HUSTLE “The Game Is On.” BBC One, UK. 24 February 2004 (Series One, Episode One). Adrian Lester, Marc Warren, Robert Glenister, Jaime Murray, Robert Vaughn. Creator-screenwriter: Tony Jordan. Director: Bharat Nalluri.

   Of the eight seasons this British TV series was on, only four have been released on DVD in the US. I recently caught up with the first episode when I saw that it was streaming online. Well worth the wait, I’d say, on one hand, but on the other, I have to ask myself, why did I wait so long?

   I have known what the basic premise was all along, of course. Every week it was on a gang of very experienced con artists pull off a long complicated scam on some unsuspecting victim. One crucial ingredient, or so I’m told, is that very often in each episode when it looks as though their plan is going to collapse, that’s when the real con takes over. It is difficult to imagine how many times the writers of this show can fool the viewer for eight seasons like this, but spread out over as many years, well, why not? Obviously they did it.

   In “The Game Is On,” not only do the basic members of the gang get together for “one last con,” but a new member of the team invites himself in, all the while playing on the greed of a victim who thinks he’s about to make a no-risk fortune on the stock market.

   The story is told in very obvious tongue in cheek, and it’s pleasure to see Robert Vaughn (the senior member of the group and the only member of the cast I recognized) play a role obviously meant for him. It is also very obvious that this is a series that I will be watching more of.

PETER RABE – Agreement to Kill. Gold Medal #670, paperback original; 1st printing, May 1957. Stark House Press, trade paperback, 2006 (published in tandem with My Lovely Executioner).

   I have in my collection nearly 300 original mystery/suspense/crime novels published by Gold Medal during the 1950s. Very few of them deal with detection in the classical sense, but in quality they often far outclass the pulp stories they are descended from. The types of stories are indeed the same pulpish stuff,with many of the same writers, their apprenticeship already served. Private eyes and tough hoodlums dominate.

   This is the first of Peter Rabe’s books that I’ve read. As far as I know, he came along after the pulps had gone. My impression is that he was popular (14 books in 5 years, for Gold Medal), writing largely from the criminal point of view, giving readers a realistic inside look into the hard and tough world of organized crime.

   Agreement to Kill is unusually strange. Jake Spinner, just released from prison, finds himself on the run for the shooting of the man who put him there. Running with him is Loma, the professional who really did the killing, on a contract from bosses in St. Louis. Loma is a cripple, an enigmatic clubfoot who never does anything for no good reason, no matter how temporarily. And Spinner? He thinks it may be time to change sides, and he wants a job and connections to the people in St. Louis.

   The ending reminds me of Cornell Woolrich. A guy and a girl are walking hand-in-hand into their future when fate intervenes. All in all, the book is very much off the beaten track, and the result is a puzzling piece of action that may either repel or wholly fascinate.

Rating: A minus.

TAKEN. “Pilot.” NBC, 27 February 2017. Clive Standen as Bryan Mills and Jennifer Beals as Christina Hart. Large ensemble cast, including guest stars, some of whom may return; others who won’t. Showrunner/screenwriter: Alexander Cary. Director: Alex Graves.

   Now as most of you already know, those of you who are well ahead of me on this, Liam Neeson played Bryan Mills, a former CIA operative whose life takes three separate and serious turns of events, each turned into a  fast action film and huge box office successes. Rather than a fourth film, what to do with the character? Go back to his beginnings and build a TV series around them.

   It lasted for two years, and believe it or not, this is the first I’ve known about it. I was scouting around on Amazon Video looking for something else to watch with Jennifer Beals in it, and there I found it.  I haven’t watched the movies either. Always meant to. Haven’t yet.

   Of course you realize that the TV series is totally generic. Take the name of the character and the title (Taken), and voila. There you have it. Name recognition from day one.

   The pilot has, unfortunately, no plot in and of itself. It’s an “origin” story all the way, nothing more. But nothing less, either. When terrorists kill Mills’ younger sister in retaliation for killing a drug lord’s son, Mills takes matters into his own hands – but not quite. He’s tracked all the way and given help (rescued) by Christina Hart’s team of operatives. She’s a Deputy Director with Special Portfolio at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. (Confession time. I had to look this up online.)

   The story ends with Mills being recruited by her. I hope I’m not giving too much away. The pilot is well enough done, but what kind of stories will follow next is not entirely clear. We are left with only our imaginations at work. I might watch the movies next, but on the other hand, since Jennifer Beals is in the series, I can’t tell you that I’m all that sure about that.

REVIEWED BY RAY O’LEARY:

CLAYTON RAWSON – Death from a Top Hat. The Great Merlini #1. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1938. Dell #169, mapback edition, 1947. Mercury Mystery #125, digest paperback, circa 1950. Gregg Press, hardcover, 1979. IPL, paperback, 1986. Penzler Publishers, hardcover, 2018; trade paperback, 2019.

   I recently bought the DVD set of Mike Shayne movies, and after watching them, I decided to re-read one of the novels. I had some Shayne mysteries among my mapbacks, but as I was looking for them, I came across this Rawson book and decided to re-read it first. Hollywood, in its wisdom, bought the rights to Mike Shayne from “Brett Halliday” and then used the character in films based on other writers’ fiction. The second film in the set, The Man Who Wouldn’t Die, is based on one of Rawson’s Great Merlini novels (not this one). The Merlini character even makes a cameo appearance in that film, giving Shayne info on magicians who do a certain kind of act.

   As Top Hat opens, Ross Harte, Mer1ini’s “Watson,” has just started working on a magazine article on the sorry state of detective fiction when he hears people pounding on the door of the apartment across the hall from his. The apartment belongs to Dr. Cesare Sabbat, a man who spends has time delving into the occult, and the three people in the hall are Eugene Tarot, a sleight-of-hand magician and radio show host, Colonel Watrous, a psychic investigator, and Madame Rappourt, a Medium. Both doors to Sabbat’s apartment are locked and bolted f om the inside and have cloth stuffed in the keyholes.

   When they finally break in they find Sabbat lying on the floor in the middle of a pentagram. He’s been strangled, and the windows are likewise locked and bolted from the inside. Harte calls the police, and when Inspector Gavigan from Homicide arrives, suggests they call on their friend, “The Great Merlini” for help.

   Well, I’m always in the mood for a locked room murder mystery, and this is a pretty good one; one I really enjoyed because I’d forgotten it completely. It’s cleverly plotted and homage is paid to the master of the sub-genre, with references to John Dickson Carr and Dr. Fell’s famous locked-room lecture. As with magic, misdirection is the key here, and Rawson really piles it on as he bamboozles the reader.

I’LL NAME THE MURDERER. Puritan Pictures, 1936. Ralph Forbes, Marion Shilling, Malcolm MacGregor, James Guilfoyle, John W. Cowell, Wm. Norton Bailey, Agnes Anderson, Charlotte Barr-Smith, Mildred Claire. Director: Raymond K. Johnson.

   I certainly can’t stop you, but I’m going to tell you up front that I’m probably not going to say anything in this review that will encourage you one iota to see this movie. On the other hand, don’t get me wrong. Just because it’s another run-of-the-mill mystery movie made in the 30s by a film company you never heard of doesn’t mean that it’s a bad movie. Unless you’re like me, that is, and you can’t get enough of these slapdash mystery movies and only watch them for the sheer fun of doing so.

   Dead is a nightclub singer who, as it turns out, she has made a lot of enemies, and what’s worse, from the point of view of those trying to name the killer, there plenty of them in and around her dressing room where she was stabbed to death.

   Assisting them in their duty, whether they want his help or not, are a well-known gossip columnist (Ralph Forbes) and a lady photographer for the same paper (a cheerfully chipper Marion Shilling). Assisting them in turn is a PI named Joe Baron (James Guilfoyle), but in only an auxiliary role.

   At the basis of the victim’s death, or so it seems, is a batch of old love letters she’s using for a bit of blackmail, but this is more than a one-note samba. There is, as expected, more to it than that. The title of this film, by the way, comes from the fact that toward the end of it Tommy Tilton advertises in one of his daily columns that he’s far ahead of the police and will announce who the murderer is in the following day’s paper.

   All of the players were new to me. Some had long careers, however, and some not so long. For one of them, this was the only movie she was ever in. Among the others with short career was the very plain if not unattractive (shall we say) young woman who played Joe Baron’s secretary. She’s quick with a quip, hwever, and a sharp retort, and she caught my attention right away. She’s not in the credits, so I had to look her up on IMDb after the movie was over. Her name was Louise Keaton, and that may be enough to tell you whose younger sister she was.

   Little bits like this always makes movies like this one, worth watching.

OUT OF LINE. Curb Entertainment, 2001. Jennifer Beals, Holt McCallany, Michael Moriarty, Christopher Judge, Rick Ravanello, William B. Davis, Alonso Oyarzun. Screenwriter-director: Johanna Demetrakas.

   While there is more than enough criminous activity in this film to warrant my categorizing it as a Crime Film, what it really is, when it down to it, is a romance. A Pretty Woman in reverse, you might say, and I’d be even more convinced of the comparison if I’d ever seen that other film. I’ve always meant to, but it’s still on my Must See list.

   But try this on for size. When Henri Brulé aka Henry Burns (Holt McCallany) is released from prison early, his parole officer is a young but very dedicated Jenny Capitanas (Jennifer Beals). She’s the kind of supervisor who finds the hard-nosed approach her fellow officers (all male) use not her style at all, and she finds herself taking him to the opera and teaching him tai chi, or if that’s not correct it’s close enough.

   The attraction between them is obviously not in the rule book, and as in all good noir films, you know that things are not going to work out well for them, nor do they. Th crime element comes in when Henri has to work on a deal he made to another inmate while still in prison: to mess with both a smooth crime boss’s business – and his wife.

   That’s all I’ll say about that, except that it does lead to the very much expected (and explosive) fireworks at the end. To me, the value of this film lies in the (probably) doomed romance, which produces fireworks of a different kind. If it works, and I think it does, a good share of the credit goes to Jennifer Beals, who I haven’t seen in a film she she started, way back with Flashdance, way back in 1983. As an actor, she’s not only beautiful, but intelligent too. Her body language and what you see in her face are fluid and natural. You can’t ask for more. At least I can’t.

   The overall film you can call only a qualified success, at best. I saw this online one of streaming channels, and I’d like to have a DVD as a permanent copy, but it seems to have gone out of print very quickly, and used copies have become pricey.

PostScript: I’ve just watched the trailer. It’s excellent.

REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

WILLIAM P. McGIVERN – Heaven Ran Last. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1949. Dell #599, paperback, date?

   How many books are there where lovers kill for money and/a freedom? Dozens? Scores? Hundreds maybe? Did the sub-genre start with The Postman Always Rings Twice, or does it go back to Macbeth? Probably good topics for discussion on somebody’s website, but I came across a cute variation on the theme in Heaven Ran Last, by William P McGivern.

   In books like this, the killers usually come up with a clever can’t-fail plan, but here Johnny Ford, a Chicago bookie who’s been having it at home with the wife of an overseas war hero, comes up with a scheme to get rid of the inconvenient husband that’s completely half-assed. And as Johnny develops his plan, even the most naive reader will spot holes, maybe-nots and needless complications.

   Oddly, this doesn’t weaken the story; it only makes it more compelling, like watching an accident happen. It’s hard to look away from (or put down) Last as the half-smart protagonist gets one bone-head “inspiration” after another, and McGivern gives the whole thing a final, nasty twist. I found the whole thing unexpectedly enjoyable, in a sweet, sick way. Look this one up if you like this sort of thing.

(Give Me That) OLD-TIME DETECTION. Spring 2020. Issue #53. Editor: Arthur Vidro. Old-Time Detection Special Interest Group of American Mensa, Ltd. 34 pages (including covers). Cover image: Ellery Queen and Nikki Porter.

   By retrieving and curating interesting facts and arcana about the detective story, Arthur Vidro renders an invaluable service to today’s readers, with the latest issue of Old-Time Detection (OTD) nicely continuing that tradition.

   The primary focus this time is on the writer(s)-cum-fictional character, multimedia star Ellery Queen (“the American detective story,” in Anthony Boucher’s estimable estimation). While EQ’s popularity has diminished over time, “his” relevance to the development of the genre worldwide never will, placing “him” in that rarified pantheon of mystery writers that includes Edgar Allan Poe, who originated modern detective fiction; Conan Doyle, who expanded and popularized it; and that bevy of authors, many of them female, who profited most from it.

   Among the varied attractions of this issue: Charles Shibuk’s article on the current trend in trade-paperback republications of classic detective fiction … commentaries by the world’s foremost Agatha Christie expert Dr. John Curran on the recent death of Christie specialist artist Tom Adams; the deplorable film adaptations of her works (“the only murder that was committed during the two hours was that of the legacy of Agatha Christie; and that the perpetrator was the BBC”); a card game (“an entertaining way to pass the time”); a coin celebrating the centenary of The Mysterious Affair at Styles accompanied by a reissue of the novel; and a prospective Agatha Christie film festival … Vidro’s reprint of Edward D. Hoch’s own introduction to his collection of Simon Ark stories (who, says Hoch, “owes a far greater debt to Father Brown than to Carnacki and the other occult sleuths”) … and Jon L. Breen’s contemporary review of Douglas Greene’s The Dead Sleep Lightly, a collection of radio plays by John Dickson Carr (“probably the greatest of all radio suspense scripters”).

   Still more attractions in OTD: Marvin Lachman’s compact biography of Ed Hoch (who “did not achieve the quantity of his writing by sacrificing quality”), with Hoch returning the favor to Lachman (“arguably our greatest mystery short story fan and proponent”) … Jon L. Breen’s review of Murder on Cue (“a case that is resolved most fairly and satisfactorily in an old-fashioned gathering of the suspects”), its chief attraction in his view being its theatrical background … Dale Andrews’s discovery of Ellery Queen’s “Easter Eggs,” by which he means the Christian holiday … and J. Randolph Cox’s account of how he first became aware of EQ and his life and subsequent encounters, personal and professional, with Ellery over the years.

   Further into this issue: Ted Hertel’s article about the two-and-only appearances that EQ made in Better Little Books … Arthur Vidro’s sidebar about that indefatigable Ellery Queen researcher, Mike Nevins (“nearly all roads [to EQ scholarship] lead to or through Nevins”) … Marv Lachman’s first and life-long encounters with EQ (“I loved Queen’s appeal to the brain”) … a memorable anecdote by book collector Andrew J. Fusco, a Sherlockian, about his meeting with Fred Dannay … J. Randolph Cox’s in-depth exploration of the religious underpinnings of the fiction by the two cousins known as Ellery Queen … Les Blatt’s review of The Chinese Orange Mystery (“The crime that was backwards”) … Ted Hertel’s take on The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (“I was not disappointed”) … this issue’s fiction piece, EQ’s radio play “Adventure of the Cellini Cup,” which, as Arthur notes, leaves somewhat to be desired as a fair play mystery … Michael Dirda’s pithy reviews of new fiction and nonfiction (“there’s plenty of excellent entertainment to be found in the Golden Age rivals of Dame Agatha”) … and finishing up with readers’ responses and a puzzle, this one with an alimentary theme.

   As usual, Old-Time Detection is always able to provide what classic detective fiction fans crave.

   A review of the previous issue of OTD is available on Mystery*File here.

   —

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THE PUSHER. United Artists, 1960. Kathy Carlyle, Robert Lansing, Felice Orlandi, Douglas Rodgers, Sloan Simpson, Sara Amman, Jim Boles, John Astin. Screenplay by Harold Robbins, based on the novel by Ed McBain. Director Gene Milford

   While it may not be polished, one thing is for certain. The Pusher has grit. Loads of it, actually. Based on Ed McBain’s eponymous novel, this crime film has the aesthetic one might expect from such a movie. Lots of on location shots of tough, crime-ridden Manhattan streets, nightclubs galore, and a particularly unsavory drug dealer who admittedly preys on the youth and vulnerable women. Although clunky at times, with pacing that never quite works, it’s an overall solid work of independent film-making and an early example of what would later be come to be known as exploitation films.

   The plot follows New York police lieutenant Peter Byrne as he attempts to solve the mystery of who killed a young Puerto Rican junkie. As it turns out, his daughter has a nexus to the crime. Not only that, she’s also been hooked on heroin by the same dealer who is a suspect in the aforementioned murder. There’s also a romantic relationship at play. Byrne’s partner is engaged to be married to his daughter. And he has no idea that his beloved is an addict. A tough spot to be in.

   What makes The Pusher work is not so much the plot, but the atmosphere. Lots of scenes showcase urban poverty, cold and cruel sidewalks, and an overarching sense of despair and dissolution. Although staid compared to 1970s cinema, it’s still a movie that pushes the envelope for its time. An MGM film, this is not. Had this movie been made in the 1980s, it definitely could have easily been produced by Cannon Films and starred Charles Bronson as the lead.

   One final thing. The film’s villain, a heroin dealer who goes by the nickname Gonzo, is portrayed by Italian American actor Felice Orlandi. Although I wasn’t familiar with him until I saw this film, he gives an exceptionally convincing performance as a conniving street smart criminal. I had a chance to look him up and saw that he was in numerous crime films from the 1960s and 1970s, including some I have seen. Next time I watch them, I will be sure to keep an eye out for him.

ROBERT WALLACE “The Mark of the Beast.” Dexter Wynne #1. First published in Thrilling Detective, February 1933. Facsimile edition published by Adventure House, paperback, January 2012.

   Robert Wallace is a house name known to have been assigned to the work of eight or more authors. Unless there is someone who reads this and knows, I have no way of telling you which one of them wrote this particular story.

   Billed as “a complete book-length novel,” it is the longest story in the magazine, but even so, it takes up only 33 pages. In it, private eye Dexter Wynne is asked by a client to check into a mysterious telegram from his sister, telling him that she is afraid of something in the mysterious house where she is living with their stepfather.

   Wynne asks his client, Harry Bates to stay while he investigates, but when he gets there, he find Bates has gotten there ahead of him, dead on the road, with half his face torn away. More than one death follows, making the guilty person all the more apparent as soon there is no one left to suspect. Lots of hidden passageways add to the atmosphere, or at least that was the intent. The build-up to the conclusion fails badly, with a rather prosaic explanation making the whole affair rather shoddy and shopworn.

   I have not said anything about Dexter Wynne, the PI in this tale, and whose only appearance this probably was. There is a reason for that. There is nothing to say. His name could have been chosen out of a hat.

   It is wonderful to have artifacts such as the magazine this story first appeared in reproduced in such a beautiful format, but I’ve sampled the rest of the stories in it, and I haven’t found any of them to be any better than this one. Not all of the detective pulps published in 1933 were of Black Mask caliber.

      Complete contents:

The Mark of the Beast by Robert Wallace
The Banding Murder Case by Allan K. Echols
The Black Ram by Perley Poore Sheehan
The Face That Came Back by Wayne Rogers
The Den of Skulls by Jack D’Arcy
Death Talks Backs by John H. Compton
The Trail of the White Gardenia by Donald Bayne Hobart
The Coward by Ken Rockwell
Reflections by John Lawrence
The Crumpled Clue by J.S. Endicott