GET MEAN. Italian-American, 1975. Tony Anthony (also wrote the story and produced), Lloyd Battista. Directed by Ferdinando Baldi. (Pther names of those involved are withheld to protect the innocent who were only collecting a paycheck and are otherwise blameless)

   Bad is, of course relative (like your brother-in-law), but when it comes to movies there are different levels of true cinematic incompetence.

   There is the most obvious kind of bad film, the low budget badly made and poorly acted film. Among the most famous of that breed are Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space, Robot Monster, and the hands down winner Manos: Hands of Fate. They wear their badness as a sort of badge of honor. We made a bad film, yes, but we would have made a better one if we had talent.

   Then there is the “what went wrong” category, when big stars, directors, writers, and even bestselling books somehow get to the screen in a form audiences simply cannot believe turn out so bad. Otto Preminger late in his career seemed to specialize in these with Hurry Sundown and Rosebud, Michael Cimmino made cinematic bad movie history with Heaven’s Gate, millions of dollars and Laurence Olivier couldn’t save Inchon. A book by Alistair MacLean and a cast that included Robert Shaw, Harrison Ford, and Franco Nero could not save Force 10 From Navarone. The less said about adaptations of Harold Robbins’ The Adventurers and The Betsy the better, but even they couldn’t come close to the one with Pia Zadora. (I won’t even write the name, there may be curses involved and malign spirits, besides Ms Zadora’s acting).

   But there is another kind of bad film, one so bad, so gonzo stupid and inept that it plays as if you were smoking something funny even when you see it cold sober. Get Mean is that kind of film.

   We begin as a typical Spaghetti Western. Tony Anthony, our hero, is being dragged through the dirt by a galloping horse through some unnamed Southwestern canyon, and to add to the mystery he is being observed by a crystal ball sitting out in the middle of nowhere.

   Let me be clear, Anthony, who starred in a number of Spaghetti Westerns, is largely to blame for this film. He not only stars, but he wrote the original story and produced the film. If there is anyone to blame it is him.

   It’s only a shame the audience and not him who suffers the most from this fact.

   Soon his exhausted horse wanders into a ghost town and promptly drops dead (and never have I seen a hammier performance by a horse). Anthony frees himself, and sees smoke rising in an abandoned building. He follows his nose and inside finds a group of Romany and an old seeress with the crystal ball we saw earlier. They offer him wine and food, and proceed to explain that he is expected.

   They dump ten thousand in gold in front of him and produce the Princess Maria, who he is told he must escort to Spain where she can free her people from the barbarians.

   Our Tony, however, has already been established as an untrustworthy mercenary type and bargains his fee up to $50,000 in gold, which they quickly agree to, when a Viking replete with furs, blonde beard, and horned helmet bursts in with three sailors dressed like escapees from Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore.

   Having dispatched them we are shown a map as Tony and the Princess cross the United States and the Atlantic to Spain. We learn from the map also that there seems to be desert canyons in Minnesota on the shores of Lake Superior, because that’s where the animated map starts our journey.

   So after a brief sojourn on the shore after they land in Spain we are in the Spanish desert (at least they actually have them there) resting and arguing because Tony is so rude to royalty and thinks she is full of hot air, when we hear many men and horses approaching.

   A great battle is about to be fought between the evil Barbarians (still Vikings, but looking more like Attila’s huns) and the Princess’s allies — the Moorish army — which were driven out of Spain by El Cid around the eighth century, save for some incursions in the South and nice architectural touches.

   The good Moors are soon wiped out thanks to the Barbarians secret weapon, Leonardo’s turret, with multiple cannons that can be rapidly fired, and Tony and the haughty princess are captured by the Barbarian chief, his Valkyrie bodyguard, and his two allies; a rather gay Prince dressed like Hamlet, and the hunchback Richard II. Yup folks, that Richard II, War of the Roses, nephews murdered in their cell, old twisted back himself.

   My kingdom for a … but I’m getting ahead of the plot. That comes later.

   For no real reason the Valkyries tie Tony up and hang him upside down from a pole. then they all ride off happily with the Princess to their castle. Sadly Tony Curtis in not present to say ”Yonda lies the castle of my fadda.” Come to think of it that was a much better film even with Tony’s accent.

   Eventually more Romany types show up and rescue Tony and the wounded leader of the Moorish army. It seems as if it is up to Tony now to rescue the Princess and collect his money, so Tony, after a brief recovery, goes and gets himself captured by the Barbarians by offering his services.

   The Chief and the Prince aren’t to sure of this, but Richard II never saw an ally he couldn’t betray and persuades them that Tony could be useful. After all, the Barbarians aren’t too smart and worship a live horse in gold plated armor known as the Stallion of Rodrigo since they live in El Cid’s castle, and it turns out are desperate to find the treasure of Rodrigo.

   Tony proves to come in handy here and is sent on a mystical quest for the treasure, which involves a strange ceremony in what appears to be a Russian Orthodox church and a semi-mystical quest which ends with him being turned black (“Everywhere,” he assures us after checking his pants), and returning with no treasure but the Scorpion Necklace which curses the bearer to die.

   At this point the Barbarian chief is tired of messing with him and has him trussed up like a pig and put on a spit over a slow fire. At least he’s white again. The Princess, seeing this, grabs a sword, duels Richard II, and is promptly killed when he throws a sword between her shoulder blades.

   Well, that plot point wasn’t going anywhere fast, and now there is a treasure worth more than the reward for delivering the Princess to interest Tony — if he doesn’t cook too soon.

   But the treacherous Prince has other things in mind and frees Tony, who turns the table on him and forces the Prince to swallow the Scorpion Necklace, which the Chief and Richard II have since learned is key to Rodrigo’s treasure.

   Still hanging in there? If not I can hardly blame you.

   The Prince is returned to the castle and force-fed until he returns the missing necklace while Tony invents some sort of four barreled hand held cannon and prepares to challenge the Barbarian horde, but before he can, the Valkyries confront him, and after briefly considering cutting off some important parts of his anatomy, instead decide to make use of them in a gang assault that Tony manages to elude and instead throw the Prince in as a very reluctant substitute.

   There are by now so many things about this film to be offended by, it is hard to focus on just its use of stereotypes and casual prejudice.

   The Prince survives without changing sides, and as Tony assaults the castle, is killed. Tony then puts scorpions down the Chief’s armor and has a chuckle or two as the Viking leader spends more time dying than the ham horse earlier in the film, but just about as boring.

   Now only Richard II and Tony are left to face each other down in a gun fight. Tony’s Colt against Richard’s six barreled revolving cannon all as Richard recites the “My kingdom for a horse” speech from Shakespeare. This film is not kosher; ham is on the menu.

   Unluckily for the viewer Tony wins that one and even finds Rodrigo’s treasure, then we are shown in animation him sailing back to America and riding into the screen, past another mysteriously placed crystal ball …

   I’m am happy to say, though, that this one does not prove accurate in its predictions, and we never have to see Tony or this movie, or anything half as stupid again unless we smoke or ingest something we shouldn’t.

   As bad films go, it is hard to rate this. Ken Russell would have thrown up his hands in despair. Ed Wood would have cried himself to sleep, the movie even has bisexual cross-dressing Valkyries. Andy Warhol would have shredded his soup cans.

   Get Mean is not the worst movie ever made, but it bows to none as the stupidest most gonzo Western in history, and I include Terror in a Tiny Town in that mix.

   If Tony Anthony gets dragged into your town behind my horse, my advice is to aim low and shoot first.

DONALD HAMILTON – Death of a Citizen. Matt Helm #1. Gold Medal #957, paperback original; 1st printing, January 1960. Reprinted by Gold Medal many times (*). Titan Books, paperback, 2013. Film: Plot elements of this book were included in The Silencers, 1966. otherwise loosely based on the Hamilton title of that name (with Dean Martin as Matt Helm).

   I have read, or at least I think I have, that in the first draft of this first Matt Helm adventure, Hamilton did not intend it to be the first of the series, but at the suggestion of his editor, the book was rewritten so as to hint that more adventures were yet to come.

   I don’t know if the story is true or not, but as far as more adventures are concerned, the hint is certainly there. I’m sure that any red-blooded male, after reading this first one back in 1960, would have to been faunching at the bit for the next one to come out. Luckily the wait wouldn’t have been long. Book number two, The Wrecking Crew, came out later that same year.

   And 1960 was a year that (in my opinion) that Donald Hamilton was in the prime of his writing career. Death of a Citizen is as lean and mean as they come, and while Matt Helm is fairly rusty at the job when the book opens, by the end he’s back in the same hard-boiled mode of action as he must have been during the war (WWII).

   Since then. though, he’s gotten married, has three kids, and a little bit of extra belly fat. He’s a writer now, and is pretty good with a camera. A comfortable life. Until the night of the Sante Fe cocktail party when Tina comes back into his life. Tina, whom he worked with during the war. Very closely, you could even say. And then the dead girl he finds in his bathtub. His current comfortable life is over in a flash.

   Hence the title. Helm and Tina are back on the run together again, and it’s quite a ride. In the world of Matt Helm you can be certain of one things: that not everything is as it seems. He tells the story himself, as opinionated about everything in the world, major or minor, from the start. He does not care for women wearing pants, for example. I don’t believe that in followup books he ever let the reader forget that.

      —

(*)   Of the dozen or so copies of this book described on abe.books as being First Printings, I found it amusing to see that none of them are.

    “Season of the Witch” was co-written and first recorded by singer-songwriter Donovan Leitch in 1966. Since then it’s been covered by dozens of other singers and bands, including most recently by Lana Del Rey and used as the theme song for Guillermo del Toro’s just released film Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark:

THE TAKE. Columbia Pictures, 1974. Billy Dee Williams, Eddie Albert, Vic Morrow, Frankie Avalon, Sorrell Booke, Tracy Reed, Albert Salmi, A Martinez. based on the novel Sir, You Bastard by G. F. Newman. Director: Robert Hartford-Davis.

   Billy Dee Williams, who was rather young at the time, plays a San Francisco cop who comes down to Paloma, New Mexico, to help harried police chief Eddie Albert bring Vic Morrow to justice, as a local organized crime leader named Victor Manso, posing as a highly respected community leader.

   What we the viewer soon know that Williams also has a hidden identity, that of a cop on the take. Apparently he’s been accepting graft money from mobsters for quite some time now, all the while building up his resumé as a dedicated cop on his way up. He even has a middle man in Sorrell Booke to launder his money for him.

   There are some occasional good scenes in The Take, a lot of good professional actors having some solid roles to play, and a more than a sufficient amount of TV style action (vicious thuggery and endless car chase scenes). The problem is twofold: (1) Williams is cocky without being likeable, and (2) there’s no sense of continuity between the good parts, the several there are. The result, not surprisingly, is a listless, jumbled up mess. Watchable, but once seen, there’s no particular reason you’d ever want to sit through this again.

DOUG ALLYN – Icewater Mansions. Michelle Mitchell #1. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1995; paperback, 1996.

   Allyn is the author of two novels about a Hispanic Detroit policeman, and numerous short stories. His “real” job is musician in a rock band. I’ve read one of his previous novels, Motown Underground, and had mixed reactions.

   Michelle “Mitch” Mitchell is an underwater welder for oil rigs on the Texas Gold Coast, or at least she has been. Now she’s back in her hometown on the Northern Michigan coast of Lake Huron, straightening out the affairs of her estranged father who died in a recent auto accident, She’d intended to sell the saloon he owned and then go back to Texas, but questions keep arising about the way he died, and pieces of her old life keep bobbing to the surface — including the father of her child back in boarding school.

   The previous Allyn book I read had some decent hard-boiled prose, but I never liked the characters enough to get involved in the story. With this one, I did. Mitchell is a tough, appealing heroine, and Allyn di d a good job with the supporting cast as well.

   The prose was lean and direct, ad there was a good feel for the cold, hard country the story was set in. The novel won’t get nominated for any awards, but it was a good story, well told.

Bibliographic Update:   The Detroit policean Barry was referring to in the first paragraph of this review was Lupe Garcia, who appeared in just the two novels he mentioned, Motown Underground being one of them. Icewater Mansionsw was the first of three cases tackled by Michelle Mitchell. I’ll list them below.

   Allyn is much better known as a short story writer than as a novelist, with over 120 of them to his credit. From one online source: “[Allyn’s] first published story won the Robert L. Fish Award from Mystery Writers of America and subsequent critical response has been equally remarkable. He has won the coveted Edgar Allen Poe Award twice, (nine nominations) seven Derringer Awards for novellas, and the Ellery Queen Readers’ Award an unprecedented eleven times.”

      The Michelle Mitchell series —

Icewater Mansions. St Martin’s, 1995.
Black Water. St. Martin’s, 1996.
A Dance in Deep Water. St. Martin’s, 1997.

   I believe I saw him once, in a New York bar. It must have been in the bar of whatever hotel the Mystery Writers of America annual dinner was being held that year, back in the early 1970s. I had read a number of his novels and recognized him from the photographs I’d seen. He would have been near eighty by then. He had been named a Grand Master by MWA and I was a shy newbie in the genre. I didn’t have the chutzpah to introduce myself to him. My loss. He died a few years later.

   Philadelphia-born Baynard Kendrick (1894-1977) might have made it into the history books as a footnote if he’d never written a word. In 1914, within an hour after England entered World War I, he had enlisted in the Canadian army, the first American to sign up for the war his country entered three years later.

   It was during the war that he met a blinded English soldier who, after fingering Kendrick’s uniform and decorations, was able to tell him his entire service history. This incident apparently triggered his lifelong interest in the abilities and challenges of the blind. After the war he worked in management at a New York hotel but was fired in the grim Depression year of 1931, a week before Christmas, and swore never again to be subject to a boss. That was the beginning of his long life as a professional writer.

   What if anything he sold at the start of his new career remains unknown. The invaluable FictionMags Index website lists his earliest published short story as appearing in Liberty magazine in 1934. The same year saw publication of his debut novel, BLOOD ON LAKE LOUISA, which was set in rural Florida. His first novels with a continuing character were THE IRON SPIDERS and THE ELEVEN OF DIAMONDS, both published in 1936 and featuring Florida deputy sheriff Miles Standish Rice, who between 1937 and 1940 also appeared in more than a dozen stories Kendrick sold to Black Mask. Early in his career Florida was already a second home to him.

   In THE LAST EXPRESS (1937), his fourth novel and his first for Doubleday Crime Clu, he changed settings and made his mark in the history of his genre by creating the first American blind detective. After losing his sight in World War I, Captain Duncan Maclain set out to develop his other senses so as to more than compensate for his inability to see.

   With the help of his partner Spud Savage and Spud’s wife Rena and the German shepherd Seeing Eye dogs Schnucke and Dreist, he’d become New York’s leading private investigator, working out of a lavish air-conditioned penthouse at the corner of 72nd Street and Riverside Drive, a residence equipped with all sorts of devices, including a meticulously detailed Braille map of the city, without which he couldn’t function.

   In this book he’s consulted by lovely Evelyn Zarinka, who’s worried about the strange recent behavior of her brother Paul, an Assistant District Attorney. And well may she worry: on the night she talks with Maclain, Paul is blown up in his car, along with two caged white mice he was unaccountably carrying in the back seat, leaving the sort of Dying Message we tend to associate with Ellery Queen.

   As transcribed and heard by Maclain and printed by Kendrick, the message is: “Sea Beach Subway—the last express!” Paul’s major project at the time of his death was a murder he was trying to pin on nightclub owner Benny Hoefle, a sinister character who never appears onstage in this novel.

   The second murder takes place about 24 hours after the first. The scene is Hoefle’s club in Greenwich Village, which Maclain and District Attorney Claude Dearborn visit after receiving an anonymous tip that club singer Amy Arden has information about the bombing. Arden takes a seat at the investigators’ table and accuses a city engineer whose wife was having an affair with Paul but quickly passes out from the effects of (as Kendrick spells it) marihuana.

   The DA leaves the club in search of a doctor. While the club is in near darkness during a wild dance routine, Arden is stabbed to death within a couple of feet of our blind sleuth whose so carefully trained other senses fail to alert him to what has happened. The engineer Arden accused happens to be in the club at the time, as are Evelyn Zarinka and her fiancé, wealthy Charles Hartshorn, who happens to come over to Maclain’s table and discovers the murder. When several other club patrons claim they saw Hartshorn wielding the knife, the poor schnook is hauled off to the Tombs.

   The next day Maclain starts investigating the Sea Beach subway, apparently a genuine line in Brooklyn. Learning of a long sealed-up tunnel under that borough’s Atlantic Avenue, he speculates that Paul Zarinka might have hid something there and determines to find a way in. He and his entourage are followed to Brooklyn by Madonna, a Wilmer Cook type who starts a fire designed to kill Maclain and the DA and the municipal engineer while they’re hunting for a secret entrance.

   This not-bad thriller sequence turns out to be a red herring since Maclain has chosen the wrong tunnel, and it isn’t until he reinterprets the dying message that the truth begins to emerge. The penthouse climax pits Maclain and his trained police dog Dreist against Madonna and the real murderer, a minor character to say the least.

   As I’ve unsubtly suggested, there are a few problems with THE LAST EXPRESS. The plot is rather loose, the characters (except for Maclain and, to a lesser extent, Madonna) not all that vivid, the writing no better than serviceable. And I’m not sure I trust Maclain when he says that “a marihuana smoker, under the influence, will almost unconsciously obey a suggestion….” or that a single puff of weed is enough to knock a smoker out.

   Among the elements I found most rewarding are the evocation of underground New York with its labyrinth of tunnels, the historical material on the earliest abortive stabs at building a city subway system, and the portrait of the technology available in 1937 to help a blind person function like one with sight.

   Someone in Hollywood seems to have been more impressed by the novel than I since Universal Pictures bought the movie rights soon after publication. But those who made THE LAST EXPRESS (1938)—primarily director Otis Garrett and screenwriter Edmund L. Hartmann—had so little regard for what Kendrick had written that they turned Maclain (Kent Taylor) into a sleuth who could see!

   Also it seems that neither Paul Zarinka nor Amy Arden are killed, the name of the Wilmer Cook avatar morphs from Madonna to Pinky—can’t offend the Legion of Decency, can we?—and Hoefle who was completely offstage in the novel gets a speaking part. A few sentences I’ve adapted from the summary prepared by Les Adams for the Internet Movie Database show how radically the movie’s plot diverges from Kendrick’s.

   Underworld boss Frank Hoefle (Addison Richards) has evidence against him stolen by his henchman Pinky (Henry Brandon) from the DA’s office but it’s then stolen from Pinky and the thief demands $300,000 ransom for its return. Hoefle hires Maclain to put the money in a subway-station locker as the thief demanded, but pickpocket Eddie Miller (John “Skins” Miller) lifts the key.

   Maclain follows Miller to an apartment house but Miller sends the key up a dumbwaiter shaft. Eventually Maclain finds a 1914 newspaper story that explains the plot to him. Adams mentions that much of the film’s subway footage was recycled in Universal’s 1942 serial GANG BUSTERS, which as chance would have it also starred Kent Taylor.

   Later in 1937 Kendrick returned Maclain to action. Most of THE WHISTLING HANGMAN takes place in Doncaster House, “a collection of beautiful homes housed in a single building” or, more prosaically, a luxurious 480-room apartment hotel on Manhattan’s East 54th Street. Dryden Winslow, an American entrepreneur who’s spent the past twenty years in Australia amassing a fortune but has come home to reunite with the family he abandoned and die, reserves several apartments in Doncaster House—for himself, his son, his daughter, the two maiden aunts who have raised his children, and a niece and nephew from England—at a total cost of, I am not making this up, $130 a day.

   His own suite consists of “a 40-foot living room encompassed on three sides by a balcony,” opening from which are “two bedrooms, a dining-room, and a kitchenette.” Outside the French windows is a huge flagstone terrace. Residing across the corridor from this suite are a weirdo psychoanalyst and Winslow’s soon to be son-in-law. (Whoever drew the sketch of the 15th floor for the Dell mapback edition carelessly flipflopped these characters’ abodes.)

   On the evening of his arrival, Winslow orders a Gideon Bible delivered to his apartment. A few hours later, while talking with the daughter he hadn’t seen since she was a baby, he unaccountably steps out onto the terrace and the daughter hears a strange whistling sound. A few seconds later Winslow is found on a terrace nine floors below with his neck broken. At the request of his friend the hotel manager, with whom he was playing chess at the time of Winslow’s death, Maclain takes a hand in the investigation and, examining the body, quickly concludes that Winslow was hanged.

   That, together with the sound his daughter heard, gives the book its title, probably the most evocative of any Maclain novel. In due course, as usual in Kendrick, there’s a second murder: a hotel maid who saw too much is flung off the interior balcony of the suite next to Winslow’s as if by invisible hands and is found on the floor below with her neck broken as Winslow’s was.

   This book I enjoyed rather more than THE LAST EXPRESS. The plot is tighter, the reader is given ample clues, the setting is vividly drawn—thanks no doubt to Kendrick’s years in hotel management—and the Bizarre Murder Method is not too outlandish. I was fascinated by the glimpses of the machinery in a top-of-the-line 1937 hotel, ranging from a building-wide vacuum cleaner system to an ultra-modern kitchen refrigerator with its motor on top—both items figuring neatly in the plot.

   On the negative side, too much of the plot hinges on the seriously mistaken legal assumption that a man can write a valid will completely disinheriting his wife. Certainly no man can do this today, and I doubt he could do it in 1937 even if, as is the case here, the issue is governed not by US but by Australian law.

   Over the years I’ve caught Kendrick in other legal blunders, but he’s certainly not the only well-known mystery writer of his time who made up his own law as he went along. Ever read a Cornell Woolrich story with a legal component?

   Whether Kendrick was discouraged from immediately continuing with his character by that terrible Maclain movie remains unknown. In any event he returned to Miles Standish Rice and a rural Florida setting with his sixth novel, DEATH BEYOND THE GO-THRU (1938). Fred Dannay told me years ago that Kendrick followed this by writing Leslie Charteris’ THE SAINT IN MIAMI (1940), which is dedicated to its ghost.

   Then he switched publishers from Doubleday to Little Brown (and later to Morrow) and brought back Maclain, who is featured in all his novels from THE ODOR OF VIOLETS (1941) to OUT OF CONTROL (1945). During the war years THE ODOR OF VIOLETS was filmed as EYES IN THE NIGHT (MGM, 1942), directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Edward Arnold (star of the first Nero Wolfe movie back in 1936), who was a tad overweight for the part of Maclain but at least was allowed to play the character blind.

   In 1945 Kendrick became a founding member of Mystery Writers of America, Inc., holding Card #1 and serving as its first president. That he published so few books during the World War II years is probably accounted for by his work rehabilitating blinded veterans of the war, the fruit of his own experience during WWI.

   During the second half of the 1940s he abandoned mystery fiction for mainstream novels including one—LIGHTS OUT (1945), which was filmed as BRIGHT VICTORY (1951)—dealing with blinded vets. Then he came back to whodunits and published six more Maclain novels, from YOU DIE TODAY! (1952) to FRANKINCENSE AND MURDER (1961), but the ones I’ve read from that period struck me as cluttered and confused. He was named a Grand Master by MWA in 1967.

   A few years later a much more youthful and dynamic version of Maclain came to America’s TV screens in the person of LONGSTREET (ABC, 1971-72), starring James Franciscus as a blind insurance investigator. For what reason I haven’t the foggiest, but Kendrick’s character was acknowledged as the inspiration for the series, and at least five Maclain novels were reprinted by Lancer Books as tie-in items.

   If I had been casting the lead role and wanted an actor who at least to some extent resembled the Maclain of the novels, instead of Franciscus or anyone like him I would have opted for that mainstay of TV’s first few decades, John Dehner.

   Brief as it was, the LONGSTREET series was Kendrick’s last interaction with the visual media. At some point in his career he had moved permanently to Florida, where he died on March 27, 1977. His papers are archived at Florida State University in Tampa. How I wish I had ordered a double chutzpah straight up, that long-ago night in that New York bar when I had a chance to talk with him and blew it!

   This is (at the moment) my favorite song from the soundtrack of what has quickly become my favorite movie about the business of making Hollywood movies.

   It may also be my favorite “buddy” film of all time, but I’m still thinking about that.

IONE SANDBERG SHRIBER – The Last Straw. Lt. Bill Grady #8. Rinehart & Co., Inc., hardcover, 1946. No paperback edition.

   I think that Ione Sandberg Shriber is a sure-fire choice for inclusion in the category of Little Known Mystery Writers. This is spite of the fact that between 1940 and 1953 she wrote a total of eleven mystery novels, eight of them cases solved by Lt. Bill Grady, whom I talked a bit about in my review of Pattern for Murder, number seven in the series, which appeared here on this blog late last year. (Follow the link.)

   The fellow named Hemingway who appeared in that one as Grady’s assistant/aide-de-camp does not show up in this one, and Grady himself has moved from the state of Ohio to the La Jolla, California area. But just as in the previous book, the book focuses on a dysfunctional family, a rather wealthy one, but money certainly does not guarantee happiness.

   The new wife of a much older man, now an invalid, is in fact in love with a another man, whose return from the war seems to be catalyst for several events to come to a head, beginning with a fatal hit-and-run accident committed with someone who has access to the family car, then a series of thefts from the house, the most recent that of some diamonds worth a small fortune.

   The old man’s death is verified by his doctor to be entirely natural, but his will, or rather his plans to change it, makes it hard to believe that hi death was just a coincidence. And in the background is the mysterious death several years before of Henry Thorne’s previous wife Iris.

   When a second death occurs, this one definitely murder, a lot of rivalries, jealousies — and just plain greed — all come to the fore. There are lots of clues and alibis for Grady to sort through, but it’s the personalizes of the people involved that Shriber takes the most care to build her novel upon, and I think she did a good job in doing so.

   The detective end of things is in fact wrapped up a tad too quickly, from my point of view, but all in all, as a mystery, it’s not at all bad. I don’t believe that Ione Sandberg Shriber should have fallen into the cracks as much as she seems to have.

       The Lt. Bill Grady series —

The Dark Arbor. Farrar 1940 [New York]
Head Over Heels in Murder. Farrar 1940 [New York]
Family Affair. Farrar 1941 [New York]
Murder Well Done. Farrar 1941 [Michigan]
A Body for Bill. Farrar 1942 [Ohio]
Invitation to Murder. Farrar 1943 [Cleveland, OH]
Pattern for Murder. Farrar 1944 [Cleveland, OH]
The Last Straw. Rinehart 1946 [California]

MONK. “Mr. Monk and the 12th Man.” Season 2, episode 9 (22nd of 125). First broadcast: August 22, 2003. Cast: Tony Shalhoub (Adrian Monk), Bitty Schram (Sharona Fleming), Jason Gray-Stanford (Lieutenant Randy Disher), Ted Levine (Captain Stottlemeyer), Jerry Levine (Kenny Shale), Ed Marinaro (Stewart Babcock), Billy Gardell (Ian Agnew), Lauren Tom (Mrs. Ling), David Figlioli (Tommy Zimm), Jimmy Shubert (Frank Pulaski), Deborah Zoe (Lisa Babcock). Writing staff: Andy Breckman (creator), Michael Angeli (writer), David Breckman (executive story editor), Daniel Dratch (story editor), Hy Conrad (staff writer). Director: Michael Zinberg.

   There have already been nine apparently unrelated murders in the San Francisco Bay area by the time a toll booth attendant is brutally dragged to death along 7/10ths of a mile of paved highway behind a sports car. The police, as is often the case in these shows, don’t have a clue, since there is no known connection among the victims. Captain Stottlemeyer talks with Monk, the department’s unofficial consultant:

    … but the water, unfortunately, isn’t to blame.

   According to Monk, the more he thinks about it the more he sees how all of the victims do have one thing in common: “Captain, this is a very diverse group,” one that’s “too diverse.” “I’m talking statistics,” he says. “You’d have to work hard, really hard, to find a group this different.” Finding a common denominator in a series of crimes can be one of the first steps in discovering a hidden motive, and once you know the motive you’re well on your way to finding the killer(s) . . .

   Normally we’re not too fond of serial killer stories, but this one is, thankfully, low on grue and high on plot. As in Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders, understanding the “why” is essential to arriving at the “who,” and this episode of Monk is a worthy successor to Dame Agatha’s classic story (there’s even an echo of it in “12th Man,” a murder in a darkened theater).

   A few years ago Curt Evans had a Mystery*File article about Seasons 1-4 of Monk (here), in which he wrote: “Season two, on the other hand, seems to me nearly flawless. The ingenuity of the mystery plots often is quite remarkable, in my view, for forty-five minute television shows.”

   We agree; the cleverness of the second season shows (and “12th Man” is one of them) was so good that the series never came as close to being that smart again. “Mr. Monk and the Missing Granny” earns high marks for cleverly obscuring the motive; “Mr. Monk Goes to the Circus” excels at exploding the impossible alibi; and “Mr. Monk and the Sleeping Suspect” takes exploding impossible alibis to stratospheric heights (those ketchup bottles—brilliant!)

   Indeed, for a long time we regarded “Sleeping Suspect” as the acme of Monk, but watching it again we’ve noticed how some of the events are throwaways not closely relating to the central story line, vignettes which are in there more for character development than driving the plot — and, we hasten to add, there’s nothing wrong with that, if done in moderation.

   The principal virtue of “12th Man,” on the other hand, is how everything — and we mean EVERYTHING — dovetails with the plot. Such apparently irrelevant elements as Sharona’s hot and heavy romance with a mayoral candidate, a man with a pipe in his head, a finger in a freezer, the outcome of a court case, and Mrs. Ling’s headaches with Monk’s dry cleaning actually serve the plot as well as being comic moments in their own right. Nothing in “12th Man” is wasted; it all fits, which is something so few dramatic mystery presentations can boast.

   Recognizing how well the various plot elements meshed (or so we’d like to imagine), the MWA nominated “12th Man” for a Major Award (as well as another Monk episode), putting us in agreement with them, for once; even so, it lost. (The winner, as it turned out, was an installment of The Practice. Nice going, MWA!)

THERE’S THAT WOMAN AGAIN. Columbia, 1939. Melvyn Douglas, Virginia Bruce, Margaret Lindsay, Stanley Ridges. Director: Alexander Hall. Shown at Cinevent 27, Columbus OH, 1995.

   A followup to last year’s showing of There’s Always a Woman [reviewed by Steve here ], with Virginia Bruce replacing Joan Blondell as Sally Reardon, wife and would-be colleague of her husband Bill (melvyn Douglas) in his detective agency.

   Bruce, as far as I’m concerned, almost makes this unwatchable. She plays a ditzy blonde, with no compensating charm or cuteness. The mystery [concerning a series of robberies from a local jewelry store] is marginally interesting, but Bruce killed off any pleasure I might have taken in it.