Agatha Christie often reworked her stories into other forms, including several featuring Hercule Poirot. “The Submarine Plans” (The Sketch, November 7, 1923) was expanded into “The Incredible Theft” (serialized in the London Daily Express, April 6-12, 1937), and “The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest” (The Strand Magazine, January 1932) as “The Mystery of the Spanish Chest” (serialized in Women’s Illustrated, September 17-October 1, 1960). “The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding” (aka “Christmas Adventure”; The Sketch, December 12, 1923) became a novella (aka “The Theft of the Royal Ruby”) first published in The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding and a Selection of Entrées (1960).

   Christie sometimes exchanged one of her many sleuths for another; what appeared in The Strand Magazine (June 1936) as “Poirot and the Regatta Mystery” was rewritten with the lesser-known Parker Pyne before its book publication in The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories (1939). The original, while collected in the 2008 U.K. version of Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories, is not in the U.S. version. She expanded some stories into novels, e.g., “The Plymouth Express,” which originally appeared in The Sketch (as “The Mystery of the Plymouth Express”; April 4, 1923), like most of those in Poirot’s Early Cases (1974), and was collected in the U.S. in The Under Dog and Other Stories (1951). The expanded version became The Mystery of the Blue Train (William Collins & Sons, 29 March 1928).

   First published Stateside in The Blue Book Magazine (as “The Plymouth Express Affair”; January 1924), the short story is narrated by Poirot’s friend and flatmate, Captain Arthur Hastings, as were the majority of them, although he appears in only eight novels. Shortly after Royal Navy Lt. Alec Simpson discovers Mrs. Flossie Carrington, stabbed to death, under the seat of a compartment in the titular train, Poirot receives a note asking him to call on her father, Ebenezer Halliday, “the steel king of America,” for whom he once did a little service (“an affair of bearer bonds”). Her poor taste in men included her husband, the Hon. Rupert Carrington, and adventurer Count Armand de la Rochefour, a “bad hat.”

   The maid, Jane Mason, reported that, en route to a house party at Avonmead Court with $100,000 worth of jewels, Flossie had suddenly announced she would not change trains at Bristol, where Jane — who saw the back of an unknown man in the compartment — was ordered to await her with the luggage, minus the jewel case. Describing Flossie’s striking outfit, she says she thinks the tall, dark man was not Rupert, a fortune-hunter from whom a legal separation was imminent. Sensing that Halliday is holding something back, Poirot threatens to decline the case, until he reveals a letter found in Flossie’s handbag from the Count, who was about to renew their acquaintance…and also matches Jane’s description.

   Poirot and Hastings meet with their old friend Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard (making a Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson/Inspector Lestrade parallel), who is astounded when Poirot correctly predicts that he has found the murder weapon, “by the side of the line between Weston and Taunton,” and interviewed the paperboy whom Flossie generously tipped at Weston. Learning that one of the “shiners” has been pawned by Red Narky, a jewel thief apparently working without usual accomplice Gracie Kidd, Poirot hastens with Hastings to Halliday’s, where he finds a duplicate outfit in Jane’s trunk. Jane is, of course, Gracie, who impersonated Flossie, and ensured that the paperboy would remember her ensemble.

   â€œIt was of the most simple!,” declares Poirot, who explains that after Gracie and Red had chloroformed and stabbed Flossie between London and Bristol, she had taken her place, “[throwing] the knife out of the window to mark the place where the crime presumably occurred.” She deliberately described a man whose appearance was the exact opposite of Narky’s, and neither the Count — “much too careful of his own skin to risk murder” — nor Rupert was involved. Such stories obviously inspired the Monty Python sketch about the “West End hit It All Happened on the 11.20 from Hainault to Redhill via Horsham and Reigate, Calling at Carshalton Beeches, Malmesbury, Tooting Bec, and Croydon West.”

   As with “The Plymouth Express” and The Mystery of the Blue Train, Christie expanded the posthumously published “The Incident of the Dog’s Ball” and “Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly” into, respectively, Dumb Witness (aka Poirot Loses a Client; 1937) and Dead Man’s Folly (1956). Interestingly, the story (1991) and the novel (2005) were adapted separately, with David Suchet, for Agatha Christie’s Poirot. Featuring the first appearances of Poirot’s valet, George(s), and private investigator Mr. Goby, next seen in After the Funeral (aka Funerals Are Fatal; 1953), the novel is set partly in the village of St. Mary Mead in Kent (presumably distinct from Miss Marple’s home west of London).

   The Mystery of the Blue Train was also adapted for BBC Radio in 1985-6, with Maurice Denham — who played Japp on film in The Alphabet Murders (1965), and Pyne on TV in The Agatha Christie Hour — as Poirot, and as a graphic novel in 2007. Christie reportedly said of this novel in her autobiography that she “always hated it,” not so surprising when financial need had forced her to return to writing after her mother’s death; the infidelity of her soon-to-be-ex-husband, Archie Christie; a breakdown; and the mysterious eleven-day disappearance dramatized with Vanessa Redgrave in the film Agatha (1979). It was first serialized in London’s The Star (February 1-March 15, 1928), minus two initial chapters.

   These backtrack (as it were) to before the murder, while the closest any character names in this third-person narrative come to the story’s are Ada Mason and the Comte Armand de la Roche. In Paris, American millionaire Rufus Van Aldin — later said by Marie Van Schuyler to be a friend of hers in Death on the Nile (1937) — buys a small parcel from a Russian, who observes both the pair following Rufus and a white-haired man taken to be their employer. After learning that these “Apaches” were repulsed with a revolver, M. le Marquis dons a mask to visit antiques dealer Demetrius Papopolous and his daughter Zia; reporting this failed attempt to steal the rubies, he vows, “The other plan — will not fail.”

   In London, Van Aldin is greeted at the Savoy by his secretary, Major Richard Knighton, and a troubling letter from his daughter, Ruth Kettering, to whom he brings the rubies — worn by Catherine of Russia and including the flawless Heart of Fire — as gifts. His son-in-law, Derek, has been cavorting with exotic dancer Mirelle, so he advises a divorce and hires Goby to investigate him; Derek darkly hints that Ruth has her own secrets, and on his way to see her Rufus spots Armand, from whose clutches he extricated her years ago, leaving her building. Mirelle notes that her death would be convenient, and tells Derek that Ruth — ostensibly headed to the Riviera — is really planning to meet Armand in Paris.

   In St. Mary Mead, Katherine Grey inherits a fortune from Jane Harfield, to whom she had been a paid companion, and departs for London. There, she receives an invitation from a cousin, Viscountess Rosalie Tamplin, to her Riviera home, the Villa Marguerite; the Hon. Lenox Tamplin, her daughter, instantly sees through it, since her fourth husband, Charles “Chubby” Evans, has no money whatever, yet while also not deceived, Katherine accepts as a change from her sheltered life. At Thomas Cook & Sons she sees Derek, a stranger who’d bumped into her at the Savoy, also booked a berth on the Blue Train, and refuses Rufus’s offer — conveyed by Knighton — of £100,000 if he will not contest their divorce.

   On the train, Katherine sees Ruth, who’d shared her Pullman coach from Victoria Station to Dover, and unburdens herself to the stranger in the dining car; Poirot, boarding in Paris at the Gare de Lyon; and Derek, curious if this is the lover of whom Ruth spoke. Met by Chubby in Nice, Katherine is informed by M. Caux, the Commissary of Police, that Ruth has been found strangled and the maid, Ada, has vanished, so only with this revelation in Chapter 11, a third of the way through the novel, do Christie’s two narratives even begin to synch up. Poirot offers his assistance, while she identifies Ruth — “disfigured…almost beyond recognition” with a heavy post-mortem blow — by the mole on the victim’s wrist.

   The jewel-case is missing, and Ruth had said she’d left Ada behind in Paris, according to attendant Pierre Michel, apparently not the same conductor in the oft-adapted Murder on the Orient Express (aka Murder in the Calais Coach; 1934). At a dinner party, Katherine is introduced to Derek, of whom she had not told M. Caux, and he is informed of Ruth’s death; Goby reveals that he and Mirelle were aboard, and Ada, seen by Knighton in Paris, is questioned by Examining Magistrate M. Carrège. He shows Rufus the letter from the Comte, ostensibly writing about famous jewels, and Poirot, while convinced that murder is inconsistent with his psychology, reports that he has leased the Villa Marina at Antibes.

   With Derek inheriting £2 million, Rufus asks Poirot to investigate, but despite his flimsy alibi, Ada cannot identify Armand conclusively; Derek denies that he knew Ruth was on the train, yet is aware of the rubies. At the Negresco, Derek sees Mirelle, who thinks he killed Ruth for her, but is told he is done with her, so she introduces herself to the Comte, stating that the police suspect him and suggesting he finger Derek. Poirot and Katherine meet with Rufus, and she makes a favorable impression upon Knighton, who in a nicely metafictional moment tells her, “You confess that you read detective stories, Miss Grey. You must know that any one who has a perfect alibi is always open to grave suspicion.”

   At a tennis match, Poirot points out to Rufus the sudden appearance of M. Papopolous in Nice, then produces the rubies, recovered from the accommodation address to which the Comte, under surveillance, mailed the parcel. Visiting the Greek, to whom he once did a service, Poirot displays the jewels — which are imitations — and says he is concerned only with the murder, not with recovering the originals, so he is given a tip on M. le Marquis. He believes that Armand planned a substitution, but was pre-empted by murder, and the Comte, claiming innocence, tries to blackmail Derek with information from Mirelle, who says she saw Kettering emerge from Ruth’s compartment just before they reached Lyons.

   Minutes apart, Derek and Knighton seek to marry Katherine, recalling Lucy Westenra’s three-proposal day in Dracula (1897); Mirelle tells the police her tale but is evasive about how she knew Ruth was dead when the train left Lyons, and George notes that, seeking a new situation, he had read in Society Snippets about Poirot being received at Buckingham Palace. Poirot leaves news of Derek’s arrest with Lenox, who says the killer could have boarded and left the train after strangling Ruth, while Zia, reminded of a secret he’d kept for her, reveals that her father has the rubies. Armand’s servant admits he’d arrived a day later than claimed, and Poirot theorizes that Mirelle found Ruth dead in her compartment.

   Homesick after receiving a letter from elderly Amelia Viner in St. Mary Mead, Katherine returns to England when she learns that Knighton and Rufus are as well, and becomes her new companion. Poirot consults his friend Joseph Aarons — a theatrical agent introduced in The Murder on the Links (1923) — about male impersonator and character actress Kitty Kidd, who had quit the stage three years earlier. Mirelle has taken up with the ex-Prime Minister of Greece and now sports the Heart of Fire, clearly sold to him by Papopolous; lunching with Katherine, Poirot says the disfigurement is central to his doubt that Derek is actually guilty, and that “the robbery and the murder were done by the same person.”

   Poirot has Rufus and Knighton return with him to the south of France on the Blue Train, where he reveals that a “youth” seen leaving the train at Lyons was Kitty (aka Ada), and Knighton, who’d feigned a limp from a war wound to facilitate his dual identity of M. le Marquis, boarded in Paris just long enough to kill Ruth. As Poirot tells Van Aldin, they had planned to scapegoat the Comte, but after his cigarette case, bearing the initial “K,” was found in her cabin, they’d hit upon Kettering as the man she’d allegedly seen. Ada, posing as Ruth, had told Pierre that the maid was left in Paris, hence the disfigurement to conceal her imposture, and thus Derek, cleared and released, leaves for St. Mary Mead…

Up next: “Murder in the Mews”

Editions cited:

      â€œThe Plymouth Express” in Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories: William Morrow (2013)

      The Mystery of the Blue Train: Pocket (1940)

CHARLES ASHLEIGH -The Rambling Kid. Faber & Faber, UK, hardcover, 1930. Charles H. Kerr, US, softcover, 2004.

   Semi-autobiographical hobo novel of a Wobbly about his experiences in America circa 1912-1919, coming to America, joining the IWW, riding the rails, and being imprisoned for opposing US involvement in ‘the war to end all wars’.

   Hardboiled writing: ‘Words that would be simple, so that all could understand, hot and clear from memory and feeling and hard thought’. About life on ‘the road — a rising coloured stream of incident, divine adventure filling his heart with action-satisfaction.’

   The road offers a reality you can’t see from the university’s ivory towers: ‘I left because it stank. Life in college became unendurably dull. It was stale — most of it—and false. I wanted reality….. There’s more genuine feeling, more straight acting and talking, more health and reality among the working class than in all the trim little intellectual circles or in all the colleges….It’s a tremendous relief to get away from the smart-alec cynicism [and] dreamy-dreamy aestheticism’.

   And there are some memorable incidents described, riding the rails. I’ll share one of them here where a young brake-man fresh off the farm accosts a car full of Wobblies:

                  ———

   Overall, sorry to say, it’s just not that good. The novel is divided into three parts, the first and last more fictionalized than the middle. And not the better for it. Ashleigh himself came to the US as an adult, proselytizing the IWW and hooking up with Claude McKay on the way. But gay miscegenation doesn’t make its way into the novel. Neither does his deportation back to England in lieu of imprisonment.

   Instead, Ashleigh concocts a story of an English family, sunken with poverty around the turn of the 20th century, with no hopes but those found in letters from family who’d made the trek to America, Land of Opportunity!

   The family makes its way to America only to find that their American brethren had been grossly exaggerating things in their letters. What did you expect? Them to tell you the truth in their letters? That after all that effort, pomp and circumstance of moving to America that things were just as bad? No. That would be humiliating. So family after family is lured to America by false hope, only to spread the horsefeathers themselves when writing their own letters back to the old country. They promised to write. Not to lie would be to admit defeat and embarrassment.

   The problem is that this ‘family moving to America’ business is made up. Not made up in the sense that it didn’t happen. Many times, of course, to other people. Just not to Ashleigh. Ashleigh is not a talented enough novelist to make up episodes of a life he had not lived and make it sing. Or singe.

   It’s for this reason that the middle section of life of a Wobbly on the rails is compelling. It has the verisimilitude that can usually only be earned by experience. Unless you’re a really talented writer. Which Ashleigh is not.

   The final section is also imagined. While Ashleigh and his protagonist doppelganger were both arrested for opposing the war, his doppelganger doesn’t take the boring option that Ashleigh took: accept deportation and go home. His character, rather, heads for the Russian revolution.

   Anyway, as I said, it’s just not that great. The middle section has some nice bits. But for a sustained novel of the hobo life by a hobo, head for the amazing Waiting for Nothing by Tom Kromer and You Can’t Win by Jack Black.

   For as long as I remember, which is about as far back as when I first started collecting pulp magazines, the story “The Diamond Wager,” by Samuel Dashiell, which appeared in the October 19, 1929 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly, has been assumed to have been written by one (Samuel) Dashiell Hammett.

   This in spite of the fact that this was the only story that Hammett would have ever had published in DFW, and even though it read nothing like anything the creator of hard-boiled detective fiction ever wrote under his own name.

   It has taken a long time, but pulp historian Will Murray has discovered another huge flaw in the assumption that Hammett actually wrote the story; that is to say, that there was a fairly well known journalist at the same time the story appeared whose name was, guess what, Samuel Dashiell.

   You can read all about it in this post on the Blackgate blog. Will Murray’s account there seems definitive to me. All the collectors who have paid a steep premium for that particular issue of DFW must be well displeased.

   This is a Vinegar Syndrome trailer for the Mexican Eurospy movie, Santo vs. Doctor Death (1973). Directed and partially written by Rafael Romero Marchent, this entry into the long-running Santo series has high production values and, as you will see, lots of stunts and fun action sequences.

RICHARD JESSUP – Port Angelique. Gold Medal s11159, paperback original; 1st printing October 1961.

   Angelique is a small island in the Caribbean, a possession of the United States. A paradise unknown to all but for its few inhabitants. A few years ago, when the notorious Sabo de Chine was finally forced from the island, his fortune in gold had to be left behind.

   And now that he’s back, the job of police commissioner Stanley Fowler is twofold: get the money, and not let his long-time nemesis slip through his fingers again. Intended, I think, as something more than just a crime novel, it still grows in momentum [as the latter] as it goes.

THE WILDCATTERS. “Kelly from Dallas.” Unaired pilot, 30 min. Batjac Productions, 1959. Claude Akins, Sean McClory, L.Q. Jones (as Justice McQueen), Karen Steele, Don Wilson (yes, that Don Wilson), Denver Pyle. Created, written & produced by Burt Kennedy. Directed by Budd Boetticher. Currently available on You Tube (see below).

   Set in WWI-era Texas, three friends work as oil well diggers on spec (that is to say, wildcatters), but their latest venture seems to have gone bust, not because there’s no oil, but the owner of the venture has lost the rights to it to a lady gambler, who has given them only one more day before closing it down.

   Also in opposition to the project is a local cattle rancher who fears that oil, if found, will poison the only watering hole on his land.

   And that’s about there can be said about the story line itself. It’s a jaunty, more than semi-humorous effort, with blaring music, a backfiring contemporaneous automobile, and featuring the beauteous Karen Steele as the lady gambler.

   A highlight of the episode occurs when the three guys barge in on the lady and start to strip down to take a well-needed bath but not noticing that she is already in the tub.

   Mostly an entertaining but essentially inconsequential enterprise, in spite of an excellent cast and high production values. If it had been picked up as a series, one has to wonder how long it would have lasted before running out of stories to tell. This pilot seems to have exhausted most of the possibilities, all in itself.

AUGUST DERLETH – In Re: Sherlock Holmes: The Adventures of Solar Pons. Mycroft & Moran, hardcover, 1945. Reprinted as Regarding Sherlock Holmes #1 – The Adventures of Solar Pons (Pinnacle, paperback, 1974).

   August Derleth was a literary phenomenon. In a writing career that lasted from his teens until his death at the age of sixty-two, he worked in a wide variety of genres and styles. Among his more than 150 books are contemporary novels, historical novels (both for adults and for young readers), regional history, biographies, mystery fiction, true-crime essays, pastiches, weird and supernatural fiction, children’s books, personal journals, compilations of nature observations, and poetry.

   He edited numerous volumes of short stories and poetry, and he founded and operated Arkham House, a publishing company originally devoted to preserving the work of H. P. Lovecraft in book form; Arkham later published the first books of such writers as Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, and A. E. Van Vogt.

   By his late teens, Derleth had read and reread all of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and wrote to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to ask if there would ever be any more of them. Doyle’s noncommittal reply spurred the nineteen-year-old Derleth to fill the gap himself. The result was “The Adventure of the Black Narcissus,” the first of some seventy stories about Solar Pons of 78 Praed Street and his literary chronicler, Dr. Lyndon Parker.

   In Re: Sherlock Holmes gathers twelve of these stories in book form. In addition to “The Black Narcissus,” the book includes “The Adventures of the Norcross Riddle,” ·”The Retired Novelist” “The Three Red Dwarfs,” “The Purloined Periapt,” “The Man with the Broken Face,” and others. As Vincent Starrett wrote in his introduction to the book, Pons “is not a caricature of Sherlock Holmes. He is, rather a clever impersonator, with a twinkle in his eye, [who] hopes we will like him anyway for what he symbolizes.” Ellery Queen’s jacket blurb asked, “How many budding authors, not yet old enough to vote, could have captured the spirit and atmosphere of the Sacred Writings with so much fidelity?”

   The Pons stories eventually filled seven volumes (including one novel), with an additional volume of miscellaneous commentary. The entire series was edited and revised by Basil Copper and issued as a 1306-page, two-volume set, The Solar Pons Omnibus, in 1982. Some diehard fans of the Pontine canon have expressed a preference for the original versions over the altered texts in the omnibus, but for the average reader the differences are hardly significant.

         ———
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.

   This live performance by Metallica is a cover of The Misfits’s “Die Die My Darling” which is, itself, the American release name for the Hammer thriller, Fanatic from 1965.

VARGO STATTEN – Ultra Spectrum. Scion, UK, paperback, 1952. Also currently available in ebook form.

   
   So much for setting. Our protagonist, he’s no hero, is Sidney Cassels, and he and Jim Prescott are on the giant pylon trying to keep the whole thing from collapsing in a terrible storm. Jim is getting a bit nervous too, not about the storm, though.

   There is a strange look in Sid’s eye, and could it possibly have something to do with their rivalry for the girl Mary Carson waiting below with their boss Fred Ashworth?

   And Jim takes the three hundred foot drop as they watch helpless below, unable to see Sid pushed him, the perfect murder until Sid is struck by lightning.

   This novel being Science Fiction in the mode of a Thirties B monster movie this does not take the paperback original Gold Medal thriller path you may be expecting, though what happens next is in its own way as hardboiled as anything from its American cousins.

   Sid wakes up and in pretty good shape, no one suspecting he might have murdered Jim, save for one thing, soon after he starts to glow. He doesn’t just glow, he can produce a pretty good charge, and without heat, cold light, the dream of energy without heat loss.

   Sid is no benefactor to mankind, and while he is trying to figure out what to do with this gift, he makes a few mistakes. The first and biggest is he tells Mary.

   And Mary, who could have sailed out of any Gold Medal novel as the fatal femme with an eye for herself, promptly sells Sid out to his ambitious boss, not that you can really blame her after Sid lights up.

   A girl, certainly one no better than Mary, has a reason to think of herself. She tells Fred Ashworth Sidney’s manager and his doctor, Billings, tells his big boss, Denham Roberts, the President of the International Power and Light Combine.

   And they would kind of like to know how Sid generates that heat, and not for the betterment of mankind or Sid.

   Sid ends up kidnapped and held prisoner, probed and prodded and measured, and when they have discovered the secret of cold light they send Sid off to be killed and his body dumped deep in a deserted mine shaft.

   Sid’s a tough lad though. He kills the hitman and he keeps himself hidden in a small village while he waits to see what happens.

   Meanwhile Roberts has invested in cold light, International Power and Light now selling cold lamps provided to people’s home and flooding the market.

   The moment is ripe and Sid slips back, but he doesn’t reveal himself. He’s discovered he can infect people with a mild case of what he has, so he sneaks around and quietly does so, just enough that stock in International Power and Light is falling and Scotland Yard in the person of Inspector Hodge is poking around.

   Now Sid shows up with his little extortion plan. Cut him 75% of International Power and Light stock and he’ll clear the cold light lamps of suspicion.

   Roberts doesn’t go for that, and Sid isn’t the forgiving type. He does go back to Mary, but time has passed, she has married, and as she tells him while she may be a the kind of a woman who will cheat on a guy for money she isn’t a murderer. Soon he is on the run and captured by Hodge, who, unable to risk touching Sid, outwits him and drops a rope on him hauling him to jail before they untie him.

   But Sid is still the key to cold light, and if he will cooperate …

   Not our boy Sid, and from there the book rushes to its fairly obvious conclusion.

   As Hodge sums it up, “Let’s get a rope round him. He was due for a rope, anyway.”

   Vargo Statten was British pulp writer John Russell Fearn, best known for his long running Science Fiction superwoman super science Golden Amazon saga. After a parting of the ways with his American pulp magazine publishers over payment in 1943, Fearn took up Crime and Westerns as well as SF in Britain and made a success of it under his own name and numerous pseudonyms (he was already Polton Cross and Thornton Ayre in the States). Vargo Statten was successful enough as a pseudonym it even got its own pulp. Some have suggested it was a shared pseudonym, but all the books as by Statten are Fearn. Volstead Gribdan was a shared pseudonym he, E. C. Tubb, and others used.

   Ultra Spectrum was one of the later Vargo Statten books that had begun to share the interest in crime reflected in his mystery and crime books.

   Frankly, as a science fiction concept cold light doesn’t really support a book this long (most of the Vargo Statten “novels” run roughly 35,000 to 45,000 words), at best its an episode of The Outer Limits or a low budget SF monster movie. There is no real character development, no growth. Everyone is exactly what they are when you meet them and no better or worse when it ends. The writing is good but nothing better, and while it is a compelling read, it is all empty mental calories.

   I enjoyed it enough. Fearn was a gifted storyteller, but for all the moving around and action nothing happens to anyone you care enough about to be involved with. Sid isn’t even so bad you are cheering for him to get what he deserves.

   He was alive, he killed a guy, he got hit by lightning, he glowed in the dark, he got screwed over by a few people, he tried to take revenge but wasn’t as smart as he thought, and he ended badly.

   You could make art out of that. Others have, pretty good art too.

   Fearn doesn’t bother.

   I suspect you probably won’t either.

THE GREEN PARROT. 1958. TV pilot, 30 min. Never aired. Howard Duff (Paul Mace), Ramon Novarro, Peter Whitney, Donald Randolph, Mari Blanchard. Created by Ida Lupino & Howard Duff. Teleplay: William Spier. Directed by Allen H. Miner. Currently streaming on YouTube (see below).

   There is small but significant number of movie, TV, and radio series based on the concept of an American (usually but not always) running a tavern, cafe. or the like in a foreign country, often an exotic one, but although he’d rather it otherwise, trouble always seems to seek him out and get him involved in peril and danger for as long as the current episode lasts.

   Such is the case with Paul Mace, who co-owns The Green Parrot (dba El Pavo Verde), a cantina in a small Mexican village. The episode begins with Mace staggering into the bar with a bullet in his shoulder, then contnues in true Sam Spade fashion as he relates to the doctor and others what kind of scrpe he has just gotten himself into – and presumably (and hopefully) out of.

   It all began with a beautiful blonde, complete with fur coat, coming into the cantina asking Mace for help. Her husband has just died in a fire. Foul play is suspected, and as his wife, she is sure that she is the number one suspect. And so she is, and Mace does his best to help.

   The cast and setting are both fine, but the story simply has no oomph. Being of the appropriate age for such material at the time it was produced, however, I’d certainly have watched any continuing episodes, if such had eventuated. But as adult fare, it’s as weak as yesterday’s tea. I wish I could say better.