THE GLADES “Pilot.” A&E, 11 July 2010. Matt Passmore (Jim Longworth), Kiele Sanchez, (Callie Cargill). Creator & screenwriter: Clifton Campbell. Director: Peter O’Fallon.

   I was obviously busy doing other things back in 2010 and the four years following. This series passed beneath my radar altogether, and based on this first episode, it’s a show that really should at least have known about. Not all of the fun mystery series that were on cable back then were on the USA network.

   Matt Passmore plays a former homicide detective who is trying for an easier life but working at the same kind of job in a small town in Florida. (It seems he was kicked out of Chicago for sleeping with his boss’s wife, but he claims he was the only one who was not sleeping with her.) He’s a cocky sort of guy who borders on being obnoxious about it. For the most part he stays on the right side of overly brash, unlike the fellow who played the lead role in Psych. (My opinion.)

   Based on this, the first episode, the other major player will be a nurse (played by Callie Cargill) who helps him get a “female perspective” on a case. There seems to be a romantic attraction between them, but she’s married with a young son and (as an interesting change of pace) a husband in prison. I don’t know where that is going to go.

   Found dead in this pilot episode is a woman found ina swamp with no head. She has been in the water to be easily identified, and most of Longworth’s time is spent on trying to find out who she is, much less find her killer. There’s a nice twist in the tale toward the end, but most of the appeal to this show seems to suggest that its appeal will be with the characters, with the detective work coming in a reasonably close second.

JOHN GARDNER – The Garden of Weapons. McGraw-Hill, US. hardcover, 1981. Mysterious Press, US, paperback, 1984. Published earlier in the UK by Hodder, hardcover, 1980.

   John Gardner is one of the most versatile British writers in the espionage genre. He gained early recognition for his Boysie Oakes series – The Liquidators (1964), Amber Nine (1966), and five others which he created in the hope they would be an “amusing counterirritant to the excesses” of James Bond; these were written in the black-humor style characteristic of the Sixties. In the Seventies, Gardner scored additional critical and sales triumphs with a much different type of series – one featuring Sherlock Holmes’s archenemy, Professor Moriarity, in The Retum of Moriarity (1974) and The Revenge of Moriarity (1975). And in the Eighties, Gardner returned to the frantic world of Bondian spies — literally — when he began a series of new 007 adventures.

   But Gardner’s best book to date is not one featuring a series character; it is the realistic espionage thriller The Garden of Weapons, which begins when a KGB defector walks into the British Consulate in West Berlin and demands to speak with Big Herbie Kruger, a legendary figure in intelligence circles. Kruger’s interrogation of the defector reveals that the greatest of Kruger’s intelligence coups — a group of six informants known as the Telegraph Boys — has been penetrated by a Soviet spy. Kruger decides to go undercover and eliminate the double agent himself. without the knowledge or consent of British Intelligence.

   Posing as an American tourist, Kruger enters East Berlin to carry out his deadly self-appointed miss1on. But the task is hardly a simple one; and Gardner’s plot is full of Byzantine twists and turns involving the East Germans, the KGB, and British Intelligence. Any reader who enjoys espionage fiction will find The Garden of Weapons a small masterpiece of its type.

   Another non-series Gardner thriller in the same vein is The Werewolf Trace (1977), which has been called “a compulsively readable thriller with delicately handled paranormal undertones and a bitter ending.”
   ———
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.

Bibliographic Update: As it so happens, The Garden of Weapons was not a standalone. There were seven in all, all but one published after this one:

      The Herbie Kruger series —

The Nostradamus Traitor (n.) Hodder 1979.
The Garden of Weapons (n.) Hodder 1980.
The Quiet Dogs (n.) Hodder 1982.
The Secret Houses (n.) Bantam 1988.
The Secret Families (n.) Bantam 1989.
Maestro (n.) Bantam 1993.
Confessor (n.) Bantam 1995.

KEVIN PRUFER “The River Market Murders.” Detective Armand #2. Short story. First appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September 2006. Probably never reprinted.

   Armand is a homicide detective in Kansas City, a town that hardly ever shows up as the scene of a detective fiction story, except maybe in the pulps. In this tale, River Market is an area undergoing urban renewal, and at least one person is violently opposed to young people moving in and squeezing the former residents out. Several of these newcomers have been murdered, all with the same M.O., but the latest doesn’t quite fit the pattern.

   She’s older, for one thing, and she lives out in the suburbs. Her husband doesn’t know why she’d be downtown. She had no friends in the area, no reason to be there.

   Armand is an excellent detective, and the puzzle continues to gnaw at him. He also can relate to the anguish the woman’s husband is going through. He lost his wife in an automobile accident a year or so ago, and the thought of it often keeps him up at night.

   As a detective story, this is a good one, but it’s also one of the darker ones I’ve read recently. Armand finds himself identifying more and more with the victim’s husband, and whether the end of the story is a happy one, I will leave you to decide, if ever you get a chance to read this one.

   Armand’s first appearance was in “The Body in the Spring,” published in the June 2005 issue of AHMM. There were only the two. As to why I thought this one was so well written, I went investigating and discovered that Kevin Prufer is a very well known poet and a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Houston. His Wikipedia page is here.

CHARLES E. FRITCH – Negative of a Nude. Mark Wonder #1. Ace Double D-367, paperback original, 1959.  Reprinted in revised form as Strip for Murder (Kozy, 1960), with Christopher Sly the new leading character.

   James Reasoner reviewed this book several years ago on his blog, pointing out that Fritch was the editor at Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine who hired him to do a long run the Mike Shayne novellas that always opened the magazine. Fritch doesn’t seem to have done a lot of writing of his own, but he did a fine job editing the magazine on what was probably a very limited budget.

   This is the only novel under his own name in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, for example, but he also has entries under the pen names of Charles Brockden, Christopher Sly, Eric Thomas and house name Troy Conway. He also wrote science fiction and was the editor of the short-lived magazine Gamma. The name Eric Thomas is significant because he wrote a second adventure of PI Mark Wonder under that name: Psycho Sinner (Athena, paperback, 1961).

   As James points out in his review. Negative of a Nude starts out in near Richard S. Prather / Shell Scott mode, with Wonder being attracted to a girl at the beach, a girl he quickly learns is a high class stripper at a local night club, and their mutually deciding to go to his apartment together. But the entertainment they have planned is interrupted by a phone call from a would-be client, and when he’s hung up the phone, both Cherry Collins and the camera case containing photos he shot for a previous client are gone.

   The book takes place in Los Angeles, so lots of the street names and other general locales are very familiar. So’s the story, in fact, but it’s complicated enough – and turns to have enough bite to it, that the oh-so-standard hi-jinks at the beginning can be forgiven, if need be.

   Let’s put it this way.  Shell Scott never had a past as an ex-police detective and a former heroin addict (the latter being the reason for the former).

   Fritch ought to have written more, and for better (or more discriminating) publishers. Based on Negative for a Nude, he was good enough.

   —

Note: More of Charles Fritch’s other mysteries written under different entangled names and various semi-sleaze publishers can be found here, posted earlier on this blog.

A. A. FAIR – Double or Quits. Donald Lam & Bertha Cool #5. Morrow, hardcover, 1941. Dell #160, mapback edition, 1947. Reprinted many times since.

   If a man working in a garage on his car’s engine is later found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning, the insurance would have to pay off double on his accidental death, right? Erle Stanley Gardner, writing under his A. A. Fair pen name, shows us how the wording of all life insurance policies says that the answer is no. No double indemnity, unless Donald Lam can come up with something.

   Unfortunately, this bit of legal expertise is the high point of this rather complicated affair involving a whole household of suspects and more horsing around than clue gathering. Lam incidentally weasels Berth Cool into giving him a partnership in their detective agency, but in general he gets himself out too far ahead of the evidence. I’d say he bungles the case; at any rate he doesn’t exactly shine.

Rating: C minus.

   This song ought to get your feet a-tapping:

BLACK MOON RISING. New World Pictures, 1986. Tommy Lee Jones, Linda Hamilton, Robert Vaughn, Richard Jaeckel. Based on a story by John Carpenter, also one of the co-screenwriters. Director: Harley Cokliss.

   The “Black Moon” in this movie is a car, and not just any car. It’s an experimental car, one that’s designed to travel at speeds of over 300 miles per hour. Valuable? Yes, no doubt about it. And when it’s stolen, by an organized gang of thieves not knowing exactly what they have, do the owners want it back>? I’m repeating myself. No doubt about it.

   This is not a “car movie,” though, as many many movies in the 80s were. It’s really about Quint, Tommy Lee Jones’ character, a thief himself. He’s stolen a cassette of important evidence that the owners want back, and he’s hidden it for safekeeping in the car that’s been stolen. Now he needs to find the car too.

   And just by the way, I said the gang of thieves did not realize what they had stolen. This is not exactly true. Their leader on the street and a whiz with cars, especially at stealing them, is Linda Hamilton, and even though it thoroughly displeases her boss (Robert Vaughn) upstairs in a tall tower of a building, she wouldn’t mind the idea of being able to drive off with it.

   It was toward the beginning of Jones’ movie-making career when this one was made, still in the stages of making movies for TV and other ones almost no one ever saw, but does he have screen presence?

   The answer, as succinctly as I can made it, is Yes. He fits my mental picture of a tough-as-nails thief-for-hire perfectly. And tough as nails is exactly what he has to be. He takes one of the more brutal beatings in this movie that I can imagine – and is still able to get up the next day to finish the operation that he has in the works to reprieve the car.  (What this is, you see,  is a double heist movie.)

   Most movie such as this I am always content to sit back and enjoy the flow. Linda Hamilton is always a plus, as easy as the eyes as she is, but this is Tommy Lee Jones’ movie all the way. Even after seeing Black Moon, the car, really do its stuff when it needs to.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece. Morrow, hardcover, 1936. Pocket #277, paperback, 1944. Reprinted many times since. TV Adaptation: Perry Mason, 28 September 1957 (Season 1 Episode 2), with Raymond Burr as Perry Mason.

   Perry Mason is approached by a “peculiar” client – Edna Hammer. who seeks help for her uncle, Peter Kent. Kent has a bad habit of sleepwalking. and when he does, he heads for (he carving knives and curls up in bed with one. Edna is afraid Uncle Peter will kill someone, and she wants Mason to prevent this.

   Kent has other troubles: a wife who instituted divorce proceedings on account of the sleepwalking but now wishes to reconcile; a fiancee whom he wishes to marry but can’t unless the divorce goes through: a complicated business arrangement with a “cracked-brained inventor”; a hypochondriac half brother; and a woman tailing him in a green Packard roadster. Mason spends a night at the Kent home, and by the next morning there is a bloodstained knife under Peter Kent’s pillow, a corpse in the guest room, and a client in very hot water.

   The writing in this early novel is taut and lean — reflective of Gardner’s hard-boiled work for such pulp magazines as Black Mask. The dialogue is terse and packs a good impact. and there are none of the long-winded conversations and introspections that characterize the later Perry Masons. A first-rate example of Gardner’s work in the Thirties and early Forties.

   Some other notable titles in the series are The Case of the Black-Eyed Blond (l944), The Case of the Lazy Lover (1947), The Case of the Green-Eyed Sister (1953), and The Case of1he Daring Decoy (1957). After the late Fifties, the novels seem to lose something, possibly as a result of Gardner’s work on the Perry Mason TV series. Mason is less flamboyant. and the plots are not as intricate or well tied off as in the earlier novels.

   Gardner created other series characters, writing under both his own name and the pseudonym A. A. Fair. The best of these under the Gardner name arc small-1own prosecutor Doug Selhy (The D.A. Calls It Murder, 1937; The D.A. Cooks a Goose, 1942). whose role as a hero is a reverse of Hamilton Burger’s; and Gramps Wiggins (The Case of the Turning Tide, 1941; The Case of he Smoking Chimney, 1943), an iconoclastic old prospector whose experiences reflect Gardner’s childhood travels with his mining-engineer father.

   In addition to his novels, Gardner wrote hundreds of mystery and western stories under various names for such magazines as Argosy, Black Mask, Sunset,  West, and Outdoor Stories.

———
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 ADVENTURES OF TOM DRAKE, GUARDIAN OF THE BIG TOP. “The Invisible Thief.” Mutual, Summer replacement show, June 1949. Air date: a Wednesday. Probably the second show of the series. Vince Harding as Tom Drake, and Fred Rains as his sidekick, Eddie Roth.

   Kids’ shows on OTR such as this one don’t show up very often, so when one does, I’m always happy to hear about it. Tom Drake was a 1949 summer replacement on Mutual for Superman, airing M-W-F and alternating with Bobby Benson on T-Th. I remember listening to the latter, since it lasted longer, but 1949 was maybe a year or two early for me to have been listening.

   The circus that Tom Drake works for is having problems with a thief in this one, an invisible one who sneaks into the performers’ tents and steals things with no one ever seeing him (or her). Since only small things are missing, Drake thinks the thefts are meant to be diversion for something bigger that is being planned.

   He’s wrong, though, and I had it figured out within the first three or four minutes. You may, too, if you listen to it here, but if I (or you) were eight or nine, maybe we’d both be fooled a while longer. Interestingly enough, there were no commercials for the show, only promos to get the show’s young listeners to call their friends in to listen too. To me the show seems far too tame to get a lot of kids excited about it. It lasted only for the one summer.

   For more information about the show, go here.

THE GAY CAVALIER. Monogram Pictures, 1946. Gilbert Roland, Martin Garragala. Nacho Galindo, Ramsay Ames, Helen Gerald, Tristam Coffin, John Merton. Screenplay by Charles Belden, based on the character created by O Henry. Foreword by Sidney Sutherland. Directed by William Nigh.

   Gilbert Roland rides onto the screen as the Cisco Kid in this B Western and does so with a good deal more romance and less action than you might expect.

   Cisco had been around ever since the story by O Henry whose original character is a far cry from the charming Mexican Robin Hood we know and love.

   The original Cisco was a sociopathic Anglo Billy the Kid type hunted by a brave Texas Ranger captain (based on Lee Nace the Ranger who arrested and befriended William Sidney Porter in Texas for embezzlement). In the story the Kid uses his Mexican girlfriend to escape the Ranger having her ride away on his horse in his clothes and to be killed by the Ranger while he escapes on her horse in drag.

   By the time Cisco came to the big screen, he was a charming but still ruthless Mexican bandit played by Warner Baxter, who managed to take home the first Academy Award playing the part in 1929 (Ronald Colman was nominated as Bulldog Drummond that year) in In Old Arizona.

   Over the years Cisco was a handsome Cesar Romero (mostly playing himself), the beloved Duncan Renaldo of television fame, Jimmy Smits in a made-for-television movie, and the dashing and dangerous Gilbert Roland.

   Roland my be billed as the gay cavalier, but there is nothing light or happy about him. There are a few rueful or slightly sinister smiles, and he romances some beautiful women, but his Cisco all in black is almost noirish dark, driven, and haunted as well as philosophical.

   Roland, debuted in the silent era and went from leading man to character actor over his career, but as Leonard Maltin once wrote, no movie was ever worse for his presence, and here as a dark and sardonic Cisco he brings something new to the character.

   The film opens with Cisco on a hill top standing with his hat off beside a cross. It is the grave of his father. As his fat friend Baby (Nacho Galindo) explains to one of the gang, Cisco’s father was the most powerful man in California at one time, and now Cisco to atone for his father’s sins and so the old man can rest, has become a Robin Hood stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.

   I don’t think any other film ever gave Cisco an origin story.

   Meanwhile Don Felipe (Martin Garragala), a poor ranchero, is marrying his daughter (Helen Gerrald) off to wealthy gringo John Lawton (Tristam Coffin) though she loves a poor Mexican boy. What no one knows is that Lawton and his man (John Merton — a bad guy surprise surprise) are criminals planning to use Don Felipe’s estate as a base and have already held up the money gathered to build a new church and blamed the Cisco Kid for the crime.

   That doesn’t sit well with this Cisco. He determines to find whoever imitated him and stole the church money, and once he knows it is Lawton to play Cupid for the young Juan and Don Felipe’s daughter.

   Meanwhile Cisco finds time to romance the older and much more attractive daughter, Ramsay Ames.

   There is a raid on Lawton’s hideout to steal the money back for the church, and a well staged duel with swords between Coffin and Roland, but little boys must have been squirming in their seats on Saturday mornings as this one unreeled. On the other hand, adults may have enjoyed a more mature Western done with some actual charm and a charismatic lead who could actually act.

   Leonard Maltin’s axiom stands. Like anything else he was in, no movie was ever worse for the presence of Gilbert Roland, and many, like this one, far better for him being in it.