CARLETON CARPENTER – Deadhead. Curtis, paperback original; 1974. Paperback reprint: Black Walnut, 1985.

   If you were to do a search for Mr. Carpenter on the Internet, you’d find more in the movie and entertainment databases than you will regarding his writing career, which consisted of only a small handful of paperback originals. There’ll be a list of them soon, in case you’re interested.

   Before concentrating on the books, though, perhaps it suffices to say that Carleton Carpenter was a both a composer and an actor, in both the movies, on television and in Broadway musicals. One of the top musical hits of 1951 was “Aba Daba Honeymoon,” sung by Debbie Reynolds and Carleton Carpenter (from the film Two Weeks in Love). His career in the movies and on TV is summed up neatly at imdb.com (with some 42 credits as an actor).

   Here’s a list of Mr. Carpenter’s mystery fiction. As previously mentioned all of these are paperback originals. * = Chester Long mysteries. ** = billed as a Jasper Wild mystery.

   Little is known about Black Walnut Books, but they seem to have been in business only to print Mr. Carpenter’s books.

   Whether Jasper Wild appeared in any of the earlier books or was intended to be another continuing character is also unknown. It would also be interesting to learn whether the AHMM short story has either Chester Long or Jasper Wild as characters, leading or incidental. Someone with access to that issue will have to let us know.

   As you can see from the cover, Pinecastle (aka Stumped) was marketed and sold by Curtis as a gothic romance, but a quick scan through my copy indicates that the people who are in it all have a very strong theatrical background, which is not surprising.

   Chester Long is a hairdresser (straight). Jasper Wild’s occupation is unknown. Someone who has a copy of Sleight of Hand will have to let us know. If by chance he’s a magician as well as a detective, that would be worth knowing.

   As for the book at hand, Deadhead, when Chester is offered a position on the side as the head of the hairdresser crew for a musical bound for Broadway, he jumps at it. For the rest of the book he’s a fascinated observer behind the scenes, giving the reader an equally vicarious (and authentic) look at a world largely foreign to us mere mortals. Even so, as Chester admits on page 81:

   The going is as light and breezy as this for over 100 pages, chatty and gossipy in trunk loads. The murder of the show’s bizarrely flamboyant producer does not occur until page 104, which gives Chester the opportunity to show his flair as a sleuth. (Not that there’s any inkling of a previous criminous adventure. Until I checked out the bibliography, I was working under the impression that this was Chester’s first encounter with detective work.)

   With the entire company on the road and snowed in as a mammoth snowstorm hits Boston, the effect is that of an isolated country house, which means, of course, besides clues and motives, means and opportunities galore.

   And until the end, when things seem to fall apart plotwise, there would be much in the reading to recommend. While Carleton Carpenter is a story teller’s story teller, he unaccountably allows Chester’s previously mentioned flair as a sleuth to fizzle out well before the finale, all of his theories disappearing into smoke. On page 189, after the killer has been nabbed, and the case is being rehashed, Chester says:

   In any case, all I can offer for a recommendation is hemi-semi-demi-positive one. The book is worth reading for the show business element – that part is simply Grade A all the way – but as a mystery, while it has its moments, the answer, if that’s what you’re asking, is, reluctantly, no. The cast and choreography are excellent, but the book itself? Good, but not up to par. It needs some work.

THE LONE WOLF SPY HUNT. Columbia, 1939. Warren William (Michael Lanyard), Ida Lupino, Rita Hayworth, Virginia Weidler, Ralph Morgan. Screenplay by Jonathan Latimer, based on the novel Red Masquerade (Doubleday, 1921) by Louis Joseph Vance. Director: Peter Godfrey. Shown at Cinevent 26, Columbus OH, May 1994.

   Warren William is, as I have pointed out before, one of the great favorites of film convention audiences (both Cinevent and Cinefest), so his stint in The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt was eagerly awaited by the conventioneers. Well, everybody has an off day, and it appeared to me that Williams’ dapper suavity was showing its age and formulaic quality here.

   He was not helped by co-star Ida Lupino, an intelligent actress requited to throw ignored girl friend fits that were noisy but sour rather than funny or wry. Lupino was uneven as an actress, sometimes betrayed by her natural ability to command attention whatever she did, even when it seemed out of key with the movie.

   Virginia Weidler was arch as Williams’s precocious daughter (a role she patented in The Philadelphia Story), although the writer of the program notes thought her “delightful.” A reminder that not all “B” movies were little gems.
   

(Give Me That) OLD-TIME DETECTION. Issue #46. Autumn 2017. Editor: Arthur Vidro. 36 pages. Published three times a year: Spring, Summer, and Autumn. Sample copy: $6.00 in the U.S.; $10.00 anywhere else.

   The latest issue of Old-Time Detection is here, and it’s definitely worth a look, as it’s full to the brim with information and insights about detective fiction’s Golden Age (and beyond).

   J. Randolph Cox has a biographical sketch of A.E.W. Mason, remembered today more for his general fiction than his mysteries (“[In the character of Hanaud] Mason seems to have wanted to create a professional detective who was unlike Sherlock Holmes, a man who was genial and friendly and willing to trust his intuition. Hanaud is all of these but is never described explicity. He is revealed by his actions, as an actor in a play is revealed”).

   Dr. John Curran keeps us up to date with the latest doings in the ever-expanding Agatha Christie universe (“This year’s [Agatha Christie] Festival was, sadly, a disappointment”).

   Jon L. Breen offers expert opinions about authors who were hot in the early ’80s (“This is a worthy sequel because of its freshly-minted bamboozlement”).

   Francis M. Nevins gives us a fine overview of the life and times of uber-reviewer Anthony Boucher, a genius in any field he chose to explore (“At two the next morning she [Lee Wright] woke up her husband with the excited cry that she had just found the first unsolicited manuscript she ever wanted to publish”).

   Michael Dirda has recommendations for those chilly evenings when TV isn’t spooky enough (“Even if you’re snowed in for the holidays — or all of January, for that matter — these collections will keep you cozy”).

   Charles Shibuk reveals the pleasures to be found in paperback reprints (“… the best reprint period I have seen in many years”), but notes the sad decline of a detective fiction legend (“Gone is the mastery of plot and puzzle, the spinning of deceptive clues, the sharp and incisive descriptions and dialogue”).

   Dennis Drabelle highlights the late P. D. James’s short mystery fiction, something she seldom produced (“The four tales in this slim volume, then, are old-fashioned, at least up to a point: no noir, yet plenty of shadows; no explicit sex, but ample erotic tension. And James spins them with the economy demanded by the short form”).

   … and, to top it all off, editor Arthur Vidro offers up a typically fine puzzler by William Brittain originally from EQMM (“The man in the comic strip. He walked right up the alley there just when the men came out of the bank, and touched them with his electric hands. And then he took them back down the alley”).

   You can subscribe to Old-Time Detection, by contacting the editor at: Arthur Vidro, Old-Time Detection, 2 Ellery Street, Claremont, New Hampshire 03743 or oldtimedetection@netzero.net.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – The Three Coffins. Dr. Gideon Fell #6. Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1935. Published in the UK by H. Hamilton under the title The Hollow Man hardcover, 1935. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and soft.

   In this Dr. Fell novel, one of the most intricate in the series, the author loses no time in making his intentions clear. In the very first paragraph, two impossible crimes are announced: a locked-room murder and what might be called a “locked-street” murder.

   The victim in the first crime is Professor Charles Grimaud, a lecturer and writer of independent means, whose habit it is to visit a local pub every evening and hold forth to a fascinated audience on magic, the supernatural, vampirism, the Black Mass, and similar topics. One evening the professor’s lecture is interrupted by a man who identifies himself as Pierre Fley, “Illusionist.”

   Although he tries to hide the fact, the professor is terrified by Fley’s cryptically threatening remarks. Some days later, Grimaud is in his study at home when a mysterious visitor arrives, forces his way into the room, and locks the door. The door is thereafter under constant observation; the room has no other exits and no hiding places. A shot is heard, and when the door is forced, Grimaud is found alone in the room, dying of a gunshot wound. His visitor has vanished.

   On that same evening, some distance away, Fley is also shot to death. The crime takes place in the middle of an empty, snow-covered street, with watchers at either end; yet no one sees the murderer, and there are no footprints in the snow.

   It quickly develops that Grimaud and Fley shared a deadly secret, with roots going back to tum-of-the-century Hungary. This connection from the past provides the book’s title: Fley once told an acquaintance, “Three of us were once buried alive. Only one escaped.” When asked how he had escaped, he answered calmly, “I didn’t, you see. I was one of the two who did not escape.”

   It also supplies the motive for the crimes. But Fell must delve into more-modern relationships and unravel some subtle trickery in order to explain the apparently impossible circumstances of the crimes and identify the guilty. When the last piece of the puzzle has fallen into place, with an extra twist in the concluding lines of the book, Fell says, “I have committed another crime, Hadley. I have guessed the truth again.”

   Chapter 17 of the novel has become famous among mystery enthusiasts, and has been reprinted separately. It is “The Locked Room Lecture,” in which Fell systematically classifies the principal types of locked-room situations. Other writers — notably Anthony Boucher and Clayton Rawson — later added to this discussion, and many others have profited from it in constructing their own plot devices.

   This chapter also contains a comment that has disconcerted more than one reader. When Fell brings the topic of detective fiction into his analysis of impossible situations, he is asked why he does so. “‘Because,’ said the doctor frankly, ‘we’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not. Let’s not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories. Let’s candidly glory in the noblest pursuits possible to characters in a book.'”

   The device of having a character acknowledge that he is a fictional character and comment on the fact has been used more than once in “high” literature. For Carr, it was simply part of playing the game — “the grandest game in the world” — with his readers, and for those readers willing to enter into the spirit of the game, it is a clever and charming touch.

         ———
   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.

REGINALD HILL – Pictures of Perfection. Dalziel & Pascoe #14. Harper Collins, UK, hardcover, 1994. Delacorte, US, hardcover, 1994. Dell, US, paperback, 1995.

   A rather officious young polilcemann has gone missing in the Yorkshire town of Enscombe, or at least his immediate superior thinks he has. Dalziel isn’t at all sure there’s anything wrong, but nevertheless dispatches Pascoe and Sergeant Wield to check into things.

   Beneath the semi-placid surface of the village several potentially hazardous are fermenting away among the locals, the Squire and his family, and all sorts of people. The policeman is indeed missing, but the hows, whys, and wheres remain elusive.

   Reginald Hill is assured a place in my heart if for no other reason than this line referring to the 80s: “But they were not long, the days of swine and Porsches.” Priceless. Hill to my eye is one of the finest prose stylists working today in any discipline.

   He is also one of the best at delineating character. Not just his regulars — the choleric and canny Dalziel, the intense and intelligent Pascoe, the gay Sergeant with the gargoyle face Wield — but also the people into whose lives they are thrust.

   Wield somewhat takes center stage here, thous as usual Hill tells his story from many viewpoints. The book begins with a man running amok with a gun, and ends in a way that I think will surprise you. Hill certainly intends for it to, anyway.

LONG LOST FATHER. RKO, 1934.John Barrymore, Helen Chandler, Donald Cook, Alan Mowbray and E. E. Clive. Screenplay by Dwight Taylor from the novel by G. B. Stern. Produced by Merion C. Cooper. Directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack.

   A deft mix of comedy and drama from the folks who brought us King Kong, this looks to have slipped in under the wire before the Hays Code gripped Hollywood. In fact, there’s a shower scene that mocks the permissiveness of pre-code Hollywood… but I’m getting off the subject before I even start.

   We start with John Barrymore running a fashionable London night spot, and solely responsible for its success as he charms the patrons (and the viewer) with his easy manner and Dwight Taylor’s quips.

   Dwight Taylor, by the way, was a writer of considerable range, with films like Top Hat, Conflict and Pickup on South Street to his credit, and he provides Long Lost Father with crime and comedy in equal measure. We’re not long into the film before an ex-con from Barrymore’s past (E.E. Clive, pleasingly roguish here) shows up looking for a job, and right on his heels a Scotland Yard Detective (Claude King) looking into a con game they once worked in Australia.

   And the twists keep turning. Barrymore has an unpleasant encounter with the daughter (Helen Chandler) he abandoned years before, finding her predictably hostile and possessed of the same wild streak that set him wandering way back when. And right after that, his obtuse employer (the redoubtable Alan Mowbray, essaying a cockney accent for a change, and doing quite well by it) insists that Ms. Chandler’s song-and-dance act is just what they need to liven things up at the club.

   So we get John Barrymore roped into a relationship with a daughter who reminds him too much of himself, and trying not to get roped by Scotland Yard, all this conveyed with a mix of wit and drama perfectly played by the principals.

   Those who only know Helen Chandler from Dracula (1931) are in for a pleasant surprise here. Ms. Chandler was a star on Broadway, as was Barrymore, and she plays off him perfectly, with the spirit and comic timing of Carol Lombard or Jean Arthur.

   Getting back to the plot, it’s wrapped up very neatly as Ms. Chandler gets in serious trouble and Barrymore and Clive must resort to their old scam and still try to keep out of jail. Watching them work it is like watching a very fine dancer pick up the tempo in a complex series of steps that could take your breath away. Catch this if you can.

8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE. TriStar Pictures, 1986. Jeff Bridges (Matt Scudder), Rosanna Arquette, Alexandra Paul, Randy Brooks, Andy Garcia. Based on the novel Eight Million Ways to Die, by Lawrence Block (Arbor House, 1982), and in part on A Stab in the Dark (Arbor House, 1982). Director: Hal Ashby.

   Hal Ashby’s 8 Million Ways to Die seems like it was doomed from the start. As Ashby was struggling to make a Hollywood comeback, he was faced with producers who apparently didn’t appreciate the type of film he was trying to make and didn’t allow him to work on editing his own film. (Ashby had previously been a stellar editor before becoming an auteur director in the 1970s.) Worse still, the production, which adapts Lawrence Block’s eponymous novel to film, shifts the story’s locale from New York to Los Angeles and turns Scudder, Block’s fictional ex-cop turned unlicensed PI, into a quasi-Southern California surfer dude who says “man” a lot.

   That’s not to say that the film doesn’t have some great moments. There’s a real genuine sense of location, an aesthetic sensibility that permeates the film: the seedier side of Los Angeles in the mid-1980s. It’s a land of palm trees and sunshine, of high priced call girls and cocaine and alcohol. And that’s where Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Matt Scudder (Jeff Bridges) lives. He’s an alcoholic who has lost it all, his wife, his house, and his kid. As he struggles to rebuild his shattered life, he becomes caught up in what he thinks is a dispute between a call girl and her pimp. Little does he know that he’s somehow stumbled upon a giant cocaine operation run by the eccentric and brutal Angel Moldonado (Andy Garcia) who struts around like a walk on villain in a Miami Vice episode.

   But as a coherent whole, 8 Million Ways to Die doesn’t work in the way it was likely intended. It tries to be a crime drama and a romance and, most importantly, a study of a man trying to rebuild his shattered life in the midst of chaos. Maybe it was the producers, maybe it was the three screenwriters, maybe it was even Ashby who was rumored to have been a cocaine addict himself in the 1980s.

   Whatever the case, this crime film never ends up feeling particular cinematic. It’s more akin to a moderately watchable made-for-cable TV movie than a feature release. Perhaps that’s why it fared so poorly at the box office.

DONALD BARR CHIDSEY “Flight to Singapore.” Short novel. Argosy, 3 August 1940. Available online here.

   Pick up any issue of the major pulps like Adventure, Argosy, Blue Book, Popular, or the like and you could be guaranteed to find at least one stem winder of a story inside, that would at least have made a first rate B-film and maybe more.

   The names that graced those pages include the famous of course like Burroughs, Brand, Merritt, Woolrich, Mundy, Lamb, and such, but also half-forgotten names that once guaranteed a headlong tale well told and usually much more, names like Robert Carse, Georges Surdez, H. Bedford-Jones, George F. Worts, Gordon Young, and the prolific and popular Donald Barr Chidsey.

   Some, like Chidsey, Carse, and Surdez even had post-pulp careers in hardcover for a time, but it is their pulp work that resonates today.

   The story “Flight to Singapore” by Donald Barr Chidsey, is one of those tales, one in a series about Prince Mike of Kammorirri and his bodyguard/pal George Marlin, who finds himself a beat cop and insurance tec now Captain of the Guard, Chief of Police, and head of the Army of the small principality of Kammorirri in Southeast Asia, where Prince Mike’s father, the Sultan, fights to keep his little nation free of being “protected” by the Western powers by keeping almost all contact with the outside world at bay.

   Not an easy task when his heir and pride is Prince Mikuud, Phni Luangha, late of Princeton, a most modern young man who flies his own plane and fights his own fights with the help of his friend George Marlin, who struggles to call him Your Highness when they visit the outside world.

   It starts as George is escorting a rare wanted visitor out of the country and encounters an eager missionary, a type the Sultan especially loathes, but in the pulp world these things can move fast and soon the “Missionary” has drawn a gun and had it shot out of his hand by George and the jungle is hot with gunfire.

   Three men, Langford (the phony Missionary), Kelt (the pilot), and a brutal Australian named Claessens, have found rubies in Kammorirri, the last thing the Sultan needs as the palace drips of them and such treasure would inevitably be an invitation by some Western nation to protect the hell out of the small principality.

   How Prince Mike, with George Marlin’s fast gun and fists, outwits the bad guys, avoids the crisis in treasure by convincing the outside world the rubies are worthless, and cleans up the mess is the crux of a fast moving and entertainingly told tale that encompasses pitched jungle battles, fancy flying, lost temples, well meaning Europeans who have to be protected and held at bay, and just about everything but a romantic interest.

   I don’t know how many of these Chidsey wrote. I do know of at least one other, that being “Run, Tiger!” which appeared in the August 9, 1941 issue of Argosy, and there may be more. “Flight to Singapore” is an entertaining take on the Westernized modern Asian trope that had begun appearing alongside the Yellow Peril several decades earlier, where Number 1 Son and Mr. Moto are both the lead and the brains of the operation, and the plot and action move along at a pace and in high style.

   It’s a shame Prince Mike and George Marlin never got a full length novel adventure. One was well deserved.

CHRISTOPHER FOWLER – Bryant & May: Wild Chamber. Bryant & May #14. Bantam, US, hardcover, December 2017.

First Sentence: On a desolate rain-battered London midnight, the members of the Peculiar Crimes Unit went looking for a killer.

   London has many private gardens, accessible only to the residents who live around them. The gardener also has a key but doesn’t expect to find the body of a woman who’d taken her dog for a walk. She has been strangled and neatly laid out on the path, her dog missing, and the garden locked before the gardener’s arrival. A second such body is found in a public park. At risk are more murders, the city’s parks being closed to the public, and the PUC disbanded. The clock is ticking.

   An aerial chase, a traffic jam, a boy’s death and a man whose life implodes. This is an opening which catches one’s attention.

   That Fowler uses a memo to provide a cast of characters is both helpful and clever. That the list includes “Crippen, staff cat,” and the subsequent memo brings readers up to date on the situation at the aptly-named Peculiar Crimes Unit truly sets the tone for what follows. Fowler’s books are not one’s normal police procedural, as the characters, particularly those of Arthur Bryant and John May, are anything but what one would normally find. Fowler gives us something unique with present day crimes overlain with an education into obscure historical facts and writing which increases one’s vocabulary. But never fear; this book is anything but dry or boring.

   Fowler is skilled at juxtaposing historic London over that of the present day in a way that contributes to the plot. Part of that is an explanation as to how Bryant became a detective. Fowler creates evocative descriptions— “The wind was high in the trees, breathing secrets through the branches.” —and observations— “Looking down on King’s Cross you’d have noticed an odd phenomenon: Every other roof was covered in white frost, forming a patchwork quilt, an indicator of which properties were owned by overseas investors and which had warm families inside.” But yes, unfortunately, there are also quite a few completely unnecessarily portents.

   It is hard to say which is more enjoyable; the cast of strange and fascinating characters of Bryant’s acquaintance, the vast abundance of arcane and historical information — who knew it was Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan, who wrote the music to “Onward Christian Soldiers”? — the members of the PUC itself, of the plot which brings all these facets together into a perfect gem of a book with a well-done plot twist. We are even given a definition as to what is a murder mystery— “’A murder mystery,’ she told Bryant, ‘is an intellectual exercise, a game between reader and writer in which a problem is precisely stated, elaborately described, and surprisingly solved.’” —and Fowler does just that.

   Bryant & May: Wild Chamber is a murder mystery in the best sense. All the clues are given, if we but see them. The best part of the book is the very last line, but that everyone will have to read for themselves.

       The Bryant and May series —

1. Full Dark House (2003)

2. The Water Room (2004)
3. Seventy-Seven Clocks (2005)
4. Ten Second Staircase (2006)
5. White Corridor (2007)

6. The Victoria Vanishes (2008)
7. On the Loose (2009)
8. Off the Rails (2010)
9. The Memory of Blood (2011)
10. The Invisible Code (2012)
11. The Bleeding Heart (2012)
12. The Burning Man (2015)

13. Strange Tide (2016)
14. Wild Chamber (2017)
15. Hall of Mirrors (2018)

RICHARD WORMSER – The Body Looks Familiar. Dell First Edition A156; paperback original; 1st printing, March 1958. A shorter version previously appeared in the September 1957 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine as “The Frame.” Also: Stark House Press, trade paperback, 2017, combined with The Late Mrs. Five, also by Wormser; introduction by Bill Crider.

   After reading I don’t know how many thousands of mystery novels in my lifetime, it seems strange to say this, but all of them have been different in some way from the others. Sometimes in very minor ways, sometimes more. Sometimes a lot more. Like this one.

   In fact, I’m inclined to say that the story line in this one is unique. Absolutely. You can tell me if I’m wrong or not by keeping on reading.

   The problem is, if I tell you what the story line is, it may tell you more than you want to know. For once, the blurbs inside the front cover and on the back cover are rather vague about it. On the other hand, the factor that makes it unique takes place in Chapter One, so if you were to start reading the book yourself, you’d find out soon enough anyway.

   But maybe you’d like to learn what it is that I’m talking about on your own. Hence the following

          SPOILER ALERT

   Reading any further will reveal essential plot elements that you may not wish to know about in advance.

   What happens in Chapter One? Well, now I’ll tell you. The assistant D.A. for an unnamed city kills the mistress girl friend of the city’s chief of police in the apartment he keeps for her and frames the murder on him. He shoots her right in front of him, taking the chief’s gun away from him by surprise and using it for the deed.

   What’s his motive? Revenge. James Latson, fast on his feet both in the political arena as well as in the bedroom, had taken Dave Corday’s wife away from him. She later committed suicide when she was dumped by Latson, and Corday could not bear the shame of taking her back.

   Whew! With an opening like that, you (the reader) have no way of knowing which way the story is going from there. Of course you’ve got to believe that Corday’s plan has any chance at all of working, and Richard Wormser as the author has his job cut out for him.

   For the most part he’s up to the task, but I have to admit that reading this particular work of crime fiction was like reading a science fiction novel, one for which the “willing suspension of disbelief” is a required element of what the reader has to bring along to the task.

   It’s not a classic, far from it, but it’s not as though reading this book really was a task. It only took a very enjoyable couple of hours, mostly spent in guessing which way the story was going to go next — and usually being wrong about it.

   Richard Wormser, by the way, was born in 1908 and wrote a couple of hardcover detective novels in the mid-1930s before switching to writing for the pulps and slick magazines through the 1940s. Westerns, adventure, mysteries, the whole gamut.

   Mostly he’s remembered, if at all, for the paperback originals, including movie tie-in’s, he did from the late 1950s on to early 1970s. He died in 1977.

[FOOTNOTE] Also shown are the covers for:

The Communist’s Corpse. Smith & Haas, hc, 1935. Series character: Sgt. Jocelyn “Joe” Dixon.

Argosy. April 6, 1940. Includes the story “Detour, Mr. Darwin,” by Richard Wormser. (His name should be discernible in the upper right corner.)

[UPDATE.]   This review was first posted on this blog on November 18, 2008. I’ve reposted it without any changes except for the information about the recent Stark House reprint. I started reading it today, and I said to myself, “This sounds familiar.” It was.