THE THIRD ALIBI. Grand National Pictures, UK, 1961. NBC, US, TV airing, 1961. Laurence Payne, Patricia Dainton, Jane Griffiths, Edward Underdown, John Arnatt, Cleo Laine. Director: Montgomery Tully. Available on YouTube here.

   A mildly interesting crime thriller that tries hard but doesn’t quite have the oomph to follow through. As the title I am sure suggests, it all revolves about a killer (musical composer Norman Martell whose wife Helen won’t give him a divorce) whose plan includes setting up alibis for both himself and his lover (Helen’s half-sister Peggy Hill) as the deed is done.

   As chance would have it, he can’t pull off the deed. Dead instead is his lover, and what good is an alibi when the wrong woman is dead? The pace is fine – the movie is both short and breezily told – but I’m not sure I understood one of the would-be alibis, and the ending is telegraphed well in advance, which is always a problem when there’s no enough time to pad the story a lot more.

   All of the players were new to me – other than singer Cleo Laine who has one nightclub scene on stage all to herself – but they were all fine in their roles. It was the story that let them down.  If I were to rate this one, I’d give it two stars out of four, but since I don’t do that any more, I won’t.

IF SCIENCE FICTION December 1966. Cover by Jack Gaughan. Overall rating: 3½ stars.

ALGIS BUDRYS “Be Merry.” Novelette. The survivors of the wreck of the Klarri spaceship had brought disease and plague to Earth, but they too were victims of terrestrial sickness. One small settlement finds a cure, but one they are ashamed of. Excellent story spoiled by an over-literary style, delighting in obscurity. (4)

DURANT IMBODEN “The Thousandth Birthday Party.” At age 1000, each person has one chance in 5000 for immortality. (3)

NEAL BARRETT, JR. “Starpath.” Novelette. After a promising beginning, in which the operation of the instant matter transmitter is described, the story ends as a routine tale of war. (2)

LARRY NIVEN “A Relic of the Empire.” Novelette. A xenobiologist learns the location of the puppeteers’ system by using local plant life to defeat a pirate crew. An episode only. (3)

BOB SHAW “Call Me Dumbo.” Novelette. A woman learns the secret of her drugged existence and neatly fails her “husband.” Two men shipwrecked alone on a planet can carry on the race. (4)

ANDREW J. OFFUTT “The Forgotten Gods of Earth.” Kymon of Kir frees the Princess Yasim from the sorcerer Gundrun. (3)

J. T. McINTOSH “Snow White and the Giant.” Serial, part 3 of 4. See report following the January 1967 issue.

MICHAEL COLLINS – Act of Fear. PI Dan Fortune #1. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1967. Bantam H4369, paperback, 1969. Playboy Press, paperback, 1980.

   Dennis Lynds, using the name Michael Collins, is writing one of the very best of the contemporary private-eye series. All the novels under the Collins name feature Dan Fortune, a one-armed detective who operates out of the Chelsea district of New York City. Fortune’s handicap sets him apart and makes him vulnerable; he is also introspective and compassionate, a believer in absolute truth, a man who is driven to find the answers. Act of Fear, Fortune’s first novel-length case, won an Edgar for Best First Mystery of the year.

   Act of Fear begins, like many mystery novels, with a missing person. Fortune is hired by a young man to find a missing friend. Apparently the friend has good reason to be missing, and Fortune soon discovers that he is not the only one looking. The elements of the case include the mugging of a cop, two murders, and the savage beating of Fortune’s client. The plotting, as in all the Collins books, is intricate, with Fortune following an the threads to their sometimes frayed ends. His fee for the entire case is $50; he spends much more than that in solving it, but once he is involved, he has to find out the truth.

   As usual in Collins’ work, the book has a serious theme, in this case the difficulty of being true to oneself no matter what the consequences. It would be difficult to say that the ending is satisfying, but it is “right” in the sense that it is the only ending appropriate for the story that Collins tells.

     ———
   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.

   Back when the Bee Gees were recording hit after hit, I was never particularly a fan, but when I recently found an acoustic version of this song on YouTube, it knocked my socks off.
   

JEROME DOOLITTLE – Kill Story. Tom Bethany #6. Pocket Books, hardcover, 1995; paperback, 1996.

   Doolittle had told me in a letter that this was going to be called Spread Eagle. but said at EyeCon that Pocket Books had decided the original title might be offensive. He didn’t really understand why, and neither do I. Oh, well.

   Tom Bethany lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and makes his living doing … well, sort of whatever comes to hand. He’s managed to extract himself from all the databases most of us are in, and officially he doesn’t really exist But he’s real, and an old friend asks for his help when one of her old friends is found dead, an apparent suicide.

   She’s not sure it is, but if it was feels the woman was driven to it by the newspaper publishing baron who bought her newspaper, and then fired many of her old friends. The man is known as “the Cobra” in the business, and not because of his looks. Bethany doesn’t know if there’s anything there, but a friend’s a friend and he agrees to poke around in the rubble.

   I think Doolittle is one of consistently best storytellers in the business. Sometimes his plots requite a little suspension of disbelief, but never more than I’ve been able to handle. Bethany, the ex-college wrestler and ex-government pilot in Southeast Asia, is simply a tremendously appealing (and irreverent) character. The first person narration is smooth and witty, but not burdened with a wisecrack every other sentence.

   Doolittle’s books are not “heavy,” and are notably free of angst. What they are is entertaining, and readable, and very much worth your time and mine.

   
      The Tom Bethany series —

1. Body Scissors (1990)
2. Strangle Hold (1991)

3. Bear Hug (1992)
4. Head Lock (1993)

5. Half Nelson (1994)
6. Kill Story (1995)

CIPHER BUREAU. Grand National Pictures, 1938. Leon Ames, Charlotte Wynters, Joan Woodbury. Don Dillaway, Gustav von Seyffertitz, Tenen Holtz. Directed by Charles Lamont. Available for viewing on YouTube here.

   Joan Woodbury as a foreign spy?!? Tell me, Maury, that it isn’t so. But even if true – and that’s a big if – she’s as beautiful as ever. And do you know? With the hint of an exotic foreign accent, maybe she should have been cast as a beautiful foreign spy in the movies more often. (And who knows, maybe she was. I haven’t watched all of her movies yet.)

   I didn’t happen to catch what country the bad guys were working for, or what the plans they are trying to steal are all about. Just that they are important plans, and do you know, that’s all we really need to know.

   The real reason this movie may have been made, though, and I’m just guessing, is to show the movie-going public back in 1938 what governmental code breaking is all about. Or at least what Hollywood thought it was all about back in 1938, with letters in a message called out by one person in the Cipher Bureau, while another uses a chalkboard to keep  a tally on how many times each letter is used.

   To be honest, some other techniques are used, but they’re never really explained, not really, which makes it seem as though the head of the bureau. Major Waring (Leon Ames) is relying on hunches and guess work as much as anything else.

   There are a couple of semi-romantic subplots, and the major’s obsession with the work at hand only results on his brother getting kicked out of the Navy, a fact that the script seems to take in stride, as he is soon back in good graces again.

   Even though the movie drags a lot (that is to say, it is rather dull) it was successful enough to produce a sequel, Panama Patrol (1939), starring both Leon Ames and Charlotte Wynters as his faithful secretary, Helen Lane.

KENNETH ROBESON – The Man of Bronze. Doc Savage #1. Bantam E2853, paperback, 1964. First published in Doc Savage Magazine, March 1933.

   Doc Savage avenges the death of his father and obtains a fortune in Mayan gold to continue his fabulous adventures in [what was] the first of his magazine tales. After being attacked in his New York [City] skyscraper laboratory, Doc and his crew of five fly to Hidalgo in Central America to investigate the land left to him there by his father.

   Hidden deep in the interior they find a golden pyramid guarded by the descendants of the ancient Mayan civilization. The killer of Doc’s father is the leader of those who would obtain the gold for themselves.

   Enormous improvements could be made in the writing style. Short sentences and shorter paragraphs prevail, slowing the reading pace. The continuity of the story itself is logical, although burdened with many fight, capture, and escape scenes, Excessive repetition of facts concerning the six men and incongruous metaphors and expression are annoying. As for Doc Savage, he must have been one of the first supermen. His popularity when he first appeared is quite understandable.

Rating: 2 stars

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. (Dorothy Parker)

PETER ENFANTINO & JEFF VORZIMMER – The MANHUNT Companion. Stark House Press, softcover, March 2021.

   During the early 1950’s there was a science fiction magazine boom which saw dozens of titles published, most of them to eventually die, only to be remembered by obsessive collectors. Yes, I am one of those bibliomaniacs who collect such magazines. We sometimes forget that there was also a crime fiction magazine boom which started with the publication of Manhunt in 1953. This magazine was such a best seller that dozens of imitators appeared during the 1950’s and 1960’s.

   These magazines are rare and expensive nowadays but I have managed to track down most of the Manhunt imitators with titles such as Guilty, Trapped, Off Beat, Pursuit, Homicide, Justice, etc. It’s still possible to put together a set of Manhunt without robbing a bank because so many copies were printed and the magazine had the reputation of being the best of the hard boiled crime fiction magazines.

   In fact, a decade ago, I wrote of my adventures collecting Manhunt and describing how I managed to find 39 of the 114 issues during one weekend at the Windy City Pulp convention. Here is the link to the article. Unlike the imitators, the prices were reasonable and I spent only $8 to $11 for each copy.

   I have spent decades reading and collecting the magazine and have put together more than one complete set as I traded off sets due to temporary insanity. I have come a long way from my teenage years when I had to make a choice between buying SF magazines and buying crime fiction titles. My allowance only went so far back then. But now we live in a golden age with stimulus checks raining down on us. If you don’t want to spend your checks on food and paying bills, then you can buy books and back issues of magazines!

   However, maybe you are not a magazine collector and don’t want to fill your house with thousands of pulps, slicks, digests, paperbacks. Maybe you don’t want to drive your non-collecting spouse crazy. Maybe you don’t want to add another hard boiled addiction to your drugs of choice like alcohol, drugs, gambling, chasing women. Then you are in luck because Stark House Press has already reprinted the best Manhunt stories in two volumes titled The Best Of Manhunt and The Best Of Manhunt, Volume Two.

   Now we have the third Stark House volume dealing with Manhunt, and it is titled The Manhunt Companion. A great magazine deserves a great companion and fellow book lovers, this is it! Over 400 pages and the price is $19.95. The book starts off with an eight page history of the magazine, including the infamous court case charging Manhunt with being lewd and obscene.

   This is followed by almost 300 pages discussing every story in every issue, all 114 issues. Each story is rated on a 4 star system, with the best fiction receiving 3 or 4 stars. The word count is also listed followed by a summary and discussion of each story. At the end of each year, there is a list of the best stories.

   Then follows over 100 pages indexing every story, article, and author, including pseudonyms. There also is an alphabetical index by series and a listing of the TV episodes based on Manhunt stories.

   If you read or collect Manhunt, this is a must buy. We must support this effort and encourage Stark House. Perhaps Peter Enfantino and Jeff Vorzimmer can be convinced to edit a collection of the Manhunt imitators and another companion, only this time on the other crime fiction magazines!

LIGHTNIN’ BILL CARSON. Puritan, 1936. Tim McCoy, Lois January, Rex Lease, Harry Worth, Karl Hackett, John Merton, Lafe McKee, and Ed Cobb. Written by George Arthur Durlam and Joseph O’Donnell. Directed by Sam Newfield.  Available on YouTube here.

   A real cheapie from the brother-act of producer Sigmond Neufeld and director Sam Newfield, just before they settled in at PRC. But this one has a little something extra.

   Not much, mind you, but a little. Lightnin’ Bill Carson still bears all the earmarks of desperate penury: bad-script, bad acting, shoddy sets and slip-shod continuity. The dross is leavened somewhat by the assured presence of Col. Tim McCoy, and a bit of imaginative nomenclature: at various times, McCoy’s Lightnin’ Bill Carson comes up against the colorfully-monickered likes of Silent Tom Rand, “Stack” Stone, Breed Hawkins, and the Pecos Kid, played by veterans John Merton, Harry Worth and Rex Lease with easy familiarity.

   The plot, if you can call it that, undulates loosely around lawman Lightnin’ Bill and his uneasy relationship with an unlucky gambler called the Pecos Kid (Rex Lease.) When the townsfolk of San Jacinto call on the services of Lightnin’ Bill, he arrives to find Pecos already in the employ of local dress-heavy “Stack” Stone (Karl Hackett) who maintains a cottage industry of robbing stagecoaches.

   It all plays out as expected, but scenarists Durlam and O’Donnell ring in some disquieting elements, starting with a frontier Cassandra (Lois January) who sees Death in the cards — she can’t say whose, but Pecos keeps turning up the Ace of Spades. Later on, an honest, upright Sheriff lynches an innocent man, a solid citizen goes on a killing spree, and our hero must set things right in a final shoot-out that seems more like a ritual killing.

   I’m not going to make any big claims for Lightnin’ Bill Carson. Fans of old cheap Westerns will enjoy it, others will wonder why. But the glimmers of thoughtful writing that peek through the sagebrush fascinate me.