THE MASK OF FU MANCHU. Cosmopolitan Pictures, 1932. Boris Karloff (Dr. Fu Manchu), Lewis Stone (Nayland Smith), Karen Morley, Charles Starrett, Myrna Loy, Jean Hersholt, Lawrence Grant, David Torrence. Based on the novel by Sax Rohmer. Director: Charles Brabin, with Charles Vidor (uncredited).

   If you’re looking for some over the top pre-code horror, trust me when I say that The Mask of Fu Manchu doesn’t disappoint. Featuring Boris Karloff as the title villain, this movie has kidnapping, a torture chamber featuring metal spikes, diabolical mind control via reptile, and its fair share of decidedly politically incorrect (by today’s standards) “yellow peril” racial paranoia.

   After all, Fu Manchu isn’t just a ruthless criminal; he’s also determined to defeat the “white race.” But with Karloff portraying Sax Rohmer’s best-known fictional character, it’s more camp than menace, making this a rather spicy horror adventure. It’s pure pulp, and it’s great.

   In The Mask of Fu Manchu, considered by some to the best cinematic adaptation of the Sax Rohmer’s works, our infamous Chinese villain seeks out the sword originally belonging to Genghis Khan. That sword, along with the Mongolian warlord’s mask, will allow Fu Manchu to become Genghis Khan’s mystical reincarnation here on earth. Fu Manchu wants to use that power to defeat his collective archenemy; namely, the white race!

   It’s up to good Englishmen to stop him. Sir Denis Nyland Smith (Lewis Stone), along with archeologist Terry Granville (Charles Starrett) and his fiancée, Sheila (Karen Morley) are on scene to save the day. But Fu Manchu isn’t going to be defeated so easily. Especially when he has his sadistic daughter, Fah Lo See (a decidedly out of place Myrna Loy) by his side.

   At a running time just shy of 70 minutes, The Mask of Fu Manchu manages to pack in a lot of action and exotic adventure. All of it appears to be in the spirit of escapist entertainment, rather than in the service of a broader artistic agenda. Indeed, as a horror film that doesn’t aim to address any deep philosophical questions about human nature, this one does everything that it’s supposed to and then some. Recommended.

Holly Golightly is a British singer-songwriter named after the character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Stylistically her music sounds to me as best described as garage rock with more than a hint of folk-blues. Holly Golightly & the Brokeoffs is a group that consists of her musical partner Laywer Dave and herself.

This is the title track of their 2011 CD:

WILLIAM PATRICK MAYNARD – The Destiny of Fu Manchu. Black Coat Press, hardcover, March 2012; paperback, April 2012.

   A confession before going farther with this review, Black Coat Press is my publisher, and I am friends on Facebook with William Patrick Maynard, but otherwise this review is as honest as I can make it.

   Pastiche is a difficult art at best. The writer usually will suffer in comparison to the original, and if he surpasses the original is too often denied the recognition he deserves. A perfect example is Barry Perowne’s pastiche of E. W. Hornung’s Raffles stories, where little that Hornung wrote is anywhere near as entertaining as Perowne’s stories, but Perowne is only a footnote today.

   Both Philip Jose Farmer and Fritz Leiber were better writers than Edgar Rice Burroughs when they tried their hands at Tarzan pastiche, and I don’t think anyone would argue Ian Fleming was anywhere near as good a writer overall as Kingsley Amis, Sebastian Faulks, or William Boyd who all tackled James Bond with varying grades of success. Having written several Arsene Lupin pastiche, I can tell you no matter how good the story is, you always come in second to the original.

   The saga of Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu Manchu has already suffered this humiliation earlier with Rohmer biographer Cay Van Ash writing two novels featuring Rohmer’s characters that both far exceeded the best work Rohmer himself did in terms of story, thrills, and sheer writing skill.

   I say this not to fault Rohmer, whose work I enjoy, but merely to state the obvious, that Rohmer himself never did justice to his own creation, in my opinion. His best books in the series do not come anywhere near Van Ash’s Ten Years Beyond Baker Street and The Fires of Fu Manchu.

   Now William Patrick Maynard has taken up the saga of the Devil Doctor, and like Cay Van Ash before him, has far exceeded the best Sax Rohmer had to offer.

   The Destiny of Fu Manchu does take a note from Rohmer in that it plunges right into the story with Dr. John Petrie, the Watson to the evil doctor’s nemesis Sir Denis Nayland Smith, pushed into the affair on his own doorstep.

   Next we are swept off to Corfu, and a new narrator, Michael Knox, an archaeologist who is a bit of a rotter with women, and hardly the most heroic of figures, stumbling on the kidnapping of Kara, Mrs. Petrie, and finding himself in the midst of the world of the Si Fan. He is thrown headlong into one incident after another, eventually finding himself about to be killed on the Orient Express by a homicidal dwarf traveling as a five year old girl.

   And we are off, Ethiopia, London, Egypt, Munich … as Knox finds himself a pawn in an increasingly dangerous and confusing game caught between a civil war for control of the Si Fan, Sir Nayland Smith, the weakness of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and Hitler’s pre-War power grabs.

   At times who is on whose side is as confusing as an Eric Ambler novel, with Knox a pawn of Fu Manchu’s rival, the horribly disfigured Esteban Milagro, aka Thomas Valley, aka Khunum-Khufu, aka …; Helga Grauman, aka Fah lo Suee, Fu Manchu’s daughter, whose memory of that fact was removed by her father; Sir Denis Nayland Smith who just saved Hitler and Mussolini from assassination by the Si Fan; and of course Fu Manchu himself who may or may not be calling the shots and manipulating everyone to his own evil goal having been deposed from leadership of the Si Fan after his failure to kill Hitler and Mussolini.

   This is all splendid pulp, rapidly paced, and surprisingly as atmospheric as the original. Maynard’s imagination never fails him, and he manages to keep the complex plot in the air with remarkable ease. Characters from past Rohmer novels and from Cay Van Ash’s books make cameos or have full roles, and there is even a nod to Guy Boothby’s Italian Menace of an earlier age, Dr. Nikola.

   Everything turns on Fu Manchu’s plot to avert the coming war by so devastating the West with a terrible plague that he can seize power.

   To the extent he can, Maynard avoids the obvious pitfalls of anachronism. The term Oriental is tossed around freely as it would be in that day and age, and the characters are far from prescient. Nayland Smith is blind to everything but defeating Fu Manchu, though not unaware of other evils, the narrator redeems himself, but not without suffering, and in the end the world is saved from one terrible fate at the cost of another.

   Maynard’s willingness to allow this bit of historical irony to weigh on the otherwise satisfactory conclusion without any heavy-handed message is one of the book’s pleasures. He is well aware of our foreknowledge, but never allows that to color his characters or their actions. They are merely reacting in the moment as most people do in times of stress and danger.

   If you loved Rohmer, I think this will entertain you, and if, like me, you always thought Rohmer’s own Fu Manchu tales lacked a bit, then this should please you. Maynard has the voice down pat, and frankly he is a better storyteller overall than Rohmer, whose best work was not in the Fu Manchu series.

   This is full-blooded old-fashioned pulp writing, fully aware of all the flaws and evils of the Yellow Peril fiction it represents, but managing to both entertain and remind us of our own prejudices and those of the time it is set in at the same time.

   It is the best Fu Manchu novel Sax Rohmer never wrote.

Bibliographic Note: William Patrick Maynard is also the author of The Terror of Fu Manchu (2009).

HARRY KEMELMAN – Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet. Morrow, hardcover, 1976. Fawcett Crest, paperback, 1977. Reprinted several times.

   This is the sixth in Kemelman’s acclaimed series about Rabbi David Small, and it is very good indeed, although not much of a mystery. It is as much about temple politics and Jewish life in suburban Barnard’s Crossing, Massachusetts, it is a mystery novel.

   The book’s only death (murder is barely even suggested) involves an old man and his allergy to penicillin, and the possible switching of two bottles of pills. This is tied in with the temple matter of the sale of a block of stores and the purchase of land for a religious retreat, which the rabbi opposes.

   Suburban Jewish life is limned as sharply as ever, with some old friends being joined by many new faces. Though the “mystery” is not great, this is a very satisfying book. It’s as if the people of Barnard’s Crossing are old friends: they’re still squabbling about temple directions, still attempting to overrule the rabbi, still givig in in the end.

   Warning: Read the books in order, as this gives away the solutions of earlier books.

Bibliographic Notes:   There were 11 Rabbi Small novels, beginning with Friday the Rabbi Slept Late in 1964, and after running through the days of the week, the series ended with That Day the Rabbi Left Town in 1996, the year Kemelman died. He was in his late 80s.

   He also wrote a collection of short stories, The Nine Mile Walk, published in 1968, but written before he began the Rabbi series. These were primarily puzzle stories and featured college professor Nicky Welt as the amateur detective involved.

“BIRTH OF A LEGEND.” First episode of the first and only season of the TV series Legion, United Paramount Network (UPN), two hrs., 18 April 1995. Richard Dean Anderson (Ernest Pratt), John de Lancie (Janos Bartok), Mark Adair-Rios (Huitzilopochtli Ramos), Jarrad Paul (Skeeter). Guest cast: Bob Balaban, Stephanie Beacham, Katherine Moffat, Jon Pennell. Creators: Michael Piller & Bill Dial. Director: Charles Correll.

   Teaming up Richard Dean Anderson, who had just finished a long gig as MacGyver, with John de Lancie, not nearly as well known except to Star Trek fans as the omnipotent and very charismatic alien being Q, was a felicitous idea that should have worked. But success or not in the annals of network TV is a chancy thing, especially when it comes to small fledgling networks, and as fate would have it, the series lasted only twelve episodes before fading away forever.

   The basic concept is hardly a new one. Sometime in the 1860s, Anderson plays a dime novelist named Ernest Pratt who gets mistaken by the townspeople of Sheridan, Colorado, for the fictional and very popular hero of his long series of books, Nicholas Legend. Far from being a hero himself, Pratt spends his days gambling and drinking in the saloons of San Francisco, but he has only himself to blame for the mixup: his stories are written in the first person and images of his face are prominently featured on all the covers.

   Learning from a good-looking female attorney (Katherine Moffat) that a warrant has been issued for his arrest in Colorado, it takes some effort, but he is finally convinced to take a trip there in order to clear his name. Causing the local townsfolk to believe that he was their savior by means of one of his many inventions is eccentric scientist Janos Bartok (de Lancie), but the deed has also severely disrupted the plans of wealthy landowner Vera Slaughter (Stephanie Beacham), who caused the charges against Legend to be drawn up.

   I doubt that I am the first to call this show a combination of Wild Wild West and Maverick, but I think the connection fits. The show is played for laughs as much as anything else, but since we’re in on the gag from scene one, I don’t believe that that was one of the primary causes of the series’ early demise. I do think, though, that Anderson may have portrayed his role a little too broadly. (He isn’t that funny.)

   This is the only episode I’ve watched so far from the set of DVDs just recently released, so I can’t tell you what kind of adventures that Legend and Bartok will have from here. This may also be one of those concepts that just has no place to go. This is a series that depended on both charisma and wacky 19th century inventions. There may not have been enough wacky inventions to go around.

C. J. HENDERSON – No Free Lunch. Jack Hagee #1. Diamond, paperback original, 1992.

   Jack Hagee had his genesis in Wayne Dundee’s Hardboiled, and the short stories were collcted by Gary Lovisi under the title What You Pay For (Gryphon Publications, 1990). I’ve seen them in neither form. Hagee is an ex-cop from Pittsburgh, and his home now is New York City. It’s a Big Apple decayed as that of Vachss and Solamita, and the first few pages are as grim, angst-ridden, and overwritten as anything you are likely to see.

   Hagee is visited by a singularly unappetizing fat man from Pennsylvania, whose fianceé has disappeared. The would-be client fears she has fallen with bad company at home and come with them to NYC, and wants Hagee to find her. Hagee, reluctant but broke, accepts the case.

   A trip to the Pennsylvania hometown reveals that the lady was a tramp and the client not as harmless as he appeared. Hagee returns to the city and begins hunting down the players. When he starts finding them people begin to die.

   This got some nice advance notices, including one by Richard Prather likening the thrill he got from it to the one he had upon reading Raymond Chandler. I’m not sure about Prather; maybe his memory failed him, or could be he mistook indigestion for a thrill. Something, anyway.

   Prose sample describing a woman’s red hair: “It jumped in long, fierce waves whenever she turned her head, crashing against her bare shoulders like the tide against white sand. It teased the blood with sparkling shocks — flaming crackles, the kind of look men kill their best friends over.” It all sounds painful.

   The writing gets in the way of the story. In some places it’s pretty good writing, in some places abysmally bad. but it gets in the way of the story. The whole thing was suggestive to me of an attempt by Mickey Spillane to imitate Raymond Chandler. There’s enough mindless violence and brutality to make up five modern PI novels. If you liked Spillane and Mike Hammer, you might like Henderson and Jack Hagee. I did (sort of), but I don’t.

      The Jack Hagee novels —

No Free Lunch (1992)
Something For Nothing (1993)

Nothing Lasts Forever (1994)

   Jack Hagee has also appeared in short stories and graphic novels. For more information, please consult the Thrilling Detective website.

  LENNIE LOWER – Here’s Luck. First published in Australia in 1930. Reprinted several times and still in print. Online at Gutenberg Australia.

   I don’t really have anything insightful to say about this one, but it is just so damn funny I feel compelled to draw your interest to it.

   I’ll award a shiny new quarter to anyone who’s ever heard of this. If you’ve actually read it, I’ll give a Dollar. (See Steve for payment.) But if you have yet to read Here’s Luck, there’s a delicious experience awaiting you because this book is a triumph of hopeless hilarity and richly-textured writing.

   In his brief day (before he drank himself to an early grave) Lennie Lower was considered Australia’s prime humorist, and this, his only novel, has been compared with Tom Sawyer and The Pickwick Papers, but to my mind it’s what Under the Volcano and Ulysses would be if they were done as comedies. And yes, I know there’s a lot of humor in Ulysses, but I still maintain that the reader in search of a good laugh will find Here’s Luck much more rewarding.

   The story deals with hard-drinking, middle-aged Jack Gudgeon — the author day-dreaming in the 1st-person? — whose wife gets fed up with him and runs home to Mother, leaving Jack and his grown-up son Stanley, who reads like Australia’s equivalent of Dobie Gillis, to stroll leisurely amok through Sydney, not actually looking for trouble, but somehow attracting it to them as flies draw honey (think about it).

   We are treated in quick succession to encounters with predatory ladies, race-track touts, vengeful gangsters, thwarted love, motorcycle chases and Jack’s brother-in-law George, just in from the Outback and awed by the great city. Or as Jack puts it. “There was something I liked about him. An open honesty and trusting innocence. I hoped he had money.”

   Along the way we get some genuine suspense and pre-Chandleresque prose, as in the scene where Jack sand Stanley hide in a closet, waiting for the detectives his wife has put on him to encounter the gangsters on his tail:

   or

   Or, describing a small town:

   Lower can write like that when he’s not being simply hilarious. And Hilarious is what this book is all about. The sort of thing Sartre used to call a “Laff Riot” and one well worth seeking out.

Loudon Wainwright III is on tour. I have a weakness for comedy folk singers:

THE CRIMSON BLADE. Columbia Pictures, US, 1964. First released in the UK by Hammer Films, 1963, as The Scarlet Blade. Lionel Jeffries, Oliver Reed, Jack Hedley (as Edward Beverley, The Scarlet Blade), June Thorburn, Michael Ripper, Suzan Farmer. Screenwriter-Director: John Gilling.

   For a film about standing up to tyranny, the titular hero in The Crimson Blade (released in the UK as The Scarlet Blade) is a rather undistinguished character. Set during the English Civil War, this Hammer production features Jack Hedley in the role of Edward Beverley/The Crimson Blade, a royalist fighting against Oliver Cromwell’s forces.

   Problem is: he’s one of the most uninteresting, if not downright dull, heroes ever depicted in an historical epic at least as far as I can remember. If you hope to find an inspired, perhaps a bit rakish hero — a swashbuckling Errol Flynn sort – in this average costumer, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

   Instead, the far more compelling character depicted in The Crimson Blade is the treacherous, borderline sociopath Captain Tom Sylvester. Portrayed by Oliver Reed with a mischievous gleam in his eye, Sylvester plays both ends against the middle to the point where you’re never exactly sure where his true loyalties lie.

   He’s also the unrequited member of a love triangle that includes the daughter of his senior officer, Colonel Judd (Lionel Jeffries) and the Crimson Blade. Reed’s a fine actor and a commanding presence and it shows. It’s just unfortunate that the movie didn’t cast him in the role of the Crimson Blade. He could have made a great, if not rough around the edges, outlaw hero.

   Even so, The Crimson Blade isn’t a particularly bad film. Not by any means. The film has that early Hammer Film aesthetic that I personally love. Even the more theatrical moments work well enough so that the movie rarely feels stagy. As escapism, the film works quite well. It’s just unfortunate that, with some obvious tweaking, the movie could have worked so much better.

P. D. JAMES – The Lighthouse. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover. First US Edition, 2005. Vintage, trade paperback, October 2016.

   Yes, Steve reviewed this recently, and no he didn’t much care for it, in fact he didn’t get far before James somewhat dense prose slowed him to a halt. This is a much more positive review of the same book.

   The Lighthouse is a somewhat slimmer book than many of the later James novels, a welcome respite from writers like Elizabeth George who seem determined to slay Sherwood Forest with their latest doorstop mystery. It is the 16th Adam Dalgliesh mystery and finds him at a crossroads in his life.

   Our sleuths are Commander Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard whose unit, consisting of D.I. Kate Miskin and Sgt. Francis Benton-Smith catches a possible murder on Combe Island off the Cornish coast. Dalgiesh is in the middle of an affair and torn about his feelings for the woman; Miskin involved with a former colleague; and Benton-Smith, a half-Indian bright young thing newly assigned to the unit falling in love with a woman he knows isn’t going to fall in love with him.

   To further muddy waters Miskin doesn’t much like Benton-Smith and resents his class, and he in turn is none to happy to have a woman who obviously dislikes him in charge of him. Add to the team the difficult forensic pathologist Professor Glenister, a woman in her mid-sixties, semi-retired with a tendency to pedantry, who is assigned to accompany the trio.

   Combe Island is another of James’s closed societies, the kind of place James loves to set her novels in, a place with a colorful history of pirates, wreckers, storms, and cruelty. Owned by the Holcombe family for generations it was left to be used as a sort of secular retreat for the great and famous who need a little down time and privacy.

   The PM hopes to hold a high end meeting on the island in the near future so security and discretion are of the highest order. Now one of the guests, novelist Nathan Oliver, has been found hanged in the old lighthouse which was burned in WWII and restored. None of the people on the island is particularly happy to see outsiders arrive, much less nosy police types asking awkward questions.

   As Emily Holcombe, last of the Holcombe’s observes, they aren’t the sort who usually visit the island.

   Steve found the going too slow and dense, and I don’t flaw him on that, but I enjoyed James carefully crafted prose. You don’t find passages like this too often today describing the scene as Dalgliesh leaves the room where the body has been examined:

   It’s a good investigation. Dalgliesh finds his life threatened by an unexpected outside force and Miskin and Benton-Smith are forced to work together in a way neither is ready for. Of course the usual lies are uncovered, a crime dating back to WWII surfaces, raw emotions are laid bare, and Miskin and Benton-Smith are forced to face the killer before he strikes again in the deserted lighthouse of the title.

   This one proves a very physical case, and there are some fine passages late in the book where Benton-Smith puts his life in real danger simply retrieving evidence, the climbing scenes particularly well-written.

   I will add a small caveat. I’m afraid I spotted the killer, not because of clues or any mistake on James part, but because of a certain distaste both Miskin and Benton-Smith show for a rather fussy porcelain figure in the suspects living quarters. I refer to these as television moments because they are the literary equivalent of figuring out who the killer is because of the actor cast in the part. In a James novel tacky taste is motive enough to be a murderer.

   James does not write in short staccato sentences. She not an advocate of the hard-boiled style, and her books are more novels about murder than thrillers, detective novels more than detective stories, a subtle difference, but one I think true of her work as well as Ruth Rendell and Elizabeth George. She became more novelistic as she aged, and while her work is nowhere near as painful to read as John Le Carré’s tangled prose, she writes English prose ‘as she is written’ to borrow a phrase.

   Most readers are not going to race through this at a sitting. If, on the other hand, you invest some time, let James detail-oriented heavily descriptive prose envelop you, and become involved with Dalgiesh, Miskin, and Benton-Smith as well as the various suspects, it is a good book, a solid read and not a flashy or quick one. I enjoyed getting to know the people involved as human beings and not simply quickly sketched in character parts. James can be cinematic, but only in the sense of a Gainsborough Studio or Ivory and Merchant film.

   I have to admit there are things in James books that I enjoy that most people would not care for. When someone leaves a copy of Middlemarch for Dalgliesh to read, he thinks of it as “that safe stand-by for a desert island” — as good of a description of that book as I have ever read. A mention of William Morris wallpaper tells us all we need to know of a room and its potential inhabitants, and Miskin hearing “small agreeable sounds from the kitchen” as her lover makes coffee of morning is a perfect touch.

   I’ll read almost anything with passages like that.

   Perhaps the best line comes mid-book when Benton-Smith wonders if the murder of Nathan Oliver will harm the island’s reputation and Dalgliesh replies: “Combe will recover. The island has forgotten worse horrors than putting an end to Nathan Oliver.”

   Depending on what kind of mystery you are looking for, this is a fine example, especially for a book so late in a writer’s career and an ongoing series.