GIL BREWER – The Red Scarf. Crest 310; paperback reprint, July 1959; cover art by Robert McGinnis. Hardcover: Mystery House, 1958. Stark House, paperback, 2-in-1 edition with A Killer Is Loose, June 2018. First published in Mercury Mystery Book-Magazine, November 1955 (probably abridged).

   Roy Nichols has a dream. A mediocre dream, maybe. But it’s his. To run a motel with his wife, who he adores. He’s got the motel. And he’s got the wife. The problem is, the motel is in the red, and the bank’s gonna foreclose if he can’t come up with a lump sum quick.

   So Roy visits his rich brother. Who turns him down. I’m doing it for you, he says. Wouldn’t want to hurt your pride by giving you the money. Plus, it’s bad for you to be beholden to anybody. Best thing is to pull yourself up by your bootstraps — stop relying on other people to bail you out.

   So that’s that. No money. And he doesn’t know what the hell he’s gonna do now. Except lose the hotel, and his dreams, and disappoint his wife who deserves better. Who deserves the world.

   He decides to hitchhike home to save what little money he has left.

   There’s a Bonnie & Clyde looking couple at the greasy spoon, and he flirts with the sexy Bonnie and gloms himself a ride. Then they crash and there’s a briefcase. With all the money you’d ever need. Plenty to pay off the bank and much besides.

   But the money ain’t free and clear. It’s mob money. And hot.

   The Clyde-looking guy looks asdead as a crash test dummy, so our protagonist and the Bonnie-looking lass make a run for it. To help her get away, she promises half the money. And all of her body. And he accepts. Lustily.

   He hides her out in a room in his motel. And the mob shows up.

   Roy Nichols is such an asshole it’s hard to root for him. He says he loves his wife, and she is clearly devoted to him, and beautiful. Yet he’s a complete douchebag, sleeping with whatever the cat dragged in and lying about it. If he reminds me of anybody, maybe it’s William H. Macy in Fargo. He’s a greedy wimp. He’s hard to root for.

   So when the mob comes to town you figure he’ll finally wake up and get the cops involved. But no. Not Roy Nichols! He’s going to outsmart the mob, pay off his bank loan, and things are gonna be milk and honey from here on out.

   Except the mob isn’t nearly as stupid as Roy Nichols thinks. And neither is his wife.

   He’s a loser who keeps on losing. You don’t like him enough to care if he succeeds. You don’t hate him enough to care if he fails. So, at the end of the day, I just didn’t care what happened one way or the other.

   You’ve heard of love/hate relationships. With Gil Brewer I wouldn’t go that far. I’ve got more of a somewhat-appreciate/hate relationship with him. A Killer Is Loose and 13 French Street are quite successful in their way. Kind of perverted John D. MacDonald/Jim Thompson standalones. Which is high praise.

   But Brewer’s always got a creepy vibe. His protagonists are all lecherous. Even when they think they’re being stand-up guys, every woman they see, they want. And not in an upfront Mike Hammer way. More in a side-eyed repressive lust that takes whatever’s there, and wants whatever isn’t. Vulturous. Sepulcherous. Whatever carrion it can carry away.

   It just leaves me standing there. Mouth agape. Rubber-necking. Shaking my head in disgust.

PHILIP R. CRAIG – Death on a Vineyard Beach. J. W. Jackson #7. Scribner’s, hardcover, 1996. Avon, paperback, 1997.

   This is a series I’ve quit a couple of times because of stupid plots. Oh, well …

   J. W. and his nurse ladylove Zee finally get married, and are no sooner hitched than a rich old man with a shady background who lives on the island wants J. W. to look into an attempt on his life; one that J. W. had serendipitously foiled on their Boston honeymoon. Now Zee is reluctantly taking handgun lessons, and hoping she won’t need them …

   First, let me say that I liked this better than any of this series I can remember. There was no plot foolishness, no cowboy action, and remarkably little violence; just a decent story with believable characters.

   There’s a bit of Robert Parker in Craig’s writing. He likes to describe meal preparation in some detail, and some of the dialogue between Jackson and Zee is a bit reminiscent of the earlier, less egregious Spenser/ Susan relationship.

   I never had any Problems with Craig’s prose, and I still don’t. His first-person narration is well-paced, and he gives a good feel for Martha’s Vineyard without going overboard. Craig finally wrote the kind of book I like to read. Took him long enough, though.

A(UGUSTUS) BOYD CORRELL, according to FictionMags, was “born in South Carolina; Newspaperman, writer for Walt Disney, author of magazine short stories; died in Los Angeles.” In 1948 he co-authored a novel, The Dark Wheel (a.k.a. Sweet and Deadly), with Philip MacDonald.

   Correll specialized in short crime fiction, however, with his over two dozen stories being placed in the major detective pulps of the ’40s and ’50s; in the ’60s he generated two episodes for Robert Taylor’s Detectives TV series, and the ISFDb credits him with three works of SFF (Science Fiction-Fantasy). Although we’re sure more of his stories are lurking out there somewhere on the Internet, for the moment we can locate only two of them, both of which are, not surprisingly, movie-related.
   

(1) “The Corpse That Played Dead” (Thrilling Mystery, Winter 1943) Online here.

   Film actor Ronald Edwards’s movies always lose money, so why does Panamint Studios boss Emil Friml keep making films with Edwards in them? For Friml, the main concern is that somebody is trying to kill Edwards while he’s making a war movie, falling sandbags and flame-throwers blasting real flames at his leading man. This is enough for Friml to call in the studio’s unofficial detective, Jimmy Lee, our first-person narrator. In spite of Lee’s presence right there on the sound stage, though, someone succeeds in doing Edwards in just as they’re filming a battle scene on a bridge:

   Lee doesn’t realize it at the time, but the apparently pointless act of the body being dragged across the floor is the key that will unlock how — and who — murdered failed matinee idol Ronald Edwards.

   Here’s a nice bit of descriptive writing that also serves to delineate the character of the studio boss:

(2) “Death on Location” (Mammoth Mystery, January 1946). Online here.

   
   Tom Ferguson’s normal occupation is scouting for movie locations, but when he embarked on this particular expedition he never anticipated finding an old woman with her throat torn out — or getting attacked by a swamp monster that walks on two legs (a “gibbering thing that smelled of putrefied flesh”), a creature straight out of a nightmare that, oddly, seems a mite too protective, not of its territory per se, but of some small shiny, round things that your average monster wouldn’t think twice about, but which would definitely excite human interest, enough human interest to lead to murder . . .

KATHLEEN MOORE KNIGHT – Three of Diamonds. Elisha Macomber #15. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1953. Detective Book Club, hardcover, three-in-one edition.

   The detective of record in Three of Diamonds is one Elisha Macomber, chairman of the Board of Selectmen of Penberthy Township, Penberthy Island, Massachusetts, a man perhaps in his 70s. Although there is a Chief of Police on the island (think Nantucket), whenever there is a serious crime (murder, for example), he is the one who is charge of the investigation that follows, and over the years, there were quite a few. (See the list below.)

   He’s off stage for much of this one, however. The action centers instead around the Crockett family, long time residents of the island, an older woman who lords it over a young sister and brother, both used to living under her thumb all their lives. In a pottery barn out back live a husband and wife, plus a young female assistant, not, as it turns out, all that harmoniously

   It is the younger brother Titus, not generally considered to be the smartest whip in the barrel, who finds the body, shot between the eyes. But when others go to find it, the body is gone. At the scene of the “crime,” however, is a playing card. The three of diamonds.

   It is difficult to solve a murder, obviously, when there is no body to be identified, if indeed there was a body. Macomber is convinced, however, and does more than due diligence to determine what indeed had happened. The case also involves some recent strangers on the island, who may be connected with some jewel robberies up in Boston,

   There is a chapter or two soon before the ending in which all of the participants in the tale spend their time skulking around in the dark, following each other at times, and in at least one instance, one hitting another over the head. The ending itself is one of those all of the suspects together kind of affairs, in which the obvious suspect sits there with Elisha in charge with a entire collection of least likely suspects.

   One might suspect that author Kathleen Moore Knight would things index control at this point, but she does not. What follows is a fast-paced mixture of confusion and chaos that could easily boggle your mind, if you were to let it. It is better just to sit back and fasten your seat belts. The ending of this one is a doozie!
   

      The Elisha Macomber series —

Death Blew Out the Match (1935)
The Clue of the Poor Man’s Shilling (1936)
The Wheel That Turned (1936)
Seven Were Veiled (1937)
Acts of Black Night (1938)
The Tainted Token (1938)
Death Came Dancing (1941)
The Trouble At Turkey Hill (1946)
Footbridge to Death (1947)
Bait for Murder (1948)
The Bass Derby Murder (1949)
Death Goes to a Reunion (1952)
Valse Macabre (1952)
Akin to Murder (1953)
Three of Diamonds (1953)
Beauty Is a Beast (1959)

THE GIRL IN THE KREMLIN. Universal International Pictures, 1957. Zza Zza Gabor, Lex Barker, Jeffrey Stone, Maurice Manson, Kurt Katch. Screenplay by Gene L. Coon & Robert Hill. Story by DeWitt Bodeen & Harry Ruskin. Directed by Russell Birdwell. Currently streaming on YouTube (see below).

   
   This twisty and twisted little thriller mostly from the Universal back-lot and sets from the horror movies is something of a cross between a Men’s Sweat Mag, the National Enquirer, Sterling Noel’s bestselling I Killed Stalin, and a government propaganda short.

   We open in Moscow at Joseph Stalin (Maurice Manson)’s deathwatch. A team of surgeons, including a noted plastic surgeon and nurse Greta Grisenko (Zza Zza Gabor) are there to operate on Stalin, but first he has to indulge his fetish for watching women have their heads shaved and oversee the murder of his double before the operation and the announcement of his death as he absconds from the USSR with half the national treasury.

   Several years have passed and we are in West Berlin where American Private Eye Steve Anderson (Lex Barker) and ex-OSS agent meets Lili Grisenko (also Zza) a naturalized American who hires him to find her sister who went missing in Russia after they were separated as war refugees and who was known to have been a nurse for Stalin.

   Steve’s friend, one-armed Mischa (Jeffrey Stone), who runs an underground group of Russian expatriates, informs Steve and Lili that he believes Stalin is still alive and that their best chance to find Greta is to find Stalin. That best chance to find the dictator turns out to be his son Jacob (William Schallert) who defected to the West in the War to escape the influence of his evil father and now hides out in a small German village trying to forget his Father, protected by Mischa and his friends.

   Meanwhile both Stalin in his hideout and the Russians in Moscow who don’t want his treachery out  send assassins to kill Anderson before he can find the dictator.

   Stalin’s son (a surprisingly sensitive performance by Schallert for this film) provides them the clue they need to find Stalin, and Anderson polishes off one of the assassins and neutralizes the other (a once wartime friend), while he and Mischa are off to find Stalin who is planning to return to Russia and take power again for a finale of suggested kinky sex (Greta allows Stalin to shave her head for kicks and tortures Steve) and a retribution ending to that first line I quoted.

   
   The Girl in the Kremlin is more interesting than good, sensational and exploitative without ever achieving the kind of pulp level garishness required for that to work and despite a few kinky flourishes –- notably the really disturbing and near pornographic scene in the opening when a peasant girl’s (Natalie Daryll who allowed her waist length hair to be shaved) hair is graphically shorn while Stalin watches intently — it never really manages to wallow in the depths it seeks. It is far too polite for that.

   Barker is appropriately tough in the lead, and Zza Zza is actually fairly good in the twin role, avoiding too much scenery chewing as the evil sister in her bald cap, the big reveal of the film’s second half, along with Barker, bare-chested of course, being whipped by two women. There is even a touch of mystery as we don’t know until the end which of the men is Stalin in his new face.

   This does capture the feel of those popular Men’s Sweat Mags of the era where the garish covers and provocative illustrations and article titles always promised more than the prose dared to deliver. This film is like that but, to borrow a line from Ian Fleming, it reads better than it lives, ending with a title card to inform us piously that man reaps what he sows.

   That sums up this one. You went for Rocky Horror Picture Show and you ended up with Scooby Doo.
   

MICHAEL SHAYNE “Man on a Raft.” Unsold TV Pilot. Aired on the NBC summer replacement series Decision, 28 September 1958. Cast: Mark Stevens (Michael Shayne), Merry Anders (Lucy Hamilton), Robert Brubaker (Tim Rourke), Robert Stevenson (William Gentry). Guest star: Diane Brewster. Teleplay by Steve Fisher, based on thee characters created by Brett Halliday. Directed by Mark Stevens. Currently streaming here on YouTube.

   The summer replacement series that replaced The Loretta Young Show for 13 weeks in 1958 consisted entirely of pilot episodes for various series, most of which never came to fruition. The first one shown was picked up, though, and went on to considerable success, that being The Virginian, starring James Drury.

   Not so for this early attempt to get a Mike Shayne series on the air. (The one starring Richard Denning as Shayne came along later.) In it a young good-looking girl comes to Shayne for help in determining when her playboy husband died. He lost his life in a boat at sea, and a good deal of money depends on whether he died before or after his birthday. The other two men on the boat survived, but barely, and the only way of determining what actually happened is by means of a diary one of them kept.

   You can take it from there, but as usual with private eye shows on television, thirty minutes of running time (less time-out spots for would-be commercial buyers) is not enough for more than a bare bones mystery to develop. Other than Mark Stevens as Shayne, none of the rest of the regulars had time enough to make an impression, and Stevens would not have been my choice of an actor to play him. He’s a little too dour for my tastes. In his series Denning looked as though he was having fun playing the role.

WILD CARD. “Pilot.” Lifetime.. 02 August 2003. Joely Fisher (Zoe Busiek), Chris Potter, Rae Dawn Chong, Bronson Picket. Director: Stephen Surjik.  Currently streaming on YouTube (see below).

   Zoe Busiek is making living as a blackjack dealer in Las Vegas, when she learns that her sister has died in an automobile accident back East, and she decides to quit and head there to take care of her three young children, two girls and a boy. Only the youngest, a girl, takes at all warmly to her sudden abrupt presence in their lives.

   Her new life, in other words, will not be easy. Making matters worse is that the insurance company has determined, on the basis of eye witnesses, that her sister was at fault, and there will be no money coming in from them. Feeling something is wrong, she decides to investigate on her own, and – you will not be surprised to learn – she is right. It takes a lot of perseverance and footwork to get there, but each in its way pays off.

   Not only that, when all is said and done, she is offered a job as an investigator with the insurance company. Or should that last sentence end with an exclamation point?

   I’ve chosen not to. All signs have been pointing to this all episode long. The happy conclusion – and yes, the kids becoming OK with her now as well – comes as all in due course, the way things should be., especially on the Lifetime network. Putting things into a proper perspective, I’d consider the entire production a step up from a similar concept on say, the Hallmark Channel. Not quite as sentimentally cloying, and maybe just a hint more of a solid edge to it, the series lasted for two seasons of eighteen episodes each.

   One additional note: I did not realize until I started writing this review that Joely Fisher is the daughter of Eddie Fisher and Connie Stevens. And a half-sister of Carrie Fisher. Talk about family values!

INTRO. Jon and I went to see this as the first film of a Randolph Scott double feature last night. It was showing at the New Beverly Theater in Hollywood, the one owned by Quentin Tarantino. While tempting we didn’t stay for the second feature, but I think a large number of the audience did. The theater wasn’t jam-packed, but as a rough estimate, it was filled to sixty percent capacity, maybe more.

   It was good to see the film on the big screen in an actual theater, with an audience that came to see the movie, not to have a party. It also made me wonder if anyone involved in making the film back in 1957 had any idea that here and now, some 65 years later, the movie would still be around to keep fans watching an enjoying.

   The review below was first posted on this blog on 19 January 2015.

THE TALL T. Columbia Pictures, 1957. Randolph Scott, Richard Boone, Maureen O’Sullivan, Arthur Hunnicutt, Skip Homeier, Henry Silva, John Hubbard, Robert Burton. Screenplay by Burt Kennedy, based on the story “The Captives,” by Elmore Leonard, published in Argosy, February 1955. Director: Budd Boetticher.

   To start off with, let me tell you that this is one of my favorite Western films of all time. I won’t tell you that it’s number one, because I’ll be honest with you as well as myself and say that it isn’t, but it’s in the top five.

   In part it’s the actors. Randolph Scott isn’t a lawman doing his job with professional dignity and humor, a common role he had in westerns. In The Tall T he’s a struggling former cowhand, no more than that, but he was good at his job. But now he’s living alone and struggling to make a go of his own small ranch, as honest with himself and others as the day is long.

   Richard Boone is the villain of the piece, who along with a pair of low-life outlaws he rides with (Skip Homeier and Henry Silva) holds up a stage only to find that it’s not the regularly scheduled one, but one chartered by the man who married the plain-looking daughter of the richest man in the territory, a rabbit of a man who gives up his wife as part of a ransom scheme to save his own hide. Scott, who just happens to be on the stagecoach, is caught up in the plan and as chance would have it, is made a captive too.

   As their captors, Richard Boone and his two cohorts are as murderous and vicious as they come. For some reason, though, Boone lets the yahoos he associates with do all the shooting, and as he confesses to Scott over an open fire, he has a wish to have a piece of land himself. Only Richard Boone could have played the part. A killer who aches with the need for someone intelligent to talk to.

   I don’t know how they managed to make Maureen O’Sullivan so plain looking, but she is, and at length she admits that she her knows exactly why her new husband married her. But it’s Randolph Scott who makes the movie work. Rugged, steely-eyed and quiet-talking, but with little ambition more than to make a living on his own, he’s also more than OK with a gun, a fact that in the end turns out to be rather important.

   Other than the actors, though, it is the storytelling, the combination of script and directing, that simply shines. The budget probably wasn’t all that large, but the story simply flows, with no wasted moments, every scene essential to the story. This is a movie that’s down to earth and real, and made by professionals on both sides of the camera.

   As for Elmore Leonard’s story, the one the movie is based on, you don’t have to read more than two or three pages before you know where the timing and the pacing of the movie came from.

   Most of the movie is taken straight from the story, at most only a long novelette, with only a couple of substantial changes. The campfire scene between Scott and Boone referred to above was added, and the way Scott and the woman defeat their captors was re-orchestrated, both changes for the better.

   Everyone agrees that Elmore Leonard’s crime fiction was always the best around, but to my mind, his western fiction, which came along earlier, is even better. That includes “The Captives,” beyond a doubt, and the movie is even better yet. To my mind, near perfect.

INTRO. This is the fifth and final story in the February 1936 issue of Dime Detective that I covered in its entirety in my column “Speaking of Pulp” in the April/May/June, 1979 issue of The Not So Private Eye.
         —

   The cover illustration is taken from the final story, a long novelette by T. T. Flynn entitled “Bride of the Beast,” which sounds more like a horror story from Dime Mystery than it docs a detective story. Flynn was an extremely prolific detective story writer from the pulps. He’s never seemed to have gathered much attention, but his stories are always filled with action, and more, they seem to know where they’re going.

   In this one, a circus is about to go bankrupt — strange things are happening on the midway! Trouble-shooter Steve Waring is sent out by the bank to find out what’s going on, and on his first night on the job an elephant rider in the opening procession is decapitated, almost in full view of the horrified audience.

   The circus atmosphere is excellent, the menace is effectively scary, and no holds are barred in producing sudden and violent death. It ends with a furious train ride through the night and with the nightmarish capture of a crazy killer about to torture Joan Wells, tied and helpless, running the circus in her father’s absence, with a twisted replica of love. Hence the title. I guess it sounds like corn, but it’s still the best story in the magazine.

   As you’ll have already gathered, if you’ve been paying attention, the emphasis [in the stories in this issue of this magazine] has not been on ordinary detective work, This had probably been even more true in earliest days of Dime Detective, which was first published in the early 1930s but the trend away from grotesque mystery had not yet eliminated it from the magazine by 1936, as we’ve just seen. Many people tell me they prefer the 1940s version of DD, when the accent changed slightly from the incredibly fantastic to the merely screwy.

   Give me a hand, will you? Help me clean up these little shreds of brown paper that are all over the floor here …

BRETT HALLIDAY “Dead Man’s Clue.” PI Mike Shayne. First published in This Week, 28 November 1954. Reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1957 and in Ellery Queen’s Anthology #9, 1965 Mid-Year Edition, in both two latter cases as “Not–Tonight-Danger.”

   As I’m sure most of you who read this blog on a regular basis already know, both “Brett Halliday” and his fictional character Mike Shayne were the brainchildren of author Davis Dresser. Over the years, though, especially after Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine had begun, but including the novels themselves, Dresser started farming out the telling of the tales to other writers, including such luminaries as Ryerson Johnson, Robert Terrall, Dennis Lynds, James Reasoner, Richard Deming, Hal Charles, and more.

   But as far as is known now, only one of the stories was written by Dresser’s then wife, Helen McCloy, and by some non-pure coincidence, this is the one. It’s unusual in a way, as it’s almost entirely a puzzle story, making it no surprise that the editors of EQMM picked up it for inclusion in both their magazine and a later anthology they did.

   It begins with a client coming to Shayne with a strange confession. To warn his wife about being careless about her purse, he “steals” it from her in a crowd of people, only to discover he’d stolen the wrong one. In one those equally strange coincidences that happen in fiction more often they do in real life, a valuable diamond medallion had been stolen that same evening in the same hotel.

   When Shayne’s client is found murdered, though, any idea of coincidence is immediately rejected. The only clue is a strip of paper with writing on it found in the stolen purse belonging to someone else, thus transforming the tale from that of an ordinary PI story to that of a clever puzzle to be unraveled. Shayne is up to the task, however, in the hands of behind the scenes author Helen McCloy, known for her many works of classic detective fiction. It ends perhaps a little more quickly that I might have liked, but this is still a small “gem” of a story,