JOSEPH CONRAD – Victory: An Island Tale. Doubleday Page & Co., 1915. First Edition (shown immediately below). Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and soft.

    Victory was the first of Conrad’s great works and his first popular success. It is also in many ways a crime novel that might well have come from Dashiell Hammett or out of Black Mask magazine.

   We tend to think of Conrad in terms of serious literature and forget that he wrote adventure stories (Lord Jim, The Arrow of Gold, and Nostromo), spy novels (The Secret Agent) political novels (Under Western Eyes), science fiction (The Inheritors with Ford Madox Ford), historical fiction (Romance again with Ford), and even domestic drama (Chance).

    Victory , set in the islands of the Malay Archipelago is the story of Axel Heyst, a mysterious and solitary Swede (“…Heyst, the wanderer of the Archipelago, had a taste for silence …”) who sets the actions of a tragedy in motion when he saves a young English woman from her predatory employer, the German hotelier Schomberg.

   Heyst retreats to his home on remote Samburan with the girl, and Schomberg’s wrath, is brought to a head by the arrival of the mysterious Mr. Jones, his “secretary,” the violent Martin Ricardo, and Pedro the brutish animal like Portuguese half cast alligator hunter from Columbia.

   It is to these three that Schomberg entrusts his mission of revenge against Heyst and the woman with rumors of the riches the mysterious Heyst is alleged to have hidden on his remote island.

   It’s hard to read the novel today without visions of The Maltese Falcon and Gasper Gutman. Joel, Cairo, and Wilbur. There are hints of something unwholesome and perverse between Jones and Ricardo, and a suggestion of crimes unspoken. “Wickedness for it’s own reward.”

   Jones is virtually the model for the suave educated villains we have seen in a thousand books and films, but with something both decadent and perverse in his genteel shabbiness. Ricardo, his violent nature barely repressed, is another familiar figure.

   When Jones and his team arrive on Samburan the events of the tragedy, the plots of the criminals and the personal drama between Heyst and the woman plunge toward a violent bloodbath (“… there are more dead in this affair — more white people, I mean — than have been killed in many of the battles of the last Achin war.”).

   Victory isn’t a thriller by any means, or a crime novel. It is dense and character driven, and by no means a quick or simple read, but it does present a fascinating portrait of evil and in Heyst and the woman he loves almost noirish prototypes.

   And yet though the fate of Heyst and the woman are tragic, the fact that they find love and finally come together makes the novels title true rather than ironic.

   Ultimately they triumph over both the villains and themselves. Their human triumph over the forces of crime and brutality is a victory.

   The 1940 John Cromwell film of Victory is not available on VHS or DVD, but should be. Frederic March and Betty Field play Heyst and the woman, and Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Jerome Cowan, and Sig Ruman Jones, Ricardo, and Schomberg. Hardwicke and Cowan are especially chilling. It was also filmed in 1919 and 1930 (as Dangerous Passage).

ALFRED EICHLER – Alfred Eichler. Death of an Ad Man. Abelard-Schuman, hardcover, 1954; paperback reprint: Berkley #105, 1955. British edition: Hammond, hc, 1956, as A Hearse for the Boss.

   It is a rather frantic time at the Malcolm and Reynolds Advertising Agency. Reynolds has retired, and Malcolm has just had what appears to be a heart attack.

   While various officials of the agency are struggling for power in an attempt to replace Malcolm as the agency’s head, someone makes sure that Malcolm won’t be around to protest. A pair of scissors is shoved into his chest while he is in the hospital.

   Kindergarten was never like this advertising agency. Children do have some sense, but precious few employees of this agency have any. The only sensible person is Martin Ames — who appears in several of Eichler’s novels — head of the radio department, which also includes television.

   Even he is erratic. He is at one point firmly convinced that an agency employee is Malcolm’s murderer and a few moments later is brooding because he didn’t stop the murderer from killing the employee.

   Ames has inherited the agency from Malcolm, and he had an opportunity to commit both murders. For this reason, and in a hope to keep the agency from disintegrating, Ames investigates. He spots the killer by discovering a new motive for murder, or what would have been a new motive if it had had anything to do with the murder.

   He also says things like “Holy hatpin!” which I guess is typical advertising talk. And he is one of the few people who have visited a psychiatrist with a “crowded anteroom.” Does this mean a ten-minute hour?

   The novel isn’t well written and the plot isn’t that great, but the insights into advertising agencies may appeal to some.

Bio-Bibliographic data: According to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, Alfred Eichler, 1908-1995, was a advertising copywriter based (it is to be presumed) in New York City, an easy inference, since that’s where he was born.

    He was the author of nine detective novels, many of which seem to reflect the author’s own occupation in the advertising and radio business, especially the first two, Murder in the Radio Department and Death at the Mike.

    Each of these also have as their leading characters Martin Ames and Inspector Carl Knickman, the latter of whom Bill didn’t happen to mention as being the detective of record in Death of an Ad Man, as well as several other cases told to us by Eichler. See below:

EICHLER, ALFRED. 1908-1995.

      Murder in the Radio Department (n.) Gold Label 1943 [Insp. Carl Knickman; Martin Ames]
      Death at the Mike (n.) Lantern Press 1946 [Insp. Carl Knickman; Martin Ames]
      Election by Murder (n.) Lantern Press 1946 [Martin Ames]

      Death of an Ad Man (n.) Abelard-Schuman 1954 [Insp. Carl Knickman; Martin Ames]
      Death of an Artist (n.) Arcadia 1955 [Insp. Carl Knickman; Martin Ames]
      Moment for Murder (n.) Arcadia 1956 [Insp. Carl Knickman]
      Bury in Haste (n.) Arcadia 1957 [Insp. Carl Knickman]
      Pipeline to Death (n.) Hammond 1962 [Martin Ames]

      Murder Off Stage (n.) Hammond 1963.

   Commentary on books I’ve covered in the New York Times Book Review.   [Reprinted from The Armchair Detective, Vol. 1, No. 4, July 1968.]

    Previously on this blog:
Part 1 — Charlotte Armstrong through Jonathan Burke.
Part 2 — Victor Canning through Manning Coles.
Part 3 — Stephen Coulter through Thomas B. Dewey.
Part 4 — Charles Drummond through William Garner.

RICHARD H. GARVIN & EDMUND G. ADDEO – The FORTEC Conspiracy. Sherbourne, US, hardcover, 1968. Paperback reprint: Signet T3832, 1969. A combination of a science-fictional theme, UFO’s, with the man on a mission suspense story — and it builds toward a shocking and memorable finale.

ROSEMARY GATENBY – Aim to Kill. Morrow, US, hardcover, 1968; Robert Hale, UK, hc, 1969. Paperback reprint: Pyramid X-2094, 1969. Weakened by too leisurely an approach (largely flashback), this second novel describes a small town terrorized by a seemingly random sniper.

FRANK GRUBER – The Gold Gap. Dutton, US, hardcover, 1968; Robert Hale, UK, hc, 1968. Paperback reprint: Pyramid N2558, 1971. Commander Sergeant returns a hero from Viet Nam, and accepts a millionaire’s assignment to investigate his fiance — a job which turns out to have international implications. This is a smooth job, though not so deviously plotted as some.

E. RICHARD JOHNSON – Silver Street. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1968. British title: The Silver Street Killer. Hale, hc, 1969. Paperback reprints: Dell, 1969; IPL, 1988. This is a powerful first novel by an inmate of the Minnesota State Prison, dealing with the seamier side of a large city slum and harshly carved out in the vernacular of its inhabitants. [Series character: Tony Lonto.]

THE DARK HORSE. First National, 1932. Warren William, Bette Davis, Guy Kibbee. Vivienne Osborne, Frank McHugh, Sam Hardy, Berton Churchill, Harry Holman, Charles Sellon, Robert Emmett O’Connor, Robert Warwick, Louise Beavers, Wilfred Lucas Photography by Sol Polito; director: Alfred E. Green. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   Guy Kibbee, the “dark horse” gubernatorial candidate of this political satire, is described by Warren William, his campaign manager, as “so dumb that every time he opens his mouth, he subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge.”

   Bette Davis is William’s secretary (and long-time girlfriend), who plays a nondescript role with her usual intelligence, but it’s Vivienne Osborne, as William’s predatory ex-wife, who steals the female acting honors as she lures Kibbee into a tryst, where in a game of strip poker he’s getting down to essentials as the police and reporters close in on their hideaway, with William flying in at the last minute in an attempt to get to the love nest ahead of them.

   Kibbee is a complete buffoon, completely innocent of anything that passes for intelligence, but he has a weak spot, an eye for a shady lady, and this pre-code film makes no bones about the unseemly nature of his relationship with Osborne.

   William is a human weasel, willing to do anything to promote his candidate, with Davis his conscience who rather belatedly manages to salvage William from the eager hands of the law. Kibbee is elected with William and Davis finally united and leaving the state to its new governor and a corrupt crew of supporters.

   I won’t be so crass as to suggest that this was selected as a less-than-discreet commentary on this year’s political slug-fest [2004], but astute observers will note some similarities with the contemporary scene. Sharp dialogue and frank treatment of the racy relationship of Kibbee and Osborne mark this as a pre-code script, and its quick footed pacing (and on the mark performances) made it a late-night favorite of the convention.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – Dark of the Moon.

Harper & Row, 1967. Paperback reprints: Berkley, February 1969; Carroll & Graf, 1987. UK edition: H. Hamilton, hc, 1968.

   John Dickson Carr was living in South Carolina when he died, so it is somewhat fitting that the last Gideon Fell mystery, Dark of the Moon, should be set in that state.

   A deviously plotted mystery, with its roots going back to the Civil War and even two centuries before, is only part of the attraction here. This is a book of many contrasts: ghosts are prominent, yet there is the fair play detection we expect from Carr.

   There is the spooky atmosphere of an old Southern mansion, and yet there is a hilarious baseball game, reminiscent of the time Carr/Dickson gave us Sir Henry Merrivale at bat in A Graveyard to Let.

   Finally, there is Fell, English to the core, having to function in hot weather in the US, after arriving in the South in his typical “shovel hat and a black cloak as big as a tent.”

ANDREW VACHSS – Haiku. Pantheon, hardcover. First Edition: November 2009.

   Haiku, for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention, is a form or Japanese poetry consisting of three lines, and notable for its beauty, precision, and simplicity. It is also notable for one other thing that far too many western writers seem incapable of understanding. It doesn’t work very well in English.

   English language haiku tends to be pretentious, portentous, and empty. It misses almost entirely the thing that makes actual haiku haunting and viable. You probably can’t do limericks in Japanese. English haiku has the same problem, it neither scans nor fulfills artistically.

   Now, I’m sure there are some fans of English haiku out there, and some who even write it. I have no problem with that, but don’t fool yourself. It isn’t the same anymore than a 16th century Japanese writer could have written Shakespearean English.

   Some forms of writing are language centric. I’ve read that the remarkable thing about Omar Khayyam is that his quatrains read better in English than in the original Arabic — which is why he is a minor poet in his own language, but a major one in ours.

   Which could be a metaphor for Andrew Vachss’s latest novel. He tries to write in the voice of an Asian character foreign to these shores, and instead he sounds as if he ate some bad fortune cookies and watched too many episodes of Kung Fu.

   Far too many.

   Vachss is a good writer. Once in a while he is very close to a fine writer. While I am not a fan of his Burke books over all — for me they there is an element of exploitation to them — I recognize and applaud the white hot passion Vachss brings to his books, the almost Spillane-like conviction and power, but married to a more controlled and carefully crafted prose.

   In addition I will state flatly and offer no defense in saying I think his novel Two Trains Running, a stand-alone novel, is one of the best crime novels of the last thirty years, one of the best since Hammett’s The Glass Key. Find it, read it. Admire it. It is simply a fine crime novel that repays multiple readings.

   But skip Haiku unless you are a die-hard Vachss fan. And maybe even if you are.

   The incredibly contrived and strained plot of this short novel deals with a group of burned out street people who join together on an epic quest that will reveal and redeem them, if they survive it…

   Ho, the narrator, is a sensei seeking redemption, Michael is a gambling addict, Ranger a spaced out Vietnam vet, Lamont a street gang leader turned poet and burned out on alcohol, and Brewster an obsessive pulp collector who sets them all in motion when the deserted building where he hides his treasures is scheduled for destruction.

   Following a mysterious woman in a white Rolls Royce Michael conceives a plan to blackmail her if he can find her. He recruits the others to track her down and in the meanwhile they also find themselves seeking a new home for Brewster’s beloved collection.

   The plot practically drips with the foreshadowing of depth and importance. Metaphor hangs over it like big city smog.

   Unfortunately none of the people in the book are really characters — they are metaphors for Vachss message about community and heroes, and the nobility of man in even the most desperate of situations.

   All very admirable, but not very entertaining. On top of which he insists on telling us all this in Ho’s strained and false voice, rather than letting any of it develop from his plot or his character’s actions. Rather than trust his readers to get his point he drives every point in like a nail with a nail gun.

   Unsubtle writers really shouldn’t try for subtlety. Vachss is at his best when he is in your face, at his most subtle when he isn’t trying to be subtle at all. Here he seems to be trying to somehow hammer home subtly. As you can imagine that’s not very successful.

   Having a writer virtually shouting at you how important and deep his work is may not be the best strategy for entertainment. It’s not a particularly good one for art either. Art should speak for itself just as entertainment should. It’s never a good idea for your narrator to keep telling the reader how important what he is saying is.

   The problem isn’t the plot, or the characters. They aren’t far from the street people in many of Vachss’s well-drawn books. The problem is the incredibly heavy-handed second-hand Kung Fu narration of Ho, Vachss’s narrator.

   In Michael’s obsessed and possessed consciousness, there is no room for morality, He is capable of highly complex thoughts, but all his thinking is reserved for the computation of odds. He has been waiting for the one bet he can’t lose, that “mortal lock” for many years. With each passing season his connection to reality grows more frayed.

   214 pages of this is a lot to put up with. It’s like reading a novel length essay by a talented but unenlightened college sophomore who has just discovered Proust or Henry James. You appreciate his finer sensibilities, but you would give anything if he could write a simple declarative sentence.

   Mostly Haiku reads like a really pretentious and slightly self-referential graphic novel without pictures, or a really bad film script. You can almost hear the strained and overdone prose voice over long shots of mean streets. Unfortunately Haiku isn’t a graphic novel or a film, but an actual novel.

   Ironically the Batman novel Vachss wrote was considerably better written than this and a much better read.

   This is the kind of book where people have a “lupine grin” rather than a wolfish one, or a “palpable odor of fear” rather than the stench of fear. Ho seems determined to say everything in the most strained and pretentious voice imaginable.

   We would all have been better served if Vachss lost his Thesaurus. Vocabulary is not always a virtue in a writer’s toolbox. Words can get in the way as well as illuminate. In attempting Ho’s voice Vachss divorces himself from everything that gives his work its power and its strength.

   Ho removes Vachss from the street and the street people he writes so well about. It’s as if Raymond Chandler had tried to strain Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles through Christopher Marlowe’s voice. Ho is so noble and philosophical that he never takes on a human face despite the tragedy and guilt that drives his actions. If you can get past him you might enjoy this. I couldn’t.

   I suppose the business about saving Brewster’s library of pulps and paperbacks is supposed to have some deeper meaning about preserving our culture, and how popular literature sometimes speaks to a truer portrait of the real America than finer literary works, but all I could think was I would rather be reading any one of the books in Brewster’s collection than this.

   Vachss is a much better writer than this. But he is not an artist, he’s a storyteller. He is capable of telling moving and even important stories, but popular literature and literature are not the same thing, and that is not a put down. He is capable of drawing painfully sharp portraits of the streets and the people who haunt them. Even here when he gets away from Ho and his borrowed voice he once in a while taps into that — but not often enough to redeem the book.

   Why Vachss felt he had to write this I can only guess, and won’t speculate here. He had enough sense to keep it short though, and I suspect he must know this isn’t his best work.

   At one point he describes a character: “If anything he looked like a man standing in the shade of a tree who could not understand why this gave him no relief from the sun.” The reader can surely sympathize, wondering why this novel is giving him no entertainment and no relief from Ho’s strained narration.

   Vachss can write well, powerfully, but here he proves he can also overreach. It won’t hurt his reputation. His loyal and passionate fans will praise it, and he’ll go back to what he does so well with no harm done, save to readers who expect a certain level of competence and entertainment from his work.

   But unless you are one of those die hard fans give this one a pass. Rent the first season of Kung Fu on DVD instead. At least the overdone pseudo Taoism of Caine and his Master has the charm of a certain camp sensibility. Vachss is all too obviously sincere, which is a shame, because this same plot would have worked as a comic novel ala Donald Westlake or much of Elmore Leonard.

   God only knows, this one could use a few laughs.

   Skip this one and spend the money on his Two Trains Running, a book that really is a work of genuine art and skill, a top flight crime writer at the very height of his ability and craft. That’s the real McCoy. That’s Vachss at his best and most representative.

   Listening to Ho’s false and pretentious voice isn’t a good deal more comfortable than being cornered by an actual street person. Instead of pity and compassion, all you feel is the need to escape. Luckily that can be done by simply closing the book. Or not picking it up in the first place.

   As I usually do before heading out of town, I’ve been busy packing up and getting some reviews posted that I wanted to squeeze in before I go. Rich Harvey’s Pulp Adventurecon #10 is an all-day show on Saturday in Bordentown NJ, and I’ll be there:

   I’ll be leaving tomorrow morning with Paul Herman. We’re planning on doing some bookhunting along the way, then staying tomorrow night with noted paperback collector Dan Roberts over in nearby PA. (What’s really neat about Dan’s collection is that it’s all out on shelves where you can actually see it, and he has a lot of shelves. Unlike having four do-it-yourself storage areas that you can’t get into all four of, since right now the door on one is busted, and even for the other three, it has to be during regular business hours. Sometimes I feel as though I have to make an appointment several days in advance to see my own stuff.)

   As for the Bordentown show, I always have a great time, and I’m looking forward to it.

THE APE. Monogram, 1940. Boris Karloff, Maris Wrixon, Gene O’Donnell, Dorothy Vaughan, Gertrude Hoffman, Henry Hall. Based on a play by Adam Shirk, adapted by Curt Siodmak. Screenwriters: Siodmak and Robert Carroll. Director: William Nigh.

   This low-budget horror film was among those shown on TCM as part of a day-long festival of Boris Karloff movies just before Halloween.

   In David Vineyard’s rundown of the list of titles (see the comments following), he gave rather short shrift to this one, and I’m sure rightfully so.

   It’s short on thrills, imagination and budget, not necessarily in that order, but the presence of Mr. Karloff in it makes it worth a look-see, as it almost always does.

   He plays one of his patented, well-recognized characters in this one, the more than slightly befuddled Dr. Bernard Adrian, whose dream is find a cure for polio in his backroom laboratory, first for crippled Frances Clifford (Maris Wrixon), who lives only a short distance away, and then for all mankind.

   He’s a kindly old man, rather feeble-looking, but slightly scary with that glaring intensity that’s always in his eyes – the sort of old man whose house small kids dare each other to throw rocks at, which they do.

   To obtain the serum for Miss Clifford’s recovery – well, that’s where the escaped ape from a circus traveling nearby comes in. Dr. Adrian finds he needs what seem to be spinal taps from dead men to continue his work, and somehow it appears that he has the ape doing his stealthy, late-at-night tasks for him.

   Here are the key words in the review so far: befuddled, kindly, scary, intensity, stealthy. Without Boris Karloff in this movie, you could also call it ludicrous. But with him in it, it’s transformed into another dimension altogether.

   It’s still not a very good movie, but I think there are parts of it, if I can convince you to watch it, that you may not forget — and no, I don’t mean the scary parts.

THE MAN WITH THE CLOAK. MGM, 1951. Joseph Cotten, Barbara Stanwyck, Louis Calhern, Leslie Caron, Joe De Santis, Jim Backus, Margaret Wycherly. Based on the story “The Gentleman from Paris,” by John Dickson Carr. Director: Fletcher Markle.

   When I watched this movie late last month, it had to have been for the first time in over 50 years, probably back then as a film on late-night TV. I had good memories of it, and even though I discovered that I’d completely forgotten the basics of the plot line, the memories I had held up fairly well — surprisingly so, in fact.

   What I remembered most: Joseph Cotten as a shabbily elegant, almost perfect player of a dissolute poet in Manhattan who befriends a young girl from Paris (Leslie Caron) with a letter from her fiancé to his uncle, whom she’s come to visit. Cotten goes by the name of Dupin in the movie, but we all know better, don’t we? Back in the late 1950s, I’m not so sure I did!

   The uncle (an aged Louis Calhern) is almost as close a friend to drink as Dupin, even though he knows it will kill him.

   He is equally suspicious of his three servants, primarily Lorna Bounty, his housekeeper (Barbara Stanwyck), a faded beauty whose eyes simply glitter with anger and resentment when she sees the prize for which she’s worked so long (his money) for about to be whisked away by this bravely innocent chit of a girl (another fine performance).

   I thought (this time) the setting fine, the dialogue most excellent and the pace slow, but not so much so as to be annoying.

   The bit about Dupin finding a missing will (from the actions of a dying man unable to speak or move more than his head) I found not as satisfying as I might have at an earlier age. I may have to read the story again to see if the movie people improved upon it, or the contrary. I suspect the latter.

● La chute de la maison Usher. [The Fall of the House of Usher.] Films Jean Epstein, 1928. Silent. Jean Debucourt, Marguerite Gance, Charles Lamy, Fournez-Goffard, Luc Dartagnan. Based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe; adaptation by Luis Buñuel. Screenwriter-director: Jean Epstein.

● The Fall of the House of Usher. G.I.B., 1949. Gwen Watford, Kay Tendeter, Irving Steen, Vernon Charles. Based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe. Director: Ivan Barnett.

● The Queen of Spades. Associated British Picture Corp., 1949. Anton Walbrook, Edith Evans, Yvonne Mitchell, Ronald Howard, Mary Jerrold. Based on the short story by Alexander Pushkin. Director: Thorold Dickinson.

   After The Phantom of the Opera [reviewed here ] I followed up with two versions of The Fall of the House of Usher: first, a French silent film from 1928 by Jean Epstein and Luis Buñuel (whom I hold responsible for frequent meaningless cutsaway to shots of frogs enjoying a night of passion) and secondly, the British quota quickie from 1949.

   I recommend both films to viewers who can enjoy a creepy mood for its own sake, and ignore some (well, a lot… make that an awful lot of) narrative deficiencies. The ’49 film in particular suffers from a bad script, dreadful acting and low budget, but it conveys such a sense of absolute horror that I find myself shuddering, even after repeated viewings.

   The Queen of Spades, made the same year, in the same country as the second House, is in fact its polar opposite: lavishly produced and directed, brilliantly written and acted, it’s a film I can recommend to anyone who loves a fine, gothic chiller, with ghosts, obsession and satanic bargains.

   And it also has a used bookstore.