Usually this column deals with work by others: novels, stories, movies, whatever. This month, for starters anyway, it deals with me, or more precisely my latest book. Judges & Justice & Lawyers & Law is a hefty tome that brings together various pieces I’ve written over the past quarter century on law-related fiction, films and TV.

   I admit up front that a few of the book’s chapters, for example the one on “Telejuriscinema, Frontier Style,” have nothing to do with the detective-crime genre, unless you include in that genre all sorts of TV Western series from The Lone Ranger and The Cisco Kid to Kung Fu.

   But many of the pre-Production Code movies that get picked apart in “When Celluloid Lawyers Started to Speak” belong to the genre in one way or another — even if I eccentrically insist on calling them juriscinema — and there are long individual chapters on Melville Davisson Post, Arthur Train and Erle Stanley Gardner, the lawyer storytellers who dominated what I eccentrically insist on calling jurisfiction from the tail end of the 19th century until Gardner’s death in 1970.

   There’s also a chapter on the three versions of the Cape Fear story, beginning with John D. MacDonald’s 1958 novel The Executioners and proceeding through the two vastly different movies called Cape Fear: the 1962 picture with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum, and Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake with Nick Nolte and Robert DeNiro.

   Also included are my takes on the fascinating if almost completely unknown court-martial film Man in the Middle (1964), with Mitchum playing a sort of Philip Marlowe in khaki, and on the equally obscure The Penalty Phase (1986), one of the last films directed by Tony Richardson, with Peter Strauss starring as a liberal judge faced with the nightmare of having to release a psychopath who raped and murdered seventeen young girls.

   The publisher of this volume is Perfect Crime Books, which also put out my Ellery Queen: The Art of Detection (2013), and I see on the Web that it’s been submitted for Edgar consideration to MWA.

   Did anyone notice? In the previous paragraph I referred to Arthur Train (1875-1945) as a lawyer storyteller but not as an author of crime or detective stories. Why? Because Train himself insisted that he didn’t write in that genre and had little interest in it. But many of his stories about attorney Ephraim Tutt and his entourage have to do with trials for murder or other serious crimes, and at least a few of them seem to me, and not just to me, to deserve a place in the genre we love.

   The earliest of these is “The Hand Is Quicker Than the Eye,” the fifth tale in the Mr. Tutt series, originally published in the Saturday Evening Post for August 30, 1919, and collected in Tutt and Mr. Tutt (Scribner, 1920). Ephraim also operates as both lawyer and sleuth in a number of other tales first published in the Post and later included in one or another Scribner collection, for example “The Acid Test” (June 12, 1926; Page Mr. Tutt, 1926) and “The King’s Whiskers” (December 30, 1939; Mr. Tutt Comes Home, 1941).

   My own favorite among the Mr. Tutt stories that include significant detection is “With His Boots On” (September 12, 1942; Mr. Tutt Finds a Way, 1945). That’s the one I chose a number of years ago when Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine editor Cathleen Jordan asked me to select and introduce a story about Ephraim for its Mystery Classic reprint series.

   Ms. Jordan thought the tale was seriously flawed — although she died before she could explain her reasons to me — and instead we settled on “‘And Lesser Breeds Without the Law’,” which struck me as only marginally crime fiction. This is one of a very few tales in the series that the Saturday Evening Post rejected. Why? In the 1920s another magazine owned by the same publisher had serialized a Zane Grey novel that was not only sympathetic to what were then called American Indians but ended with the Navajo hero marrying the white woman he loved.

   So many benighted readers were so outraged that the publisher adopted a new policy: NO MORE POSITIVELY PORTRAYED REDSKINS! EVER!!! That policy was still in force when Train submitted his story, which was set on New Mexico’s Cocas Pueblo reservation and anticipates the treatment of Native Americans that we tend to identify with Tony Hillerman. The tale appeared as an original in the Train collection Mr. Tutt Comes Home (1941) and never came out in a magazine until AHMM for February 2002.

   Not quite that long ago, when I was commissioned to write an essay on the poetry-crime fiction interface for the Poetry Foundation website, I decided that this column was the ideal place for material (of which there was a bunch) that wound up on the electronic cutting room floor.

   In recent years I haven’t run across any items that would justify reviving the old Poetry Corner feature, but now I have. Remember the world-famous Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)? One of his classic early poems was “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” a work consisting of twelve lines divided into three stanzas, written in 1888 and first published two years later.

      Rex Stout, who needs no introduction here, considered Yeats “the greatest poet of the century.” (I assume he meant the 20th century.) In August 1943, a few years after Yeats’ death, Stout wrote “Booby Trap,” fifth of the Nero Wolfe novelets, which appeared in American Magazine for August 1944 and was included in the Farrar & Rinehart collection Not Quite Dead Enough not long afterwards.

   It’s one of the very few tales in the saga where Wolfe is working without pay as a civilian consultant to Army Intelligence and Archie Goodwin has become a major in the same branch of service. The hijacking of industrial trade secrets shared with the military for war purposes leads to the murder of a captain and a colonel, the latter taken out by a powerful hand grenade right in G2’s New York headquarters.

   The tale like so many of Stout’s is hopelessly unfair to the reader, with Wolfe fingering the culprit by the lazy old expedient of setting a trap and seeing who springs it, but for sheer readability it still holds up nicely after almost 75 years.

   All well and good, you may be saying, but where’s Yeats? Good question! In Chapter 4 Archie finds a sheet of paper containing a typed copy of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” which for no earthly reason whatsoever is printed in the text. Its only plot significance is that both Wolfe and Archie immediately notice that it was typed on the same typewriter that produced an anonymous letter earlier in the story.

   Sharing that information with the reader didn’t require printing a line of Yeats’ poem, let alone the complete work. We know from John McAleer’s Rex Stout: A Biography (1977) — which misleadingly states that Stout quoted only the first “three stanzas” —that Yeats’ U.S. publisher raised a stink when the story appeared in print. Here’s how Stout explained to his Farrar & Rinehart editor.

   â€œI am an ass. When I was writing ‘Booby Trap,’ out in the country, I phoned somebody at Macmillan to ask if it would all right to quote that poem … and was told that it would be. But I made no record of the conversation, I don’t know the date that it took place, and I don’t know whom I talked to. Beat that for carelessness if you can, and let me know which jail I go to.”

   McAleer doesn’t tell us how the matter was resolved, but most likely Stout had to pay Macmillan some money. The poem must still have been protected by copyright in 1944, but it’s been in the public domain for decades and can be found online in a few seconds. On YouTube you can even hear Yeats reading it.

   The city of Ferguson is about 15 miles and 20 minutes’ drive from my home in St. Louis’ Central West End. While I was working on this column, Ferguson exploded. Hundreds of thousands of words have already been written about the events and I see no reason to add to them except to quote a passage from Ellery Queen’s non-series novel The Glass Village (1954) where the protagonist reflects “that man was a chaos without rhyme or reason; that he blundered about like a maddened animal in the delicate balance of the world, smashing and disrupting, eager only for his own destruction.”

   If Thanksgiving week was a sad time for reason and common sense, Thanksgiving Day was especially sad for our genre. P.D. James, one of the last great English detective novelists, died peacefully at her Oxford home. She was 94 and still thinking about writing one more novel. Peace be upon her.

YELLOW CARGO. Grand National Pictures, 1936. Later released as Sinful Cargo. Conrad Nagel, Eleanor Hunt, Vince Barnett, Jack La Rue, Claudia Dell, Vance Carroll. Story, screenplay & director: Crane Wilbur.

   Pretty much a minor leaguer in the overall scheme of things, but this was the first of four crime and espionage movies featuring the two leading stars Conrad Nagel and Eleanor Hunt in a series of “G-Man” pictures, the other three being Navy Spy, The Gold Racket, and Bank Alarm, all from 1937.

   Conrad Nagel plays Alan O’Connor in all four, while his companion in crime solving is Bobbie Reynolds, played by Eleanor Hunt, about whom I will have more to say later. O’Connor works for immigration office in Yellow Cargo, sent to the west coast to breakup a gang who has been smuggling illegal immigrants from China into, while Bobbie Reynolds is a brash young newspaper reporter covering the movie industry.

   Their paths meet when they both learn that a small time movie studio is using a make-believe film to conduct their business, replacing movie extras dressed in Chinese garb by the men from China they are smuggling in.

   The movie is played as much for laughs and light entertainment rather than a serious crime drama, with balding Vince Barnett as the dimmest (and clumsiest) news photographer ever to try to take a picture with an old accordion box camera.

   You have to give the actors credit. They take their roles seriously, even if the story (lame) and production values (practically nil) are far beneath their ability. Stalwart leading man Nagel’s career lasted until the 1960s in both TV and the movies, but unfortunately Eleanor Hunt made only one more film after this series ran dry. Her large expressive eyes reminded me of Kay Francis, but with a much brassier demeanor. To add to the comparison, she also has a hint of a lisp.

   As a former chorus girl, Eleanor Hunt also had the legs to show for it, at least in one short scene in which her skirt came up above her knees. I don’t know why I noticed that, but I did.

   In spite of its various and sundry flaws and shortcomings, I enjoyed this less than 60 minute programmer, and I think I’ll look to see if the other three in the series can be found.

THE HANGING TREE. Warner Brothers, 1959. Gary Cooper, Maria Schell, Karl Malden, George C. Scott, Karl Swenson, John Dierkes, Virginia Gregg, with Ben Piazza as Rune. Screenplay: Wendell Mayes & Halstead Welles, based on the novella by Dorothy Johnson. Music by Max Steiner. Title song sung by Marty Robbins. Directed by Delmer Daves and (uncredited) Karl Malden.

   The Hanging Tree was Gary Cooper’s last western other than the documentary The Real West, and appropriately it is one of the best of his career, and one of the best of the 1950‘s, the golden age of the Hollywood Western. It’s based on the novella by Dorothy Johnson (A Man Called Horse, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) and directed by Delmer Daves (3:10 to Yuma, Jubal), or it was supposed to be directed by Daves until he fell ill and Gary Cooper, whose company was also producing the film, asked Karl Malden to take the helm. It proved a remarkable collaboration and the start of a friendship and mutual admiration society that lasted until Cooper’s death.

   Like most good westerns the story is simple, Doctor Joe Frail follows the 1873 Montana Gold Trail to a small mining community, mostly tents and mud, where he sets up practice. When a boy, Rune (Ben Piazza) is shot for stealing from a sluice Frail saves him and makes him his bondsman, a virtual slave, blackmailing him with the bullet that proves he was the sluice thief.

   It’s a rough little town not improved by glad-handing backstabbing miner Frenchy (Karl Malden) who knows Doc Frail from another mining camp, knows how fast he is, and about the fire Frail may have set that burned his wife and her lover alive.

   This is a very adult adult western.

   When Frail wins a gold claim from gambler Society Red (John Dierkes) all seems set, and no one much listens to Grubb (George C. Scott) a fanatic faith healer who hates Frail and knows his history. There is only one element left, and that arrives when the stagecoach is held up and the horses panic. Everyone dies but a young woman who suffers severe wounds and exposure, Elizabeth Mahler (Maria Schell), a Swiss immigrant come west with her now dead father.

   Frenchy finds her and feels a proprietary interest in her, as well as undressing her with every lewd look. Frenchy has other bad habits than backstabbing. But Doc takes on her care with young Rune, and while Doc seems a hard man there are signs he is more than that. Frankly Rune just can’t read him and neither can Elizabeth: a man with secrets like he carries becomes remote, even his name is false. He took the name Frail because he figured all men were frail and he was the frailest.

   When Elizabeth is well she tires of Frail’s bossiness, especially when he tells her he is sending her back to Switzerland because he can’t live near her. She runs away, Rune rebels, and Doc secretly backs them through store owner Tom Flaunce (Karl Swenson), the only decent man in this little mud hole Sodom of the west despite his shrewish wife, Edna (Virginia Gregg).

   Backed by Doc Elizabeth and Rune team with Frenchy who knows gold digging though he isn’t very good at it, and though they find nothing Doc keeps backing them whenever they need money.

   When a rainstorm fells a tree on their claim they find the glory hole, a vein of nuggets in the roots of the tree and beneath. Now they are rich and rush to town to celebrate.

   But Frenchy hasn’t forgotten Elizabeth and when he tries to rape her, Doc arrives just in time and kills him. No, that’s an understatement, because in one of the most brutal scenes in any American western of its era, Cooper empties his gun into the fleeing Frenchy, who dies at the edge of a cliff, and Doc then kicks his corpse over.

   The grim Frail as he coolly walks down the pleading running Frenchy putting bullet after bullet in him is a scene you won’t soon forget. Perhaps only Cooper’s brutal beating of Jack Lord in Man of the West and throwing Cameron Mitchell into the fire in Garden of Evil come anywhere near it. And, I’m little ashamed to admit it, it is a very satisfying scene as well, Malden is always a very killable bad guy.

   Grubb and Society Red and a group of drunken miners drag Frail to the hanging tree to lynch him, and have the rope on his neck and Grubb at the horse’s reins when Elizabeth and Rune arrive and buy his life at the cost of their claim. As the drunken miners battle over the claim Rune frees Frail and Elizabeth turns to leave but Frail calls her back and kneels in the buckboard to embrace her. Fade to the Marty Robbins theme. He literally found his love at the hanging tree.

   The Hanging Tree has more than enough virtues and might be Cooper’s best if not for High Noon. Frail is a complex character who is never just a hero, just a good man, just misunderstood. Life and fate have bred a rattlesnake mean streak in him and it is clear he fears it though he fights it more successfully than he knows.

   It is not until he comes clean that the viewer knows for certain he did not set than fatal fire. Malden, fresh off his Oscar, is quite good as Frenchy, but as a director he is a revelation. This film is as well directed as any major western of the era, a worthy rival for Ford, Mann, Hawks, Daves, or any of the other iconic Western directors. IMDb says he finished the film, but Daves became sick early, and Malden directed the bulk of the film

   Ben Piazza as Rune is a little lost in this cast of veterans, but not badly lost, and Schell is fine in a tough no nonsense non-glamorous role that is both physically and emotionally demanding. And then there is that New York actor making his Hollywood debut on screen, George C. Scott. He has only a little time on screen, but he makes the most of every scene as the fanatic, cowardly, venal, murderous Grubb. If he had never done anything else you would remember him from this. I did for years, though I didn’t really know who he was or connect the star of television’s East Side, West Side with the part.

   But like almost any film he is in this is Gary Cooper’s film and there is never a moment you don’t know it, whether he is on screen or not. I recall seeing this on the big screen (it was the debut of Technirama) and being bowled over by Cooper. He’s still impressive on the small screen though in this one, Malden seems to have staged it to shoot Cooper from a lower angle making him seem even taller and more commanding than he was to begin with.

   The Max Steiner score is fine, and surprisingly, considering the title, the Marty Robbins theme song turns out to be one of the best of the era and one of the best western themes ever. “To really live/ You must almost die …” proves haunting if you may not want to think about it too much and “I found my love at the hanging tree” is a tough lyric to pull off even in a western song but Robbins succeeds.

   Brian Garfield suggested they should have stopped making westerns when Cooper died and this should have been the last of its kind. I don’t know that I agree with him, but his point is well taken. In many ways this is the last and one of the best of its breed. Screen westerns never really reached this height again; in my opinion, they were never this good again, not at this level. Whatever Cooper brought to the western, went with him.

   If you have never seen this one then find it. It shows up on TCM now once in a while and is available from the Warner’s Archives to own or watch on line if you are a subscriber. You can also listen to the Marty Robbins song and see the titles and end scene on YouTube.

   This is quite simply one of the best westerns of the 1950‘s and one of Gary Cooper’s best westerns, which makes it one of the best westerns ever made.

THE TIME MACHINE. Dreamworks/Warner Brothers, 2002. Guy Pearce, Sienna Guillory, Samantha Mumba, Jeremy Irons, Orlando Jones, Mark Addy, Phyllida Law, Alan Young. Based on the novel by H. G. Wells and the 1960 screenplay by David Duncan. Director: Simon Wells.

   There’s some resemblance between one of H. G. Wells’ most famous stories and this movie, but not a whole lot. I suspect it’s a lot closer to the 1960 film based on a screenplay by David Duncan, the one starring Rod Taylor and produced by George Pal, but it’s been so long that I watched that one that perhaps I should not even bring it up.

   The first part of the movie, the part that takes place in Victorian England, is better by far than what follows, as Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce) travels into the future to find out why he can’t change the past by means of a time machine he has built (a wonderful concoction of revolving rings, clockwork gears and sharply focused beams of light) — a past in which his fiancée dies, and keeps on dying every time to goes back in time to save her, only to fail.

   In the far, far future mankind has evolved into two races: the Eloi, a peaceful lot who live above ground but who seem to have no purpose in their lives, and the Morlocks, a race of ravaging monsters who live below ground and prey on the Eloi at feeding time.

   There are a lot of computer generated effects to make this future come to life. The past is easier to reproduce (ignoring the fact that Hartdegen’s betrothed (Sienna Guillory) uses present day makeup to enhance her already natural beauty). Much is made of Hartdegen’s inability to change the past, but the explanation, when it comes, is tossed off in a line that takes less than five seconds to say.

   It is one of those temporal paradoxes like the one that says you can’t go back and kill your grandfather before you are born because then there would be no you to go back in time to kill your grandfather. But to put a proposition like this before an audience that might want to think about it while would take some effort, and Simon Wells (H. G. Wells great-grandson) takes the easier way out and concentrates on the monsters and the blow darts and the explosions instead, presumably thinking that’s enough to satisfy the reality based science fiction fans among us.

   It isn’t. No more than to imagine that destroying the moon in its orbit in the 21st century would allow for any kind of life to exist on the Earth 800,000 years later, much less speak English.

TREASURE OF RUBY HILLS. Allied Artists, 1955. Zachary Scott, Carole Mathews, Barton MacLane, Dick Foran, Lola Albright, Gordon Jones, Raymond Hatton, Lee Van Cleef. Based on the story “The Rider of the Ruby Hills,” by Louis L’Amour. Director: Frank McDonald.

   For a Western with quite a few excellent character actors, Treasure of Ruby Hills is overall something of a disappointment. Based on a Louis L’Amour story, the movie stars Zachary Scott as a man determined not to follow his deceased father down the rabbit hole of frontier criminality.

   Scott, with menacing eyes and a thick mustache, portrays the enigmatic Ross Haney, a man determined to revenge the death of his friend and business partner at the hands of Frank Emmett (the always enjoyable-to-watch Lee Van Cleef). Haney also seems to have a greater scheme in mind. Although it takes a while for the viewer to learn his overall motivations, one soon learns that Haney’s overall objective is to control the water supply to the town of Soledad, so as to exert power over the thuggish cattle barons who rule the town.

   Sounds simple enough.

   Unfortunately, the film tries to do too much. It introduces far too many characters in a running time of just over seventy minutes. There’s the rancher brother and sister combo. No surprise here: Haney falls in love with the sister and ends up the mortal rival of her would-be fiancé, Alan Doran, portrayed by Dick Foran.

   There are also two rival cattle/land barons, Chalk Reynolds (Barton MacLane) and Walt Payne (Charles Fredericks), both of whom end up with a bellyful of lead thanks to Doran’s scheming. Plus, there’s the marshal; Scott’s other would-be business partner; a wounded man whom Haney tends to; an innkeeper; and a waitress. Add to this some backstories about the characters and you end up with an overall muddled story, one that simply refuses to flow smoothly.

   What Treasure of Ruby Hills does have going for it is, however, is atmosphere. The narrative unfolds in a semi-claustrophobic, self-enclosed universe of suspense and violence. There really are no good guys here, just men morally clad in shades of grey, burdened by the albatross of their past misdeeds and their family history.

   Significantly, there are no children in the film and, if I am not mistaken, apart from horses, no animals either. The movie presents the West as rough and tumble world, where live is cheap and loyalty is a commodity to be bought and sold.

   As much as I like Zachary Scott, Lee Van Cleef, and Barton MacLane, I’d very much hesitate to categorize Treasure of Ruby Hills as a particularly good film. Sad to say, but it’s really just another mediocre mid-1950s Western. But somehow I managed to see it through to the very end, wondering how it’d all turn out and who’d still be alive and kicking once the proverbial dust settled. Take that for what it is, as it surely must mean something.

NOTE:   This movie is available for viewing on Hulu. Follow the link.

WILSON TUCKER – To Keep or Kill. Rinehart & Co., hardcover, 1947. Lion #21, paperback, 1950; Lion Library LL84, 1956.

   Tucker, who is probably better known today for his science fiction, wrote a total of five Charles Horne mysteries for Rinehart back between 1946 and 1951. After that he apparently decided he was better off not trying to write detective fiction, even as a sideline.

   Not that he left the field completely, but I think he probably made the right decision.

   Horne is a private eye. Most of his work is done for insurance companies. He quite vehemently does not do divorce work. The small metropolis of Boone, Illinois, where he has his office, is a figment of Tucker’s imagination, although there is a Boone County (up near Rockford).

   This is the second Horne book. As it begins, he is witness to an explosion. He thinks it’s a practical joke at first, but when it goes off it takes part of a city block and a couple of victims with it. Later, Horne is kidnapped and kept a prisoner in the home of the girl who planted the bomb. She’s a redhead, tall, beautiful, and as loopy as a loon.

   She is in love with Horne, she has been stalking him for months, and now that she “owns” him, so to speak, she expects — well, this was written before such explicit intentions could be stated, but those are the kinds of intentions she has. Viewed from today’s more permissive perspective, Horne’s brave resistance to temptation seems both admirable and refreshingly naive.

   Tucker’s style in this book is a burbling, slap-happy one, somewhat reminiscent of Fredric Brown in nature. In all, however, it hardly manages to disguise a total apparent lick of respect for logical thought processes. Or let me put it another way: the sort of logic that is used by all concerned would make sense only to the well-confined inmates of a lunatic asylum.

   It wouldn’t be hard to enjoy this quirky excuse for a detective story immensely. There is a thin line, it is said, between genius and lunacy. If I’d been able to follow the plot at all, I’d have said this was the work of the former.

   As for a letter grade, I’m not too sure of this one at all, but if it means anything to you, what I’m going to do, if I don’t change my mind tomorrow, is give this book a definite (C plus?).

The Charles Horne series —

The Chinese Doll. Rinehart, 1946. Dell Mapback #343, 1949.

To Keep or Kill. Rinehart, 1947. Lion #21, 1950.
The Dove. Rinehart, 1948.
The Stalking Man. Rinehart, 1949. Mercury Mystery #150, no date.
Red Herring. Rinehart, 1951.

GEORGE C. APPELL – Gunman’s Grudge. Lion #139, paperback original, 1953; reprinted as Lion Library LL161, 1957.

   Now how’s them for creds!

   Actually, this is surprisingly fine: a fast, remorseless and straightforward tale of violence and damnation in the manner of Jim Thompson and James M. Cain — yes, it’s that good.

   Tracy Silleck opens the book on the run from killing the man who killed his dog. There’s a brief, rather cryptic scene early on as he returns to his home town and tries to reconnect with people who never really accepted him in the first place, then murders a man for no very good reason. Back on the run again, he takes refuge in an outlaw town where he’s quickly roped into another murder and slowly finds himself mired in the role of killer-for-hire.

   I’ve only read one other book by Appell (the rather unimpressive Ambush Hell) and it did nothing to prepare me for the unsettling nihilism of Gunman’s Grudge. I mentioned Jim Thompson with good reason, as this book recalls the best of Savage Night (published the same year, also by Lion) and The Getaway, which came several years later.

   Silleck’s character recalls the Thompson protagonist: drawn to violence but haunted by remorse. He’s no pulp-novel killer, but a man who can miscalculate, talk too much and worry over what he’s become and where he’s going. And as Grudge speeds to its predestined end, it carries the reader with him irresistibly.

CHRISTOPHER BUSH – The Case of the Platinum Blonde. Macmillan, US, hardcover, 1949. First published by Cassell, UK, hardcover, 1944.

   My copy of this novel is a previously owned one. One of the former owners wrote on the first page, “Good to the last suspect.” I quite agree with the anonymous reader that it’s a good mystery, but Ludovic Travers in this outing is not a very appealing detective. Perhaps the pain from his recently acquired war injury makes him irascible and thus rather irritating.

   Travers is convalescing at his sister’s home in the village of Cleavesham. In his rambles around the village he notices a man putting up a sign on another man’s house, a sign saying, among other things, “REMEMBER — THIS NIGHT SHALL THY SOUL BE REQUIRED OF THEE.”

   The next day Travers finds the occupant of the house in his living room with a bullet in his head. Because Travers loves “ironic situations and even creating them,” he toys with the evidence and does not reveal all to the police. And then he discovers that the wife of the Chief Constable, a man whom he admires, may be involved somehow.

   An interesting investigation by Travers, along with his friendly rival, George Wharton of Scotland Yard. But it would have been a better novel if Travers had been better behaved.

Bibliographic Notes: Over a period of 42 years, from 1926 to 1968, Bush wrote over 60 detective novels under his own name, all with Ludovic Travers as the leading detective. Superintendent Wharton may have been his rival and ally in all of them as well, but this is not so indicated by Hubin. Bush also wrote a small numbers of crime and thriller novels as by Noel Barclay and Michael Home.

APACHE. United Artists, 1954. Burt Lancaster, Jean Peters, John McIntire, Charles Bronson, John Dehner, Morris Ankrum, Monte Blue. Based on the novel Broncho Apache by Paul Wellman. Director: Robert Aldrich.

   You’d think that a movie starring Burt Lancaster with strong supporting roles by John McIntire and Charles Bronson (billed as Charles Buchinsky) would be more captivating and engaging than Apache, a mid-1950s film about the life and times of Massai, one of the last Apache warriors. The film is based on Paul I. Wellman’s novel, Broncho Apache and on fact as well as fiction.

   The story follows Massai (Lancaster) as he escapes a prison train meant to deliver him and other Apache prisoners, including Geronimo (Monte Blue) to confinement in Florida. Massai makes his way through the Midwest, encountering Whites in St. Louis and a Cherokee Indian man who teaches him about the Cherokees’ decision to grow corn and to adopt a non-warrior lifestyle. Initially, Massai, who really isn’t all that personable a fellow, thinks little of this approach to living, but eventually decides to crow his own corn when he arrives back in Arizona.

   There is, of course, a love interest. Massai falls for Nalinle (Jean Peters), daughter of an Apache man who betrays him to the White authorities. He is a fugitive, after all. On his trail are two men, Al Sieber (McIntire) and the Apache Calvary officer Hondo (Bronson). Both of them are excellent in this otherwise average Western.

   Apache often feels labored, almost soporific. It’s not that there isn’t any action. There’s actually action a plenty, but much of it seems so forced and downright tedious. There is, however, one notable exception. In a tense, beautifully filmed sequence, Massai and Al Sieber (McIntire) play cat and mouse in Massai’s small cornfield. For a moment or two, it’s not quite clear who is going to best whom and with what weapon.

   Unfortunately, too many of the other chase sequences just aren’t all that thrilling. And then there’s the unavoidable question of whether the casting of the blue-eyed Lancaster as an Apache warrior was a good choice. I’ll leave that to future viewers to decide.

CONQUEST OF COCHISE. Columbia Pictures, 1953. John Hodiak, Robert Stack, Joy Page, Rico Alaniz. Director: William Castle.

   On the other hand, for a Western/historical drama that isn’t all that, you know, historically accurate, Conquest of Cochise is nevertheless a fairly entertaining action packed little film. Like Masterson of Kansas, which I reviewed here, Conquest of Cochise is a William Castle/Sam Katzman collaboration that holds up to the test of time far better than many other similarly situated lower budget 1950s Westerns.

   Why is this the case? First of all is the strong cast. Although they may not have been the biggest box office stars of their time, both John Hodiak, who portrays Apache chief Cochise, and Robert Stack, who portrays U.S. Calvary Major Tom Burke, are both solid actors more than capable of delivering above average performances. The two men’s attempt to bring peace between the United States and the Apache Nation is repeatedly thwarted by events both in, and out of, their direct control.

   The film also benefits greatly from the presence of Joy Page in her portrayal of Consuelo de Cordova, a Mexican woman caught between her family, the Apaches, and Major Burke’s romantic advances. Rico Alaniz, who may be familiar to fans of 1950s TV Westerns, portrays Felipe, a hotheaded Tucson man seething at the Apaches for the murder of his wife.

   The film’s story line, if not true to history, is both fairly straightforward and (thankfully) without a lot of the forced, well meaning, anti-racist platitudes that ironically only served to categorize Indians as a people almost irrevocably culturally apart from broader American society. In Conquest of Cochise, the Apaches are neither presented as fundamentally misunderstood “noble savages,” nor as mindless brutes. They are a people caught between the Americans and the Mexicans, with their leader Cochise trying to make good decisions under difficult geopolitical constraints.

   Indeed, Conquest of Cochise is a surprisingly thoughtful Western with some breathtaking scenery to boot. Although it doesn’t have the cinematography and sentimentalism of John Ford’s cavalry trilogy or the star power of James Stewart (Broken Arrow), William Castle’s Conquest of Cochise, with a running time of around seventy minutes, nevertheless remains a worthwhile investment of one’s time.

   True, it’s no classic. But there’s action, moderately well developed characters, internal and external conflict, and romance. Perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t try to be a heavy-handed horse opera.

   One final thing to consider: although it can be said about nearly every film ever made, I do think that this movie in particular has to be far more enjoyable when watched as it was meant to be seen on the big screen. Maybe it has something to do with Castle’s unique, if not easily categorized, vision of how a film should be directed so as to captivate the viewer’s attention.

   If you’ve been following the comments over the past couple of weeks, you will have discerned that I’ve been out of town for most of that time. Having decided to take my laptop with me, I’ve been able to keep up with email, more or less, and I’ve even been able to keep on posting while I’ve been away. Some of the reviews I’d prepared in advance, others I’ve had to improvise, with fairly decent results, except for the images, which I wasn’t always able to do justice to.

   I’ve therefore spent this evening upgrading all of the recent posts, going all the way back to November 12 and Mike Nevins’ review of the first Joe Gall book. Go back and take a look, if it so suits your fancy.

   I might also point to you that the comments following David Vineyard’s review of the movie Susan Slept Here last Sunday have evolved into a two-sided conversation between David and myself about the sad state of affairs in mystery writing today, in our opinions. Go back and read it, and join in, again if it suits your fancy.

   Hopefully I’ll be able to return to a regular schedule soon, but perhaps not tomorrow as (1) a huge Nor’easter is promised, with dire amounts of snow predicted, and (2) I have two and a half plastic postal bins containing held mail to work my way through. Nasty work, but someone’s got to do it.