FRED ZACKEL – Cinderella After Midnight. Michael Brennen #2. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, hardcover, 1980. No paperback edition.

   When private investigator Michael Brennen agrees to help find his client’s daughter, he thinks he’s working on a run-of-the-mill custody case. Instead, the trail leads him straight into the gritty, grimy pesthole of San Francisco’s notorious Tenderloin district.

   One of the primary obligations of the California private eye novel has always seemed to involve the public display of some of the sorrier undersides of the once-proud California dream. Here we get an eyeful. We’re led from alley to gutter and back again, and just as we’ve begun to feel there’s no escape – and for most of the inhabitants of this noxious world there is not – the trail suddenly takes a surprising twist upward, into the light of day and into the inner offices of some of the state’s leading politicians and financial leaders.

   Brennen’s client turns out to be a hooker, but at one time she was a call girl with powerful government connections. He spots the daughter in a porno film, one she made with a live-in lesbian lover. The mother is murdered, the girl is kidnapped, and the underground revolution is blamed – but we know better. Big Business and Big Government are both involved – the twin Boogie Men that may grab us all yet.

   The story is steeped in sour sex and melancholia. There is little to blow away the pervading gloom. The plot is wonderfully convoluted, a mystery addict’s delight, but its grip on the reader never wholly takes hold. Why this should be so is not entirely clear. There may be cause for beginning to wonder whether, just maybe, a message like this one might not have been a measure too much for its limited means of conveyance to handle.

Rating: B

      The Michael Brennen series —

Cocaine and Blue Eyes (1978)
Cinderella After Midnight (1980)

TEQUILA AND BONETTI.  “Street Dogs.” CBS, 60m. 17 January 1992. (Season 1, Episode 1.) Jack Scalia as Detective Nico “Nick” Bonetti, Charles Rocket as Captain Midian Knight, Mariska Hargitay as Officer Angela Garcia, Brad Sanders as Tequila (voice). Writer: Donald P. Bellisario. Director: Michael Zinberg.

   In case you’re wondering, Tequila is a dog, a police dog, mind you, and a good one, but a dog, and one of the ugliest dogs you’ve ever seen. Police detective Nick Bonetti is a transplant to L.A. from New York City, and part of the basis thesis of the series is that he’s a fish out of water. I think Jack Scalia made a good part of his acting career playing an Italian from Brooklyn, a role which I’m sure came very easy to him, because that’s exactly who he is.

   In “Street Dogs” he solves a murder which everyone else thinks was a suicide, but it takes Tequila’s strong sense of smell to catch the killer. And having written that, I see that I’ve neglected telling you what the kicker is in all this. We, the viewer, get to hear Tequila’s wry commentary on what’s going on around him. No one else, only us.

   Well, someone thought this was going to be a very funny concept, and audiences would lap it up. It might have been a go – audiences like talking animals, as you well know – but in spite of Bonetti’s natural brashness, he also comes with his own baggage. He accidentally killed a 12-year-old girl while on duty back in NYC, and he still hasn’t gotten over it. Breaking down and crying in the arms of his ex-wife just doesn’t go with the flow. It broke the comic mood entirely, I can tell you that.

   Apparently 10 of 12 episodes that were filmed actually made it onto the air. It’s a wonder it lasted as long as it did.
   

THE BRAVADOS. 20th Century Fox, 1958. Gregory Peck, Joan Collins, Stephen Boyd, Albert Salmi, Henry Silva, Lee Van Cleef, Herbert Rudley, Andrew Duggan, Ken Scott, George Voskovec, Barry Coe, Gene Evans. Screenplay by Philip Yordan, based on a novel by Frank O’Rourke. Director Henry King.

   This widescreen Technicolor western may not quite be a classic, but it comes close, and as the saying goes, I wouldn’t want to live on the difference. Directed by veteran Henry King and with a remarkable cast of actors, even for a Western from this period, it follows one man’s path to revenge and ultimately redemption.

   Jim Douglass (Gregory Peck) rides into a quiet and tense little town on the eve of a public hanging of four outlaws who shot up the place and killed several people. All he will say is that he is from a small town one hundred miles away and he is there to see the hanging. The law (Herbert Rudley) is nervous about strangers in town and waiting for the hangman, unsure of this quiet sullen man who has traveled so far to see four men die.

   Also in town is Josefa Valarde (Joan Collins, and quite good here) who knew Douglass five years ago in New Orleans. Through her we gradually piece together Peck’s nature and journey, his wife’s death, his six month quest to hunt down these four men he has never seen (that’s a key point later in the film).

   There are several small characters from the town drawn sharply, the young lovers and the girl’s disapproving father who wants more than small town life for her (Kathleen Gallant, Barry Coe, George Voskovec), a gullible good natured deputy (Ken Scott), Rudley’s lawman, padre Andrew Duggan (who knows the secret Douglass hides from everyone).

   During a church service the supposed hangman (Joe deRita — yes, that Joe deRita, unbilled and quite good in serious role) frees the prisoner, stabbing Rudley and getting killed for his efforts and the young girl Emma (Gallant), is taken hostage by the escaping killers.

   There’s a fine scene when the wounded Rudley stumbles bleeding into the church, eloquently shot and staged for full effect.

   In a scene that echoes The Searchers, Peck refuses to join the others in a pointless nighttime posse. He knows the hunt will be long and deadly.

   Peck’s performance here as a man grown deadly and possessed by his anger, grief, and need for revenge anchors the film.

   Boyd is his usual charming over-sexed sadist, a part he perfected (his showdown with Peck is well staged as less a duel than an execution), Salmi a vicious brute (a part he perfected), Van Cleef a hothead prone to losing his cool and a coward when it comes down to it (one of the stronger scenes key to the movie is when Peck’s character executes him in cold blood), and Silva the cool half-breed (Salmi: “I don’t trust the Indian. You never know what he’s thinking.”}, the key to this Western drama that proves to be much more than just the typical Western revenge Kabuki theater we are so used to.

   Uniquely for King, who usually composed his films like paintings, the camera work here is often nervous and edgy, especially when Peck is on screen. Shot by the great Leon Shamroy, who often worked with King, the film’s intelligence goes well beyond the screenplay and O’Rourke’s fine novel (he also wrote Two Mules for The Marquesa, the basis for The Professionals), to the films visual style which varies from wide sweeping shots to tense close ups.

   A tensely shot fight between Salmi and Peck in a shadowy grove of woods is one of the best uses of outdoor Technicolor filming you will see in a film and the dramatic scene when the posse finds Salmi hanging upside down from a tree a masterpiece of implied violence. You’ll notice Peck wears a black hat and dark blue and black clothes throughout the film and rides a black horse, visual shorthand for what he has become.

   What isn’t shown or even said is more eloquent than any dialogue could be in this film.

   The key to the film lies in the duel of wits between Henry Silva’s half-breed and Gregory Peck. As the killers circle towards the Douglass ranch never knowing it, a gentle neighbor of Douglass is killed (Gene Evans), and the girl attacked by Boyd, but left alive at Silva’s insistence when he interrupts her rape by Boyd to force him to flee. Even Collins, who has sought to curb Peck’s wrath is ready to see him kill them all when they find the girl in Evans cabin.

   Peck gives a subtle understated performance here. As the hunt goes on his humanity begins to reemerge, as he kills the men one by one until only he and Silva are left.

   The answer changes this film from what it began as, and gives it a remarkable turn rare in a Western revenge film, one Peck plays to the hilt, and one that leaves this film feeling remarkably modern and marks its rare intelligence. That is is also beautiful to look at and the cinematography is part and parcel of telling the story is also notable. There is also a fine score by Lionel Newman with contributions by Hugo Friedhofer and Alfred Newman uncredited.

   The suspense here is less whether Peck’s character will survive and more whether he will end up worse than the men he is hunting.

   Peck has a particularly good Western resume, from films like The Gunfighter, and Yellow Sky, to Only the Valiant and The Big Country and fairly late in his career, The Stalking Moon. This one fits well within the mold,

   And if you want to call it a classic, you won’t get an argument from me.

FRANCIS CLIFFORD – Amigo, Amigo. Coward Mccann, US, hardcover, 1973. Pocket, US, paperback, 1975. Academy Chicago, US, paperback. First published in the UK: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973.

   Few writers of suspense/adventure novels, British or American, can match Francis Clifford for sheer elemental tension, depth of characterization, and prose of rare smoothness and creative imagery. Clifford’s novels are edge-of-the-chair thrillers with global settings – Mexico. Guatemala, England, Ireland, the Eastern Bloc states — and up-to-the-minute plots involving the IRA, espionage activities, the cold war, and random terrorism.

   But more than that, they are psychological studies of considerable power that adhere to a common theme, as stated by Clifford himself in an interview: “Only during strain – a moral, a physical, or a psychological strain – do you get to know your own character … it is only under such circumstances that the right character of a man emerges.”

   The personal trial by fire of Anthony Lorrimer, a cynical, self-involved, “cold fish” British journalist. begins in Mexico City. About to return to England, he is approached by a man with something to sell – a manuscript purportedly written by Peter Riemeck, a former high-ranking Nazi who was once Heydrich’ s deputy. This manuscript, according to the salesman, tells not only what happened to those Nazis who fled to South America after the collapse of the Third Reich, but which of them are still alive, their cover identities, and their present whereabouts.

   Lorrimer isn’t about to buy a pig in a poke; he demands proof – and gets it: one name, SS-Oberführer Lutz Kröhl, a former Auschwitz administrator now calling himself Karl Stemmle and living the purgatorial existence of a curandero – a dentist and healer –in an isolated village on the rim of a Guatemalan volcano.

   Lorrimcr goes to Guatemala to meet Kröhl/Stemmle face to-face: the final proof, After an exhaustive trip by plane, bus, and on- foot he arrives in the. village of Navalosa, where he finds Sternmle gone for the day and the German’s young, bored, and promiscuous native woman, Mercedes, a willing sexual partner. All along Lorrirner has been wondering: What kind of man is Sternmle? Why would he choose to lead the kind of life he does? When he finally meets the ex-Nazi, he realizes there are no easy answers. It isn’t until he and Stemmle and Mercedes find themselves captives of mountain bandits that Lorrimer begins asking those same questions of himself and learns who the real Anthony Lorrimer is.

   Clifford makes the reader feel the heat, the thin air, the frightening desolation of the Guatemalan wilderness; he also makes the reader care about his characters, even the most incidental of them. The Chicago Tribune said that Amigo, Amigo “takes all superlatives,” and that it “will keep you mesmerized.” Indeed it will. If you enjoy literate thrillers that really are thrillers, don’t miss this one.

   And don’t miss any of Clifford’s other suspense novels, especially The Naked Runner (1966), a tale of intrigue behind the Iron Curtain that was made into a rather poor 1967 film with Frank Sinatra; A Wild Justice (1972), a tale of strife in Ireland told against the backdrop of a bleak Irish winter; and Goodbye and Amen (1974), which Ross Macdonald lauded as “an extraordinary thriller about several people of importance who are sequestered with an armed killer in a room of a first-class London hotel. It is intricately and brilliantly constructed, and written with tremendous drive and flair. Not only the ending surprises. There are surprises on nearly every page.”

———
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

REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

BLOOD MONEY. 20th Century, 1933. George Bancroft, Judith Anderson, Frances Dee, Chick Chandler, Blossom Seeley. Director: Rowland Brown

   Where a movie like SOUND OF FURY (reviewed here, and Sweet Lord, how I hate that title!) tries to analyze its characters, a dandy little film called BLOOD MONEY seeks only to understand them, with much happier results: fast-paced and thoughtful, cynical and sentimental, BLOOD MONEY deals out the tale of a bail bondsman (flamboyantly played by beefy George Bancroft) and his sadder-but-wiser gal — a remarkable tum by Judith Anderson, better known for prim, patrician parts in REBECCA and LAURA, in slinky gowns, brassy makeup, and weary sang-froid.

   This is a film that sustains itself on attitude rather than plot, but what story there is spins around Bancroft’s sudden infatuation with debutante Francis Dee, who (the script hints) likes men who play rough. Bancroft jilts Anderson for Dee, who ditches Bancroft for a fling with Anderson’s kid brother (Chick Chandler) a bank robber out on bail, then connives to have him betray Bancroft, thus heading the whole cast into shootings, gang war and general aggravation.

   That’s the crux of the thing, but BLOOD MONEY doesn’t waste a lot of time on it; what it does is limn some vivid cameos of colorful characters and let them live and breathe on the screen a while. Chandler and Dee do a fine, understated sketch of flashy self-destruction, and there are some memorable bit parts of gang bosses, bent politicos and crooked cops. There’s even a flamboyant lesbian. But what stays in the mind is the relaxed and altogether real-feeling relationship between Bancroft and Anderson, as written by Hal Long (who also wrote ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES) and directed by Rowland Brown, a talented director whose penchant for violence got him black-listed.

   The scene where Anderson and Bancroft break up tugs at all the right strings: it’s upstairs at Anderson’s speakeasy, with everyone partying down below. Bancroft tries to let her down gently, she grimly hands him his hat, and he slowly walks downstairs, feeling like a heel. As faded, jaded Blossom Seeley croons “Melancholy Baby,” he tosses off a last drink at the bar and mutters, “That song kills me,” before walking out of her life. It’s a moment worthy of the great romantic films, and all the more moving for showing up in a film as fast and tough as this one.

EYES “Pilot.” ABC / Warner Brothers. 30 March 2005 (Season 1, Episode 1.) Tim Daly (Harlan Judd), Garcelle Beauvais, A. J. Langer, Laura Leighton, Eric Mabius, Rick Worthy, Natalie Zea. Creator: John McNamara. Director: Jon Amiel.

   Harlan Judd (Tim Daly) is the head of a huge private detective agency, Judd Risk Management, with many operatives and many cases going on at one time. Their offices are in a large multi-story building, mostly open to the roof, with people at their desks or walking around doing busy things at any one time. There is one big problem. They’re barely breaking even, and rumors have it that someone is trying to do a leveraged buyout.

   There is also one big solution. Daly is hired by one businessman to get the money back, amount in the millions, embezzled by another, a former associate. The problem is, the embezzler admits he has the money, but that he also has the goods on the man he embezzled it from.

   There are several other smaller cases worked on in this first episode, which I won’t go into, but I will mention that there are also several non-work related relationships between some of the employees that are stating to interfere with their work. And I haven’t yet told you that there is a mole in the firm, someone telling tales out of hand to whoever it is that may or may not be trying to buy them out.

   This is the high glitzy end of the PI business, and I’m not sure if there is anything like it in book form. Tim Daly is perfect in the role of the brash, perhaps way too brash, head of the firm, but he has good people working for him. Some, however, as mentioned above, not so good.

   This was the first of what was intended to be twelve episodes, but only five were aired before ABC pulled the plug. Based on only the first episode, I’m not in a position to tell you what went wrong. Was glitzy not in style in 2005, or did viewers not particularly care for glitz and internal intrigue in the PI business? In any case, all twelve episodes were filmed and the entire series has been telecast in various parts of the world. Just not in the US.

LIONEL BLACK – The Penny Murders. Kate and Henry Theobald #5. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1979. Avon, US, 1st US printing, February 1980.

   As if we didn’t already know, the age of electronics is upon us. When a wealthy numismatist is found shot to death in an inner sanctorum of his home, completely guarded by the most sophisticated of perimeter circuits and alarms, suicide is the only logical possibility. The dead man had the only keys, and they were found on his body.

   Kate Theobald, unstoppable lady journalist, is persuaded by the manservant of the deceased, however, that there is more to the story. Not surprisingly, there is. Some information about the impossibly rare 1933 and 1954 English pennies, which supposedly never left the mint, comes to light, and so do some decidedly noxious wart s that had blighted the dead man’s personality.

   Kate’s husband, Henry, is a barrister, the son of England’s most famous criminal lawyer, and a coin collector of sorts as well. Together, Kate and Henry make a pretty good team, although it is she who does most of the detecting, and he who (so reminiscent of the many pitfalls stumbled into by a certain Mrs. North) stupidly falls into a trap while trying to give her a hand.

   The dialogue, as seems common in a goodly amount of British crime fiction, is blunt, terse, and flat. Black has an engaging writing style, and he uses it well to conceal the lack of depth exhibited by his characters. The solution is as up to date as today’s hardware store, and (surprisingly) it is as easily explained and as obvious ex post facto (an exciting phrase from the Latin which means here that, no, I didn’t figure it out but either) as most locked-room mysteries usually are.

Rating: C plus.

         — Attributed to SF author Clifford D. Simak:

    “And when you get around to those unreadable stories, you must not lose sight of the fact that whether a story is readable or unreadable depends entirely upon the person reading it. This is an extremely nebulous area in which to make a judgment. I will mention no names or titles, for I should be ashamed to, but I must confess that for me there are certain stories that are unreadable. The horrible thing about this is that some of them have been critically acclaimed as masterpieces. No doubt they are, but I still can’t read them. And yet, I consider that it would be impudent and perhaps even a little stupid of me to go about proclaiming them as unreadable.”

   I have some bad news to report. Those of you who have been readers of this blog for a long time will recognize Michael’s name for sure. He started out by leaving comments on posts he found interesting and ended up being one of this blog’s most frequent reviewers.

   I have been informed by a close friend of his that he passed away on July 17, 2020. He suffered from a variety of serious ailments, including bad vision, extreme diabetes, and heart disease. He was 65 years old.

   I did not know him personally, outside of this blog, and I never met him in person. I would have liked to. His interests were many, but included TV shows, old time radio, comics and graphic novels, and light-hearted mystery fiction, and he wrote knowledgeably about all of them.

   Michael was a long time fixture on the Mystery*File blog, and I will miss him tremendously.

RUTH RENDELL – The Lake of Darkness. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1980. Bantam, US, paperback, 1987. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard,US, softcover, 2001. First published in the UK by Hutchinson, hardcover, 1980. TV Adaptation: Episodes 8 & 9, Season 11 of Ruth Rendell Mysteries, 03 & 10 May 1999.

   When Ruth Rendell’s books involve her series character, Inspector Wexford, she writes detective stories, and, as a guess, most of her fans like those best. She also writes crime novels with a psychological bent, none of which carries a character over from one to the next. From all indications, these are the ones the author herself prefers to write. While they are intended less to be read for the sheer pleasure of reading, perhaps, they are not, by any means, any less rewarding for it.

   Wexford is not in this one. There are instead two other major participants in this ironic melodrama as it gradually unfolds. One is a mild-mannered accountant wrestling with latent homosexual urgings, thrust suddenly into an affair with a married woman. The other is a pale, anemic handyman with (he thinks) psychic powers. He is also (we know) a psychopathic killer. That their paths are doomed to cross, of course we also know.

   That it makes for such shivery reading has nothing to do with the supernatural. These two unfortunates are so overwhelmed by life, so permanently warped in personality, that they have literally become alien to the rest of humanity, in thought and in behavior, if not in appearance. They are innocents caught up in a monstrous twist of fate. What Rendell renders so convincingly is the fact that even is we were so inclined, there’s no way in this world we could ever help them.

Rating: A minus