THE SEVENTH VICTIM. RKO Radio Pictures, 1943. Tom Conway, Jean Brooks, Isabel Jewell, Kim Hunter, Evelyn Brent, Hugh Beaumont. Producer: Val Lewton. Director: Mark Robson.

   A naive young woman in a private girls’ school heads for New York to see if she can find her missing sister. Once there, she discovers that her sister has become involved with a cult of rather tame devil-worshipers. The movie itself is moody, atmospheric, and — not very interesting.

   Maybe it’s the lack of a proper budget, but I found myself nodding off, more often than not. In its own way, though, the ending is worth waiting for. This movie has more sting in its tail than any other of its type I’ve seen for a while — a solid, telling blow in the never-ending battle of good against evil.

[UPDATE] 06-14-10.   This movie has a rating of well above average on IMDB, 6.9 stars out of 10. I’m willing to concede that I may be mistaken in my opinion of this movie. To that end, so that I might watch it again, I have recently purchased a box set of nine Val Lewton movies, and this is the first one I’ll take out of the pack.

   In the meantime, let me ask this question. The movie’s discussed on a number of noir-oriented blogs and websites. Is it noir, or it did come along too early to be a true noir? If it is noir — and I understand this full well — it was only accidental. Who knew what noir was in 1943?

   The nine movies, by the way:

      Cat People
      The Curse of the Cat People
      I Walked with a Zombie
      The Body Snatcher
      Isle of the Dead
      Bedlam
      The Leopard Man
      The Ghost Ship
      The Seventh Victim
      Shadows in the Dark

STEVE FISHER – I Wake Up Screaming. Dodd Mead & Co., hardcover, 1941. Paperback reprints: Handi-Book #27, 1944. Popular Library #129, no date stated [1947-48]. Bestseller Mystery B204, digest-sized, 1957. Bantam Books A2145, 1960. Black Lizard, 1988. Vintage, 1991.

    ● Film: 20th Century-Fox, 1941. Working title: Hot Spot. Betty Grable, Victor Mature, Carole Landis, Laird Cregar, William Gargan, Alan Mowbray. Director: H. Bruce Humberstone.

    ● Film: 20th Century-Fox, 1953, as Vicki. Jeanne Crain, Jean Peters, Elliott Reid, Richard Boone. Director: Harry Horner.

   Steve Fisher’s 1941 novel I Wake Up Screaming is undoubtedly the greatest title ever written in the English language. The novel itself ain’t bad, either, with a clever puzzle wrapped in a pleasingly corrosive portrait of the Hollywood Studio system in the 1940s.

   Fisher’s take on studio politics and personalities is as fascinating as the mystery itself, centered around a newly-arrived writer at a major studio and the murder of a would-be starlet poised to hit the big time.

   For mystery fans, Screaming also features a verbal portrait of Cornell Woolrich: “Ed Cornell” a frail, consumptive cop who haunts the story like some wispy wraith — or a damn pest — and solves the case in a very unexpected fashion.

   The dying detective makes a fine counterpoint to the hustling denizens of the rest of the book, strangely menacing, yet oddly poignant, and for author Steve Fisher, who finished out his career writing bad western movies, it’s a surprising achievement.

   When Fox filmed this the same year, they moved the locale from Hollywood to Broadway, changed the hack to a flack, and cast big, beefy Laird Cregar — who looks about as wispy as a charging bull — as the detective.

   Aside from that, though, the film sticks pretty close to the book, fleshed out with some fine players. Betty Grable and Carole Landis are merely adequate, and this early in his career, Victor Mature’s tough guy act seems faintly effeminate, but Alan Mowbray is delightful as a hammy thespian, and Laird Cregar … well, it’s not the character as Fisher wrote it, but his Ed Cornell is a hulking, haunting presence that lingers in the mind.

   Screaming duly came up for a remake in 1953, as Vicki, and Fox cut the budget back to the bone, with skimpy sets, sparse extras, and a general air of penurious haste.

   Harry Horner, who created the sets on ambitious films like The Heiress and The Hustler got the directorial reins here and did a competent if unmemorable job; the film has a blunt look, forceful at times, but mostly rather bland, with a cast less charming than Screaming‘s but more interesting:

   Jeanne Crain and Jean Peters are better actresses in the same roles as Grable and Landis, but Horner doesn’t realize their potential. Elliott Reid wears the Victor Mature part like a wet raincoat, and Alex D’Arcy pretty much just stands there showing off his veneer as the hammy actor, with none of the charm Alan Mowbray showed us.

   As the detective, Richard Boone looks a bit more like Woolrich, and he manages to project a hint of the twisted, obsessive character, but again, Horner doesn’t exploit his potential. What we get is a film that shows some promise but never keeps it.

   An interesting side-light: Both Vicki and Fiend Who Walked the West (reviewed here ) feature off-beat turns by actors who later became major Hollywood producers: Aaron Spelling turns up in Vicki, and his name is probably familiar to anyone who watched TV in the 1970s. Robert Evans, who got the Richard Widmark role in Fiend, later produced films like Chinatown and Urban Cowboy.

   As actors, they’re not really very good, but strangely watchable.

Note:   I Wake Up Screaming, the novel, was previously reviewed on this blog by Marv Lachman. Look for it here.

LEROY LAD PANEK – An Introduction to the Detective Story. Popular Press, Bowling Green University, hardcover/trade paperback, 1987.

   If LeRoy Lad Panek’s An Introduction to the Detective Story seems like a textbook for a college course on the mystery, veteran readers should not be put off. Panek, a former Edgar winner, is more knowledgeable than anyone has a right to be, especially regarding the mystery before Poe.

   Yet, the book is equally strong for its frequent wit, proving that writing about the mystery can be fun. Insights and historical perspective leap off every page.

   Panek devotes considerable space to the usually neglected turn-of-the-twentieth-century writers, after pointing out that “Doyle’s first 24 Sherlock Holmes stories created such a demand they turned people into detective-story writers overnight.”

   Though giving full credit to Doyle and his creation in as good a one-chapter summary as I can recall, he points out Doyle’s weaknesses as a novelist — but also his strengths as a short-story writer.

   Both the Golden Age and the rise of the hardboiled mystery are well handled. Regarding the former, Panek is persuasive how the classic puzzles were a double reaction on the part of writers and readers to the mindless thriller as well as avant garde mainstream fiction, with its de-emphasis on story.

   Private eyes like Race Williams and the Continental Op are correctly pointed out as contemporaries of Doyle, thus reminding us that hardboiled fiction, after more than sixty years, is just as traditional a form of the genre as the classic puzzles.

   Considering the amount of information Panek dispenses, he makes relatively few factual errors. The Detective Book Club is misnamed the “Detective Story Club.” Mary Roberts Rinehart is said to have died in 1926, though she lived on for more than thirty years longer.

   Christie’s And Then There Were None is dated 1930, not 1939. Dennis Wheatley’s “File” books did contain narratives, though through letters, telegrams, and police reports, rather than the usual story-telling devices.

   I also would quarrel with Panek’s loose use of psychological terminology. He refers to “psychotic” heroines of Gothic novels when they were only nervous, usually due to their mysterious employers and those single lights which kept shining in windows.

   Vidocq is called a “paranoiac” when even Panek’s description shows him to be merely self-promoting. A reference to “pathological insanity” is surely redundant, since I doubt if any doctors have seen cases of insanity without mental pathology.

   Panek’s book may be the best history of the entire field written to date. If ever a book deserved a second printing, It is An Introduction to the Detective Story. That would afford an opportunity to clear up some of the errors and would mean it had reached the substantial audience it deserves.

Editorial Comment:   This is the third in a series of reviews in which Marv covered reference works published in 1987, books about the field of mystery and crime fiction. Preceding this one was Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books, by H. R. F. Keating. You can find it here.

MEANS DAVIS – Murder Without Weapon. Harrison Smith & Robert Haas, hardcover, 1934.

   Memorial Hospital may be a fine place to visit. It is not a good idea to be one of its patients. One doctor thinks hot coffee and bromos induce sobriety. Another doctor also believes black coffee will straighten out a drunk, but he in addition employs a stomach pump that he just happens to have in his pocket while attending a funeral.

   (The stomach pump is an odd instrument, consisting of a long tube with an oval bulb at one end. The patient, or victim, swallows the end with the bulb. Shortly thereafter, by gravity or faith or something, the stomach contents gush forth through the tube.)

   The hospital’s physician-in-chief describes an aunt’s obsessive interest in her nephew as an Oedipus complex. Another doctor, an expatriate German, says, gutturally of course:

   He is preaching to the converted while holding on to the converted’s thighs, but it’s a good example of how a mystery author craftily contrives to subtly. convey information amid a somewhat mixed metaphor. The converted, by the way, is a nurse; when “she whispered, her nose, which was too long, and her lips, which were too full, contorted sensuously.”

   The author may mean “sensually”; then again, he may not. He may also know what he’s talking about; I don’t. Noses contorting sensuously or sensually are beyond my comprehension.

   This same doctor, something of a ladies’ or at least a nurses’ man, observes the heroine and, wouldn’t you know, mutters:

   Not satisfied with these M.D.’s, the author introduces, should any reader have unwisely reached this point, Timberlake Pitts, a lawyer so oleaginous that Uriah Heep would be forced to view him askance.

   And there is the heroine’s brother, a seldom-do-well whose “charm lay in the rapidity with which the pockets under his eyes could relax into silver-gray shadows.”

   Remember, I just report; don’t expect me to explain.

   Max Higgins, whom many of you will recall from The Hospital Murders (1934), a book I really want to read after I recover from this one, is in Memorial Hospital with a kidney problem. The hospital authorities ask him to investigate. Since he cannot leave the hospital, he calls in his assistant.

   The reason I bought Murder Without Weapon was the chapter titled “Snod Smooty Starts Snooping.” Snod is something of a Saul Panzer, only more talented:

   Actually, it is only when Snod is around that the novel becomes semi-interesting. When asked what he’s been doing recently, he replies that he has been involved in prison work. Asked what he discovered, he says: “Usual thing. Perversion and pellagra. Result: Riots.'”

   When I once read a mystery that had a shark as the murder weapon — no, nothing so mundane as the shark eating the victim — I thought I could no longer be surprised by any murderous device. Means Davis did astonish me here with a unique, I would hazard, method of inducing death, or possibly insanity, though it would seem to work only with elderly ladies who have weak hearts and with young ladies who are neurasthenic.

   Luckily it’s a weapon bloody difficult to find and employ.

   Plot? With all of the above, you want a plot, too? There’s just no satisfying some readers. Well, an elderly lady dies in the hospital after screaming three times and saying, “Vi’s eyes.” And then the heroine sees eyes and screams for 15 minutes and is put away in the same hospital. And then another elderly lady dies in the hospital with a look of awful horror on her face, a look that any sensible reader had long before she got the idea.

Bibliographic Notes:   As Bill pointed out in his review, Max Higgins appeared in one other detective novel by Means Davis, that being The Hospital Murders, 1934, also published by Smith & Haas. He did not mention a third mystery by the author, that being The Chess Murders (Random House, 1937).

   A fact that Bill did not know, or he would have used a different pronoun in referring to the author, is that Means Davis was the pen name of Augusta Tucker Townsend, 1904-1999.

   An online obituary notice for Mrs. Townsend tells us more about her:

[UPDATE] 06-16-10.   I’ve found copies of all three books for sale online, and the first has already arrived. I’ve just added the cover image of The Hospital Murders; the others will be included as soon as they get here.

[UPDATE #2] 06-25-10.   As you see, I now have cover images for all three books. All three that I ordered arrived in due course, and all three had jackets, even though I did not pay more than $20 for any one of them, including shipping. That the jackets are somewhat the worse for wear is not worth mentioning.

LINDA. Made for cable-TV, USA Network, 08 October 1993. Virginia Madsen, Richard Thomas, Ted McGinley, Laura Harrington. Based on the novella by John D. MacDonald. Director: Nathaniel Gutman.

   A summer vacation at the beach becomes a deadly affair when the wife of one couple kills the wife of the another, and in the process neatly frames her own husband for the deed.

   It starts slowly, goes into a period of intense action, interrupted only by massive amounts of commercials, then settles down for the obvious but highly anticipated conclusion to develop.

   USA is making great strides in making yesterday’s B-movies today, but this one has several strikes against it:

   (1) After the first two stars named above, the acting is absolutely horrible.

   (2) The behavior of the police, the D.A.’s office, and the accused husband’s lawyer are all equally unbelievable.

   (3) After the tale is told, there are still somehow several minutes to fill, and believe me, there is nothing even Richard Thomas could do at that point that could get anyone as choked up about it as we’re supposed to.

   The one thing the movie did have going for it was that it was based on a story by John D. MacDonald, so I went up to my upstairs closet and dug out the book it came from. It’s the second half of a paperback entitled Border Town Girl (Popular Library #750, June 1956), which is where it first appeared.

   It’s only 70 pages long, and it took me less than an hour to read it. And I was right. The things I didn’t care for in the movie were things that weren’t in the book:

   No bad acting. No shipshod police work. No lousy cornball ending.

   It’s still a bit unchewable as a story, but JDM almost made me believe it. And if I hadn’t have seen the movie first, maybe I would have.

   [UPDATE] 06-13-10. There was an earlier TV movie based on the story “Linda,” one I did not know about when I wrote this review. It was on ABC, 03 November 1973, as the Suspense Movie of the Week. It starred Stella Stevens, Ed Nelson, John McIntire, and John Saxon, with Jack Smight as the director. On the basis of the actors alone, there’s a chance I might have enjoyed it more than I did the one on USA.

   I’ll have to see if I can track either one down, or hopefully both. I may have a VHS copy of the later one, but based on my comment about the commercials, there is a possibility that I watched it live. On the other hand, you still notice how many and how often, even when you’re fast-forwarding through them.

SHERLOCK HOLMES. Warner Brothers, 2009. Robert Downey Jr. (Sherlock Holmes), Jude Law (Dr. John Watson), Rachel McAdams (Irene Adler), Mark Strong (Lord Blackwood), Eddie Marsan (Inspector Lestrade), Robert Maillet (Dredger), Geraldine James (Mrs. Hudson), Kelly Reilly (Mary Morstan). Based on the characters created by Arthur Conan Doyle. Director: Guy Ritchie.

   I go to the cinema very rarely as my tastes don’t really run to explosions and the special effects that all crime films seem to have nowadays, but, as a Sherlock Holmes aficionado, this is one I couldn’t miss.

   There has been a lot of discussion before this film was released about the suitability of, especially, Robert Downey Jr as Holmes, Guy Ritchie as director, and the depiction of Holmes as a scruffy waster who indulges in fistfights. Reviews here were mixed but I went with what I hoped was an open mind and I can now reveal that I thoroughly enjoyed the film in almost all respects.

   Sure Downey’s Holmes is out of sync with most other interpretations but it can be argued that most of them are at least as far from Doyle’s original as his is. He is physical, involved in fist fights both during the investigation and for pleasure, but then Holmes we are told by Watson “was undoubtedly one of the finest boxers of his weight that I have ever seen” (“The Yellow Face”) though also that “he looked upon aimless bodily exercise as a waste of energy” (sic).

   However in The Sign of Four Holmes comes across McMurdo and introduces himself as “the amateur who fought three rounds with you… four years back,” so he did fight for reasons other that practicality.

   There are other nods towards the Doyle canon, for example when Holmes and Watson join in deductions from a watch that echo those made by Holmes about Watson’s brother’s watch (also in The Sign of Four), an event that will have occurred shortly before those of this film.

   There is also at least one nod towards the Basil Rathbone films as Downey twangs the violin at a jar of flies to control their flight patterns as Rathbone had done in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

   The humour, too, was very good, especially in the repartee between Holmes and Watson and both Downey as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson were excellent.

   The plot was a little outlandish with lots of large scales fights and special effects (as to be expected in a modem day film) and the scale of the villain’s ambitions (world domination) was rather extreme.

   Sets, especially those showing London landmarks were well done, but I was unable to understand that when Holmes was pursuing Irene Adler through cellars at the Houses of Parliament they should end up not only on the then under-construction Tower Bridge but on the upper level of it.

   Still, over all this was an enjoyable romp and I hope that the hinted at sequel with Professor Moriarty comes about.

JUDSON PHILIPS – The Laughter Trap. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1964. Paperback reprint: Pinnacle, 1973.

   Peter Styles, a writer for Newsview magazine, is returning to the Darlbrook Lodge, a ski resort in Vermont. The last time he was there he was trying to reconnect with his alcoholic father but the attempt failed.

   While driving his father back to New York City his car was forced from the mountain road by a black car with two passengers in hoods and dark glasses; the one in the passenger seat laughed maniacally as they passed by.

   Peter’s car was forced down a steep hill and he was thrown clear but his father was trapped inside the burning car. His father was killed and Peter lost his right leg below the knee. Now he has come back, hoping to find the people responsible.

   Due to overcrowding at the Lodge, Peter shares a room with Jim Tranter, a publicist for the Lodge who narrates most of the story. That night Peter meets a young woman named Jane Pritchard who actually gets him to dance for the first time since his accident.

   She is sharing a cabin with her friend Martha Towers. In the middle of the night, Peter wakes Jim up when he hears the same maniacal laughter that he heard a year ago. A quick search around the grounds reveals nothing, but the next morning Jane and Martha are found stabbed to death.

   Are the people who caused Peter’s accident the same ones who murdered the girls?

   This was a pretty good effort. Decent characterization with several twists until a surprising least-likely suspect turns up at the end.

Previously reviewed on this blog —

    A Murder Arranged (by Steve Lewis). A long discussion of Philips’ crime fiction follows in the comments.

EMYL JENKINS – The Big Steal. Algonquin Books, trade paperback, July 2009.

   The once growing cottage industry of mysteries with settings in the antiques world has shrunk considerably, but professional appraiser and antiques columnist Jenkins, in her second novel featuring (no surprise) appraiser Sterling Glass, should please any fan of mysteries who’s also a fan of PBS’s Antiques Roadshow.

   When Glass arrives at the Orange Country VA mansion where she’s agreed to do an appraisal of the considerable collection amassed by a deceased couple, she finds a curator who appears little inclined to facilitate her work and a board whose own interests seem contrary to Sterling’s appraisal.

   There’s relatively little action but a lot of talk that revolves around the authentication of antiques. Still, if you have any interest in collecting (and it doesn’t need to be antiques), you should enjoy the behind the scenes look at a highly competitive field.

   And Sterling Glass is a very appealing creation, with a variety of colorful characters adding spice to the mix.

Bibliographic Note:   Emyl Jenkins’ first mystery and Sterling Glass’s first appearance was Stealing with Style (Algonquin, 2005).

LORI ARMSTRONG – No Mercy. Pocket, hardcover, January 2010. Paperback reprint: November 2010.

Genre:   Suspense. Leading characters:   Mercy Gunderson, 1st in series. Setting:   South Dakota.

First Sentence: In the arid summer heat on prairie rangeland, a dead body doesn’t so much rot as it becomes petrified.

   Recovering from her wounds received in Iraq, Army sharpshooter Mercy Gunderson returns to the South Dakota ranch, left to her by her father. Her homecoming isn’t a restful one.

   Mercy’s sister and nephew have problems of their own, and she is being pressured to sell the ranch. The body of a young Indian boy is found on her property and his mother wants Mercy to find who killed him. Another death occurs and Mercy, feeling there is no one she can trust, sets out against escalating violence to find a killer.

   Reading a new-to-you author is a bit of a crapshoot; sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Sadly, this was one of the latter.

   First, there is a portent on page 22: “…I doubted my life could get more complicated or out of my control. Famous last words.” It’s a mystery! Of course things will get out of control. The foreshadowing is completely unnecessary. I might not have even minded so much had the author left off the last three words “Famous last words.”

   Next we have the characters. There is very little character development in the true sense. We receive pieces of background information on some of the characters, but none of them ever feel real to me.

   Mercy is supposed to be a highly trained sniper who was good at her job because she can disassociate her emotions from the task. We never see that. She, and many of the characters, vacillate between being tough to being completely pliant.

   She is the daughter of a former sheriff and spent over 20 years in the military, but I never had a feeling of a code of honor with her, particularly when she did something completely illegal.

   The plot was a case study in “fabula interruptus.” Whether with the scenes of suspense or sex, Armstrong takes you to the point where the circumstances become intense and then backs away. It feels as though she doesn’t know how to follow through and complete those scenes so she doesn’t; she fades to black and picks the story back up later. This isn’t a regency romance, after all.

   I will give credit where it is due. Armstrong does establish a very good sense of place and, while elements of the climax were rather trite and predictable, the story still had some good suspense to it. While I did identify one villain very early in the story, there was a twist and second villain I didn’t see coming at all.

   In all, the problem comes down to the author’s overall writing style and voice. To say the author’s voice was erratic would be an understatement. Armstong employs humorous sarcasm, which I enjoyed to a point, but much of the dialogue is overly strident, and her writing, overall, lacks nuance; there are no shades of gray.

   I doubt I shall read more by Ms. Armstrong.

Rating:   Poor.

      Lori Armstrong’s PI Julie Collins series —

1. Blood Ties (2005)

2. Hallowed Ground (2006)    [profiled here ]
3. Shallow Grave (2007)
4. Snow Blind (2008)

      The Mercy Gunderson series —

1. No Mercy (2010)
2. Mercy Kill (2011)

HENRY KANE – A Corpse for Christmas.   Dell #735, reprint paperback, no date given [1953]. Originally published in hardcover by J. B. Lippincott, 1951.

Also reprinted in paperback as Deadly Doll, Zenith ZB-19, 1959; and as Homicide at Yuletide, Signet D2877, 1966; and under its original title by Lancer in 1971.

   Seasons greetings! Private richard Peter Chambers gets mixed up with a dead man with a red beard and a false identity, a gorgeous lady PI, several more luscious women (some with husbands, some with not, it doesn’t seem to matter), a mobster, and a box of missing jools.

   The story is told with lots of short, snappy dialogue, sometimes a page or so at time, which is neat, but sometimes it is so short and snappy that it can also give you a headache if you’re not careful.

   Also [WARNING: Plot Alert] beware of the gimmick of the clocks that are stopped at the scene of the murder. Maybe it wasn’t old hat at the time, but I think it was.

COMMENT: Here’s a prime example of a PI novel that you can enjoy while at the same time realizing what kind of lowbrow, generic entertainment it really is. Kane should be commended for writing a completely adequate Fair Play Detective Story, however, with lots of clues for the reader to pick up on. And even though I knew the killer’s identity some time before Peter Chambers did, I was surprised to learn I hadn’t spotted them all!

[UPDATE] 06-12-10.   For some reason I seem to sound embarrassed to have been caught reading a low level paperback for its entertainment value only.

   If that was the case, and it certainly sounds as though I was, then I apologize and shame on me!

   I am glad to see, however, that I pointed out Kane’s ability to write a Fair Play puzzle story at the same time as he was doing a lowly PI novel, at least in his early days of his career.

   One of his best efforts in this regard was Too French and Too Deadly, an Avon paperback from 1955 and a Peter Chambers novel that was reprinted in its entirety in Hans Stefan Santesson’s The Locked Room Reader (Random House, 1968).

   Bill Crider, by the way, likes this book, too. You can read his review of it over on his blog.

   To be posted here shortly, reviews of Trinity in Violence (Avon, 1955) and The Midnight Man (Macmillan, 1965), the former with Peter Chambers, and the latter one of Kane’s trio of McGregor novels.