HILARY BAILEY – Hannie Richards. Ballantine, paperback reprint, 1987. Hardcover: Random House, 1986. Originally published in England: Virago, trade paperback, 1985.

   Some editions of this book are subtitled “the Intrepid Adventures of a Restless Wife,” which is a pretty good summary. We’ll get back to this in a minute – bear with me.

   Hilary Bailey, the former wife of SF-Fantasy writer Michael Moorcock, is the author of a number of mostly general fiction novels, often with a historical slant. Among the ones I spotted of possible interest are Frankenstein’s Bride, a sequel to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Mrs. Rochester, a sequel to Jane Eyre.

   Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV lists two others of criminous interest: The Cry from Street to Street, said to take place in London of 1888, and a short story collection entitled The Strange Adventures of Charlotte Holmes.

   A little bit of Googling on this latter title reveals that Charlotte Holmes is the sister of – you guessed? – Sherlock Holmes, and Mary Watson (Dr. Watson’s wife) assists her on most (all?) of the seven adventures in the book, which I have to see if I can obtain. One review suggested that the stories are connected, and in much the same way (to get back to the one in hand) that several of the chapters in Hannie Richards are.

   And like Charlotte Holmes, Hannie Richards is also very much a liberated woman, although the latter’s adventures are all very much present day, and “liberated” means more (I am assuming) in the present day than it did in Holmes’s time. While married and having young children, that is to say, Hannie thinks nothing of having lovers on the side, while managing her affairs as an international smuggler.

   Framed by brief episodes around the fire in an all-female version of a London men’s club, the Hope Club – a restaurant, comfortable sitting rooms, bedrooms, a bar – Hannie tells her friends three major stories: “The Adventure of the Little Coral Island,” “The Adventure of the Small African Child,” and “The Adventure to Find a Cure for Death.”

   In the first Hannie must rescue a letter that will establish the true ownership of a small Caribbean island, an adventure marred by Hannie’s stated procedure of working out the details as she goes along, which she does marvelously well, saved only by the weakest of out-of-nowhere but hardly unexpected outside forces (known perhaps best in the vernacular as deus ex machina).

   â€œSmall African Child” is far more interesting, as Hannie finds herself venturing into the heart of Africa to find a brilliant African child (named Bob) who is the object of interest to a number of various interests, including that of the entire hierarchy of Catholic Church. Verging into the realm of science fiction or fantasy here, this is a type of story that – and this is the only hint I can give you – should only take place at – no, I can’t tell you. I think I should say only “at a certain time of year.”

   In the final tale, surprised and extremely upset at discovering that her stay-at-home husband has taken on a lover himself, Hannie recklessly heads for South America in a (well-paying) quest to find a plant whose leaves may contain a cure for cancer, and she makes a number of crucial mistakes she perhaps would not have otherwise made, ending up for a short time in gaol and badly served for her troubles.

   A mixed bag, in other words. From a feminist’s point of view, I think there are some conflicting, mixed messages included here – whether intentionally or not, I have not entirely decided.

LARCENY. Universal International, 1948. John Payne, Joan Caulfield, Dan Duryea, Shelley Winters, Dorothy Hart, Percy Helton, Patricia Alphin, Don Wilson. Based on the novel The Velvet Fleece by Lois Eby & John Fleming. Director: George Sherman.

   This little-known but still better than average film noir seems to have fallen through the cracks. With the huge popularity of genre, with any inconsequential black-and-white movie being swooped up and called a noir film, you’d think that someone would have recognized this as the real thing and put it out as something other than as an under the counter collector-to-collector DVD.

   Which is how you can find this one, and the only way, if you go looking. While not a full-fledged masterpiece, it’s certainly worth the time to go searching for it. As you might expect, Dan Duryea is one of bad guys, and the ruggedly handsome John Payne is a member of his gang of con-men. Their favorite modus operandi is letting their marks persuade themselves into backing some sort of real estate venture, while Duryea and the others are there, ready and willing to make off with the funds.

   In Larceny, Payne is the one who is elected to hustle a war widow (Joan Caulfield) into building a home for wayward boys as a memorial for her husband, killed in action in the war and for whom she is still mourning. And he’s so convincing as the dead man’s buddy that I think I would have believed him myself.

   Complications? You shouldn’t doubt it for a minute. She is obviously falling in love with him. He for her? It is difficult to say, but it seems to be the road the story is taking. But messing things up completely is a brassy blonde named Tory (Shelley Winters) who is nominally Duryea’s girl but who has a yen for Payne. Amd he for her, all things considered.

   And that’s not all. There are two other good-looking women in the tale who are more than willing to slip John Payne’s character their telephone numbers. I said ruggedly handsome, and I meant it.

   And as in true noir fashion, things do not end well for all of the participants. Everyone seemed to be having a good time making it, and I enjoyed watching, never quite knowing which way it was heading.

LIMEHOUSE BLUES. Paramount, 1934. Re-released as East End Chant. George Raft, Anna May Wong, Jean Parker, Kent Taylor, Montagu Love, Billy Bevan, Eric Blore and (don’t blink or you’ll miss her) Ann Sheridan. Written by Cyril Hume and a bunch of others, including Philip MacDonald. Directed by Alexander Hall.

   Sheer unmitigated bosh, done up in the lavish Paramount style, and a lot of fun, though you may not respect yourself in the morning.

   George Raft stars as a Chinese-American gangster (!?) transplanted to London , where he and Anna May Wong run Paramount’s version of a Waterfront Dive, filled with fog, smoke, and smoggy folk, with musical numbers to rival a Cher concert.

   But this tawdry pleasure dome is just a cover for his smuggling activities, which have roused the ire of the constabulary and a loutish rival (Montagu Love) with a cute guttersnipe step-daughter (Jean Parker.) When George saves her from the law she returns the favor, and when he murders her step-father (unbeknownst to her) he offers her a job in his club and starts making her over into his ideal English gentlewoman.

   All is not My Fair Lady, however; it ain’t even Vertigo. This Galatea has no love for her Pygmalion (The writers hint that the White Woman in her naturally recoils from the racially-mixed Raft.) but Anna May Wong is murderously jealous of their non-relationship. When Jean meets Kent Taylor (in a scene that just about defines “meeting cute” — they’re caught in a puppy stampede) and falls for him, George gets lethally jealous himself. And the law is closing in on just about everybody.

   I should warn potential viewers that the ending is a sappy, badly-motivated thing that will please no one, and there’s plenty of subtle racism about the place, but this is done with that elegant Paramount polish, the look that took Lubitsch and Von Sternberg to the heights, and it’s awfully easy to watch. George Raft’s constipated thesping could almost be mistaken for Oriental inscrutability, and it’s just too bad he’s paired off with Anna May Wong’s genuine article — those wonderfully expressive eyes in her beautiful mask-like face show him up rather badly.

   The rest of the cast is typical Hollywood perfection, though: a regiment of solid supporting players effortlessly underpinning a movie that can’t be taken seriously but rewards an indulgent critical wink.

RAE FOLEY – Death and Mr. Potter. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1955. Also published as: The Peacock Is a Bird of Prey. Dell, paperback, 1976. Thorndike Press, hardcover, large print, 1985.

   Rae Foley is, in mystery terms, a graduate of the Mary Roberts Rinehart and had-I-but-known school of writing. She is known as one of the leading lights of “romantic suspense,” yet in her early days Foley wrote mysteries that approximated the classic puzzler. Death and Mr. Potter is one of those efforts. It is the first in a series of books featuring mild-mannered Mr. Hiram Potter as amateur sleuth.

   Potter is Old Money. But that money had always been in the firm grasp of his autocratic mother. As the book opens, the matriarch’s funeral is concluding and the long-cowed and obedient son finds himself unexpectedly independent — both emotionally and financially. If that isn’t excitement enough, a young woman plunges from a neighboring high-rise into Potter’s garden. Hiram investigates out of a sense of moral outrage — and the suspicion that one of the mourners at his mother’s funeral must he the murderer.

   The story resembles standard murder-at-the-manor fare, except this time the manor is in Gramercy Park and not an English village. The characters are generally stock figures, from the blackmailing poor relations to the ethnic servants who (as Italians) are fat, drink too much wine, and smell of garlic.

   Still, there is a certain charm to Hiram Potter and his sincere, if largely ineffectual, sleuthing. The nine Potter mysteries represent Foley’s best mystery work. Although inferior in quality, Foley is better remembered for the more than twenty damsel-in-distress thrillers she produced in the Sixties and Seventies. In these, feminine but fluff-headed young women prove even more ineffectual at detecting than Hiram Potter. They are usually thoroughly bruised and battered by the time they stumble across the murderer, and into the arms of a dominant male suitor, at book’s end.

   Hiram Potter also appears in Back Door to Death (1963), Call It Accident (1965), and A Calculated Risk (1970).

         ———
   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.

REED STEPHENS – The Man Who Risked His Partner. Axbrewder & Fistoulari #2. Ballantine, trade paperback, October 1984; mass market paperback, 1986. Forge, hardcover, revised edition, 2003; Tor, paperback, 2004.

   As the book opens, the main characters are recovering from the events in the first book of the series, The Man Who Shot His Brother. Ginny Fistoulari, the head of the agency, lost her left hand in an explosion, and is depressed and fearful to the point of real neurosis; Mick Axbrewder, who shot his brother while drunk, is now a recovering alcoholic with all the attendant problems. They are offered a job by an accountant, supposedly to protect him from a gang boss to whom he is in debt.

   Fistoulari, reasonably enough, doesn’t want to take the job, feeling that to oppose the gang leader is insanity. For reasons of his own, Axbrewder more or less shames her into accepting it. There is a subplot involving a Chicano youth befriended by Axbrewder who has been killed who was a numbers runner for the gang boss, who is known as El Senor.

   The plot is complex, as their client proves layered with deception after deception. What kind of man he really is, and why he needs their protection, change in definition almost from chapter to chapter.

   These are terribly damaged pe6ple. All of them. There are no characters in the book, even those sketched most lightly, for whom it was possible for me to feel any empathy, or any emotion other than a horrified or distasteful pity. The despair is unremitting. By the end my only feelings were relief and a determination not to subject myself to more such.

   It will come as no surprise to those who have read Stephen Donaldson‘s books that Reed Stephens is a pseudonym of his. Few if any authors are more adept than Donaldson at delineating pain and despair, and seemingly none more determined to explore them in all their myriad facets. More power to him, and to those who enjoy such misery. I am not among them.

       The Axbrewster & Fistoulari series —

The Man Who Killed His Brother (1980)

The Man Who Risked His Partner (1984)
The Man Who Tried To Get Away (1990)
The Man Who Fought Alone (2001)

CHANGING LANES. Paramount Pictures, 2002. Ben Affleck, Samuel L. Jackson, Kim Staunton, Amanda Peet, Toni Collette, Sydney Pollack. Director: Roger Michell.

   Matching Ben Affleck up with Samuel L. Jackson is like putting a loaf of Wonder Bread into the ring with one the most intimidating and scene-stealing actors on the big screen in the last 20 or 30 years. The former is a high-powered attorney who needs a particular file to convince a judge that his firm has the legal right to oversee a charity foundation that the senior partners, including his father-in-law (Sydney Pollack) are milking millions of dollars from, unknown to him.

   While Samuel L. Jackson is a middle-aged father whose wife is leaving him and heading across the country with their two young boys. It seems that he has alcohol problems, and anger management issues. What’s the connection between the two? A collision between their two cars on the FDR Highway while both are running late for appointments, both in courtrooms. Affleck rushes off, and Jackson, being late for his courtroom date, finds his life slowly swirling down the drain.

   Except for one thing. He has Affleck’s missing file.

   In the events that follow, all taking place at an ever-escalating rate during the course of a single day, it is Jackson’s woes that engage us more. His pain is the more visible, and his revenge, although going waaaay over the top, is all the sweeter. Not that Affleck’s problems are going to go away anytime soon. Even his wife, the boss’s daughter (Amanda Peet), piles on, urging him during lunch to do the Right thing, which of course is the Wrong thing.

   Does it end well? Without giving much away, I hope [WARNING: PLOT ALERT], in movies like this, they almost always do. This one was a lot of fun to watch.

THE LAST CHALLENGE. MGM, 1967. Glenn Ford, Angie Dickinson, Chad Everett, Gary Merrill, Jack Elam, Delphi Lawrence, Royal Dano. Screenplay: John Sherry, based on his novel Pistolero’s Progress (Pocket, 1966). Director: Richard Thorpe.

   Late 1960s oaters don’t have all that much to recommend them. Made at a time when the Spaghetti Western was reinventing and reinvigorating the genre, many of these films are more compelling as cultural artifacts than as compelling movies in their own right. Such is the case with The Last Challenge, a mediocre and formulaic Western featuring Glenn Ford as an outlaw turned lawman.

   Directed by Richard Thorpe, who had a long career at MGM, The Last Challenge was the veteran director’s final film. Unfortunately, it has almost nothing in it that you haven’t seen before. Ford portrays Dan Blaine, an aging gunfighter and former bank robber who installed himself as marshal in a small town. He’s also shacked up with the local brothel owner, Lisa Denton (Angie Dickinson). Then along comes upstart gunman, Lot McGuire (Chad Everett) who challenges Blaine to ascertain who is the better pistolero.

   At a running time of just over ninety minutes, the film offers up the typical – one might say even say stereotypical – tropes of 1960s B-Westerns: a crooked poker game, violent Indians, a man unable to fully escape his past. Truth be told, Glenn Ford, a presence in his own right, is just about the only thing that makes The Last Challenge worth watching. As for Dickinson, she looks completely bored, which is understandable when comparing how uninteresting her character is in this altogether forgettable film.

PAUL DURST – Die, Damn You! Lion #75, paperback original, 1952.

   I just can’t resist a book with a title like Die, Damn You!, so I’d have bought this in any event, but to my pleasant surprise. it proved to be well worth reading, a noirish, hard-boiled Western, with a moody, idiosyncratic Loner spurred on by vengeance, running into gangsters, goons, femmes fatales, false faces, double-crosses, some very stylish violence (At one point a man sets fire to his own bed to get a rattlesnake off his chest! and a complex storyline the results in lines like:

   The author even adds a Mask of Dimitrios touch by keeping the bad guy central to the plot but off-stage till the very end. I have no idea who author Paul Durst is — or was — but he writes a lightly enjoyable, fast-moving mystery/western that’s easy to take.

Some Bibliographic Notes [Steve]: One online bookseller says: “Paul Durst is the author of thirty-one books under his own name and various pseudonyms.”

   From Crime Fiction IV, the following:

DURST, PAUL (1921-1990); see pseudonyms Peter Bannon & John Chelton.
Backlash (Cassell, 1967, hc) [Michael Carmichael; U.S.]
Badge of Infamy (Cassell, 1968, hc) [Michael Carmichael; Israel]
Die, Damn You! (Lion, 1952, pb) [Texas; Past] Mills, 1955.
The Florentine Table (Scribner, 1980, hc) [London]
Paradiso County (Hale, 1986, hc)

BANNON, PETER; pseudonym of Paul Durst, (1921-1990)
If I Should Die (Jenkins, 1958, hc)
They Want Me Dead (Jenkins, 1958, hc) [Missouri]
Whisper Murder Softly (Jenkins, 1963, hc) [Missouri]

CHELTON, JOHN; pseudonym of Paul Durst, (1921-1990)
My Deadly Angel (Gold Medal #524, 1955, pb) [Florida]

   From bookfinder.com, the following appear to be westerns under his own name:

Ambush at North Platte (John Long, 1957)
Bloody River (Lion, 1953)
Dead Man’s Range (Robert Hale, 2009; previous printing?)
Gun Doctor (Avalon, 1959)
Johnny Nation (Mills & Boon Diamond W Western, 1960)
Kansas Guns (Avalon, 1958)
Kid from Canadian [??] (World’s Work, 1956)
Prairie Reckoning (Gold Medal #619, 1956)

   Plus: A Roomful of Shadows, Dobson, 1975. “… his childhood autobiography – from four to twelve – in the American Middle West during the 1920s and ’30s. This era comes alive through the eyes of a small boy who is ‘half-orphan’, introspective, and full of wonder at the unpredictability of life.”

   Shall we go over my homework assignment for last month? The 1949 live TV version of “Goodbye, New York” was interesting to watch and certainly captured the Woolrich mood of desperation. But the scenes that are the heart and soul of the story, the ones that take place on the street, on the subway platform, on the IRT train, in Penn Station — how could they possibly have been done live? Even with the help of silent film clips that gave the actors time to run from one set to the next, there’s no way this pioneering live teledrama could do justice to Woolrich. What a shame that the story was never adapted for a 30-minute filmed series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents!

   â€œGoodbye, New York” appeared in print at least four times while Woolrich was alive: first in Story Magazine (October 1937), then in The Story Pocket Book, ed. Whit Burnett (Pocket Book #276, paperback, 1944), later in EQMM for March 1953, finally, as “Don’t Wait Up for Me Tonight,” in the Woolrich collection Violence (Dodd Mead, 1958).

   I happen to have all but the first of these, and for some unaccountable reason I decided a few weeks ago to compare the texts of the three versions on my shelves and see what I could see. What I found was what I’ve discovered many times before: all sorts of interesting attempts to update the story as time went by.

   The first of these relates to home entertainment. In the Pocket Book version the female narrator says that figuring out precisely how deeply she and her husband were in debt “had given us something to do in the evening, in place of a radio.” Fred Dannay left this sentence untouched when he reprinted the story in EQMM, but in Violence the last phrase morphs into “in place of TV.”

   The next has to do with the price of a daily newspaper. In the Pocket Books version we read that “the morning paper only came to two cents a day….” In 1953 Fred changed this to “a few cents” a day, and Violence follows his change. Then comes the cost of a man’s suit. The narrator purchases one for her husband, paying for it with a $50 bill he stole from the man he killed, and the salesman in the Pocket Books version “returned with fifteen dollars change….”

   In the era of post-WWII inflation Fred knew that a suit couldn’t be bought in Manhattan for $35 and substituted “with the change…,” which is how the phrase appears in Violence five years later. (Could a suit be bought in 1953 for less than fifty bucks? Dunno.)

   Finally come a couple of alterations connected with the New York subway system. The fare in 1937 was five cents — as we know from the Woolrich classic “Subway,” which first appeared in 1936 as “You Pays Your Nickel” — and the woman puts two such coins in the slot, telling her husband “I’ll leave a nickel in for you….” In EQMM the nickel grows to a dime, and in Violence it becomes a token. Having just returned from New York, I can report that today you can’t enter the system without an electronic fare card, from which a staggering $2.75 is deducted for each ride.

   A bit later in the Pocket Books version we are told that a subway clerk “wasn’t obliged to make change for anything greater than two dollars.” Two-buck bills were still common back then. Fred changed “greater” to “bigger” but kept the dollar amount as it was. In Violence it’s cut to one buck.

   I also discovered two sentences in the Pocket Books version that didn’t survive into later printings. Penn Station is described as “The one place where they [the police] could count on anyone who wanted an out in a hurry showing up to get it.” Why Fred cut this is unclear. Perhaps because Grand Central Station was unaccountably ruled out? The second expurgated line comes after the woman watches her husband carefully deposit some trash in a station wastebasket. “God, neatness at such a time!” she thinks.

   Such are the joys of comparing different versions of the same story. With or without changes, I still think “Goodbye, New York” is one of Woolrich’s finest even though Suspense didn’t do justice to it.

   This column began with a TV drama from 1949 so shouldn’t it end with a novel from the same year? Aaron Marc Stein (1906-1985) wrote something like 110 mysteries, under his own name and as George Bagby and Hampton Stone.

   Recently I pulled down Coffin Corner (1949), as by Bagby, which I’m sure I read decades ago but had forgotten almost completely. The body of a legendary athlete who in his diabetic declining years has been working as scout for a pro football team is found at the base of the team’s uptown home stadium, and medical evidence soon convinces Bagby’s series character Inspector Schmidt that he neither jumped nor accidentally fell off the stadium’s parapet but was murdered by a massive overdose of insulin.

   The rest of the book takes place in less than 24 hours and in one setting, a huge apartment atop the stadium which is surrounded by an even larger terrace complete with outdoor swimming pool and other athletic niceties, and the small cast of suspects includes the team owner, his wife, and various players and wannabees.

   The backstory which led to the central murder takes a bit of believing but I found the book highly readable, packed with insights into diabetes and pro football (which more than one character calls a racket) and with those unique sentences, long but not convoluted like Faulkner’s, which are a Stein trademark.

   Aaron wrote for half a century but never really hit it big. Many of his 110 novels were reprinted in paperback or as book club selections but none became movies or radio dramas and, to the best of my knowledge, only one made it to live TV. “Cop Killer,” based on the 1956 Bagby novel of the same name, was seen July 9, 1958 on Kraft Mystery Theatre, a 60-minute version starring the long-forgotten Fred J. Scollay as Schmitty and featuring Paul Hartman and Edward Binns. I remember watching this summer replacement series regularly but can’t recall whether I caught this episode.

   Beginning in 1946 after returning from service as an Army cryptographer, Aaron wrote four or five books a year, usually in a few weeks apiece, and spent much of the rest of his time traveling in odd corners of South America and other parts of the world, many of which show up in the novels published under his own name. In the early 1950s Anthony Boucher described him as the most reliable professional detective novelist in the country.

   I’ve been partial to his books since my teens and continue to revisit them now and then in geezerhood. I came to know him well in the Seventies, when both of us served on a University of California library board and he autographed many of his books for me. After his death I was invited, whenever I visited New York, to stay in the co-op on Park Avenue and 88th Street which he’d shared with his sister and her husband, and thanks to that invitation I enjoyed the unique experience of reading some of his late novels in the room where he wrote them. I still remember him fondly.

ON TRIAL. Essanay Film Co., 1917 James Young, Barbara Castleton, Sydney Ainsworth, Patrick Calhoun, Little Mary McAlister. Assistant director: W. S. Van Dyke. Director: James Young. Shown at Cinefest 18, Liverpool NY, March 1998.

   A melodrama with a suspenseful courtroom climax; the sharp print was struck from an original 35mm nitrate negative. Robert Strickland (Sydney Ainsworth) confesses to the murder of Gerald Trask (James Young) and refuses to defend himself on the stand. Adroit cross-examinations by his lawyer of Strickland’s wife and young daughter arouses sufficient doubt in the minds of the jury for them to quickly reach an 11 to one verdict to acquit, but the adroit holdout convinces them that although Strickland may not be a murderer he is undoubtedly a thief.

   They request that Trask’s secretary Glover (Patrick Calhoun) be recalled for questioning and in a tense, effective sequence, the calm, self-assured Glover is shown to be both the actual murderer and the thief.

   The acting style of the women is considerably more extravagant than that of the men, and reminded me somewhat of Theda Bara’s style. The person who introduced the film theorized that Van Dyke might in fact have been responsible for much of the direction.

   The film is certainly superbly controlled and paced, and the attention paid to small details, like the way Glover preens when he is called back to the stand and the characterization of secondary players during the trial is impressive. The director has the ability to integrate this detail with the suspenseful main narrative in a way that is quite striking.