MAN AT LARGE. 20th Century Fox, 941.  Marjorie Weaver, George Reeves, Richard Derr, Steve Geray, Milton Parsons, Elisha Cook Jr., Richard Lane, George Cleveland, Kurt Katch. Screenplay: John Larkin. Directed by Eugene Forde.

   Who are the Twelve Whistling Men?

   That’s the question in this spy comedy released just before America’s entrance into the Second World War as wanna be newspaper photographer Dallas Dayle (Marjorie Weaver) gets her shot at a real job on a New York newspaper when she’s assigned by editor Richard Lane to cover the story of a German Ace who escaped from a Canadian internment camp and is expected to cross over into the United States on his way to Canada.

   Complicating things is rival reporter Bob Grayson (George Reeves) who she thinks murdered German fifth columnist Hans Brinker (Kurt Katch) in the newspaper reception room. We know he was killed by a sinister man with a silenced gun (Milton Parsons), but when Grayson shows up at the same motel on the border as Dallas and the killer, then meets with the escaped German flyer (Richard Derr), it starts to look more than a little suspicious, especially when another German agent at the motel (Spenser Charters) who meets with the killer is murdered like Brinker. Grayson and Dallas are arrested for it by Sheriff George Cleveland while Grayson tries to steal the camera Dallas snapped a photo of the German flyer with.

   Just what are the Twelve Whistling Men the dying Brinker whispered about, and what do they have to do with the passage from “Peter and the Wolf” everyone seems to be whistling, and a pulp story that is uncannily close to exactly how the German flyer escaped in the first place and seems to be popping up everywhere? And what does that have to do with convoys carrying supplies to England being sunk?

   Following the style, and a bit more (Grayson and Dallas get handcuffed together at one point) of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, Man at Large doesn’t move, it positively gallops hardly giving the viewer a chance to breathe from the opening escape in the dark to the final clench.

   Little surprise that. Screenwriter John Larkin was one of the brightest lights of the B film of the period, penning and directing Quiet Please, Murder! an early film noir about a stolen Shakespeare Folio, murder, Nazi art collectors, and a masochistic thief. With the capable Eugene Forde directing this little gem fires brightly from Weaver’s screwball Dallas, Reeves fast talking mystery man, and a fine assortment of German agents.

   Back in New York Dallas tracks down the pulp author who proves to be wealthy Karl Botany (Steve Geray), a suave blind man whose recently hired secretary is none other than one Mr. Sartoris (Milton Parsons).

   Up to this point things haven’t been moving slowly, but now the kick into overdrive with Grayson and the German flyer tying Dallas up as they go to meet a contact, Dallas escaping with help from hotel clerk Elisha Cook Jr., the real Nazis revealed, much more confusion on Dallas part, more dead bodies, Grayson and Dallas doing a mind reading act in a run down girly show theater, and no one, including the viewer, quite sure who anyone is until the final confrontation.

   The plot, almost more than this B film can bear, manages to hold up well enough to keep you entertained without asking too many questions, and most of the ones you might ask are covered by the various reveals without bothering to explain them to the viewer.

   No one takes a long enough breather for that. Anything not covered by the breathless plot really doesn’t seem worth worrying about anyway.

   I’ve been looking for this one for years and only recently found it. Happily it is no disappointment. It’s fast, fun, attractively acted, and the polish of the B department of Fox in the period shows despite its lowly origins.

   This might have fared well as an A with a better known cast, it’s that good.

   The print I saw is flawed, and I really have no idea if a better one exists, but this is a small delight. Just buckle in and enjoy.

CLAYTON RAWSON – The Great Merlini: The Complete Short Stories of the Magician Detective. Gregg Press, hardcover, 1979. Introduction by Eleanor Sullivan. Also currently available as a Kindle edition.

   For those of us who have Clayton Rawson’s Merlini novels but who lack most of the early issues of EQMM, the knowledge that there are Merlini short stories has been tantalizing — and, over the past decade, frustrating. Around 1970, Frederic Dannay considered collecting the stories in his “Ellery Queen Presents” series; and a few years later, the Aspen Press told several of us that it planned to publish such a volume. Nothing came of these plans until Otto Penzlet and Gregg Press produced this handsome volume.

   The book is well worth the wait. But to begin negatively, several of the Merlini stories were written as EQMM contests, and these can hardly be called ingenious; indeed, the stories make me wonder how Queen was able to determine the winner from the many (I assume) correcr answers.

   Much better are the longer tales. “From Another World” is probably, the beat, short story/novelette (except for the works of Carr) ever written about an impossible crime. “Off the Face of the Earth” is the most satisfactory explanation of one of the most difficult of miracle problems — how someone can disappear from a telephone booth under constant observation. “Miracles — All in a Day’s Work” and “Nothing Is Impossible” are almost as good, though I suspect that Rawson would have altered their titles for book publication.

   In short, these four stories alone make it worth scraping up almost ten bucks for tl1e book. As Eleanor Sullivan says in the introduction (slightly misquoting Dannay) this is certainly a Queen’s Quorum book.

ANNE PERRY – Death with a Double Edge. Daniel Pitt #4. Ballantine, hardcover, April 2021. Setting: Georgian England, 1911.

First Sentence: Daniel was worried.

   Jonah Drake, a senior lawyer with fford Croft and Gibson, has been murdered, his body found with Daniel Pitt’s card in the pocket of his jacket. Almost more important to the law firm than who killed Drake, is learning whether the murder was personal, or involved the legal chambers. Looking into his past cases, which were mostly financial,  but which also involved two murder cases, Daniel and colleagues are concerned about possible wrongdoing on Drake’s part, and whether Marcus fford Croft, the firm’s founder, was involved.

   The book starts off very well with Perry adroitly setting scenes that convey the transformation from the Victorian era to the Georgian period, and with the thoughts and anxiety Daniel feels traveling to the morgue. The dialogue is audible; one not only hears the words but the intonation and emotion. Perry wraps one inside Daniel, allowing one to know his thoughts.

   Unfortunately, that becomes the book’s downfall as we spend too much time with Daniel thinking and not doing. It is the protagonist making decisions and acting on them that creates a compelling read. The constant dithering of Daniel, and later even his father, Thomas Pitt, becomes repetitive and, frankly, boring.

   It was nice to have Daniel’s parents, Thomas and Charlotte, involved. Kitteridge, a colleague in the firm, is a good secondary character, but fford Croft is ill-used, and Roman Blackwell and his mother, the two most fascinating characters, were seriously underutilized, which made no sense as they were the ones with the skill and contacts to have done the on-the-street investigation.

   There are huge leaps and assumptions made with no substantiation. At the point of danger and suspense, Perry backs off since one knows the threat isn’t dire and won’t be acted upon. The situation makes no logical sense, and the character behind it could not possibly have thought the threat would work. Even so, once again, the characters sit and dither rather than act. Worst of all, the ending is abrupt making it completely unsatisfactory.

    Death with a Double Edge  is not the best representation of Ms. Perry’s fine writing. As has been noticed for other authors, this may have been a case of trying to write during a period when no one’s focus or attention was quite up to par. One must hope that the next book will be up to Perry’s usual standard.

Rating: Poor

THRILLER. “Lady Killer.” Associated Television [ATV], UK, 18 January 1973. (Season one, Episode one.) Robert Powell, Barbara Feldon, Linda Thorson, T.P. McKenna, Mary Wimbush. Screenwriter/creator: Brian Clemens. Currently streaming on Shout Factory TV.

   At least at the present time, all six seasons of this Brian Clemens-created mystery series are available to be seen online. Clemens is known best, of course, for his involvement with The Avengers, but he also had more than a hand in producing The Baron, The Persuaders!, and The Protectors, plus a few other British TV series not nearly as well known as the one that brought Diana Rigg to the world’s attention as Emma Peel, John Steed’s sexy partner in some of the more bizarre cases of crime-solving in television history.

   As much as I’ve been looking forward to sampling the series, “Lady Killer” doesn’t get Thriller, the series, off to the best start possible, at least it didn’t to my most considered satisfaction. It begins with a shy, pretty but not quite beautiful girl from Indiana (Barbara Feldon) being picked up by a handsomely dressed young chap (Robert Powell) in a British resort hotel and almost literally swept off her feet.

   Every single viewer watching this knows he’s a scoundrel from the first time they see him, but it’s also clear that the young lady he has his eyes on has not had much experience in matters such as this.

   After they’re married, while his plans for her are not yet clear, we know – and probably too soon, for the sake of the story – that he does have plans for her. Could the new housekeeper be involved? Or the man who stops by thinking he has recognized her new husband? She doesn’t know something, however, that the viewer knows, and that is that Linda Thorson’s name was quite openly visible in the opening credits.

   The newly married couple’s new house is close to the sea, with a steep cliff down to the water below. What we have, in other words, is disaster of some kind ahead, and the story doesn’t waste a minute letting the viewer know about it. Which is probably where my disappointment in the story comes in. Semi-spooky, but even though there’s a twist in the tale ahead, too obvious to be really spooky, if you know what I mean.

   On the other hand, it was nice to see Barbara Feldon’s acting ability wasn’t limited to playing Agent 99 on Get Smart, that other show that made her famous.

EDMUND CRISPIN – The Moving Toyshop. Gervase Fen #3. Gollancz, UK, hardcover, 1946. Lippincott, US, hardcover. 1946. Penguin, US, paperback, 1977. Felony & Mayhem, US, trade paperback, 2011.

   The droll opening scene of The Moving Toyshop has Richard Cadogan in his garden in the heart of London, dickering with his publisher over advances and royalties for his latest book of poetry and absentmindedly waggling a pistol under the publisher’s nose. Cadogan is “craving for adventure, for excitement: anything to stave off middle age.”

   He soon finds it in Oxford. After lightheartedly prowling the late-night streets, he enters a dark toyshop, finds a body, and gets conked on the head. Before the first  chapter is over, the body and the lethal toyshop are gone.

   Cadogan consults his old friend Gervase Fen, and the investigation gets rolling (sometimes almost out of control when dashing about in Fen’s sportscar, a vociferous Lily Christine III).

   The poet gets swept along, interviewing witnesses, bullying blackguards, rescuing damsels, facing death, and eventually breathlessly winding up the mystery. Along the way, the spirited duo enlists an elderly don and various clumps of students, attends chapel, puzzles out the clues in a nonsense rhyme, argues literature on the phone with the chief constable, interprets an eccentric will, and generally chases around Oxford in a boisterous fashion.

   Gervase Fen is very serious and determined when being a detective, but volatile and absentminded. When in a tight spot, he plays literary games, like Unreadable Books and Awful Lines from Shakespeare, and makes up titles for the thrillers that Crispin writes. He claims that “I’m the only literary critic turned detective in the whole of fiction.”

   The Oxford background is well realized, and the humor sustains the story. The basic plot was obviously influenced by John Dickson Carr. The climactic scene, revolving around the chase to catch the criminal, is so powerful, so moving, that Alfred Hitchcock borrowed it to use as the windup in his film
Strangers on a Train (1951).

     ———
   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.

   You all know what movie this video clip is taken from, don’t you?
   

J. T. McINTOSH – Snow White and the Giants. Serialized in If SF, October-January, 1966-67. Avon S347, paperback, May 1968. Also published in the UK as Time for a Change (Michael Joseph, hardcover, 1967).

   The town of Shutel, England, is destined to be the site of the worst disaster in the world’s history. It is also the main attraction for a history class traveling from the future, but there are ulterior motives behind their visit. They hope that a dangerous mutant strain can be eliminated by altering the past. In spite of disrupted plans, success is theirs, at least temporarily.

   The first installment is quite leisurely in its pace, almost maddeningly casual, as the visitors seem to take few pains to conceal their strangeness. When the fire breaks out, the action increases abruptly and continues until the final lengthy discussion and explanation. People act correctly, as real people should, and do, in the face of something new, or confronted with disaster.

Rating: ****

GORILLA AT LARGE. Panoramic Productions/Fox, 1954. Cameron Mitchell, Anne Bancroft, Lee J. Cobb, Raymond Burr, Lee Marvin, Charlotte Austin, Peter Whitney, Warren Stevens, John Kellogg, Billy Curtis, and John Tannen. Written by Leonard Praskins and Barney Slater. Directed by Harmon Jones.

   If you only see one movie in your entire life, it should be Gorilla at Large. Where else in the known universe will you get a chance to hear tough cop Lee J Cobb snarl, “We’ve got two gorillas around here, and one of them’s a murderer.” Where, I ask you?

   Cobb is only one feature of a surprisingly able cast for what is essentially an inflated B-movie. Raymond Burr radiates menace very nicely as the boss of an elaborate carnival, playing effectively off Anne Bancroft as his wife, who does a trapeze act above the cage of Goliath “the world’s largest Gorilla” who manages to narrowly miss grabbing her at each performance.

   Cameron Mitchell and Charlotte Austin walk through their bland parts as leading man and heroine, and Lee Marvin is wasted as a comic relief dumb cop, but Perter Whitney as a blackmailing carny and John Tannen as a publicity flack with his eye on the main chance ooze a very fitting sleaziness into their under-written roles.

   Come to that, maybe it’s the writing that puts Gorilla at Large. so firmly into B-movie class. The dialogue is flat and obvious when it isn’t memorably bad, the plot is predictable when it’s not implausible, and…

   Oh yeah, the Plot: Burr decides to put Cameron Mitchell in an ape suit to double for Goliath, but someone steals the hirsute suite and goes around killing blackmailing carnies and blaming it on Goliath. Yeah, who’s gonna notice an ape running around the lot? And the concept is not helped at all by the fact that the real ape and the phony are both played by guys in gorilla suits.

   Fortunately, all this arrant nonsense is handled with pace and precision by Harmon Jones, a director who had his moments, and in his sure hands, it’s all really quite enjoyable. And really, if you’re only going to see one movie in your whole life, well, whathehell, it might as well be Gorilla at Large.

What can I say. I think she’s wonderful, and he’s no slouch either:

JOANNA CANNAN – Death at the Dog. Inspector Guy Northeast #2. Victor Gollancz, UK, hardcover, 1940. Reynal & Hitchcock, US, hardcover, 1941. Rue Morgue, US, trade paperback, 1999.

   Six weeks after the beginning of World, War II, a rural squire is found dead in his local pub, The Dog.  Mathew Scaife was hated by just about everyone who knew him, so the consensus of public opinion was that it was good riddance and too bad.

   It couldn’t be put down  to natural causes. His son, Edward, and Edward’s wife, are unhappy because the squire won’t come up with the money to modernize the farm  on which they live with him; Crescy Hardwick is upset because he has given  her notice to vacate the cottage she has fixed up and loved.

   His other son gets along neither with him nor with the upper class villagers. Bert Saunders is also being  turned out of his home. Two: other local couples are  suspects mainly because they were in the lounge bar when  he was killed.

   Detective-Inspector Guy Northeast, C.I.D., is delegated the tasks of sorting out these and other motives and finding an intelligent murderer who must also have access to nicotine, a car sponge, and a horse. Northeast is himself an  interesting character who has had run-ins with the local police force in a previous case, and in this one is fascinated by an older woman.

   Carefully drawn characters,   good local  background, and a skillful   murder method give this mystery high marks. I shall  look around for others by Cannan.

Bibliographic Update: There was one earlier case for Inspector Northeast, that being They Rang Up the Police (Gollancz, 1939), that perhaps being the one Maryell refers to in this review. As for the author, she wrote a total of thirteen mysteries between 1929 and 1962; of these, five were cases solved by Inspector Ronald Price.