DANIEL WOODRELL – Give Us a Kiss. Henry Holt, hardcover, 1996. Pocket, paperback, 1998. Little Brown & Company, softcover, 2012.

   Woodrell is on my list of under-appreciated modern crime writers. His three books featuring the Shade family of Louisiana – the first two (Muscle for the Wing and Under the Bright Lights) focus on René, a cop in the bayou town of Bruno, and the last (The Ones You Do) on his scapegrace wandering father – are all outstanding examples of dark, down-and-dirty regional fiction. He has changed his setting here from the Louisiana bayou to the Missouri Ozarks, and this one is billed as “A Country Noir.”

   Doyle Redmond is from an Ozark clan that always been about half mean, and the other half outlaws. He’s bred true in a lot of ways, but he’s also made a writer out of himself, and been living out in California with a would-be poet wife. She takes up with a real poet, though, so he steals her car and loads up his favorite books – he never did get more than half housebroke, you see – and heads back to Missouri to see his folks in Kansas City.

   They talk him into going back down to the Ozarks to hunt for his older brother, Smoke, who’s sort of wanted by the law. He finds him, and one thing leads to another, and before you know it, he’s involved in a dope-growing deal and lusting after his brother’s woman’s young daughter, But then the fun begins.

   This is probably the best novel I’ve read this year. What I’ve written above gives you no idea of the flavor of the book, but there’s no way I could without quoting large chunks of it. There isn’t any sort of mystery or detective story, and I guess “country noir” isn’t too far from the mark. The voices … well, unique is an awfully big word, but it’s certainly a distinctive one, and one you’ll savor and won’t soon forget.

   Woodrell’s people are hard people, and they’re real people, though you’ve probably never known any of them. This isn’t genre fiction, but it’s damned good fiction, maybe award quality. Read it.

MACK REYNOLDS – After Some Tomorrow. Belmont, paperback original, 1967.

   Two people, Michael Grant and Anne Enesco, are among those a strange foundation has given scholarships to Earl University on the condition they study para-psychology, Their psionic powers attract the attention of another foundation , which is interested in their ability to foresee the future for political gain.

   The sociopolitical systems of the world are about to fall, and knowledge of the prevailing forms of government could be of immense value. Hallucinogenic drugs play a part also and aid them in sending their original benefactor back to his own time.

   The major part of the book deals with their enforced study of political science, which gives Reynolds his usual chance for lecture. In addition, the story of narcotics and their relation to human culture is told. There is an underling story, however, and while it is not as thrilling as the cover would imply, it reads fairly well.

   Naturally, no clue can be given as to the social system that will eventually emerge from the welfare state that Reynolds quite pessimistically sees for the US, and the book ends without resolution on that level. The love interest proceeds beneath the lines, revealed mainly when Grant forbids Anna to wear a transparent blouse. A not too favorable view of Johnson’s role in Vietnam is given on page 67.

Rating: ***½

VERA CASPARY – Laura. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1943. Previously serialized in Colliers from October 17 to November 28, 1942 in seven parts as “Ring Twice for Laura.” Popular Library #284, paperback, 1950. Dell, paperback, 1957. Reprnted many times. Film: Twentieth Century Fox, 1944, starring Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews.

   This was by far the best of my vacation reads. It’s astoundingly good. There’s a good afterward in the “Femmes Fatales” series edition that I read written by A. B. Emrys. Emrys notes that Laura, like Caspary, worked in advertising as a copy writer. Emrys adds that “Caspary applied what she called ‘the Wilkie Collins method’ of multiple narrators, each of whom tells us about the others as well as revealing their own selves.”

   What’s interesting about the storytelling method is that each of the three narrators makes a written account. And each of the accounts is stylistically distinct. The novel reads like it was written by three different authors.

   The first ‘writer’ is Laura’s mentor, Waldo Lydecker. Lydecker is a prissy and affected pseudo-intellectual who writes a syndicated prissy, pseudo-intellectual column in the paper for prissy pseudo-intellectuals. He’s quite popular. And, of course, his section of the novel is written in a particularly prissy and affected manner.

   The next sections alternate between Laura and police detective Mark McPherson. McPherson writes his account in the terse manner of a police report. Laura writes her sections as diary — the diary of an advertising copy writer from the 40’s.

   Of course, all this stylistic mastery would be for naught if the story sucked. But the story is captivating. As the story begins, Lydecker and Laura’s fiancé, Shelby, are both stricken as Laura is found dead: shot in the face with a shotgun.

   As Detective McPherson investigates the case, he too falls in love with Laura. So much so that he purchases Laura’s painted portrait from the estate. McPherson is a very human detective — not at all hard boiled. Caspary later admitted that she shared Laura’s contempt for fictional detectives, who Laura claims invariably fall into two types: “the hard-boiled ones who are always drunk and talk out of the corners of their mouths and do it all by instinct; and the scientific kind who split hairs under a microscope”. Caspary wrote an article about McPherson as a different type of detective in Otto Penzler’s book The Great Detectives.

   And then the unthinkable: Laura turns up alive! But not until after her substitute’s body has been cremated. And without a body it’s nearly impossible to prosecute a murder!

   But McPherson isn’t going to give up that easily. He’s going to find the killer. He only hopes that the killer isn’t the dead woman he fell in love with.

HOUSE OF CARDS. Universal Pictures, 1968. George Peppard, Inger Stevens, Orson Welles, Keith Michell, Perette Prader, Barnaby Shaw, Genvieve Cluny, Maxine Audley, William Job. Screenplay: James P. Bonner (Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr.), based on the novel by Stanley Ellin. Directed by John Guillermin.

   The film opens with a the city of Paris shot from the surface of the Seine as if the viewer is floating lazily along. A man is watching from the Pont des Arts and as the POV changes we see the body he has spotted floating in the river. Soon a fisherman hooks the body and pulls it ashore, the corpse of a young well dressed man, The police are called and the man on the bridge watches as the body is recovered, a cruel smile on his lips.

   The camera focuses on the man on the bridge blacking everything else out and the colorful titles suddenly fill the screen

   Re-opening when they have finished on American Reno Davis (George Peppard) getting beaten badly in the ring in a prize fight and quickly tossing in the towel.

   He’s an ex boxer with a chequered career who has been kicking around Europe for six years trying to write something important, but mostly just avoiding living an ordinary life or going back to the states to work on his brother’s chicken farm (“Do you know what time chickens get up?”). He’s not lazy, just listless and without any real direction.

   That changes that night as he and his friend Leo are traveling back to Paris and someone takes a shot at them.

   That someone turns out to be Paul de Villemont (Barnaby Shaw) age eleven who has stolen his mother’s revolver.

   Returning to the villa where Paul lives, Reno meets his over protective American mother, Anne (Inger Stevens), and somewhat cooler of head demands the boy apologize leaving on good terms.

   The next day as he is planning to move on from Paris Anne shows up in a Rolls and offers him a job as Paul’s tutor and bodyguard, primarily to teach the boy how to be a boy and an American since his father, a French military hero from a distinguished military family , was killed in Algeria.

   The money is good, Anne is beautiful, and Reno has nothing better to do so he agrees.

   The boy very much needs to discover childhood. The household he lives in is that of an aristocratic French family run off their estates in French Algeria in the recent conflict and living in the past dreaming of past glories and injuries and something more sinister.

   There is the boy’s grandmother (Patience Collier) a cold-hearted type who makes the family watch home movies of their days in Algeria every night with Paul’s creepy aunts, uncles, and cousins (Maxine Audley, Paul Bayliss, Ralph Michael), and the creepier secretary Bourdon (William Job) who was the man on the bridge. And of course there is beautiful Jeane-Marie (Perette Prader) a house-keeper who throws herself at Reno, as Anne does, both wanting something he’s not sure he wants to give.

   Then there is Dr. Morillion (Keith Michell) the imperious physician who lets Reno know he is not really welcome, that Anne is off limits because she is his patient being treated for a breakdown she recently was hospitalized for explaining her paranoia about Paul being kidnapped, and that he sees to Paul as well.

   At a party Reno meets Leschenhaut (Orson Welles) a friend of the family who feels him out on some distinctly fascist political opinions and the night ends with Reno decking the snide Morillion.

   Still Reno isn’t fired, and continues with Paul, still thinking Anne drinks too much and is mentally unstable even claiming his predecessor was murdered, the man found drowned in the Seine. That paranoia seems more real when Bourdon and the family chauffeur try to kill him while he is fishing on the Seine with Paul then kidnap the boy and frame Reno for the murder of his friend Leo. And when he escapes the police and returns to the villa it has been closed and everyone is gone.

   House of Cards is based on a novel by Stanley Ellin which came from his later period, and while critics in general tend to dismiss some of the slicker novels of this era like The Valentine Estate and The Bind, they are well written, entertaining thrillers with complex heroes who have a bit more to them than just black and white heroics. Like Reno Davis in this book and film, his protagonists are people not quite committed to ordinary life who don’t fully fit into society. They are on a high order of well written and involving suspense novels.

   Hunted by the police, Reno will discover Anne had every right to be paranoid, uncover a world wide fascist conspiracy led by Leschenhaut that even reaches into the States, be pitted against fanatics determined to take over government and put the “inferior” races in their place, and arranging for Reno and Anne to die in a car wreck.

   He and Anne will escape from a burning fortress, discover the secret of Paul’s honored father’s death, and he’ll join Anne in a race across France and Italy to rescue Paul from being modeled into a replacement for his father, all ending in a confrontation in the Coliseum in Rome with Leschinhaut and a brainwashed Paul with a gun, coming full circle from the opening.

   Granted this is all sub-Hitichcock, and the film takes some liberties with Ellin’s novel, but I’ve always liked the film and the book, and have some fondness for Peppard’s films of this era anyway (The Executioners, The Third Day, Operation Crossbow,The Groundstar Conspiracy). I suppose it depends on your tolerance for Peppard, but mine is fairly high.

   Here he is perfectly cast as the guarded somewhat footloose Reno, and Stevens brings real vulnerability to a role that makes you regret she never got to play a real Hitchcock ice blonde. Welles is Welles, but not tiresomely so and he does project menace in a minor if perverse Sidney Greenstreet key while Keith Michell manages to be equal parts superior, snide, and threatening (he and Peppard also appeared together in The Executioners).

   John Guillermin captures a grittier view of Paris than say Stanley Donen’s Charade, but it is closer to the city I knew, without romanticizing the grungier areas or over relying on the usual tour of the high spots, and the film makes good use of several locations including at least one very good stunt involving leaping through a second story window to an awning below.

   For some reason filmmakers always make Paris feel claustrophobic and crowded, and this one opens the city up. Unlike too many American films shot on location in Paris it isn’t half travelogue. Like actual people who live there, no one feels the need to go to the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame or drive beneath the Arc de Triumph just because it is there.

   Like Donen’s Charade and Arabesque, House of Cards it is modeled on Hitchcock with a mix of suspense, sex, sudden violence, and even some comedy. And while it lacks the star power of those two films and the genius of Hitchcock, it is handsome, diverting, has an intriguing score, beautiful cinematography, and attractive leads, with a plot perhaps more relevant today with the rise of extremism in Europe and elsewhere.

   It entertains and won’t insult your intelligence, and those are fairly high bars for any suspense film.

JOHN EVANS – Halo in Brass. Paul Pine #3. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1949. Pocket 709, paperback, 1950. Bantam 1727, paperback, 1958. McMillan, paperback, 1988, as by Howard Browne.

   Paul Pine, a Chicago P.I., has been hired by an elderly couple in Lincoln, Nebraska to find their missing daughter. Her last known residence was in Chicago, having fled the small towny-ness of Nebraska for the big city.

   His only lead is the girl’s high school friendship with a prostitute who also made her way to the city. But every time Pine finds a lead, the lead witness winds up dead.

   The plot hinges on a thread/threat of (L)esbianism (which word is capitalized in the book as if the women were immigrants from the island of Lesbos). Browne expresses regret for this in the 1988 introduction and says that with the benefit of hindsight he never would have written the plot the way that he did.

   I personally (though I am not a woman (and thus my opinion is of questionable import) and not a lesbian though I have joked of being a lesbian trapped in a man’s body) thought that the lesbian angle was not handled particularly poorly. In fact, (SPOILER ALERT) there’s a trans twist in the story that I think might cinematically work even today—and to some extent has already been used in The Crying Game.

   Browne himself as a young man made the same move as the missing girl, hitchhiking from Lincoln to Chicago, which perhaps lends some verisimilitude to his presentation of the narrative.

   While not up to the level of his masterful Taste of Ashes, Halo in Brass remains a very enjoyable and well done Chandleresque detective novel.

HOLMAN DAY – Clothes Make the Pirate. Harper & Brothers, hardcover, 1925. Grossett & Dunlap, hardcover, Photoplay edition.  Silent film: First National, 1925, starring Leon Errol and Dorothy Gish.

   I pause to appreciate the oddities of this world as I reflect that a book nearly a hundred years old turned up at Hussey’s General Store in Maine.

   Author Day alleges to have based his tale on an obscure historical record to the effect that the town of Pemaquid Maine was sacked sometime around 1770 by a Pirate known as Dixy Bull, who appears to have sailed off into the fog of History shortly thereafter.

   From this meager shard he fashioned a tale that would have made a fine vehicle for Bob Hope: The story of meek tailor Tidd in pre-revolution Boston, whose parents saddled him with the Christian name of Tremble-at-Evil, which seems to have fit him nicely, for he is henpecked at home, derided by his debtors, and pointedly ignored by his niece’s Redcoat paramour.

   Browbeaten by Boston, Tidd takes spiritual refuge in reading and re-reading an escapist epic, The Buccaneers of the Spanish Maine.  Indeed, his escapism has grown to the point where he has fashioned himself a suitably piratical outfit, purchased second-hand broadsword and cutlass, and practiced glowering in front of the mirror like a truly fearsome corsair.

   You’ve guessed where all this is headed. In short order, Tidd is mistaken for the notorious pirate captain Dixy Bull and finds himself in dubious command of a band of cut-throats on the high seas (well the coast of New England, actually, but High Seas sounds more romantic, don’t you think?)

   Holman Day takes an enjoyably light-hearted view of all this, and while Clothes is seldom actually funny, it is always consistently entertaining, especially as he winds up his story with the appearance of the actual Dixy Bull, thirsting for the blood of his impostor. Like I say, it would have made a fine vehicle for Bob Hope!

         Back then: January 1968. I said:

BRUNO FISCHER “Deadlier Than the Male.” Novelette. Published in Dime Mystery Magazine, May 1945. A soldier’s buddy comes home from the war to check on his friend’s wife, who seems to have changed. Murder welcomes him at the door. Fairly obvious ending. (2)

         Now:

   While on furlough and with his buddy is still off fighting the war in Germany, Sgt. Peter Cole visits his friend’s wife, whose letters to him have become fewer and fewer, and what’s worse, less passionate. The woman who greets him is beautiful and outwardly caring, but Cole senses something is off.

   Hearing a small noise in the bedroom and his suspicions aroused, he forcibly decides to check it out. What he does not expect is to find is a dead man in a closet. Knocked unconscious almost immediately, the next thing he knows is being woken up by a cop in the alley behind his friend’s wife’s apartment. Both of them head back in, but of course the body is missing.

   It’s a good opening, and Fischer always had a good way with words, so this one starts out with a lot of promise. But sometimes the openings of stories by even good authors fail to fulfill early expectations, and such is the case here. What follows is a decent enough detective story, but it runs a little too complicated, and what Fischer failed to do is make it interesting as well. I wish I could say otherwise, but there were no sparks in this one for me.

Rating: 2 stars.

JOHN D. MacDONALD – The Drowner. Gold Medal k1302, paperback original, 1963. Reprinted several times.

   Paul Stanial, private investigator, is hired to investigate the drowning of a young, fit woman in a lake. The authorities have determined that it’s an accidental drowning. But her family doesn’t buy it.

   Stanial focuses his investigation on the drowner’s love interests: her rich playboy husband, from whom she is estranged; and her current boyfriend, a rich middle aged land developer currently facing tax fraud charges.

   MacDonald is masterful at altering his dialogue to fit the speaker. Obviously a bible thumper doesn’t talk the same as an unrepentant redneck. But you wouldn’t know it from many of the novels out there. With MacDonald he’s got the patter down. The dialogue rings true.

   About halfway thru the novel, the meaning of title changes from ‘the drowner’ as victim to ‘the drowner’ as the perp, as Stanial closes in on the suspect.

   It’s quite good. Maybe my second favorite MacDonald next to Soft Touch — another one where the meaning of the title horrifically shifts in the course of the book.

DENNIS LEHANE – Darkness, Take My Hand. Patrick Kenzie & Angela Gennaro #2. Morrow, hardcover, 1996. Avon, paperback, 1997.

   Lehane won a well deserved First Novel Shamus from the PWA for 1994’s A Drink Before the War, though the book didn’t even make the Edgar short list. Why are we not surprised?

   It seemed relatively innocent. A friend of Kenzie’s had a friend with a son she was afraid was being stalked by someone who meant him ill, and she wanted them to allay her fears. Then someone got killed in a particularly messy way, and the modus operandi matched that of a  crime more than a decade old, whose perpetrator was still in prison.

   That wasn’t the last of the bloody, perverse deaths, and yes, it all turned out to be connected. Everything that either Kenzie or Gennaro held dear would be threatened and damaged before the twisted skein was unraveled.

   Darkness, I guess so. This makes his previous book seem like a fairy tale. Well, maybe not quite, but it’s tougher than the back end of a shooting gallery. Don’t read it if you’re depressed, because the pain and bloodshed are, or seemed, unrelenting.

   Lehane did not fail of the promise of his first book in terms of writing, though this is an excellently written book.  You know I don’t like serial killers, and I’m not too crazy about cowboy PIs, and there’s both here, and that tells you something about how good a job Lehane did.

   This is going to be a strong contender for both an Edgar and a Shamus, unless the judges of each go completely brain-dead. Um. Come to think of it …

DIME MYSTERY MAGAZINE. May 1945. Cover by Gloria Stoll. Overall rating: *

BRUNO FISCHER “Deadlier Than the Male.” Novelette. A soldier’s buddy comes home from the war to check on his friend’s wife, who seems to have changed. Murder welcomes him at the door. Fairly obvious ending. (2)

TALMAGE POWELL “The Dark, Unfriendly Tide.” A man tries to dispose of a girl’s body in the bayou, but the elements betray him. Overly melodramatic. (3)

WILLIAM R. COX “They’ll Kill Me!” Novelette. Tom Kincaid has a murderous competition in his attempt to make a movie about gambling. Low grade Hollywood all the way. (0)

CYRIL PLUNKETT “Murder on the Wing.” A man obsessed with owls suspects his wife of poisoning him. (1)

FRANCIS K. ALLAN “The Man with the X-Ray Eyes.” Novel. Duke Danube saves a girl from involvement with murder in an opium den. Could have been put down at any time. (0)

JOHN PARKHILL [pseudonym of William R. Cox] “Slips That Pass in the Night.” An ex-Marine helps an explorer’s daughter regain two stolen rubies. (1)

JOE KENT [pseudonym of Francis K. Allan] “The Madman in the Moon.” Novelette. A soldier on furlough returns to his old neighborhood and is nearly framed for murder. A certain flavor of the wartime forties enhances this less-than-average story. (3)

DAY KEENE “A Corpse for Cinderella.” Novelette. Dancing skeletons, the kiss of death, and other “supernatural” happenings are exposed by a private detective. Had promise, but much too overdone. (1)