MICHELLE NOLAN – Ball Tales: A Study of Baseball, Basketball and Football Fiction of the 1930’s through 1960’s. McFarland, hardcover, February 2010.

   Over the decades I have collected just about every pulp genre except for love pulps and sport pulps. I have several issues of each type, but every time I’d try to read a romance or sports story, the strict formula that these magazines followed would defeat me.

   Most of the fiction was very upbeat with happy endings, even more formula-bound than the western pulps. At least I can read the other genres (western, SF, detective, adventure, etc), but not the love and sport pulps.

   And this prejudice is not mine alone. I’ve come across a few collectors like Digges La Touche and Steve Lewis who occasionally buy a love pulp, but until I met Michelle Nolan and possibly Randy Vanderbeek, I never really met someone who was seriously collecting runs of sport and love magazines.

   At PulpFest 2010 I had an opportunity to talk to Michelle and we briefly discussed her book, Love on the Racks, which mainly covers the romance comics with a few pages on the love pulps. But the main topic was her new book recently published by McFarland, Ball Tales. Copies are available on amazon.com for $35.00.

   If you are at all interested in sports fiction, then you should buy this book. The book mainly discusses sport fiction in books and paperbacks. However pulps are referred to in several chapters, and this is of course of interest to pulp collectors. I counted around 20 cover illustrations of pulps showing a sports scene and many other photos of book covers.

   The book is 279 pages long. Pulps are discussed in Chapter One, but the main subject is dime novels. Chapter Two is titled “The Great Pulp Sports Rally During the Depression” and covers sport fiction in many of the pulps like Argosy, Sport Story, and so on.

   However the best chapter on the pulps (this chapter is a nice long 32 pages) is Chapter Five where Michelle covers sports in many sport and even some love titles. She then covers in Chapter Twelve the only example of female sports competition portrayed on a sports cover (Sport Story, 1st March 1939). This is a very interesting observation when you consider that there were over 1500 sport pulp magazine covers.

   She also covers the fact that there have been very few sport pulp anthologies, only three that she lists. Think of it; we live in the Golden Age of Pulp Reprints, but no sport or love reprints from the pulps. (I quickly ordered the three anthologies from abebooks.com).

   Finally there is a very valuable appendix: three pages listing the different sport pulp titles, publishers, and years published.

   Fellow pulp readers and collectors, this is an excellent piece of original research and if you love sports fiction, or you collect pulps,then it should be in your library.

ADDENDA:  Three anthologies taken entirely from the sports pulps are:

Baseball Round-Up, edited by Leo Margulies (Cupples & Leon, 1948).

All American Football Stories, edited by Leo Margulies (Cupples & Leon, 1949).

While the Crowd Cheers, edited by David C. Cooke (E. P. Dutton, 1953)

   Michelle also calls The Argosy Book of Sports Stories edited by Rogers Terrill “wonderful,” but these came from the time when Argosy was a men’s adventure magazine, not a pulp. Buy the hardback (A. S. Barnes, 1953) because the paperback (Pennant P-61, 1954) cuts five stories.

LUKE SHORT – First Claim. Bantam A2057, paperback original; 1st printing, May 1960. Reprinted several times.

   I was disappointed with this one. Short is one of my favorite western authors, but this slender book (only 152 pages) can be read very quickly – not so much because it’s short, but because there’s but a single straight line that can be drawn from the beginning of the story to the end.

   When Giff Ballew returns to his home town of Harmony to claim his father’s land that had been confiscated during the Civil War, he finds that it had been taken over by a family of rich ranchers who also own the local lawyer and sheriff, and who aren’t about to give it up now without a fight.

   Only the local newspaper editor and publisher is willing to lend him a sympathetic ear, and that doesn’t include the young, good-looking widow who works for him. Her father owes the Weybrights money, and she doesn’t want any trouble aroused by Giff to tumble back on him.

   Giff, of course, is stubborn, if not bull-headed, but he’s also in the right. Many of the folks he meets along his way are against him, but he comes also across a growing number who are for him and have not been able to speak up against the Weybrights until now.

   The characters are interesting, and they find themselves in very human situations. But for the most part, anyone who’s read a lot of westerns has read this all before. What’s there is tasty enough, but there’s not enough meat in this particular entree to keep you satisfied till breakfast.

  STEVEN SAYLOR – Catilina’s Riddle. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, October 1993. Reprint paperback: Ivy Books, August 1994. Other reprint editions exist. Roma sub Rosa #3.

   I thought the first of this trilogy, Roman Blood, was the best first novel of 1991, and one of the best of that year, period. I have yet to read the second, Arms of Nemesis.

   Now Gordianus the Finder (the Roman equivalent of a private eye) is Gordianus the Farmer, having inherited a farm in Etruria from an old friend. He is surrounded by that friend’s relatives, who bitterly contested the will but were defeated in the Roman courts by Gordianus’s old acquaintance and employer, Cicero.

   Now Cicero is calling in his marker. He wants Goridianus to allow Catalina, one of Rome’s radical politicians, to occasionally use the farm as a refuge. Not because he’s Catalina’s friend, though; au contraire. He sees this as a way to keep track of his comings and goings. Gordianus reluctantly acquiesces, and thus is drawn into what history was to label the Catiline Conspiracy.

   I remain tremendously impressed by Saylor’s skill at interweaving history and fiction and by his ability as a wordsmith. He has created a memorable character and chronicler in Gordianus, whose portrayal has deepened over the course of the series. He has acquired a larger family in the interim between the first and third books, and they too are finely drawn.

   As I remarked at the end of the first book, Saylor’s love and knowledge of Roman history is evident on every page – as is his own opinion of the various historical personages.

   This is less of a mystery than the first, though there is one, dealing with a series of headless corpses that appear on the farm. Mystery included or mystery aside, though, it’s an excellent novel. I can’t imagine you not liking it.

      The Roma sub Rosa series —

1. Roman Blood (1990)
2. Arms of Nemesis (1992)

3. Catilina’s Riddle (1993)
4. The Venus Throw (1995)

5. A Murder On the Appian Way (1996)
6. The House of the Vestals (1997)
7. Rubicon (1999)

8. Last Seen in Massilia (2000)
9. A Mist of Prophecies (2002)
10. The Judgement of Caesar (2004)
11. A Gladiator Dies Only Once (2005)
12. The Triumph of Caesar (2008)

THE MAGICIAN. MGM, 1926. Alice Terry, Paul Wegener, Iván Petrovich, Firmin Gémier, Gladys Hamer, Henry Wilson, Hubert I. Stowitts. Based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham, adapted by Rex Ingram. Director: Rex Ingram. Shown at Cinecon 27, Hollywood CA, September 1993.

   When I told a close friend how excited I was that Cinecon had scheduled one of my long outstanding “must see” films, Ingram’s The Magician, he replied that Ingram was not one of his favorite directors and this film was “one of his weakest.”

   Talk about a wet blanket!

   He added that the print he had seen was not “a very good one.” Well, I can now report that Cinecon came up with a beautiful print that displayed to marvelous advantage Ingram’s notable pictorial qualities.

   The narrative concerns an Aleister Crowleyish black magician (Paul Wegener, the unforgettable creature of The Golem) who elopes with a beautiful sculptress (played by Alice Terry) whom he needs in a hellish experiment to create life according to a formula he has discovered in an ancient book of sorcery.

   The climactic sequences take place in his stone castle, sitting on a hill overlooking an ancient city with cobbled streets and Tenggren-like houses (see the opening sequence of Pinocchio for an artistic equivalent).

   He is aided by a malicious, misshapen dwarf, and at the end, the top of the castle blows up. This is the quintessential setting and some of the narrative and character staples of the 1930s Universal Frankenstein cycle, and, if it is hokum (as indeed it is), it is hokum in a style that I can’t resist.

   The opening scene is a sculptor’s studio that looks like a plate out of a 19th-century art history book. Wegener’s flamboyant style is perfect for the mesmerizing role of the magician and I am only sorry that there wasn’t a Bride of the Magician, and a Son of the Magician to constitute a cycle.

   Now, if somebody will just schedule screenings of Ingram’s Scaramouche and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. But I won’t ask my friend for a recommendation.

Editorial Comment:   Dan Stumpf reviewed the book by Maugham this movie is based earlier this year. Check it out on this blog here.

DOUGLAS CORLEONE – One Man’s Paradise. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, April 2010.

Genre:   Legal thriller. Leading character:  Kevin Corvelli; 1st book. Setting:   Hawaii.

First Sentence:   They pawed at each other against the black backdrop of night, the restless Pacific waters purring at their feet.

   New York Attorney Kevin Corvelli has given up life in the Big Apple. A man he rather carelessly defended and was sentenced for murder, died in prison. He was also innocent.

   Corvelli has come to Hawaii thinking he’ll no longer practice criminal law, but only handle misdemeanors. His new landlord has different ideas and Corvelli finds himself defending a young New Jersey man accused of murdering his girlfriend, determined not to have another innocent man go to prison. The killer has different ideas.

   This was a bit of a mixed bag for me. Corleone did create a lot of characters. Some were interesting and developed them well while others were not. The voice created for Kevin is one of metaphors, sarcasm and self-deprecating humor, all of which I enjoy: “I let go of the kayak’s leash and the kayak immediately starts to float back to shore. It’s no doubt as frightened of me as I am of it.”

   Kevin’s excessive drinking, in spite of the “reasons” for it, and breaking of his own ethical rules made the character unappealing — someone about whom I came to care less the more I read. The emphasis given drinking for both Kevin and his landlord Jake became almost annoying.

   For the secondary characters left undeveloped, I was occasionally confused as to who they were. What worked very well was Corleone’s attention to detail. Corleone has an eye for detail and description presenting Hawaii from the eyes of someone newly arrived.

   His experience as an attorney is evident. The information on legal process and procedure was interesting without ever seeming analytical. I do love a good courtroom scene, and these were very good.

   The story overall was exciting and, at times, very suspenseful. Unfortunately, I did identify the killer early on, in spite of a couple red herrings and very good plot twists. Even so, the ending was very effective.

   The book won the Minotaur Books/MWA First Crime Novel Award for 2009. While credible, I always take such accolades with a grain of salt. At the end of the day, it comes down to whether I liked it and would read another book by the author. I thought the book was good, but definitely not great, and would probably read a second book by Mr. Corleone, but he’s not yet going on my “must buy” list.

   More law, less alcohol, please.

Rating:   Good.

Editorial Comment:   An online interview with the author can be found here.

MIGNON WARNER – Speak No Evil. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1985. Robert Hale, UK, hc, 1986. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 volume, no date given.

   There are some interesting things to be found in Mignon Warner’s mystery bibliography. She was born in Australia but lived primarily in England, and of her eleven books (as of 1994), all take place in the U.K.

   What’s unusual, though, is that several of them appeared in the U.S. before the British edition, and one, Death in Time (1982), was published only in this country. Three early non-series books were published only in England, and are extremely scarce, with (doing a quick search) none presently available on the Internet, at least at the moment. [Update: This is no longer true, but the few copies that are available are pricey.]

   Warner’s series character was Mrs. Edwina Charles, a clairvoyant detective who appeared in eight of the eleven, including Death in Time. Speak No Evil, the one in hand, came close to being the last one, but some nine years later another one appeared. Under what circumstances the curiously titled Exit Mr. Punch (1994) finally was published, with no US edition, I cannot say, and I’d like to know.

   Hubin, by the way, calls this book a paperback in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, but several copies for sale online are described as having dust jackets, so that’s something we now know that he didn’t (until now).

   While I have several of Mrs. Charles earlier adventures, this is the first I’ve read, and besides the actual mystery, she remains also something of a mystery to me. While her given name is actually Adele, she’s revised and adapted her ex-husband’s name, Edwin Charles, for use as her own, even though (on page 26) she considers her marriage to him a very bad mistake. Dating back to the depressing days of “Charles the Third,” she says, there are “names, names of some very important people socially and politically, the publication of which could place them (and her) in very hot water.”

   These people may have been clients in those days, but in any case Eddie Charles has an invisible something he’s holding over her. Which brings us to (at last) the case at hand. When is the last time you read a mystery in which a small-time thief (calling himself Jimmy Valentine) hires a private detective (Mrs. Charles) to investigate the strange death (deemed suicide by the authorities) of a another private detective? The latter, also female, is named Tony Manners.

   In case you missed the connection, Jimmy Valentine was sent by Mrs. Charless former husband, and she considers having to agree to look into Tony’s death a form of blackmail. It’s a first for me, too.

   Also puzzling to me — which is hardly the first time — is — without reading the earlier books in the series — why Mrs. Charles is constantly referred to as a clairvoyante. She doesn’t do anything that even slightly resembles clairvoyeuring until page 163, when a seance is held, which admittedly does help in bringing the case to a close.

   Before then, the search for Ms. Manner’s killer, if indeed it was a murder, is a perfectly ordinary one, in a muddled, rambling sort of fashion. Lots of connections between people whose names come up in the investigation, too many coincidences (Mrs. Charles’s very words on page 70), with lots of false trails for the unwary reader to make their down.

   Great stuff, I thought, even while I was totally mystified. Or while I was being totally and massively misdirected. Sleight-of-hand such as this is rather uncommon, and if that’s the kind of mystery you enjoy, I think you’ll like this one.

       The Mrs. Edwina Charles series —

1. A Nice Way to Die. Hale 1976.
2. The Tarot Murders. Hale 1978.

3. Death in Time. Doubleday 1982.
4. The Girl Who Was Clairvoyant. Hale 1983.
5. Devil’s Knell. Hale 1984.

6. Illusion. Hale 1985.
7. Speak No Evil. Hale 1986.
8. Exit Mr. Punch. Breese 1994.

[UPDATE] 08-19-10.   I don’t know about you, but I’m intrigued by my own review. I have to confess that I do not remember this book — only that I read it, and in the Detective Book Club edition — but that last paragraph I wrote is a clincher. I’ll have to read it again.

   I don’t think either the author or her series character was ever very well-known, and I’m sure both are quite forgotten now.

[UPDATE #2] Later the same day. Here’s some intriguing news from British mystery bookseller Jamie Sturgeon:

Hi Steve,

There are two more Edwina Charles books by Mignon Warner – The Devil’s Hand and The Tarot Reading – both published by Robert Hale in 2008

http://www.halebooks.com/display.asp?K=9780709086215&pge=hale&st2=not+67351&sort=sort_date%2Fd&sf1=Keyword&sf2=lcode&x=20&st1=warner&y=10&m=1&dc=2

Regards,

Jamie

    Me again. This is intriguing news. I wonder where these books came from. Is Mignon Warner actively writing again? There are no dates for her in CFIV, so at the moment she’s very much a woman of mystery.

    (To see details of the second book, you have to follow the link in the first page of two that the one above sends you to.)

[UPDATE #2] 09-12-10.   I’ve postponed saying anything until/unless I had a more definitive answer, but based on an online plot description, Jamie and I now suspect that The Devil’s Hand is a retitled reprint of Devil’s Knell, and therefore it’s a good possibility that The Tarot Reading is the same for The Tarot Murders.

LENORE GLEN OFFORD – The Glass Mask. Duell Sloan & Pearce, hardcover, 1944. Paperback reprint: Dell #198, mapback edition, 1947.

   Lenore Glen Offord is one of the truly underrated writers of the World War II and postwar periods. Her characters are engaging and true to their times and environments.

   Her heroine, Georgine Wyeth, is the forerunner of today’s feminists — a single mother supporting her daughter with short-term jobs, forcing herself to deal with her fears, to stand up for herself, insisting all the time that she’s tired of being saved.

   Most of Offord’s books are set in Berkeley or other areas of northern California. She excels in portraying the uniqueness of the university town and the wartime atmosphere — the paranoia as well as the desperate excitement.

   Although she deals more with innocent romantic situations than is stylish now, every seeming digression into a character’s personal life is relevant to the plot.

   In The Glass Mask, the chief responsibility for detection shifts from Georgine Wyeth to pulp writer Todd McKinnon, though the story is told from Georgine’s viewpoint. Todd, Georgine, and Georgine’s eight-year-old daughter stop off in a Sacramento Valley town to satisfy his curiosity about a family mystery: Did Gilbert Peabody hasten the death of his ailing grandmother in order to inherit her house and thus be able to afford to marry?

   There is no proof, only verdict by rumor. Unable to face the innuendo, Gilbert has enlisted in the army and gone, leaving his wife to deal with the townsfolk and the more unpleasant relatives.

   By varying means, she tricks and inveigles the McKinnon-Wyeth menage into staying on day after day to investigate the nocturnal footsteps in the attic, the family patriarch who rants and feigns seizures, and the mystery of what the old lady got from the bank the day she died and where she hid iit.

   This is an entertaining tale, and one of Offord’s best. Georgine Wyeth is also at her most appealing in Skeleton Key (1943), in which she investigates the murder of a wartime air-raid warden during an unexpected blackout.

   Unfortunately, Offord’s output was not great: merely eight mysteries, four other adult books, and a juvenile. Especially good among the other mysteries are Murder on Russian Hill (1938), The 9 Dark Hours (1941), and The Smiling Tiger (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.

Editorial Comment:   Some additional bio-bibliographical information on Lenore Glen Offord follows the review preceding this one, that of The Smiling Tiger, written by Bill Deeck.

LENORE GLEN OFFORD – The Smiling Tiger. Duell Sloan & Pearce, hardcover, 1949. Hardcover reprint: Unicorn Mystery Book Club, December 1949. Paperback: Harlequin #159, Canada, 1952.

   Although Todd McKinnon, who writes fictional short stories based on true cases, is having a writing slump, he is not interested in the tale presented to him by Hugh Hartlein. According to Hartlein, someone in Beyond-Truth, a cult opposed to any marriage that will produce children since the world is shortly to end, is bumping off its members who disobey that tenet.

   Since some of the bumpees are Hildegarde Latham, Harriet Withers, and Grace Vane, McKinnon naturally is not duped.

   Still he does take an interest in the leader of the cult. When Hartlein either commits suicide or is murdered by means of an inhaler containing crystalline cyanide, McKinnon gets somewhat involved. Later, after his wife, Georgine, is threatened, he takes the whole matter very seriously.

   Another fine novel by Offord.

Bio-Bibliographic Data:   Besides being a mystery writer, although not a prolific one, Lenore Glen Offord (1905-1991) was, I have discovered online, the long time mystery critic for the San Francisco Chronicle (1950-1982). She and the newspaper received the Mystery Writers of America Edgar award for best criticism in 1952.

   Mike Grost has a lengthy commentary of several of her books on his Classic Mystery and Detection website. (He has placed her in the Mary Roberts Rinehart school of mystery fiction.)

    Crime Novels:     [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin]

# Murder on Russian Hill (n.) Macrae-Smith 1938 [Bill Hastings; Coco Hastings; San Francisco, CA]

# The 9 Dark Hours (n.) Duell 1941 [San Francisco, CA]
# Clues to Burn (n.) Duell 1942 [Bill Hastings; Coco Hastings; Idaho]
# Skeleton Key (n.) Duell 1943 [Todd McKinnon; San Francisco, CA]

# The Glass Mask (n.) Duell 1944 [Todd McKinnon; California]
# My True Love Lies (n.) Duell 1947 [San Francisco, CA]
# The Smiling Tiger (n.) Duell 1949 [Todd McKinnon; California]
# Walking Shadow (n.) Simon 1959 [Todd McKinnon; Oregon; Theatre]

HERBERT FLOWERDEW – The Villa Mystery. Brentano’s, US, hardcover, 1912. First published in the UK: Stanley Paul, 1912. Serialized in The Cavalier, May 24 through June 21 1913. Also available online here and in various POD editions.

   Before I discovered this book online and in various Print on Demand editions, I saw the title and author in this blog’s recent checklist of “Serials from Argosy Published As Books” and found a copy of the Brentano’s hardcover edition without too much difficulty. For less than twenty dollars in fact, which is one heck of a lot cheaper than finding a complete set of the five issues of The Cavalier which it appeared in.

   Of course, it does me no good to brag about this, not when you can read it online for free.

   But should you? Can an obscure mystery or detective novel written in 1912 be worth the time and effort? My answer’s yes, given certain conditions, and I’m about to tell you why.

   The story’s definitely an old-fashioned one – how could it not be? – and if you have an allergy to old-fashioned stories, you might as well stop reading this review right now. It begins with a young girl, totally destitute, making her way to a former friend of her dead father, a wealthy man who has refused to repay a loan.

   But now that she has found the IOU, which had gone missing, she hopes to persuade him to repay his debt — but he refuses to listen to her, requiring her to return in the morning. He has no time to listen to her now. She leaves, but then returns to watch through the window of the study where she saw him earlier before entering once again, leaving the IOU and making off with a suitcase of money she has decided is rightfully hers.

   In making her way back to the train station, however, she is accosted by one man and rescued by another. In the way that the world worked back in 1912, the latter is the stepson of the man whose debt to Elsa Armandy has been repaid in such an unorthodox fashion.

   In another of the ways that the world worked back in 1912, Nehemiah Grayle is soon found dead, possibly a suicide (or so the butler claims) but more probably not. Compounding Esmond Hare’s deepening dilemma, for he believes the girl’s story (and she is most attractive) is that to remove her from suspicion means incriminating his own mother, now estranged from the dead man.

   There is a local detective in charge of the case, but it is on Hare’s shoulders that solving the crime falls. But this is a story of romance as much as it is one of detective work, with much missing of connections as the characters move here and there and do not stay where they are supposed to stay, mostly because of revelations and stories not quite believed or not told in timely enough fashion.

   And all the while staying out of the hands of the police, especially Elsa, but Esmond also, who fears he may say and reveal too much if he is questioned further.

   Delicious, I say. They don’t write stories like this very much any more. But what’s even better is that there really are some even more delightful twists and turns in the detective side of things, including a final explanation which is really quite clever, almost as clever as one found in the best of the Golden Age of Detective stories.

   It’s just a little awkward in the telling, I have to confess, and there are some even clumsier aspects of the clues and what the characters make of them earlier on, in their naively old-fashioned way, so it’s with these caveats that I do recommend you read this one.

Bio-Bibliographic Notes: There are 16 books listed for the author in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, but nine of them are indicated with a hyphen as being only marginally criminous.

   Herbert Flowerdew died in 1917 at the age of only 51. If he’d lived longer, perhaps he’d have taken this book as a stepping stone to a more significant mystery writing career, but that alas, we’ll never know.

THE CORPSE CAME C.O.D. Columbia Pictures, 1947. George Brent, Joan Blondell, Adele Jergens, Jim Bannon, Leslie Brooks, John Berks, Grant Mitchell, Marvin Miller, Una O’Connor. Screenplay by George Bricker and Dwight V. Babcock, based on the novel by Jimmy Starr (1944). Directed by Henry Levin.

   When Hollywood jewelry and dress designer Hector Rose is murdered (shot at the studio, the sound covered up by a prison escape being filmed nearby), his body is shipped C.O.D. to the home of movie star Mona Harrison (Adele Jergens) whose numerological charts predicted a bad day, as she tells her butler, Fields.

   [ It’s too small for you make it out otherwise, but that’s a book on numerology that she’s reading over there on the right. Trust me.   — Steve.]

   She also calls on wanna-be boyfriend Joe Medford (George Brent), a fast talking newspaper man who isn’t above playing fast and loose with the facts to get a scoop.

   Joe calls in cop Lt. Wilson (Jim Bannon), who hangs around the studios, hoping the apparently starstruck detective will give Mona a break, while at the same time keeping some facts from him, like the dress fabric he saw Mona take from the packing case that contained Hector’s body.

   Back at Palisades Studio Joe finds things complicated by fellow reporter Rosemary Durant (Joan Blondell) and a lot of people with something to hide.

   Between flirting with every woman who crosses his path but Rosemary, Joe heads for Hector Rose’s home, still two steps ahead of the police, where he tussles with someone who leaves him unconscious and with Rose’s unconscious business manager on his hands just as Rosemary shows up.

   Jimmy Starr who featured Joe Medford as a reporter sleuth in two other slightly hard-boiled screwball detective novels (Three Short Biers, 1945; Heads You Lose, 1950) was a Hollywood reporter (he’s even mentioned in the film’s opening, along with Heda Hopper and Louella Parsons).

   The screenplay is co-written by Black Mask alumnus Dwight V. Babcock (Homicide Hannah), with direction by studio stalwart Henry Levin.

   Joe spots Mona with Rudy Frasso (Marvin Miller), a tough guy who is “always around the clubs,” and who threatens Joe if he involves Mona. Meanwhile Joe is called back to the studio by studio head Mitchell Edwards (Grant Mitchell) where Rosemary is already prowling around in the dark.

   Hector Rose was importing something from New York, maybe something worth dying for, and Joe and Rosemary both soon find themselves in the dark among the bolts of cloth in the studio costume department with someone with a gun looking for it. At which point Joe stumbles on yet another murder — this time of a studio executive, the Director of Publicity.

   This is programmer fare, but with an attractive and capable cast. The humor is a bit forced at time, and Brent isn’t at his best (to see him handle this same kind of material much better, see Front Page Woman, with Bette Davis as his newspaper rival), but the film is still fun and moves quickly, and he gives a perfectly good performance.

   It’s no great discovery, but well worth a little time and fun to watch the pros at work, especially Blondell, who brings what energy the film has to her rivalry/romance with Brent.

   Mildly screwball — it never quite rises to the occasion, but strays near it once or twice — and pleasant, the film is worth a small investment of your time as a minor but entertaining example of the comedy-
mystery form.

   Joe gets clobbered (again) at the studio after a tussle with Rosemary over photos of the latest murder and wakes up in the infirmary where he and Rosemary decide to team up.

   How many times have we heard that one in one of these?

   Frasso turns out to have a past with Mona Harrison and Hector Rose, and an iffy criminal record including some shady dealings in the jewelry racket.

   Back at Mona Harrison’s Rosemary gets to dope from her on her past marriage back in Denver while Joe examines the bolt of cloth she hid with a fortune in diamonds in it. Mona used to be married to a man who hates her now — maybe enough to frame her for murder, but she is too scared of him to say more.

   Joe manages to lose the diamonds, but not before he figures out who done it, and closes in on the killer back at Mona Harrison’s place, about the least “least likely” suspect in the history of these things.

   I’m not sure even Agatha Christie could have pulled this one off, but to be fair the clues are there if you look for them, which is more than many of these manage to do. Once you know who the killer is you can honestly look back and see where you had half a chance to figure it out if you were paying close attention.

   The Corpse Came C.O.D. is no lost classic, but in the right mood it’s fast paced, fairly funny, and the mystery a bit better than average with some decent misdirection along the way.

   I must say I found it generally more entertaining than I expected, and only wished the energy of the actors and the comedy had been as good as the mystery element — which is a unique complaint about a comedy-mystery from this era.