ANTHONY BERKELEY – Mr. Priestley’s Problem. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1930. Originally published as by A. B. Cox: Collins, UK, hardcover, 1927. Penguin, UK, paperback, 1948. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1928, as The Amateur Crime, as by A. B. Cox.

   Practical jokers are the bane of civilisation. Their only purpose seems to be to present a persuasive argument for retroactive abortion. Still, they are tolerable if confined in the pages of a novel, where no one real is likely to suffer from their untender ministrations. And in this novel it may be that the biter gets bit.

   Matthew Priestley, age 36 but seemingly a great deal older than that to his friends, is content with his Greek and Latin studies, his books, china and collection of snuffboxes. A friend argues that Priestley only thinks he’s happy, though if that is good enough for Priestley it should be good enough for anyone.

   In order to get Priestley out of his dull and stodgy ways, and also to do a psychological study of the reactions of a good man who inadvertently commits a murder, Priestley’s friend and some of the friend’s colleagues set up a drama in which Priestley seems to kill a man. Things, of course, go wrong for the plotters.

   The young lady who lures Priestley to the scene of the crime-to-be gets handcuffed to him by a constable who arrives quite unexpectedly after the fake murder. This young lady is the perfect example of the ‘modern girl’ of the 1920s. Everything is lots of fun as long as someone else is having problems; when she begins to be hoist by her own petard, she longs to return to the old standards.

   Meanwhile, the chaps who set up the fake murder find themselves confronted with a bit more than just the dim local constabulary. They appear to enjoy themselves as the situation becomes more complicated, but it is obvious that the strain is beginning to tell.

   The whole thing is, one hopes, totally preposterous, but it is also great fun, as long as one isn’t Priestley, and maybe even if one is. Suspend disbelief and enjoy Anthony Berkeley at his wildest, though arguably not at his best.

NOTE: Thanks to Geoff Bradley, editor and publisher of CADS magazine, for offering me the use of the reviews that Bill Deeck did for his magazine, an offer which I immediately accepted. This is the first of these. Along with Bill’s reviews from Janet Rudolph’s Mystery Readers’ Journal, you can expect to see his byline on this blog for some time to come. You can email Geoff for subscription information for CADS by clicking the link. (Tell him I sent you.)

From this country singer’s CD Welder, which ranked #23 on Rolling Stone‍‘​s list of the 30 Best Albums of 2010:

“The Monster of Peladon.” A serial of six episodes from Dr Who, BBC, UK, 23 March to 27 April 1974. (Season 11, Episodes 15-20). Jon Pertwee (Doctor Who), Elisabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith), Donald Gee, Nina Thomas, Frank, Rex Robinson, Alan Bennion. Writer: Brian Hayles. Script editor: Terrance Dicks. Director: Lennie Mayne.

   This six-episode sequel to “The Curse of Peladon” (Season Nine, 1972) takes place 50 years later, with the Doctor and Sarah Jane discovering that the planet Peladon’s decision to join the Galactic Federation is not going so well.

   The trisilicate miners are demanding better working conditions, but keeping them under their rulers’ thumb is a phantom replica of Aggedor, the royal beast, who starts appearing in the mines and using a heat ray to disintegrate rebellious miners. The politics of the situation are not only local. There are also intergalactic considerations at play as well, and the Doctor and Sarah Jane land the Tardis right in the middle of them.

   Not one of the better serials, I’m afraid. All of the action takes place in a underground rooms connected by dark torch-lit passageways, with a lot of fur-haired miners running back and forth (and probably in circles) to mostly no avail.

   Episodes two and three cover mostly the same ground and could easily have been combined into one. It isn’t until episode four, when Commander Azaxyr and a force of Ice Warriors come to take over the planet in the name of the Federation, that anything other the same old, same old happens.

   There is a surprise twist or two in the final two episodes that almost (but not quite) makes this serial stand out above the mediocre. There is a brief attempt by Sarah Jane to convince the Queen of Peladon that she should stand up more herself, but not too long afterward, the latter is dragged along as a hostage just as damsels in distress always did, long before women’s lib came along.

   It should be noted that Commander Azaxyr’s full-face helmeted and caped garb, along with his heavy breathing while talking, is unmistakably an early prototype of Darth Vader, well before the latter showed up in a totally different setting.

“Big Swing Face,” by the Buddy Rich Big Band, from the LP of the same name. Recorded live at the Chez Club, Hollywood, California, 1967. The CD released in 1996 has six additional tracks.

UPDATE: This new video, for as long as it stays up, should play directly, instead of diverting you to YouTube. It consists of the entire original LP, starting with “Norwegian Wood.”

  STEPHEN GREENLEAF – Death Bed. Dial Press, hardcover, 1980. Ballantine, paperback, 1982. Bantam Crimeline, paperback, 1991.

   If you’re a private eye fan and you haven’t yet discovered Stephen Greenleaf, then you’ve been missing one of the bright new names in the field. This is only his second book, and already, for all intents and purposes, he has the formula down to perfection.

   Greenleaf’s detective is an ex-lawyer named John Marshall Tanner. The scene is San Francisco, home of more private detectives per capita than any other city in the nation, Los Angeles notwithstanding. Tanner’s client is a rich man who is dying of cancer and who wants his alienated son found. Tanner is hired to find him.

   The son, however, is a leftover radical from the stormy Berkeley days of the sixties. He is also wanted by the police. The amount of money he would inherit is sizable, and naturally there are those who would also like their hands on it, which they would, were Tanner to fail.

   Tanner also has other irons in the fire. A crusading reporter who prefers to work incognito has come up missing, and the police are worried about an unknown underground organization rumored to be buying up all the guns and ammunition on the black market that they can. Tanner has to do some fancy footwork just to remember what case he’s working on at what time.

   I mentioned “formula” above. As any experienced PI enthusiast will immediately recognize, all these cases that Tanner finds himself working on are not separate, but one. As far as PI fans are concerned, however, the more complex the plot is, the happier they are, and Greenleaf has enough twists involved in this labyrinthine maze of conflicting emotions and desires to satisfy anyone’s cravings.

   The combination of mood and atmosphere is black: dark, ugly, and violent. The writing is solid — if anything, perhaps a little too solid. Take this passage from page 202, for example. It’s fairly typical:

   It’s a well-written, picturesque paragraph-sentence, but it’s not one entirely conducive to speed-reading. It runs — if you’ll forgive me — counter-commuter-wise to the flow of the story, if you see what I mean.

   All the ingredients of a successful private eye series are here. For my own part, I wish I didn’t have this underlying feeling that everything — what have you: the mood, the complex plot, the overly elaborate set of metaphors and similies — wasn’t just a trifle too calculated.

   Which is to say, if only I could get it into words, I continually felt as though I were being forced to admire all the great scenery going by — without ever being able to sit back and enjoy the ride.

Rating:   B plus.

NOTE:   This book was reviewed earlier on this blog by Marcia Muller. Check it out here.

CHAMBER OF HORRORS. Warners, 1966. Cesare Danova, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Laura Devon, Jeanette Nolan, Marie Windsor, Jose Rene Ruiz, Wayne Rogers, Patrick O’Neal. Written by Stephen Kandel and Ray Russell. Directed by Hy Averback.

   If you only watch one movie in your lifetime, it should be Chamber of Horrors.

   This gaudy comic-book of a film was originally conceived as the pilot for a projected TV series to be called House of Wax, with Cesare Danova and Wilfrid Hyde-White as co-owners of a Baltimore wax museum, circa 1900, who solve the grisly crimes on display in their emporium. When the result was judged a bit too intense for network TV, a few scenes were added and it was released as a feature film. Something similar happened in 1964 over at Universal with their updated version of The Killers, as the once-rigid line between big and small screen began to blur.

   The result in this case is hokey but fun, with an able cast and some dandy bits of business to delight the adolescent boy in all of us. Chamber offers splendid sets, lurid color and tricky camerawork to highlight the efforts of several perfectly-cast players: Cesare Danova fills his shirt neatly as the strapping hero, Wilfrid Hyde-White is his lovable old self as his partner-in-detection, Laura Devon (who would cap her brief career the next year in Blake Edwards’ Gunn) looks awfully good in a part with a bit of range, and Jose Rene Ruiz (billed here as Tun-Tun, his persona in several Mexican films) adds diversion as a diminutive helper. But the film really and truly belongs to Patrick O’Neal as a mad killer named Jason — think about it.

   Jason makes his entrance here forcing a preacher at gunpoint to marry him to a corpse, and from there on, things just get fruitier. Apprehended through the efforts of the Police (Wayne Rogers) and our team of amateur sleuths, he escapes from the train taking him to his execution by cutting off his own manacled hand and leaping from a bridge into a river where he is presumed drowned.

   But we know better, don’t we?

   We next see Jason with a leather apparatus attached to his arm in place of the missing extremity, being fitted by a sinister Oriental (Barry Kroeger, one of the slimiest bad guys of Hollywood’s noir days) with a variety of attachments to suit his sinister needs: hook, scalpel, cleaver, etc. and preparing to enact a baroque revenge on his erstwhile nemeses.

   Given a part like this, many actors would have been tempted to ham it up in the campy Batman style of the times, and O’Neal does give it a full-blooded (sorry) rendering in the classic Lugosi style, but he stops short of self-parody. When Jason has a victim in his clutches, O’Neal really seems to enjoy it:

         JUDGE: (Surprised) “But-but you’re dead!”

         JASON: “Yes. Won’t you join me?”

   … and when he celebrates his triumphs with a cigar, you can almost feel the nicotine rush. This is a movie villain in the classic style, one who enjoys evil for its own sake, and he approaches a fitting climax in a running battle through the wax museum as good-guy and bad-guy fight with prop spears, torches and battle axes, set against a background panoply of gruesome wax murders.

   In all, a film to savor, and I hope you do, but I should add that what they tacked on to turn this into a feature film is sort of absurd: the “Horror Horn” and the “Fear Flasher.”

   When Jason is just about to butcher another victim, a horn sounds and the screen flashes “So that the faint-hearted can look away or close your eyes” an announcer tells us in a prologue.

   Fine, except that there’s no gore and very little blood to be seen, and when the lights and noises come, it’s generally to presage a moment of almost tasteful metaphor: Jason swings his ax, the camera pans decorously away… and what was all the fuss about?

   Still and all it’s a harmless bit of fun in a film you shouldn’t miss.

From Good, the first album recorded by the Boston-based alternative rock trio Morphine:

ROBERT AVERY – Murder on the Downbeat. Arcadia House, hardcover, 1943. Death House #3, digest-sized paperback, 1944.

   Clarinetist Steve Sisson is widely respected for his great jazz playing, but he has lots of enemies. Early one morning in Fat-Ankles’s joint during a jam session, one of those enemies shoots Sisson in the head with the working part of an ice pick.

   The girlfriend of jazz columnist Malachy Bliss is arrested for file murder, she having had the opportunity and several good reasons for doing away with Sisson. Bliss, who is an even bigger toper than Jonathan Latimcr’s Bill Crane, begins his own investigation among musicians and the underworld.

   After Avery has constructed a quite good, but perchance not accurate, simile — “as pure as a seminarian’s dream” — his inventiveness is exhausted. A typical Arcadia product: interesting background, poorly executed novel.

Bibliographic Notes:   Robert Avery wrote three other mysteries, but all for the lending-library market. This seems to be Malachy Bliss’s only appearance, but two feature a sleuth named Joe Kelly, described by Bill elsewhere as a writer and amateur detective:

A Murder a Day! Mystery House, 1940. [Joe Kelly]
The Corpse in Company K. Swift, 1942. [Joe Kelly]
Murder on the Downbeat. Arcadia, 1943.
A Fast Man with a Dollar. Arcadia, 1947.

“The Deep End.” An episode of Kraft Suspense Theater, NBC, 2 January 1964 (Season 1, Episode 11). Aldo Ray, Clu Gulager, Tina Louise, Ellen McRae, Whit Bissell, Paul Langton. Teleplay by Jonathan Hughes based on the novel The Drowner by John D. MacDonald. Directed by Francis D. Lyon.

   Despite some of the more obvious sexual aspects of the novel being toned down considerably, this is a fairly faithful adaptation of the Gold Medal original paperback by John D. MacDonald published as The Drowner, and about the closest thing MacDonald ever wrote to a straight private eye novel.

   Lucille Benton (Ellen McRae) a soon to be divorced daughter of regional old money, has died while swimming on private property owned by her lover wealthy self made developer Sam Kimber (Aldo Ray), except, we, the viewer, saw her murdered by someone in scuba gear in the opening credits, so we are one step ahead of everyone but the killer when insurance adjustor Dan Walsh (Clu Gulager) shows up asking Sheriff Kyle (Paul Langton) about things like suicide. Things get even touchier when he talks to Sam Kimber at his office once he gets past Kimber’s protective Amazonian secretary Angie Powell (Tina Louise).

   It seems Lucille Benton was divorcing weak willed Nico Benton (Dan Barton) for rough tough sweet Sam a real man, and it also plays out Lucille was holding some $200,000 dollars of money for Sam he had salted away as emergency funds without telling the IRS. Now Lucille is dead, the money is missing, the IRS is hard on Sam’s heels, accountant Gus Hickman (Whit Bissell) has been nosing around and may have talked enough to get Lucille killed, and who knows where this Walsh character will pop up. Sheriff Kyle may know which side his bread is buttered on when it comes to Sam Kimber, but he isn’t so loyal he will keep quiet about just anything.

   Then Lucille Benton’s sister Barbara Shepherd (a dual role for Ellen McRae) shows up unnerving Sam with her resemblance and we discover Dan Walsh is no insurance man but a private detective she hired because she thinks Lucille was murdered. When Gus Hickman is killed suspiciously near one of Kimber’s construction sites, Walsh puts two and two together, but the only way he can prove his suspicions is make himself bait for murder at the same place and in the same way as Lucille Benton.

   Television had to tone down the novel considerably, Lucille goes swimming in a one piece and not skinny dipping for one thing, MacDonald’s sexual themes are kept to a minimum, and there is some psychosexual business that gets considerably trimmed, but all in all it is a good adaptation of a MacDonald novel that touches on many of his themes including the self made man versus corrupt inherited wealth and influence, the darker side of American business and its practices, adultery, sexual healing, and sexual frustration as a motive for twisted emotions and even murder.

   As always in MacDonald, sex as anything but a healthy outlet for adults is dangerous and destructive and nothing more so than repressing it or expressing disgust at it. Prudery and murder are never far from each other in MacDonald’s universe.

   There is really too much story for the hour-long format to let a lot of suspense develop, but the performances are good and the story moves along well. It might help if the teleplay didn’t keep revealing things too soon, but at the same time I doubt many people couldn’t guess how this was going to go.

   Although Dan Walsh is not the only private detective to appear in a MacDonald novel, he is the only one to be anything like the protagonist in one. You have to wonder if MacDonald just wanted to try a private eye set up on for size or what his motivation was since this could easily have been told in a more typical MacDonald manner with a more typical MacDonald hero. He had used investigators, police and Federal, before, but I think Walsh is his only private detective hero.

   Nothing great, but worth seeing for MacDonald fans. There is even an early James Bond joke when Sam Kimber says of Dan Walsh’s theory that it is as fantastic as “That Bond fellow, the one who is always fighting criminal masterminds, what’s his name?” It may even be one of the earliest James Bond references in mainstream television, or close to it.

   A good hour long entry in a usually reliable anthology series, and an interesting one for John D. MacDonald fans.