MIRAGE. Released: July 7, 1965. Running time: 109 minutes. Cast: Gregory Peck (David Stillwell), Diane Baker (Shela), Walter Matthau (Ted Caselle), Kevin McCarthy (Josephson), Jack Weston (Lester), Leif Erickson (Crawford Gilcuddy), George Kennedy (Willard), Robert H. Harris (Dr. Broden), Anne Seymour (Frances Calvin), House B. Jameson (Bo), Hari Rhodes (Lt. Franken), Neil Fitzgerald (Joe Turtle). Producer: Harry Keller. Writers: Peter Stone (screenplay) and Howard Fast (uncredited; based on his 1952 novel Fallen Angel, as by Walter Ericson). Director: Edward Dmytryk.

   David Stillwell has managed to do the impossible, at least according to a nervous psychologist who presumably knows about these things: While David has spent the last two years living and working in New York, he has absolutely no memory of any of it. “Impossible!” says the shrink that he has desperately sought out; amnesia can last, at most, maybe two months — not two years!

   But when a nervous pro-wrestling-addicted schmo practically kidnaps him in his apartment, and a big plug ugly starts taking shots at him in the park, and people he knows — or thought he knew well — either wind up dead or are plotting to kill him, it occurs to David Stillwell that he will have to retrieve his lost memories — and fast! Unknown to him, buried deeply in his subconscious is the knowledge of something — and this is no exaggeration — that could completely change the world forever . . . .

   There are a lot of twists and turns in this movie, too many to detail, but it zips along at a good pace. By telling the story in a nonlinear way with lots of flashbacks that at first don’t make much sense, the viewer is kept as much in the dark as the main character about just what the heck is going on. The writers lean heavily on Gregory Peck’s amiable charisma to keep the audience sympathetically engaged in his nightmare.

   The production also makes full use of late autumn scenes in New York’s streets and Central Park, and although the film is a full-length theatrical release, it seems wise for them to shoot it in muted black and white in order to give it a noirish feel.

   The aforementioned “nervous psychologist” is played by Robert H. Harris, one of those familiar faces from mainly ’50s and ’60s network TV that you might have trouble attaching a name to. The IMDb awards Harris 130 credits, including a long run in The Goldbergs (51 episodes), Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Court of Last Resort (23 episodes), Alfred Hitchcock Presents (8 episodes), Perry Mason (7 episodes), with sporadic appearances in dozens of shows and movies as late as The Six Million Dollar Man in 1977.

PostScript: The one copy of Fallen Angel currently on AbeBooks has an asking price of $3500.

BRIAN GARFIELD – The Paladin. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1980. Bantam, paperback, 1981.

   Some books either work or they don’t. They are so audacious in imagination and execution as to leave the reader with only two choices, go along with the game or throw his hands up in disgust and the book across the room.

   In The Paladin veteran author Brian Garfield (The Last Hard Men, Hopscotch, Death Wish, Manifest Destiny, Wild Times among many others under multiple names) succeeds brilliantly in the first reaction. His idea and execution are so perfect, the idea so brilliantly brought off, that the reader is swept up in the imaginative details and left too stunned to protest.

   The book opens as Englishman Christopher Creighton stands in London, 1965, like thousands of other Brits, as the procession of Sir Winston Churchill’s funeral winds its way through the streets of London past Whitehall and the Cenotaph. Like those thousands of others Creighton feels a great loss at the passing of the great man, but for Creighton it is personal, and that is the story Garfield proceeds to tell.

   Christopher Creighton first met Winston Churchill before the war when Creighton was only ten and on an adventure and stumbled on Churchill painting. The year was 1936, the wilderness years when Churchill was out of favor, his career at its lowest ebb and his voice alone in decrying the Nazi menace in Europe.

   A strange friendship develops between the two, Creighton, who Churchill calls, Christopher Robin and the older man the boy calls Tigger curiously drawn together. Creighton is fifteen when it occurs to Churchill that with the War having broken out there is something the boy can do, a mission involving a Belgian boy of the same age, something best done by a youngster.

   With the success of that first mission and Creighton’s cleverness when it goes wrong, Churchill imagines there will be other opportunities for a boy good at languages and with a cool head, and Creighton is soon in training as a full fledged agent. Creighton will be involved in the assassination of French Admiral Darlan, Pearl Harbor, D-Day and other vital operations of the war, all quite reasonably told.

   Absurd as it may seem Garfield sells it, and without the tongue in cheek play of Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider books about a latter day Christopher Creighton.

   The book was a best seller, but more than that it created a sort of cottage industry, because Brian Garfield wasn’t the only one taken with the idea of Christopher Creighton’s career as Christopher Robin.

   The Paladin was published in 1979, in 1987 Christopher Creighton turns up as the co-author of Noel Hynd’s The Khrushchev Directive dealing with the Soviet Prime Minister’s trip to the West and tying it to the mysterious disappearance of famed British diver and War hero Lionel Crabb V.C. (The Silent Enemy) who disappeared while diving beneath a Russian trawler in a British port on a probable mission for the British Security Services and suggests Lord Mountbatten’s 1979 assassination was not the work of Irish terrorists but related to his preventing the assassination of Khrushchev on his 1956 trip. In this one Creighton is an adult drawn back into international intrigue and adventure.

   You would think that would be enough, but Christopher Creighton wasn’t done quite yet, in 1996 “Christopher Creighton” penned his own book, Op JB (“Operation James Bond”) purporting to be the true story of an operation by Ian Fleming to smuggle Martin Bormann out of Berlin under the noses of the Soviet’s under the orders of Churchill and Roosevelt in order to recover billions in Nazi loot. This one is presented as non-fiction replete with an index and photographs revealing Creighton was the really John Christopher Ainsworth-Davis, actor, writer, director, and musician.

   A further book called The Mountbatten Report fell prey to authorial disputes with Ainsworth-Davis collaborators.

   None of the books really acknowledge each other much though they share details , and whatever “truth” involved both the Garfield and Hynd books are strictly fictional in presentation while Op JB is presented as history but as far as I know uncorroborated. Certainly Simon and Schuster, the publisher, made no claims regarding the books authenticity and no American edition was ever published which is suggestive in itself. An epigraph, an alleged admonition from Winston Churchill to Creighton in the latter book warns, “Guard above all your reputation as a young man of no character; for if anyone should become proud of you — you are lost.”

   Creighton seems to have done an excellent job at that.

   As literary gamesmanship goes this one is a fascinating case. Three works in three different decades by three different writers, two of them best sellers, and all purporting to be based on the memoirs of a figure who either has the best untold story of WW II or is the most inventive fictionneer since Baron Corvo.

   All three books are well worth finding strictly as fiction of the playful historical kind. Since none of the people I would expect to be all over this sort of thing like Ben McIntyre, William Stevenson, or Jeremy Duns have deigned to write about it, I have my doubts though as might be expected there are some interesting side points that lend some probability to some of Creighton’s claims.

   Then again, if true, it would still be almost impossible to prove short of some remarkable secret papers or diaries showing up.

   Garfield said of his book:

   
   Garfield could hardly have imagined he had started a mystery that would still be intriguing in the 21rst Century much less create a minor industry of books following where he led. Perhaps ironically Garfield wrote an expose a few years later on British soldier and diplomat Richard Meinhertzhagen whose exaggerated biography was told in John Lord’s Duty, Honour, Empire. Meinhertzhagen never saw the day his claims were as shrouded in mystery as those of Creighton/Ainsworth-Davis. History at least acknowledges Meinhertzhagen was there.

MACK REYNOLDS – Amazon Planet. United Planets #5. Serialized in Analog SF in three parts: December 1966 through February 1967. Ace, paperback, 1975.

   United Planets, with its variety of political systems, socioeconomic theories, and religions, is once again the [setting] for a lecture by Reynolds. This time Renny Bronston of Section G is sent to Amazonia to investigate the alleged suppression of the male half of the population. Amazonia is, however, a most enlightened planet, threatened with overthrow by the forces of a renegade G-agent.

   If it weren’t for the obviousness of the lecture, things might happen a little faster. Reynolds has good ideas, though, the most noteworthy being the possible use of time as monetary basis. A clever plot fits together well, except for a feeling of being just a little too forced.

Rating: 3½ stars.

C. W. GRAFTON – The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope.  Gil Henry #1. Farrar & Rinehart, hardcover, 1943.  Dell #180, mapback edition, no stated date. Mercury Mystery #97, digest-sized paperback, 1945. Perennial Library, paperback, 1983. Poisoned Pen Press, trade paperback, 2020.

   Ruth McClure of Harpersville, Kentucky becomes suspicious when her deceased dad’s boss, William J. Harper, offers her exorbitant prices for her father’s shares of stock in his company with the stipulation that she turn over to him her father’s papers as well. She approaches Gil Henry, a junior partner in his law firm to investigate.

   Gil is an unusual investigator — short, pudgy, thirty, and living at the YMCA. He takes the case and Harper is killed shortly thereafter in his study. Ruth’s stepbrother is arrested on suspicion and Gil has to quit the firm to represent him because the firm proper already handles the Harper estate. Soon a neighbor, Miss Katie, is killed as well.

   There are some very good scenes at the bank when Gil is trying to get into the safety deposit box belonging to Ruth’s father. It’s fairly complicated with a lot of references to stocks and depreciation and whatnot, and Gil does some handy will juggling himself at the request of Mrs. Harper.

   It’s all neatly tied up at the end, however. The Mother Goose title is a bit far-fetched. Gil represents the rat gnawing at the rope, setting off an inevitable chain of events. I will definitely read the sequel,  The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher (1944).

HOWARD BROWNE “So Dark for April.” Paul Pine. Novelette. First published in Manhunt, February 1953 [Vol. 1 No. 2] as by John Evans. Collected in The Paper Gun (Dennis McMillan, 1985) under the author’s real name, Howard Browne. Reprinted also under the author’s real name in The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg (Carrol & Graf, 1988).

   Unless I am mistaken, this is the only instance of Chicago-based PI Paul Pine appearing in a work of short fiction. Not only that, but if you’re a fan of Raymond Chandler, you really need to read this one. If Raymond Chandler never existed, neither would Paul Pine. He’s his own man, mind you, with his own particular brand of cases he tackled, so I can’t, nor wouldn’t, call the stories pastiches in any sense of term. What they are are a lot of fun to read. I’ll list all of Pine’s novel length investigations at the end of this review.

   It (probably) goes without saying, but you can’t get the full flavor of a Paul Pine story in one as short as “So Dark for April.” It has a semi-wacky opening, though, one that will draw any reader of PI stories right on in. Pine walks into his office one day only to find a dead man in his outer waiting room. The man has been shot in the chest. He has very little by which he could be identified, and his clothes do not match. A good new coat, dirty slacks, and shoes but no socks.

   The detective sergeant on the case is belligerent to Pine, nothing new there. Very seldom do cops and PI’s get along. The day is rainy, hence the title, but that’s nothing that people living in Chicago take much note about. Pine’s detective work is excellent, but it’s the telling that makes the story:

—

      The Paul Pine series —

         As by John Evans:

Halo in Blood. Bobbs Merrill 1946
Halo for Satan. Bobbs Merrill 1948
Halo in Brass. Bobbs Merrill 1949

         As by Howard Browne:

The Taste of Ashes. Simon & Schuster 1957
The Paper Gun. Dennis McMillan 1985 (collection)

ELIZABETH GEORGE – In the Presence of the Enemy. Thomas Lynley et al #8. Bantam, hardcover, 1996; paperback, 1997. TV movie: BBC/PBS, 2003.

   After I read the [most recent] of this series I got rid of all I had but the first three, and crossed George off my reading list. I had gotten tired of the unremitting angst that seemed to suffuse about two-thirds of the pages, which were too numerous. A friend said this [one] was more like the early ones I had liked considerably, though, so …

   The acknowledged but illegitimate child of a woman high in the Tory government is kidnapped, and both she and the child’s father, the editor of a muckraking left-wing tabloid, receive notes demanding that he acknowledge his first-born child on the front page of his paper. The woman, fearing political repercussions, is unwilling for either that to happen or the police to be notified; the man, though willing, abides by her decision and seeks help in finding the child. This help consists of Simon St. James, Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley’ s best friend, and Lady Helen Clyde, his fiancé. Then the story turns darker.

   I shouldn’t review this series where anyone new to it might read the review (and I won’t), because it wouldn’t be fair to them or George. Y’ see, her characters have just worn me out. There’s not as much browbeating and hair-tearing angst from them here as in some of the previous ones, but it doesn’t take much for me now, not with this bunch. I really don’t like them anymore. Too, George creates some of the most miserable, Rendell-ian characters imaginable, and I don’t like that. And her books are too damned long.

   What it amounts to is that she doesn’t do anything I enjoy any longer, and the fact that she’s without argument a more than competent prose stylist isn’t sufficient to change that. I will not read another of these.

CHARLES FINCH – An Extravagant Death. Charles Lenox #14. Minotaur Books, hardcover, February 2021; softcover, January 2022. Setting: Newport RI / New York City, 1878.

First Sentence: It was a sunny, icy late morning in February of 1878, and a solitary figure, lost in thought, strode along one of the pale paths winding through St. James’s Park in London.

   British Enquiry Agent, Charles Lennox, solved a case that brought down Scotland Yard with the three top men headed to trial. Prime Minister Disraeli determines it best that Lennox is not in England during the trial and sends him to the United States with the Queen’s Seal on a tour of the East Coast law enforcement agencies. 1878 Newport, Rhode Island: a place of extreme wealth and self-indulgence. A place of new money, and a focus on marrying well. The murder of a young woman of the first diamond doesn’t fit into this scenario. Lennox’s help is requested.

   Finch does an excellent job of providing a summary of Lenox’s background, folding in that of his wife, Lady Jane, in the process. However, it is confusing that the case for which Lennox is being lauded falls into a huge gap: When did Lennox and Jane have a second child? When did Polly and Dallington, Charles’ partners in the agency, get married? And most of all, what was the case that brought down Scotland Yard? Either this reviewer blanked out this information, or Finch and/or his publisher just decided to skip a book and these annoying little details.

   As Lenox gets to know New York, Finch presents the stark contrast between the wealthy and the laboring class very well, demonstrating compassion but not dismissiveness or pity. Lenox’s excitement is tangible as he crosses the border from New York to Connecticut, consulting his little book of maps showing the thirty-eight states, as one learns the origin of the word “shrapnel,” and later the term “I heard it through the grapevine.” Those small bits of information lend richness to the story.

   Just as with the contrast in settings, Finch displays the contrasts in characters and their lives with the working class and merchants of the town, to the very wealthy “cottage” owners such as the Vanderbilts and Mrs. Astor. As is often true, some of the most interesting characters are those of ex-soldier James Clark, and Fergus O’Brian, the Irish valet,

   It is interesting to see Lenox dogged determination and attention to detail as he investigates every aspect and every possible suspect. The details of how and why Lily, the victim, was killed are laid out perfectly and done in a scene of edge-of-seat suspense rather than the more pedestrian style of Christie. The final chapters are heart-warming, especially the requests he makes on behalf of others.

   An Extravagant Death is just shy of being excellent, in part due to a scene at the end. The mystery is well done with some secondary characters nearly stealing the show. It will be interesting to see where the series goes from here.

Rating: Good Plus.

DOROTHY B. HUGHES “The Homecoming.” Short story. First published in Murder Cavalcade (Duell Sloane & Pearce, 1946, the first MWA Anthology). Reprinted in Rex Stout’s Mystery Monthly #9, 1947, and Verdict, July 1953. Also reprinted in Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy & Otto Penzler (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).

   There isn’t a lot that’s new in this chilling short story of a jilted lover’s leap into madness and revenge. When “Hero Jim” comes home from the war as just that, while stay-at-home Benny’s contribution to the war effort was limited to working in his home town’s recruiting center, it’s no wonder that the latter feels the way he does when Nan takes up with Jim again.

   No, it’s the telling that will this tale stuck in your head for a while. Hughes’s prose is both poetic and incisive. The reader knows exactly what is going to happen and can’t look away. An ordinary writer whose talent was confined to the level of the pulp magazines at the time simply wouldn’t have been up to the challenge. Dorothy B. Hughes simply nails it in “The Homecoming,” a small noirish gem of a tale.

   And one quite worthy of an author whose novel-length work was responsible for movies such as The Fallen Sparrow (1943), In a Lonely Place (1950), and Ride the Pink Horse (1947), each one an absolute classic of the film noir genre.

E. V. CUNNINGHAM – Samantha. Masao Masuto #1. William Morrow, hardcover, 1967. Popular Library, paperback [date?]. Also published as: The Case of the Angry Actress. Dell, 1984.

   Samantha was a pathetic Hollywood hopeful who ended up on the casting couch with a succession of unscrupulous men. Even then, she failed to land a part. Eleven years later, the men are being murdered, apparently in revenge. Each of them is now married to a woman who just might be Samantha with a new name. Detective Sergeant Masao Masuto of the Beverly Hills Police Force has his work cut out for him.

   This is the book that introduced Masuto, a Zen Buddhist like his creator, who is actually the prolific Howard Fast writing under a pseudonym. A Nisei who lives in a Culver City cottage with his wife, three children, and his beloved rose garden, Masuto is culturally about as distant from the fast-lane denizens of Beverly Hills as a cop can get. Yet he declines to let them rattle him; he doesn’t envy, despise, or judge them.

   His trademark cool — sometimes masking a very human inner turmoil — is as appealing as his sometimes acerbic wit. The Hollywood crowd, not surprisingly, is mystified by him and his Zen ways; he explains himself with a disarming simplicity that leaves them even more baffled.

   The contrast between the two cultures he moves between is the chief charm of this and the other Masuto mysteries, among them The Case of the One-Penny Orange (1977), The Case of the Russian Diplomat (1978), and The Case of the Poisoned Eclairs (1979).

   Before creating Masuto, Fast published, under the Cunningham name, a number of non-series thrillers utilizing the first names of their female protagonists as titles. Some of these have serious themes: Sylvia (1960), Phyllis (1962). Others are comedic in tone: Penelope (1965), Margie (1966). Most have rather outlandish plots that entertain despite putting a strain on the reader’s credulity.

   Fast’s first crime novel, Fallen Angel (1952), originally published under the pseudonym Walter Ericson, was made into the 1965 film Mirage, with Gregory Peck and Walter Matthau; both novel and film are taut and engrossing but suffer from that same lack of believability.

     ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

CORNELL WOOLRICH. “Dipped in Blood.” Novelette. First published in Detective Story Magazine, April 1945. Reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1964, as “Adventures of a Fountain Pen.” Collected in The Ten Faces of Cornell Woolrich (Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1965) also as “Adventures of a Fountain Pen.” Film: US title, Oh, Bomb! (Japan, 1964, directed by Kihachi Okamoto).

   There is a small but significant subgenre of both fiction and the movies in which the story follows an object of some importance is followed through its lifetime as it’s passed from hand to hand in small vignettes. It may be a gun, an automobile, almost anything, including a similar chain connecting people in all walks of lives. (If there’s a name to such a subgenre, I don’t know what it is. Maybe someone reading this can help.)

   The object in this richly ironic story by Woolrich is a fountain pen, manufactured to order as a means of assassination by one gangster meant for another. Things go awry, however, as they always do in a Woolrich story, with one final twist at the end, about which I will tell you only that it’s there but nothing more. There are things best to be discovered on one’s own.

   I don’t believe this is one of Woolrich’s better known stories, but what it has is both an ending worth waiting for and people in it who are described to perfection in just a few words or lines. This is why, when back in the 1970s when I first started to seriously read mysteries, if I was asked who my favorite mystery writer was, it was always a tossup between Erle Stanley Gardner, Rex Stout, or Cornell Woolrich, in alphabetical order. That still holds true today.