POUL ANDERSON “The Martian Crown Jewels.” Short story. Freehatched Syaloch #1. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February 1958. Reprinted in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1959; in A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, Volume One, edited by Anthony Boucher (Doubleday, hardcover, 1959); and in (among others) Ellery Queen’s Murder — in Spades! (Pyramid, paperback, 1969) as “The Theft of the Martian Crown Jewels.” Collected in Call Me Joe: The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson #1. (NESFA Press, hardcover, 2009).

   If you are roughly the same age as I, and if you’ve read the story yourself, there’s a good chance that you did so in the two volume set of the Treasury edited by Anthony Boucher (see above) and given out as a premium to untold new members of the SF Book Club back the 1960s and for many years beyond. It’s also been reprinted many times; I didn’t begin to list them all.

   One reason for the story’s popularity, I think, is that there really aren’t many examples of combining traditional detective stories with hardcore SF, and this is a good one. The detective on the case is Martian private detective Freehatched Syaloch, but this seems to have been his only appearance in print. Missing are the Martian Crown Jewels, which have been on display on Earth, but on their state secret return to Mars, via Phobos, one of the planet’s moons, they have completely disappeared.

   The rocket they were on was unmanned. They were definitely loaded onto the ship on Earth, but once the ship landed on Phobos, they are nowhere to be seen. The chances of the ship having bee being boarded along the way in the vast expanses of space is impossible, but yet, they are nowhere on the ship, which is hastily taken apart, piece by piece, to be sure.

   While he wrote a few out-and-out mysteries, Poul Anderson was far better known as the writer of hundreds of both fantasy and science fiction stories, but this is no fantasy. As a combo of both mystery and SF, it’s far stronger as SF, with just enough skill on Anderson’s part to cover its somewhat weaker standing as a impossible crime puzzle. Are all the facts the reader needs to solve the theft on his or her own? The answer is yes, if you follow the basic rule that when all the possibles are eliminated, keep on looking!

I finished three books yesterday. It might have been more, but I ran out of crayons.

E. V. CUNNINGHAM – Sylvia. Alan Macklin #1. Doubleday, hardcover, 1960. Crest d789, paperback, 1965. Also published as by Howard Fast: Carol Publishing, hardcover, 1992.

SYLVIA. Paramount Pictures, 1965. Carroll Baker, George Maharis, Joanne Dru, Viveca Lindfors, Peter Lawford, Edmond O’Brien, Aldo Ray, Ann Sothern, Lloyd Bochner, Jay Novello, Nancy Kovak. Screenplay by Sydney Boehm, Howard Fast (E. V. Cunningham), based on the latter’s novel.  Directed by Gordon Douglas.

   That’s the voice of private eye Alan Macklin (if it sounds familiar both Lew Archer and Philip Marlowe say close to the same thing), who specializes in digging into people’s past, whether they want to be uncovered or not. His love is ancient history, and it makes him good at digging into the history of the people he is hired to investigate. Luckily this looks like one of the nicer cases he might be called to exercise his skills on, one of those “moderately filthy jobs”.

   His client is one Frederick Summers, a cool piece of work, wealthy, patrician, attractive, and cultured and anxious to investigate his fiancé Sylvia West— No object on earth is so rigged with weary sound than the face of a beautiful woman, and with Sylvia it was the quality of the face not the measurement of it. She did not look like anyone else, she looked like herself.

   There isn’t much to go on, either. Reasonably a man engaged to a woman might expect her to have a history, family, even distant family, but Sylvia appeared out of nowhere a year earlier, became engaged to Summers, the story she told him about who she was is a lie, and Summers wants to know the real story. He’s the scion of big money, oil money, and he wants no surprises popping up after he marries.

   She writes poetry, indifferently, she speaks Chinese, but with a child’s vocabulary, she can mimic a faint British accent, she is well read, she has a passion for roses, and she has a peculiar way of phrasing things almost as if English wasn’t her first language.

   Summers simply wants to know who she is, and he wants Macklin to do the job without ever meeting her. He doesn’t want her suspicious he is looking into her past. If she knew it would be the end of their engagement.

   If it sounds like a variation on Laura it is. Macklin is going to delve into Sylvia’s past and the more he learns, the deeper the mystery and the closer he comes to being obsessed with and then in love with the woman and the mystery.

   E. V. Cunningham was novelist Howard Fast who was a bestselling mainstream writer of books like April Morning, and wrote science fiction (under his own name) and a number of mysteries under various names, including Mirage which became a suspense film with Gregory Peck and Walter Matthau. His later books as Cunningham featured a Japanese-American policeman, but he also wrote a series of suspense novels all named after women, Sally, Penelope, Sylvia… several of which were filmed (all three of those named), and were often book club and Reader’s Digest choices.

   Sylvia was filmed with Carroll Baker in the title role, George Maharis as Macklin, and Peter Lawford as Summers. It looks pretty much like a television production, and features a cast of stars who often appeared on television as the suspects Macklin encounters while digging into Sylvia’s past. It’s not bad, but Maharis never quite registers as tough, world weary, and cynical as Macklin in the book, and Baker, a fine actress normally, is far too earthy and real for the mysterious Sylvia, who to be fair, turns out to be closer to Baker at books end as Macklin falls for the real Sylvia as opposed to the shadow Summer’s wants to possess.

   Despite how it might sound, I like the movie. It at least tries to be something more, thanks to the script by Boehm and Fast. It’s just that the structure of the movie is too much of a gimmick to sustain the promise of the novel. It becomes one of those which star will pop up next projects that too many films devolved into in that period.

   And Macklin does finally solve both the mystery of Sylvia, and because Fast, under any name, is too good not to, it is Alan Macklin who proves to be more interested in being a decent human than a detective, and pretty much stamps all over all the Archers, Marlowes, and others who put loyalty to a client above the law and all else.

   Sylvia is almost an anti-private eye novel. The ending throws the whole genre for a loop.

   It’s that ending that makes this something more than just another hard boiled private eye novel, and a good one at that. Sylvia is ultimately a novel about a private eye and not a private eye novel.

G. K. CHESTERTON – The Incredulity of Father Brown. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1926. First published in the UK by Cassell, hardcover, 1926,. Many reprint editions exist.

   As several critics have observed, the Father Brown stories are small gems to be relished sparingly. If too many are read at one time, the effect is lessened and one might even begin to pick holes in their logic. But as detective stories, they are still masterpieces, and the most lasting of all the writing Chesterton produced in his prolific career. Their influence upon later mystery writers — especially John Dickson Carr – was enormous, and Carr’s major detective character, Dr. Gideon Fell, was patterned after Chesterton himself.

   The Incredulity of Father Brown is not the best of the five Brown collections, but it is unique in that seven of its eight stories contain locked rooms or impossible crimes as a part of their plot. One of these, “The Oracle of the Dog,” is perhaps the best of all Father Brown stories, and one of the best detective short stories ever written. The stabbing death of Colonel Druce while alone in .a summerhouse whose only entrance is under constant observation, together with a dog that seems to howl at the moment of the colonel’s death, sets up a classic situation in which the impossibility of the crime is linked to a seemingly supernatural event. It was a situation to be explored often by Carr and other writers that followed, but their solutions have rarely been us ingenious as the one Chesterton offers here.

   The other six impossible-crime stories in the book are “The Arrow of Heaven,” in which an American millionaire is killed by an arrow inside a guarded room; “The Miracle of Moon Crescent,” featuring the disappearance of a man from a guarded apartment; “The Curse of the Golden Cross,” about a curse on defilers of an ancient tomb; “The Dagger with Wings,” in which a strange cloaked figure is found dead in unmarked snow; “The Doom of the Darnaways,” involving a locked-room poisoning: and “The Ghost of Gideon Wise,” wherein Father Brown is confronted with a ghostly appearance. In all, the atmosphere of the inexplicable is brilliantly realized.

   ———
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.

ROBERT BARNARD – Death of a Perfect Mother. Scribner’s, US, hardcover, 1981. Dell/Scene of the Crime #52, paperback, 1982. Published preciously in the UK as Mother’s Boys (Collins, hardcover, 1981).

   To tell the truth, as a second thought about the title might tell you, Lill Hodsden is something less than perfect as a mother, and as a wife. She is the loud, vulgar type, the victim of an over-indulgent self-love, and a haggard creature of sexual cravings and wiles – or so she’s pictured. It is no wonder her two sons are planning to kill her.

   Nor are they the only ones. Upon Lill’s untimely passing, the fatal victim of a “mugging” attack before her boys can do more than plan, the spotlight falls on the motives of at least a dozen others as well.

   A detective story of sorts does evolve as a result, but it’s a detective story steeped in large amounts of delightfully unmitigated cynicism. And contempt. as well, especially for middle-class conventions, as exemplified best by the fairly incompetent inspector who’s been placed in charge of the case.

   I don’t really know what the minimum daily requirement for well-regarded misanthropism in everyone’s diet may be, but there must be one, and in this book Barnard seems to be at odds enough with the world for all of us. Most certainly, for all its inherent honesty, this is not quite the book to be read and appreciated on Mother’s Day.

   Rating: B

JOHN S. ENDICOTT “Double Murder.” Novelette. First published in Thrilling Detective, November 1942. Reprinted in Thrilling Detective Pulp Tales, Vol. 1, edited by Jonathan W. Sweet (Brick Pickle Media, paperback/Kindle, 2019).

   Even though John S. Endicott has dozens of story credits for the detective pulp magazines, it wouldn’t be of much help for me to print a list of then all. “Endicott” was a house name, used as a cover by many authors. For what purpose, I don’t really know, but some of the authors whose stories are known to have been published under that byline are Norman Daniels. George A. McDonald and Donald Bayne Hobart.

   For almost of its run of over 20 years and 213 issues, Thrilling Detective was a second or third-rate pulp magazine, but “Double Murder,” whoever wrote it, is a solid notch better than average. The hero is a police detective named Mortimer Tracy who treats a bum to a meal but is suspended from the force when the guy turns out to be an escaped homicidal maniac who knifes two people to death after absconding with a knife from the diner. (Tracy, whose only appearance this probably is, does his best to be known only as Tracy.)

   Working on his own, Tracy is not that sure about what actually happened, and decides to investigate on his own. The rest of the story is a well-written combination of a hardboiled tale with a puzzle story. The first is to be expected in a pulp story from the early 40s; the second not as much. It makes a story all the more pleasurable when it catches you a bit off guard like this.

   The publisher, Brick Pickle Media, already has three collections such as this one, with (I am hoping) more in the works. Even if not all the stories are as good as this one, the Kindle editions are inexpensive enough that I’m quite sure I will be purchasing and downloading more of them as time goes on.

   Other stories in this first collection are: “Murder’s Mandate,” by W. T. Ballard; :Murder Trap” by Johnston McCulley; and “Shed No tears fo Me” by Frederick C. Davis.

MURDER CITY “The Critical Path.” ITV/Granada Television, 18 March 2004 (Season 1, Episode 1). Amanda Donohoe (DI Susan Alembic), Kris Marshall (DS Luke Stone), and a large ensemble cast. Guest Cast: Mac McDonald, Stephen Martin Walters. Writer: Robert Murphy. Director: Sam Miller.

   The large ensemble cast consists of a group of actors playing various members of a homicide squad in a single station based somewhere in London. I have read that many of these players take turns having leading roles as the series went on (it lasted for two seasons and a total of ten episodes), but for the most part it the the mismatched couple of Detective Inspectors Susan Alembic and Luke Stone who were most commonly paired off, as it is in “The Critical Path,” the pilot episode.

   Susan is in charge of one case, that of a missing teen-aged girl, with the assistance of a self-described psychic magnificently cast heavy set Mac McDonald, who steals the show with his innocent but craggy expressive face. That he seems to have knowledge of the case he could not really have disgusts Luke Stone no end – he being a detective who builds his cases on facts, not ESP or worse.

   Which comes into play on his own case, very much a counterpoint to Susan Alembic’s. A man is shot and killed by an arrow in an all but deserted office building in which the surveillance cameras are all working but show absolutely no sign of anyone entering or moving throughout the building. Stone has a suspect, a egotistical man who simply dares Stone to find out how he did it.

   I do not know if the contrasts in techniques and procedures will continue through the rest of the series, but I’ll be watching to find out. I enjoyed this one. It helps considerably when all of the actors are as top notch as they are in this very first episode.

   
PETER CHEYNEY – This Man Is Dangerous. Lemmy Caution #1. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1936. Coward McCann, US, hardcover, 1938. Reprinted many times. Film: Sonofilm, France, 1954, as Cet Homme Est Dangeureux.

   Peter Cheyney (1896-1951) never visited the United States in his life and knew next to nothing about Americans, but in the late 1930s he became an instant success in his native England and in Europe, especially France, a writer or fake-American hard-boiled novels. In This Man Is Dangerous and ten subsequent titles, he chronicled the adventures of rootin’-tootin’-two-gun-shootin’ Lemmy Caution, an indestructible FBI agent who downs liquor by the quart, laughs at bullets flying his way, romances every dame in sight, and blasts away at greasy ethnic-named racketeers and (in thelater novels) Nazi spies.

   Americans, of course, saw these ridiculous exercises for what they were, and only the first few were ever published here.

   Certainly no one would read Lemmy Cautions for their plots, which are uniform from book to book — all 1hc nasties double-crossing each other over the McGuffin — nor for their characterizations, which are pure comic strip. But mystery fans with a taste for lunacy may be attracted by Cheyney’s self-created idiom. Lemmy narrates his cases in first person and present tense, a wild-and-crazy stylistic smorgasbord concocted from Grade Z western films, the stories of Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon, eyeball-poppers apparently of Cheyney’s own inventor (like “He blew the bczuzu” for “He spilled the beans”), and a steady stream of British spellings and locutions.

   Nothing but quotation can convey the Cheyney flavor. From This Man ls Dangerous:

   I says good night, and I nods lo the boys. I take my hat from the hall and walk down the stairs to the street. I’m .feeling pretty good because I reckon that muscling in on this racket of Siegella’s is going to be a good thing for me, and maybe if I use my brains and keep my eyes skinned, I can still find some means of double-crossing this wop.

   From Don’t Get Me Wrong (1939):

   Me — l am prejudiced. I would rather stick around with a bad-tempered tiger than get on the wrong bias of one of these knife-thrown’ palookas. I would rather four-flush a team of wild alligators outa their lunch pail than try an’ tell a Mexican momma that I was tired of her geography an’ did not wish to play any more.

   From Your Deal, My Lovely (1941):

   Some mug by the name. of Confucius – who was a guy who was supposed to know his vegetables – once issued an edict that any time he saw a sap sittin’ around bein’ impervious to the weather an’ anything else that was goin’, an’ lookin’ like he had been hit in the kisser with a flat-iron, the said sap was suffering from woman trouble.

   Lemmy Caution became. so popular on the Continent that Eddie Constantine, an American. actor, portrayed him in a series of French films. These films were so successful that Jean Luc Godard used Constantine as Caution in his New Wave film Alphaville.

   Eventually Cheyney launched a second wave of novels, written in a spare ersatz-Hammett style and featuring Slim Callaghan, London’s toughest PI. But for those who love pure absurdity, and appreciate the wild stylistic flights of Robert Leslie Bellem and Henry Kane and Richard S. Prather, a treat of compatible dimensions is in store when they tackle the adventures of Lemmy Caution.

———
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.

ONE BODY TOO MANY. Paramount Pictures, 1944. Jack Haley, Jean Parker, Bela Lugosi, Blanche Yurka, Lyle Talbot, Douglas Fowley. Director: Frank McDonald.

   There’s no way of getting around it. One Body Too Many owes more than a lot to The Cat and the Canary, the movie with Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard that came along five years earlier. Not that that’s a bad thing, but any movie reviewer worth his salt has to point out things like this.

   In this one leading actor Jack Haley plays an insurance salesman who finally has an appointment with a wealthy recluse to sell him a $200,00 life insurance policy. Little does he know that by the time he gets there, the man is dead and his relatives, almost all of whom he had despised in his lifetime, have gathered around to hear the reading of his will.

   All they get, however, is a preliminary statement from the lawyer, which in essence says that if he is buried above ground, the estate is divided one way, but if he is buried under ground, the bequests will be distributed in the reverse order. (Don’t ask.) More, all the relatives are required to stay in the house together until such time as the burial occurs.

   When he arrives, Haley is mistaken for the PI the attorney has hired the watch the body, the PI having been met and disposed of just as he arrived. This causes a lot of happy confusion, as you might expect, before that particular matter is all straightened out. In the meantime, Haley and Jean Parker, the dead man’s favorite niece, have become attracted to each other, and he decides to stick around to give her what assistance he can.

   There are lots of hidden passages, sliding panels, trap doors, and eyes that watch rooms through the eyes of paintings on the wall, not to mention a sudden thunderstorm and lights that go on and off. The body itself seems to come and go at will, and the butler, superbly played by Bela Lugosi, acts even more suspicious than the other relatives, a greedy lot all.

   Jack Haley, I think, was underrated as a comedian, probably because he never goes as over the top as a Bob Hope, say, or heaven forbid, at least as far as this film is concerned, a Red Skelton. Haley is far more subtle here than either of those gentlemen, and he’s a huge factor in making the movie as much of a success as it is, if this is the kind of movie you like as much as I do. That said, at 75 minutes, it runs maybe 15 minutes too long. If it had been up to me, although I was only two at the time, I’d have trimmed the scene in which the coffin, with Haley inside, was tossed in the pool. Your opinion may vary.

EDWARD D. HOCH “The Problem of the Tin Goose.” Dr. Sam Hawthorne #24. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1982. Collected in More Things Impossible: The Second Casebook of Dr Sam Hawthorne (Crippen & Landru, 2006). Previously reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunits, edited by Mike Ashley (Running Press, US, 2004).

   In the 1920s troupes of barnstorming pilots were all the rage, doing al sorts of fancy flying maneuvers and such daredevil stunts such as wing-walking, including stepping from the wing of one plane onto that of another. And even though Dr. Sam Hawthorne was but a young man then and new to his practice, he was around to watch – and to solve a murder that on the face of it had no possible explanation.

   To wit: When one of the planes involved in such activities comes back down to the ground, the pilot is found stabbed to death in the cockpit, which was locked from the inside, nor was there any feasible way for the knife to be thrown through the open window from the other plane.

   Hoch’s stories were almost always perfect models of pure puzzle stories, with only occasional attempts at in depth characterizations. If that is what you’re looking for in the crime stories you read, Hoch is probably not the author for you. And even so, I thought the crucial part of the clue to howdunit could have been amped up a little without letting any of the cat out of the bag.

   A mere quibble. “Tin Goose” is not only a really neat puzzle yarn, but it’s fun to read simply for the brief incursion into the past it provides, showing us what kinds of local events got small town America excited between the wars.