GEORGE BAXT – The Neon Graveyard. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1979. Intl. Polygonics Ltd., paperback, 1989.

   This is Baxt’s first mystery novel in some time, and the title fits perfectly. It’s flashy, it’s rotten to the core, and it’s terribly depressing. What the title actually refers to is the city of Hollywood, USA, and maybe you’re way ahead of me.

   As a novel of the utterly bizarre, it comes equipped with all the essentials, including a clonish retread of Mae West, a gorilla who acts as her bodyguard, and a castle of orgies so vile that even federal investigators are forced to sit up and take notice.

   The not-so-surprising lesson to be learned from all this is that decadence per se can carry a mystery story only so far. The humor may be called biting and sardonic by some, but the truth of the matter is that while detective story readers are given a lot to swallow here, there’s really no way they can avoid starving to death on the food for thought that Baxt totally fails to provide.

Note:   There was a seven year gap between Baxt’s previous mystery novel, Burning Sappho, and The Neon Graveyard, and it was another five years before he wrote The Dorothy Parker Murder Case, the first of a series of many “movie star” mysteries, all of which I believe I can safely recommend over this one.

THE BROKEN STAR. United Artists, 1956. Howard Duff, Lita Baron, Bill Williams, Douglas Fowley, Henry Calvin, Addison Richards, Joel Ashley, John Pickard, Joe Dominguez. Written by John C. Higgins. Directed by Lesley Selander.

   Back in the late 1940s, John C. Higgins wrote some memorable film noir scripts turned into riveting movies by Anthony Mann: T-Men, Raw Deal, Railroaded and Border Incident, as well as He Walked by Night. In the 50s, his output became more variable with things like Shield for Murder, The Black Sleep and Untamed Youth, capped off in the mid-60s by Robinson Crusoe on Mars. And somewhere in and among these he recycled his Shield for Murder script into a Western called The Broken Star.

   This opens with Deputy Sheriff Howard Duff scoping out an illicit money drop used by the local cattle baron to store his ill-gotten goodies; which, it seems, are also ill-guarded by a lone Mexican who passes quickly and noisily out of the story when Duff guns him down and makes it look like self-defense.

   But when Duff stashes the loot and gives his story to his boss (Addison Richards) he’s met with professional skepticism. Richards sends Deputy Bill Williams out to investigate the scene, where he (Wiliams) runs into two goons — excuse me: owlhoots — in the employ of the Cattle Baron, who wants his ill-guarded gains gotten back.

   Meanwhile Duff has his own problems with the murdered man’s sister: a fiery Mexican Maiden who sings in the local saloon and does a specialty number with a whip. (We’ve all had relationships like that, haven’t we?) The kind of girl I used to date in college. Before long, the hired goons/owlhoots have summoned Duff to a meeting with Mister Big/Cattle Baron, a genial and unsavory sort who reminds one of Sydney Greenstreet or perhaps Robert Emhardt in Underworld USA, squeezing the local ranchers in between hosting barbecues and making threats while calling the steps at a square dance. And when he smiles and tells Howie he wants his money back, we know the jig is up.

   What follows however is a bit of a mess. The goons kidnap Lita, Howard fights them, Deputy Bill fights them, they kidnap Litas again, Bill fights them again, Howard fights Bill, Howard tries to grab the loot and hit the trail and the whole thing ends up pretty much as we knew it would. In a proper film noir our doomed protagonist would have ended up bleeding in a gutter desperately groping for escape, but here we get a rather protracted shoot-out in an abandoned mine, with everyone jockeying for position and the loot.

   Director Lesley Selander helmed some fine shoot-’em-ups in his day, including some of the best of the Hopalong Cassidy series, but he has little feel for this sort of thing, and it shows. Douglas Fowley does what he can as a ratty little double-crosser (a specialty of his) but beyond that and an elaborate saloon fight, the action seems a bit perfunctory, the sense of fatality that’s so much a part of noir is totally lacking, and a film that could have been a fine successor to movies like Ramrod and Pursued just sort of wastes its time — and ours.

   By the way, Mister Big/the Cattle Baron here seemed awfully familiar to me, sort of a nasty Jonathan Winters type, and it took me a while but I finally placed the actor who portrays him; it’s Henry Calvin, best remembered by viewers my age as Sergeant Garcia in Disney’s TV show Zorro.

One of the greatest rock albums of all time:

  OLIVER BLEECK – The Brass Go-Between. William Morrow & Co., hardcover, 1969. Pocket, paperback, 1971. Perennial Library, paperback, 1983. Warner, paperback, 1993.

   Ross Thomas uses the pseudonym Oliver Bleeck for his entertaining Philip St. Ives books. These are fast-paced stories with first-person narration, reminiscent of many private-detective novels. But St. Ives is not a detective, he is a professional go-between — that is, he acts as an intermediary between such parties as kidnappers and the kidnap victim’s family, insurance companies and thieves, etc. He has built a reputation in this strange profession and people on both sides of the law seem to trust him.

   In The Brass Go-Between, the first book of the series, he is dealing with the Conker Museum in Washington, D.C., attempting to recover a huge brass shield that has been stolen from the museum’s Pan-African collection. But there is more to the shield than meets the eye. Not only is it historically priceless, it is also a magnificent work of art. Add to this the fact that at least two opposing African nations claim rightful ownership, and it becomes obvious many people would like to discover the whereabouts of the shield.

   Naturally, all this complicates St. Ives’s job as he encounters many of the interested parties along the way: Winfield Spencer, a rich and reclusive art collector; and Conception Mbwato, a giant emissary from the African nation of Komporeen, to name but two.

   This and the other Oliver Bleeck titles — Protocol for a Kidnapping (1971), The Procane Chronicle (1972), The Highbinders (1974), and No Questions Asked (1976) — are distinguished for their crisp dialogue, unusual background and understated sense of irony. Qualities, of course, that Thomas also infuses into his novels published under his own name.

         ———
   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.

THE AMAZING MR. CALLAGHAN. French, 1955. Originally released as À toi de jouer Callaghan!. Also released in the US by Atlantis Films as Your Turn to Play, Callaghan. Tony Wright, Lisianne Rei, Colette Ripert, Robert Burnier, Robert Berni, Paul Cambo. Written and directed by Willie Rozier. based on the novel Sorry You’ve Been Troubled by Peter Cheyney.

   The success of Meet Mr. Callaghan and the hit theme from that film, plus the success of Peter Cheyney’s novels in the famed Serie Noire series of paperbacks in France was enough to inspire a series of films based on his work. Since it was Slim Callaghan who first made his way to the screen in England, so he appears here in the guise of Tony Wright, replete with the theme from the British film, outfitted with French lyrics and whistled off and on by the star.

   There is little about the blonde muscular Wright to suggest the slender character with dark messy hair and shabby suits from the Cheyney novels, and the adaptation of Sorry You’ve Been Troubled moves the action to the Riviera in 1955, where Slim is arriving to aid an English Colonel whose note for gambling losses is held by a none-too- honest casino.

   With help from his pal Windy Nicholls (Robert Burnier), here an older man than Slim unlike the books where he is a young Canadian, Slim sets him up as an American who needs to be skinned by a crooked Vicomte (Robert Berni) in with the boss and club owner (Paul Cambo). Unfortunately first thing out of the box he is recognized and has to fight for his life out of the villa housing the private club.

   From there on the action is fast and furious, as Slim seduces one beautiful girl involved in the ring after another, manages several underwater scenes to show off Wright’s physique and swimming skills, and plays the bad guys for suckers until the big showdown, a well done car-chase and a minor surprise reveal of the man behind it all. It’s lucky for Slim that he gets along with the French police much better than he does Scotland Yard.

   All of this is played for comedy for the most part, right down to Wright and Rei singing a duet in his sports car before the last clench, a trope that carried over into Eddie Constantine’s Lemmy Caution films.

   Wright played Slim in one earlier film in that same year, A Whiskey for Callaghan (based on It Couldn’t Matter Less), and once more in 1963. In 1957 Eddie Constantine made at least one Slim Callaghan film before taking on the role of suave wise cracking FBI undercover agent Lemme Caution.

   The Callaghan films are hard to find, but this one is available in French on YouTube and included below. You might take a look for yourself, it’s pretty self-explanatory, and there is some fun to be had, though Wright lacks the smirk and style — as well as the singing voice — of Constantine.

DEBORAH CROMBIE – A Share in Death. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1993. Berkley, paperback, 1994. Avon, paperback; 1st printing, September 2003.

   A Share in Death is the first of now 17 books in author Deborah Crombie series of mysteries solved by the Scotland Yard pairing of Supt. Duncan Kincaid and his assistant, Sgt. Gemma James. Although there are two brutal deaths that occur in it, it would best to describe it as a cozy, I’m sorry to say, with many of the negative connotations that that might imply.

   If you can’t have a manor house snowed in and full of guests for the holidays, the next best thing might be a timeshare vacation resort filled with strangers to each other, which is exactly where Kincaid is heading for a week’s worth well-deserved rest. He’s there totally incognito, but you as well as I know exactly how long that’s going to last.

   Found dead in a Jacuzzi pool is the assistant manager, a man who made his business to know as much as he could about the guests, and from that point on Kincaid’s vacation is essentially over. He’s an outsider, though, and the local police inspector is one of those blokes who resents the high muckety-mucks from Scotland Yard horning in on his turf — one of the oldest clichés in the mystery writer’s handbook.

    Worse, there is another. A elderly lady having memory problems tries to tell Kincaid about something she has seen, but they are interrupted, and Kincaid doesn’t bother getting back to her. Until, of course, it is too late, and there is a second victim, and you don’t get even a single chance to guess who.

   Even worse. The solution comes from nowhere — at least from nothing the reader was privy to. On page 244 Kincaid thinks back to a conversation he had overheard on page 55 (the Avon edition), puts two and two together and comes up with five because we the reader weren’t told everything that transpired in that aforesaid conversation.

   I hate it when that happens.

   And if Kincaid had heard what he is supposed to have heard on page 55, he should have known exactly whodunit by page 56.

   Maybe I missed something, and you can certainly correct me if I’m wrong, but at least one reviewer of this book on Goodreads points out the same thing.

   Not a series I’ll be continuing.

Sandy Owens is one of my favorite pianists, capable of handling any style of music. If you want to listen to a noir style song that will put you in the mood for a PI walking down the mean streets, “Reflections Of A Detective, 3:00 A.M.” is a good choice. It’s available on his album Themes In Search Of A Movie. You can buy this or any of the artist’s other work from his website http://sandyowen.com

Sandy Owen (piano)

Paul Carman (tenor saxophone)

Ted Owen (percussion)

MYSTERY SHIP. Columbia Pictures, 1941. Paul Kelly, Lola Lane, Larry Parks, Trevor Bardette, Cy Kendall, Roger Imhof, Byron Foulger, Dwight Frye. Director: Lew Landers.

   Mystery Ship is a movie about two federal agents, Allan Harper (Paul Kelly) and Tommy Baker (Larry Parks) tasked with a secret mission of escorting a ship filled with criminals and political agitators back to Europe. It’s a strange little film. And I don’t mean that in the avant-garde or experimental sense. It’s strangeness lies in the fact that it is a bizarre amalgam of several film genres: the crime film, the spy film, the screwball comedy, and the silent film, at least in terms of how the fight sequences are directed.

   Directed by B-movie king Lew Landers, the movie tries to blend action with suspense and suspense with romantic comedy in which Harper’s fiancée, Patricia Marshall (Lola Lane) manages to smuggle herself about the ship. Overall, the attempt is a failure not so much of direction as it is of imagination.

   This could have been a gritty action film set on the high seas or it could have been a screwball comedy featuring a motley crew of criminals and political subversives. Instead, it is really neither. It remains a lightly entertaining, if completely forgettable movie that is neither particularly good nor particularly awful. Film fans might appreciate the unmistakable Cy Kendall as one of the thugs.

MARGARET MARON – Southern Discomfort. Deborah Knott #2, Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1993; paperback, 1994.

   I thought that Bootlegger’s Daughter was one of the finest series debuts I’d read, and looked forward to the second with both anticipation and apprehension. Would it live up to the first? You bet.

   Deborah Knott is a judge now, having been appointed to fill the term of an incumbent who died of a heart attack. The book opens as she is sworn in, and we follow her through the first few days of her judgeship. She and a niece, the daughter of her electrician brother, are helping in building a house for an organization called WomenAid.

   The project, and Deborah’s life, take a turn for the worse when, she discovers her niece unconscious at the site, the victim of attempted rape, and her assailant is later found there with his head bashed in. Even worse, her brother suffers a heart attack the same night; but did he have time to kill his daughter’s assailant first? And did he?

   This is an excellent book in all respects, from start to finish. While it’s difficult to say what Maron’s greatest strength is as a writer, certainly one of her strongest points is characterization. Not only Deborah, but each person of significance is sharply delineated, and made to come alive on the page. As I remarked on reading the first Knott story, I have never lived in North Carolina, but I know the rural south, and so does Maron. These are people I have known. They speak as people of the south speak, and they act as people of the south act.

   The story is told first person, in an extremely attractive voice. If you don’t like Deborah Knott, you’re at least a misogynist, and probably a misanthropist. The plot is designed to keep her at the center of the story without contrivance, and is brought to a believable end.

   The prose is straightforward when moving the story along, and strongly evocative where appropriate. As was the first in the series, it is not only a fine mystery, but a fine book. Maron has emerged as one of the best.

UPDATE:   Southern Comfort was nominated for both the Agatha and Anthony awards. There are now 20 books in Margaret Maron’s Deborah Knott series, and nine in the Lt. Sigrid Harald series mostly written at the beginning of her career. Note, though, that the ninth (and final one) is scheduled to be published in June, after a gap of some 22 years. The two characters turn out to have family connections in common, and they met in the book Three-Day Town.

LOREN D. ESTLEMAN – Sweet Women Lie. Amos Walker #10. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1990. Fawcett Crest, paperback; 1st printing, February 1992.

   Amos Walker, a private eye based in Detroit, has been around for a long time. His first adventure appeared in 1981, and as of later this month, there will be 26 novels and one two short story collection[s] under his belt. I’d put him on the Chandler side of Chandler-Hammett divide, with lots of similes and other eye-catching literary devices, each one a semi-polished gem, if not out and out brilliant.

   Now admittedly too much of the latter can also slow the storytelling down to a crawl, but once you’re on Estleman’s wavelength, you’ll find yourself cruising along in high gear with a grin on your face popping up at least once a page, many times more.

   For example, picking a page totally at random, Chapter 9 begins thusly: “One of the advantages of following someone in your building is knowing which boards squeak and which steps wobble because the super hasn’t held a hammer since Eisenhower.”

   Walker’s first client in Sweet Women Lie is a former B-movie queen who now uses her former fame to run a nightclub show in downtown Detroit. “The Club Canaveral’s rainbow front died short of the alley that ran alongside the building.” She gives Walker a briefcase containing $750,000. She wants him, she tells him, to use the money to buy her freedom from her former gangster boy friend.

   Turns out that the story isn’t at all true. It’s a ploy she’s been forced to play a part in by a CIA counterassassin who wants to close up his career with no hitches, but who senses that he’s being followed. It gets complicated from here, but I’ll just add that Walker’s former wife is now married to said CIA man. Other than that, without a scorecard, which I admit I neglected to use, you’ll soon lose track of who’s following who.

   I also admit that I found the story itself not very compelling, except for the nebbish private eye who also gets sucked up into the plot. Him I liked, and I’m sorry he wasn’t able to hang around longer. Other than Amos Walker, who tells the story himself, the rest of players have only their roles to play. My advice? Read this for the telling and let the plot take care of itself.