T. C. H. JACOBS – The Red Eyes of Kali. Temple Fortune #2. Stanley Paul & Co., Ltd., hardcover, 1950. No US edition.

   
   Chief Inspector Barnard in particular looks forward to the day Fortune steps over the line, and of course there wouldn’t be a book if this wasn’t the time Fortune and his associate Sailor Milligan took that step while trying to protect attractive client American Julie Somerset and recover the rubies of the title, the red eyes of Kali (colorful story about their origin in Burma included, but no curses).

   Breathless is how the jacket copy describes it, and it is a fair description of this book and most of the British thriller genre. Here there is even a little bit of scientific detection thrown into the mix as Fortune struggles against the police and on the other side of the game his first suspect, Leon Markovitch, who mistaking Fortune for a gentleman thief tries to hire him to steal the jewels from Julie Somerset’s father.

   With a name like Leon Markovitch in the hands of any British thriller writer but John Creasey you know he is up to no good.

   The easy way out being closed, Fortune now finds himself at odds with two known elements and a third yet to be discovered, never a bad set up to keep the action moving which is the prime reason for the thriller genre.

   This is the second Temple Fortune novel, after Dangerous Fortune (luckily Jacobs gave up early on all the titles having Fortune in the title), and the beginning of Jacobs’ association with his most popular creation. Jacobs began writing in the Thirties, mostly about Chief Inspector Barnard and Detective Superintendent John Bellamy, who appeared in nineteen novels between 1930 and 1947. And yes, it is the same Barnard, a bit of an oddity as if Leslie Charteris had written a series of Claude Eustace Teal novels along with the Saint (though Barnard still gets a few chapters to shine). 1948 saw the birth of Fortune, Jacobs most successful creation, but far from his last.

   Jacobs was one of those prolific British thriller writers, virtually unknown on this side of the Atlantic, but who had a long career in popular fiction (his last book was released in 1974) in multiple genres. Aside from Jacobs he also wrote the Slade McGinty books under his own name Jacques Pendower, twenty three of them between 1955 and 1974, and books about Mike Seton and Jim Malone as Jacobs, romance novels as Pam Dower, Marilyn Pender, Anne Penn, and Kathleen Carstairs, and Westerns as Tom Curtis. Most of his later books are sub-Bondian spy novels.

   Along the way he found time to write three true crime books and a radio play based on his own novel.

   Temple Fortune is a private eye, but in name only. He’s basically the gentleman adventurer a la the Toff or Norman Conquest dressed up with an office and clients instead of stumbling into adventure. He has little relationship to his American cousins ,or for that matter to Peter Cheyney’s slightly shady tough guys or David Hume’s Mick Cardby. Fortune is the type the forelock tugging classes call “guv” and his friend Sailor tends to say “Sink me…” fairly often when taken aback.

   Sailor is mostly there as semi comic relief and to give Fortune someone to explain to while once in a while lending a helping fist when needed, the role of good sidekicks from the earliest days of the genre, violent, but not overly smart.

   This is the kind of book with characters called Hambly Hogban, Freddy Flack, a Chinese thug named Charlie Yeo, and the Honorable Charles Falconridge referred too once to often as the Hon. Charles.

   While not bad, Jacobs really doesn’t deserve reviving. There is some historical importance as the Fortune and Pendower books demonstrate how the British thriller was changing in the Post War era. Jacobs managed to ring enough changes on his writing over the years to graduate from minor Edgar Wallace imitation to the Peter Cheyney era and eventually a curious mix of the first two with a little James Bond thrown in. The Fortune stories tend to be detective stories and the McGinty’s spy novels.

   He wasn’t unique in evolving with the times, but he did it well enough to survive and prosper over the years, no mean talent. Broken Alibi, a Bellamy novel, based on the Brighton Trunk murders from 1957, is a good one if you are interested, or 1954’s Good-Night, Sailor with Fortune.

   The Nero Wolfe series comprises 46 books published during Rex Stout’s lifetime (1886-1975), from Fer-de-Lance (1934) to A Family Affair (1975), plus spin-offs featuring his supporting characters Dol Bonner and Inspector Cramer, The Hand in the Glove (1937) and Red Threads (1939), respectively. The few domestic screen adaptations include two failed pilots: “Count the Man Down” (1959), with Kurt Kasznar and William Shatner as “legman” Archie Goodwin, and an adaptation of The Doorbell Rang (1965) with Thayer David — who died before it aired — as Nero Wolfe (1979). Series did eventuate, starring William Conrad/Lee Horsley (1981) and Maury Chaykin/Timothy Hutton (2001-2002).

   Interestingly, however, Fer-de-Lance and the second novel, The League of Frightened Men (1935), were quickly filmed by Columbia with Lionel Stander (miscast, in Stout’s and my opinion) as Archie. Impeccably filling the title role of Meet Nero Wolfe (1936), the great Edward Arnold was replaced by Walter Connolly — originally envisioned in the part by the studio, although Stout would have preferred Charles Laughton — when Arnold declined to re-up for The League of Frightened Men (1937). David Vineyard admirably analyzed the strengths and, more pointedly, weaknesses of the onscreen League here in a 2020 review so I will, with some relief, turn back to Wolfe’s literary and cinematic debut.

   I say this with no authority whatsoever, but suspect that few series have had conventions as numerous and specific as Wolfe’s, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing — with the rules so firmly established, it’s even more fun when you occasionally break them (more on that and the Conrad series in a future post). Stout wastes no time laying them down when we, well, meet Nero Wolfe; an abridgement appeared, as “Point of Death,” in The American Magazine in November 1934. Fer-de-Lance opens, as usual, on New York’s West 35th Street, in “the old brownstone less than a block from the Hudson River where Wolfe had lived for twenty years and where I had been with him a third of that,” per narrator Archie.

   A man of gargantuan girth, appetite, and intellect, Wolfe never (well, hardly ever) leaves the brownstone, wherein also reside those who service his obsessions: food and orchids. Gourmet Swiss cook Fritz Brenner doubles as butler/majordomo; Theodore Horstmann presides over the plant-rooms where Wolfe spends 9:00-11:00 and 4:00-6:00 daily in his unvarying routine, arising at 8:00, breakfasting with the newspapers in his second-floor bedroom, and descending to the office at 11:00. Wolfe sometimes hires outside help in the form of “the three ’teers” — Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, and Orrie Cather — and Fred sets this plot in motion when, on behalf of wife Fanny, he brings Maria Maffei to Wolfe.

   Her brother, immigrant metal-worker Carlo, vanished after receiving a threatening phone call at his rooming-house, where maid Anna Fiore recalls his cutting an article out of the Times about the sudden death of Peter Oliver Barstow. The Holland University president had keeled over while golfing with son Lawrence and friends E.D. and Manuel Kimball at the Green Meadow Club near Pleasantville, his death ruled as coronary thrombosis by eminent Dr. Nathaniel Bradford. In short order, Wolfe dispatches Archie to White Plains with an offer to bet Westchester County D.A. Fletcher M. Anderson $10,000 that, if it is exhumed, Barstow’s body will reveal poison and “a short, sharp, thin needle” in his belly.

   He has deduced that Carlo, found stabbed, was hired, and then silenced after a blackmail attempt, to make a club  — switched for Barstow’s driver — that would shoot a needle from the handle on impact. When it is found, Ellen Barstow offers $50,000 for her husband’s killer in an ad that her daughter Sarah asks Wolfe to disregard on behalf of the family and Bradford; they were trying to shield Ellen, whose mental instability had led her to take a shot at him months earlier. To Sarah’s relief, circumstantial evidence rules Ellen out, but the absence of any apparent motive remains baffling until Wolfe questions the caddies to learn that on the first tee, with his off looking for a ball, Barstow borrowed E.D.’s driver.

   The real target, grain-trader Kimball admits that while living in the Argentine, he’d killed his wife and her lover as his two-year-old son played on the floor, returning 26 years later for Manuel, an aviator and now the obvious suspect. Visiting Wolfe, he rejects the theory about the not-yet-found driver and demands retraction of the warning that E.D.’s life is in danger, but an ad of Wolfe’s own confirms that a plane was seen landing in a pasture near Hawthorne, enabling Carlo’s murder. Q.E.D. when Wolfe, having been lured upstairs on a pretext, and learned that snake venom killed Barstow, finds the titular South American reptile in his desk drawer full of beer-bottle caps, aptly smashing its head with some suds.

   Some series take a while to get up to speed, but this isn’t one of them — the characters and dynamics, Archie’s perfect narration and repartee with Wolfe, all spring full-grown from Stout’s brow, and revisiting this after 40+ years, I found myself laughing aloud at regular intervals. Per Wolfe, “it would be futile for a man to labor at establishing a reputation for oddity if he were ready at the slightest provocation to revert to normal action.” He utters his favorite exclamation (“Pfui!”); only the gathering of interested parties in his office for him to do his ’splainin’, soon a commonplace, is missing as Manuel, confronted with the proof that a faux hold-up has elicited from Anna, kills himself and E.D. in a plane crash…

   Written by Howard J. Green, Bruce Manning, and Joseph Anthony, Meet Nero Wolfe was directed by Herbert J. Biberman, later one of the blacklisted, HUAC-defying “Hollywood Ten”; Maria (now Marie Maringola) was played by Rita Cansino, better known under her subsequent stage name, Hayworth. It opens with the foursome among Emanuel Jeremiah (E.J.) (Walter Kingsford) and Manuel (Russell Hardie) Kimball, Professor Edgar Barstow (Boyd Irwin, Sr.), and Claude Roberts (Victor Jory), engaged to his daughter, Ellen (Joan Perry). We also see Carlo (Juan Torena) apparently poisoned after he cuts out the article, plus the sorry spectacle of would-be wife Mazie Gray (Dennie Moore) harassing Archie.

   For some reason, the names of Ellen and Sarah (Nana Bryant) have been switched, while Fritz has been supplanted by Scandinavian chef Olaf, a typical role for John Qualen, part of John Ford’s stock company. Arnold’s joviality as Wolfe — whom Mazie dismisses as a “beer-guzzling orchid-grower” — is the one discordant note as both his physicality and the script stick closely to Stout’s characterization. No sooner has the maid (Martha Tibbetts) identified the article than Wolfe intuits both murders, but when the m.o. he posits results in the exhumation, Det. Lt. O’Grady (Gene Morgan) takes credit, so Wolfe sends Archie to get in writing the offer that Dr. Bradford (Frank Conroy) counsels Sarah to withdraw.

   As everyone converges on Wolfe to threaten legal action, Roberts fabricates an excuse to avoid the imminent Manuel, later explaining that he’d been fired as the golf instructor at a Buenos Aires club for allegedly stealing money from E.J.’s locker. The luncheon with caddies Bill (William Anderson), Johnny (William “Billy” Benedict), and Tommy (Roy Borzage) is marred by unwelcome “comic” relief as Mike (George Offerman, Jr.), who’d been fetching E.J.’s visor from the clubhouse, steals frankfurters from Archie’s plate. On learning that his chauffeur was killed by the bite of a fer-de-lance — whose venom did in the others, as well — in his car, E.J. decides that Wolfe’s theory is not “twaddle” after all.

   E.J. requests Wolfe’s protection, and Roberts, persuaded to relate his sordid history, adds that Ellen was born in South America and came to the U.S. as a baby, signalling a drastic detour from Stout’s story. E.J. was acquitted of his wife’s murder, believed to have been committed by Sarah’s first husband, Henderson, who vanished that day; she believes that an entity named Hamansa controls her life, and that E.J. killed Henderson. This provides Wolfe with a half-dozen people who had possible motives to kill E.J., so Archie winds up playing Monopoly with the Kimballs while guarding him, and after they narrowly avoid a burst of machine-gun fire, Wolfe orders him to round up, and bring in, the usual suspects.

   E.J., Manuel, Ellen, Sarah, Roberts, and Bradford are assembled as reluctant houseguests, ostensibly for protection, though we later learn that it was Marie, firing blanks at Wolfe’s behest. Wolfe receives a package containing a “bomb” that will actually release poisoned gas if submerged in water as a precaution, and after neutralizing it he uses it to smoke out Manuel, who accidentally killed their chauffeur as well as Barstow while trying to avenge his mother. If you’ll forgive a mixed metaphor, Hamansa is a red herring out of left field, and at the close, Archie unthinkably marries the insufferable Mazie — but Wolfe turns out to have an ulterior motive for his wedding gift, a cruise to Paris on the S.S. ÃŽle de France.

   Mind you, this is the man who, in The League of Frightened Gentlemen, relates, “I’m funny about women. I’ve seen dozens of them I wouldn’t mind marrying, but I’ve never been pulled so hard I lost my balance”; mercifully, there is neither sign nor mention of Mazie (or of Olaf) in the screen version, directed by Alfred E. Green. Guy Endore, who scripted with Eugene Solow, is notable — at least in my circles — as the author of The Werewolf of Paris (1933), filmed as Hammer’s The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), and as a scenarist on Mark of the Vampire, Mad Love (both 1935), and The Devil Doll (1936). The novel was serialized in six issues of The Saturday Evening Post (from June 15 to July 20 of 1935) as The Frightened Men.

   Featuring an actual excursion by Wolfe, it concerns Paul Chapin, who wrote Devil Take the Hindmost as his quasi-confession for murdering one of the “League of Atonement,” who crippled his leg in a hazing accident. Two die in apparent accidents or suicides, the rest terrified by anonymous verses. Onscreen, after psychologist Prof. Andrew Hibbard (Leonard Mudie) vanishes, taxi driver Pitney Scott (Victor Kilian) opts out when banker Ferdinand Bowen (Walter Kingsford), Dr. Loring A. Burton (Kenneth Hunter), architect Augustus Farrell (Charles Irwin), journalist Michael Ayers (Jameson Thomas), attorney Nicholas Cabot (Ien Wulf), and florist Alexander Drummond (Jonathan Hale) hire Wolfe.

   The novel introduces Wolfe’s frequent but mutually respectful sparring partner, Inspector Cramer (whose assistant, Sgt. Purley Stebbins, was invoked but unseen in Fer-de-Lance); Wolfe’s friend and neighbor, Dr. Vollmer; and his sometime freelance hirees Del Bascom and Johnny Keems. As David relates, League is more faithful than Meet Nero Wolfe, yet despite old reliable Eduardo Ciannelli as Chapin, Connolly’s not-at-all-housebound, beer-eschewing Wolfe compounded Stander’s presence. Nana Bryant and Kingsford returned in new roles, the former as Agnes Burton, anticipating the Chaykin series, which — unlike Conrad’s — used only Stout material with a repertory cast as killers, suspects, and victims.

   Only after more than 40 years and Stout’s death would Wolfe reappear on U.S. screens…

            — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   
   

   Editions cited:

Fer-de-Lance: Pyramid (1964)
The League of Frightened Men: Pyramid (1963)
   

   Online sources:

RAY LORIGA – Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore. Translated by John King. Grove Press, softcover, 2004. First published in Spain, 1999.

   Futuristic tale about a drug company rep who sells pills that erase memories. Long term or short term. Want to get over grief? Erase the memory that the person ever existed. Want to get rid of trauma? Eliminate the traumatic memory. Want to be happy? Take out all the sad.

   The book starts with the salesman in Arizona. He’s very good at his work. But he starts to use his own stuff. He has his own tragic memories he can’t handle. And soon he can’t remember anymore.

   Each day becomes the same. He cannot remember his parents’ names. Is he married? Is she alive?

   He’s transferred to Thailand. But he can’t stop using.

   And as the book progresses, the salesman’s memory continues to deteriorate until he can no longer function.

   And the narrative itself, fairly straightforward to begin with, starts to become repetitive and confused, as the text and the salesman’s mind deteriorate together.

   It’s a similar theme to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But where the protagonist there decides that keeping a tragic memory of love is still better than nothingness — this book shows what would have happened had the character proceeded with the severance of a memory of a failed relationship that served as a core particle of one’s soul. The soul can no longer hold.

   Aside from the story and execution being compelling, the author’s use of simile is as good as anything I’ve read since Raymond Chandler:

   It’s a good book. It’s not as revolutionary as the blurbs on the cover insinuate. But it’s good. Don’t kill yourself trying to get ahold of it. But if you like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Philip K. Dick, it’s worth checking out.

JAMESON COLE – A Killing in Quail County. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1996. Worldwide Library, paperback, 1997.

   Cole lives in Colorado, and this is his first novel.

   It’s the Summer of 1957 in Bob White, Oklahoma, and Mark Stoddard is 15. He’s been living with his Deputy Sheriff brother since their parents were killed in an accident a year ago, and not having an easy time of it.

   This summer an old man who hates his brother will be released from prison, return to Bob White and set up a bootlegger’s still, and begin to haunt Mark’s life. This summer his best friend’s cousin, a young girl, will come to spend the summer with them, and Mark will find that girls can be more, much more, than just pests. This summer human beings will die by violence in Bob White, and Mark’s childhood will end forever.

   This is a coming-of-age novel, a story of the rites of passage from one view of the world to another, and a damned good one. I hate to see it published as a genre novel by a house that won’t promote it, because it deserves better.

   Cole does as good a job of showing small town rural life in the 50s as you’re likely to find, and you can trust me on this; I was there, a hundred or so miles south and a couple of years earlier. He tells his story in straightforward first-person prose, and creates characters you can believe in. It may not work for everybody, but it sure did for me.

JOHN D. MacDONALD “Ring Around the Redhead.” First published in Startling Stories, November 1948. First reprinted in Science-Fiction Adventures in Dimension, edited by Groff Conklin (Vanguard Press, hardcover, 1953). First collected in Other Times, Other Worlds (Fawcett Gold Medal, paperback original, October 1978).

   I don’t imagine that any young SF reader coming across this story in the (at the time) most recent issue of Startling Stories had any idea that the author would become rich and famous a few years later as the John D. MacDonald you and I know today as, for example, the author of the series of mystery novels for which he is most remembered, thous about “salvage expert” Travis McGee.

   Nor did, I suppose, those fans of the Travis McGee books happen to know that he started out writing SF stories — as well as mysteries — for the pulp magazines of the late 1940s. I don’t know if all of his early SF work were later collected in Other Times, Other Worlds (1978), but there are sixteen of them, and ones MacDonald much have felt worth reprinting at the time.

   â€œRing Around the Redhead” is, well, one of them, and it begins with a defendant in court having been accused of murdering his next door neighbor, and in a most vicious fashion: the dead man had been decapitated as if by a mammoth pair of tin snips. When the defendant, an amateur tinkerer, gets to tell his story to the jury, it really is quite a story. Having strangely discovered a mysterious ring in his workshop in the basement, he learns by trial and error that by reaching through it, he can bring back, among other items, valuable jewels, for example. (This is why he is seen arguing with the neighbor, who has discovered this.)

   One day, then, he brings a beautiful girl back through the ring, a redhead, who is wearing next to nothing but strangely still something.

   Hence the title of the story, which has no other objective than to be fun and amusing. No deep scientific principles are discussed in this tale. What this tale reminded me of, more than anything else, are the SF stories very common back in the early 30s, based on speculation but not a whole lot of down-to-earth physics – but, in this case, a tale that’s a whole lot better written.

   Nonetheless, without a solid background in science, JDM must have decided that science fiction was not a field where he had much of a future. Considering how things worked out for him, this was a wise choice.

ARTHUR MALING, Editor – When Last Seen. Mystery Writers of America Anthology. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1977.

   Another excellent offering in this thematic series. The theme in this case, as the title suggests, is of people or things that disappear, and the authors’ roster includes such luminaries as.Starrett, Ross Macdonald, Gores, Hoch, Slesar, Ellin, de la Torre and Pronzini.

   Some of the stories  — Hoch’s “Vanishing of Velma”, James Holding’s amusing “The Philippine Key Mystery” (with detective Leroy King) — are old favourites of mine, but many others introduced to me authors and stories I hadn’t met before.

   Of the new authors I was extreme1y impressed by Pauline C. Smith’s “That Monday Night” and Stanley Cohen’s haunting “Nadigo” about a strange little town that isn’t to be found on any map, while amongst the old reliables, only Vincent Starrett’s “The Big Door” seems slow and dated. (And of course it was originally published well before the war.)

   My favourite story in this volume? Well, the palm goes to either to “Natigo” or to Henry Slesar’s “The Girl Who Found Things,” in which a missing man is sought by a clairvoyant, and the twist is almost the last paragraph.

   All in all, a first class compilation.
      

      Contents:

1 · Gone Girl [Lew Archer] · Ross Macdonald · nv Manhunt February 1953, as “The Imaginary Blonde” by John Ross Macdonald
37 · The Crime of Ezechiele Coen · Stanley Ellin · nv Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine November 1963
65 · That Monday Night · Pauline C. Smith · nv Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine August 1971
93 · The Three Halves [Daniel Kearny Associates] · Joseph N. Gores · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine July 1968, as “The Pedretti Case”
111 · Back in Five Years [Insp. (Supt.) Hazlerigg] · Michael Gilbert · ss John Bull December 18 1948
123 · The Vanishing of Velma [Captain Leopold] · Edward D. Hoch · nv Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine August 1969
145 · The Perfectionist · Gerald Tomlinson · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine February 1974
157 · The Girl Who Found Things · Henry Slesar · nv Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine July 1973
185 · Born Killer · Dorothy Salisbury Davis · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine #120, November 1953
203 · Putting the Pieces Back · Bill Pronzini · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine April 1976
211 · The Philippine Key Mystery [Martin Leroy & King Danforth] · James Holding · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine February 1968
229 · The Lost Heir [Dr. Sam: Johnson] · Lillian de la Torre · nv Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine December 1974
249 · Nadigo · Stanley Cohen · ss Mystery Monthly September 1976
269 · The Dog Incident · Patrick O’Keeffe · ss
279 · The Blue Door · Vincent Starrett · na Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories August 1927, as by Edgar Savage
335 · All the Way Home · Dan J. Marlowe · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine September 1965, as by Jaime Sandaval
      

JOHN L. SPIVAK – Hard Times on a Southern Chain Gang. University of South Carolina Press, trade paperback, 2012. Originally published as the novel Georgia Nigger (1932).

ROBERT ELLIOTT BURNS – I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang. Vanguard Press, hardcover, 1932. University of Georgia Press, trade paperback, 1997. First serialized in True Detective Mysteries magazine, beginning January 1931. Filmed in 1932, starring Paul Muni.

   Hard Times on a Southern Chain Gang is a crappy title for a pretty amazing piece of work. The original title is more powerful but no longer publishable.

   Spivak used some connections to get access to Georgia chain gangs in the 30’s for a supposed academic study. Instead, he took the stories he heard from the inmates and the terrible things he saw to create a novel. An amalgam character, David Jackson, is put through the veritable wringer and becomes the camera’s eye of the action.

   The take home message is that life for Black folks in the South was worse after slavery than before. During slavery, a slave would cost the slaveholder serious coin. David’s grandfather cost $1800. This meant that, like a cow or a horse or other farm chattel, the farmer had a financial interest in keeping his slaves alive and relatively healthy.

   But now slave labor was much cheaper. Here’s the recipe: If you need a slave, ask the sheriff to arrest some Black folks for vagrancy. Any Black man walking down the street is fair game.

   Once arrested, you have a choice. Three months on the chain gang or a $10 fine. You don’t have $10, but a farmer comes by and says: “Hey, tell you what I’ll do. If you’ll come work for me, I’ll pay the fine out of your next months wages. I pay $20 a month.

   You figure anything’s better than a chain gang, so you take the deal. What you don’t know is that you’ll never pay off the $10 to the farmer. The farmer will charge you for room and board, and charge usurious interest, and each month you work there you’ll be further and further in debt.

   Plus unlike a slave that cost the farmer big money, you only set him back $5. So if you get sick, he’ll let you die. He’ll work you til you die, and if you refuse to work, he’ll whip you til your body’s welted and bloody.

   And if you run away, the Sheriff will track you down and charge you with theft of the debt you owe the farmer, plus resisting arrest, disturbing the peace. That’ll get you a year on the chain gang or $25 dollars. And so on. You’ll never get free.

   It’s a terrible story, striking, descriptive, horrific and well-told. But no one read it because that same year a white northern journalist named Robert Burns put out his autobiographical tale of his time on a Georgia Chain gang. He had a pretty bad time too. But his writing is not very descriptive. And aside from him telling you how bad it was, you can’t really visualize it because he doesn’t give you the gory details.

   Burns’s tale was immediately optioned by Hollywood and made into a popular melodrama, insuring its vague memory in the public mind while the much better book by Spivak has been mostly forgotten.

   But if you’re really interested in this tale of woe, of Georgia chain gangs and their lacerated legacy, skip Burns and go straight to Spivak.

   I watched the first ten minutes of the Hollywoodified Burns tale and had to turn it off. If Burns was tepid — this was wretched.

   I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang can be viewed at:

https://archive.org/details/1932iamafugitivefromachaingangsoyunfugitivomervynleroyvose

   It was later made as a film starring Val Kilmer: The Man who Broke 1,000 Chains (1997):

LILLIAN de la TORRE – The Detections of Dr. Sam Johnson. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1960. Dolphin Books, paperback, 1962. Intl Polygonics Ltd, paperback, 1984.

   At first glance, the great eighteenth-century English lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson seems an unlikely detective. On closer consideration, however, the idea of the man who, after years of sleuthing, published the first English dictionary (1755), and who had the original Boswell close at hand to chronicle his literary detections and adventures, seems just right. The combination of the grumpy sage Johnson and his Scottish biographer, James Boswell of Auchinleck, forms the model for the classic detective-story Holmes-Watson relationship.

   The eight stories in this book are pastiches, written in Boswell’s style with the fancy of the author woven into the fabric of history. The detections take place around the 1770s, mostly in London ( “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” -S.J.), and in Bath and Stratford-onAvon. Johnson, or “Cham,” as he is sometimes called, investigates crime and chicanery, fraud and felony.

   His unique position enables him to mix with all classes of society and get involved in various events-from the soldiers’ court-martial on the greensward of Hyde Park, to the robbery of Gothic enthusiast Horace Walpole, to the espionage exploits of the female American patriot against Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne. In “The Tontine Curse,” he hears of dying children and blesses a Roman parent. The “harmless drudge” probes the pitfalls of antiquarianism and exposes forgery in “The Missing Shakespeare Manuscript.” “The Triple-Lock’ d Room” is a case of murder and theft at Boswell’s lodgings with its weird inhabitants.

   The Dr. Sam tales are scholarly and quaint and quite the best of their kind. An earlier collection is Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector (1946), and there are more to come. Most of the stories originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

      Contents:

• The Black Stone of Dr. Dee · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Feb 1948
• The Frantick Rebel · nv Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Dec 1948
• The Missing Shakespeare Manuscript · nv Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jul 1947
• Saint-Germain the Deathless · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jan 1958
• The Stroke of Thirteen · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Oct 1953
• The Tontine Curse · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jun 1948
• The Triple-Lock’d Room · nv Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jan 1952
• The Viotti Stradivarius · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Aug 1950

———
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.

ANTHONY ABBOT – About the Murder of a Startled Lady. Thatcher Colt #5. Farrar, hardcover, 1935. Avon Murder Mystery Monthly #25, digest paperback, 1944.

   Thatcher Colt, Police Commissioner of NYC, District Attorney Doughterty, and Colt secretary Tony Abbot (an actual character unlike Philo Vance’s Van Dine) are strolling casually back to their offices when a policeman shows up looking for the Commissioner. It seems the police have just busted a phony church and spiritualist scam, and the husband and wife mediums, the Reverend and Mrs. Lynn, made their phone call to call in a professor who insists they are the real thing, and something more.

   That leads to an impromptu seance with the attractive Mrs. Eve Lynn, the medium, who contacts the victim, Madeline, who tells Colt where to find her body.

   And it turns out there is a body, a woman, a woman whose body has been at the bottom of the ocean off Shadow Island, in two hundred pieces, with a bullet in her skull.

   A fair enough start for just about any mystery, and shortly they uncover the name of the victim, Madeline Swift, a solid motive, a connection of Tammany Hall (and the DA is up for reelection and owes his position to Tammany Hall), and a suspect who couldn’t look more guilty but Colt isn’t so sure.

   Anthony Abbot was noted writer Fulton Oursler (The Greatest Story Ever Told), father of pulp and mystery writer Will Oursler, and a noted literary figure of his day who famously chose his pseudonym because of its alphabetical advantages.

   His Thatcher Colt mystery novels were in the S. S. Van Dine tradition, but like Ellery Queen, and Rex Stout, he often outdid the creator of Philo Vance with Colt, based on Theodore Roosevelt, himself a former NYC Police Commissioner, being at once more believable, having a great sense of humor, and his position as Police Commissioner giving him more realistic entry into the murders he investigated.

   Most of the Colt novels are interspersed with actual touches of police procedure, here the reconstruction of the victims face from her skull, and Colt able to command his army of police and contacts around the country without the need for a DA Markham or Sgt. Heath or for that matter a policeman father.

   The books eventually came to the screen with Adolph Menjou surprisingly well cast as Colt and later Sidney Blackmer, who often played Theodore Roosevelt in films, ideal despite a much lower budget.

   Though the books never achieved the success of Van Dine, they hold up better over all, and Abbot at least never introduces the killer in the same chapter on the same page and paragraph in every book as Van Dine was apt to do.

   Though as static and talky as any mystery in the Van Dine tradition Abbot keeps things moving at a decent pace, and throws enough curves and red herrings to delight even the most hardened aficionado of the form.

   Who killed Madeline Swift, the startled lady of the title (based on the expression of the reconstructed face)? Was it the boyfriend, his forceful sister who disapproved of Madeline and her brother, the fanatic mediums using Madeline’s death to prove they are real, the Tammany Hall politician who may have been too interested in a girl the same age as his daughter, someone else?

   But prove it he will in an operating theater of a major hospital with a doozy of a final gathering of the suspects.

   These aren’t without many of the flaws of the Van Dine school, and colorful as Colt’s model may be he doesn’t always live up to him, his portrayal in many ways a collection of traits rather than personality (his sartorial splendor making Menjou a natural to play the part).

   This is mystery fiction as a game, dated in many ways, but also surprisingly modern in others (the Van Dine school was often socially conscious racially and ethnically in ways unusual for the period). I personally tend to prefer the Brits from this era to most of the Americans in the Van Dine school (Ellery Queen outgrew the Philo Vance business and Rex Stout had Archie’s hardboiled voice to appreciably change things up) including Abbot, but Colt is perhaps the most human of the Van Dine sleuths until Ellery’s humanization.

   Not that he is never high-handed, most of the great detectives on either side of the pond are high handed, but with Colt it seems to arise from the needs of the case and his position as Police Commissioner. He is the most likable of the Van Dine sleuths, as well as one of the smartest.

   There are a number of good entries in the Colt series, and they are worth reading if you like the form, Oursler is a capable writer, and not above a little theatrics to spice up the mix, and unlike Vance, no kick in the pants is needed.

RICHARD DIAMOND. “The Sport.” CBS. 15 February 1959 (Season 3, Episode 1). David Janssen (Richard Diamond), Barbara Bain (Karen Wells), Mary Tyler Moore (Sam; uncredited). Guest Cast: Ross Martin, Ed Kemmer, Irene Hervey, Mort Sahl. Written by Richard Carr, based on the character created by Blake Edwards. Directed by Alvin Ganzer. Currently available on YouTube.

   After two years of PI Richard Diamond being based in New York, this first episode of the third season has him relocated to L.A., in all likelihood hoping to pick up some of the glamour if not (hopefully) the success of another TV show taking place there, namely 77 Sunset Strip, as a prime example. He also has a luxurious place on the beach, and a telephone messaging service, that service provided by the seductive voice of Sam, never quite seen, but what is seen hints at something quite special. And so is the byplay on the phone.

   Also introduced is a girl friend for Mr. Diamond, a lovely beauty in her own right by the name of Kitty Wells (Barbara Bain). As one of several players in the episode,, we the viewer do not know that she will turn up again, but she did, making five appearances in this third season in all. (And all to the good, I’d say.)

   Adding to the special flavor of this episode are guest appearances by Ross Martin (always welcome) and Mort Sahl (even though the portion of his night club act that we are allowed to see is rather lame). And of course, David Janssen’s portrayal of a wonderfully laconic PI is, as always, spot on perfect.

   As for the story itself, I have to say it isn’t much, having to do with a missing race car driver, later found dead it what is at first assumed to be a terribly unfortunate automobile accident. Oh, well. In a PI show only thirty minutes long, you can’t have everything.