THE FULL TREATMENT.   Hammer Films/Columbia Pictures, UK, 1960. Also released as Stop Me Before I Kill. Claude Dauphin, Diane Cilento, Ronald Lewis, Francoise Rosnay. Screenplay by Ronald Scott Thorn based on his novel, with Val Guest, who also directed.

   On their honeymoon Alan (Ronald Lewis) and Denise Colby (Diane Cilento) are involved in a terrible car wreck. Alan, a race car driver, is terribly injured and takes a long time to recover, and even when he comes out of the hospital he is still weak and suffering from nerves, tension, paranoia, and the psychological after effects of the traumatic event.

   He also fears he may be dangerous after he briefly tightens his hands around her neck during a passionate moment.

   On the Riviera to rest up they meet Dr. David Prade (Claude Dauphin … “He’s too elegant to be an aristocrat. Most aristocrats look like peasants.”) who takes an interest in them both despite Alan’s distrust and aggressive behavior (“…you’re refreshingly rude.”).

   Told by Denise about the accident, Prade reveals he is a psychiatrist, and that he fears Alan may suffer from repressed emotions that could make him dangerous to her and himself, but he overplays his hand and Alan and Denise decide to go back to London and try to start over.

   But things are no better in London, and Denise becomes increasingly concerned as she and Alan argue and he becomes more violent. When she learns Prade has followed them to London in his concern for Alan, she finally persuades Alan to see him in his Harley Street offices.

   Under intense therapy, he slowly begins to convince Alan to trust him and reveals the trauma that is causing all the problems. Alan is cured and sent home to Denise before they fly out the next day for the start of the racing season.

   But when Prade visits the next morning Denise is gone and there are signs of a violent struggle and bloody second hand medical instruments like the ones Alan described under hypnosis as the kind he would use if he was disposing of Denise’s body having killed her.

   Prade persuades Alan to let him institutionalize him before going to the police, but on the way to the asylum they are in a wreck, Prade is knocked unconscious and Alan flees.

   Hiding out on the Riviera Alan watches the London papers expecting to read about Denise’s body being found, and that he is wanted by the police, but then sitting at an outdoor bistro he sees a woman that looks suspiciously like Denise and watches as she climbs on a yacht, owned by Prade…

   The Full Treatment based on a novel by fine British suspense novelist and humorist Ronald Scott Thorn (Second Opinion, Twin Serpents, Upstairs Downstairs — the Michael Craig movie, not the Masterpiece series) was directed and co-written by director Val Guest (Penny Princess, The Runaway Bus, The Quatermass Experience, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Where the Spies Are) for Hammer Studios.

   Though this isn’t the only suspense film made by Hammer in this period, it is closer to the Hitchcockian model than films like Maniac, Sudden Fear, and The Snorkel that all had more shocker and borderline horror elements. It’s very much a psychological suspense film and not a shocker.

   The cast is excellent: Lewis’s well controlled and believably dangerous protagonist; Cilento’s sexy (there is a brief but distant nude scene) and concerned French wife; and Dauphin’s enigmatic Prade, by turns a bit creepy and yet believably solicitous and professional, all hit their marks perfectly. The suspense is genuine and the black and white photography gorgeous and the script intelligent.

   Admittedly the movie runs a little long, and perhaps some of the early scenes before they reach London could be tightened or even eliminated, but overall it’s an effective suspense film that ties what seems like loose ends up in the final moments. What holes there are in the plot are no worse than the ones in most Hitchcock films as far as that goes.

   I don’t want to oversell this, and I am a fan of Thorn, a suspense novelist in the tradition of Winston Graham, but it is a solid entertaining and attractive suspense film done on a decent budget and well handled all around.

ANNA MARY WELLS – Murderer’s Choice. Grace Pomeroy #2. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1943. Dell #126, mapback edition. Perennial Library, paperback, 1981.

   As so few of the female detectives in mystery fiction from the 1950s and before were private eyes, it really is worth seeking out and reading about those who were. In her first book, though, Grace Pomeroy was a private nurse, and I am not clear whether in her third and final adventure she returned to her original profession or not. Nonetheless, in Murderer’s Choice she is a full-fledged private eye, whether she had any training or not. (It does not appear that she had.)

   This first case is a doozy, though. Working for the Keene Detective Agency, her client has a strange story to tell. He is one of two cousins who hated each other, from childhood on. Frank Osgood, still alive, was the weaker one, tormented by the other their whole life through. Before his death Charles Osgood, a mystery writer, told the other he was going to commit suicide but plant enough clues so that Frank would be blamed.

   But when Charles dies, his death is attributed to natural causes, he left no money behind, and there is no trace of the insurance policy he promised Frank he was going to take out on himself. Frank is waiting for the other shoe to fall, and in desperation he tells Grace the entire story.

   A story which well may be unique in the annals of detective fiction. With a beginning as intriguing as this, what follows could be a complete letdown, as far as the story is concerned, but Anna Mary Wells is fairly well up to the challenge, bringing in several other characters who are interested in knowing what happened to Charles’ money: Frank’s mother; his fiancée (and she has been for eight years); a Broadway floozy who claims she was secretly married to Charles; a housekeeper promised money in Charles’ will;and another mystery writer who claims that Charles stole many of his ideas.

   Grace gets it wrong at least once, which is probably par for the course for an amateur, but she prevails in the end. Priding herself as never having told a lie, moreover, the last line of the book is quite apt: “For a first lie,”she said judiciously, “that wasn’t bad.”

   This one isn’t a classic, but it comes close to it many ways. The hardcover is not easy to find (I found not one for sale with a jacket), but either paperback edition, one as recent as 1981, can be picked up fairly easily.

         The Grace Pomeroy series:

A Talent for Murder. Knopf 1942 [with Dr. Hillis Owen]
Murderer’s Choice. Knopf 1943
Sin of Angels. Simon & Schuster, 1948 [with Dr. Hillis Owen]

NORBERT DAVIS “Don’t Give Your Right Name.” PI Max Latin #2. Novelette. First published in Dime Detective Magazine, December 1941. Reprinted in The Hardboiled Dicks, edited by Ron Goulart (Sherbourne Press, hardcover, 1965; Pocket, paperback, 1967) and collected in The Complete Cases of Max Latin (Steeger ,Books, 2013).

   I can see why Ron Goulart picked as the lead story in his The Hardboiled Dicks. Norbert Davis had a wicked sense of humor to go with a master’s touch in telling the rough, tough, hardboiled kind of tale that both Dime Detective and Black Mask specialized in.

   “Don’t Give Your Right Name,” for example, begins with a chaotic scene at Gutierrez’s restaurant, a place that’s always hopping in spite of everything Gutierrez can do to keep customers away because they eat too fast instead of savoring their food.

   This includes paying an autograph collector to go in and annoy all of the famous people gathered there. But things turn serious when the fellow turns up dead in the alley in back, and to save his own skin, Max Latin is forced to take on the case. Latin is a not-so-honest PI who, when he calls his lawyer, the latter is all but out the door and heading to the police lockup where he assumes Latin is, and is calling from.

   The story is enormously complicated, with more than a smidgen of sexual innuendo to go with it. There lots of strings to the plot, but even with the pace as fast as it is, Davis manages to keep everything under control to the end. On his part, Latin manages to keep himself out of jail, but on their part, not everyone else survives the night. It’s a risky business, showing up in one the stories he’s in.

Note: I first wrote a review of this story in 1967, and I posted it on this blog a week or so ago. Follow the link and you can read it here.

DONALD HENDERSON CLARKE – Louis Beretti. Vanguard Press, hardcover, 1929. Grosset & Dunlap, hardcover, photoplay edition, 1929. Novel Library #19, paperback, 1949; Avon #575, paperback, 1954. Film: Fox, 1930, as Born Reckless.

   My golly. This novel is freaking amazing. I can’t believe it.

   It’s the first novel by this NYC journalist who became close to famed NYC mobster Arnold Rothstein (who appears fictionally as Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby and as Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, and who was famous for, among others things, fixing the 1919 World Series).

   One can’t help but think that Rothstein’s demise in 1928 freed Clarke to publish Louis Beretti along with the nonfiction In The Reign of Rothstein, both in 1929.

   There’s an awful lot of inside mobster facts about beating prohibition in Louis Beretti (such as how to make ‘smoke’ out of a quart of denaturalized wood alcohol sold at paint shops and adding a few drops of iodine, shaking the concoction til it attains a milky hue), that give the novel an incredible verisimilitude. Also some timeless mobster advice on success with the ladies: ‘treat a whore like a duchess and a duchess like a whore.’

   The novel is pretty much an episodic look at the life of a NYC mobster from birth to ‘maturity’. Think Little Caesar meets Studs Lonigan.

   The thing is, it’s much more fun to read than Little Caesar, and for the life of me I cannot understand why Burnett’s mob novel is hailed as an important first of its kind while this one is forgotten.

   It’s possibly because the film version of Louis Beretti is mostly forgotten (directed by John Ford in 1930), while the highly regarded film Little Caesar kept the novel’s title and has that iconic, genre defining performance from Edward G. Robinson as the lead.

   In any case, don’t sleep on Louis Beretti. It’s really, really good. It also shows how natural it was for close relationships to form between alcoholic journalists and bootleggers with a speakeasy.

MICHAEL COLLINS “Dan Fortune and the Hollywood Caper.” PI Dan Fortune.  Short story. First published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, November 1983. Collected in Crime, Punishment and Resurrection (Donald I. Fine, 1992) as “The Woman Who Ruined John Ireland.” Reprinted in Silver Screams: Murder Goes Hollywood, edited by Cynthia Manson & Adam Stern (Longmeadow, paperback, 1994).

   Dan Fortune is hired by a young woman, a file clerk for a company in midtown Manhattan, who lives a life on the borderline between real life and movieland fantasy. She looks like Gloria Grahame, and there are times when she thinks she is. She is having an affair with the manager of a small used bookstore whom at times she believes he is John Ireland. When she is shot at, she comes to Dan, convinced that her lover’s wife, Grace Kelly, is the one responsible.

   Before he has solved the case, she even has Dan doing it. Here below is a list of the movie stars who play a part in the investigation, even briefly. I hope I haven’t missed any. It would make one hell of of a movie, wouldn’t it?

MY LEARNED FRIEND. Ealing, 1943. Will Hay, Claude Hulbert, Mervyn Johns, and Ernest Thesiger. Written by Angus MacPhail & John Dighton. Directed by Basil Dearden & Will Hay. Currently streaming on Plex.

   Will Hay — for reasons that escape me — was an enduring star of British stage, screen and airwaves. His observations seem obvious to me, his delivery deliberate, and his timing tortuous. Still, you can’t argue with Success (Or rather, you can, but It won’t listen,) he made a score of well-received films, and I actually enjoyed this one.

   Hay stars as Will Fitch, a former barrister brought up on charges of fraud, who easily gets himself acquitted with a flurry of wheezy old jokes, then invites the flummoxed Crown Prosecutor, fittingly named Claude Babbington, back to his digs for a drink.

   But there they are confronted by a recently released felon gone mad (a delightfully miscast Mervyn Johns, whom you may remember as Bob Cratchit to Alastair Sim’s Scrooge.) who has sworn to kill everyone who had a hand in sending him up, and just wants to give Hay a heads-up you know, because he’s last on the list.

   Duly alarmed, Fitch and Babbington set about trying to thwart the madman by getting to his prospective victims first, following clues he has thoughtfully provided them. All they manage, though, is to arrive late or at the wrong places and get themselves suspected and ultimately hunted by Scotland Yard.

   It’s a tenuous concept for a comedy, but it gets more than its share of laughs, mostly because Babbington, Fitch’s partner in not-solving crimes is played by veteran comic actor Claude Hulbert.

   Hulbert specialized in playing the Silly Ass, and even essayed a turn as Algy Longworth in Bulldog Jack (aka: Alias Bulldog Drummond). Everyone involved had the wisdom to give him free rein here, and he’s simply and completely hilarious, even when the jokes are not. Indeed, he gets a tour de force dance number that he handles with amazing gracefulness (sorry) and split-second timing.

   Friend ultimately devolves into a farcical set-to inside an explosive-laden Big Ben, but by that time I had surrendered to Hulbert’s charm and found myself enjoying this nonsense in spite of myself. You might, too.

CAMFORD SHEAVELY “The Tie That Blinds.” Novelette. Clyde Collier #1. First published in Detective Story Magazine, June 1947. Never reprinted.

   I may be stretching it a bit to call Clyde Collier a private eye, but then again trouble shooters for the movie studios in the 1930s and 40s are generally allowed to be thought of to be in the category – think of W. . Ballard’s “Bill Lennox” stories as a prime example – so even if maybe Collier is in reality only a glorified PR man, he’s still a PI in my book, especially when murder is involved.

   Even though it’s the lead story in the issue it’s in, it’s still a minor tale. What I think I’ll do is tell you the basics and let you see if you can’t figure out the plot on your own. Dead is one of Hollywood’s top ranked directors. What’s unusual is the way he’s dressed: in a blue coat and tan shirt, with a tie decorated with purple and maroon flowers. Later on Collier spots one of the crew playing cards, only to lose because he confuses a spade for a heart in what would otherwise be a straight flush.

   Sorry, but no more hints. Not that I think you are likely to need any.

   The rest of the story is padding, but that’s ameliorated by the fact that Sheavely seems to have been someone who knew his way around a movie studio. I’d never heard of the author before either, but he had about a dozen stories published in the detective pulps in the 40s, including one in Black Mask (July 1946). You may know him better as John Reese, who wrote quite a few western novels under his own name, beginning in the 50s, including ten in his Jefferson Hewitt series.

   I’ve not read any of the latter, but I’ve always meant to. I believe, but am not sure, that Hewitt was a detective in the Paladin sense, who traveled the early West taking various jobs for hire. If anyone can say more, that’s what the comments are for.

● A FOR ANDROMEDA. (1961) Television Serial in six parts. Peter Halliday, Julie Christie, Frank Windsor, John Hollis, Patricia Kneale, Mary Morris. Teleplay by (Sir) Fred Hoyle and John Elliott. Directed by Michael Hayes and others

● ANDROMEDA BREAKTHROUGH. (1962) Television Serial in six parts. Peter Halliday, Susan Hampshire, John Hollis, Mary Morris, David Saire, Claude Ferrell. Various Directors including John Elliott.

● A FOR ANDROMEDA.  (2006) Tom Hardy, Charlie Cox, Kelly Reilly. Screenplay by Richard Fell, based on the teleplay by Fred Hoyle and John Elliott. Directed by John Strickland.

● Novelized as A for Andromeda (1962) by Fred Hoyle and John Elliott, and Andromeda Breakthrough (1964) by Fred Hoyle and John Elliott.

   The British throughout the fifties and sixties did a series of Science Fiction serials for BBC Television varying from those aimed at younger audiences like City Beneath the Sea and Secret Beneath the Sea, to more adult stories by the legendary Nigel Kneale (Quatermass, The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass and the Pit, The Trollenberg Terror, The Broken, The Stone Tapes) whose work was often made into feature films, as well as other creators’ works such as Doomwatch, and the John Wyndam remake of Day of the Triffids, and the Tripods.

   At a time when most American SF was limited to anthology series like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits or children’s fare the British were doing intriguing SF with grown up themes, and of course a fair amount of monsters.

   A for Andromeda, created by BBC producer and creator John Elliot and Plumian Professor and Science Fiction author Sir Fred Hoyle in 1961, is one of the more legendary of these serials if only because of the young actress introduced as its title character, Julie Christie.

   The story is simple enough. In 1970 John Fleming (Peter Halliday) and his friend Brenner (Frank Windsor) are working at a civilian facility on a radio satellite designed to aid the military in intercepting radio traffic by potential enemies. To that end Fleming is scanning deep space as he fine tunes the satellite, a rebel pursuing his own interests at the governments expense.

   The arrival of a Judy Adamson (Patrica Kneale) a new security expert sent in as a public relations expert comes at an inopportune time for Brenner who has secretly been selling information to Intel a mysterious multi national group run by the mysterious Krautman (John Hollis).

   Everything changes when the computers detect a signal coming from space, from the Andromeda region, and when Fleming begins to decipher the code suddenly the military’s interception of radio traffic isn’t half as important.

   The coded transmission proves to be binary code for a super computer and the team is moved to a remote base in the Hebrides to build it, as Brenner is pressured by Krautman and his threatening chauffeur Egon (Paul Henchie)who even takes a few pot shots with a high powered rifle to scare Adamson off.

   When the computer transmits information for the creation of a biological entity Professor Dawnay (Mary Morris) is brought in and Fleming begins to question the safety of the project. Just what are the motives of the high handed alien intelligence behind the computer? Are they all being led down a rabbit hole by a malign alien intelligence?

   When Catherine (Julie Christie with dark hair) Brenner’s assistant is killed in an accident by the computer it creates a new biological avatar in her image, Andromeda, aka Andre (Julie Christie now an ethereal blonde) and destroys the “Cyclops” the previous attempt made by Dawnay.

   Meanwhile Adamson has closed in on Brenner and Krautman is pressuring Fleming as the latter becomes more and more convinced the computer is controlling Dawnay and the others around it as much as it does Andre, and when it attempts to kill Dawnay with a flesh eating bacteria when she questions it Fleming sees the only chance as appealing to Andre’s human side since the Prime Minister and the military can only see the super computer as a way to rebuild Britain’s lost glories.

   The Intel sub-plot is seemingly sidelined at this point, but comes back with a vengeance in Andromeda Breakthrough. The first serial stands alone, but is enhanced by the second.

   In the end Fleming succeeds in appealing to Andre’s human side and is able to destroy the computer while Andre destroys the instructions for building a new machine after realizing the computer will ultimately destroy her. Andre and Fleming escape pursued by the Royal Marines in charge of security to a nearby cave where Andre seemingly drowns in a pool and Fleming is arrested, but the world is safe.

   Andromeda Breakthrough picks up exactly where the first serial ended with Fleming under arrest and Andre (now played by yet another major discovery, Susan Hampshire of The First Churchills and Fleur in The Forsyte Family) supposedly dead. She isn’t though and soon, with Fleming, she is under arrest.

   That changes when Fleming, Andre, and Dawnay are kidnapped by Intel and Krautman and Mlle Gamboule (Claude Ferrell) and flown to the Arab kingdom of Azaran where Intel has rebuilt the super computer and needs their expertise.

   In the meantime Andre’s health begins to fail and Fleming and Dawnay rush to save her as the world’s weather begins to deteriorate and Andre traces it to an alien enzyme that threatens to destroy Earth’s fragile climate.

   With the new computer exerting influence on Mlle Gamboule and amid murderous storms and a revolution in Azaran Fleming, Dawnay, and Andre must fight to save the world and Andre and finally solve the puzzle of the mysterious alien message that began the whole thing while divining the secret of Andre’s creation.

   Both serials begin fairly slowly, but build up exponentially as they go on with more plot threads and character arcs than I can cover here, as you might expect of the serial form. Both deal with elements of the outside worlds reaction to these events that I’ve largely ignored here.

   A for Andromeda is, sadly, lost. It has been recreated using what footage still exists and titled stills from the series into a two hour feature that covers the story fairly well, and luckily most of the last two episodes are intact including the exciting ending. It was remade as a movie in 2006 starring Tom Hardy as Fleming, though unfortunately much of the plot is sacrificed and a different ending tacked on that does not allow for the events of Andromeda Breakthrough. It’s not bad, but truncating a six part serial into a less than ninety minute movie means a lot of vital story is lost for what becomes a basic Frankenstein story.

   The restructured original serial, the 2006 remake, and the entire six episode Andromeda Breakthrough serial are currently available on YouTube in decent prints, and while time has blunted some of the originals scientific edge both serials remain worth seeing.

   Most seem to agree the brunt of the writing on both the serial and the two novelizations was done by John Elliott with Fred Hoyle, despite being the author of such Science Fiction classics as Ossian’s Ride, October the First is Too Late, and The Black Cloud, is largely a technical adviser. Still considering Fred Hoyle is the man who coined the phrase “the Big Bang” (however sardonically) and whose Steady State Theory of the Universe has recently been back in favor (as flawed but useful) among many physicists attempting to understand the nature of the Universe that’s a pretty good technical adviser for any SF series.

   I read the two novels years before ever seeing the serial and still hold them in high regard as excellent SF thrillers of a kind of near future SF the British seemed to specialize in (John Wyndham, Charles Eric Maine, Christopher Hodder-Williams, Archie Roy, John Christoper, L. P. Davies etc.). Both held up well on rereading, though now I can’t help but see the characters in relation to the actors who played them. The books, published here in paperback by Fawcett Crest in 1967 when I was seventeen, were fairly seminal in my adult Science Fiction reading and expand on the serials rather than just aping them.

   In any case, that the two serials provided the screen with both Julie Christie and Susan Hampshire is a fairly good reason in and of itself to check them out.

HENRY KANE “The Memory Guy.” PI Peter Chambers. First published in Come Seven, Come Death, edited by Henry Morrison (Pocket, paperback original, 1965). Reprinted in Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine (US), March 1966.

   In “The Memory Guy” Peter Chambers is hired to do one thing – find who’s been leaving an aspiring Broadway actress phone calls threatening her father’s life – and ends up doing another. To wit:  saving her from being accused of killing him. It seems that he was doing his best to keep her from her desired choice of career, including the rather drastic measure of persuading her to marry his law clerk, a man with a photographic memory.

   Hence the title.

   If you were to read the blurb for this particular story on the back cover, it gives the entire plot away, so don’t. As a pure detective story, it’s too short to linger in your memory for very long afterward, but it’s very well constructed.

   What I found disappointing, is that there’s nothing of Peter Chambers himself in the story. The Personality he’s developed in earlier stories doesn’t exist in this one. The PI the girl hires could have been anyone. In fact, he needn’t even be a detective, just someone she knows who’s a little more observant than a stranger off the street.

DONALD HAMILTON – The Steel Mirror. Rinehart & Co., hardcover, 1948. Dell #473, paperback, mapback edition, 1950; cover by Robert Stanley.  Gold Medal, d1617, paperback.  Film: United Artists, 1957, as Five Steps to Danger.

   So, I know I’m supposed to read Donald Hamilton. And I know this isn’t the one you’re supposed to start with. But it’s one I happen to have in paperback. And we’re on vacation on the beach in North Carolina this week. And reading vintage Gold Medal’s on the beach, sitting on a lawn chair, with an ice cold can of beer, while one’s children run around building sand castles, jumping waves, flying kites and collecting shells, is one of the most truly wonderful experiences in the world.

   And I’ve been meaning to read the guy. So, why not?

   This man Hamilton can really write. And grab you. He’s really good.

   Problem is, I’m not sure if in the end he has anything to say. Which is to say that, to me, it feels like the plot is just scaffolding to hold terrific prose.

   In terms of plot, the book is pretty heavy on the postwar paranoia Russian spy angle. And that’s not really my bag. Though current events may bring this sub genre back into style.

   John Emmett has a month off between jobs. He had a job in DC, but it was a temp job filling in for a returning soldier. He got a new job in Bakersfield and bought a cheap junker to take a slow meander cross country to his new gig.

   Unfortunately it breaks down in Iowa. And the cost to fix it outstrips the value of the car. So he’s resigned to taking the train when an overheated pretty lady in an overheated car stops into the garage. When he finds out she’s heading west one of them picks up the other, it’s not clear which, and they head off in her convertible.

   Turns out she’s recently come out of the loony bin, having PTSD from being held in a Nazi concentration camp as part of the French resistance. She has amnesia about whether or not she ratted out her resistance comrades, leading to their demise.

   She finds out that a former co-prisoner is now a professor in Denver — so she’s headed there to try to fill in the blanks in her memory.

   Unfortunately, Russian spies don’t seem to want her to meet the professor. And will do anything in their power to stop her from reaching her destination.

   The story is pretty enthralling until you finish it. You turn the pages as quickly as you can. And then, by the end, you wonder why you wasted your time.

   I mean it was fun and everything, I guess. But looking back it kinda reminded me of the ending of Neil Simon’s Murder by Death in which the murderer confesses at the end and then takes off mask after mask after mask, where by the end every single character has plausibly confessed.

   It’s not quite as ridiculous as that. But the depth of supposed Russian double agent state infiltration runs so deep it makes McCarthyism seem understated.

   Anywho, like I was saying, this Hamilton guy can really write. And one thing I really came to appreciate from the guy is how he makes setting descriptions a part of the story itself. He doesn’t use metaphor to show what a great poet he is. He uses it to advance the tension and move the story. Which is something too few writers do. Nothing makes me shut a book quicker than a cliched, unnecessary metaphor.

   Let me illustrate just how good Hamilton is at this:

   First take the title itself:

   
   Protagonist confusion:

   
   The girl escapes capture, the protagonist wonders where she’s gone:

   
   Marching at gunpoint:

   
   Racing thru the mountains, tailed by villains:

   
   As the protagonist figures out a major clue in the mystery:

   
   The relationship between boy and girl starts to unravel: