OUT OF SINGAPORE. Goldsmith Productions, 1932. Noah Beery Sr, Dorothy Burgess, Mary Carroll Murray, George Walsh, Montagu Love, Leon Wong, and Jimmy Aubrey. Written by John Francis Nattleford and Frederic Chapin. Directed by Charles Hutchison.

THE LAST ALARM. Monogram, 1940.  J Farrell MacDonald, Warren Hull, Polly Ann Young, Mary Gordon, and George Pembroke. Written by Al Martin. Directed by William “One-Shot” Beaudine, as William West. (The latter added later.)

   My life was blighted at the tender age of Fourteen.

   Or if not actually blighted, at least noticeably warped when I read William K Everson’s The Bad Guys (Citadel, 1964) and was seduced by his loving descriptions of films I had little if any chance of seeing. I mean, for a kid in his mid-teens, living in a one-TV household in a three-station town, the opportunities were a bit slim, all in all, and if something interesting did make it onto the local channels, it was usually late on a School Night.

   And so I grew up feeling Life had cheated me, thinking “If only I had been around when these films, so knowingly praised and lovingly analyzed, were made…. Or if I were just a few years older, living the free and independent life of an adult….”

   Of course I had no way of knowing then that before I reached middle-age, the world would expand: Satellite TV, then VHS, then DVDs and streaming, brought all this to me in the wisdom of my advancing years. And finally I have the chance to see what the Old Sage of the Cinema was talking about, all those years ago.

   Well it ain’t much. Everson himself admitted Out of Singapore was “one of the cheapest of poverty row quickies” but even that doesn’t begin to describe the static camerawork, cardboard characters, perfunctory screenplay, and jagged editing.

   Or the rudimentary plot: Captain Carroll of the Marigold, desperate for a First Mate, signs on Woolf Barstow (Noah Beery Sr) a seaman who holds the Indian Ocean Division record for losing the most ships at sea, all full of dubious and heavily-insured “cargo.”

   Also on board is a skullduggerous Bos’n, Scar Murray (Montagu Love) The two rascals take to each other immediately, and I have to say their scenes together are a delight, chortling over their plans to do away with the Captain, sink the Marigold with all hands, and make off with the skipper’s nubile daughter (Mary Carol Murray) “A few weeks on a desert island will bring her around!”

   Of course if things went according to scheme, Out of Singapore would be a much different movie. In this case, the flies in the ointment are a doughty Second Mate (George Walsh, rather ineffectual and obviously no match for either of the nasties.) and a fiery Latina temptress (Dorothy Burgess) whom Beery is ditching for Ms Murray — and who will not go gentle into the tropical night.

   Well we’ve all had relationships like that, haven’t we? In this case, it leads to a rather predictable comeuppance for Beery and Love. A pity that, because they were the liveliest part of the whole enterprise.

   The Last Alarm is a quieter affair altogether, despite reams of fiery stock footage to pad out the plot of aging an Fire Department Captain (J Farrell MacDonald) put out to pasture just as a serial arsonist begins terrorizing the city — cue stock footage of massive conflagrations, none of which seem terribly exciting because they’re all done in grainy long-shot. From time to time we cut to cynical reporters, the Chief demanding action from the Arson Squad, and old MacDonald grumbling about being old and useless. Big whoop, as the kids say.

   (Do the kids still say that? “Big whoop?”)

   But about this time George Pembroke comes into his own as the Mad Fire-Bug, and the scenes of him peering through his thick spectacles, cackling over his latest atrocity, or going all googly-eyed when someone lights a pipe are the stuff of real old-school, full-blooded villainy, and a pleasure to behold.

   So what we’ve got here is two bad movies that I kind of enjoyed. I can’t recommend either of them to any serious film buff, but those of us who recall the works of Willian K Everson, will feel a pleasant twinge of nostalgic fun.

   In a column from a few years back I discussed the Maigret short stories that Georges Simenon wrote in the late 1930s, the years just before the outbreak of World War II. There were very few such stories during the war years but, sandwiched between several non-series books, we find a total of six Maigret novels, which are all worth some attention.

   We have to keep in mind, of course, that Simenon wrote them in France when that country was first threatened and then occupied by the Nazis. It was an unwritten rule during these years that every novel, story and film had to be set, explicitly or by implication, back in the tranquil Thirties. (For the impact of this rule on the French film industry, which was totally controlled by Germany during the occupation years, I refer you to my friend Tony Williams’ 2018 essay “The Silence of the Noir” in FILM NOIR PROTOTYPES: ORIGINS OF THE MOVEMENT, ed. Alain Silver & James Ursini.) This is certainly true of Simenon’s wartime fiction, whether stand–alone novels or Maigrets.

   A few months into 1939, Simenon and his then wife and their newborn son moved to Nieul-sur-Mer, a village about six kilometers from the seaport city of La Rochelle. That was the family’s home at the time Hitler invaded his neighbors and it was there that he wrote the final two Maigret short stories. (All the later Maigrets at less than novel length are too long to be described as short stories.) Both tales first appeared in the weekly Sept Jours and were collected after the war in MAIGRET ET LES PETITS COCHONS SANS QUEUE (Presses de la Cité, 1950).

   â€œL’homme dans le rue” (Sept Jours, 15 & 22 December 1940, as “Le prisonnier dans la rue”) is a tale of pure atmosphere, with a plot all but non-existent. On a freezing Sunday night a well-to-do physician is shot to death in the Bois de Boulogne. A few days later Maigret has an announcement published in the newspapers that an arrest has been made and that a reconstruction of the crime will take place early the next morning.

   With the arrestee played by a small-time criminal known as P’tit Louis (perhaps the same Louis who appears in several other Simenons and perhaps not), the reconstruction is held, with Maigret’s men planted all over the Bois to check out anyone who seems unduly interested.

   Attention quickly focuses on one man and the chase begins, “a chase which was to go on for five days and five nights, through a city that was unaware of it, among hurrying pedestrians, from bar to bar, from bistro to bistro, Maigret and his detectives taking it in turns pursuing this solitary man and becoming, in the end, as exhausted as their quarry.”

   After Maigret plants another story in the papers, this one completely false, the man gives up and confesses — -no, he is not the murderer — and the story ends. It first appeared in English as “Inspector Maigret Pursues” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1967), and was collected under its original title “The Man in the Street” in MAIGRET’S CHRISTMAS (Hamish Hamilton 1976, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1977). In English, by the way, P’tit Louis becomes Louis the Kid.

   If nothing else, “Vente à la Bougie” (Sept Jours, 20 & 27 April 1941) is a sterling example of unity of time and place, consisting of a single scene in a single setting, an isolated country inn in the middle of the marshes of the Vendée, although describing the tale requires me to break those unities.

   On the evening before a local farm is to be auctioned off on a cash-only basis, apparently for non-payment of debts and taxes, two wealthy peasants come to the inn with large sums of money for the bidding. Near midnight one of these men is found in his room with his skull fractured, his mattress on fire and his well-stuffed wallet missing.

   Maigret, presently head of the crime squad in Nantes (a position he never held except in this story), comes alone, believe it or not, to investigate. There are seven suspects: the innkeeper (who happens to be an ex-convict), his fat paramour, a teen-age servant girl, the farmer who was about to lose his property, the other potential buyer, and two locals.

   Recognizing that the case depends on why the mattress was set on fire, Maigret makes the seven re-enact their moves on the fatal evening over and over. As usual in Simenon, the reader has no chance to beat the Commissaire to the solution, which involves an insurance policy of a sort that, if it ever existed, must have been unique to France: the insured is paid off if he lives to age 50!

   The tale appeared in English as “Inspector Maigret Directs” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March 1967) and, like the one before it, was collected in MAIGRET’S CHRISTMAS. In case you were wondering, “Vente à la Bougie” literally means sale by candlelight, which has somehow, don’t ask me how, come to mean an auction.

   In December 1939 Simenon wrote the earliest of the six wartime Maigret novels, LES CAVES DU MAJESTIC, which wasn’t published in the U.S. until 1978 (as MAIGRET AND THE HOTEL MAJESTIC). The title seems to be a tip of the beret to Simenon’s friend and admirer André Gide (1869-1951) and his 1914 novel (which he refused to call a novel) LES CAVES DU VATICAN.

   The basement of this luxe Paris hotel (which, according to www.trussel.com, a gem of a website if ever there was one, was modeled on the Claridge in the same city) has more to do with Simenon’s plot than the caverns underneath the Vatican with Gide’s, but in neither work are the caves central as those beneath the Paris Opera House are in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.

   The Maigret novel opens early one morning as a breakfast chef at the Majestic discovers the strangled body of a wealthy American woman in a basement locker and soon finds himself the prime suspect. Maigret discovers — Simenon doesn’t bother to tell us how — that the woman was French by birth and had been a semi-pro hooker in Cannes before she met an American millionaire and tricked him into marriage. In time the plot morphs from sexual to financial intrigue, and at the climax Maigret uncharacteristically punches the murderer in the nose.

   Here and elsewhere in middle-period Maigret, Simenon seems to stress plot more than earlier or later, although Ellery Queen-style fair play is still not his cup of café au lait. Writing at white heat as he did, he slips here and there; for example, a police report in Chapter One gives the age of the dead woman’s maid as 42, but when Maigret gets to meet her much later in the book she’s described as an old lady.

   What makes LES CAVES rough going in spots for American readers is that either the translator or the publisher was very careless with punctuation, sometimes forgetting to insert a new set of quote marks to indicate a new speaker, at other times inserting new marks although the speaker hasn’t changed.

   And one tends to get heartily sick of hearing Maigret ask “What’s he (or she) saying?” whenever a character speaks English and of hearing American characters ask the same question whenever Maigret or someone else speaks French.

   Still and all, I liked this book. After reading tons of Simenons in which Maigret simply absorbs people and atmospheres and at the appropriate moment tells us who did what, it’s a pleasure to find one in which he acts a bit more like a detective.

   A month later, in January 1940, Simenon wrote LA MAISON DU JUGE (translated as MAIGRET IN EXILE, 1978). Thanks to a shake-up at the Police Judiciaire, Maigret has been transferred to Luçon, in the Vendée. After vegetating there for a few months he is visited by an old woman from the village of l’Aiguillon, some six kilometers from Luçon, a tiny place where the main occupation is mussel-gathering.

   Her husband, a retired customs inspector who had met Maigret in the past, has sent her to tell him that a few days earlier, while on a ladder pruning one of his fruit trees, he had seen a dead body on the floor of a second-story room in the house back-to-back with his own, a house owned by a retired judge named Forlacroix. The body is now no longer where it was, and the suspicion is that the judge is going to drag it out and toss it into the sea as soon as the tide is high enough.

   Maigret comes to l’Aiguillon, joins the old customs inspector’s surveillance, and watches the judge setting out to do precisely what it was suspected he was about to do. Thus begins the investigation, not only of the judge but of his mentally disturbed daughter, his violent-tempered estranged son, and a tough local mussel-gatherer who was sneaking visits to the house for sex with the daughter.

   As usual, Maigret reaches the truth by intuition, coming close to making us doubt he’s a detective. Even though the bedroom of the judge’s daughter adjoins the room where the corpse was first seen, he never bothers to interrogate her: one conversation with her would have ended the book then and there.

   Simenon even allows the judge to exit the scene halfway through the novel by confessing to a 20-year-old murder and having himself put in prison, without any formalities, any trial, rien ne va plus. I find it hard to believe that under French law at the time this was, shall we say, kosher.

   The vividly evoked atmosphere that we usually find in Simenon is conspicuous by its thinness. The English translation has flaws of its own, playing so fast and loose with French accent marks that the cedilla under the c in Luçon, which signifies that the letter is pronounced soft as in Lucy rather than hard as in lucky, is perhaps best described as now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t. By any measure this is certainly one of the lesser Maigrets.

   That Simenon managed to do any writing at all during the tumultuous year 1940 is something of a miracle. Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg in May. Simenon, a Belgian citizen though residing in France for more than fifteen years, expected to be drafted.

   He went by train to Paris but, on consulting with the Belgian embassy, he was directed to serve as unofficial high commissioner for the thousands of Belgian refugees pouring into his part of France. He tackled this job with the manic energy he devoted to writing. When did he eat? When did he sleep? his colleagues wondered.

   After three hectic months he closed the reception center he had created and returned to Nieul and his career. A few months later he and his family moved further inland to Fontenay-le-Comte, not far from Luçon where Maigret had been stationed in LA MAISON DU JUGE. He rented part of a huge château recently vacated by the Nazis and, in December, resurrected his signature character.

   In CÉCILE EST MORTE (translated as MAIGRET AND THE SPINSTER, Hamish Hamilton 1977, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1977) Maigret is back in Paris and in his office on the Quai des Orfèvres, working on a case involving a Polish gang that seems to date this novel contemporaneously with the 1938 short story translated as “Stan the Killer.”

   During this period he’s been visited several times by a dowdy and sheeplike young woman with the complaint that someone has been sneaking by night into the fifth-floor apartment she shares with her widowed and near-bedridden aunt: someone who disturbs various items of furniture but never takes anything.

   As the novel begins she’s waiting for Maigret on yet another morning, but by the time he arrives and is ready to see her she’s vanished, leaving behind a frantic note. Alarmed, he visits the woman’s apartment building and finds her aunt, who in fact owned the building, strangled to death. Later that day the missing niece is also found dead, in a broom closet in the Palais du Justice building, which is connected with the Police Judiciaire by a glass door.

   Among the most likely suspects in the aunt’s murder are a penniless nephew whose wife is about to give birth and a disbarred lawyer suspected of child molestation who occupies the apartment just below the dead woman’s. Maigret soon learns that Aunt Juliette was a miser who kept a fortune in thousand-franc notes hidden in her apartment, that she treated her niece Cécile as more or less a slave, and that, at the behest of her ex-lawyer tenant, she had become whole or part owner of several brothels.

   As the case proceeds, Maigret’s superior asks him to let a visiting Pennsylvania criminologist tag along with him on the investigation. The Yank adds nothing to the plot but helps expand the book to its proper length. Maigret is given a chance to explain his methods — which boil down to the simple sentence “I feel things” — and also to introduce the American to French cuisine, like cèpes à la bordelaise and coq au vin, washed down with Beaujolais and, later, with coffee and Armagnac. (Cèpes are wild mushrooms, also known as porcini.)

   The book ends with the truth discovered (although one discovery generates a thorny legal issue in which Simenon has no interest but which those who dote on such matters and don’t mind having part of the plot spoiled for them can find discussed by clicking here) and the Parisian and the Philadelphian getting tipsy together. Thanks to its rich atmosphere and vivid character sketches, CÉCILE ranks very high among the cases of Europe’s most famous detective.

   These first three wartime Maigrets were not published separately like all the previous books in the series but in a single 528-page omnibus, MAIGRET REVIENT (1942). They appeared in the U.S. in individual volumes decades later.

   Between 1941 and 1943 Simenon wrote three more book-length Maigrets, which appeared in France in an even larger omnibus volume, plus one short novel about the Commissaire which is accessible in English only on the Web. These we’ll save for another column.

WILL OURSLER – Departure Delayed. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1947. Ace Double D-37, paperback, 1953. Also reprinted as Bullets for a Blonde (Bestseller B110, digest paperback, 1949).

   The voice belongs to Roy Marshall, a former U.S. Ranger and combat veteran, but beyond that memories are disjointed or blank. He’s bleeding through his shirt and his memory of the last four months is gone. It’s not long before he realizes he has bigger problems, the police and the FBI want him for the murder of British Captain Everett Curtis of Naval Intelligence and worse.

   Fairly standard noir country, though despite the elements and voice this is only noir in subject and voice, which quickly gets worse when Roy is arrested, but then new elements shows up: such as  suspicious Lt. McCormack of the NYPD, Richard Farr of the FBI who was a friend of Curtis, and Nisei Lt. George “Spike” Yamada of G2. From the moment Sgt. Roy Marshall meets the New York accented Lt. Yamada the action moves forward at a pace.

   Will Oursler was a well known name. Aside from the dozen or so mystery novels he wrote, he had appeared in the pulps, but he was far better known for his religious and nonfiction writing which had appeared in Reader’s Digest and the Saturday Evening Post among other places.

   With his famous father, Fulton Oursler, author of the Thatcher Colt mysteries as A. Abbot, he co-wrote Father Flannagan of Boys Town, his best known work. He came to the genre second generation, and his books tended to be polished and highly readable, soft boiled, but well done.

   Departure Delayed, published by Bestseller Mystery as Bullets for a Blonde, is a solid entry in fifties-style spy suspense fiction, with Roy Marshall a likable protagonist in a fairly typical amnesia plot that plays out with familiarity, but also skill and a little energy thanks to the introduction of Spike Yamada, the man from G2. The attractive cover of the Ace Double edition has often been reprinted, and was teamed with a solid mystery titled The Drowning Wire, by Marvin Clare.

   As you can see, Oursler has a punchy style born out of the mystery pulps, and if not exactly hard-boiled, he had the voice and pace down pat.

   There is a mystery man named Downes, and everything turns on Marshall remembering his past in China where he met Curtis and Downes and putting it altogether in time before Downes gets to him and silences him. The plot winds down to a fast and satisfying conclusion.

   This kind of competent, fast paced, well written entry seems better today than it likely did then, though reviews were good, simply because then it had so much it had to compete with. Today there are flashier and better written books, but too often they lack the professionalism and confident competence of a book like this.

   Departure Delayed is nothing new. It was nothing new then. What it has going for it is good writing, sheer competence, intelligence, and readability, something I used to take for granted in the genre, and find all too rare lately.

   Yes, it’s a little old hat and shop worn today, but it is hard not to admire the very real skills involved and how compelling old fashioned storytelling can be.

THE MIGHTY QUINN. MGM, 1989. Denzel Washington (Xavier Quinn), James Fox, Mimi Rogers, M. Emmet Walsh, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Esther Rolle, Robert Townsend (Maubee). Based on the book Finding Maubee by A. H. Z. Carr. The title of the film is derived from the song “Quinn the Eskimo” by Bob Dylan. Director: Carl Schenkel.

   Xavier Quinn has his hands full in this one. Having graduated from the FBI Academy at Quanico in the US, he’s come home to become the chief of police on a small island in the Caribbean, when he’s asked to close up a case of homicide as quickly as possible. Problem: the most obvious suspect is Maubee, a friend of his from childhood. He’s also forced to deal with his estranged wife Lola and he barely has time to see his son.

   Over the years Maubee has become a puckish ne’er-do-well who has a knack of just staying one step of the authorities – that is to say, Quinn, and he leads the latter a very merry chase throughout the movie. The governor of the island and the others powers that be are not amused.

   There is a detective story behind this rather amusing overlay, but it takes second place behind the general atmosphere of singing, dancing and the beautifully photographed colors of the people, the local shop, the beaches and blue sky. It may seem a little forced at first, but once the story gets underway, it all blends together in very fine fashion.

THE STEPFATHER. Screen Gems / Sony, 2009. Dylan Walsh, Sela Ward, Penn Badgley, Amber Heard, Sherry Stringfield, Paige Turco. Screenplay by J.S. Cardone, based on a earlier screenplay by Donald E. Westlake. Director: Nelson McCormick.

   Let me be upfront. The Stepfather, a tepid remake of the eponymous 1987 cult film about a serial killer who repeatedly invites himself into people’s families, is not a particularly good movie. It’s formulaic, predictable, and easily forgettable. But it has an undeniable shlock charm to it. It may be silly, but it moves at a rapid clip. So much so that the movie’s glaring weaknesses don’t become truly obvious until it’s all over.

   Case in point: there are a few moments in The Stepfather, at least in the first thirty minutes or so, in which the suspense morphs into parody. Indeed, there were a few scenes in which I imagined being in a theater watching the movie and hearing teenagers and twenty-somethings snicker uncontrollably at the proceedings. But for the last hour or so, the movie takes on a more serious – and sinister – tone and these sequences are easily relegated to one’s cinematic memory hole.

   The plot is threadbare. Serial killer and all-around weirdo Grady Edwards/David Harris (Dylan Walsh) has a habit of going from place to place and finding single moms to charm. Soon enough, he’s the new stepfather in town. That is, until the children disappoint his exacting parental standards. Then off he goes on a murderous rampage.

   His latest target is the exceptionally naïve Susan Kerns Harding (Sela Ward) and her two young children. Little does he know that Susan also has a wayward teenage son off at military school who may not be so eager to put up with his nonsense. Enter Michael Harding (Penn Badgley) who turns out to be the one rational actor in the whole affair, especially in comparison to his cloying and annoying girlfriend Kelly Porter (Amber Heard), whose only role in the movie seems to be to cast doubt on Michael’s suspicions that his newfound stepdad is a killer.

   There really aren’t any surprises in the movie. And my summary of the plot doesn’t really give away any spoilers. We know from the first scene in the film that the stepfather is a murderous creep. This takes away the “is he or isn’t he” suspense which could have made this a taut and thrilling movie.

   As it is, The Stepfather is little more than fleetingly mediocre entertainment. Not particularly offensive. But not particularly good, either.

ED DOHERTY – The Corpse Who Wouldn’t Die. Mystery House, hardcover, 1945. Handi-Book #49, paperback, abridged, 1946.

   The protagonist in this better-than-average mystery from a lower-than-average publishing company is Dan Fallon, free-lance writer, who comes on board the S. S. Lesterloid just before it docks in New York, hoping to find someone worth interviewing for a human interest story. One such candidate is a sailor on board who was the only survivor of a ship sunk at sea. Another perhaps is a world famous writer or one of his entourage.

   Before he can talk to the sailor, Eric Raft, however, the man is found dead in his cabin, first shot then hit over the head with one of those blunt instruments you find every so often in mystery novels such as this. Even after the ship lands and everyone is allowed to disembark, Dan finds himself caught up in solving the case, even though the primary detective is Inspector Scott McBurney of Homicide, a 300 pound fellow who looks and talks a lot like Sidney Greenstreet.

   It is not clear how Fallon gets himself invited into the activities of the group surrounding the writer John Helm, but it’s good thing he does, because they constitute the entire list of suspects. Now you may be thinking that the set up so far doesn’t sound like anything out of the ordinary, and I didn’t either until the amount of alibis and other lies start to come into play. The relationships between the characters are complicated, and it seems every and every one has a reason to give an alibi for someone else. It’s either that, or to establish one for themselves.

   I love this kind of approach to a murder case that’s all tangled up like this. Another problem is the gun, which is used to commit another murder – but how did they manage to get it through a very thorough customs inspection?

   I do wish the ones responsible for the title had chosen another one. Hoping not to spoil anything for anyone but [WARNING] it has a lot to do with what happens toward the end of the book that would have been a lot more of surprise without the title the book was given.

   Otherwise, anyone looking for a decent, well-written 1940s era detective story might look around for a copy of this one. I enjoyed it.

HARLAN COBEN – Win.  Grand Central Publishing, hardcover, March 2021.

First Sentence: The shot that will decide the championship is slowly arching its way toward the basket.

   Billionaire friend of the author’s Myron Bolitar character, Windsor Horne Lockwood III is taken to the tower apartment of a hoarder who has been murdered. While one can barely move in the main room, the victim’s bedroom is immaculate with minimal contents. However, there is a Vermeer painting that had been stolen from the Lockwoods, and a bespoke leather suitcase bearing the Lockwood family crest and Win’s initials.

   Both the painting and the suitcase had been missing since Win’s cousin, Patricia, had been kidnapped, yet escaped, more than 20 years ago. The apartment murder victim was behind a group of 70s domestic terrorists, some of whom are still free. The FBI, and Win, would like to find them.

   As the psychopathic sidekick to best friend Myron Bolitar, Win was intriguing. As the protagonist, he’s just boring. By the nature of his character, he’s an empty shell mimicking a functional person. In that, Cohen succeeded in creating his character. However, as a reader, it is not enough.

   The narcissistic recitation of his wealth, art, cars, planes, suits, guns, knowledge of martial arts disciplines, is eye-rolling. It soon becomes apparent his family is as psychotic as he is. Yes, he has one slight crack of humanity; but even that threatens to be a continuation of his dysfunctional family line.

   As for the Jane Street Six, those of us who lived through the years of the SLA, etc., don’t need to be reminded, especially when we now have the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, QAnon, etc. It may have been Coben’s attempt to make the plot current but, with many being on overload, it just doesn’t work.

   Win is a book most readers will probably enjoy. Some, however, may find themselves not caring enough to do more than skim through.

Rating: NR (Not Recommended)

NEW ORLEANS AFTER DARK. Allied Artists, 1958. Stacy Harris, Louis Sirgo, Ellen Moore. Director: John Sledge.

   According to TV Guide, this sad imitation of Dragnet was based on a television series. It took some searching, but I finally discovered that Stacy Harris was also the lead on an obscure syndicated series called N.O.P.D. so that must be the one but that’s all I know about it.

   This movie version concerns dope traffic coming into New Orleans, and two homicide detective who investigate when two showgirls who use the stuff are bumped off. The motive is not exactly clear, but apparently there is a chance they’ll talk if they’re arrested and forced to go without their regular supply.

   Stacy Harris was a veteran radio star — in fact, he was the leading man on This Is Your FBI for most of its eight years on the air — and while his voice is about twice the size he actually is, he does a decent job, but everyone else in this movie acts as stiff as a board.

   At best, this would be fifth-rate TV. How’d they ever come to make a whole movie of it?

RICHARD A. LOVETT “A Pound of Flesh.” Alex Copley #1. Novella. Analog SF, September 2006. Never reprinted.

   A tale of the not-too-distant future, but if the author is to be believed, PI’s are always destined to be down on their luck and work in dingy offices in the bad part of town. Alex Copley, who tells his own story is one such, and speaking on down on his luck, here’s the way his life is going. He is behind on his rent, no surprise there, but here’s the thing, and it’s the thing that makes his a science fiction story.

   Nanotechnology has made it possible to avoid having to call in bill collectors when tenants cannot come up with the rent. When a contract is signed, the signee agrees to be injected with nano bots that, if/when the time comes and a loan is not paid, the defaulter is automatically infected with a pre-specified ailment or disease, which lasts until a antidote nano is taken. No more bail bondsmen, in fact no more lawyers. A brand new way of conducting many a business or financial attraction.

   Or in other words, Copley has a lot to worry about. Until, that is, a beautiful lady client comes knocking on his door. She needs his help, and what’s more, she has money, and she’s willing to spend it. What she needs Copley for is to find a former partner in formulating a another type of nano that can tell if a person, once infected, is telling the truth or not.

   It’s a great beginning, but the rest of story is wasted on finding the former partner, who has gone off hiding in deep backwoods country, and far too many pages are spent with Copley’s adventures in tracking him down, including traveling down a river in a kayak over several whitewater rapids.

   The initial concept is good, but the follow through failed to grab me. It’s still nice to know that you can find PI stories almost everywhere. (This is apparently Alex Copley’s only recorded case.)

TERI HOLBROOK – A Far and Deadly Cry. Gale Grayson #1. Bantam, paperback original, 1995.

   This is a first novel by a lady who is a former journalist. Interesting — the publicity material refers to her several times as Teri Peitso.  She is an American, a Southerner.

   Gale Grayson, an American expatriate once married to an Englishman, and her 3-year old daughter Katie Pru live in a picturesque Hampshire village where now all seems well. It didn’t three years ago, when Gale’s husband was cornered in the local church by police seeking to arrest him for terrorism, and rather than be arrested blew his brains out.

   All will not be well again, either, as Gale’s baby-sitter, a young local woman, is found murdered. The policeman who led the charge that resulted in the church death is dispatched from Scotland Yard to investigate, and all the half-healed wounds are opened again.

   This was recommended to me by someone whose tastes I didn’t know that well, and it looked a bit thick (nearly 400 pages), but it was a village mystery, so I tried it-and it turned out pretty well. Quite well, actually. The Chief Inspector and his lady Sergeant were believable and likable characters, and the numerous villagers were generally well-drawn also. The viewpoints shifted frequently (with that of the police predominant), and the story occasionally slowed down a bit; not surprising in a book of this length.

   But considering how little actually happened, action-wise, it held up really well. It could have been 50 pages shorter, but as is it’s still one of the better village mysteries I’ve read this year.

      The Gale Grayson series —

1. A Far and Deadly Cry (1995)
2. The Grass Widow (1996)
3. Sad Water (1998)
4. The Mother Tongue (2001)

Bibliographic Update: The author’s full name is now known to be Teri Peitso-Holbrook.