KIT CARSON. United Artists, 1940. Jon Hall (Kit Carson), Lynn Bari, Dana Andrews (Captain John C. Fremont), Harold Huber, Ward Bond, Renie Riano, Clayton Moore, C. Henry Gordon. Screenplay: George Bruce. Director: George B. Seitz.

   First of all, let me reassure you that I did not take a single word or scene from this movie as a meaningful reflection of anything that ever happened in the real world. I won’t go into it further, but I really doubt that Kit Carson used the help of a troop of the US Cavalry, lead by John C. Fremont, to guide a wagon train of settlers headed for California. And all the time vying for the hand of of beautiful Dolores Murphy (Lynn Bari), daughter of the owner of a large hacienda already in place there.

   They run into all of the usual problems on the journey, of course, challenges mostly caused by Indians, Shoshones in particular, all riled up and supplied with rifles by General Castro (C. Henry Gordon), the governor of California with designs of becoming the dictator of the entire territory as well as Mexico, and American are most decidedly not welcome.

   But included in this movie is one of the best filmed circle-the-wagons scenes I’ve watched in a while, while at the same time the soldiers are trapped in a dead-end canyon with Indians shooting at them from atop the cliffs on either side. Life was tough back then.

   Miss Murphy is also first aghast at the sight of Carson and his fur-trapping buddies torturing a Mexican who has been spying on them, then repulsed by Fremont (following the rule book) summarily calling up a firing squad and executing the prisoner right in front of her.

   Which one of the two will she choose after this incident? I’ll give you a hint: What’s the title of the movie?

   Even though his ways are uncouth and he is barely literate, and he seems determined to do what’s best for her and not himself, her heart belongs to Kit. What struck me right away was how much Jon Hall’s performance seemed to channel Randolph Scott, down to the latter’s soft southern drawl. I didn’t learn until later that the role was actually intended for Scott, before things didn’t work out.

   This is a strange movie in another way, besides being a biopic with not much emphasis on the “bio.” It’s a large scale production, running nearly ninety minutes long, but (and you can correct me if I’m wrong) the people in it are far from being A level stars, even in 1940.

SARA WOODS – My Life Is Done. St. Martin’s, US, hardcover, 1976. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition. No US paperback edition. First published in the UK by Macmillan, hardcover, 1976.

   Barrister Antony Maitland is asked to investigate a case of blackmail — a stolen letter could embarrass a member of parliament who opposes a reservoir development in his home region.

   There’s little action. It’s a classic case of parlor detection that still manages to result in two murders. Conversational nuances are cleverly used in the place of tangible evidence, but I suppose that many an armchair detective will feel disappointed with the degeneration into a courtroom confessional scene not unlike television’s Perry Mason.

Rating:  C plus.

From this Austin-based jazz singer’s 2012 album Way Down Low, funded by a Kickstarter campaign:

   Ross Thomas to me succeeds on every level as a writer of fiction. His plots are intriguing, complex without being bewildering; his prose is smooth, seamless and unobtrusive; his dialogue fits his characters like a made-to-measure suit; but his strongest suite is characterization. I have yet to read a Thomas book without the feeling that here was a person, usually a group of people, that I would like to meet again.

   For better or worse, I have had that pleasure relatively seldom, for with the exception of eleven books featuring three different sets of characters (see list below), Thomas has chosen to eschew the series character. Eleven out of twenty-three might not seem all that much like eschewing, but except for two they were written over fourteen years ago. Perhaps he is wise; none of the sequels have quite measured up to the originals, in my eyes.

   Thomas has won two Edgars: for Best First Novel with The Cold War Swap in 1966, and nearly 20 years later for Best Novel with Briarpatch in 1984. Many people, though, consider Chinaman’s Chance his best novel; certainly it’s the book that finally began to gain him the major recognition he so richly deserved.

   My own favorite of Thomas’s books is The Fools in Town Are on Our Side. It is really two stories, the first of a man who doesn’t care about anything and how he came to that condition, the second the story of cleanup-by-further-corruption of a town. Comparisons to Hammett’s Red Harvest are inevitable, at least partially apt, and have been made; nevertheless the two books bear little resemblance but for that partially shared theme.

   He may have created his most numerous set of memorable characters here, and that is high praise indeed. To me, this is the quintessential Ross Thomas novel.

   My choice for second-best is The Seersucker Whipsaw. The character of Quentin Sharlene is unforgettable, and the story of an African coup is both entertaining and riveting from beginning to end. Almost every character is a major or minor masterpiece. The treatment of the African milieu was exceptional, I think, for 1967.

   His next, due out possibly by the time this sees print, is reported to be a third in the Durant-Wu series; but that’s immaterial — as long as there is a next.

       The Mac McCorkle-Michael Padillo series —

1. The Cold War Swap (1966)
2. Cast a Yellow Shadow (1967)

3. The Backup Men (1971)
4. Twilight at Mac’s Place (1990)

       The Philip St. Ives series (as by Oliver Bleeck) —

1. The Brass Go-Between (1969)

2. The Procane Chronicle (1971)

3. Protocol for a Kidnapping (1971)
4. The Highbinders (1974)
5. No Questions Asked (1976)

       The Quincy Durant-Artie Wu series —

1. Chinaman’s Chance (1978)

2. Out On the Rim (1987)
3. Voodoo, Ltd. (1992)

       Other novels —

The Seersucker Whipsaw (1967)
The Singapore Wink (1969)

The Fools in Town Are On Our Side (1970)
The Porkchoppers (1972)
If You Can’t Be Good (1973)
The Money Harvest (1975)
Yellow Dog Contract (1976)
The Eighth Dwarf (1979)

The Mordida Man (1981)
Missionary Stew (1983)
Briarpatch (1984)
The Fourth Durango (1989)
Ah, Treachery! (1994)

Editorial Comment:   Voodoo, Ltd. was the book that Barry was referring in his last paragraph. Ah, Treachery! was Ross Thomas’s final book, and was also not included in the bibliography Barry prepared for this profile when it was first published.

   Well, synchronicity strikes again. I’d just finished writing up my notes on watching this movie, only to discover that Dan Stumpf had beaten me to it, in one of his bimonthly contributions to DAPA-Em some 23 years ago. Neither one of us knew what the other was writing or had written, but as you will see, we were watching the same picture.

   Since this is my blog, I flipped a coin, and I came up first. (Or in other words, age before beauty.)

THE MISSING JUROR. Columbia Pictures, 1944. Jim Bannon, Janis Carter, George Macready, Jean Stevens, Joseph Crehan, with Trevor Bardette, Mike Mazurki, Pat O’Malley & Ray Teal (these last four uncredited). Director: Oscar Boetticher Jr.

   This was the second film directed by Budd Boettecher, the first being One Mysterious Night, a Boston Blackie film released earlier the same year. My review of that earlier film can be found here. I gave it essentially a thumbs down review, but two people who often leave comments on this blog had an opposite opinion, which you should go read also, should you be so inclined.

   The story in The Missing Juror isn’t all that much — in fact, it’s pretty bad — but you can easily see the stylistic touches that Boetticher added, including very smooth panning shots and a “through the wall” approach to filming people moving from one room to another with a cross section of the wall seen separating the two rooms. (If there is a technical name for this, I don’t know what it is.)

   Jim Bannon, of Red Ryder and Jack Packard (I Love a Mystery) fame, plays a reporter who has covered the trial and conviction of a man accused of killing a young girl, but on the eve of his execution, finds the clue that saves him. The man has gone mad in the meantime, however, and once freed, he is confined to a mental institution, where he dies in a horrible fire.

   Or did he? He, or someone else acting as a one-man avenger, is causing the deaths of the twelve members of the jury that falsely convicted him. One of these jurors is home decorator Alice Hill (Janis Carter), whom Bannon’s character is immediately attracted to.

   Beware reading the IMDb page, else all will be revealed, but perhaps the name of George Macready as the member of the cast will steer you in the right direction anyway. There are holes in the plot a mile wide, and the extensive flashbacks at the beginning of the movie make the early going more difficult than it should be, but if you can ignore the story line and watch the fun the players seem to be having, then I think you will too.

   A movie shouldn’t really need as many redeeming qualities as The Missing Juror offers. Its rather rushed and unconvincing screenplay by Charles O’Neal is directed with real panache by Oscar “Budd” Boetticher, who would later work so memorably with Randolph Scott, and here offers up some meorable stylistic flourishes.

   The acting by Radio Star Jim Bannon as the standard wise-cracking reporter/detective is deep-voiced by totally without charm — though to be fair, Ronald Colman and Fred Astaire put together would have trouble eking any likability out of the lines Bannon has to work with — but there’s a typically magnetic performance from cold, slimy George Macready as an innocent victim and/or mad killer, a role that allows him to pull out all the stops, which he wisely avoids doing.

   As for the rest, the plot involves the serial murders of a jury that convicted an innocent man, and Bannon’s attempts to stop same. The Cops are all dumb, the women all lovely — particularly Janis Carter, as one of those classy 40s heroines with a weakness for dumb hunks — and the milieu is the familiar Columbia back lot, dressed up and photographed to best advantage.

   There’s also one of those movie moments that will linger on my mind a while:Janis Carter as a an ex-juror/victim-to-be, remarking casually about the odd number of furnishings waiting in the next room for her to deliver to a (heh-heh) customer. She closes the door, but the camera lingers in the room for perhaps ten seconds. Long enough for the camera to scan over heaps of boxes, all marked “12” and come to rest on a clock chiming Noon.

   Think about it.

LESLEY FROST – Murder at Large. Coward McCann, hardcover, 1932.

   One would suppose that a daughter of renowned poet Robert Frost would have inherited some of her father’s literary skills, and in fact Lesley Frost Ballantine (1899-1983) seems to have received a certain amount of talent. She was the author of one collection of poetry, a collection of collegiate journals, and several children’s books, as well as numerous essays, lectures, and correspondence pertaining to her father’s work.

   Ah, but in her youth she was also responsible for Murder at Large.

   In the 1920s she and her older sister Marjorie managed a bookshop in Pittsfield, MA, during which time she developed an affinity for detective stories. So naturally she decided to write one of her own. The result is pure alternative gold – a novel I wish I’d known about when I was doing the Gun in Cheek books.

   The basic premise of Murder at Large requires considerable suspension of disbelief. To quote the jacket blurb: “David Whittaker, in the prime of life, has been sentenced to die of cancer, and it is his strange and demoniacal whim … to expose in name and deed the intimate friends with whose hidden crimes he has had a confessor’s acquaintance. To allow them a terrible moment in which to flavor their own ruin, he asks them for a week-end of celebration and, as the starting gun, informs them of the Memoir [sic; it’s actually a Diary] he is about to release for publication. In case of trouble, and as an added twist of cruelty, Ordway Belknap … a famous amateur detective and criminologist, is invited to be present and to share in the excitement.”

   Belknap is no ordinary detective. No, indeed. “His friends claimed for him a sensitive, reserved nature that shed humankind with reluctant cynicism for lack of a better method,” while the world in general “found him definitely uncommunicative, or, when communicative, ironic, which is a turn of speech that leaves the hearer not much the wiser.” He solves his cases by “jumping to insane conclusions in the intuitive manner that was his strongest claim to distinction.” While in the past he assisted the police in minor matters, he “had really fastened his teeth into nothing worth the candle.”

   So being “weary of women [and] stale with an overdose of detective fiction,” he happily accepts Whittaker’s invitation. “‘Something thrilling for me to do?’” he says. “‘You’re going to put me wise? Oh, I see: give me an opportunity to get wise. Of course. Any old thing for a change.”

   Soon Belknap and eight of Whittaker’s “favorite respectable killers” – four men, and four women (one with the inspired name of Romany Monte Video) – are gathered at his Long Island estate. And it doesn’t take long for Things to Happen.

   The Diary mysteriously vanishes after Whittaker gives a sample reading to the assemblage. An attempted murder is followed by a series of actual murders in rapid succession, five in all, by stabbing, shooting, poisoning, and drowning. There is much skulking around among the survivors and a gaggle of policemen. Belknap and two of the cops, Lieutenant Berry and Sergeant Stebbins, lock horns – a battle of wits among battling twits. Sliding panels, “secret attics,” and a coded message also play minor roles in the melodrama.

   The surprise revelation of the murderer’s identity and the true motive behind the mass slayings requires more suspension of disbelief than anyone except an alternative junkie like me is likely to grant. As does this explanation of the “damning articles of trade” found hidden on the culprit’s person:

   As wonderfully bad as the story itself is, the true alternative genius of Murder at Large lies in Ms. Frost’s prose. As suggested by the above quotes describing Ordway Belknap, she was a master (mistress?) of the “Huh?” style of writing – passages of narrative and dialogue that stop the reader cold and require rereading one or more times in order to decipher their meaning, if any. The novel fairly bristles with such nuggets as:

   I don’t know if Robert Frost shared his daughter’s affinity for detective novels. But if he read Murder at Large, as he surely must have, he may well be the reason why she never wrote another one.

LISBON. Republic Pictures, 1956. Ray Milland, Maureen O’Hara, Claude Rains, Yvonne Furneaux, Francis Lederer, Jay Novello. Director: Ray Milland.

   It takes more than a big name cast to make a movie that’s worth watching, and here’s a case in point. All the action in this “action adventure” movie, which is how I’ve categorized it, takes place in stretch of time less than five minutes long in the last ten minutes of this ninety minute movie. Blink (or more likely, doze off) and you’ve missed it.

   The rest of the story consists of talking, talking and more talking — but in the fanciest rooms and eating places in Lisbon — and taking tours of the city with the characters cheerfully pointing out to each other various points of interest. The string-laden orchestration by Nelson Riddle in the background is (to my ears) both annoying and badly timed.

   The story is this: Maureen O’Hara wants to pay Claude Rains (a gentleman crook of the best sense of both words) to facilitate the release of her much older (and very wealthy) husband from behind the Iron Curtain. Rains, in turn, hires Ray Milland (a smuggler of high fashion perfumes) and his boat to assist in the transfer at sea.

   There’s a little bit of dounle-crossing and ulterior motives at work all around here, including Milland’s attraction to both Maureen O’Hara and Yvonne Furneaux (as Rains’ “secretary”), but there’s nothing here that needs 90 minutes of running time. If you’d like to see a travelogue of the city of Lisbon in 1956, I’m sure you can do better in that regard as well.

CARTER BROWN – Negative in Blue. Signet Q6220, paperback original; 1st printing, December 1974.

   I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart (or is it my head?) for Hollywood-based private eyes. Which is probably why, of the many series characters created by Australian mystery writer Alan G. Yates (who writes as Carter Brown), my favorite is Rick Holman.

   Holman bills himself as an “industrial consultant,” and specializes in clearing up nasty messes, invariably involving homicide, which film colony stars find themselves in, with causing any bad publicity for the stars or studios involved. He, like Shell Scott, is a direct descendant of my beloved Dan Turner, Robert Leslie Bellem’s wonderful Hollywood shamus of the pulps, and is one of the very few of the breed still active.

   This is the best Carter Brown of recent memory. Two opposing factions are involved in all kinds of skullduggery concerning the negative of an unfinished movie whose female star died of an overdose of barbiturates. A member of one of the factions catches a shotgun blast in the face, and Holman steps in to investigate.

   Although the process by which Holman solves the mystery is glossed over to the point of being ignored, the pace, as always with Brown, is excellent, building to a stunning, satisfying conclusion. If you haven’t yet sampled one of Brown’s more than a hundred novels, here would be a fine place to begin.

From this Portland OR based folk- and blues-singer 2011 CD Rose City Ramble:

CHRISTOPHER BUSH – The Case of the Counterfeit Colonel. Macmillan, US, hardcover, 1953. No US paperback edition. First published in the UK: Macdonald, hardcover, 1952.

   On page 176 is a challenge to the reader that can’t be ignored, and I quote: “Too hard for you? Well, maybe it is, but it;ll do you no harm to try to think it out.” So in spite of some tough alibis and some quite unbelievable behavior on the part of Ludovic Travers’ client, no, it wasn’t too hard at all.

   Usually I’m the lazy kind of reader who is entente to sit back and let the author do all of the tedious work with timetables, fingerprints and such, but as I say, that’s the kind of challenge that can’t be turned down. In fact even though some of the details were off, in smoe ways I like my version better.

   The affair concerns a hunt for a missing wartime hero; a blackmailer posing s a retired army officer; and the secret connecting them. Travers has an unusual working arrangement with Scotland Yard, having his own detective agency, but on a consultant basis he’s able to call freely upon the services and assistance of Yard personnel.

   This is purely a puzzle story, although there’s nothing wrong with that. The characters do suffer the humility of cavorting around with their strings showing, however, and the timetables and alibi-taking in a word is best described as sloppy.

Rating: C.

Bibliographic Notes:   Between 1926 and 1968 Christopher Bush wrote an amazing 63 detective novels under his own name, all with Ludovic Travers as the lead detective. Also listed in Hubin are one novel as by Noel Barclay and another 13 as by Michael Home, some indicated as only marginally criminous.