THEODORE STURGEON – Some of Your Blood. Ballantine 458K, paperback original, 1961. Reprinted several times.

   Speaking of tough, fast and scary, following my review of Jim Thompson’s Savage Night, I revisited Theodore Sturgeon’s Some of Your Blood, which has all that and is also by way of being one of the most compassionate books I’ve ever read.

   The tale of a bloodsucking freak is told as a psychological detective story, with an overworked Army shrink trying to delve into the psyche of a likable but mysterious GI, “George” whose personal correspondence is the catalyst of the case. Along the way we uncover serial killings and some other things not suitable for a family show, but Sturgeon never loses sympathy for “George” and the result is a uniquely chilling and memorable story.

   Bombay Mail was screened at Cinevent in Columbus, this past weekend. I certainly agree with Steve’s assessment of the film, reviewed here, which is fun but cluttered with too much plot and too little development of the large cast of characters. This might, however, repay a visiting, and Steve, I’d be interested in your take on the film after a second viewing.

   There were several crime films screened, and, of the ones I saw, I was most impressed by The Under-Cover Man, a 1932 Paramount Publix release, that gave George Raft his first starring role. He had no great range as an actor, but the role, that of a small-time crook who goes undercover for the police to help them catch the murderer of his father, nicely suited his talent. It also helped that he had a strong supporting cast that included Nancy Carroll, Lew Cody, David Landau, Gregory Ratoff and Roscoe Karns.

   I was less impressed by a British film, Appointment with Crime (a British National release, 1946), a grim little drama that was marred by a badly written climax that may have been scripted to satisfy a morality code demanding a “suitable” punishment for the criminal lead (Kenneth Harlan). There were some striking performances, most notably that of Herbert Lom as an upperclass villain, standing out among the lowlifes he dealt with.

   An oddity was Blondie Has Servant Trouble, an old house mystery in the long-running Columbia series based on the even longer-running newspaper strip. I’ve seen the movie more than once (and I did see it on its original release) and it’s probably the only one of the series that I would watch again.

   An enthusiastic Variety review is quoted, and, with even a modicum of encouragement, I will pull the film from my box set of the complete series (now you know the probably awful truth about my taste in films) and see if it’s held up for me.

   For the record, the films I most enjoyed at the convention were Dick Turpin (Fox 1925; John G. Blystone, director; starring Tom Mix); The Virginian (B. P. Schulberg Productions, 1923; Tom Forman, director; Kenneth Harlan (The Virginian), Florence Vidor (Molly Woods), Russell Simpson (Trampas), and Pat O’Malley (Steve); and Mare Nostrum (MGM, 1926; Rex Ingram, director; Alice Terry and Antonio Moreno).

   I will add that Ellery Queen’s Penthouse Mystery (Darmour Inc./Columbia release, 1941; James Hogan, director, Ralph Bellamy, Margaret Lindsay, Charley Grapewin, and Anna May Wong, among a cast of familiar faces) seemed to me a silly travesty of the EQ character, with Bellamy dithering through much of the film over Nikki Porter’s “meddling” in a murder investigation instead of sticking to her typewriter and working on his latest novel.

   After the screening, when a friend asked me what I thought of the film, and I told him, it was only then that he told me that, fired by his enjoyment of the film, he had bought a complete set of the Queen films from one of the convention dealers. Not one of my more comfortable moments during the convention.

   If you’re a fan of Old Time Radio (The Green Hornet, The Shadow, Sam Spade) and Early TV (The Twilight Zone), then you already know Martin Grams’ name. But you may not know that he’s started his own blog: http://www.martingrams.blogspot.com/

   So far he’s been posting only once a week, but each post is long and jam-packed with vital information to collectors and connoisseurs of, well, Old Time Radio and Early TV shows, information you will find nowhere else, I guarantee it.

   Topics covered so far, working backward:

Boris Karloff: The “Lost” Radio Broadcasts
Cincinnati Old Time Radio Convention
Batman: The TV Series
Cavalcade of America, A History in Pictures
Duffy’s Tavern: Year One

   In its ongoing attempt seemingly to wring every last pound of profit out of the Agatha Christie literary estate, HarperCollins has recently reprinted The Floating Admiral, the collaborative detective novel (originally published in 1931) by fourteen members of the then recently formed Detection Club (each writing a successive chapter).

   Although Agatha Christie’s contribution is a chapter of eight pages (in my 1979 Gregg Press edition) — 3% of the book — she gets top billing, with only Dorothy L. Sayers and G. K. Chesterton (the latter of whom contributed, by his own admission, a strictly ornamental prologue of five pages) also being mentioned by name, in much smaller letters. Such are the publishing perks of fame and continued books sales!

   To my mind, the detective novel, requiring as it does the most scrupulous planning, is not really a form that is receptive to “round robin” treatment. Case in point: The Floating Admiral. Overloaded with complications from too many eager hands, the tale in my opinion begins to take on water and sink well before reaching its conclusion (tellingly entitled by Anthony Berkeley, “Cleaning Up the Mess”).

   Nevertheless, if one is interested in authors of Golden Age detective fiction, The Floating Admiral is in many ways quite interesting, whatever its artistic failings.

   Things go pretty well for the first five chapters (written by Canon Victor L. Whitechurch, G.D.H. and Margaret Cole, Henry Wade, Agatha Christie and John Rhode), with the authors refraining from over-elaboration. Unfortunately the calmly floating boat is upset by water violently churned by Milward Kennedy (his chapter, which follows Rhode’s “Inspector Rudge Begins to Form a Theory” is impertinently entitled “Inspector Rudge Thinks Better of It” — the good Inspector should not have).

   Dorothy L. Sayers tries to straighten everything out that had tangled with a thirty-seven page chapter but she only makes things worse.

   Ronald A. Knox’s chapter, “Thirty-Nine Articles of Doubt” (Chapter Eight) warningly raises thirty-nine problematical points that have accumulated for the authors following him to consider and Freeman Wills Crofts in Chapter Nine politely notes that, among other things, the body (allegedly of the admiral of course) was never adequately identified or an inquest arranged. But all to little avail.

   Clemence Dane complains in her notes to her Chapter Eleven, the penultimate chapter, that the mystery has become “quite inexplicable to me” — and she likely has not been alone in that sentiment over the years.

   Anthony Berkeley’s conclusion has been praised heartily by over-generous critics. I deem more like the curate’ egg — good in spots but essentially rotten. But to be fair to the poor fellow, he was handed the devil of a job.

   The fun for me in reading The Floating Admiral is not in reading a cogently plotted detective novel (it simply isn’t one), but in seeing the narrative approach each author takes in his/her chapter:

    ●   G. K. Chesterton writes rich prose.

    ●   Canon Whitechurch introduces a charming vicar.

    ●   Henry Wade develops appealing and credible relationships among his policemen.

    ●   Out of the blue, Agatha Christie introduces a garrulous, gossipy lady innkeeper.

    ●   John Rhode discusses tidal movements (the admiral was floating after all) and sympathetically expands the role of the retired petty officer, Neddy Ware.

    ●   Milward Kennedy overcomplicates the story, as does Dorothy L. Sayers (the ingenious Sayers should have been given the opening chapter — she and Kennedy both clearly wanted it).

    ●   Ronald A. Knox makes a long list.

    ●   Freeman Wills Crofts checks alibis and has his inspector travel by train.

    ●   In his notes to his chapter, Knox amusingly declares, “I once laid it down that no Chinaman should appear in a detective story. I feel inclined to extend the rule so as to apply to residents in China. It appears that Admiral Penistone, Sir W. Denny, Walter Fitzgerald, Ware and Holland are all intimate with China, which seems overdoing it.”

   In her recent Guardian review of the new edition of The Floating Admiral, Laura Wilson deems Agatha Christie proposed solution for the tale “as you would expect, the most ingenious” of all the solutions. Certainly it’s more tricksy than, say, the solution proffered by John Rhode (without a complicated murder means, Rhode is unable to play to his greatest strength here). It’s also absolutely absurd.

   Here’s how Christie envisioned the state of affairs in the Admiral’s household     (*** SPOILER *** to Christie’s proposed solution follows, obviously):

   The Admiral’s niece is really his Uncle’s nephew masquerading as the niece. He has been doing this in his Uncle’s household for weeks, and is able to get away with it because he “has been an actor at one time” (that Golden Age crutch for the unlikely accomplishment of great disguises) and because the Admiral has not seen the niece since she was a child (he has seen the nephew more recently, however). The servants are fooled as well, as are the various beaux of the neighborhood, whom the nephew “takes an artistic pleasure” in vamping.     (*** END SPOILER ***)

   Ingenious or rather ridiculous? You decide for yourself, but I know what I think.

   On the whole, I much preferred Double Death, a round robin novel with chapters by Dorothy L. Sayers, Freeman Wills Crofts, Valentine Williams, F. Tennyson Jesse, Anthony Armstrong and David Hume that originally appeared in the Sunday Chronicle in (I believe) 1936 and was published in book form by Victor Gollancz.

   It is often stated to be a Detection Club production, but I do not see how this could be, since only two of the six writers, Sayers and Crofts, were members of the Detection Club.

   In her introductory chapter to Double Death, Sayers sets up a compelling possible domestic poisoning situation, followed by a death at a railway station, at the evocatively named town of Creepe.

   Freeman Wills Crofts embroiders on this opening situation ably (he even provides a stunning map of Creepe and Creepe station), as does Valentine Williams, though the latter is more known for his “Clubfoot” thrillers than his (underrated) detective novels. Unfortunately the later authors are less concerned with cluing, so that as a fair play mystery the tale ends up rather a bust (especially if you read the silly prologue, added later).

   However, the writing and overall emotional situation remains compelling throughout Double Death, thus making the tale more of a success than the The Floating Admiral.

   It’s interesting to note that in Double Death, written in the mid-thirties, all the authors are concerned with maintaining love interest; whereas in The Floating Admiral all the characters are sticks in whom one could not be expected take the slightest interest (well, there’s the vamping transvestite nephew, as envisioned by Christie).

   As the 1930s progressed, the Golden Age detective novel began to put more emphasis on emotional situations and less on ratiocination. In the end, it is this shift in emphasis that makes Double Death more interesting than The Floating Admiral, in my view. Admiral depends for artistic success on detection and too many hands on deck sink the craft.

   Yet with less than half the people involved, Double Death might have managed to work as a true fair play detective novel. Certainly Sayers, Crofts and to a lesser extent Valentine Williams made an admirable start of it.

   I rather wish the novel could have been kept a collaboration simply of two: Sayers and Crofts. The two authors corresponded over the opening chapter of Double Death in the spring of 1936, with Sayers requesting and Crofts supplying pertinent points of railway station detail.

   Sayers had already written her railway timetable novel The Five Red Herrings (1931) as a sort of homage to Crofts’ Sir John Magill’s Last Journey (1930) — these two brilliant books continue to stand today as the ne plus ultra of railway timetable mysteries. Double Death in their hands might well have been a classic product of the Golden Age. As it is, it is still a good read.

MODERN LOVE. Universal, 1929. Charley Chase, Kathryn Crawford, Jean Hersholt, Anita Garvin. Screenplay by Albert DeMond and Beatrice Van. Director: Arch Heath. Shown at Cinecon 44, Hollywood CA, Aug-Sept 2008.

   Long considered to be a lost film, but “recovered” by researchers at Universal, this Charley Chase feature was filmed during the transition from silent to sound and includes silent episodes with intertitles, interspersed with some talking sequences.

   In this modern comedy of manners, Charley’s young wife (Kathryn Crawford) is forced to keep her marriage a secret to hold on to her job. When a client (Jean Hersholt) arrives from France, Crawford is obliged to give a dinner party, with Charley serving the meal.

   This extended sequence is the comic highlight of the film, with Hersholt, unfamiliar with American table manners, willingly following Charley’s lead at using what he imagines to be proper etiquette. The other guests, not wanting to embarrass Hersholt, imitate his bizarre performance to Crawford’s consternation and Charley’s barely concealed delight.

   Charley gives a charming performance, nicely supported by Crawford, and if the film lacks the inspired playfulness of his best shorts, it’s still a very entertaining demonstration of Charley’s comic skills.

   Another rare Chase film was screened during the weekend, The Awful Goof (Columbia, 1939), the first of four shorts that completed Charley’s contract at Columbia.

   This is one of those marital comedies at which Charley excelled, which often consisted of two married couples involved in misunderstandings that put Charley on the receiving end of some unwelcome attentions from a husband who suspects him of playing around with his wife.

   This short was, in part, a remake of a classic short, Limousine Love (1928), and not a very successful one. The audience loved the short, while I found it a sad reflection of past glories.

JON A. JACKSON – The Blind Pig. Random House, hardcover, 1978. Dennis McMillan Publications, softcover, 1988. Dell, paperback, 1995. Grove Press, softcover, 2000.

   If you’ve ever spent any time in or around Detroit, you surely know what a blind pig is. You also know how Detroit is a city awash with guns. Sergeant Mulheisen works for the Detroit Police Department, and guns are part of his everyday working life. And where else but in Detroit would a train be hijacked to steal a boxcar containing over two million dollars’ worth of rifles and ammunition?

   The case begins with a pair of street cops mowing down a gunman hiding in a darkened garage, and it grows to include a gang of Cuban revolutionaries as well as the constant underlying presence of the local Mafia.

   Mulheisen, whom we met previously in The Diehard, no longer seems plagued by self-doubt, and the subtler
aspects of his character have disappeared. Loosely put together, for a detective
novel, and vaguely dissatisfying.

Rating:   C plus.

[UPDATE] 06-01-11.   In spite of my only so-so comments about The Blind Pig, and even though it took 12 years for the next in the series to appear, Jon Jackson has gradually put together a sizable reputation for tough, hard-boiled crime fiction, including this one. I don’t remember reading any of the books following The Blind Pig, but there have been seven more:

      The Detective Sergeant Mulheisen series:

1. The Diehard (1977)

2. The Blind Pig (1978)
3. Grootka (1990)
4. Hit on the House (1993)

5. Deadman (1994)
6. Dead Folks (1996)
7. Man With an Axe (1998)
8. La Donna Detroit (2000)
9. No Man’s Dog (2004)

HIGHWAY 13. Screen Guild Productions, 1948. Robert Lowery, Pamela Blake, Clem Bevans, Michael Whalen, Gaylord Pendleton, Lyle Talbot, Maris Wrixon, Mary Gordon. Director: William Berke.

   If you were to go looking for this film on DVD, you’ll find it easily enough in an inexpensive box set of noir films recently released to the market.

   Noir? Don’t believe everything you’re told. Even though there are noirish elements to it, there aren’t any more than you’ll find in any black and white crime film made in the 1940s or early 50s, and that’s all that this movie is. No more — or no less.

   It turns out that California’s Highway 13 is a death trap for truckers, with six accidents having occurred in as many weeks. The problem is that the accidents have happened only to the drivers working for one company, the one that Hank Wilson (good-looking and well-built Robert Lowery, soon to become serial-world’s Batman) has hired on for. Sabotage is suspected.

   Most of the movie takes place in or around Pops Lacy’s isolated restaurant and truck stop somewhere along that same Highway 13 where Wilson’s steady girl friend Doris (Pamela Blake) works as a waitress behind the counter. Pops himself is a sour cantankerous old cuss played by Clem Bevans, who is (no surprise) perfect for the part. The players are fine, in other words; it’s the story that doesn’t match up.

   Most other reviewers of this film rate it a whole lot higher than I do, but personally I don’t care for crime films in which the culprit(s) is/are obvious; the scenes while individually fine are jammed together in haphazard fashion; and the reason for the whole affair doesn’t make any more sense than a chicken caught in a fence.

   It isn’t really all that bad, but reading that last sentence back again, almost.

HERBERT KERKOW  [VAL LEWTON] – The Fateful Star Murder. Mohawk Press, hardcover, 1931.

   Just about anyone who admires vintage black and white films, in particular those made during the 1940s, is familiar with the name Val Lewton.

   From 1942 to 1946, while head of the horror unit at RKO Pictures, Lewton (born Vladimir Leventon) produced nine memorable films that, despite their low budgets and often lurid, studio-mandated titles, were of considerable quality, including: Cat People and Curse of the Cat People (made even though or possibly because Lewton had a morbid fear and hatred of cats), The Leopard Man, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Seventh Victim.

   Not quite so many aficionados are aware of the fact that Lewton published several novels prior to taking a writing job with MGM in New York and eventually migrating to Hollywood. These appeared under an array of pseudonyms: Cosmo Forbes, Carlos Keith, Herbert Kerkow, and Val Lewton. Most had contemporary settings, at least one was a historical, all were distinguished (if that’s the right word) by their explicit sexual themes, and all are exceedingly scarce.

   Very few people at all, I’ll wager, know that the novel published as by Herbert Kerkow is a detective story. Fortunately, it was Lewton’s only foray into the field. I say fortunately because The Fateful Star Murder is of a distinct alternative bent, though not quite bad enough to join the classic titles at the top, or rather the bottom, level of the pantheon.

   The most interesting thing about this lumbering, disjointed mess of a mystery is its kinky and remarkably graphic (for 1931) sexual content. There are enough lustful elements in its 239 pages to make the stories in the Spicy pulps seem tame by comparison, and to make this reader wonder how the novel managed to escape the wrath and censorship crusades of the era’s blue noses.

   Possibly what saved it was the fact that its publisher, Mohawk Press, was an obscure outfit whose offerings had miniscule printings. (The only other mystery published by Mohawk during its short life was Stuart Palmer’s first and rarest book, the gangster saga Ace of Jades.)

   The “fateful star murder” victim, one Dawn Loyall, is a nymphomaniac who,we are told, is so obsessed and debased that she enjoys sleeping with clients of one of Seaside City’s most notorious whorehouses free of charge. Her nineteen-year-old sister, Sybil, having been deflowered at age 13 by the same sexual predator who deflowered Dawn, is either casually or desperately promiscuous (it isn’t clear which) and in danger of becoming a nympho herself.

   One of the suspects in Dawn’s death by shooting, drowning, and/or poison is the aforementioned sexual predator, a middle-aged politician whose hobby is molesting prepubescent girls. Another suspect is a “cured” sadist who gets his jollies by beating up and burning women of all ages. And one of the nominal protagonists has a girlfriend named Gwenie who operates a whorehouse and is “a queen between the sheets.”

   As if all of this wasn’t enough to satisfy the most prurient reader, there are two gratuitous on-stage sex scenes between Sybil and her newspaperman lover, Maurice Martin, both of which are described in what for its day was explicit detail.

   In the second of these, for good (or bad) measure, Martin coldly and calculatedly interrupts his lovemaking at a crucial moment to accuse Sybil of bumping off her sister.

   The rest of the novel is made up of: Chapters and events that don’t quite connect with one another. Some highly dubious psychological observations and motivations. Ridiculous methods of amateur detection. A questionable explanation of the effects of ricin, the poison extracted from castor beans. The activities of a low-life gangster of (gasp!) Italian extraction, Giacomo the Wop.

   More: A gratuitously poisoned Siamese cat, on the corpse of which the protagonist gleefully performs an autopsy in his office. And some pointless astrological commentary, possibly tossed in to justify the title, for Dawn is said by her mother’s live-in lover to have been“murdered under a fateful star.”

   The autopsy-performing “hero” of the piece is one Luigi Rothmere, an allegedly eminent psychiatrist who thinks nothing of confiding intimate personal details about his patients to anyone who’ll listen, and who predicts Dawn’s violent demise by claiming “the woman who is a spendthrift of her love courts death.”

   He is given to making other “learned” observations throughout, such as this little gem of cerebral insight: “Women are the most savage murderers. Criminology teaches us to look first for a woman when we find that the victim’s body has been brutally mutilated or dismembered.”

   Rothmereis aided in his sleuthing by a pair of newspapermen, neither of whom is introduced until a third of the way through the book. Maurice Martin, Sybil’s lover, a horny columnist who once dreamed of being a “male harlot” so he could have all the women he wanted; and Henry Deal, a dipso reporter so far gone that he needs to consume a quart of brandy in the morning (!) in order to steady his hands so he can tie his tie.

   Dr. Rothmere, Martin, and Deal conduct their investigation by eliminating one suspect after another through mostly illogical reasoning, until only one name is left on the list – the most likely suspect with the least satisfying motive for dispatching Ms. Roundheels.

   Do Rothmere and his cohorts then turn the murderer over to the police for due process? They do not. The good doctor self-righteously knocks off the villain himself to ensure that justice is done, after which his friend, a politically ambitious District Attorney, absolves him of any wrongdoing.

   The pair then collude to officially write off the shooting, drowning, poisoning death of Dawn Loyall as a suicide so as to protect the remaining members of her family.

   And there you have The Fateful Star Murder. An alternative mystery, to be sure. Deserving of only two stars, though, because of a low risibility factor.

MALLA NUNN – A Beautiful Place to Die. Atria, hardcover, January 2009. Washington Square Press, trade paperback, October 2009.

Genre:   Police Procedural. Leading character:  Det Sgt. Emmanuel Cooper; 1st in series. Setting:   South Africa; 1952.

First Sentence:   Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper switched off the engine and looked out through the dirty windscreen.

   Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper is sent from Johannesburg to Jacob’s Rest after a call comes in reporting a possible murder. What he finds is the body of the town’s Afrikaner police captain, William Pretorius, and a confrontation with his volatile family.

   Members of the powerful Security Branch also arrive and push Cooper out, leaving his to investigate a peeping tom case unsolved by the dead chief. Clues and determination lead Cooper to Pretorius secrets and the motive for his death.

   A Beautiful Place to Die gives a stark portrayal of South Africa during apartheid and the Immorality Act banning sexual conduct between whites and nonwhites. Although I was able to look the terms up, a glossary might have been helpful for those of us not as familiar with the history and terminology.

   Cooper makes a sympathetic protagonist with shades of Charles Todd’s Ian Rutledge character. While it’s an interesting homage, it also felt like a cheap, and not very satisfying, way of telling us about Cooper’s background. We do learn, though other means, some of this background throughout the story, but much remains vague about him.

   However, all the characters seemed stereotypical, from the Jewish doctor and his wife, to the enigmatic Zulu constable, to the storm trooper Security Branch and on. There was very little dimension to the majority of the characters.

   The plot conveys how unjust and brutal living was under apartheid. While interesting and educational, it’s not enough to make the book work. The mystery itself, and its investigation, became almost secondary. It did have a number of well-executed twists and revelations, along with suspense and some brutality. I did identify one villain early but not another. However, my largest complaint was that, although realistic, I found the ending unsatisfying.

   I certainly don’t regret having read this book. It was interesting, I did learn from it. However, I don’t believe this is a series I will continue to follow.

Rating:   Good.

MARTIN CRUZ SMITH – Three Stations. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, August 2010. Pocket, trade paperback, September 2011.

   As aged and battered as Moscovian police detective Arkady Renko must be by now, he’s evidently still irresistible to women, such as the journalist in Three Stations. Be that as it may, he’s worthy of being irresistible to readers. In this, the seventh in the series that began with Gorky Park 30 years ago, he’s still solving crime and helping friends with his intelligence, integrity and dark humor.

   One young woman’s murder intertwines with the story of a young prostitute, Maya. With her baby, she escapes her controllers; they send assassins to make an example of her. Hoping to disappear into the crowds of Moscow, Maya instead loses her baby to kidnappers running illegal adoptions.

   Determined to find the child, she crosses paths with Arkady’s chess-playing protégé, Zhenya, and the threads begin to weave together. The ending could be more elegantly finished, but at least it’s a happy one, whatever that means in such a bleak context.

   Three Stations is a devastating look at what the promise of a new Russia has devolved into.