(1) MACK REYNOLDS – The Rival Rigelians. #3 in his “United Planets” series. Paperback original, 1967. A shorter novella version entitled “Adaptation” appeared in Analog SF, August 1960. Published separately by Wildside Press, trade paperback, July 2020.

   A political lecture in fictionalized form. A team of eighteen is sent to Rigel’s two planets having been given fifty years to bring the abandoned colonies here back to civilization and eventual union with the Galactic Commonwealth. They split into two forces to settle their argument over the optimal plan of action, capitalism or communism.

   This might be a valid premise for a story, except (page 25) Earth has had world government for some time, implying that some political wisdom must have been gained since the present time. The local leaders even realize this and unite to force their unwanted visitors to depart in favor of proper ambassadors.

   â€œPower corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and Reynolds pulls every trick in the book to make this obvious. He needn’t have tried so hard. The faults of current political systems are obvious enough, without the lecture.

Rating: 2½ stars

Comment: From the online Science Fiction Encyclopedia: “The United Planets Organization [worked] in the cause of socioeconomic progress in the often-eccentric Ultima Thule colony worlds of a Galactic Empire.”

(2) A. BERTRAM CHANDLER – Nebula Alert. Empress Irene #3. Paperback original, 1967.

   Ex-empress Irene and the crew of her ship Wanderer enter the Alternate Universe of the Rim Confederacy after being pursued through the Horsehead Nebula. Their cargo consists of two dozen (somehow later twenty-six) Iralian embassy personnel. But the Iralians are capable of transmitting knowledge by heredity and hence are extremely desirable as slaves.

   Thus begins a tale of chase and fast action, but the plot becomes more and more tangled up in itself and fails to be resolved by an ending which comes from nowhere. Possibly OK if read as an adventure story only, but what a waste of undeveloped ideas!

Rating: 2 stars

Comment: Once Irene and her crew pass through the Horsehead Nebula they meet Chandler’s major series character, John Grimes. This is the last Irene story. It was preceded by Empress of Outer Space (1965) and Space Mercenaries (1965).

PANIC IN THE CITY. Feature Film Corp. of America, 1968. Howard Duff, Linda Cristal, Stephen McNally, Nehemiah Persoff, Anne Jeffreys, Dennis Hopper. Director: Eddie Davis.

    Just because a movie isn’t good, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be interesting. Case in point: Panic in the City, a late 1960s Cold War thriller that you’ve probably never heard of, let alone seen. By all normal standards, it’s not a particularly well-crafted film. The plot, in which a federal agent tracks down a rogue Eastern Bloc agent aiming to detonate a nuclear device in Los Angeles, is essentially something that could just have been done better in an episode of Mission: Impossible. As for the cinematic quality of the film, it is practically non-existent. Indeed, the movie really feels more like a made-for-TV pilot episode of a mid-tier detective show than something one would pay to see in a theater.

    What makes the movie worth a look, however, are a couple things. First, there are two performances in the film that stand out. Although he is only in the movie for less than thirty minutes, Dennis Hopper has a memorable turn as Goff, a thug for hire. He’s signed up to work for rogue communist agent August Best (Nehemiah Persoff) and engages in murder for hire job before the tables are turned and he is himself murdered. The late 1960s, of course, would be a turning point in Hopper’s career. For much of the 1950s and early 1960s, Hopper was primarily a guest star or supporting actor in television shows. All that would change in 1969 – one year after Panic in the City – with the release of Easy Rider (1969).

    As for the aforementioned Persoff, his role in this film is, like nearly all of his performances, acutely memorable. A student of Elia Kazan, discussed here, Persoff never achieved the fame of many of his contemporaries and never really became a leading man. Nevertheless, he had many roles in both television and film. For those interested, you can view part of his performance as a mob boss in an episode of Hawaii Five-O, one that also features John Ritter, here.

    Another aspect of Panic in the City that makes it a bit more interesting than would be expected is that (SPOILER ALERT!!) the lead character, federal agent Dave Pomeroy (Howard Duff) dies at the end. In a nuclear blast no less. There is no optimistic Hollywood ending here. Just a death in a mushroom cloud and a lonely woman walking the streets alone. You can watch the entire film here, with ads unfortunately.

HUGH PENTECOST – Death After Breakfast. Pierre Chambrun #13. Dell / Scene of the Crime #6, paperback, 1980. Previously published in hardcover by Dodd Mead, 1978.

   I’m sure that everyone with an interest in paperbacks at all has seen this new series of Murder Ink/Scene of the Crime mysteries from Dell. Chosen by the respective proprietresses of two of the country’s first specialized mystery bookshops, so far the series has emphasized detective novels of a recent vintage over Golden Age reprints. Even so, there have been a few of the latter included among the ones I have received so far, notably Anthony Berkeley’s The Poisoned Chocolates Case and A. A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery.

   Of the others I’m familiar with, those which are reprints of recent hardcover mysteries, there seems to have been a noticeable attempt on the part of their authors to add a sizeable amount of characterization to their work – and in some cases, like The Brandenburg Hotel, by Pauline Glen Winslow, and McGarr and the Sienese Conspiracy, by Bartholomew Gill, this seems to have been done at the expense of the plot, unfortunately.

   This one is a Scene of the Crime selection, and I missed it when it came out in hardcover. What else can I say? Everyone should read a Pierre Chambrun novel sometime, but other than that there seems to be no reason at all why anyone would want to read more than one.

   Even when he turns up missing, as he does in the first half of this one, the Hotel Beaumont (of which he is the manager) might go on running as smoothly as ever for a while, but that’s only another measure of how completely his personality dominates the scene.

   In his absence, the nymphomaniac chairwoman of the Cancer Fund Ball is found brutally murdered in her room, and a bomb threat is taken very seriously.

   Pentecost is, if nothing else, always smooth and easy to read. The greatest handicap he faces in continuing the Chambrun series, of which there are a great number already, is the enormous effort and amount of maneuvering required to get all the principals in his coolly-calculated melodramas together under one roof, even one as large as the Beaumont’s.

Rating: C

UPDATE: There were in all 22 in the Chambrun series, the last being Murder Goes Round and Round (1988).

The 25 selections are:

1. “Suspense” (1913)
2. “Kid Auto Races at Venice” (1914)
3. “Bread” (1918)
4. “The Battle of the Century” (1927)
5. “With Car and Camera Around the World” (1929)
6. “Cabin in the Sky” (1943)
7. “Outrage” (1950)
8. “The Man with the Golden Arm” (1955)
9. “Lilies of the Field” (1963)
10. “A Clockwork Orange” (1971)
11. “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” (1971)
12. “Wattstax” (1973)
13. “Grease” (1978)
14. “The Blues Brothers” (1980)
15. “Losing Ground” (1982)
16. “Illusions” (1982)
17. “The Joy Luck Club” (1993)
18. “The Devil Never Sleeps” (1994)
19. “Buena Vista Social Club” (1999)
20. “The Ground” (1993-2001)
21. “Shrek” (2001)
22. “Mauna Kea: Temple Under Siege” (2006)
23.”The Hurt Locker” (2008)
24. “The Dark Knight” (2008)
25. “Freedom Riders” (2010)

      Here’s a question left as a comment on a long-ago post:

   “These are pieces of the story of a movie I caught only a bit of, and missed the title and cast…. 1930s-1940s, B&W, etc. Genre like a Its a Wonderful Life, etc…

   “A gentleman in a small American town leave friends a bar, is mugged by the tracks, wakes up with no memory and wearing his assailant’s clothing. For all appearances he is a hobo, and he believes as much and moves on, leaves town for several years…. and around Christmastime, appears back in the same town, remembering nothing about it or his old self. A Ward Bond-ish cop mushes him off a snowy park bench at nighttime — in a respectable neighborhood, and as he is ready to comply and leave, he is espied by a younger man at the front door of what had been the elder gentleman’s home; then his wife — the young man’s mother — and he appeal to the old vagabond (without a good look at his face in the darkness) to join them as it is Christmas, after all (this is hugely climatic and heart-swelling). BUT, the kindly gent evidently does not want to impose on the family’s Christmas party and moves on.

   “The End and then the credits rolled… unread by me, dagnabbit!!

   “Please, it’s been 30 years that I have attempted to connect with this film. Not one person I have asked has heard of it, not a wit.”

TWO O’CLOCK COURAGE. RKO Radio Pictures, 1945. Tom Conway, Ann Rutherford, Richard Lane, Lester Matthews, Roland Drew, Emory Parnell, Bettejane Greer, Jean Brooks. Based on the novel of the same title by Gelett Burgess. Previously filmed as Two in the Dark (1936). Director: Anthony Mann. Available on DVD and  streaming here on the Internet Archive.

   There are three good movies all wrapped up in this one and struggling to get out. Unfortunately with only just over 60 minutes of running time, not one of them manages to prevail. The result is a totally entertaining but still disappointing film that could have been so much better if the people behind this one had chosen one of the three and stuck to it.

(A) Noir. A man staggers out into a foggy street and a cab manages to stop from hitting him only in the nick of time. The driver of the cab, female, lends a sympathetic ear when she discovers that he is bleeding from a wound on his head, and cannot remember who he is or why he’s there on the street. I was reminded immediately of Cornell Woolrich and many of his stories at this point.

(B) Screwball comedy. Trying to discover who he is, the pair run across a murder, a dopey cop, a wise aleck reporter and a butler who didn’t do it. They also find themselves rubbing elbows with the high class elite of the city, all dressed up in night club finery, including the cab driver (Ann Rutherford, who never looked finer).

(C) A serious detective mystery, centered around the manuscript of a successful play, but the name on the manuscript is not the same as the person who’s taking credit for it. As far as I was concerned, here’s where I decided to sit back and simply enjoy the movie, since none of this made any sense.

   Quite a mishmash indeed, is what I’m trying to say. Tom Conway, as the amnesiac, which I see I have neglected to mention before, is perfect in his role: suitably bewildered but still obviously a gentleman of some refinement. I do see I have mentioned Ann Rutherford already. She is worth mentioning twice. And did you see Jane Greer in the credits? A small part, I grant you, but she’s just another reason for watching this one. An indubitable bonus, if you will.

MARK SABIN – Winchester Cut. Gold Medal #144, paperback, 1951. recycled as Stranger from Arizona: Dodd, Mead, hardcover, 1956, as by Norman A. Fox. Also Dell #969, paperback, 1958; and Avon, paperback, 1987.

   I’ll use any excuse to sample a Gold Medal, and the title of this one intrigued me, winking up from a neat pile of paperbacks in a used book store on the main drag of an old hippie town somewhere in Ohio. So I bought it, then a few weeks later I cracked it open and found:

   So I knew at least this guy loved to write. The ensuing pages filled out a book that’s nothing special, really, but a solid read.

   Clint Tracy arrives in Montana emotionally scarred by a Texas range war, battle hardened and ready for the heady ranchers’ feud he finds brewing. But he has his own agenda, and it has more to do with the people involved than with land or cattle. The characters turn out to be fairly standard types: tough old rancher, willful daughter, hot-headed son, etc. but the author writes them as if he’d just thought them up, and the result is they never seem as cliché’d as they really are.

   Sabin/Fox leans on the mystery of Tracy’s mission (which ain’t all that mysterious) a bit heavily at times, but he fills the story with enough riding, fighting and shooting to keep it lively, and when the range war finally erupts, it’s intelligently done. Nobody blunders for the sake of convenience, and Sabin/Fox’s lean prose carries the action very nicely indeed.

   Winchester Cut won’t get on anyone’s Ten Best List — Hell, it’ll never even make a Top100 — but it makes for an entertaining hour or so of the kind of fast-moving reading they just don’t seem to write anymore.

LIZA CODY – Dupe. PI Anna Lee #1. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1980. Scribner’s, US, hardcover, 1981. Warner, US, paperback, 1983; Bantam, US, paperback, 1992. TV adaptation: Season 1, Episode 1 of Anna Lee, 27 February 1994, with Imogen Stubbs as Anna Lee.

   To say that the biggest fault with Liza Cody’s first novel is that we don’t get to know private eye Anna Lee well enough is testimony to the attractiveness and likableness of her heroine. Anna is a former policewoman in her late twenties, employed by the London private inquiry firm Brierly Security. In a welcome relief from her usual assignments – hunting for missing minors or “scent-counter security” – Anna is assigned to dig into the past of an apparent fatal accident victim, Dierdre Jackson.

   Dierdre had been estranged from her parents for three years, and her mother wants to know if she was happy in those last years, while her father wants information because he suspects Dierdre’s car crash was no accident. Representing herself as a friend of the family, Anna traces Dierdre’s friends and employers, most or them on the fringes or the film world; and soon she, too, begins to suspect there is more to the young woman’s death than a crash on an icy road.

   Anna’s low-key approach to investigation is refreshing, and she proves herself tough enough when the case requires it. The glimpses we are allowed into Anna’s private life – especially those scenes involving her zany and endearing neighbors, Bea and Selwyn Price – are tantalizing. So much so, in fact, that any reader will want to know more about her background, such as what her family was like and why she joined and then left the police force.

   An engaging novel with a strong plot, Dupe won the John Creasey Award for Britain’s Best First Mystery Novel. Cody’s second and third novels, also featuring Anna Lee, are Bad Company (1982) and Stalker (1984).

———
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
   

      The complete Anna Lee series –

Dupe (n.) Collins 1980
Bad Company (n.) Collins 1982
Stalker (n.) Collins 1984
Head Case (n.) Collins 1985
Under Contract (n.) Collins 1986
Backhand (n.) Chatto 1991
Bucket Nut (n.) Chatto 1992 [with Eva Wylie]

RAYMOND J. HEALY & J. FRANCIS McCOMAS, Editors – Famous Science-Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time And Space. The Modern Library G-31; hardcover, 1957, xvi + 997 pages. First published as Adventures in Time in Space, Random House, hardcover, 1946. Bantam F3102, paperback, 1966, as Adventures in Time and Space (contains only 8 stories). Ballantine, paperback, 1975, also as Adventures in Time and Space.

   Part 1 can be found here.

P. SCHUYLER MILLER “The Sands of Time.” A pointless time-travel story, if that could be imagined, including a mysterious battle between unknown invaders of Earth sixty million years ago. (1)

Update: First published in Astounding Stories, April 1937. First reprinted in this anthology, then in Great Science Fiction Stories, edited Cordelia Titcomb Smith (Dell Laurel-Leaf Library, paperback, 1964) and Voyagers in Time, edited by Robert Silverberg (Meredith Press, hardcover, 1967), among others. After a moderately lengthy career writing science fiction, mostly between the 1930s and early 40s, Miller became the long-time reviewer of the field for Astounding/Analog SF from 1951 to 1975.

LEWIS PADGETT “The Proud Robot.” Novelette. Gallagher invents a robot while drunk, then forgets its purpose, but finally manages to use it to prevent a monopoly of the television industry. (3)

Update: Lewis Padgett was one of the pen names used by Henry Kuttner. Some of the stories published under this name were co-written by C. L. Moore, but I do not believe this was one. The “Gallagher” series, of which this is a prime example, were very popular. “The Proud Robot,” the third in the series, first appeared in Astounding Science-Fiction, October 1943, and was first reprinted in this anthology. First collected in Robots Have No Tails (Gnome Press, hardcover, 1952), then in Return to Otherness (Ballantine F619, paperback, 1962). Over the years it has appeared  in many other anthologies and collections of Kuttner’s works.

A. E. Van VOGT “Black Destroyer.” Novelette. An exploring spaceship discovers a planet now ruled by the killer coeurls, descendants of a once-powerful civilization. Most notable for the description of one of these alien creatures, the story loses some of its effectiveness with a confusing ending. (4)

Update: First appeared in Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1939. From Wikipedia: “‘Black Destroyer’ was combined with several other short stories to form the novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle (Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1950). It was claimed as an inspiration for the movie Alien and van Vogt collected an out-of-court settlement of $50,000 from 20th Century Fox.” A source quoted by Wikipedia suggests that this particular story “represents the start of the Golden Age of Science Fiction.”

TO BE CONTINUED.…

BLIND ADVENTURE (RKO, 1933) Robert Armstrong, Helen Mack, Roland Young, Ralph Bellamy, John Miljan, Tyrill Davis, and Phyllis Barry. Written by Ruth Rose. Directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack.

   This one gets off to a slow start, especially for a movie only an hour long, but stick with it.

   Blind Adventure was cobbled together while stars Armstrong and Mack were lolling around on RKO’s dime, awaiting completion of the stop-motion effects in Son of Kong. And it has a charmingly thrown-together look, courtesy of Ruth Rose’s one-damn-thing-after-another story, and Ernest B Schoedsack’s rough-and ready direction.

   Things get moving when Robert Armstrong, an American at loose ends in London, gets lost in a foggy night, wanders into a stately town house to get directions, and finds it deserted — except for a dead body (Ralph Bellamy.) He catches a glimpse of someone running out of the house, loses him in the fog, and returns to find the house filled with staid, respectable Englishmen, no dead body in evidence, and everyone assuring him there’s no need to bother the Police.

   Enter delightful Helen Mack as a niece visiting staid, respectable relatives she’s never seen. She and Armstrong overhear the others arguing about what to do with them and start to sneak out… only to discover Ralph Bellamy, who it turns out was merely stunned by a bullet grazing his head.

   Bellamy explains that the house is full of spies, he’s with the Secret Service, and they must deliver a cigarette case to his boss — the fate of the Free World depends on it.

   Fortunately, the story that ensues is not nearly so simple-minded. Twist follows turn, complications compound, and mysteries mount with every scene.

   Chief among said complications is a cockney burglar, played to the hilt and then some by Roland Young, usually typed as pusillanimous businessmen, looking delighted with the change. The three principals forge their way through a plot as dense as the London fog that fills the screen, courtesy of Henry W. Gerrard’s evocative photography.

   But the real star of this thing is Ruth Rose’s story and her director-husband’s gift for telling it with verve and a certain amount of affection. The critical world will little note nor long remember Blind Adventure, but it offers a pleasant hour of adventure that I shall cherish.