BEFORE DAWN. RKO Radio, 1933. Stuart Erwin, Dorothy Wilson, Warner Oland, Dudley Digges, Gertrude Hoffman, Jane Darwell. Based on a story by Edgar Wallace; director: Irving Pichel.

   As far as I’ve been able to determine, Edgar Wallace wrote this story in Hollywood especially for this film, and it was never published separately. I’m far from being an expert on Wallace, so I can easily stand to be corrected.

   Assuming that you don’t expect to see a detective story when you watch this movie, I think you’ll enjoy it immensely. (I did.) Warner Oland is the villain in this one, playing an Austrian psychoanalyst who listens intently to a dying man’s last words as he confesses to a crime that he committed 15 years earlier.

   Not only that, he reveals where a million dollars in stolen gold is hidden, somewhere in back in the US, which turns out to be in one of those spooky old dark houses that were so popular in criminous 1930s cinema.

   Slow-speaking and soft-spoken Stu Erwin plays an undercover cop who nabs Patricia Merrick (Dorothy Wilson) and her father (Dudley Digges) as a pair of phony mediums – only to discover there’s nothing phony about her at all. And off they go to the house where the suspicious death of the owner, Mrs. Marble (Jane Darwell) has occurred – the very same house where Dr. Cornelius is snooping around.

   If mediums able to speak to the dead actually exist, I’d like to think that they would be intelligent, beautiful and petite young brunettes like Dorothy Wilson, whose career in Hollywood (1932-1937) was not nearly long enough.

   She married scriptwriter Lewis R. Foster (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) in 1936, and that was it as far as her career was concerned; she raised a family and stayed married until his death in 1974. She herself died in 1998.

   There is plenty to see in this sixty minute movie: secret doors and rooms, deadly cisterns in the basement, candles blowing out, no telephones, cops that go tearing off in the wrong direction at precisely the wrong moment, and the evil deeds of Dr. Cornelius.

   You can’t go wrong!

WILLIAM G. TAPPLY – The Dutch Blue Error. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1984. Paperback reprint: Ballantine, 1985.

   The Dutch Blue Error is the second book in the Brady Coyne series. Coyne, a lawyer to Boston Brahmins, finds detective work is often what his clients want. Since Coyne is divorced, has an apartment overlooking Boston Harbor and loves to fish and play golf, he likes the money he gets from his clients and usually obliges them.

   In his second book, we meet Xerxes (“Zerk”) Garret, a young black law graduate who substitutes for Coyne’s pregnant secretary while studying for the bar exams. Oliver Hazard Perry Weston summons Coyne to help him quietly buy a duplicate of the Dutch Blue Error, a stamp owned by Weston and thought to be one of a kind.

   Weston takes great pride in his stamp collection, especially since being confined to his house in a wheelchair. Tormented by the thought that his stamp might not be unique (Weston is not an attractive person, treating his adoring son badly), he asks Coyne to act as “his legs” and locate the stamp, validate it, and then negotiate payment.

   Coyne reluctantly agrees, and these chores lead him to some unusual characters as he keeps appointments in the Combat Zone, Harvard Square and the Peabody Museum, where he and Zerk have a body on their hands.

   The police quickly settle on Zerk as the likely murderer, and suddenly Coyne has an increased desire to straighten out the question of the Dutch Blue Error and clear Zerk. The book is well plotted and the ending is both unpredictable and realistic.

   Death at Charity’s Point, the first in the Coyne series and winner of the 1984 Scribner’s Crime Novel Award, features Coyne’s investigation of the apparent suicide of a wealthy client’s son at a liberal boarding school. While this is an intriguing case, Coyne’s politics and sensitivities are vague. In The Dutch Blue Error, he is more clearly defined and likable.

   Brady Coyne also makes a cameo appearance in The Penny Ferry by Rick Boyer.

         ———
   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.

RAYMOND CHANDLER – The Lady in the Lake.   Alfred A. Knopf, 1943. Armed Services Edition #838, paperback, 1945. Pocket 389, ppbk, 1946. Many other reprint editions, both hardcover and soft.

   I was really disappointed upon rereading this one for the first time in fifteen years and found it far from the “masterpiece” which Barzun and Taylor dubbed in it their Catalogue of Crime. According to Frank MacShane’s Life of Raymond Chandler, Chandler was in the dumps when he wrote this, his fourth novel, plagued by personal hassles as well as anxiety over the war in Europe.

   It shows. The first half of the book is paced quite nicely and in the first two chapters in particular hero Philip Marlowe is in top wisecracking form. But for the most part the verve and spark of Chandler’s best work are sadly lacking.

   By any standards other than Chandler’s own this could pass as a minor but competent private eye novel. But it is Chandler, and here he’s just going through the paces. All of his stock characters and situations are on hand: the brutal cop, the honest but tired cop, the good girl, the mystery girl (two, in fact), Marlowe at constant odds with the law and his own client, being lied to in his search for a missing wife by everyone, every step of the way.

   But the writing is peculiarly flat. The plotting, never Chandler’s strong point, is slipshod. The murderer’s identity is glaringly obvious. Marlowe’s solution of the case is unsubstantiated guesswork. The solution itself makes not an iota of sense, raising far more questions than it answers.

   But, most irritating of all, a number of very skillfully drawn characters — some quite integral to the story — appear briefly, speak their lines, are talked about for the rest of the book, but never appear on stage again, giving the whole project an uncomfortable, vaguely lopsided effect.

   Chandler is my favorite Eye writer, the yardstick by which I measure all others who work the genre, and it hurts like hell to say these things. But it’s hard to believe that The Lady in the Lake is by the same man who gave us such milestone works, such true masterpieces, as Farewell, My Lovely and The Long Goodbye.

SUSAN KANDEL. Shamus in the Green Room, 2006.
      —, Christietown, 2007.

   Cece Caruso, a biographer of mystery writers and an amateur sleuth, after cases involving research connected with her biographies of Erie Stanley Gardner and the writers of the Nancy Drew series, turns her attention to Dashiell Hammett and Agatha Christie.

   In Shamus, after her biography of Hammett has been published to some acclaim, she’s hired by the producer of a new film about Hammett to tutor the actor who will play the writer/detective.

   In my reviews of the two earlier books I noted that that Cece was often as much concerned about her clothes as her sleuthing, but that’s definitely not true this time. There’s an occasional sign of Cece’s clothes buying addiction, but the focus is definitely on the Hammett connection and the novel is all the stronger for it.

   Christietown is something of a return to the clothes conscious Cece of the first two books, but she’s having some trouble finishing her biography of Christie, bogging down in the puzzling segment of Christie’s life that, in 1926, found her fleeing her marriage and the subject of a week-long manhunt that received extraordinary media coverage.

   Eventually, her breakthrough in understanding this facet of Christie’s life also leads to a breakthrough in her understanding of the murders connected with a real estate development, a Christietown that is attempting to recreate a village from Christie’s era in the Mojave desert.

   This is currently one of my favorite series and while there’s no teaser for a fifth novel, I’m hoping that’s not a sign that the series has ended.

   Bibliographic data:

      SUSAN KANDEL

I Dreamed I Married Perry Mason. William Morrow, hc, May 2004. Avon, pb, March 2005.

Not a Girl Detective. Willliam Morrow, hc, May 2005. Avon, pb, March 2006.

Shamus in the Green Room. William Morrow, hc, May 2006. Avon, pb, May 2007.

Christietown. Harper, trade pb, May 2007. Avon, pb, June 2008.

      >>>

[UPDATE]   The chances that there will be more books in the series are awfully slim, or so it seems. You can find Susan Kandel’s website here, but only the four books are mentioned, and her calendar of events is all but empty after June of this year.   — Steve

[UPDATE #2]  11-18-08.  Good news, straight from Susan Kandel herself:

  Hi Steve,

   Thanks for the note — there is indeed a fifth Cece book, called Vertigo a Go Go, which will be out early next fall (2009), again from Harper. I took a year off to rest (!), but the series continues! I think the problem is I haven’t updated my website in years (literally), and I’m planning to get to that this fall so readers have a sense of what’s coming up for me.

WILLIAM G. TAPPLY – Cutter’s Run.  St. Martin’s Press; paperback reprint, November 2002. Hardcover first edition: St. Martin’s, 1998.

   Tapply has been writing the Brady Coyne books for a long time, since 1984, and for some reason he’s still not the big name in the mystery field I think he should be after nearly 20 years. Note that it took almost four and a half years for this one to move from hardcover to paperback. By any standard that’s a long time to be kept on hold.

   I think that Tapply may be working against the grain — that the current market is demanding fluffier and fleecier female fiction, while the machio-er and male-oriented mysteries are left to manage for themselves.

   But to the case at hand. Coyne is a low-profile Boston attorney who seems to run into mysterious doings wherever he goes. This time it’s swastikas in Maine, a poisoned dog, and a reclusive African-American lady who then disappears. Tapply’s prose is deceptively smooth, like the surface of a quiet pond suddenly revealing gnarly snags below. One of his greatest assets as a writer is the shivery sort of anticipation he produces when you (think you) know what’s coming.

   Coyne has been spending his weekends in the small, rustic, backwoods country town of Garrison with a lady friend named Alex. From the outside they seem to be very compatible, but there are hints of trouble there too. Besides the mystery, a good deal of the rest of the story is about a huge communications gap between the sexes that — from a sympathetic male point of view — mystifies me as much as it does Brady Coyne.

   Tapply is a smooth, experienced writer, but where he may be the weakest, or so it seemed to me this time around, is in the detective end of things. Coyne gets the local sheriff interested in the case easily enough — in fact, he even makes Coyne a deputy — but why is it that he (Coyne) is the only one to investigate the missing woman’s home? Brady also does a lot of other detective work, but the case is solved by what amounts (in retrospect) as near happenstance.

   So is this what’s holding Tapply back? He’s good, but he’s just never found the key to what would make him great? Or is it — and this is what I hinted at this before — that he’s a male writer in a field where the Sisters in Crime are now the leading edge?

[UPDATE] 11-17-08.   Bill Tapply and Brady Coyne are still going strong, I’m happy to say, no matter what I wrote back then, with books and more adventures showing up on the shelves at Borders on a regular basis. I still don’t think he gets the recognition he deserves, not nearly as much as he should have, after a career as long as his — and it’s not over yet!

CAROLYN WELLS – The Tannahill Tangle. J. B. Lippincott, US/UK, hardcover, 1928.

   I can’t remember who killed whom in Carolyn Wells’ The Tannahill Tangle, nor have I any desire to look it up.

   The feature that sticks in my mind is the two well-to-do couples who are the main characters. They are engaging in spouse-swapping, and, when one of them is killed, the perceptive reader might feel that the inherent frictions of this diversion have some bearing on the crime.

   But no, the survivors and Ms. Wells take great pains to assure themselves, each other, and us that they are too “well-bred” for such messy sports as murder. Fleming Stone is called in and, as I recall, is able to find someone of less-illustrious parentage and prospects to pin the rap on.

   Fortunately, I had only this one book of Ms. Wells to get rid of. It is a reminder I will not soon forget that the Golden Age produced the worst clinkers as well as the masterpieces of detective fiction.

PEGGY LEADS THE WAY. American Film Company-Mutual, 1917; Lloyd Ingraham, director; Mary Miles Minter, Andrew Arbuckle, Carl Stockdale, Alan Forrest, Emma Kluge, Margaret Shelby, George Ahern, Frank C. Thompson, William Spencer. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   Lightning struck a third time, bringing to light a film starring Mary Miles Minter, few of whose films have survived and whose career was, in effect, ended by the unsolved murder of director William Desmond Taylor, with the scandal arising from rumors of her relationship with Taylor tarnishing her screen image.

   I had never seen one of her films and I was completely charmed by her bright, take-charge performance. She returns home after studying in the East to find her father’s country store struggling in the wake of government regulations and the entire community’s livelihood and existence threatened by the dastardly actions of a heartless developer.

   Fortunately, he has a son who’s as charmed by Mary as I was. He takes the side of the locals, and with Mary orchestrating the revolt, helped by a fortuitous storm, happiness and prosperity are restored to the small community.

GARY PHILLIPS – Shooter’s Point.

Kensington/Dafina; paperback reprint, Oct 2002. Hardcover first edition: Kensington, October 2001.

   If you’re looking for an over-the-top medium-to-hardboiled mystery crime novel starring a statuesque black ex-Las Vegas showgirl as detective, look no further. This is it, the second in the series of adventures of Martha Chainey, courier extraordinaire to the city’s high-rollers, hustlers, players and gamblers.

   While it might be better to read the previous book, High Hand, first, most of the action of the first book is recapped well enough to get the gist of this followup adventure. Which is a Good Thing, as the action more or less picks up where the previous one left off.

   And this one begins with the assassination of one of two boxers during a championship bout taking place in a casino arena, then continues with the simultaneous theft of money that is not supposed to exist from a secret underground room — Phillips thinks locked rooms are an Agatha Christie specialty, but who remembers John Dickson Carr these days — and when Chainey finds her good friend, female boxer Moya Reese, murdered in a shabby motel room, she starts to take it personally.

   Also involved is a hugely popular rap star, King Diamond, a cult of positive-thinking Nymnatists who have been sponsoring the murdered boxer, and various and sundry other casino owners and scam-artists. Martial law is imposed, Jaguars are wrecked by runaway tanks, and the usual Vegas night life goes on.

   If you turn your mind off and go with the flow, Phillips has a take-no-prisoners approach to crime fiction that will keep you jazzed for hours. It’s not a detective mystery, I warn you, though. Any attempt to keep track of who knows what when and why (or why not) is doomed to failure. In the over 24 hours it takes Martha Chainey to call the case closed, she does not sleep at all, and in her wanderings here and there across Las Vegas, everywhere she goes she just happens to meet someone else involved in the plot.

   Personally I hit page 118 and realized I didn’t have a clue as to what was going on, kept on going and discovered it didn’t really matter. Sound like your kind of novel? If you’ve read this far, I’ll bet it is.

[UPDATE] 11-16-08.   I’m going to have to find my copy of High Hand, which I still haven’t read. (I always seem to read books and their sequels in the wrong order.)

   While these are the only books that Martha Chainey has appeared in, she also was in a short story called “Beginner’s Luck” (Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African-American Writers, Berkley, hc, 2004; trade ppbk, 2005).

GERALD PETIEVICH – Money Men and One-Shot Deal.

Harcourt Brace, hardcover, 1981. Money Men: published separately in paperback by Pinnacle, 1982; Signet, 1991. One-Shot Deal published separately in paperback by Pinnacle, 1983; Signet, 1991. Film (based on Money Men): Warner Bros., 1993, as Boiling Point.

   These two short novels are printed in one volume and are Petievich’s first published fiction. He is a former member of the U.S. Army Intelligence Corps, and later was a special agent of the U.S. Secret Service assigned to counterfeit investigations. He knows intimately the subject he’s chosen for fiction, and that’s what makes these novels work so well.

   Both novels feature Treasury agent Charles Carr. In Money Men he is after the man who shot to death another agent in a motel room that Carr had bugged. Not only do Carr and his partner, Jack Kelly, suffer the agony of listening to their fellow agent being murdered while they are too far away to help, they also must bear the brunt of the responsibility for the tragic operation.

   Carr is going to be transferred, most likely to a desk job, but he talks his superior into giving him a few weeks before the move and he uses that time to stalk the agent’s killer.

   Carr and Kelly work against the clock as they slowly close in on a con man named Red Diamond and his young cohort Ronnie Boyce. The setting is Los Angeles, the action fast, the plot tight, all written in a style that smacks hard of realism.

   Washington, D.C., as well as Los Angeles is the setting for One-Shot Deal. This novel is the more ambitious of the two, and probably the best.

   Here Carr is set on the trail of someone who has engineered the theft of government security paper from the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the special kind of paper used to print money.

   The someone is a fascinating villain named Larry Phillips, an ex-con who is a skilled hypnotist and runs with beautiful blond prostitute Melba, a woman who is literally under his spell. The story is intricately plotted and builds in suspense to a satisfying conclusion.

   Both novels are written in a direct, uncompromising style that establishes a tough authenticity. The dialogue is hard-edged and street-wise, and the knowing attention to detail lends a stark reality that only an insider can bring to this kind of fiction. Money Men and One-Shot Deal are both lean, mean, and entertaining.

   Other Petievich novels are To Live and Die in Beverly Hills (1983), To Live and Die in L.A. (1984), and The Quality of the Informant (1985).

         ———
   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.

TO DIE FOR. Columbia, 1995. Nicole Kidman, Matt Dillon, Joaquin Phoenix, Casey Affleck, Illeana Douglas, Alison Folland, Dan Hedaya, Wayne Knight. Based on the novel by Joyce Maynard; screenwriter: Buck Henry. Director: Gus Van Sant.

   There doesn’t seem to be any way around it. In the course of talking about this movie, I’m going to have to reveal more about the story line than I’d really like to.

   I know what I’m talking about. I was watching the movie, which I’d just taped off HBO, when I needed to take a short break, and while I was up and about, I decided to check out who an actor was on IMDB. The first thing I saw was the key plot line that was coming up next but which I hadn’t yet gotten to.

   So just in case you haven’t seen the movie yet: POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT.

   The movie does begin, in grand pseudo-documentary fashion, with the death of Suzanne Stone’s husband. Apparently she’s been accused of being involved in his death, but how and why, we (the viewer) do not know.

   Nicole Kidman plays Suzanne Stone in one of most convincing performances I’ve ever seen. Ms. Stone (she does not use her married name, Maretto, for professional reasons), has talked her way into becoming the weather person for the local cable outlet, a small two-man operation that Stone is convinced is going to help her find her way to the top.

   Of the TV profession, that is. She is obsessed with television and the fame that comes to those who are on the screen; she will do anything, and work for the longest hours, to become a success.

   What she does not realize is how lacking she is, both in awareness of the world and opportunity. I’m not convinced that she has the ability, either, but that has never stopped others, and it probably wouldn’t stop her either, given the chance. Of course (as it happens) her husband of one year (Matt Dillon) does not share her dreams; he is content to help run his father’s low scale restaurant for the rest of his life.

   Deciding to do a documentary on local high school students, Suzanne Stone finds three slackers and unfortunates who are willing to help: Joaquin Phoenix, Casey Affleck, and Alison Folland, who find their own lives briefly brightened by her interest in them.

   They also become part of the plan Suzanne Stone is hatching. Her husband is becoming part of the ball and chain that is holding her back.

   I suppose that most mystery fans will put the pieces together well enough from here. Some of Suzanne Stone’s most convincing arguments take place in bed (a dim-witted but very virile Joaquin Phoenix) or making promises of taking Alison Folland, overweight and with no friends, along with her to Hollywood.

   As characters, two more pathetic creatures can hardly be imagined; as actor and actress respectively, both Phoenix and Folland are to be congratulated as highly as they can be.

   All of the performances are ‘A Prime,’ in fact, including especially Illeana Douglas, who as the dead man’s sister, can see right through her new sister-in-law’s facade in an instant. The latter’s a four-letter word that starts with C, she says. Cold.

   But Nicole Kidman’s performance is more than that. I may be the only person in the world who thinks so, but she makes Suzanne Stone also so vulnerable that I could only find pity for her, in spite of the deeds she does, especially in the end, when her fate finally catches up with her.

   It is very difficult to tell someone that their dreams are very likely not going to be realized, and that is the saddest part of this movie, I found, by far.