductive work, and the book often reads that way too. Flurries of action, once quite deadly, then long lulls of relative calm. Leads spring up, then fizzle out. Gerry’s problem, though, is of her own making. She gets too close to Eugene, whom she recognizes as illiterate and weak in the ways of the real world – so much so that the oral agreement he’s made with the D.A.’s office is not worth (as they say) the paper it’s not written on.

   Is Gerry too close to closing the line? Once Eugene Rossi has testified, if the case ever gets that far, he’ll be hung out to dry. No witness protection program for him, no matter what he’s been lead to believe. Is she a woman or is she a cop? In the male-dominated world of cops and lawyers, it’s not a good question.

   This is inside stuff that is going on in Lady Gold. All the details ring true. If the going is slow at first, stay with it. The pages of the last third of the book will flicker by in a blur.

PostScript. After Lady Gold was written, and with no other books to her credit, Angela Amato became a consultant for the NBC series Third Watch (1999-2005), and as Angela Amato Velez, wrote four of the episodes.

   From Wikipedia: The series was “set in New York City… It followed the exploits of a group of police officers, firefighters, and paramedics in the fictional 55th Precinct and Fire Station 55 whose shifts fell between 3 p.m. and 11 p.m, the ‘third watch.’”

MACKENNA’S GOLD. Columbia Pictures, 1969. Gregory Peck, Omar Sharif, Telly Savalas, Julie Newmar, Camilla Sparv, Keenan Wynn, Ted Cassidy, Eduardo Ciannelli, Lee J. Cobb, Raymond Massey, Burgess Meredith, Anthony Quayle, Edward G. Robinson, Eli Wallach.
   Narrated by Victor Jory. Based on the novel by Will Henry. Director: J. Lee Thompson.

   Now this is what you can call an epic!

   Over two hours of gold fever: outlaws teamed up with honest townspeople, evading the cavalry, being chased by Indians, crossing rapid rivers, through treacherous mountains, across deserts, into secret valleys seen by only one white man before, and his eyes were taken from him before he could return to tell the tale.

   There is only one honest man in this picture, and that is the sheriff (Gregory Peck) who mistakenly kills the Indian chieftain who has the map, and he’s in constant trouble from that time on.

   Peck is also the only leading player in this picture who does not seem seriously miscast for his or her part. I mean, come on, Telly Savalas as a cavalry officer? Julie Newmar as the most statuesque Indian this continent has ever seen? Camilla Sparv as the kidnapped blonde and blue-eyed daughter of a murdered judge?   (*)

   Other critical sources appear to be united in saying that this movie is overblown, over-produced, and not very good, either. It’s still a highly entertaining film, in spite of what they say.

   It’s tough to keep a good western story down, and if you don’t like the story, you can always watch the scenery. It’s terrific.

____

  (*) Looking through the credits again, I’m willing to reconsider that statement, just a little. Keenan Wynn is perfect as the drunken lout of a sidekick for the notorious Mexican bandit, Colorado. (Played by Omar Sharif, of course.)

[UPDATE] 01-12-09.   I found a few other scenes taken from the movie that I could have added to show you, but the review was too short to accommodate them all. (Sorry.) The only other comment I could add is that my younger self has convinced me, if nobody else, that this is a film that’s a Must See Again.

EDWINA NOONE – Dark Cypress.

Ace K-213, paperback original; 1st printing, 1965. Reprinted at least once.

   Edwina Noone was, as you might have guessed, if you didn’t already know, one of the pseudonyms of Michael Avallone, one of more prolific writers of the 60s and 70s. As the author of a long armful of detective novels, his primary private eye character — and probably his favorite — was the inimitable Ed Noon, the books in which he appeared I should really unpack and read again soon.

   Avallone as Noone stays totally within the restrictions of the gothic romance novel, however, as practiced in the 60s and 70s, and except for sheer readability, perhaps, there’s nothing in this tale’s style of writing to suggest that it was Avallone who was really at the wheel.

   We move from Cornwall (see my earlier review of The Shadow of Polperro, by Frances Cowen) to Connecticut. From the present day when the previous book took place, we shift in time to some unidentified period in the past. Rather than a desolate castle on a rocky coastline, the focus is instead a grove of cypress trees surrounding a bathing pool behind a huge manor house.

   A young girl comes to be the tutor of a young motherless boy, his aloof father and two servants the only other occupants of a house that’s full of secrets. Many another gothic novel has started in very much the same way. The boy’s older brother is dead, drowned in the pool behind the house, a magnificent lad; a prodigy, the housekeeper says. The mother had died at childbirth. The younger boy never knew her.

   Very atmospheric, and although you can read pages at a single glance, the tension builds so that you can all but feel it. Built to a formula, but in the hands of a man (in this case) born to write, formulas can also have substance.

[UPDATE] 01-12-09. Another reason you should go back to the review I posted of The Shadow of Polperro is that in the comments afterward Xavier Lechard and I had a brief exchange about the formula that most gothics were structured on, plus a display of a few of their covers in their French incarnations.

   The following list does not include all of the gothic romances written by the late Michael Avallone, only the ones for which his Edwina Noone byline was used. (He also wrote gothics as by Priscilla Dalton, Jean-Anne de Pre, Dora Highland and Dorothea Nile.) Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

NOONE, EDWINA. Pseudonym of Michael Avallone.

      Corridor of Whispers (n.) Ace 1965
      Dark Cypress (n.) Ace 1965
      Heirloom of Tragedy (n.) Lancer 1965
      Daughter of Darkness (n.) Signet 1966
      The Second Secret (n.) Belmont 1966
      The Victorian Crown (n.) Belmont 1966

      Seacliffe (n.) Signet 1968

      The Craghold Legacy (n.) Beagle 1971
      The Cloisonne Vase (n.) Curtis 1972
      The Craghold Creatures (n.) Beagle 1972
      The Craghold Curse (n.) Beagle 1972
      The Craghold Crypt (n.) Curtis 1973

   Of the two covers shown, note that the first is a stylized version containing all of the traditional ingredients, while the second features photographed models, rarely used for gothics, with a close-up shot of only their faces.

   The book itself was marketed as “a novel of high romance,” so it was an obvious attempt to move away from the typical gothic novel. Nonetheless the blurb on the front cover gives it away: “… dark tale of foreboding love between the daughter of a Yankee captain and a mysterious seafaring stranger, on the windswept coast of Maine.”

SHE LOVED A FIREMAN. 1937. Dick Foran, Ann Sheridan, Robert Armstrong, Eddie Acuff, Veda Ann Borg. Director: John Farrow.

   If you don’t like movies about firemen, the only reason I can come up with as to why you might want to watch this one anyway is that Ann Sheridan is in this one, too. (See my review of The Patient in Room 18 which I posted here not so long ago.) TNT recently ran these movies back-to-back, and I didn’t get the connection until I finally got around to watching them.

   There is very little plot to She Loved a Fireman. What there is, is a lot of documentary footage showing what it takes to become a firemen, how to get through fire college and so on, but the story itself is pretty slim.

   Dick Foran plays “Red” Tyler, an ex-bookie and a small-time political hack who, when he needs a job, decides to become a fireman. He gets on the wrong side of the captain, however (Robert Armstrong), and to get his goat he tries to charm his way into the life of the older man’s sister, which is where Ann Sheridan comes in.

   While Foran is an oaf — a good-natured one, but still an oaf — I think you can tell even from this mediocre film that Miss Sheridan had chances to go places in the movies.

   Other than this one small positive note, you’ll have to wait for the final scenes — there’s just got to be a big fire in a movie like this, doesn’t there? — to find any other excuse for not doing whatever else it was you were supposed to be doing instead of watching this movie. (Never mind. Ann Sheridan is reason enough.)

[UPDATE] 01-12-09. Even though we really are digging into obscurity when we watch picture shows like this one, there’s almost always something positive that can be said about even the most underwhelming B-movie (like this one).

   Don’t take just my word for it. It’s not only me. Everyone who’s left a comment about this film on IMDB is in total agreement that Ann Sheridan is the standout attraction, if not the only one.

   But if that isn’t enough to help you decide whether or not to watch this movie the next time it comes around on TCM, they’ve helpfully provided an online trailer for it. I’ve just watched it, and if you’ve read this far, I think you should too.

   Truth in advertising. The photo you see here of Miss Sheridan has no other connection with Fireman. It’s a publicity shot for a movie called Winter Carnival, which came out a couple of years later, in 1939.