JOHN WALTER PUTRE – Death Among the Angels. Scribner, hardcover, February 1991. No paperback edition.

   John Walter Putre brings back his private eye Doll in Death Among the Angels, a book with little to recommend: no people I’d care to meet again, a rather insubstantial plot insubstantially resolved, an unmemorable Florida setting, muddy motivations.

   An old girlfriend of Doll’s asks his help: she’s in jail, charged with the murder of her current boyfriend. She refuses to talk to her lawyer, says she was drunk during the critical night and doesn’t remember what happened, and in dare course also refuses to talk to Doll.

   What’s behind all this? Well, maybe an illegal salvage operation, into which — as is usual in these matters — it may be fatal for Doll to inquire.

Bibliographic Note:   This is the second of only two works of detective fiction involving Doll, the first being A Small and Incidental Murder (Scribner, 1990).

“A DEATH OF PRINCES.” An episode of Naked City, ABC, 12 October 1960 (Season 2, Episode 1). Paul Burke, Horace McMahon, Nancy Malone, with Eli Wallach, George Maharis, Jan Miner. Teleplay: Stirling Silliphant. Directed by John Brahm.

    “A Death of Princes” is the second season opener of Naked City, the ABC police procedural starring Paul Burke as Detective Adam Flint and Horace McMahon as his crusty but amicable boss, Lt. Mike Parker. Guest starring is Eli Wallach portraying Detective Bane, a cynical rogue cop involved in blackmail, robbery, and murder.

    In this taut, action-packed episode, Wallach’s Brooklyn-accented character is quite similar to the sociopathic hit man, Dancer (portrayed by Wallach in a great film noir role), in Don Siegel’s The Lineup, which I reviewed here.

    The episode begins with church bells and gunfire. It’s Sunday. Adam (Burke) and Bane (Wallach), partners for the time being, are chasing an armed thug through an industrial district and to the top of a building overlooking the river. The criminal doesn’t have much luck. His gun jams and he cowers helplessly on the ground. That’s when Bane plugs him.

    Adam realizes what just happened and is shocked his partner just killed defenseless suspect in cold blood. Bane tells Adam he saw things wrong. But he doesn’t seem to care much anyways. Of the dead man, Bane says: “Look at him, a pile of nowhere. He came, he went, and who cares.” These criminally poetic words let us know from the get-go exactly what type of character Bane is going to be.

    Back in the precinct headquarters, Adam tells Mike he wants out. He no longer wants to work with Bane. Mike originally won’t hear of it, but he gradually changes his mind, allowing Adam to trail Bane to figure out what sort of criminal activity the rogue lawman is up to.

    As it turns out, Bane is blackmailing three people into working for him on a job. His objective is to steal money raised during a charity prizefight. Among the people Bane is blackmailing is the boxer, Tony Bacallas (George Maharis), who turns out to be the only redeemable criminal among the bunch.

    Bane, the most corrupt of the four, hates the fact that he has to rely upon what he perceives as scum, common criminals, to achieve his goals, telling them: “I despise myself because I need you.” It’s so dark, so cynical, and so very noir.

    And as in many noir stories, the criminal ends up down a path that lead to his doom. “A Death of Princes” is no exception. Adam, who was originally shocked by Bane’s capacity for violence, eventually shoots and kills Bane, leaving him dying alone on the carpet. But how can we feel sorry for the guy? As Mike tells Adam: “You don’t need to eat an egg to know it’s bad.”

    Naked City, of course, wasn’t just about characters and plotting. It was also known for its on location setting. This particular episode does not disappoint. There’s a great scene in the Central Park Zoo in which, if you watch carefully, you can get a glimpse of the famous Essex House sign in the background. There are some good subway scenes and a great shot of the old Yankee Stadium.

    And if you like neon, there are a couple of great moments shot at night in which we see Manhattan nightspots lit up. We also learn that sometimes, at night, a car may go crashing through a building entrance, a criminal mastermind may have his plans foiled by a man with a conscience, and a good cop may have to use his gun to get rid of a bad one.

    “A Death of Princes” is a very good episode with solid writing. Best of all, it features a great performance by Wallach, who seems to be the master of using his eyes to convey mood and meaning. Watch his eyes throughout the episode and you’ll see what I mean. (The entire episode can be seen on Hulu online here.)

  HORROR EXPRESS. Benmar Productions/Granada Films, 1972. A Spanish/British production; released in Spain as Pánico en el Transiberiano. Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Alberto de Mendoza, Telly Savalas, Julio Peña, Silvia Tortosa, Ángel del Pozo, Helga Liné, Alice Reinheart. Director: Eugenio Martín.

   I’m sure I’m not the only one, but I love movies that take place on trains, and all but one half of one percent of this one does, so what does that tell you? And any movie with both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in it has got to be worth watching, and doubly so when they’re on the same side — well, friendly rivals, I would say.

   Christopher Lee plays Professor Saxon, a British anthropologist, on board the Trans-Siberian Express from China to Moscow, along with the frozen body of a monstrous-looking humanoid discovered in a remote Manchurian cave (as if remote and Manchurian never appeared in the same sentence before). A colleague, Dr. Wells (Peter Cushing) is also on board, but only fortuitously so.

   Or even luckily so. Both men are needed, as it so happens, since the creature in its sealed crate must be responsible for the series of mysterious deaths that quickly ensue — but how? — even before the train starts off on its long trek through the isolated snow-covered Siberian wasteland — the eyes of the victims sucked purely white, their brains wiped clean, as smooth as a baby’s bottom. (We get to view the makeshift autopsy on the moving train.)

   There is an explanation, a science-fictional one, but the real fun is watching a pair of true professionals (Lee and Cushing) enjoy themselves immensely, or so they make us believe. (Cushing’s wife had died just before filming began, and he nearly backed out of his role.) As for Telly Savalas, as a loudly flamboyant Cossack officer (to put it mildly), the less said the better, at least by me.

NOTE:   The video link above is of the final four or five minutes only. To see the movie in its entirety, go here.

THE MAN THEY COULD NOT HANG. Columbia Pictures, 1939. Boris Karloff, Lorna Gray, Robert Wilcox, Roger Pryor, Don Beddoe, Ann Doran, Jo De Stefani, Charles, Trowbridge, Byron Foulger. Director: Nick Grinde.

   If in Night Key (reviewed recently here) Boris Karloff was a bumbling but revengeful old inventor who was seriously wronged, he was at heart a kindly old gentleman with (as I made a point in mentioning) a beautiful daughter. In The Man They Could Not Hang, Mr. Karloff is a scientist, not an inventor, and even before he is serious wronged (see below) he doesn’t have the best of dispositions to begin with.

   But after he is hanged (see the title), his quest for revenge upon the jury, the judge, prosecutor, and the members of the police force who helped convict him turns him into a mad scientist whose vengeance is clever, wicked and just plain diabolical.

   His crime? That of killing a medical student who had willingly agreed to become the subject of Dr. Henryck Savaard’s latest experiment – a crucial one indeed, one in which the student is put to death under controlled conditions, expecting to waken again by means of a strange, weird-looking apparatus in Savaard’s laboratory.

   The police are summoned before the test of the equipment is completed, however, and their intervention means the student cum guinea pig is doomed to a permanent death.

   The middle third of the movie is the slowest moving one, taking place as it does in the courtroom, with plenty of room for the prosecutor and Dr. Savaard to speak their views and respond to the other’s. Savaard suggests that being able to bring patients back to life on the operating table would mean more lives saved during surgery; nix on that, says the D.A.: a death is a death, and murder is murder.

   The last third of the film could have been the most fun, with many of well-recovered Dr. Savaard’s would-be victims locked up together in a booby-trapped house, and for the most part is it is, but the ending seems rushed. Here (not so coincidentally) is also where the mad scientist’s beautiful daughter comes into play – an essential role, to be sure, but one well telegraphed in advance.

                  

HOLD YOUR BREATH. Christie, 1924. Dorothy Devore, Walter Hiers, Tully Marshall, Jimmie Adams, Priscilla Bonner, Jimmy Harrison, Lincoln Plummer, Max Davidson. Director: Scott Sidney. Shown at Cinefest 26, Syracuse NY, March 2006.

   The audience greeted the silent comedy with considerable pleasure. In its own way, it is somewhat bizarre, as cub reporter Dorothy Devore attempts to get an interview from reclusive millionaire Tully Marshall in his well-guarded apartment.

   Through a series of ruses, she gains entry and even manages to ingratiate herself when an organ-grinder’s monkey reaches through an open window and makes off with an expensive diamond bracelet, the most recently acquired bauble in Marshall’s collection.

   The rest of the film consists of Devore’s hair-raising attempts to retrieve the necklace as the monkey climbs about the building’s exterior, with a detective in hot but somewhat less exposed pursuit, A highlight for the audience was a cameo by Max Davidson as a street pedlar who takes advantage of the crowd gathered to hawk his wares.

   Devore is a delight, and this film was one of the comic highlights of the weekend. Sidney also directed the Elmo Lincoln Tarzan of the Apes, as well as another Christie comedy that I’ve seen and liked, Charley’s Aunt (1925). According to the program notes, Devore was the top female comedian on the Christie lot in the 1920s. I don’t find that hard to believe.

CLIVE CUSSLER & JUSTIN SCOTT – The Race. Putnam, hardcover, 2011. Berkley, paperback, September 2012.

   In The Chase Clive Cussler introduced a new hero in early 20th-Century Van Dorn Agency operative Isaac Bell, and delivered the freshest and most entertaining book he had written in years. In the follow-ups he turned the series over to veteran suspense novelist Justin Scott (The Shipkiller, The Normandie Triangle) who has run with the ball adding to the energetic series that combines Cussler’s love of anything mechanical, Scott’s gift for historical thrillers, and an attractive and entertaining hero to cheer for.

   Somewhere between Nicholas Carter and the Nickel Library, a Road Runner cartoon, and a modern Tom Swift, Isaac Bell’s adventures have only gotten better.

   The Race was the fourth book in the series (preceded by The Chase, The Wrecker, and The Spy), and has been followed by The Thief and The Striker.

   In this one, vicious millionaire Harry Frost attempts to kill his aviatrix wife Josephine’s supposed lover airplane designer Marco Celero. He apparently succeeds, leaving young Josephine, fresh off the farm and enamored with flight penniless. Harry escapes, Marco’s body hasn’t been found, but millionaire newspaper magnate Preston Whiteway is smitten and plans a cross country aviation race for Josephine to win.

   That’s where the Van Dorn Detective Agency comes in, because Frost has threatened to kill Josephine, and she needs constant protection. Enter the Van Dorn’s top man, Isaac Bell, who has a violent past history with Frost from the latter’s days as a Chicago tough.

   It’s Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines with bullets as well as planes flying, as Bell and his team set out to protect their client from the juggernaut Frost, a giant in a bullet proof vest capable of hiring an army of thugs and gunmen to make sure Josephine never reaches San Francisco.

   The books move at a rapid pace and Bell, his boss Van Dorn, his fiancee (later wife) Marion a pioneer film maker, and a cast of regular Van Dorn operatives make for a good team to cheer for usually cast against a villain equal parts Snidely Whiplash, Mr. Hyde, James Bond’s Blofield, and Marvel comics Juggernaut — virtual forces of nature, dangerous, sly, smart, and ruthless.

   In addition there is usually a mystery that the reader if not Bell and company knows the solution to, and some good if prosaic detective work that despite the period reminds me much more of my Pinkerton days than Hammett’s Continental Op or Nebel’s Cardigan.

   The villain is Wily E. Coyote in these, and Bell the Road Runner one step behind and encountering one setback after the next while pulling the irons out of the fire enough to get to the next set piece. The analogy is particularly good in this one since the villain loses a piece of himself literally in every encounter. I kept waiting for anvil to fall on him or for him to run off a cliff, but he never quite manages it.

   There are usually good if lightly drawn secondary characters, a surprise or two (at least they are supposed to surprise readers, whether they actually do is another question), lore about cars, boats, airplanes, guns, railroads, and a thousand other facts from the era that somehow fit in with much more ease than in Cussler’s Dirk Pitt novels, where he has been known to stop mid-book for an extraneous car rally or flight in a vintage airplane that is forced into the plot like a square peg hammered into a round hole with a sledge hammer. Here the details and action blend smoothly and keep the pages effortlessly turning.

   This one has everything, running gunfights, vintage cars zooming about, special express trains, early airplanes made of spit glue and fabric, gangsters, gamblers, a passionate Italian beauty to be rescued from a madhouse, a plucky heroine with secrets, a crazy Russian inventor, a shadowy figure with his own agenda, heroic drivers (the word pilot was not in use yet) of vintage planes, and a short course on flying better than the one I took in high school where I learned to fly.

   Who wins the race and how, how Bell defeats Frost, Josephine’s secret, the shadow man and his dire scheme, flying, fighting, tornados, thunderstorms, narrow escapes, and daring heroics make sure you never really take time to think too hard about all of it, and why should you? This is pure escapism of a high order, the Rover Boys with guns, dime novels with better prose, barn burners with real burning barns.

   In the modern tradition Bell is a Boy Scout with violent tendencies, morally pure, upstanding, a shade pompous, but still attractive and likable. Someone needs to give modern thriller writers a quick course in anti-hero, even straight shooter Tom Mix sometimes played a bandit. But that’s a minor peeve, and what ever the flaws, this is one of my favorite current series.

   These shared series are popular now, and Cussler has been joined by James Rollins now along with many others (some posthumously) in these collaborations, but Cussler has three of the best co-writers, in Scott, Thomas Perry (yes, that Thomas Perry the Edgar award winning one), and Jack Du Bruhl. It shows in the quality of the books they produce. These writers had their own successes and readers well before they tied their names with the Cussler brand, and it shows in the quality of the work produced.

   Incidentally I chose this one because I found it the least of the series yet, but it is still fun, smart, fast paced, and funny when it means to be. If the worst book in the series is this good you should have an idea how good the best is. Here’s hoping Isaac Bell keeps chugging along in his vintage boats, planes, and automobiles for years to come.

GUY COMPTON – Disguise for a Dead Gentleman. John Long, UK, hardcover, 1964. No US edition.

   Not a happy one is the life of the confidence man, particularly one as inept as Graham Boyce. Hating his brother and embittered at not having attended what would appear to be a second-class public school, Boyce is planning to impersonate his brother at the school’s centenary celebration and sell some worthless stock to one of the old boys.

   Unfortunately, Boyce did not know that his accomplice, whom he asked to take up with any graduate of the school in order to be invited to the ceremonies, would choose Ben Anderson, the best friend of Boyce’s brother at the school, mystery writer, and detective manqué . After Anderson arrives for the celebration, two deaths occur at the school.

   As I read this book I had the feeling that Compton was a good writer who could — and really should — have done better for his characters and his plot. Though the novel does leave some dissatisfaction, I would be willing to try another of Compton’s works.

      The Ben Anderson series —

Too Many Murderers. Long, 1962.
Medium for Murder. Long, 1963.
Dead on Cue. Long, 1964.
Disguise for a Dead Gentleman. Long, 1964.
High Tide for Hanging.Long, 1965.

Bibliographic Note: While I was getting this review ready to post, I discovered that Guy Compton has to be a lot better known to science fiction fans than he is to mystery fans. Most of his SF novels were as by D. G. Compton, many of them published in the US as paperbacks.

MATTHEW BRANTON – House of Whacks. Bloomsbury, paperback, April 1999.

   House of Whacks got some poor reviews on the net, mostly, I think, from reviewers who were either turned off by the cover, or turned on by it and then disappointed by the contents. Both camps missed the point of a book I found witty, suspenseful and deeply moving at times.

   The story opens in Chicago, 1950, where Susan, an aspiring chorus girl, is making ends meet [insert joke] by posing for bondage photos. Branton wisely plays this for character rather than titillation. Also he seems to have researched the mail-order kinky porn business of that day pretty thoroughly, and he injects just enough detail to make it happen for the reader.

   We quickly shift however, to an unnamed first-person narrator in another part of town who turns out to be a fifty year old woman dying of cancer, wrapping up her publishing business (she has a dozen writers working for her under one pen name) and reflecting with wry humor on her past (“…we gazed at each other with eyes as clear and innocent as a couple of Florida real estate brokers.”) as a Hollywood Screenwriter. Again, I was impressed with the author’s knowledge of the movie scene and small-time mid-century publishing, and with his skill at evoking them.

   In short order, the Mob moves in on the porno racket, Susan meets a nice young mobster with visions of moving the Mafia into more legitimate enterprises because that’s where the money is, and the nameless narrator starts hatching plans for a big-time heist that will leave her dead and her unemployed ghost-writers well-off for life.

   Author Branton handles these disparate elements (and several more) with a sure hand. He seems well-steeped in the movie business, Mob politics, publishing and slow death, and he moves the story along quickly, with just enough detail to ground it in reality (for Fiction, that is) but he’s not afraid to sit back and indulge his characters in some genuine emotion.

   The narrator makes her case for not getting cancer treatment in a scene that actually echoed things I’ve heard from others in the same situation. And her last meeting with her estranged ex-husband rang so heart-wrenchingly true that I forgot all about the Heist coming up just a few pages away.

   The result may be a bit surreal for some tastes, but I found House of Whacks just off-the-wall enough to make a fast and fun read. Don’t know if I’ll seek out any more by Branton, but I’ll definitely remember this one.

EDWARD D. HOCH – Nothing Is Impossible: Further Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne. Crippen & Landru, 2014. Introduction by Janet Hutchings. Collection: 15 stories from EQMM.

   For Edward D. Hoch (1930-2008), mysteries were primarily about plot, with characterization necessarily taking second place. The knottiest kind of mystery plot has always been the “locked room” or “impossible crime” story, which of necessity calls for more than the usual amount of cerebration on the parts of both the writer and the reader, who is expected to participate in the “game” of “howdunnit” set up by the author.

   During his career, Hoch outdid even the grand master of the locked room mystery, John Dickson Carr, in the number and variety of his plots, churning out these brainbusters on a production line basis.

   Hoch had several series characters threading their way through his nearly one thousand short stories, among them Ben Snow, Simon Ark, Rand, Captain Leopold, Nick Velvet, and Dr. Sam Hawthorne. It was in the stories of that last worthy, a New England general practitioner, according to Janet Hutchings (Hoch’s editor at Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, EQMM) in her introduction, that “one finds some of the best Hoch plots, perhaps because he liked to save the most difficult kind of puzzle, that of the locked room, for his country doctor.”

   Hutchings contrasts Dr. Sam with one of Agatha Christie’s series characters:

   Thus Hoch was able “to create a milieu that readers could look forward to returning to again and again.” His entire series of Dr. Sam stories would begin in 1922 (the Roaring Twenties), pass through the Depression Thirties, and end (due to his death) in 1944 (the War Years), with the ones in this collection covering the period from early 1932 to late 1936.

   If you like impossible crime stories that are puzzling without being disappointing in their solutions then Edward D. Hoch’s Dr. Sam Hawthorne stories are a good place to go. Unless you’ve collected just about every issue of EQMM since 1974, however, it’s unlikely you’ll have the complete series, which is why you’d do well to get this book — and the two previous Dr. Sam collections issued by Douglas Greene’s fine publishing house, Crippen & Landru.

    — NOTE: A slightly different version of this article appeared on The American Culture website.

THE GIANT BEHEMOTH. Allied Artists Pictures, 1959. Gene Evans, André Morell, John Turner, Leigh Madison, Jack MacGowran, Maurice Kaufmann, Henri Vidon. Directors: Douglas Hickox & Eugène Lourié.

   The Giant Behemoth is an America-British science fiction/horror film starring Gene Evans (who appeared in several Samuel Fuller films and in Richard Fleischer’s Armored Car Robbery, which I reviewed here) and André Morrell (Quatermass and the Pit).

   The two actors portray scientists tasked with stopping a giant radioactive dinosaur from reeking havoc on England. Think Godzilla transported to Cornwall and London and you’ll have a pretty good idea what this film is all about.

   That’s not to say it’s simply a throwaway creature feature with amateurish acting and even worse special effects. It’s not. Ukrainian-born director Eugène Lourié, who had worked as a production/set designer for such directors as Jean Renoir, Max Ophüls, and Samuel Fuller, clearly put care into the project. Indeed, while no cinematic masterpiece or a classic worthy of academic scholarship, The Giant Behemoth is actually a solid 1950s sci-fi film, one that showcases the fact that worries about the effects of atomic testing were hardly limited to Japan.

   The plot is about as straightforward as you would expect. Dead radioactive fish wash up on the Cornwall beach and American marine biologist Steve Karnes (Evans) is on the case. He partners up with British scientist, Professor James Bickford (Morell) to figure out what is going on.

   It turns out there’s a giant Paleosaurus on the loose. Oh, and it’s radioactive too. (And why wouldn’t it be?) The two men work with the British military to stop the behemoth, but not before the growling giant lizard stomps around London a bit, wrecking a power station and picking up a car and dumping it in the Thames.

   The film can definitely feel dated at times. It takes suspension of disbelief to fully appreciate the film for what it is, namely a better than average monster movie. The movie neither goes for cheap thrills, nor demonstrates implicit contempt for its audience. Slow moving at times, The Giant Behemoth admirably avoids the stilted, laughably amateurish acting that plagued too many of the creature features of that era. Both Evans and Morell appear to take their roles seriously. The story’s not much, but then again it doesn’t need to be.

   By far, the weakest aspect of the film is that it’s so obviously a knockoff or, if one is feeling charitable, an homage, to Godzilla. And as in the original Japanese version, we don’t see much of the creature for the first thirty minutes or so. It’s in the ocean somewhere doing whatever dying radioactive dinosaurs do. We’re supposedly just waiting in suspense for the guy to show up. Problem is: in The Giant Behemoth, the oversized angry dinosaur takes a bit too long to appear on the screen in its full glory.

   The movie does, however, succeed in having some great moments. While the special effects are, in many ways, completely antiquated, there are a couple of scenes in which the dinosaur is lurking about London that just look just fabulous in crisp black and white. I’ll take those over most lavish and expensive computer graphics any day.

   I wouldn’t call The Giant Behemoth a great film by any stretch of the imagination. But, provided you know what you’re getting yourself into, that doesn’t stop it from being a surprisingly enjoyable one.