Tue 23 Feb 2021
Dan Stumpf Reviews One-and-a-Half KANE’s (HENRY, that is).
Posted by Steve under Reviews[16] Comments
â— HENRY KANE. My Darlin’ Evangeline. Dell First Edition B198, paperback original; 1st printing, 1961. Revised and reprinted as The Perfect Crime (Belmont, paperback, 1967). TV Adaptation: As “An Out for Oscar,” The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, 05 Apr 1963 (screenplay by David Goodis).
â— HENRY KANE. Death on the Double. PI Peter Chambers #13. Avon #761, paperback original; 1st printing, 1957. Signet D2644, paperback, 1965.
A week or so ago I looked through my vast, well-organized (HAH!) bookshelves and noticed some books about which I could remember nothing. Intrigued, I pulled a few out and….
Henry Kane is best-remembered for his character Pete Chambers, Private Eye (Or Private Richard, as Chambers put it.) but My Darlin’ Evangeline is a stand-alone about meek bank clerk Oscar Blimmey, who meets and falls in love with a globe-trotting town tramp, Evangeline Ashley. They meet in Miami, where Kane also rings in Bill Grant, a small-time heel who dreams of becoming a big-time cad. When Evangeline and Bill run afoul of a local drug lord, he takes a powder, and she quits the scene by marrying the closest available chump — Oscar Blimmy.
That’s just the beginning of Oscar’s woes though, because he happens to be in charge of the cash handed out on Thursdays to several large payroll accounts; this was the early 60s, remember, when lots of cash money changed hands, banks were built like marble tombs, and bank tellers were trained to use firearms. So when Evangeline re-connects with Bill, and they….
Write the rest yourself. Any decent writer could, and many did it pretty well, but Kane stumbles in his portrait of the central character. Besides being a perfect schlemiel, Oscar is also built like an Adonis but shy with women, proficient with guns and fists, but a confirmed pacifist and a devout coward. The contradictions in character are just too many and too convenient to the story to make it at all convincing.
Death on the Double consists of two novelettes featuring Peter Chambers. The writing in the first, “Watch the Jools,” is agreeably glib, but the plot is something Keeler would have rejected as overly fanciful. Something about a rare gem with a curse on it, a man found drowned in his locked (and quite dry) private office, a costume party where everyone must dress in the costume dictated by an eccentric millionaire, and… well by the time Kane rang in the sword-swallowing Master Criminal, I was ready to call it quits. “Beautiful Day,” the second half of Death on the Double awaited, but I had a Fredric Brown next on the pile….
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Note: Updated to include information about the TV adaptation of My Darlin’ Evangeline. (See comment #3.)
February 23rd, 2021 at 12:09 pm
‘Crime and Peter Chambers’ is an OTRR radio serial, adapted from this author’s works.
Stars Dane Clark. I myself haven’t ever sampled more than a few minutes; something about it (even the very title) seems lackluster.
Another program struck me the same way: ‘The Casebook of Gregory Hood’. Such characters seemed invented-out-of-whole-cloth; no readily-apparent ‘handle’ or hook to them.
No candle to something like, ‘Johnny Madero, Pier 23’. The appeal is right there in the title.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_and_Peter_Chambers
February 23rd, 2021 at 12:39 pm
Henry Kane not only wrote for the radio show, but I believe he was also the producer. It didn’t matter. The show was as dull as the proverbial dishwater.
February 23rd, 2021 at 12:42 pm
MY DARLIN” EVANGELINE was adapted into an hour-long episode of ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS entitled “An Out For Oscar” in 1963. Notable not so much for its stars, Henry Silva and Linda Christian, as for its scriptwrriter: David Goodis.
February 23rd, 2021 at 1:00 pm
You can file this under things I didn’t know before, but now I’m glad I do. Thanks, Bill!
February 23rd, 2021 at 4:04 pm
I have more patience with Chambers overall, indeed I enjoy his breezy but now dated style in most cases, and the variation on the PI Henry Kane pretty much invented, the “Cool Hip” Fifties and Sixties style eye (there is a reason Kane was chosen to write the PETER GUNN novelization and Darren McGavin’s Mike Hammer always struck me as more Peter Chambers than Hammer even though Johnny Liddell creator Frank Kane wrote many of them).
Equal parts Dan Turner, Mike Hammer, and radio’s Richard Diamond, Chambers was the prototypical wise cracking, narrow tie, Brooks Brothers, private eye in a snap brim pork pie modeled on Frank Sinatra’s look.
Kane was also one of the first to write a serious female eye in the modern era (Mavis Trent, PRIVATE EYEFUL), and one of the rare writers to ever fall into the soft porn trap and claw his way out of it back to near the top (with his critically acclaimed McGreggor books).
Granted there isn’t a lot new or inventive in the Chambers saga, at his best he is a capable mystery writer, but he did cement a vision of the private eye that television made iconic with Peter Gunn, 77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian Eye, and Surfside Six among others.
But yeah, the radio series almost entirely misses the voice needed for Chambers who in his earliest incarnation is just another eye until Kane found his voice.
February 23rd, 2021 at 6:05 pm
H’mmm! @ #5. Intriguing.
I can only name a very meager few female P.I.’s from the pulp / pre-modern era.
Madame Storey
Candy Matson, (YUkon 2-8209)
Torchy Blaine
Modesty Blaise
Honey West
Barbarella
February 23rd, 2021 at 6:52 pm
You’ve listed most of the well-known early ones, Lazy, except Bertha Cool (of the ES Gardner/AA Fair books), but there are a quite a few others. Check out this list, for example:
https://www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/triv138.html
February 24th, 2021 at 5:47 pm
Rex Stout’s Dol Bonner is one of the few to get her own full length novel, though quite a few operated in the pulps at shorter length.
I think Trent gets to be the first of the modern paperback era to get her own book, and though she is a tall ex beauty queen more serious than Honey West or Mavis Seidlitz.
February 24th, 2021 at 6:50 pm
I have never thought of Madame Storey — whom Lazy brought up — as a private investigator, and I don’t know why not, for of course she is.
The first novel she was in was in 1925, which puts her ahead of Dol Bonner. Then of course there was Loveday Brooke, back in the 1890s, but I believe all of her cases were published as short stories.
February 24th, 2021 at 5:57 pm
Violet McDade and Nevada Alvarado are doubly interesting as eyes because not only are they female eyes, but Nevada is Hispanic, Violet sort of a more competent Bertha Cool.
Their are some earlier female eyes including Frederick Arnold Knoener’s husband and wife team, and while she is “official” Baroness Orczy’s Lady Molly largely functions as an eye.
February 24th, 2021 at 6:48 pm
Do you mean Frederick Arnold Kummer, David? Even if so, I’m not familiar with much of anything he wrote.
February 24th, 2021 at 6:56 pm
Aha, here we go. Richard and Grace Duvall, all of whose books were by Kummer but under his pen name Arnold Fredericks:
https://www.thrillingdetective.com/more_eyes/richard_and_grace.html
“An early sleuthing couple, preceded only in the genre as far as I can tell, by M. McDonnell Bodkin’s Paul Beck & Dora Myrl, Arnold Frederick’s RICHARD AND GRACE DUVALL were known as “The Honeymoon Detectives,” and appeared in several serialized novels between 1912 and 1917.
“In the aptly titled “The Honeymoon Detectives,” the five-part serial which made its debut in the March 23, 1912 edition of The Cavalier, we meet “gifted” young hotshot New York private detective Richard whose reputation is good enough that he’s recently been summoned to France to work as an assistant to Monsieur Lefevre, the Paris Prefect of Police.”
Then:
“But this was, nonetheless, a rather important series, simply by virtue of the fact that Grace, once married, didn’t vanish from the plots or serve as a mere sounding board for hubby. In each adventure, both she and Richard shared the spotlight more or less equally. And, to tell the truth, for all of Richard’s “gifts” and her flying leaps of deduction, Grace seemed the smarter of the two, and arguably the better detective, cracking most of the cases herself while he often came off as just a wee bit dense.”
Totally new to me. Where have I been all these years?
February 24th, 2021 at 7:56 pm
In your passing mention of “An Out For Oscar” onAHH, you didn’t mention that the title character was played by Larry Storch – one of the few completely serious characters that that talented comic ever got to play.
The Hitchcock Hour originally ran when I was about 12 years old; I didn’t appreciate it at that time, but in the years since – well, let’s say I’ve learned a few things …
Elsewhere, another side item has sent me into Fantasy Mode:
The OTR series The Casebook Of Gregory Hood sounded interesting when I first read about it; it was short-lived, and had a revolving-door cast, but a couple of names caught my notice, triggering the following “What-If”:
(Monday night on CBS, circa 1962-63🙂
Tonight, Lucille Ball and DESILU present:
THE CASEBOOK OF GREGORY HOOD!
Starring GALE GORDON as Gregory Hood!
Co-Starring HOWARD McNEAR as Sanderson Taylor!
Created by ANTHONY BOUCHER and DENIS GREEN!
Brought to you by General Foods!
Mind you, if the actual show had turned out to be any good, so much the better …
February 24th, 2021 at 8:14 pm
I kind of like your Fantasy Mode, Mike. Feel free to share yourself with us anytime.
But you also had me doing some Googling about the show (which was not a PI show; Hood was a wealthy “hobbyist” detective), and I found a description of this episode:
http://www.digitaldeliftp.com/DigitalDeliToo/dd2jb-Case-Book-of-Gregory-Hood.html
8:30 p. m. — Gregory Hood (WKOW): with Howard “Sam Spade” Duff.
48-04-13 The Bradford Era
Radio’s Sam Spade (Howard Duff) seeks the aid of gentleman sleuth Gregory Hood (Elliott Lewis) during Mutual’s broadcast of the adventure dramatic series, “Casebook of Gregory Hood,” tonight 9:30 to 10 p. m.. For this “Casebook” entry Spade asks Hood to help him solve an involved robbery. Jewelry and objects of art have been stolen with an Insurance firm on the short-end of the pay-off. Greg solves the case for Spade—and also uncovers a murder plot caused by buried loot.
February 24th, 2021 at 8:38 pm
Ha! I lurv it.
‘Gregory Hood’ –there’s an episode of something-or-other –where he’s introduced as the summer replacement series for a much better serial that I happened to be enjoying at the time. Something else California-based, whatever it may have been. The actor is given 30 seconds to introduce the show. Talk about a downer. So stiff and so formal.
Re: early females. I’ve read the links which branch off from this site to the fascinating ‘histories’ by Mike Grost. Impressive stuff. A real touchstone.
Mystery readers I’ve met lately seem to have a slight mania to name, “who was the first” this-or-that. But it’s really more intricate than meets the eye. I’ve heard that the first female mystery-solver is a Chinese novel from the 1600s. I can’t recall where I heard of this.
Then there is, Emma Murdoch Van Deventer, Elizabeth Braddon, and Anna Katharine Green.
But the first female ‘pulp troubleshooter’, no one has yet seemed to pinpoint, and it’s an engaging little exercise in bibliography to do so.
I digress. Certainly enjoyed the above mention of Howard McNear, whom I am convinced is the greatest stars that we all under-rate. The guy was pitch-perfect in thousands of serials; he came, (as everyone knew) from ‘the old stock circuit’ and was a beloved figure of old Hollywood. People adored this man with good reason.
A final plug: Gale Gordon. You might not believe it but it was not unknown for him to play a dashing rake, see here:
https://tinyurl.com/ycggmva9
Quite a handsome devil in his youth.
His comedic ‘meltdowns’ on radio or on TV, were legendary. He had a knack for this, to which few others have ever laid claim. But I’ve also heard him in 1930s radio serials where that bass voice of his, lent itself to some of the most vivid villainry ever.
These were fine, special talents.
February 24th, 2021 at 8:58 pm
Oh ho. Re @ #14, I shouldn’t be surprised that ‘Gregory Hood’ was played by ‘Mister Radio’ Elliott Lewis. But it just wasn’t a very exciting show. Even this talented performer couldn’t save it.
Lewis is stellar in two-fisted action adventure: ‘Voyage of the Scarlet Queen’ –and in comedy, ‘The Phil Harris Show’ –but his presence unfortunately couldn’t save everything.
Who keeps a ‘casebook’, anyway?