STUART KAMINSKY – Murder on the Yellow Brick Road. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1977. Paperback reprints include: Penguin, 1979; Ibooks, 2000.

   Stuart Kaminsky is a film writer and critic as well as a mystery novelist, and he has put his expertise to good use in his series about 1940s Hollywood private eye Toby Peters.

   The novels are a blend of fact and fiction — that is, of real Hollywood personalities (now deceased) and fictional characters.

   Peters, investigator for the stars, is wise to the ways of Hollywood; he shares an office with a dentist, Shelley Minck, who provides much of the comic relief in these books; he eats abominably — burgers, Pepsis, milk shakes; he lives in “one of a series of two-room, one story wooden structures L.A. management people called bungalows”; and he has a running feud with his brother, Homicide Lieutenant Phil Pevsner (the real family name).

   Murder on the Yellow Brick Road concerns the stabbing of a munchkin — one of L.A.’s many “little people” (they prefer that label to that of midget) — on the set on which The Wizard of Oz was filmed.

   Judy Garland finds the body and calls Peters in a panic. Peters goes to MGM, where he meets Miss Garland, PR man Warren Hoff, Garland’s costume designer friend Cassie James, and Louis B. Mayer himself. Mayer hires Peters to conduct an investigation and divert any adverse publicity.

   What follows is an entertaining story of Hollywood in its heyday, the inner workings of the film community, and the brotherhood of the “little people.” Peters meets such luminaries as Raymond Chandler, and pays a visit to Clark Gable at William Randolph Hearst’s fabled San Simeon.

   Kaminsky does a good job of evoking both Hollywood of the Forties and the personalities of the various stars; his portrayal of the child/woman Garland is especially good.

   Other Toby Peters novels include Never Cross a Vampire (1980), which features Bela Lugosi and William Faulkner in his screen-writing days; and He Done Her Wrong (1983), in which Mae West calls on Peters to find her missing, sizzling autobiography; and Down For the Count (1985), which features fighter Joe Louis.

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   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.

STUART KAMINSKY, R.I.P. According to his obituary in the Chicago Tribune, Stuart Kaminsky “died of complications from hepatitis and a recent stroke Friday, Oct. 9, in Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis […] He was an Army medic in the 1950s, when his family believes he got hepatitis C.” He was 75 at the time of his death.

   Unusual for most mystery writers, Kaminsky was the creator of four distinctive series characters. Besides 1940s Hollywood PI Toby Peters, who appeared in 24 novels [see below] in which he rubbed shoulders with many movie stars of the day, Kaminsky also chronicled the adventures of (quoting again from the Tribune) “… Porfiry Rostnikov, a police inspector in Moscow [16 novels]; Abe Lieberman, a crusty but wise Chicago cop who works the streets with his younger partner, Bill Hanrahan [10 novels]; and Lew Fonesca, a former Cook County state’s attorney investigator now operating as a cut-rate private eye in Sarasota [6 novels].”

   Kaminsky also wrote two novelizations of the TV series The Rockford Files, three novelizations of CSI: New York, two stand-alone suspense novels, three story collections, and was the editor of two recent crime fiction anthologies.

   Without much fanfare, Stuart Kaminksy was without a doubt one of the more prolific mystery authors of recent years. He was a quiet giant in our field.

      The Toby Peters series —

1. Bullet for A Star (1977)

2. Murder on the Yellow Brick Road (1977)
3. You Bet Your Life (1978)
4. The Howard Hughes Affair (1979)
5. Never Cross a Vampire (1980)
6. High Midnight (1981)
7. Catch A Falling Clown (1981)

8. He Done Her Wrong (1983)
9. The Fala Factor (1984)

10. Down for the Count (1985)
11. The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance (1986)
12. Smart Moves (1986)
13. Think Fast, Mr. Peters (1987)
14. Buried Caesars (1989)

15. Poor Butterfly (1990)
16. The Melting Clock (1991)

17. The Devil Met A Lady (1993)
18. Tomorrow is Another Day (1995)
19. Dancing in the Dark (1996)
20. A Fatal Glass of Beer (1997)

21. A Few Minutes Past Midnight (2001)
22. To Catch a Spy (2002)
23. Mildred Pierced (2003)
24. Now You See It (2004)

WILLIAM HAGGARD – Powder Barrel. Cassell & Co., UK, hardcover, 1965. Ives Washburn, US, hc, 1965. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, January 1966. Paperback reprints: Signet D2991, US, 1966; Penguin, UK, 1967.

   William Haggard is, for my money the best of the later British thriller writers in the Buchan tradition, and one who wrote rings around Le Carre. Most of his books feature Sir Charles Russell of the Security Executive in the most civilized and ruthless thrillers you will ever read (roughly covering 1958 to 1991).

   Haggard’s a conservative — damn near a Tory — and he’s no doubt a bit of a snob, but it’s that civilized snobbery that marked Buchan and the best of the Buchan school.

   Indeed Russell is close to Buchan’s Edward Leithen, and like Leithen and Richard Hannay’s adventures the books are as likely to have a sympathetic or even heroic enemy — not to mention a charming Italian Madam (The Hard Sell), second story man (Slow Burn), blowzy but sympathetic courtesan (The Antagonists), or even Soviet agent (The Powder Barrel).

   None of the books run over 60,000 words, but they are masterpieces of economy, the characters well drawn, the plots intricate (but never overly so), and the suspense and action well choreographed.

   Among the non-series books his first novel The Telemann Touch and The Kinsmen are both exceptional entries, the latter having many of the qualities of a Hitchcock thriller. The Telemann Touch, about an apologetic assassin, ends on a wonderfully choreographed duel with bayonets.

   There are fine set pieces in the books too. The SF touch at the end of Slow Burn and a second story man’s seduction of a high priced call girl, an assassination on a gondola in The Venetian Blind, and a tense shootout on a ski lift in The High Wire. Haggard most resembles Victor Canning in that mastery of the clean simple and — there’s no other word for it — civilized style of thriller that seems so veddy British.

   In Powder Barrel, Ernst, aka Ernest, a likable, handsome, if none too bright, East German Soviet agent stationed in a vital Arab principality as the driver of playboy Shaikh (sic) Ali bin Hassan bin Ibrahim sets off a series explosive events when he takes it on himself, while in England for a Rolls Royce mechanic course, to try and kill British Foreign Secretary Vincent Gale.

   Vincent Gale is the man Her Majesty’s government has chosen to negotiate the new oil concessions in the shaikhdom (sic) known as the Oil Terminal along the Arab oil coast, a negotiation complicated by the fact that he had a discrete and passionate affair with the Shaikh’s sister Princess Nahid, known as ‘Madame.’ Just how he will be received by his ex-lover, an intelligent and willful woman, may be key to the powder keg growing in the shaikh’s country.

   It’s just the sort of explosive situation Russell (“He’s English of course, you have to watch them.”) handles with cool aplomb, so he sends his second in command Robert Mortimer along with Gale for security, and then is surprised when his opposite number in the Soviet government, the General, shows up to let him know that Ernst is a wild card determined to kill Gale without orders.

   Riots in the street, a hunt for the Soviet agent by the Shaikh’s handpicked Greek chief spy Stradvis, a playboy shaikh who takes his money and runs for the Riviera with Ernst’s help, and the renewal of a long term affair are some of the events that lead to Gale and a wounded Ernst alone in a villa with Madame in a taut confrontation at gunpoint between the diplomat and the oddly honorable assassin.

   As might be expected Russell pulls all the irons out the fire without anyone getting appreciably singed, and manages to get those oil concessions from the progressive Princess when she replaces her abdicating brother, but it’s a near run thing as the Duke of Wellington said of Waterloo, and the suspense runs down to the wire.

   Haggard was a civilized and intelligent writer of tautly wound thrillers that found a balance between the fantasy of Ian Fleming and the drab ordinary world of Le Carre. The Russell novels are exciting, literate, sexy, and understated in the best British tradition.

   His people are believable human beings whether good guy or villain, and Russell a likable protagonist of the old school who would have been equally at home in Buchan’s Rungates Club or Kipling’s India. Compared to today’s overblown, overwritten, and overlong thrillers they are perfect models of the form.

   As I do every year, I’ll be spending Columbus Day weekend in Cadillac, the small town in Michigan where I was born and grew up. My sister and her husband still live there, and my brother and his wife drive over from London, Ontario, where they live. (I fly, and I’ll be leaving mid-afternoon tomorrow.)

   I won’t be back until late on Tuesday, so of necessity the blog will be quiet until then. And I’m sure it will take me a few days to catch up on everything once I’m back. This current short but scheduled hiatus, in other words, is likely to be followed by a period of scattered and intermittent postings, I’m sorry to say.

   But will I run out of reviews to publish? Books and movies, both old and new? None of the above, and not any time soon, that’s for sure!

GEOFFREY HOMES – Forty Whacks.   William Morrow, hardcover, 1941. Paperback reprint: Bantam #117, 1947, as Stiffs Don’t Vote. Filmed as Crime by Night, Warner Brothers, 1944 (with Jerome Cowan, Jane Wyman, Faye Emerson, Eleanor Parker).

   Homes/Mainwaring created three completely different series detectives for his other eleven novels, each of them with unorthodox abilities.

   The first was newspaperman, Robin Bishop, who is featured in Homes’s first five titles, among them The Man Who Didn’t Exist (1937), which deals with the baffling suicide of a famous writer named Zenophen Zwick who seems never to have existed in the. first place.

   The second sleuth was Humphrey Campbell; an unconventional private investigator who, with his fat, lazy, and corrupt partner, Oscar Morgan, appears in one of the Bishop novels (Then There Were Three, 1938) and in four of his own.

   The third series detective was Mexican cop Jose Manuel Madero, “knitter extraordinary — not only of socks but of mysterious loose ends,” who stars in a pair of titles: The Street of the Crying Woman (1942) and The Hill of the Terrified Monk (1943).

   Chubby Humphrey Campbell is probably the best realized of the three; certainly his cases are Homes’s most intricate and satisfying detective puzzles. Forty Whacks involves Humphrey and Oscar in an ax-murder in the California town of Joaquin — “the second Borden case,” as Campbell refers to it.

   Humphrey, with grumpy Oscar watching out for any illegal dollar that might be made, sets out to prove that Joe Borden wasn’t responsible for the grisly remains found under the seat of an overturned rowboat floating down the San Joaquin River.

   Along the way he gets mixed up with a female artist’s representative; a successful concert pianist who gave up his career to hunt for gold; a tough lady newspaper publisher; a couple of mayoralty candidates; and a lot more bloody murder.

   The action in Forty Whacks is fast and furious, but there is a good deal more than that to recommend it: clever plotting, witty and remarkably good dialogue, and a lean style made lyrical in places by some of the most vivid descriptive writing to be found in all of mystery fiction.

   The other three Campbell-Morgan adventures — No Hands on the Clock (1939), Finders Keepers (1940), and Six Silver Handles (1944) — share the same qualities.

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   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.

CRIME BY NIGHT. Warner Brothers, 1944. Jane Wyman, Jerome Cowan, Faye Emerson, Charles Lang, Eleanor Parker, Stuart Crawford, Cy Kendall, Charles Wilson. Based on the novel Forty Whacks by Geoffrey Homes (Daniel Mainwaring). Director: William Clemens.

   All of the fire power in this 1940s private eye movie is on the female side: Jane Wyman, who receives top billing: four Oscar nominations, one win (Johnny Belinda, 1948); Faye Emerson: two Emmy nominations; three Oscar nominations, one Emmy nomination, one Golden Globe nomination.

   Jerome Cowan, who plays PI Sam Campbell (named Humphrey Campbell in the book), gets my nomination in a Top Five William Powell look-alike contest, but he has little else going for him but more than enough charm to get by. I regret to say that I haven’t read the book itself, unless I read it long ago when it was reprinted in paperback by Bantam as Stiffs Don’t Vote way back in 1947, so I can’t tell you one way or another about the similarities (or the lack thereof), but one thing I can tell you is that there’s plenty of plot.

   And not all that much comedy relief, I am relieved to be able to tell you, but Cy Kendall as the semi-corrupt local Sheriff Max Ambers, overweight and alternately a jovially unctuous sycophant then a resentful small town cop, nearly steals the show. Sam Campbell is supposed to be the kind of guy who girls can’t keep their eyes off of, including the girl at the hotel switchboard who can’t keep her eyes on the job, but I’ve decided to simply chalk that up as just another Hollywood fiction.

   Dead is the father of Campbell’s client’s ex-wife, with whom he’d had a vicious argument some time ago (and losing a hand by means of an axe in that particular incident).

   This is motive enough, one supposes, and according to the local law, it is, but (a) clients are supposed to be innocent, and (b) there is another matter of some secret chemical formulas that are missing as well.

   There is a pretty good attempt on the killer’s part to leave both a false trail and a delightful assortment of false clues. As I say, there’s plenty of plot, and plenty to enjoy in this movie, another highlight of which is …

   I forgot to tell you. Jane Wyman plays Robbie Vance, Sam Campbell’s very charming and very possessive assistant in this movie, and you should see the claws come out when she thinks Faye Emerson’s character is poaching on her territory. Rowrrrr …

              

[UPDATE]   Later the same day.   As soon as I can get to it, I’ll post Bill Pronzini’s review of Forty Whacks from 1001 Midnights. As I suspected, there’s only a brushing acquaintance between the book and movie, or as my family used to say when I was growing up, they’re only shirttail cousins.

SHARP SHOOTERS. Fox, 1928. George O’Brien, Lois Moran, Noah Young, Tom Dugan, William Demarest, Gwen Lee, Josef Swickard. Director: John G. Blystone. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   A modest effort in which George O’Brien dallies with a French dance-hall girl (Moran) before he leaves her, protesting eternal love, with his comrades Young and Dugan for their next port in the states.

   When Moran finds him, he’s already dallying with another dilly and not too pleased to see her. Young and Dugan, exercising what passes for a moral example, maneuver him into an unwanted marriage.

   Then, as you might suspect, anger turns to something much warmer, and the film ends on a very happy note. Demarest is the cad who tries to separate the two.

   A nice, undemanding entertainment for the start of the first full day of screenings.

JEREMIAH HEALY – Swan Dive. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1988. Pocket, pb reprint, 1989, 1991.

   In terms of name recognition, John Francis Cuddy is the Avis of Boston PI’s and Spenser is the Hertz, but the latest novel by Jeremiah Healy is all but guaranteed to be a better read than the latest Robert B. Parker, and Swan Dive is no exception.

   As a favor to a lawyer friend, Cuddy agrees to bodyguard Hanna Marsh, who has, left her sadistic husband and is seeking both a divorce and the luxurious marital home. Roy Marsh, who is not only a wife-beater and womanizer but deals cocaine on the side, tries to persuade Hanna to drop the suit by disemboweling their daughter’s cat.

   Cuddy goes outside the law to teach Roy a lesson in litigation etiquette, but a few nights later when Roy and a prostitute are murdered in a fleabag hotel, all the evidence points to Cuddy, who is menaced not only by the police but by Roy’s coke-dealing colleagues hunting for a missing shipment of their stock in trade.

   Healy carefully balances whodunit and mean-streets elements, draws vivid characters (although too many of them speak Ethnic English), gives us the usual sharply observed tour of metropolitan Boston, and even imparts some movement to Cuddy’s long-stalled relationship with the lovely assistant D.A. whom he refuses to sleep with out of loyalty to his dead wife.

   I still think The Staked Goat (1986) is the best of Healy’s four novels to date, but Swan Dive is my choice for second best.

WILLIAM DENBOW – Chandler. Belmont Tower, paperback original, 1977.

   A while ago back, Bill Crider said something in his blog about Chandler, by William Denbow. The cover says it’s “…the toughest novel since The Maltese Falcon and Farewell, My Lovely,” but it’s more like a cheap attempt to exploit the success of Joe Gores’ Hammett (1975).

   Like any responsible critic, Crider savaged the book, but I remembered buying it at a grocery store when it first came out, and I remembered thinking it wasn’t awful. And that’s all I remembered — I’m afraid I was quite drunk at the time. So I figured I’d try reading it sober and see what it was really like.

   Well it just ain’t that bad. It ain’t that good, either, but somehow it didn’t strike me as completely awful.

   For starters, I should warn potential readers (both of you) that there’s a lot of flat-footed explication here, some of the characters don’t exactly come to life on the page, and there’s a truly dreadful conversation between the fictional Raymond Chandler and the fictional Dashiell Hammett where Hammett comes up with the name ‘Philip Marlowe,’ and while I was getting through it, I seriously considered ripping my own eyes out rather than reading another line, it’s that bad. So you’ve been warned.

   On the other hand, as I say…

   Well, the plot moves along quickly, probably because it has to in a hundred-and-fifty-page paperback; the bad guys are engagingly nasty; one or two of the characters do come to life on the page; there’s some good research, and author Denbow occasionally comes up with bits like:

   I don’t care what anybody says, that’s good writing. There’s also a vivid shot of a stint in a Mexican jail, and an interview with a half-drunk widow just enough like the scene with Jessie Florian in Farewell, My Lovely to evoke it without imitating it.

   In all, what you’ve got here is a book that doesn’t merit a lot of praise, and I’m not going to lend it out to my friends, but when I finished reading it, I put it back on my shelf.

   Which I guess is something.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA: William Denbow, according to Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, was the pen name of George Stiles. Chandler is his only entry in CFIV under either name. Nothing else is known about Stiles. (He does not appear to be the British composer of such stage and screen musicals as Honk! and Peter Pan, as the latter was born in 1961).

PHILIP MacDONALD – Mystery at Friar’s Pardon. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1932. Collins Crime Club, UK, hc, 1931, as by Martin Porlock.

   Friar’s Pardon, built in the reign of King James the Second, had had five mysterious deaths of the owners of the house. In the last one, a doctor swore that the owner had died of drowning, though he was upstairs and there was no water in or near the room, and no evidence of water on his clothes or person.

   Despite these overtones of the supernatural, Mrs. Enid Lester-Greene, best-selling author of, among other titles, Sir Galahad Comes Home, Oasis Love, and Paradise for Two, buys the house and plans to occupy the room where the mysterious deaths took place as her study.

   She does this in the face of warnings by friends and family and despite reports of a sometimes mischievous and sometimes nasty poltergeist active in the house.

   All this build-up would be rather disappointing if nothing happened to Mrs. Lester-Greene, so something does. In a locked room about four minutes after having made a phone call crying for help Mrs. Lester-Greene is found dead, drowned, according to the medical examiner, though there is no water in the room.

   The solution to the locked-room aspect will probably be familiar to those who read widely in that subgenre, and the murderer may be a little too evident to the reader, but not to the police, who lean toward the supernatural explanation.

   An interesting amateur detective — the recently hired estate steward who never has a chance to do any of the work for which he is employed — the unusual murder method, a fair amount of the occult, and some amusing minor characters make this a novel well worth finding.

   And since the supernatural, or what seems the supernatural, plays a significant role in the crime, the seance to ask the murdered woman who and how is a fitting climax.

ALAN HUNTER – Gently by the Shore. Cassell / Crime Connoisseur Book, UK, hardcover, 1956. Rinehart & Co., US, hc, 1956.

   This is a book that I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. Way back, I read Gently with the Ladies (1965) but was not impressed enough to continue with the series.

   However Hunter comes from Norfolk, my home county, and this book, his second, is set in the fictional seaside resort “Starmouth,” which Hunter makes clear in a foreword is based on a real seaside resort, clearly Great Yarmouth (often just called Yarmouth), which is where I was brought up (and still frequently visit).

   Unfortunately the book was a disappointment. The story, involving the body of a foreigner found on the beach, did not involve me and Gently’s investigation (he is called in from Scotland Yard) is not very interesting.

   Worse, the depiction of Yarmouth (sorry, Starmouth) doesn’t seem particularly accurate. True, there are two piers (though they are given new names), and the pleasure beach with its wooden “scenic railway,” but the roads mentioned are fictitious, and it just didn’t seem right.