PATRICIA MOYES – Death on the Agenda. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1962. Holt Rinehart & Winston, US, hc, 1962. Paperback reprint: Owl Books, 1984.

   Moyes is a dependable writer; her protagonists, Henry and Emmy Tibbett, are solid and capable, though happily not past a little flightiness now and then.

   This time they’re in Geneva for a meeting of the Permanent Central Opium Board. The cast is international; the scene is Switzerland, both its wealth and its natural beauties playing a part in the story.

   One of the interpreters, John Trapp, is found murdered in one of the offices of the subcommittee Henry is chairing, under circumstances which make Henry the obvious choice as murderer.

   Intrigue about the drug traffic and intrigue about love make the motive hard to determine. Opportunity is even worse, for scarcely anyone but Henry could have done it, so it seems.

   The Tibbetts get to know one of the wealthiest couples in Geneva, and Henry has a belated fling with a lovely young staff member of the subcommittee. Once again Henry and Emmy emerge as real and likable people, enmeshed in a plot that’s not their own, and doing their best to get out of it by finding the real murderer.

   Which they do.

THE HOUSTON STORY. Columbia, 1956. Gene Barry, Barbara Hale, Edward Arnold, Paul Richards, Jeanne Cooper, Frank Jenks, John Zaremba, Chris Alcaide, Jack Littlefield, Paul Levitt. William Castle, director; Sam Katzman, producer. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

    I didn’t know that Castle, before he made something of a name with gimmicky horror films, directed some crime films, and if this film is any indication, quite competently.

    Gene Barry is an oil worker who goes to a local crime-boss (Edward Arnold, considerably thinner than in his years as a major supporting player) with a scheme for skimming off oil from the major companies, installing his unwitting brother-in-law Frank Jenks as the token company president.

    Barbara Hale, almost unrecognizable if you mainly know her (as I did) as Perry Mason’s faithful secretary Della Street, is a nightclub singer and gangster’s moll who hooks up with Barry in his meteoric (and brief) rise to the top of the local mob scene.

    Jeanne Cooper is the pre-crime spree girl friend of Barry who finally catches on to his double-dealing ways, and there’s a tense final shoot-out at the roadside cafe where she works and wears her heart on a sleeve for the errant Barry.

    A fast-paced 80 minutes or so that caught Barry in mid-career between his role as the hero in Pal’s War of the Worlds and his successful career as Bat Masterson (a program I never watched).

   Barry showed something of an edge in the brief interview that followed the screening, shortened I would imagine by his almost total lack of recall of much of his career, with the most uncomfortable moment his confused question, “Have we talked about War of the Worlds?,” a subject that had indeed been covered earlier in the interview.

ELMORE LEONARD – Unknown Man No. 89. Delacorte, hardcover, 1977. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and soft, including Dell, 1978 (shown).

   I’ve read a couple of Elmore Leonard’s in the distant past and enjoyed them more than enough to want to read a few more.

   However I’ve only just got around to this other one, which is about process server Jack Ryan who is hired to trace a violent criminal by a man who specialises in finding unclaimed stock issues and the unknowing rights holders.

   Offered a goodly sum, Ryan pursues the criminal but his life changes when at an AA meeting he bumps into the criminal’s wife.

   Knowing that he is being pursued on all sides by violent criminals, he must arrange things so that they are clear of all that, preferable with outstanding money to their credit.

   I raced through the first 50 pages but somehow it all slowed down — probably my own fault — for another 50 pages before grabbing my attention and racing through to the end. I shall have to get to some of the other Leonard’s in my TBR pile.

   The late Edward D. Hoch (1930-2008) holds — and probably always will hold — the record for publishing the most mystery short stories. At the time of his death, he’d written — and had published — over 900 of them.

   A writer that prolific would be expected to have a lot of his stories reprinted, and that is the case. Moreover, as a professional short story writer Hoch would be expected to contribute to original themed anthologies, and that is also the case.

   Below are the first three of many examples of his voluminous output that I have unsystematically stumbled across in my reading. Another grouping of three will appear here on this blog soon.

   These stories will date from the ’60s through the early 21st century, with at least one from each decade of his publishing career except the first, the ’50s, a deficiency I hope to correct soon.

1. “I’d Know You Anywhere.” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, October 1963. Reprinted in: Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories to Be Read with the Lights On, Random House, hc, 1973; Dell [Volume One], pb, 1976.

COMMENTS: Contrell (no first name) and Willy Grove survive a desperate situation fighting the Germans in the Tunisian desert, but Willy betrays a ruthlessness in liking to kill. Eight years later, Contrell encounters Grove again during the Korean War and sees that Willy is just the same.

   In Berlin in the early ’60s their paths cross once more; Contrell can’t help noticing how dangerous it is to have a volatile individual like Grove involved in such a tense international situation. Finally, Contrell and Willy meet for the last time in Washington — the very last time.

NOTES: Not really a mystery, but the buildup to the final explosion is well-laid. And while the ten-page story takes us across three decades, Hoch doesn’t make the mistake of trying to round out his characters too much.

2. “The Leopold Locked Room.” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, October 1971. Reprinted in: Tricks and Treats, edited by Joe Gores & Bill Pronzini, Doubleday Crime Club, hc, 1976.

COMMENTS: Captain Leopold has a past, as Lieutenant Fletcher discovers to his surprise: an ex-wife who is unwilling to forgive and forget.

   Leopold’s past violently catches up to him at a wedding when he apparently shoots his ex dead in a completely empty room with absolutely no possibility of anyone else pulling the trigger.

   She dies of a bullet through the heart fired from no more than two inches away, while Leopold is standing almost seven yards from her. Even Leopold’s confidence in himself is shaken, but thanks to Fletcher’s perseverance the “impossible crime” is shown to be altogether possible.

NOTES: This story was adapted for an episode of the TV series McMillan and Wife, starring Rock Hudson and Susan St. James (“Cop of the Year,” November 1972), but Commissioner McMillan’s capable assistant Sergeant Enright is the one blamed for the murder.

3. “The Golden Nugget Poker Game.” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, March 1987. Reprinted in: The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits, edited by Mike Ashley. Carroll & Graf, softcover, 1993.

COMMENTS: Free-lance gun-for-hire Ben Snow finds himself in the wild and woolly Yukon during the Gold Rush, where men were men and women made the most of it.

   In a frontier town like Dawson, occasional violence is fairly normal; but you wouldn’t expect to come across a criminal conspiracy like the one Ben runs afoul of, a variation of the old badger game — but with bullets.

   When a man dies once too often, Ben’s detective instincts are fully engaged; his client, furthermore, is innocent of murder even when several eyewitnesses — including Ben — see him fire two bullets into the man. Ben’s job is to prove his client didn’t commit murder while not getting himself murdered.

NOTES: As a professional gunslinger, Ben Snow is remarkably ineffectual in this one; but he makes up for it with his detective skills.

LOREN D. ESTLEMAN – Sugartown. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1984. Paperback reprints: Fawcett Crest, 1986; Ibooks, 2001.

   Since the publication of Motor City Blue in 1980, Estleman and his tough Detroit private eye Amos Walker have been a formidable team, combining to create an average of one high-quality PI novel per year.

   Walker has been called “hard-edged and relentless”; Estleman has been lauded as “having put Detroit on the detective map.” Both encomiums are accurate; and in Sugartown, author and Eye carry on the tradition.

   Walker is hired first by an elderly Polish immigrant to find her grandson, who has been missing for nineteen years: He disappeared following an ugly, tragic incident where his father shot his mother, his sister, and then himself — a scene of carnage that the boy discovered upon returning home from school. Later the old woman also asks Walter to find a family heirloom, a silver cross — a job that leads him directly into a murder case.

   Walker’s second client is a Soviet defector and famous author who thinks a Russian spy is out to kill him. After an investigation that takes Walker through the dark underbelly of Detroit, he escapes a trap that almost takes his life and establishes a connection between the two cases.

   Plenty of action and solid writing in the Chandler tradition make Sugartown (which won the PWA Shamus for Best Novel of 1984) the same kind of potent book as its predecessors in the Amos Walker series. The others are Angel Eyes (1981), The Midnight Man (1982), and The Glass Highway (1983).

   The versatile Estleman has also written two novels as completely different from the hard-boiled private eye as it is possible to get: a pair of Sherlock Holmes pastiches pitting the Great Man against two legendary Victorian “monsters,” Sherlock Holmes versus Dracula (1978) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes (1979).

         ———
   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.

LOREN D. ESTLEMAN – Kill Zone. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1984. Paperback reprint: Fawcett, 1986.

   In Kill Zone, Loren Estleman, who is best known for his rough-and-tumble, Chandleresque private-eye novels, introduces Peter Macklin, “efficiency expert” — a euphemism for hit man.

   Macklin is the toughest character — hero or antihero — to arrive in crime fiction since Richard Stark’s Parker; and Estleman’ s prose the hardest-boiled since the days of Paul Cain and Cap Shaw’s Black Mask. Macklin and Estleman, in fact, would probably have been too grimly realistic even for the pioneering Shaw and his magazine.

   A terrorist group takes control of a Lake Erie excursion boat with 800 passengers, rigging it as a floating bomb. They demand the release of three prisoners within ten days. Michael Boniface, the head of the Detroit mob, offers his assistance from his prison cell in return for parole, but it is not until the FBI discovers that one of the passengers on the boat is a cabinet member’s daughter that they take him up on it.

   Boniface’s assistance is in the form of his top “efficiency expert,” Peter Macklin. Macklin tries to concentrate on the business at hand while dealing with an alcoholic wife, the knowledge that someone close to him has betrayed him, and the fact that he is being stalked by a killer working for Charles Maggiore, acting head of the mob, who does not want Boniface to get out of prison.

   Estleman takes an expertise previously displayed in PI and western novels (one of his westerns, Aces and Eights, won the Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award for Best Novel of 1982) and in applying it to a different type of novel has once again scored high marks.

   Fans of hard-boiled fiction won’t want to miss it — or subsequent Peter Macklin titles: Kill Zone is the first of at least three.

         ———
   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.

    Bibliographic Data: There was a long delay between the first three and the fourth and fifth:

       The Peter Macklin series:

Kill Zone (1984)
Roses Are Dead (1985)
Any Man’s Death (1986)

Something Borrowed, Something Black (2002)
Little Black Dress (2005)

LOREN D. ESTLEMAN – Angel Eyes. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1981. Paperback reprints: Pinnacle, 1984; Fawcett Crest, 1987; Ibooks, 2000.

   As is the case with all good private eyes, Amos Walker is a man with an unswerving code of honor. When his client, a girl singer with unforgettable eyes, disappears, as she had predicted she would, shaking him from the case is as easy as sneaking a steak from a hungry dog.

   The scene is Detroit, and union politics combine with and merge inevitably into the background of a city in slow decay. To perk things up and to keep the case moving, Estleman is a current master of the well-tuned metaphor. He is also better at mood than he is at plot, and there is enough plot in the second half of the story to choke a full-grown horse.

   The longer the trail becomes, the more it insists on turning incestuously back upon itself. Not surprisingly, there are also plenty of guns to go around.

Editorial Comment: This is the second book in Loren Estleman’s “Amos Walker” series. How many of the PI series being written when he began are still being written today? That’s “enough said” to say it all.

   The Amos Walker series:

Motor City Blue (1980)

Angel Eyes (1981)
The Midnight Man (1982)
The Glass Highway (1983)

Sugartown (1984)
Every Brilliant Eye (1985)
Lady Yesterday (1987)

Downriver (1988)
General Murders: Ten Amos Walker Mysteries (1988)
Silent Thunder (1989)

Sweet Women Lie (1990)
Never Street (1996)
The Witchfinder (1998)
The Hours of the Virgin (1999)

A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (2000)
Sinister Heights (2002)
Poison Blonde (2003)
Retro (2004)
Nicotine Kiss (2006)

American Detective (2007)
The Left-Handed Dollar (2010)

● House of Frankenstein. Universal Pictures, 1944. Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, John Carradine, Anne Gwynne, Peter Coe, Lionel Atwill, George Zucco, Elena Verdugo. Story by Curt Siodmak. Director: Erle C. Kenton.

● House of Dracula. Universal Pictures, 1945. Lon Chaney, John Carradine, Martha O’Driscoll, Lionel Atwill, Onslow Stevens. Director: Erle C. Kenton.

● Bride of the Gorilla. Realart Pictures, 1951. Barbara Payton, Lon Chaney, Raymond Burr, Tom Conway, Paul Cavanagh, Gisela Werbisek. Screenwriter and director: Curt Siodmak.

   Following The Body Snatcher (reviewed here ) came House of Frankenstein / Dracula, the sad swan songs of the Monster Movie heyday, offering the Frankenstein monster, Dracula and the Wolfman, with Mad Scientists and Hunchbacks tossed in for good measure.

   These movies are two of my guilty pleasures; I know in my head they’re ridiculous, but it thrills my heart to see all the old cliches — and I mean all of them — treated respectfully one last time.

   As for Bride of the Gorilla, it shows more intelligence than you’d expect to find in a movie called Bride of the Gorilla.

   Written and directed by Curt Siodmak, it offers Raymond Burr as a virile man-about-jungle who kills his mistress’s husband and finds himself the subject of a jungle-movie curse with predictable echoes of The Wolf Man (also written by Siodmak).

   One interesting twist is that Burr gets cursed not because he killed a man, but because he toyed with the affections of a local girl. The other twist is … well, I won’t reveal it except to say that this tatty little quickie repays careful viewing.

BRIAN ANTHONY & ANDY EDMONDS – Smile When the Raindrops Fall: The Story of Charley Chase. Scarecrow Press, 1998.

RICHARD LEWIS WARD – A History of the Hal Roach Studios. Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.

   Together these two books give a nice portrait of one of the most interesting smaller studios during Hollywood’s Golden Period. The Charley Chase book covers the creative sides by telling the story of one of Hal Roach’s most talented stars and directors. The Ward book covers more of the business and practical aspects of the studio and includes a great deal of specific figures on the cost and earnings of individual films and series.

   I am a bit late to the party on Charley Chase, as other than his supporting role in Laurel & Hardy’s wonderful Sons of the Desert, I was not very familiar with his film work. I had seen a few of his shorts but those few were years ago. More recently, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) ran some of his silent short subjects as well as talkies and it piqued my interest. Chase was a very talented fellow, both as a performer and director.

   Born Charles Joseph Parrott in Baltimore in 1893, he spent his first 10 years in an ethnic neighborhood near the inner harbor. After his father died, the family moved in with his mother’s sister and Charley began running errands and anything he could to bring in money.

   A talented tap dancer with a pleasing voice, he began earning money on the streets as an entertainer. Soon he teamed up with two other boys and the trio gained bookings in vaudeville theaters. Eventually, he teamed up with another comic for a routine entitled “The Boys from Nutsville” that was very successful. Charley became tired of living out of a trunk and stayed in Los Angeles when a tour ended in 1911.

   He found employment with Lon Chaney’s stage troupe as a member of the chorus. There he met his wife, but soon Chaney abandoned his stage career to enter movies. Out of a job, Charley did the same, first with the Christie Studios and then with Mack Sennett.

   With Sennett, Charley began doing bits and graduated to featured roles, and along the way, was given his first chance at directing. He also became friends with the star of the Sennett lot, Charlie Chaplin, and appeared in several of the Chaplin films circa 1914. After several years with Sennett, Charley freelanced as a director and performer at Paramount and other studios.

   His younger brother Jimmy Parrott went to work for the Hal Roach Studio in 1917 as a gag writer on Harold Lloyd comedies and eventually made his way in front of the camera. Jimmy was drafted into the Army and sent to Europe where he was wounded.

   After his return, Roach put him back before the cameras but soon James Parrott left acting to become one of Roach’s best directors.

   Meanwhile, his brother Charley joined Roach and because of his experience with some of the best producers, he was made supervisor of all productions. It was at Roach that Charley made his mark both in front and behind the camera.

   As a studio manager, Charley lured Stan Laurel into returning to the Roach Studio trom vaudeville. Charley had worked with Oliver Hardy in the Billy West comedies and in 1924, he added him to be Roach stable of actors. While others have credit for teaming L&H, Charley got them to the same studio.

   The star of the Roach Studio in the early days was Harold Lloyd. I attended a 100th birthday party for Hal Roach given by the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. Nearly completely deaf, Roach did answer questions posed. Asked who was his favorite comedian, Roach immediately answered “Harold Lloyd.” Why? “Because I made the most money with him.”

   I need to dig up my notes from the Roach interview to be exact but when he was asked who he thought was the funniest comic, he quickly said “Charley Chase. But he was a terrible drunk.” Alas, in a hard-drinking era, Charley was notable for his love of brandy and eventually, it killed him in 1940.

   Rail thin, slicked-back hair and a small mustache was the picture of a young man on the go in his early movies and even as he grew older, he maintained a very likable film persona. It is ironic that he is best remembered for his role as the obnoxious fraternal order convention-goer who plagues Laurel and Hardy in Sons of the Desert.

   When Roach exited the short subject field (except for the “Our Gang” series), he used Chase in a couple of features and then fired him. Chase took a full page ad in Variety to thank Roach for a wonderful 17-year run. He moved over to Columbia where he had his own series, and he directed others including several of the best by the Three Stooges including Violent Is the Word for Curley.

   The biography is an odd collaboration as Andy Edmonds had done much of the research years before but had never finished the biography. One day Anthony knocked on his door and asked him “Why?”

   Together they finished the book: The close cooperation of Chase’s daughters and children add a human element often missing from biographies. The writers also visited the homes they lived in and that added a lot of physical detail.

   Edmonds’ early interviews saved a lot of information that would have been lost with the death of Chase’s contemporaries. He even tracked down Joe Kavigan, the bartender at the theatrical oriented Masquers Club where Charley was an officer. Kavigan used to drive Chase home when he was in his cups. Chase would yell “Stop the car!! Get out!!” And outside, he said “Look at the sky! Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?”

   Kavigan said his helping the patrons home could be misinterpreted. He often escorted an inebriated Spencer Tracy from the club to his home. One late evening, Mrs. Tracy came to the door to help her husband in and said sharply, “How come when he’s with you, he’s always drunk?” She probably had no idea he was the bartender.

   The Ward history of the Hal Roach studio is a much drier book but I found the level of detail fascinating. Discussed in detail are the relationships with Pathe as his distributor, fol1owed by the glory years with MGM and then finally with United Artists.

   I knew Roach had been in trouble in the early 1930s after the crash but was surprised to learn that the studio nearly went under in 1940. Although Roach produced the wonderful Of Mice and Men starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Burgess Meredith, the rave reviews did not translate into profitability due to mishandling by United Artists.

   As documented in a wealth of detail, the studio was never in great financial shape. Hal Roach, Sr. eventually turned it over to his son and Hal Roach, Jr. made the lot one of the most active in the early days of television. Shows shot at Roach included My Little Margie, Blondie, Racket Squad, and The Stu Erwin Show.

   Independent producers rented the studio to make series including Amos and Andy, Life of Riley, Beulah, You Are There, and Waterfront. Yet, the studio couldn’t make money because of the debt it was carrying, including a hefty buy-out for Hal Roach Sr. Eventually, it went bankrupt.

   Interesting tidbits: “Our Gang” weekly salaries in 1937: Spanky $200, Alfalfa $175, DarIa $150, Buckwheat $80.

HOWARD BROWNE – Thin Air. Carroll & Graf, reprint paperback, 1983. Originally published by Simon & Schuster, hc, 1954; Dell #894, pb, 1956.

   Ames Coryell, successful advertising executive, is bringing his wife, Leona, and their three year old daughter home from a peaceful, happy summer vacation. They arrive home at 3:00 a.m. Leona opens the front door and goes into their home. In the time it takes her husband to carry their daughter upstairs and come back down, she has disappeared — into thin air.

   No signs of a struggle, purse left behind, and no goodbye note. What happened to Leona? And why does their daughter tell the police “Why didn’t Mommy come home with us?”

   Ames attempts to locate Leona himself, after feeling frustrated by the apparent unconcern of the police. On the other hand, the police consider it a strong possibility that Ames killed his wife.

   When a woman resembling Leona is found murdered (discovered by Ames, no less!), the action and intrigue quicken.

   This is a tautly written tale, with strong characterization and a compelling style. Thin Air is not likely to disappoint any mystery fan.