TROPIQUES CRIMINELS (aka Deadly Tropics) “Les Anses d’Arlet.” French TV, 11 November 2019 (Season 1, Episode 1). Sonia Rolland (Mélissa Sainte-Rose), Béatrice de la Boulaye (Gaëlle Crivelli), and a large ensemble cast. Currently streaming on MHz.

   Take a couple of mismatched male detectives in L.A. (forgive me if this sounds familiar), make them both female, move them to Martinique, and give them all sorts of quirks and other baggage, and what you get is a TV series very much along the lines of Tropiques Criminels. Sonia Rolland plays the thinner one (she looks very much like a runway model), while Béatrice de la Boulaye plays the chunkier one (short but peppery).

   Rolland’s character is by-the-books solid; de la Boulaye is wacky and often all but out of control, and every once in a while you can forget the “all but.” Rolland’s character arrives in Martinique from Paris under pressure (her ex-husband also on the force was also quite crooked), and she has two children who do not like having had to move. de la Boulaye has an ex-boy friend who has cheated on her.

   I’m sure you get the picture. This, their first case they are given to solve together, has to do with a dead man who apparently arrived home to find it in the process of being robbed. The case is solved rather easily, but the investigation is not really the point. What the focus is this time around is getting to know the two main characters, first of all, then the other members of the ensemble cast.

   The setting is of course beautiful, but I don’t think it’s likely that this series will follow the lead of Death in Paradise, another series taking place on an island in the middle of the Caribbean – the latter’s specialty consisting of formal clues and strange, usually impossible crimes taking place.

   That’s not where I expect this one to be headed. No matter. Clichés and all, everyone seems to be in well-synced accord with the roles they are playing, and I enjoyed this more than I expected to. It will be interesting to follow along and see what sorts of criminous escapades they get into next. (So far there have been two seasons of eight episodes each.)

M. W. CRAVEN – Dead Ground. Washington Poe/Tilly Bradshaw #4. Constable, UK, Jun 2021; paperback, November 2021. Setting: Cumbria, Lake District, England; contemporary.

First Sentence: The man wearing a Sean Connery mask said to the man wearing a Daniel Craig mask, “Bertrand the monkey and Raton the cat are sitting by the fire, watching chestnuts roast in the hearth.”

   Detective Sergeant Poe and analyst Matilda “Tilly” Bradshaw are part of the Serious Crimes Analysis Section (SCAS) of the National Crimes Agency. They hunt serial killers and serial rapists; investigating the murder of a man found in a pop-up brothel is not their function. However, the victim was the co-owner of a private helicopter company transporting bigwigs, including the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, to a trade summit which means MI5 and the FBI are involved. Poe and Bradshaw are assigned to solve the murder and determine whether it is safe for the Secretary to attend.

   Although it is always good to read a series from the beginning, Craven provides enough structure that, due to an effective opening that then takes one into the story where he introduces many of the major players along the way, one may jump straight in. He is also clever in making the victim someone other than the top official while making the importance of the summit clear and leaving the plot plenty of scope to travel down other paths. He writes very short chapters. Each is a scene that keeps the story moving forward.

   Craven also understands that some of the major elements so critical to a good story are humor— “From Harry Potter to prostitutes in three easy moves — that was quite a turnaround.”;  –dialogue which is quick and crisp; and relationships. Not only is Poe protective of Tilly, but she is of him as well. The partnership is also an excellent way of including detailed information which is understood by Tilly and enables her to explain it to both Poe and to the reader. Where Tilly is logic, Poe is emotion and determination. While some of the technology is fascinating, it is also terrifying as some of it is real.

   The plot is original and brilliant with an excellent flow that proceeds at breakneck speed still giving one time to take an occasional breath. This is not a story one can predict. Characters are often not who one thinks they are. The revelations are not only surprising but occasionally shocking and cleverly constructed. As each occurs, one feels they should have seen it but didn’t because the story is so absorbing. The masterful twists and red herrings continue to the very end. The tension of the climax is gripping, the final resolution well done, and the very end a perfect lead-in to subsequent books.

   Dead Ground is an excellent read. The depth and excitement of the rapid-paced plot, causes non-stop reading, and puts Craven’s name on the list of “must-read” authors.

Rating: Excellent.

INSIDE MAN. Universal Pictures, 2006. Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer, Willem Dafoe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Carlos Andrés Gómez, Kim Director, James Ransone. Director: Spike Lee.

   This is a heist film, but a puzzling one, as the thieves seem more interested in stalling around than they are in negotiating their demands in exchange for the release of their hostages, several dozen of them. In fact it gradually seems clear that the hostages are an integral part of their well-constructed plan: for some unknown reason, they don’t appear to be interested in the money at all.

   Complicating matters for Denzel Washington as the head negotiator for the NYPD is the presence of Jodie Foster as a “fixer” whose client is the aristocratic owner of the bank (well played by aristocratic Christopher Plummer). She has something on the mayor, and that allows her carte blanche to do whatever she pleases with the hostage situation.

   As expected with a Spike Lee production, the camera work is terrific, the actors are superb, the several comic side bits are wonderful, and the story simply didn’t work for me. The thieves (as well as the hostages) are fully masked at all times, and in so doing are essentially anonymous. There is a reason for this, from their point of view. It is part of their plan, but why Clive Owen agreed to be in this picture with his face covered 90 percent of the time is a good question.

   Denzel Washington is, as always, the strong figure in the film, cool and collected, always with a good quip when a good quip is exactly what’s needed. Jodie Foster’s role, on the other hand, simply fizzles out, especially at the end, exactly when a good ending is needed. Not her fault, though.

   The movie did well at the box office, and that’s the bottom line, so you may call me Mr. Grumpy when I point out that no matter how elaborately the thieves’ plan was worked out in advance, it just doesn’t work. I don’t want to give away anything, but the security cameras watching the doors before the thieves break in *were* working, weren’t they?

HAROLD R. DANIELS – House on Greenapple Road. Random House, hardcover, 1966. Dell, paperback, 1969. [See comment #2.] TV movie: Quinn Martin, 1970.

   The “Red Kitchen Murder,” as it came to be known in the press, began when Marian Ord’s nine-year-old daughter returned home from school to find “brown stuff … like paint or when you spill iodine” all over the kitchen of their tract house on Greenapple Road in the small Massachusetts town of Holburn.

   Marian’s sister-in-law, who lived next door, called the police. But there was no body in the house or anywhere else in the vicinity. What had happened in that kitchen? Where was Marian Ord, dead or alive?

   Dan Nalon was in charge of the investigation. Along with his fellow officers, he began probing into Marian Ord’s background-and found a maze of twisted relationships that proved she was anything but an average suburban housewife. Among her “friends” were a phony minister, head of the “Church of Redemption Through Love”; a cruel and selfish ski instructor; a decent young Italian biker; an equally decent young lifeguard at the local country club; a big-shot bookie known to have Cosa Nostra connections; and a succession of men she picked up in bars.

   She was also guilty, Nalon discovered, of passing bad checks, welshing on gambling debts, and stealing money from her tavern conquests.

   When it became apparent that her husband, George, knew of Marian’s sleazy “other life,” and that his alibi for the time of the Red Kitchen incident was not what it first seemed, Nalon’s attention focused on him- But had Ord really killed his wife in a fit of jealous rage? Just what had happened that tragic afternoon in the house on Greenapple Road?

   This is a taut and baffling thriller, told in a semi-documentary, ex-post-facto style that makes excellent use of flashbacks. The characterization, especially of Marian 0rd, is of the first rank; the writing is crisp (and there is plenty of sex to spice the narrative); and the revelations at the climax are surprising, yet fairly clued.The film version, made for TV in 1970 with Janet Leigh and Christopher  George, is faithful to the novel and just as suspenseful as a result.

   Daniels published several other novels of merit in the Fifties and Sixties, all of them paperback originals; the best are The Accused (1958), The Snatch (1958), and For the Asking (1962).

     ———
   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.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – The Sleeping Sphinx. Gideon Fell #17. Harper & Brothers, hardcover, 1947. Bantam #996, paperback, 1952. Reprinted many times.

   Does every man have in his past a girl once loved in silence, in vain? The scene is post-war Britain, and Carr’s hero, falsely reported dead while on an undercover assignment in Italy, returns home to find the breath of murder hovering over his best friend and the girl he loves. Only the genially grumpy Dr. Fell has the answer to what seems to have been a supernatural curse flung down in their midst.

   Carr will of course always be best remembered for his supreme expertise with locked rooms, but once again I’m almost equally impressed by the hints of black sinister mystery   that his stories always seem possess as well.  It’s as if his plots were more the product of a twisted and tormented imagination of a Van Gogh than the clever mind of a master detective story writer, yet when in the final chapter the curtain rises on a bare stage, the collapsible sets and other trappings are finally recognized as the common and prosaic pieces of apparatus they really  are.

   Perversely, often like the magician who, untrue to hie craft, reveals the cards up his sleeve, the mystery is more fascinating without the solution.

Rating: B

RON GOULART, Editor – The Hardboiled Dicks. Sherbourne Press, hardcover, 1965. Pocket, paperback, 1967.

   Eight stories from the pulp-age detective magazines, when violence and action were the keywords. The question is, are these stories merely representative, or were they chosen to be among the best of each author’s work? If the majority of pulp stories were below these in quality, they deserve obscurity, but if these are indeed only meant as typical examples, future digging might be quite rewarding. Overall rating: 3 stars.

[Note: Rather than reprint the entirety of the eight stories in one fell swoop, what I’ve decided to do is post them on this blog two at a time, over the next few weeks.]

  NORBERT DAVIS “Don’t Give Your Right Name.” PI Max Latin #2. Novelette. First published in Dime Detective Magazine, December 1941. Reprinted in The Complete Cases of Max Latin (Steeger Books, 2013). Max Latin, not-so-honest private eye, solves the murder of another detective working on a case connected with a job of Latin’s. Too many coincidences when thought about afterward, but is effectively done. Characterization is complete, but ending comes fast. (3)

  JOHN K. BUTLER “The Saint in Silver.” Steve Midnight #4. Novelette. First published in Dime Detective Magazine, January 1941. Collected in The Complete Cases of Steve Midnight, Volume 1 (Steeger Books, 2016). Steve Midnight, a cab driver, takes a fare on part of a treasure hunt and becomes involved in the narcotics habit of a religionist’s wife. Well told story, in Southern California surroundings. (3)

               — November 1967.

THE BLACK WATCH.  Fox Films, 1929. Victor McLaglen, Myrna Loy, Lumsden Hare, David Torrance, David Rollins, Roy D’Arcy, Mitchell Lewis, Walter Long, Francis Ford. Screenplay by James Kevin MacGuinnis & John Stone, based on the novel King of the Khyber Rifles by Talbot Mundy. Directed by John Ford.

   Whether you enjoy this early talkie or not may depend on your tolerance for Fordian sentimentality and the primitive technology of early sound. Stiff dialogue delivered stiffly doesn’t help a great deal either. Compare this to the superior Bulldog Drummond also from 1929 to see just how stiff it is.

   What does help is the stunning visuals true to Ford at his best ably abetted by Cinematographer Joseph H. August and some exciting moments thanks to the few times the film actually strays toward Talbot Mundy’s classic pulp novel.

   That said, the first twenty minutes of the film are a write off of Fordian sentimentality and unnecessary back story.

   Captain Donald (*) King (Victor McLaglen) of the famed Black Watch Highland Regiment is summoned to headquarters from the Regimental dinner on the eve of sailing for Europe and the early days of WW I.

   At headquarters Captain King is told he is needed in the Khyber Pass in India where he previously served in the Khyber Rifles. It seems the hillmen are rallying behind a mysterious woman known as Yasmani who they believe is a goddess. King is to find Yasmani and prevent the hillmen from falling on vulnerable India and sweeping the weakened British off the sub-continent.

   As part of his secret service work King cannot let his fellow officers know that he is being sent to India. They have to believe he is deserting the regiment as they march to war for safety in India. He can’t even tell his younger brother Malcolm (David Rollins) who worships him.

   That would be bad enough without a drawn-out scene of the regiment boarding the train for the ship to France and goodbyes to their family along with some much unneeded comedy relief.

   It’s twenty wasted minutes. Thankfully Ford will learn to better balance this sort of thing in later films and make a virtue of it (usually). He doesn’t here though there are more than enough Fordian touches.

   Things pick up a little in India where the Mundy novel begins in the first place. There King ties up with his old ally Major Mohammed Khan (Mitchell Lewis) who will help him in his mission which begins by attracting the attention of Yasmani (Myrna Loy) and her allies the ambitious Rewa Gunga (Roy D’Arcy) and the savage hillman Harim Bey (Walter Long) both with her longing glances at his manly presence and his heavy drinking and bad behavior leading Gunga to think King will be a good deserter.

   Staging the accidental killing of a fellow officer King “escapes” and is taken in by Yasmani who offers to take him into the Khyber Pass and the infamous Cave of Terror where the hillmen are meeting before sweeping into India. Unlike the character in the book, no one tries to pass Victor McLaglen off as a native in disguise (thankfully) though he does get to don a turban and robes.

   The sets and staging for the Cave of Terror scenes are worth the whole film. Though the restraints of budget show Ford and August use imagination, shadow, and smoke to create a genuinely entertaining vision replete with McLaglen battling a native bare chested to prove his worth.

   Despite the stiff delivery of dialogue that would read better on a silent title card they actually keep some of the more fantastic elements of Mundy’s novel including Yasmani’s claim to be a descendant of Alexander the Great and suggestions of past lives between she and King.

   And she almost wins him over to her vision of paradise in her arms as the king of India until she shows him his regiment in France in a crystal ball and he sees his brother Malcolm wounded in battle. Considering how Loy looks in those gauzy outfits, he proves a better man than me. This was from the era when she played exotic roles like the daughter of Fu Manchu and the murderous and vengeful Eurasian in Thirteen Women, gauzy suits her.

   A fairly exciting battle between the hillmen and King and Khan’s men armed with machine guns follows shot beautifully in smoke and shadows with captured and blinded Major MacGregor (Francis Ford) who King has freed from slavery leading the troops with King’s sword thrust into his hand.

   King doesn’t get the girl, but he does get his Regiment, a happy ending for any Ford film.

   Henry King ignored Mundy entirely for his version of King of the Khyber Rifles with Tyrone Power as a half Indian King. Despite having no relation to the book it was much more exciting even without Yasmani with a splendid set piece for the ending ironically mindful of a similar scene in John Ford’s The Searchers.

   McLaglen’s stiff delivery of his lines (Loy is no better) doesn’t help, but he looks great when he isn’t speaking and it is the visuals for this, often mindful of Joseph Clement Coll’s famous illustrations for the book, that make it worthwhile, and Loy is believably ethereal as Yasmani (though there is little ethereal about the vibrant wild child of Mundy’s novels).

   Mitchell Lewis and Walter Long fare best in the acting department, playing vibrant over the top characters with an energy you only wish McLaglen and Loy brought to their roles.

   This is an early example of the popular British Raj genre that reached its peak with films like Gunga Din, Lives of a Bengal Lancer, The Four Feathers, and Charge of the Light Brigade. The elements aren’t quite there, but even at this stage Ford hits most of the right notes.

(*) Just why King is named Donald in this is a mystery in itself. In the book his name is Athleston and in the Power version Alan. Donald seems a bit arbitrary.

   I’ve yet to spot them but supposedly John Wayne and Randolph Scott appear in this as Highlanders. Considering they are in uniform and shadow much of the film it may take some luck to find them, but the print on YouTube is pretty crisp.

   In addition you get a chance to see what McLaglen must have looked like a few years earlier when he was Governor General of Damascus after T. E. Lawrence captured the city.

WORLDS OF TOMORROW – February, 1967.  Edited by Frederik Pohl. Cover by [Gray] Morrow.  Overall rating: 3½ stars.

SAMUEL R. DELANY “The Star-Pit.” Short novel. The golden are those people psychologically capable of traveling beyond the limits of the galaxy, exploring new worlds, having adventures that ordinary people dream of and hate them for. Vyme, working at ship-repair at the edge of the galaxy, is trapped there. But the golden, exploited for their ability, are trapped, too, in another way. The best treatment of this theme ever written. Characterization is truly tremendous; there are no minor roles in this story. The future of the human race on a believable galactic scale. (5)

KEITH LAUMER “The Planet Wreckers” Novelette. An Earthman gets caught up in the efforts to stop an alien movie company from destroying the US while filming a galactic effort. Meant to be funny, but not very convincing. (3)

KENNETH BULMER “Station HR972.” No story, but a brutal picture of our highway system if this goes on. (3)

RICHARD C. MEREDITH “The Fifth Columbiad.” Short novel. Twelve descendants of Earth capture an enemy spaceship as part of a revenge lasting over 700 years. Action story, with sex arising in inconsistent ways; not too interesting. (2)

HAROLD Q. MASUR “The Corpse Maker.” Short story. Scott Jordan. First published in Come Seven, Come Death, edited by Henry Morrison (Pocket, paperback original, 1965). Never collected or reprinted (unless advised otherwise).

   Attorney Scott Jordan’s client, a notorious fence, is guilty as charged, but when the D.A. offers to make a deal, he turns him down. It seems that the police forced their way into the man’s apartment and searched it without a warrant. So why then does the man not show up for his trial? Has he skipped bail just when he’s about to go free?

   Totally baffled, Jordan tracks him down and finds him at home almost beaten to death. He names his assailant and an (almost) dying message, which of course gives Jordan a lot to go on. And he needs it, as the case is (almost) as complicated as a full-length novel, complete with another killing and (of course) a beautiful girl.

   All to the good, but the story is badly marred by heavy coincidence – two, in fact, occurring on the very same page. Nor in the length of the tale (22 pages) is there time for any real detection. Jordan’s explanation fits all the facts, but how he managed to put them all together is not gone into. And in spite of the fact that I’ve enjoyed all of the Scott Jordan novels I’ve read, that was a long time ago, and I was disappointed with this one. In “The Corpse Maker,” he’s as straight and narrow as white bread, with not a ounce of grittiness to him.

   I’ll have to go back and read some of his early books again.

RICHARD NEELY – No Certain Life. Jove, paperback original, 1978.

   It begins as an idyllic Hollywood love affair. A handsome would-be screenwriter meets a promising young starlet, lonely and compulsively withdrawn, but a long weekend together seems to change all that. Then overnight their brief world of happiness crumbles to panic-stricken dust. She has a husband already, it turns out, a former prisoner of war not at all the same person since his release. An attempt at hospitalization fails, she flees, her new lover finds her, but back in Beverly Hills her mother-in-law is found, slashed to death.

   At this point one expects no more than a rather common chiller-thriller in the vein of Hitchcock or perhaps one of his bloodier imitators, but the pacing lags more than it seems it should, and the observant reader (aren’t we all?) will puzzle over certain inconsistencies in the behavior of some of the characters. Of course all is not what it seems, but the feeling begins to grow that Neely dashed this off on a bad day.

   Wrong! The ending is certain to make a shambles of all premature conclusions. Neely is not writing by the strict rules of classical deduction. and while the “locked room” aspect of the two lovers’ nightmare of terror is nearly lost to view, it can’t be missed the second time through.

   Beyond saying that this is indeed a book which has to be read a second time, I can’t give anything more away, but while this smashing knockout of a story was surely written with an eye for the movies, do read it now.

Rating: B plus.

     
   Novels:

Death to My Beloved (1969)
The Plastic Nightmare (1969) aka Shattered. Filmed under the latter title in 1991. Reprinted by Stark House Press.
While Love Lay Sleeping (1969) Reprinted by Stark House Press.
The Walter Syndrome (1970)
The Damned Innocents (1971) aka Dirty Hands. Filmed under the latter title in 1975.
The Sexton Women (1972)
The Smith Conspiracy (1972) Finalist 1973 Edgar Award for Best Paperback.
The Japanese Mistress (1972)
The Ridgway Women (1975)
A Madness of the Heart (1976) Finalist 1977 Edgar Award for Best Mystery
No Certain Life (1978)
Lies (1978)
The Obligation (1979)
An Accidental Woman (1981)
Shadows from the Past (1983)