This is the title track from bluegrass singer Claire Lynch’s 1995 CD from Rounder Records:

ENEMY OF WOMEN. Monogram, 1944. Re-released as The Mad Lover. Wolfgang Zilzner (as Paul Andor), Claudia Drake, Donald Woods, H. B. Warner, Ralph Morgan, Gloria Stuart, Robert Barra, Byron Foulger. Written and directed by Alfred Zeisler.

   A real oddity.

   An independent production picked up and distributed by Monogram, this was written and directed by Alfred Zeisler, who was born in Chicago but rose to prominence in the German film industry of the 1920s and 30s, with memorable hits like Gold (1934) and Viktor und Viktoria (1933) on his resume. Like many other talents, he was forced out of Germany with the rise of the Nazis and ended up back in America, where he worked mostly on “B” products like this story of the rise and (anticipated) fall of Paul Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and brief successor.

   Given that background, one would expect a strident film here, but Enemy is surprisingly restrained, even gentle at times. It doesn’t try to make Goebbels sympathetic or even likable, and yet ….

   Goebbels is played by Wolfgang Zilzner, an actor usually cast as a sinister Nazi underling in films like Invisible Agent and All Through the Night; the guy standing behind Peter Lorre, with a sullen look and no lines. But here he’s the star, and the film opens on him, with a smooth night-time tracking shot in the rubble of a recently-bombed Berlin neighborhood (tellingly evoked by photographer John Alton, one of the architects of film noir.) Goebbels’ car arrives on the scene and he enters one of the smoldering ruins, preparing a radio broadcast to the effect that the damage was “negligible” but there’s something strange about his manner, and as he slumps into what’s left of a chair, we flash back ….

   What follows is a rather staid account of the fortunes of Joseph Goebbels, starting off with him as a tutor spurned by his young student (Claudia Drake, the woman no one remembers in Detour) and hooking up with the rising Nazi Party more to recover his self-esteem than from any political conviction.

   There are some understated (and economical) vignettes as Goebbels takes power and publishers and broadcasters find themselves out of work or under arrest, usually done in a single scene on one set—an approach that heightens the sense of ruthless Nazi efficiency and saves money at the same time—and a surprisingly lavish bit at a swanky party used by Goebbels to push more propaganda.

   There’s also an unexpected and quite suspenseful sequence where he finds himself scheduled for a visit from the SS and has to get next to Hitler before he can be spirited away by his rivals. It’s one of those moments like the car-sinking scene in Psycho where the viewer finds himself suddenly identifying with a killer.

   In fact, as Enemy of Women goes on, it becomes less about the Nazis and more about Goebbels’ ruthless pursuit of the woman he loves (the Claudia Drake character) a pursuit punctuated by murder, kidnapping and detention, but with none of the gloating villains or noble martyrs so common in movies those days.

   The conclusion is skillfully and intentionally tipped off ahead of time as we suddenly recognize the room where Claudia Drake awaits her unwanted lover and this becomes, of all things, a story of losing the thing one loves by trying to possess it. The flashback ends as the master propagandist of the Third Reich delivers his prepared lies, and his close-up reveals the face of a man who realizes he is the herald of a fallen angel.

   No, there are no brave patriots here, no stirring speeches or beastly villains, but despite the trashy title, Enemy of Women hits its target by humanizing it.

FRANK GRUBER – Swing Low, Swing Dead. Belmont L92-586, paperback original, April 1964. Cover art: Victor Kalin. Reprinted several times, including Belmont B75-2039, 1970.

   Once again through no fault of their own, Johnny Fletcher, masterly and maybe masterful bookseller who specializes in one title, and Sam Cragg, the strongest man in the world, are living hazardously. Sam has won all rights to a rock-and-roll song called “Apple Taffy,” the first line of which is “I love apple taffy, sweet, sweet, sticky sticky apple taffy.”

   Johnny claims this song is better than most, and adds: “The whole point and purpose of rock and roll music is to see how childish, how infantile you can make it.”

   Several people are seeking the original manuscript, some for a consideration, others for nothing, except, perhaps, the lives of Johnny and Sam. After all, someone has poisoned the original composer, and that someone is not likely to let a few more lives stand in his or her way.

   Fletcher has street smarts and Cragg has no smarts. Both of them would like to be rich, but Fletcher knows such a change in fortune would take all the fun out of their lives, such as it is, though Cragg may have a different opinion since he likes to eat regularly. Gruber`s Fletcher and Cragg novels are great fun if not sampled too often.

       The Johnny Fletcher & Sam Cragg series —

The French Key. Farrar 1940.

The Laughing Fox. Farrar 1940.
The Hungry Dog. Farrar 1941.
The Navy Colt. Farrar 1941.

The Talking Clock. Farrar 1941.
The Gift Horse. Farrar 1942.
The Mighty Blockhead. Farrar 1942.
The Silver Tombstone. Farrar 1945.

The Honest Dealer. Rinehart 1947.

The Whispering Master. Rinehart 1947.
The Scarlet Feather. Rinehart 1948.
The Leather Duke. Rinehart 1949.
The Limping Goose. Rinehart 1954.
Swing Low Swing Dead. Belmont 1964.

HALF A SINNER. Universal Pictures, 1940. Heather Angel, John King, Constance Collier, Walter Catlett, Clem Bevans, Henry Brandon. Based on a story by Dalton Trumbo. Director: Al Christie.

   What a pleasure it is to start watching a movie you know nothing about, only to discover that against all expectations you’re enjoying yourself immensely. And when that happens it’s also sometimes difficult to put into words what magic of movie-making it was that made a small visual treat as Half a Sinner such a pleasant way to spend on hour, or at 59 minutes, just a hair less.

   The players themselves were not stars then, nor did they ever become stars.. Heather Angel may be best remembered, at least in some circles, as Bulldog Drummond’s girl friend Phyllis Clavering in several of the former’s movie adventures, while John King is remembered in some quarters as Ace Drummond in the 1936 13-chapter serial (no relation, I don’t imagine). He was perhaps even better known as John “Dusty” King in a host of early 40s B-westerns.

   In any case, they certainly make a fine pair together in this definitely screwball mystery comedy in which Heather Angel plays a prim and proper schoolteacher who decides to kick up her heels one day, buy a nice dress and new hat, add some silk stockings and have some fun for a while.

   What she doesn’t expect is to end up stealing a car (trying to escape a wolf who’s really a small time gangster) that has (she discovers later) a corpse in the back seat. As she’s making a getaway, she’s flagged down by John King’s character, who decides to play along with her as the two of them try to elude both the police and the gang of crooks who stole the car in the first place.

   Of course the plot doesn’t make any sense, and the crooks are about as ineffectual as a gang of crooks could ever have been, but everybody in the fast-paced flim-flam of a movie plays it with all the gusto they’ve got. And it shows.

JAMES SHEEHAN – The Law of Second Chances. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, March 2008; paperback, September 2009.

   This book has been sitting in a stack next to my bed ever since I bought it, over six years ago. This week I finally got my money’s worth from it. While it’s not a knock-your-socks-off kind of novel, it does have some good moments, and once started, it kept me up last night well beyond my usual bedtime.

   I didn’t realize it when I began, but it turns out that this is the second book about Florida attorney Jack Tobin, the first being The Mayor of Lexington Avenue (2005). There since has since been a third, The Lawyer’s Lawyer (2013).

   His story is one awfully common in fiction, perhaps not so in real life. He had once been a very successful civil trial attorney, but having pocketed a twenty million dollar buyout after one case, he’s changed his way of living around, as of course we all would. What he does now, though, is work on behalf of clients who have been unjustly accused or convicted and would like a second chance to prove themselves, hence the title.

   This is a lengthy book, over 400 pages long and is made up of two separate cases, two that somewhat overlap, but they’re really quite different. In the first half of the book, Tobin finds himself negotiating a new trial for a convict who’s been on Death Row for seventeen years. The second half has him defending a (very) small time hoodlum who is charged with murder, with eye witnesses to prove it. Bennie is also the estranged son of a friend of Tobin’s, back in high school days in New York City.

   Sheehan writes in a flat but engaging style that gets the job done. He’s particularly effective when it comes to matters relating to Tobin’s personal life, including flashbacks to his boyhood in New York City. But Sheehan knows his law, too, and that’s what kept me reading far into the night last night. On the minus side, I think the stakes grow far too high in the second matter at hand, nor did I ever think that [SPOILER ALERT!] Tobin’s affair with a new girl friend was anything but far too soon.

THE DOOLINS OF OKLAHOMA. Columbia Pictures, 1949. Randolph Scott, George Macready, Louise Allbritton, John Ireland, Virginia Huston, Charles Kemper, Noah Beery Jr., Dona Drake , Robert Barrat, Lee Patrick. Director: Gordon Douglas.

   Suffice it to say, there’s nothing new under the Western skies in The Doolins of Oklahoma. Starring Randolph Scott as real life outlaw Bill Doolin, this docudrama/Western has its moments, but is an overall average movie that begins and ends pretty much as you would expect it to.

   What makes it worth a look, particularly for those with fond memories of this type of movie that they certainly don’t make anymore, is the presence of co-star George Macready as the U.S. Marshal on Doolin’s trail. Character actors John Ireland and Noah Beery (Jr.) feature prominently as members of Doolin’s gang. Scott, not yet the star of films directed by Andre De Toth and Budd Boetticher, portrays Doolin as a man who wants nothing more than to leave his criminal past behind him and start a new life working the land as a farmer.

   Problem is: Scott’s Doolin is just too darn nice. One can hardly imagine him as a bank robber or the leader of The Wild Bunch, let alone a killer. As far as Doolin’s wife, as portrayed in the film by Virginia Huston, she hasn’t a clue. She’s nice and pretty, but that’s about as far as it goes. Still, if you happen to like Scott as a Western star – and I very much do – he’s not all bad here and does his best with the rather mediocre script.

   There’s some dry humor, genuine pathos, and wit here, all delivered in Scott’s distinguished Southern gentleman’s accent. It’s just not enough to make this movie particularly memorable.

ELAINE VIETS – Murder Between the Covers. Signet, paperback original, 2003.

   Touted by one Tim Dorsey (blurb writer and author of The Stingray Shuffle) as Janet Evanovich Meets The Fugitive, this second in the “dead end job mysteries” finds Helen Hawthorne on the run from a very messy divorce in St. Louis and working at a bookstore, Page Turners, in Fort Lauderdale.

   The bookstore is run by a mean, book illiterate black sheep of a once successful family operation that he’s running into the ground. When he’s predictably murdered and a friend of Helen’s is charged with the murder, Helen, with the help of her eccentric landlady, sets out to find the real killer.

   Viets worked for a year at a Barnes & Noble and the behind-the-scenes bookstore business details seem authentic. The book is funny and the warm Florida setting was irresistible to me in the prospect of a cold Pittsburgh winter. It’s not as drop-dead funny as the early Evanovich books, but the blurb shouldn’t deter anyone looking for an entertaining bibliomystery.

The Dead-End Job series —

1. Shop Till You Drop (2003)

2. Murder Between the Covers (2003)
3. Dying to Call You (2004)
4. Just Murdered (2005)
5. Murder Unleashed (2006)

6. Murder with Reservations (2007)
7. Clubbed to Death (2008)
8. Killer Cuts (2009)
9. Half-Price Homicide (2010)

10. Pumped for Murder (2011)
11. Final Sail (2012)
12. Board Stiff (2013)
13. Catnapped! (2014)

14. Checked Out (2015)
15. The Art of Murder (2016)

CONFIDENTIALLY YOURS. Films A2/Les Films du Carrosse/Soprofilms, 1983. France, 1983. Original title: Vivement dimanche! Also released as Finally, Sunday! Fanny Ardant, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Philippe Laudenbach, Philippe Morier-Genoud, Caroline Sihol, Georges Koulouris. Screenwriters: François Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman, Jean Aurel, based on the novel The Long Saturday Night by Charles Williams. Director: François Truffaut.

   This was François Truffaut’s final film; he died soon after it was finished. Filmed in black and white, it was intended as an homage to fellow director, Alfred Hitchcock, but I suspect that close eyes watching would spot a sizable amount of other inspirational material.

   I’ve not read the novel in many years, so I’m relying on summaries of the book I’ve found online as well as my probably unreliable memory, but the novel goes something like this: A businessman returns from a duck hunting trip only to learn that a fellow member of the club has been shot and killed in the same area. He’s accused of the crime, since it is widely suspected that the man was having an affair with is wife. When she is also found murdered, he’s the one immediately accused of both crimes.

   It is only with the help of his very efficient secretary that he is able to clear himself, during the passage of one long tense Saturday night. (If I have any of this wrong, please do correct me.)

   The film follows the story very closely, at least as far as the outline goes that I’ve supplied you above. I don’t remember the book well enough to tell you whether the same person is the killer or not.

   Jean-Louis Trintignant plays the businessman, and while Fanny Ardant is his secretary, getting top billing, perhaps surprisingly but deservedly so. She steals the show from beginning to end: a slim, full-lipped, beautiful brunette who is constantly on the move: if not walking, then running (like a girl). She even looks ravishing in a trenchcoat, and there is an extremely good reason why she is wearing a trenchcoat.

   The book and the movie do diverge. The book was an out-and-out thriller. Although filmed in black and white, with lots of interesting camera angles, the movie is often played for humor if not comedy. The real estate broker and his secretary are always bickering. She is fired more than once, and if it were possible, she once says in exasperation that she would fire him.

   Of course we all know what it means when a man and a woman in a movie are constantly battling each other, even though they are nominally on the same side. Unfortunately the two leading players don’t seem to have all that much attraction to each other. He is 20 years older, she may be four to five inches taller.

   I enjoyed this one anyway, perhaps in a way because of the above, and I recommend it to you highly. I wish I could tell you that all of the loose ends are tied up at movie’s end, but since I watched the film with subtitles (quite small and often white on white), I found myself concentrating more on reading the words than following all of the action. I will tell you this. If I find the time to watch this movie again, I most certainly will. I will also start looking for any other films that Fanny Ardant may have made. What does that tell you?

KEN PETTUS – Say Goodbye to April. Knightsbridge, paperback original; 1st printing, 1991.

   Knightsbridge was a short-lived company that published a wide variety of books, both fiction and non-fiction, including ones by Ralph Nader and Vince Bugliosi, not to mention 24 first edition mysteries listed in Crime Fiction IV, all between 1990 and 91. I’ve always suspected there was a connection between Knightsbridge and Kensington, an imprint from Zebra (or is it the other way around?) that is still going strong today, but a quick search on Google came up dry, so perhaps not.

   This connection was suggested, by the way, by the fact that the first mystery written by [the late] Jim McCahery, a friend of mine through DAPA-Em (I’ll explain some other time), was published by Knightsbridge (Grave Undertaking) and the second by Kensington (What Evil Lurks). The detective of record in both books was Lavina London, an elderly retired Old Time Radio actress.

   Knightsbridge also reprinted several books in Bill Pronzini’s “Nameless” PI series, most (or all?) in two-in-one packaging. Ones I know about are Dragonfire/Casefile, Hoodwink/Scattershot, and Labyrinth/Bones. They’re all scarce in these Knightsbridge editions: only seven combined copies of the three books are available at the moment [when this review was written] on ABE.     [FOOTNOTE.]

   Say Goodbye to April is almost, but not quite, as difficult to come by. There are 12 copies now on ABE, and believe it or not, four of them can be purchased for a dollar each. If you’re one of the first ones to read this, you can get one cheap, in other words, but if you’re not quick off the mark, I’ll be willing to wager that a number of Mystery*File’s readership will have gotten there ahead of you, this book not being widely known before now as a private eye story.

   Which it is, and yes, I’m finally getting there. Ken Pettus had a long career before writing this, apparently his first and only book in print, as a high honcho in the world of television mystery and action-adventure drama, his credits including stints as scriptwriter for (I’ll start with the earliest ones first) Bonanza, Combat!, The Gallant Men, Branded, The Big Valley, The Wild Wild West, The Green Hornet, Mission: Impossible, The High Chaparral, Hawaii Five-O, Cannon, Jigsaw, Battlestar Galactica, Magnum P.I., and Shannon. It’s quite a resume, and there’s not one of these shows I wouldn’t mind having boxed DVD sets for. (Some more than others.)

   Pettus’s last TV credit appears to have been in 1985. Goodbye to April was published in 1991, but of course it could have been written at any time before then, only to filed away in a cabinet somewhere, waiting for a publisher to come along and pick it up.

   And if that’s the case, which of course is a matter of high conjecture only, it should have seen print long before it ever did. It’s no classic, but … let me get into that now.

   The private eye who tells the story is Tug Cash, an ex-cop with a disability discharge. His partner on the police force, a heavy-set fellow by the name of Checkers (no first name discernible), is now retired and is running a PI agency. Tug works for him on occasion.

   The “April” in the title is April Tyson, their client in this case, who may be the long-lost missing granddaughter of one of those aged and reclusive multi-millionaires that California is so well known for. When the lawyer who is representing her, and who is also her live-in lover, is found murdered, she calls on the Checkers agency for help.

   That’s one of the story lines. Another has to do with a gang of hoodlums and drug-runners that April’s lawyer seems to have been mixed up with. It is not entirely clear for a good long while whether it was they who are involved in his death, or the gang of hangers-on surrounding the frail Mr. Tyson – including servants, crooked lawyers, crooked doctors, and a right-wing evangelist who, it goes without saying, is as crooked as they come. (The servants are a pretty devious pair themselves.)

   There is twist after twist in this tale, and they are not subtle ones. More like bombshells that explore on contact every once in a while. Pettus has a nice breezy style of writing, it almost goes without saying, with a tendency perhaps of being a little too “prime time,” which is to say that he has a tendency to allow dramatic happenings to overshadow the characters a little too much.

   Which forces Tug Cash to do some very strange things and to make some very strange decisions, some of which had me shaking my head at the time he made them, and sure enough, some very bad things happen as a result. On page 223, Cash calls himself a “crown prince of fools,” and no, I can’t disagree with his judgment there.

   A little lower on the same page, this concept is reinforced by the following. He’s walking on Venice (California) pier:

   In terms of his way with words, here, for what it’s worth, is Pettus’s take on the Santa Ana winds. Judge him for yourself in comparison with how Raymond Chandler (for example) may have said something along the same lines. From page 249:

   A lot of people eventually die in this book, a staggering number so, and all because of one chance event – well, not a chance event, it was deliberate – and for Tug, it turns the entire case around. It was something also made me sit up and think about it as well. While what happened was something I was wondering about all of the way through, it did not at all occur to me that this (I can’t tell you more) is what it was that turns out to have happened.

   If you were wondering, at the end of the book there is only a small hint that Tug Cash is destined to appear again in a followup adventure. In any case, for whatever other reason there was, as it turns out, no he didn’t.

   It’s no classic, but for a book by a professional writer, one with which I found only minor problems to quibble about, as suggested above, you could do worse than keep an eye out for this one.

FOOTNOTE.   A short note from Bill Pronzini confirms that these three doubles are the only books of his that Knightsbridge did. He also passes along all of the information he has about the short-lived company. (See the first comment.)

From her 2008 CD They Oughta Write a Song.

BONUS: A live version of “A Whiter Shade of Pale” from the same CD: