MINETTE WALTERS – The Ice-House. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1992; paperback, 1993. First published in the UK by Macmillan, hardcover, 1992.

   Minette Walters is an author new to me, and in 1992 at least, was new to everyone. I think her first novel is a most impressive debut.

   Set in Hampshire, the story begins with the discovery of a badly decomposed (and partially eaten) body in an abandoned ice-house at Stretch Manor. The Manor is no stranger to trouble — ten years ago its sadistic master vanished, and though the police believed his wife to have murdered him, were unable to make a case. Since then, she and two schooldays chums have lived there, ostracized by the villagers and the subject of devoutly believed rumors ranging from lesbianism to witchcraft.

   The police return to Stretch Manor in the person of Inspector Walsh, who investigated the original murder and still is convinced of the lady of the manor’s guilt, and Sergeant McLoughlin, a brooding Scot undergoing marital difficulties and a bout with the bottle. Questions: Is the body that of the missing husband, or someone else? Why have the three women locked themselves away in despised isolation for a decade?

   This is an excellently written book with very few flaws, and one of the best first novels I’ve read in recent memory. The characterization was outstanding for both major and minor players, with only a character shift or two that didn’t quite ring true. The almost Gothic-seeming plot had several unexpected twists, and never strained my credulity to excess.

   I don’t believe this has the makings of a series (though I’ve been wrong before), but you may be sure I’ll read Mrs. Walters’ next offering regardless. You should read this, and if you like it spread the word.

   
From Wikipedia:   “Her first full-length novel, The Ice House, was published in 1992. It took two and a half years to write and was rejected by numerous publishing houses until Maria Rejt, Macmillan Publishers, bought it for £1250. Within four months, it had won the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey award for best first novel and had been snapped up by 11 foreign publishers. With her next two books, The Sculptress and The Scold’s Bridle, Walters won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award and the CWA Gold Dagger respectively, giving her a unique treble. She was the first crime/thriller writer to win three major prizes with her first three books.”

WHISTLING HILLS. Monogram, 1951. Johnny Mack Brown, Jimmy Ellison, Noel Neill, I. Stanford Jolley, Marshall Reed, Pamela Duncan. Director: Derwin Abrahams.

   There’s a little more plot than usual to this otherwise run-of-the-mill western, enough so that I decided it was worth talking about. It seems that the local stage is being held up on a regular basis by a gang of outlaws who always seem to know which pass it’s going through, and they go into action only on days when the strongbox is full.

   Key to their success is a rider dressed all in black who rides the crests of the surrounding hills and blows a whistle when it’s time for the bandits to go into action. The local sheriff (Jimmy Ellison) is stumped; he has no clue as to who the rider in black is.

   When Johnny Mack Brown comes to town looking for a horse that has been stolen from him (and finds both it and the fellow responsible), he stays on to help the sheriff, the owner of the stage line (I. Stanford Jolley), and his niece (a very petite Noel Neill). Problem is, although very much a good guy, Sheriff Dave Holland resents Johnny taking over the chase, and more: he really resents the fact that the niece seems to be making a play for Johnny.

   There is the usual amount of riding and shooting, and barroom fisticuffs, too, but the little bit of mystery adds to the story — not a detective story in reality, although it acts like one, since there’s no reason to suspect the guilty party ahead of time — unless, that is, you realize that there are only a limited number of suspects it could be.

HUGH PENTECOST – The Girl with Six Fingers. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1969. Zebra, paperback, John Jericho series #5; 1st printing, June 1974.

   John Jericho is a massive bulk of a man, six feet six inches tall, and two hundred and forty pounds of solid bone and muscle. With a beard of flaming red, he looks like a Viking warrior. In reality he is an artist of some renown, based in Manhattan and fiercely dedicated to the cause of justice. All conservative causes beware!

   His stories are told by a much less impressive gent named Arthur Hallam, a writer with several novels to his credit but little acclaim. But the two are friends and had six book-length adventures together, plus a large number of novelettes and stories, all appearing in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine between 1964 and 1987.

   It should also be pointed out that both Jericho and Hallam had a previous incarnation as long-standing members of The Park Avenue Hunt Club, with many recorded adventures appearing in the pulp magazine Detective Fiction Weekly in the 1930 and early 40s. Jericho was then a big game hunter, Hallam a bespectacled intellectual type, with the third member being actor Geoffrey Saville. They were on occasion assisted by their Oriental servant, Wu.

   While the title of this later adventure is intriguing — and so is the cover! — it has an easy, more or less mundane explanation. The girl is on an LSD trip and is only imagining the extra finger. The other girl, the one shown on the cover in multi-colored paint, is otherwise nude and is/was the star attraction to a Happening on an exclusive estate somewhere in the wilds of rural Connecticut.

   What brings the outraged Jericho and Hallam into the story is that the event was raided by a non-approving self-organized right-wing militia, and the girl dancing has disappeared. Pentecost pulls out none of the stops in the tale that follows, not really a detective story at all, but a wild and woolly pulp story updated to the Swinging Sixties.

   Unfortunately, and I cannot tell you why, but I think detective stories dealing with hippies, drugs and love-in’s have dated even more than tales written in the 1930s taking place in manor houses and rich people’s estates. It may also be that Pentecost (pen name of Judson Philips, 1903-1989) really wasn’t writing on the basis of personal experience, but perhaps second- or even third-hand knowledge only.

   Nevertheless, the story, previous caveat aside, kept me well occupied for the first leg of a cross-country flight from CA to CT earlier this week.

      The John Jericho series —

Sniper (1965)

Hide Her From Every Eye (1966)
The Creeping Hours (1966)
Dead Woman of the Year (1967)

The Girl With Six Fingers (1969)
A Plague of Violence (1970)

Lori Burton was a record producer as well as a singer-songwriter in her own right. Released in 1967, Breakout was her only solo album and has been described as “a mixture of soul and densely produced New York mid-’60s pop/rock.”

THE EQUALIZER. Columbia Pictures, 2014. Denzel Washington (Robert McCall), Marton Csokas, Chloë Grace Moretz, David Harbour, Haley Bennett, Bill Pullman, Melissa Leo, David Meunier, Johnny Skourtis. Loosely based on the CBS television series (1985-89) created by Michael Sloan and Richard Lindheim and starring Edward Woodward. Director: Antoine Fuqua.

   Well, the name’s the same, and by time the movie’s ended, you can see the new Robert McCall going into same business as the original one did. In that regard, you might call this the prequel.

   This the film version is a delight for the eyes of any action thriller fan, much flashier than the one I watched many years ago on TV, and naturally a lot more violent. Everybody loves to get revenge, no matter not small the slight, and everyone who does will love this movie.

   It starts very slowly, depicting as it does the life of a dedicated foreman at a home improvement warehouse store, living a life of quiet, spending evenings in a diner eating and reading alone. But in so doing he makes the acquaintance and a small friendship with Elena, a young local hooker, played to perfection by an actress previously unknown to me, Chloë Grace Moretz. They are close enough that when she is beaten up by a gang of Russian pimps, he takes it upon himself to avenge her.

   Here is where the action (finally) begins. A confrontation in their lair ends up with all five of the thugs dead within an interval of time that seems like less than a minute. There are secrets, the viewer quickly realizes, that the mild-mannered McCall had not revealed until now.

   All well and good, but is it possible that he may have bitten off more than he can chew. It so happens that the five pimps were just the tip of a Russian mafia iceberg. One man against a huge East Coast operation, headquartered back in Moscow? Seems impossible, but true.

   But to me, without a challenge — and there is none — there is also no movie. No matter how beautifully filmed and choreographed, it’s all movie fakery, with no more depth than the pages of a comic book. What I’d liked to have seen is some weakness in McCall, enough that he could have used Elena’s assistance, for example. She doesn’t show up from the time she’s in the hospital until the end of the movie, a character and performance on the part of Chloë Grace Moretz that’s utterly wasted.

STANLEY ELLIN “Robert.” First published in Sleuth Mystery Magazine, October 1958. Reprinted several times, including Tales for a Rainy Night, edited by David Alexander (Holt Rinehart & Winston, hardcover; 1961; Crest d557, paperback, 1962) and Ellin’s story collection The Blessington Method and Other Strange Tales (Random House, hardcover, 1964; Signet D2805, paperback, 1966).

   Frequent visitors to this blog are likely familiar with the work of Stanley Ellin (1916–1986). A prolific mystery writer and the winner of three Edgars, Ellin sold his first story, “The Specialty of the House” to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1948. Several of his works were adapted for film and television.

   One of Ellin’s stories, simply entitled “Robert” has, as far as I know, never been adapted to stage or screen. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t vast potential there for such an adaptation. A work of horror and suspense more than a mystery tale, “Robert” concerns the interactions between a schoolteacher named Miss Gildea and the eponymous Sixth Grade student. Robert is not like the other kids. He’s a bit … different. And his difference seems to stem from his having uncanny, if not almost psychic, powers.

   Students and schoolteachers often don’t get along. And there’s always one troublemaker in particular that seems to have it in for the teacher. But Robert really has it in for Miss Gildea, so much so that he confesses that he wished he could kill her. This leads the frantic schoolteacher to rush to the school principal. Big mistake. For from the moment that she makes young Robert her adversary, things start going downhill for her. And fast.

   Overall, “Robert” doesn’t explain why things are happening so much as depict a scenario in which such bizarre things could possibly occur. While the resolution to the story is somewhat anticlimactic, getting there is a thrilling little ride.

POOR WHITE TRASH. Cinema Distributors of America, 1961; originally released as Bayou by United Artists, 1957. Peter Graves, Lita Milan, Douglas Fowley, Jonathan Haze and Timothy Carey. Written by Edward I. Fessler. Directed by Harold Daniels.

   Neither sleazy exploitation nor a great movie by any standard, Poor White Trash / Bayou is nonetheless a film like no other.

   The background here is that independent filmmakers Fessler and Daniels made Bayou in 1957 and released it through United Artists to general indifference, possibly because much of the dialogue is spoken in the Cajun dialect. Or perhaps because the film sometimes loses its way veering between drama and documentary in its story of architect Peter Graves trying for a job in New Orleans.

   He doesn’t get the job, but he hooks up with lovely Cajun girl Marie (Lita Milan, who soon afterwards left the movies to marry the billionaire son of a dictator). Unfortunately Lita is lusted after by swampland big-shot Ulysses (Timothy Carey) leading to the usual drama, a fist-fight and a pat wrap-up.

   So as I say, the movie drifted into obscurity, which is okay by me if it’s okay Bayou, and there it might have remained, but in the early 1960s an outfit called Cinema Distributors of America bought it outright, added a musical prologue and some murky nude scenes using doubles, and reissued the whole thing with a salacious ad campaign under the new title. Poor White Trash it became, and it continued showing at drive-ins and grind houses into the 1970s.

   That’s the film I saw and the one I’m reviewing now. It’s not a sleazy rip off, it’s not a classic movie, but it is a unique and interesting thing, due mainly to the performance of Timothy Carey as the local bad guy, Ulysses.

   Carey dominates this thing like Lugosi dominates Dracula or Barrymore Svengali, with a bravura performance placed center stage. He bullies, he wheedles, smirks, screams and even socializes. At one point he breaks into a dance like you wouldn’t believe: shaking, kicking, scratching himself and writhing like Nicholas Cage on speed. And through it all he dominates the film with sheer force of will.

   Almost as memorable is Lita Milan, who projects a vital liveliness that her hackneyed dialogue never dampens. We also get a couple of rather startling montages, as the camera pans around a simple Catholic church while curtains flutter and wave across the image like nothing else I’ve seen before, and a sensuous cross-cut between a raging storm and a couple making love.

   Amid all this, square-jawed Peter Graves makes an appropriately cardboard hero, Douglas Fowley puts in a typical character part, and a bunch of actors I’ve never heard of provide colorful and convincing Cajun background.

   The result is the sort of thing usually called a Cult Movie, and I recommend it to anyone out there whose movie tastes run to the unusual and haunting.

SIMON BRETT – Mrs. Pargeter’s Pound of Flesh. Mrs. Pargeter #4. Charles Scribner’s Sons, US, hardcover, 1993. Penguin, US, paperback, 1994. First published in the UK by Macmillan, hardcover, 1992.

   This is the fourth in Simon Brett’s “secondary” series (he is better known for his very popular stories of the actor Charles Paris) featuring Melita Pargeter. I’m in a distinct minority that doesn’t care for the Paris books at all, so it might seem surprising that I’m fairly fond of Mrs. Pargeter. No so, though; my antipathy toward the former is founded in my dislike for Paris himself, and not in reservations about Brett’s ability.

   For the benefit of newcomers to the series, Melita Pargeter is the widow of a shadowy figure who was evidently quite a proficient criminal of some sort, high up in the criminal hierarchy. He has left her not only very well provided for, but with a seemingly inexhaustible list of persons with shady specialties upon to call at need.

   Here, Mrs. Pargeter and a friend check into the British equivalent of a fitness spa, not so coincidentally run by an ex-associate of her late husband. She hasn’t been there long before discovering a young girl’s body, apparently dead of starvation. Then another death occurs, and she enlists the aid of several of her “helpers” to investigate. Before she’s done, she’s brought down a commercial empire or two and settled some old scores.

   The Pargeter books are witty and light in tone, and not meant to be taken too seriously. Brett is a very good writer with a sharp eye for character, and a breezy and enjoyable narrative style. Mrs. Pargeter provides a refreshing and engaging twist on the LOL detective — likable, intelligent, and altogether competent to deal with whatever comes to hand. Miss Marple she ain’t. I also enjoyed the first two books in the series, and recommend them.

Bibliographic Notes:   To this date there are 19 books in Simon Brett’s Charles Paris series, 8 books about Mrs. Pargeter, 17 books taking place in the seaside town of Fethering, 7 books in his Blotto & Twinks series, and at least 10 standalone works of crime fiction.

Sweetwater was a psychedelic rock/fusion band originally from Los Angeles, California, and were one of the opening acts at Woodstock. The lead singer on this, their first LP, was Nansi Nevins.

ROBERT B. PARKER – Perish Twice. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, October 2000. Berkley, paperback, November 2001.

   I think everybody reading this blog has already made up their minds, one way or the other, whether they’re ever going to read one of Parker’s Spenser novels again. He’s a controversial author and he’s a controversial character, no doubt about it, and everybody knows what side they’re on.

   But for some reason, and maybe I just wasn’t paying attention, I don’t believe I’ve ever read any reviews or eve serious discussion of Parker’s series of Sunny Randall books. She’s a PI too, and also based in the Boston area. I don’t believe she and Spenser ever met, but as I understand it, some of the minor characters in the Spenser novels show up now and then in the Randall books.

   For what it’s worth, this is my report on the first of the latter’s books I’ve read. If you don’t like Spenser, you can stop right here. There’s no way in the world that I can persuade you read any of the Sunny Randall books. I’m not sure how convincingly Parker was able to pull off telling the six books in the series from a female point of view, from a female perspective, but I can tell you this. There’s no mistaking the voice. The author of the Spenser books is the same fellow who wrote the Randall books.

   In Perish Twice Sunny starts with two clients: First, her sister, who thinks her husband is cheating on her. (He is.) Then she’s hired by a high-powered feminist to find out who’s stalking her, which she does, but the stakes seem to suddenly go higher when an associate of her client is murdered. The cops think the dead women was killed by mistake. Sunny disagrees, and quite strongly so, and she ends up fired, without a paying client.

   Does that stop her? No way, no how. There’s a lot more I’ve decided not to go into, and this includes the therapy gives her long time friend Julie whose marriage is also breaking up. Sunny’s non-extinguished love affair with Richie, her ex-husband (mob-connected), seems to make her an expert on love affairs that are going wrong.

   It’s too bad that with her dedication to finding answers to questions that bother her doesn’t end up with her solving the case on her own. That she has to depend on Richie’s family for, giving her the answers but not much in the way of resolution. This is a bit troublesome, if you think about it.