CHARLES WILLIAMS – Shadows of Ecstasy. Victor Gollancz, UK, hardcover, 1933. Pelligrini & Cudahy, US, hardcover, 1950. Reprinted several times in both hardcover and paperback. Available online at Project Gutenberg Australia.

   There once was a small gathering of friends, sometimes two, sometimes three, at a public house in Oxford. The three men called themselves The Inklings because they were all writers. Two of them were Oxford dons at one of the colleges that compose that ancient institution: a Catholic scholar in ancient tongues and elder sagas who would pen one of the great children’s books of the 20th Century and go on to create a literary phenomena, a trilogy that would become one of the cultural icons of the 1960’s and remain one of the world’s most read and loved volumes.

   The other don was no less successful; his conversion to Christianity would make him one of the most famous Christian apologists of his era, and he would pen a trilogy of science fiction novels that helped, along with writers like Kingsley Amis and Aldous Huxley, to drag that genre kicking and screaming out of the pulps into the literary light. His tragic late marriage would become one of the great love stories and inspire one of the key works on grief, and a series of children’s allegorical tales about a place called Narnia would become among the best loved stories in the world.

   Those names you know well, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, yet the third member is not so well known today despite the fact that at that time he was far and away the most famous member of that group: poet, playwright, lecturer, radio personality, leading Christian apologist, and bestselling novelist, Charles Williams.

   Williams was the brightest star of the Inklings. He and Tolkien quietly clashed and were held together by Lewis. Tolkien, a Catholic did not agree with Williams’ Anglican views of faith, and probably resented his hold on Lewis, himself a late convert to the Church of England. Nor was Williams a particularly donnish or quiet sort. To the contrary it is difficult to imagine him in that sedate literary trio.

   No one reads Williams’ poetry much today and his plays go unproduced, but his novels are kept in print, and while not as famous or widely read as those of his fellow Inklings, they have not suffered complete obscurity. But they lack the timeless setting of Lewis’s Perelandra and Narnia and of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Instead they are allegorical thrillers, a sometimes confusing mix of those two great friends P. G. Wodehouse and Sax Rohmer (they were clerks at the same bank in Egypt and remained life long friends and literary supporters) though his writing style is closer to the Huxley of the thirties or early Durrell.

   Christian thrillers are in vogue today, but don’t confuse them with Williams. These poorly written examples of bad pulp, intolerance, and simple-minded theology are no kin to Williams witty, deep novels of soaring imagination, vision, and ageless questions.

   The best of his works is All Hallows Eve, a novel about two people suspended between life and death in shadowy ghost of London unseen by the living around them. Here though we are concerned with one of the thrillers, Shadows Of Ecstasy, which spins a threat that would daunt James Bond, and a villain —- well, is he a villain? — you’ll have to decide for yourself: is he the Antichrist as vicar Ian Caithness holds, a hypnotic power mad genius as agnostic Sir Bernard Travers suspects (Travers and Caithness are best friends — the vicar can’t stand other people’s dogma and Travers has none), or is poet Roger Ingram right, is Nigel Considine’s blinding star to be followed at whatever cost?

   Three main plot-lines tie these people and events together: in London a wealthy Jewish collector of rare gems has committed suicide shortly after a visit from Considine and left his collection, including the holy Jewels of Messia, to two relatives who plan to transport part of the collection to the temple in Jerusalem where it belongs; in Africa there are uprisings and unrest, the colonial forces are in retreat, and someone calling himself the High Executive proclaims the day of the European way is ended and a great force is rising from the past to conquer the world with love, but not without bloodshed and the threat of invasion from the great black masses,” the great age of intellect is done.”

   Meanwhile Roger, Travers, and Caithness have befriended a young black man, Inkamasi, they saved from an ugly English mob only to find he is the charming and well educated traditional king of the Zulu nation, descendent of Shaka, and exiled like the hero of Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. He is also key to Nigel Considine’s plans, a king must die.

   And in London the black people are rising, the secret army of the High Executive, “ Daughters and Sons of Africa, you are called to the everlasting sacrifice.” Soon bombs fall from above, or so the populace believes, and the streets are filled with angry mobs attacking innocent blacks, Jews, and Indians. Williams is no racist; even if his views are dated, there are few demeaning stereotypes. Far and away his greatest wrath is aimed at the English mobs destroying their own city, unknowingly doing the High Executive’s bidding, he isn’t too keen on the government either.

   Is Considine the High Executive? When Travers finds a family photo of Considine taken with his grandfather by Travers as a child in 1883 he realizes Considine would have to be over a hundred years old, and Inkamasi knows him from earliest childhood as the Deathless One.

   Rounding out the cast are the male and female ingenues: Travers’ son Philip, a soldier on leave, and his fiance Rosamund, a beautiful and rather shallow young woman whom Travers has little use for, and who has the thankless job of representing the prejudice and blindness of the average upper middle class Englishwoman or man; two of Considine’s disciples. the Devotees: Nielson, the German who is ready to die and rise again, the final step in achieving the highest order of immortality, and Mottreaux, the Frenchman and Considine’s right hand man.

   Finally there is Roger’s wife Isobel, beautiful, wise, loving, and far and away the sanest person in the book. Even in Considine’s opinion, she is Roger’s anchor to sanity as the world spins into madness, and if you are wondering just who the hero of this book is, the character closest to truth let me point out again Roger is a poet with a rather sardonic tongue, just like the author: “I think you dare encounter darkness.” Considine tells him.

   Granted this is complex and confusing, and Williams, while highly literate and capable of spinning lyrical sentences and witty rapport is not an easy writer, especially for readers used to today’s choppy one-sentence paragraphs. Williams never saw a complex sentence or long paragraph he didn’t like and the book seems longer than it actually is because you have to think while you read.

   Don’t be fooled though, this is compelling page-turning reading, your imagination and intellect kept reeling and your faith or lack of it challenged. This isn’t Narnia, though I suspect Williams’ The Place of the Lion inspired Lewis Aslan.

   I used a key word earlier in relation to Considine, “disciples,” because it soon becomes clear what the allegory is here, and Williams never clearly establishes if Considine reaches too far or fails because of hubris, but the point of the allegory is made pretty clearly when Considine fails to raise Nielson from the dead and is struck down by the bullet of a greedy traitor, who covets the Jewels of Messia, at his moment of triumph:

   Who is Considine, a secular second savior, a super criminal worthy of and far more nuanced than Fu Manchu, the Antichrist, or something of all three? At several points Milton and Paradise Lost are invoked but no one quite makes the connection. In the end there are no easy answers, and this thriller bears on its shoulders a greater weight than mere conspiracy and world conquests. Roger and the reader are left wondering, pondering.

DAVID V. REED – The Thing That Made Love. Unibook #15, digest-sized paperback, 1951. Originally published as “The Metal Monster Murders” in Mammoth Detective, November 1944. Also published as I Thought I’d Die: Green Dragon #23, digest-sized paperback, 1946.

   I owe Bill Crider a debt of gratitude for cluing me into this book (follow the link and click on the back cover), and the miracle of the Internet for making it easy to find, for despite the trashy cover, this is a thoughtful story and one that will surprise you — even if you know a surprise is coming.

   The story here involves yet another mysterious and predatory thing lurking in a swamp, but unlike the pesky critter in Night of the Black Horror, this one is less tangible and more cerebral — they might even have titled it The Thing that Quoted Whitman, though that mightn’t have helped sales much.

   At any rate, the creature inhabits Jamaica Bay, New York, and as the story starts, it has established contact with a writer named Jim Shilling and is just beginning to exert its diabolical influence on Shilling’s journalist friend, Elliott Hammond.

   Here’s where things get tricky. Increasingly alarmed by the Thing and its growing power over him, Hammond relates events to a fantasy-writer friend of his, author David V. Reed. In fact, the novel is laid out as Reed’s collection of pages from Hammond’s journal, mixed in with newspaper clippings, interviews with Hammond’s psychiatrist and sundry input from various other interested parties.

   The multiple viewpoints, many of them first-person, could easily have become confusing, but Reed keeps it all running smoothly and clearly… and with increasingly ominous notes as the Thing begins to extend its control over Shilling and Hammond and young women start turning up dead — each with an unexplained look of ecstasy on her face. At length they work up a scheme to destroy the Thing, but it may be too late as Hammond finds himself more and more living in a world of hallucination and horror….

   I won’t reveal too much more here except to say that author Reed rings in a surprise I found truly ingenious. He also throws in references to fellow-writer John Broome and the Continental Op, making this book a sneaky treat for fans of comic books (Reed wrote memorably for Batman in the 50s and 70s, and Broome brought the silver-age Flash into four-color stardom in the 1960s.) and lovers of Hammett’s pulp classics.

   And for me there was an added and very personal pleasure: Reed created a character just exactly like a guy I once arrested, and I mean to say the parallels left me gasping with surprised recognition.

   In short, this is a gem one wouldn’t expect to find behind that lurid cover and trashy title, and a genuine treat in my Halloween bag.

T. J. BINYON – Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction. Oxford University Press, hardcover, 1989; softcover, 1990.

   Though I find it both distressing and difficult, I will refrain, for the most part, from criticizing Mr. Binyon’s book on the basis of what I would have written had I not been incompetent and indolent and had I written a reference work of this sort.

   Mr. Binyon’s intent — he achieves his goal — is to present a selective history not of the genre but of the genre’s principal character: the detective. He posits three main classes:

   Under the Professional Amateur, Mr. Binyon subdivides by various categories: Sherlock Holmes and the Magazine Short Story, Holmes’s First Successors, Dr. Thorndyke, Law, Medicine, Journalism, The Private Detective: 1920 to the Present, The Private Eye from Williams to Warshawski, etc.

   For the Amateur Amateur, there are such classifications as Priests, Missionaries, and Rabbis, The Theatre, Husbands and Wives, and Finance. Within the Police category can be found Inspector French, Younger Policemen, More Cultured Policemen, and the Amateur Professional.

   In his necessarily subjective judgments for placement in the various categories, I found nothing with which to argue. Quibble, yes, that goes without saying. Of course, I did take issue with some of his judgments about quality. For example, Mr. Binyon finds Nancy Spain’s novels quite amusing, where-as I have never detected any humor in them.

   Most shocking to my mind, he gives the Lockridges’ Mr. and Mrs. North novels short shrift. When Mr. Binyon prefers Lynn Brock’s Colonel Gore over Philip MacDonald’s Col. Anthony Gethryn, one can but gape. Judging Ellery Queen, as he appears to do, on the first dozen books isn’t quite fair play.

   Still, if there is a weakness in the book, which there isn’t, it is that in many cases Mr. Binyon mentions a book or a series but fails to make a judgment, even misguided, on quality.

   For errors, I noted but two: Erle Stanley Gardner’s first name is spelled Earle the two times it is used. Sara Woods’s Antony Maitland is said to have a game leg rather than a bad right arm. Of course, there’s the curious sentence, probably the handiwork of a clumsy copy editor, that ! took some while to figure out- as you know, I’m a bit slow: “After Priestly the curious view — implicit in both Futrelle’s stories and Rhode’s early books — that logic is the prerogative of the scientist’s lapses….” Well, I guess I figured it out.

   Writing about the Amateur Amateur, Mr. Binyon says he “is usually as amiable — and occasionally appears as foolish — as [Bertie] Wooster; but the foolishness is only a mask, concealing a keen brain and an iron will.” As I have demonstrated, more or less, in another review, it is P.G. Wodehouse’s Psmith to whom these gentlemen should be compared, not the mentally negligible Wooster.

   In the first paragraph of this review, I said I would refrain “for the most part” from criticizing Mr. Binyon for what was not included in his survey. At this point I must state that any discussion of Crooks and Villains series is woefully incomplete without a mention of Frank McAuliffe’s Augustus Mandrel[ and Kyril Bonfiglioli’s Charlie Mortdecai.

   Authorities on the genre may not learn anything new from Murder Will Out. Luckily, such paragons aren’t numerous, and I am not among their number, so I both enjoyed Mr. Binyon’s book, well written and witty, and furthered my knowledge of the genre. Moreover, his remarks about Peter Antony’s novels have started me off on another author hunt that will also include Mr. Binyon’s two crime novels, Swan Song and Greek Gifts.

MYSTERY RANCH. Fox Films, 1932. George O’Brien, Cecilia Parker, Charles Middleton, Charles Stevens, Forrester Harvey, Noble Johnson, Roy Stewart, Betty Francisco. Based on the novel The Killer, by Stewart Edward White. Director: David Howard.

   The best line in this antique and in many ways very Gothic western comes very near the end, as the villain in the piece comes to realize that the jig is up, standing at the edge of a cliff: “Young man, if you want to serve that on me, you’ll have to do it in Hell!” And off he jumps, tumbling hundreds of feet down to his death, and a well-deserved one at that.

   It’s the end of a very satisfying, and for a western made in 1932, quite sophisticated film, a watching experience best enjoyed in the company of other western fans, as was the case for me last weekend in Walker Martin’s living room the evening before Rich Harvey’s pulp and paperback show the nest day.

   IMDb describes the plot thusly, and I can’t improve upon it in terms of either brevity or accuracy: “An undercover ranger investigates a deranged rancher who acts as a law unto himself, finding a girl held as a prisoner until she agrees to marry the madman.”

   George O’Brien is the hero, stalwart and strong. Cecilia Parker plays the girl held against her will by deceased father’s business partner, Henry Steele, played by a gaunt but still powerful-looking Charles Middleton, who first claims that Jane Emory is his niece, but then reveals his true plans: to marry her, carried away both by lust and to take full control of the former partnership.

   On her own, Jane would be no match for the mad, piano-playing Henry Steele, who vows to eliminate any living person near his ranch who will not bow down to him. It is up to Texas Ranger Bob Sanborn (George O’Brien) to save the day.

   Besides the ending, which I apologize for revealing, just in case you decide obtain this movie on DVD and watch it for yourself, there was one other scene that I found extremely striking. Toward the end of the movie, Bob and Jane are trying to make their escape, and they find themselves trapped atop an old Apache stronghold in the hills. Bob is firing a rifle down upon their pursuers, while Jane, a mere slip of a girl, is cowering against his back. It’s straight from pulp western cover. If only it had been in color!

HOT SATURDAY. Paramount Pictures, 1932. Cary Grant, Nancy Carroll, Randolph Scott, Edward Woods, Lilian Bond, William Collier Sr., Jane Darwell. Director: William A. Seiter.

   Hot Saturday isn’t the best or the most salacious of the pre-Code films, but it’s nevertheless a punchy little melodrama. Directed by William A. Seiter, Hot Saturday stars Cary Grant, in his first leading role, as Romer Sheffield, a perpetual bachelor, playboy, and host of elaborate parties who falls for Ruth Brock (Nancy Carroll), a bank clerk put off by her hometown’s catty and gossipy ways.

   She is the victim of a small town mentality that wants to know what everyone else is up to and who is sleeping with whom. After staying for a few extra hours at Sheffield’s (Grant’s) house after a dating misadventure with another man, she becomes the topic of salacious discussion, with the town’s women suggesting that she spent the night with Sheffield.

   The poor girl is shunned by her peers and is even fired from her job at the bank. Fortunately for her, childhood friend Bill Fadden (Randolph Scott), now a prominent geologist, arrives back in town and confesses he’s always loved her. It’s not an easy thing for him to express in words, for Fadden’s very awkward with the ladies. Marriage, it would seem, is in the cards. It’s to be Ruth’s escape from the small town that has, through idle and false gossip, turned against her.

   But it is not to be.

   At a party, Fadden discovers that Ruth has withheld information about her past and about the non-existent scandal. He’s angry and hurt. He yells at her and thinks the worst of her, disbelieving her attempts to explain away the gossip as the malicious workings of a bored small town’s collective imagination. If anything, this scene exemplifies Scott’s ability to portray a man consumed with rage, a type of character quite distinct from his roles in the Zane Grey westerns.

   Ruth is then faced with a choice. Does she go after Fadden and beg him to take her back? No. She runs to Sheffield and spends the night with him, making what was only a false rumor a veritable truth. And she’s not ashamed of her behavior one bit. In fact, it’s a liberating moment for her, freeing her from what she perceives to be the shackles of small town Americana mores.

   In Hot Saturday, the girl eschews the good guy for the playboy and drives off into the wider world with him. And she’s happy. Elated, in fact. It’s not the most creative, or shocking, ending to a film, but it’s the type of movie ending that wouldn’t be so easily replicated once the Production Code went into full effect in 1934. Grant’s quite good in this one too, although he’s not nearly the screen presence he would become in the decades ahead.

LAWRENCE GOLDMAN – Black Fire. Ace Double D-170, paperback original, 1956. Published back-to-back with Flight by Night, by Day Keene.

   I purchased this last weekend in the Old Book Store in Morristown, NJ, a Mecca of sorts for lovers of old books and magazines up and down the East Coast. The shop is clean and well-organized, and the books are priced so that books move out almost as fast as they come in. Used bookstores such as this one are an endangered species. If there’s one near you, by all means, give them all the support you can. That is to say, buy books from them even if you already own more books than you can possibly read in one lifetime.

   I bought this one because of the book on the flipside, the one by Day Keene, which I didn’t remember if I owned or not. It didn’t look familiar, and the price was right, so I did. Later that evening when I was looking for something to read, I decided to sample this book by Lawrence Goldman for a chapter or so, as long as I owned it, then go on to the Keene half, which I was looking forward to.

   But I surprised myself, and 30 minutes later I was 60 pages into the book. It was also time to turn the lights out, and I had to wait a couple of days before I could finish it, which I’ve just done.

   Black Fire starts out as an an ordinary domestic thriller, by which I do not mean a cosy, but one in which the teller of the story, Bill Kincaid, happily married, falls in lust with his boss’s wife. Not only that, but his boss is his best friend, who asks Bill to track down the guy whom he knows is messing around with his wife.

   The company both men work for (with one of them the owner) is a shipping concern, and as the wheels of fate (and the story) would have it, the four of them, Kincaid and his wife, and the Skipper and his wife Joyce, find themselves marooned at sea off the coast of Mexico in a boat with no gasoline. Not only that, the Skipper has no memory of his attack on the man whom he thought was lovimg his wife.

   Pulled into shore, they find themselves to be the guests, if not the prisoners, of El Jefe, who controls the small town of Aparicio, a small settlement located at the base of an every-so-often active volcano called Fuego Negro — thus creating a novel of suspense far from anywhere you might have thought the first few chapters were heading.

   It’s no great shakes of a story, with no other surprises in store — you probably can easily guess some of what happens from here, with just this little part I’ve told you about — but with the sense that I may be the only person to ever have reviewed this book before, I can honesty say that I’m happy to have read it.

   But now on to the Day Keene half of the book. Stay tuned.

   In ELLERY QUEEN: THE ART OF DETECTION I mentioned that the music for the first ten episodes of the ADVENTURES OF ELLERY QUEEN radio series, which debuted in 1939, was composed by the young Bernard Herrmann, and that three excerpts from his scores for the series could be heard on the Web, played on a synthesizer by David Ledsam.

   A few weeks ago I discovered that three complete Herrmann scores for the series were uploaded to the Web last summer, more than a year after my book came out. The episodes for which Herrmann’s music can now be heard are “The Fallen Angel,” “Napoleon’s Razor” and “The Impossible Crime,” which aired respectively on July 2, 9 and 16 of 1939.

   Each score runs from ten to twelve minutes and is played on a synthesizer by Kevin Dvorak. I’m sure the music would sound more like the Herrmann we know and love if it were played on the instruments for which he wrote it, but it’s a lot better than what we had before, which was nothing. Check all three out via the YouTube videos above.

   For us old-timers “Gone Girl” is the name of a Lew Archer short story by Ross Macdonald. Now it’s also the name of a first-rate crime-suspense movie, directed by noir specialist David Fincher and written by Gillian Flynn based on her 2012 best-seller of the same name.

   Most readers of this column are likely to have seen something about the picture, so I won’t bother to summarize the plot beyond saying that when beautiful Amy Elliott Dunne (Rosamund Pike) disappears from her upscale Missouri home amid signs of violence, the media go into a frenzy and all but crucify her husband Nick (Ben Affleck) as her murderer.

   There are several strong females in the film so perhaps I’m not revealing too much when I say that one of them struck me as the film noir woman to end all film noir women, and a manipulator of such epic proportions that she leaves Diedrich Van Horn and all the other Iago figures in the Ellery Queen novels choking on her dust.

   A few weeks ago, with a bit of time to kill, I decided to tackle REDHEAD (Hurst & Blackett, 1934), the fourth of John Creasey’s 600-odd novels, the second of 28 that deal with Department Z — which in those days of Creasey’s youth was called Z Department — and the earliest I happen to own.

   According to the invaluable Hubin bibliography, this item was never published in the U.S., not even back in the early 1970s when Popular Library was putting out original paperback versions of countless Creaseys from the Thirties. My copy is an English softcover (Arrow pb #417, 1971) and indicates that the book was revised for republication, although the revisions must have been done with a very light hand indeed.

   Department Z has little to do with the operation, which pits a muscular young Brit named Martin “Windy” Storm and various of his cohorts against an American gangster known as Redhead who’s determined to bring his crime methods into England.

   If Creasey took this notion from Edgar Wallace’s 1932 novel WHEN THE GANGS CAME TO LONDON, he moved the center of gravity to the remote Sussex village of Ledsholm and the ancient castle that dominates the area. Much of the book’s second half is taken up by a long long action sequence in which our guys inside Ledsholm Grange are besieged by two separate gangs equipped with revolvers, automatics, machine guns, armored cars, explosives, the whole nine yards of weaponry.

   But since all the characters are stick figures, it’s very hard to keep the action straight or care who shoots or socks whom. Every other sentence ends with an exclamation point (“The greatest criminal enterprise in the history of England was reaching its climax!”), and the king toad makes Lord Voldemort look like a newborn kitten (“Through the hole in the wall he saw the demoniac eyes of Redhead, green, fiendish, glowing with the blood-lust that possessed him”).

   The writing is almost Avallonean in spots: “‘Be quiet!’ hissed Redhead.” And if Creasey preserved lines like “A bullet winged its message of death across the room, sending the dago staggering back”, I can’t help wondering what gems of political incorrectness he tossed out.

Fast forward to his books of only seven or eight years later, like the early Roger West novels (the first five of them collected in INSPECTOR WEST GOES TO WAR, 2011, with intro by me), and you see at a glance how radically Creasey’s writing skills improved over the Thirties.

   Or did it take that long? I also happen to have a copy of the next Department Z adventure, FIRST CAME A MURDER (Andrew Melrose, 1934; revised edition, Arrow pb #937, 1967). It has all the earmarks of a Thirties thriller but the writing is so much more restrained and stiff-upper-lippish that it’s hard to believe it came from the same pen as REDHEAD just a few months before.

   I don’t have copies of any Creaseys earlier than these but, judging from the quotations in William Vivian Butler’s THE DURABLE DESPERADOES (1973), both SEVEN TIMES SEVEN and THE DEATH MISER resemble FIRST CAME A MURDER in this respect. Of course, what I have is the revised version of the latter title, and perhaps Butler was quoting from the revised versions of Creasey’s earlier novels too.

   But in that case why does the revised version of REDHEAD sound so different? I can only speculate, and perhaps, in the words of so many Erle Stanley Gardner characters, I’m taking a button and sewing a vest on it. But it strikes me as significant that REDHEAD was originally published by Hurst & Blackett whereas the publisher of all the other early Creaseys was Andrew Melrose.

   Creasey once said that SEVEN TIMES SEVEN, the first novel he sold, was the tenth he’d written. Could REDHEAD have been one of the rejected nine? If there’s ever a comprehensive biography of that awesomely prolific author, perhaps we’ll learn the answer.

RANDY STRIKER – Key West Connection. Signet, paperback original, 1981. Reprinted as by Randy Wayne White “writing as Randy Striker,” Signet, paperback, 2006.

   Here’s the first installment of a brand new “action-packed” adventure series. The hero is Floridian charterboat captain Dusky MacMorgan, ex-US Navy (underwater demolition). He’s a cross between Travis McGee and Don Pendleton’s Mack Bolan, if you can believe it.

   He leaves a lot of dead people behind him. And, of course, so do the villains. In this book they’re a gang of dope smugglers. The top levels of the gang include a US Senator (unnamed) and assorted top officials in all levels of the executive branch. And an ounce of humanity you would not find in any of them.

   MacMorgan’s wife and twin little boys are killed in a bomb accident (it was meant for him), and he takes his remorse out in total retaliation. He leaves a lot of dead people behind. (Or did I say that?)

   I think Randy Striker (is that his real name?) should quit the annoying habit of telling the end of each chapter first. Otherwise, well, you probably already know if you’re going to go out looking for this book or not. If Striker is the charterboat captain we are informed he also is, these are — if you’ll excuse this expression — his wet dreams.

Rating:   C minus.

The Dusky MacMorgan series —

1. Key West Connection. Signet, 1981.
2. The Deep Six. Signet, 1981.
3. Cuban Death-Lift. Signet, 1981.

4. The Deadlier Sex. Signet, 1981.
5. Assassin’s Shadow. Signet, 1981.

6. Everglades Assault. Signet, 1982.
7. Grand Cayman Slam. Signet, 1982.

FLAME OF ARABY. Universal International, 1951. Maureen O’Hara, Jeff Chandler, Maxwell Reed, Lon Chaney Jr., Buddy Baer, Richard Egan, Royal Dano, Susan Cabot. Director: Charles Lamont.

   Imagine you’re pitching a movie project about a Bedouin tribesman in an obsessive pursuit of a wild black stallion. And that Bedouin happens to fall in love with a Tunisian princess threatened by her malevolent cousin.

   Now, ask yourself: whom would you want to see cast for the two leading roles?

   Perhaps you’d consider choosing a Brooklyn-born Jewish actor less than a decade out of U.S. military service and a redheaded Irish actress perhaps best known to the public for her starring role in Miracle on 34th Street. Then you’d think to yourself: nah, that couldn’t work. That wouldn’t work.

   But you’d be wrong.

   In Flame of Araby, an entertaining work of pure escapism, Jeff Chandler stars as Tamerlane, a Bedouin chief in hot pursuit of a wild black stallion in the North African desert. His pursuit is initially interrupted when he is forced to save the Tunisian Princess Tanya (Maureen O’Hara), from a horse stampede. The push and pull, loathing and attraction, between these two characters propel this adventure story forward.

   Joining these two major Hollywood stars on their wild gallop through an Arabesque fantasy world are Lon Chaney Jr. and Buddy Baer, who portray two Barbarossa brothers in competition for Princess Tanya’s hand in matrimony. Chaney definitely plays it to the hilt, making Borka Barbarossa a memorable, although not particularly evil, big screen villain. He seems to be having fun with this character, making him just a delight to watch.

   Now I’m not going to say that Flame of Araby is somehow a neglected classic or a gem hiding in plain sight. In many ways, it’s quite dated and doesn’t stand up to the test of time all that well. The costumes occasionally appear more silly than stylish. And some of the dialogue, including the overabundant usage of the term “wench,” while not particularly offensive, only detracts from the narrative and visual flow of the production.

   Still, there’s something to be said for a time when Hollywood studios were turning out innocently fun adventure tales that successfully transported the viewer to foreign, exotic locales, desert lands that never truly existed outside the imagination of poets and artists from long ago.

ISAAC ASIMOV – Tales of the Black Widowers. Doubleday, hardcover, June 1974. Fawcett Crest, paperback, August 1976.

   Until the early 1970s, Isaac Asimov was best known to whodunit devotees as the writer who virtually invented the science-fiction mystery. In his novels The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957) and in the short stories collected as Asimov’s Mysteries (1968), he masterfully bridged the gap between the two genres and proved that genuine detective fiction could be set in the future as well as In the present or past.

   Although he had previously written one contemporary mystery novel, The Death Dealers (1958), Asimov’s best-known crime fiction of the non-futuristic sort is the long series of Black Widowers tales that debuted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1972 and is still going strong today after four hardcover collections’ worth of stories.

   The Black Widowers are five middle-aged professional men — Avalon the patent lawyer, Trumbull the cryptographer, Rubin the writer, Drake the chemist, and Gonzalo the artist — who meet once a month for dinner at an exclusive New York club. Each month one member brings a guest and that guest brings a problem, sometimes but by no means always criminal in nature.

   The narration of the dilemma is interrupted frequently by cross-examination and highbrow cross-talk among the Widowers, who like Asimov himself are inordinately fond of puns. After each of the five club members has tried to solve the conundrum and failed, a solution — invariably on target — is proposed by Henry, the ancient and unobtrusive waiter who has been serving dinner and drinks throughout the dialogue. Everyone then goes home both intellectually and gastronomically satisfied.

   The Black Widowers stories stand or fall on the quality of the puzzles and their resolutions. Characterization and setting are minimal, and too many of the tales are either unfair to the reader or wildly incredible, but the occasional gems are clever indeed, and those who share Asimov’s fondness for oddball facts, logical probing, and the spectacle of cultivated men scoring intellectual points off one another will delight in even the weaker links in the chain.

   The four collections published to date are Tales of the Black Widowers (1974), More Tales of the Black Widowers (1976), Casebook of the Black Widowers (1980), and Banquets of the Black Widowers (1984). Asimovians might also look into the author’s book-fair whodunit, Murder at the ABA (1976), and his short-story collection The Union Club Mysteries (1983).

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   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.

Note:   Since this review first appeared, there have been two additional collections of Black Widowers stories: Puzzles of the Black Widowers (1989) and The Return of the Black Widowers (2003), the latter posthumously.