THE DANGER SIGNAL. Columbia, 1925; Erie C. Kenton, director; Jane Novak (shown below), Dorothy Revier, Robert Edeson, Gaston Glass. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   An incomplete print of this film only turned up in 2002 and even with careful piecing-together and restoration, shows signs of nitrate decomposition and narrative gaps. However, what remains (and is, in fact, only about 900′ short of the original footage listed in the American Film Institute Catalog) proved to be one of the highlights of the weekend.

   It’s the melodramatic story of a an unwed mother who gives up one of her twin sons to a successful father, signing away all rights without telling him there were two boys. Years later, she’s running a small dress shop while the son she raised is working for the railroad his father owns, with his brother being groomed to succeed his father.

   The one son is poor but honest and a genuinely sterling character, while his brother is a lazy good-for-nothing. The plot finds the good son falling in love with his brother’s girlfriend, a love that’s returned. The plot has echoes of classic drama (both French and English/American), with a good dollop of novelistic high-jinks that climax in a thrilling runaway train chase that had the audience literally cheering.

   The resolution reunites all the long-separated parties, rewards the good and provides a way toward redemption for the wayward.

   A moral tale whose charm, coupled with first-rate acting, directing, and scripting, carried the day.

ANTHONY WYNNE – Death of a Banker.   Hutchinson & Co., UK, hardcover, 1934.  J. B. Lippincott, US, hc, 1934.

   Anthony Wynne’s Death of a Banker begins with the titular character done in on horseback in the middle of a field before the eyes of an assembled throng — a variation of the locked room.

   The investigation hardly begun, Mr. Wynne’s series character, Dr. Eustace Hailey, and a member of the official force he drags along for company have their attention distracted from the crime by the necessity to extract a member of foreign royalty from the clutches of a character wearing a sign saying “villain.”

   For some reason, the prince prefers present company. The two duos chase each other over land and sea, on occasion the good guys are kidnapped, and there are numerous “confrontations,” which all parties use to call each other names and catch their breath before the chase resumes.

   The allotted number of pages being written, Dr. Hailey pulls the solution (a good one) out of his hat; Scotland Yard agrees to cover up the prince’s guilt (Who else? The choices for least likely person are few; between two characters, one of whom is referred to as “blackguard” on every page); and Mr. Villain meets the end we have been so eagerly awaiting.

   Mr. Wynne’s “The Cyprian Bees,” also featuring Dr. Hailey, is a good short story, but I immediately disposed of all his novels I owned.

   I received some sad news this morning. John Wright, a mystery writer living in South Africa whom I interviewed here on the blog back in February 2007, has passed away.

   That post included a complete bibliography of his mystery fiction, and of course I hope you’ll go back and read the entire interview. In it we also touched on several of his other achievements, including a life-long interest in old-time radio and early comic book fandom.

   It’s been a while since I heard from him, but some good news he was able to pass along is that several of the PI novels he wrote as Wade Wright have recently been reprinted by Ramble House.

   Here’s the email I received today:

Dear Friends,

It is with a sad heart that I give you the news of John passing away on Friday the 14th at 3 AM.

He had been in hospital for the last week and I had prepared everything for him to come home as the Doctor was of the opinion that though he would be bedridden, I would be able to nurse him at home with some assistance. The Lord knew best and took him home as he was in a lot of pain and discomfort.

Your friendship over the years has meant a great deal to John, and I know we have all lost someone of great worth. Someone, who has touched our lives in so many ways and will be deeply missed.

The funeral service is to be held at St Marks on Wednesday the 19th at 11 AM, and though you can not be here your thoughts and prayers can be with him as we say our last farewell until we meet again.

   God Bless.

      Love Coral

BILL PRONZINI – Starvation Camp.

Berkley; paperback reprint, December 2001. Hardcover: Doubleday, January 1984. Large print hardcover: Thorndike, March 2003.

   There’s no doubt that the most well-known gold rush in North American history was the one that took place in California, circa 1849. But to those of us who grew up listening to the radio in the 1950s and the frost-bitten tales of Sergeant Preston of the Mounties and his lead dog Yukon King, there’s another: the rush for gold that took place in Alaska and the Canadian Yukon Territory in the early 1900’s. Incessant winds howling across the airwaves, and cold? You’d better believe it.

   And when supplies ran low, food became as scarce and as valuable as gold itself. In this recently reprinted novel, published as a western, when Corporal Zach McQuestion’s good friend Molly Malone is murdered for her storehouse of provisions, he becomes personally involved.

   As a crime or mystery novel, which this definitely also is, the plot is essentially one-directional. Simply follow the killers, wherever they go, and in this case, down the coast from Skagway to Seattle to San Francisco and beyond.

   What Pronzini offers as background is even more of a leading attraction: the rough and tumble life of a boisterous young frontier America, just after the heyday of the cowboys, as towns were growing up and open spaces were just starting to fill in.

   The result is pure entertainment, save for one small-sized caveat: The story ends begging for a sequel; unfortunately, it never happened.

[UPDATE] 11-14-08.   I asked Bill whether Zach McQuestion has ever appeared in any of his short stories, or if perhaps he’s shown up in one of the Sabina Carpenter and/or John Quincannon tales. Here’s his reply:

  Steve:

   Re the McQuestion character: Starvation Camp was intended to be the first of a trilogy featuring him and his quest to find George Blanton and bring him to justice. Two things kept this from happening: I got sidetracked into other projects, including a plethora of anthologies that took up a lot of my time; and my editor at Doubleday was replaced and the new one didn’t seem as keen on the trilogy idea. Too bad. I’m pretty sure I’d’ve have enjoyed writing another McQuestion or two.

   No, McQuestion hasn’t turned up in a Quincannon story. But since they’re contemporaries, it’s a good idea; I’ll see what I can do along those lines.

   I’m glad you did your recent post on Ross Macdonald because this reminded me that it was important for me to reread some of his outstanding novels.

   Speaking of rereading, I know you have run across novels like I have where you know that you have read the book a few years ago, or sometimes only a few months ago, but cannot recall anything at all about it.

   Usually this means there was nothing outstanding about the story, just a mediocre reading experience that you eventually forget. To prevent myself from rereading these type of bland novels, I put a note in the book or magazine listing the date, my comments and a grade.

   But yesterday I was reading a Day Keene novelet of about 15 pages in the June 1946 issue of Detective Tales, titled “If a Body Meets a Body.” I recognized every character and plot turn in the story but there was no note indicating that I had read it.

   Needless to say, this was a mystery I had to solve because I never forget to rate and comment on a story. Digging through my Day Keene books I stumbled across a Hard Case Crime paperback titled, Home Is the Sailor.

   Mystery solved. I’d read the novel in October 2006 and now realize that the June 1946 novelet was expanded into the original 1952 Gold Medal novel. Both stories using the basic same plot but I had found the full length novel to be ok but nothing special.

   However, the novelet was outstanding at 15 pages. Just another example of how expanding a story sometimes is not a good idea. But I guess Keene got the usual couple thousand dollars advance for the full length expansion.

   Despite my opinion of the novel as being mediocre, I somehow managed to remember the plot two years later. Maybe there is hope for our memories after all!

   By the way, the above might generate some discussion among your readers about rereading, memory, Day Keene, rating novels, etc. Feel free to post it to Mystery*File if you wish.

[EDITORIAL COMMENT]   For more on Day Keene, including a complete bibliography of both his novels and all of his known pulp fiction, check out this page on the main Mystery*File website, beginning with the Gold Medal column about Keene that Bill Crider did for M*F back when it was a print zine.

   As for rereading mystery novels, I do try, but I own so many of them, it’s tough to put reading one a second time before reading others for the first time. In cases like Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, I do make exceptions!

   I’ve written reviews of almost everything I’ve read since the mid-1970s, although some of the early ones are only short notes to myself, like Walker’s, and you won’t ever see them posted on here on the blog. The primary reason I’ve done this, I think, so that I do remember the story lines. I’ve discovered that if I don’t write a review of a book or a movie, I forget almost everything about it.

   I admire people who can describe in detail either a book or a movie they’re read or seen many years before. Not me. If I don’t write a review right away, forget it. Or at least I do! They’re gone.

   This “lack of memory” property does help when rereading a detective novel, though. I almost never remember who did it. (Except for that Roger Ackroyd novel….)

LARRY KARP – The Midnight Special.

Worldwide; reprint paperback, August 2002. Hardcover edition: Write Way, March 2001.

   This is the third in a series of Dr. Thomas Purdue’s mystery adventures, and the first that I’ve read. He’s a medical doctor, but the criminal element in the stories doesn’t enter in from that end of things, as you might immediately suspect, but from his passion for the collecting and repairing of antique music boxes, which also seems to make cash registers start ringing in the minds of some rather nasty people. (It’s also a lot more interesting than hospital misbehavior, or at least it is to me.)

   His wife Sarah, as wives are generally supposed to be, is barely tolerant of both the collecting and the murder cases in which he seems to find himself involved. The rest of his circle of friends are either dealers, craftsmen or fellow collectors — all of whose idiosyncrasies are guaranteed to give mystery fans a nice warm, comfortable glow inside, as they identify more and more with their own personal obsessions as the book goes on.

   This particular case centers around a valuable, perhaps one-of-a-kind six-cylinder plerodienique-revolver box, circa 1875, and no, I had no idea what that might have been before I read this book. (But see the cover of the hardcover edition below.) Nor did I follow all of the details of the various machinations the thieves, con men and killers in this book went to in order to obtain it.

   What I found more interesting, I have to admit, were Dr. Purdue’s attempts to deal simultaneously with his friend Emma’s depression, resulting from a dehabilitating stroke, and the rehabilitation of his newly found assistant Jitters, whom he meets for the first time while the latter is attempting a daring skylight break-in at the doctor’s apartment.

   Purdue’s joyous approach to life is at once enjoyable, contagious and fun to read, which makes the dark clouds stand out in all the more as rolling in they come, inevitably, or so it seems. Not a prize-winner by any standard, I suppose, but all in all, nicely done.

   Bibliographic data:   [mystery fiction only]

      The Music Box Mystery series:

The Music Box Murders. Write Way, 1999; Worldwide, 2000.
Scamming the Birdman. Write Way, 2000; Worldwide, 2001.
The Midnight Special. Write Way, 2001; Worldwide 2002.

      The Ragtime Mystery series:

The Ragtime Kid. Poisoned Pen Press, 2006; trade PB: 2008.

The King of Ragtime. Poisoned Pen Press, 2008.
Book 3, forthcoming.

   *** For a complete list of this week’s Forgotten Books, go here on Patti Abbott’s blog.

BABY FACE. Warner Bros., 1933. Alfred E. Green, director; Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Donald Cook, Alphonse Ethier, Henry Kolker, Margaret Lindsay, Arthur Hohl, John Wayne, Robert Barrat. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   This screening of the original cut of a pre-code film restored scenes that contributed to editing and re-shoots that the Hays Office demanded to make the film less morally reprehensible.

   Stanwyck, in one of her most striking roles, plays a gold-digger who makes her way up the corporate ladder by seducing her bosses and moving to the next level when the opportunity presents itself. She leaves destroyed lives behind her until she reaches the top where she finds a love that restores her moral sense even as she loses almost everything she’s schemed for.

   There’s a somewhat happy ending in both versions (with the ending more jarring in the edited version). Arthur Hohl is especially good as her depraved father, while a besotted Donald Cook is the most damaged of her conquests.

   This is a black comedy whose taut direction and uniformly good performances keep it from veering into the absurd.

[EDITORIAL NOTE] Click here for a two minute trailer for the film, and here for nearly five minutes from the movie itself, courtesy of YouTube.   — Steve

AFTER THE DANCE. Columbia, 1935. Nancy Carroll, George Murphy, Thelma Todd. Director: Leo Bulgakov.

   As you will have noted, Thelma Todd is in both this movie and the one I previously reviewed on this blog, Lightning Strikes Twice. This may not strike you as remarkable as it does me, so allow me to explain further. I recorded both movies back-to-back on the same home-made VHS tape back in 1991, but Lightning was shown on American Movie Classics, and a day or so later, After the Dance was on The Movie Channel.

   You might guess that there was some sort of anniversary of Thelma Todd’s suspicious death around that particular time, but she died in December 1935, and the movies were shown in August. I’m going to assume that it was just chance, until or unless you can persuade me otherwise.

   As for After the Dance, to get right to it, it’s – well – not very good. One reviewer on Amazon has called it a “proto-noir,” but while I concede the point, it isn’t one that would have occurred to me.

   It is a crime movie in part — in fact, for the most part — with only a semi-happy ending – which was, I admit, very uncommon in 1935 – but the story is sappy, and George Murphy’s character Jerry Davis, aka Jerry Blair, a nightclub entertainer who’s railroaded off to jail for a crime he didn’t really commit, simply accepts the bad fate that’s thrust upon him with far too little emotion for the person watching to care very much either.

   Thelma Todd, as Mabel Kane, might have saved him, since she was in the room when the death occurred (which was before the movie started), but she clams up – she’s the villainess in this one – and off to the lime pits he goes. Only to escape, accidentally – Jerry Davis doesn’t seem to do anything on his own initiative – and to be found by Anne Taylor (Nancy Carroll), a vivacious nightclub singer and dancer (and a sheer joy to watch) who puts Davis, now Blair, into her act.

   Where he becomes the star attraction, and whereby the movie changes coats like a chameleon and becomes a song-and-dance musical, and not a crime film at all. But of course fate (Thelma Todd) intervenes once again.

   I liked the part of the film that was a song-and-dance musical. Some of the other Amazon reviewers suggest that parts of the rest of the film are missing, especially a big chunk at the end. It could be; it’s a better theory than mine that the criminous portions of the proceedings were made up as they went along.

   Nancy Carroll was an awfully cute actress, though.

HERMAN PETERSEN – Old Bones.

Duell, Sloan & Pearce, hardcover, 1943. Paperback reprint: Dell 127, 1947 [mapback edition].

   Herman Petersen was a prolific contributor to the aviation, adventure, and detective pulps of the Twenties and Thirties; one of his stories appears in the famous “Ku Klux Klan Number” of Black Mask (June 1, 1923). Between 1940 and 1943, he published four crime novels advertised by the publisher of three of them, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, as “quietly sinister mysteries with a rural background.”

   All four are set in an unnamed county in an unspecified part of the country (presumably upstate New York, Petersen’s home base). Three feature a team of more or less amateur sleuths: old Doc Miller, the county coroner; Paul Burns, the D.A.; and the narrator, Ben Wayne, a gentleman farmer. Miller does most of the sleuthing, Burns most of the worrying, and Wayne most of the leg work.

   Old Bones, the last and nominally best of the Doc Miller books, begins with the discovery — by Wayne’s wife, Marian — of a jumble of old bones wedged into the bottom of a standpipe at an abandoned gristmill.

   Before the authorities can remove them, someone else gets there first and tries unsuccessfully to hide them. Doc Miller’s eventual examination and investigation reveal that the bones are those of Nathaniel Wight, a black-sheep member of the district’s leading family; that he died of a crushed skull; and that he has evidently been dead for five years — ever since the night he was banished by old Aunt She, eldest and most imperious of the Wights, who believed he had seduced his cousin Amelia.

   It soon becomes apparent that someone in the Wight family, or someone close to it — perhaps more than one person — is willing to go to any lengths to keep the truth about Nate’s death from surfacing along with his bones.

   Much of the action takes place at or near the mill, and in the swamp that separates it from the Waynes’ farm, known as Dark House. In one harrowing episode, Wayne nearly drowns inside the standpipe; in another he is attacked in the mill loft and superficially stabbed.

   A second murder, the actions of a transient who has been bothering women in the area, a nightmarish stormy-night chase through the swamp on the trail of a kidnapped girl, and a tense and fiery conclusion are some of the other highlights.

   Old Bones drips atmosphere and understated menace. Its mystery is well constructed, with some legitimate detection on Doc Miller’s part; there is a nice sense of realism in the characters; and the touches of folksy humor are adroitly handled.

   The novel does have its flaws: We are told almost nothing about the backgrounds and private lives of the protagonists, people we want to know better; the solution to the mystery comes a little too easily and quickly; and more could have been done with the final confrontation. But the pluses here far outweigh the minuses. This and Petersen’s other servings of fictional Americana are well worth tracking down.

   Doc Miller, Paul Bums, and the Waynes are also featured in Murder in the Making (1940) and Murder R.F.D. (1942). The D.A ‘s Daughter (1943) also has a rural setting and emphasizes comedy along with murder and mischief.

   Petersen’s only other mystery novel, “The House in the Wilderness,” was published serially in 1957 and did not see book publication.

         ———
   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.

DENISE DANKS – Phreak.

Orion, UK, paperback reprint, 1999; reissued 2001. Hardcover edition: Gollancz, UK, 1998. No US edition.

   Big cities in England in today’s mass computer and telecommunication age are no longer very much like what they were like in Agatha Christie’s day (to pick an obvious example) and hard-bitten investigative journalist Georgina Powers might well be the most complete antithesis of Miss Marple (to pick another) I think you can find.

   Miss Marple was a pretty sharp lady, and there were quite a few secrets in rural English villages that she was aware of, but in her wildest imagination, I just don’t think there’s any way she could have foreseen anything as hard on the senses as this.

   A world of neon lights, computer hackers and phone phreakers, booze and dope, dingy buildings and easy sex, that is; a London teeming with Asians, informants and other unsavory and often unkempt individuals operating “at the edge of the post-modern world.” Without much warning, it’s like stepping into the science-fictional world of a Philip K. Dick, except that his worlds were often only props, and this is real.

   The first death of that of a young Muslim phone hacker Georgina had been cultivating for a story. His T-shirt has her lipstick on it, making the police as interested in her as they are in finding the killer.

   Since this is fifth Mrs. Powers novel, it takes some time to catch up with all of her friends and acquaintances. Other than that, there’s no need to ask questions. It’s sit back and go along for the ride time, and perhaps take a shower afterward. This is Raymond Chandler territory, without a doubt. Chandler is far the better writer, but Ms. Danks’ streets are darker and meaner, and the edges, if possible, are even sharper.

   Not for everyone’s taste, but if you’re a fan, say, of the SFnal cyberpunk movement, here’s a mystery novel that’s very much in sync.

Bibliographic data:    [Expanded from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

  DANKS, DENISE. Journalist and screenwriter living in London.

         Georgina Powers series:

   1. The Pizza House Crash. Futura, UK, paperback, 1989. Published in the US as User Deadly, St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1992.

   2. Better Off Dead. Macdonald, UK, hc, 1991.
   3. Frame Grabber. Constable, UK, hc, 1992; St. Martin’s, US, hc, 1993.
   4. Wink a Hopeful Eye. Macmillan, UK, hc; St. Martin’s, US, hc, 1994.
   5. Phreak. Gollancz, UK, hc, 1998.
   6. Torso. Gollancz, UK, hc, 1999.

   7. Baby Love. Gollancz, UK, hc, 2001.

   All of the books have been reprinted in the UK as Orion paperbacks.

[UPDATE] 11-12-08. Noting that the last book in the series came out in 2001, one wonders what has happened to Denise Danks’ career, and what she has been doing in the past seven years. If anyone can say, please let us know.