THIS ISLAND EARTH. Universal International, 1955. Jeff Morrow, Faith Domergue, Rex Reason, Lance Fuller, Robert Nichols. Based on the book by Raymond F. Jones (Shasta, hardcover, 1952), a fixup novel comprised of stories appearing in three separate issues of Thrilling Wonder Stories, 1949-50. Director: Joseph M. Newman.

   There is an old saying that you can’t go home again, and I know it’s true, as this movie proves. When I saw this movie the first time, I was 13 years old, and I thought it was the best science fiction movie I’d ever seen. It was in color, first of all, and all of the gadgets in the movie simply knocked my socks off.

   Forbidden Planet came along the very next year, but while that one was also in color and had Robby the Robot and even better special effects, I still liked This Island Earth better. Why? Two scenes have stood out over all these past 60 years. The two scientists building a communications device called the interlocutor from scratch using blueprints and parts send by mail from an anonymous source.

   I tried doing the same thing in my basement at home, but some of the parts must have gotten lost in the mail.

   The other scene I remember is Jeff Morrow and Faith Domergue standing in clear vertical tubes designed as either compression or decompression devices so as to condition them for either space travel or life on the aliens’ planet on their way to the latter to save their civilization. I’ve always been a little vague about the details, but details don’t matter, when you see the two Earthlings in skeletal form as the tubes do what ever is is they did.

   What I didn’t remember — and how could I forget? — is the weird ugly mutated monster that threatens the pair as they make their way back to Earth having failed their mission. A convenient form of amnesia, I guess.

   Nor do I remember when I was 13 wondering why it was the aliens who had so much power and could do many wondrous things on Earth needed all those scientists from Earth to help them fight their battles with other aliens back home.

   I don’t think that Faith Domergue impersonated a atomic scientist very well, but she certainly wore her tight fitting space uniform quite nicely, long before Racquel Welch did in Fantastic Voyage. This Island Earth was there first in a number of ways, but once the group of four left the planet Earth for Metaluna, the story seems to lose its way. Some nice memories were lost along the way as well. I was disappointed.

PAUL AYRES – Dead Heat. Bell, hardcover, 1950. No paperback edition.

   I am always very hesitant in saying that any book is the first and/or only one in a particular category, but off the top of my head, I don’t know of any other mystery novel that was based on a radio series, that being Casey Crime Photographer, which was of course based on the character created by George Harmon Coxe.

   I don’t know how this book happened to come about. Perhaps Randy Cox, our resident expert on all things Casey, will leave a comment to tell us more. As for the author, one supposedly Paul Ayres, he was in real life writer Edward S. Aarons, of Gold Medal’s “Assignment” series fame. In 1950, however, he’d written only one book under his own name; before then he was always Edward Ronns.

   You have to be of a certain age to have listened to the radio when the program was on the air. It ended in 1955 — after having started in 1943 — but since we did not have a local CBS outlet nearby when I was young, I never heard it until I started collecting OTR shows on tape in the mid-70s. Nonetheless, the book brought back quite a few memories from that later time and era:

   The characters were Casey, of course; his girl friend Ann Williams, who also worked for the Morning Express; and Captain Logan of Homicide. Every so often the action stops and they all find their way to the Blue Note cafe, where Ethelbert was the bartender and Herman played the piano.

   From the title and cover image above you might possibly guess that Dead Heat takes place in the world of horse racing, and it does, but it also takes place i the dead of summer, and the whole city of Boston is sweltering in the heat. Murdered is a jockey who has made a mess of his two currently overlapping love affairs, but who is also known for being scrupulously honest. This makes the timing of his death very suspicious: it’s before a race that if he were riding, he’d be a cinch to win.

   Aarons’ prose is clean and uncluttered, very descriptive, and since the plot is not all that complicated, the book takes no time at all to read. It probably isn’t as rewarding as one of Coxe’s own stories about Casey, but I enjoyed it immensely.

CHARLES O. LOCKE – The Hell Bent Kid. W. W. Norton, hardcover, 1958. Popular Library, paperback, 1958; reprinted. 1963. Ace, paperback, date unknown. Named at one time as one of the top 25 Western novels of all time by the Western Writers of America. Film: Released as From Hell to Texas (20th Century Fox, 1958) Don Murray, Diane Varsi, Chill Wills, R. G. Armstrong, Dennis Hopper. Directed by Henry Hathaway.

   Tot Lohman is only about eighteen, a fair hand with cattle, but gifted with his two loves, horses and guns. He’s a decent kid, hard luck, but hard luck isn’t unusual on the Staked Plains of West Texas, the Llano Estacado.

   But life has just spun out of control for Tot because he killed a Boyd, and the Boyd was related to Hunter Boyd, and his son wild Tom Boyd, and neither will stand for the killing.

   Tot wisely decides getting out of the country will be better than waiting for the Boyds. He heads for New Mexico looking for his father determined to put the Boyds behind him, but the Boyds are determined and want “justice,” and they will do anything to get it, including turning Tot Lohman, a big kid who just happens to be good with a gun into the Hell Bent Kid, a killer with a conscience and a growing list of white crosses in his wake.

   I have a taste for Westerns, and bend to no one in my love of the more common pulp Western from Zane Gray to Louis L’Amour and the men and women who write them, but there is another kind of Western, the more literary model, the Western as novel, and not just story that I admire. It is no attack on the former to admire the latter.

   It’s a sub-genre of the more popular form with a history in itself with familiar names like Owen Wister, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, Walter Van Tilberg Clark, Frederick Manfred, Dorothy Johnson, Wallace Stegner, Conrad Richter, Oakley Hall, Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, and now one I never knew about before, Charles O. Locke. Titles like The Oxbow Incident, The King of Spades, A Man Called Horse, Sea of Grass, Shane, The Last Hunt, Warlock, Blood Meridian, and Lonesome Dove are among its more famous examples.

   As you might imagine, it’s rarer to discover a book in this category than in the more familiar form and a time to celebrate when you do.

    The Hell Bent Kid is a pure example of the form. The plot may be straight out of a hundred pulp Western fantasies, but this is a novel and not just a tale. It is about the destruction of a young man forced to run and fight through brutal country against hard men who learn too late his almost mystical skill with a gun. It is about a good kid forced to become a killer, a decent young man who doesn’t want to be what his hunters make him into, who meets a girl, has a brief moment of normalcy, and is forced to take up the gun one last time.

      It’s the inevitability of Tot Lohman’s fate that makes this a novel and not just a well written pulp tale. The same story appeared in a thousand Western pulps and original paperbacks and still does today, but seldom written with the simplicity and human understanding of this version.

   It’s no coincidence this one ends in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, though Tot Lohman is no Billy the Kid, and his fate isn’t met at the hands of a Pat Garrett.

   There is no shortage of standard Western thrills here, but there hangs over the book a hint of Greek tragedy, of hard country written on men’s souls, and burned in women’s broken hearts and too short lives. As I said at the beginning I had never heard of this book or of Locke, but now I will look for his name and treasure this book.

   Told in epistolary form, a long section in the middle by Tot himself, the book is as easy to read as any Western, it just has a little more to say than most, the difference between a great B Western film and John Ford, between blazing guns and the smell of gunsmoke and the exposed souls of the people involved.

   The Hell Bent Kid was made into a decent film in 1958, From Hell To Texas, directed by Henry Hathaway. It’s a pretty good little film aimed at focusing on younger stars, but it is a pale adaptation of the novel, much more a standard Western than the well-written novel this book is.

STEVE SHERMAN -The White Mountain Murders. Hugh Quint #2. Walker, hardcover, 1989. No paperback edition. (See also comment #2.)

   Hugh Quint, ex-Boston cop, now a PI, heads for New Hampshire to help find the half-sister of a friend and ends up preventing the theft of a $100,000 antique chest. Several murders occur as well, he most obvious suspect being a back-to-nature Abenaki Indian.

   The same Indian who’s gone off with the half-sister who started it all. The detective work is slight, and most of the book’s charm comes from the rustic setting and the bucolic nature of its inhabitants. Unfortunately it begins to wear off about halfway through.

       The Hugh Quint series —

The Maple Sugar Murders. Walker 1987
The White Mountain Murders. Walker 1989
Primary Crime. Appledore 2000

THE QUIET GUN. Regal Films / 20th Century Fox, 1957. Forrest Tucker, Mara Corday, Jim Davis, Kathleen Crowley, Lee Van Cleef, Tim Brown. Based on the novel Law Man, by Lauren Paine. Director: William F. Claxton

   Sheriff Carl Brandon (Forrest Tucker) is a man with a code. The quiet but strong type, he is the lawman of a Western frontier town. With a live and let live attitude, he does not seem to have all that much to do, other than keep things calm. All that changes when the city attorney comes to his office and tells him that he and the town are about to file an immorality complaint against rancher Ralph Carpenter (Jim Davis).

   Carpenter’s alleged crime? Relations with a teenage Indian girl named Irene (Mara Corday). After all, his beautiful wife has temporarily left him due to marital troubles and it can’t simply be that the Indian girl is his servant? Can it?

   Brandon warns the city attorney to let it be. First of all, Carpenter is an old friend of his. But more importantly, the good sheriff knows that provoking Carpenter will be like provoking a bear and will likely result in bloodshed. The city attorney is determined, however, to have his say and ends up getting himself killed by Carpenter.

   What follows is a compelling hour or so of action and drama in which Brandon investigates what happened at the ranch and attempts to uncover the conspiracy that ends up getting Carpenter and Irene murdered before it all ends. This leads him into a direct conflict with saloon owner John Reilly (Tim Brown) and cattle rustler Doug Sadler (Lee Van Cleef).

   In many ways The Quiet Gun could just have easily been a pilot for a late 1950s TV Western with Forrest Tucker cast as the lead, but the movie transcends the limitations of the small screen with some stark visuals, a hardy cynicism, and a rather dismal view of the human propensity to gossip. It would seem as if nearly every man in the town except Brandon and his deputy, the kind, but mentally slow Sampson (portrayed by Hank Worden, known for his association with John Ford).

   There’s not much in this Regal Films production that you haven’t seen before – a man quietly in love with his friend’s wife; a lynch mob exacting brutal frontier justice; and a sheriff holed up in his office determined to make sure that his prisoners face a judge rather than a street mob – but one thing I noticed in The Quiet Gun is that nary a minute is wasted. This is a taut, well-edited film and one that deserves more attention.

DIAL RED O. Allied Artists, 1955. Bill Elliott, Helene Stanley, Keith Larsen, Paul Picerni, Jack Kruschen, Elaine Riley. Written and directed by Daniel B. Ullman.

   Getting too old for the B-westerns he’d been making, and with B-westerns on their way out anyway, “Wild” Bill Elliott ended his movie-making career with five low budget police dramas from Allied Artists. This is the first of the five, all of them recently released in a box set from Warner Archives.

   Strangely enough, Elliott never appeared once on television, so when the five crime films didn’t pan out, he seems to have disappeared quietly into retirement. I’ve had the five movies on a want list for quite a while, but while Dial Red O is perfectly acceptable for what it is, I was also disappointed. Except for possibly some of the lighting effects and a jazzy score by Shorty Rogers and his group, there are no noir aspects to the film at all.

   Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But Dial Red O could easily almost have been an extended version of Dragnet on TV, without the monotone deliveries and the distinctive “Dum – – – de – DUM – DUM.”

   Not that Elliott doesn’t speak in terse, clipped tones himself. In this film he’s a Hollywood police lieutenant named Andy Flynn, and the fugitive he’s after is an escapee from an army psychiatric hospital whose wife had just divorced him.

   The wife, played by Helene Stanley, has been playing around. After she’s killed by her married lover, the fugitive Flynn os looking for is the obvious suspect.

   From here on, or even before, there are no frills, only straight-forward police work. Nothing less, but nothing more, either.

DALE L. GILBERT – Murder Begins at Home. Carter Winfield & Matt Doyle #3. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1989. No paperback edition.

   Ever wonder what it would be like if Nero Wolfe and his gang were to move to San Diego, take up new identities and went back into business? Well, dream on. This isn’t it, but it’s close. Slightly whacked ouyand steamed up, but close. Blame it on Californication.

   Matt Doyle is the legman for reclusive/exclusive PI Carter Winfield, and in this case,they go to work (under duress) for a Mafia kingpin who needs a bodyguard for hi family. The writing is vaguely reminiscent of the pulps, but the characters are vividly drawn.

{UPDATE]   I followed this at the time with a footnote that included a detailed description of what I found to be a serious plot flaw. Reading it now, though, I found it boring and uninteresting. Deciding that you would too, in the context of a review that I now consider to be far too short, I’ve omitted it.

   What I really would like to know now is more about the Nero Wolfe-Archie Goodwin connection. I didn’t go into that very well back in 1989, and I guess the only way I’m going to be able to is to find my copy of this book and read it again.

   This was the final book in the series. It was preceded by The Black Star Murders (1988) and The Mother Murders (1989). Dale Gilbert, the author, died in 1988.

BRIAN CLEEVE – Vice Isn’t Private. Sean Ryan #3. Random House, hardcover, 1966. Lancer 73-621, paperback, 1967. First published in the UK as The Judas Goat (Hammond, hardcover, 1966).

   Somewhere between the suave James Bond, the tough minded Quiller, and Len Deighton’s nameless (in the books anyway) Chandler-voiced cynical operative there was Brian Cleeve and his creation, former IRA killer turned reluctant British agent, Sean Ryan.

   Like many of his fellow British spy writers, Cleeve was a former intelligence operative, but unlike most, he chose a darker and less glamorous path. You wonder if Ryan ever owned a dinner jacket; in fact, you wonder if he owned a decent suit most of the time.

   This gritty thriller opens with Ryan recently rescued from prison by a cold-blooded major (is there any other kind in spy fiction) to work for counter-intelligence, “You don’t have to know anything, just do what you are told.”

   Kathy O’Hara’s “friend,” Mike Rafferty, is in Garside prison, and a fixer named Harry Marks has arranged for a meeting with Ryan as the man to get him out, but Harry is under the thumb of brutal gangster Guilio Romano, and he sings like a bird that Ryan is “Big Law”.

   Ryan’s job is to get Rafferty out, disguising the fact he has the government behind him, follow him and retrieve the photographs Rafferty is blackmailing a cabinet minister with. Not just any cabinet minister either, Garrett Cameron-Harvey, the Home Secretary.

   To this point, this entry in the series is pretty clearly based on Sean Bourke’s book about breaking traitor George Blake out of prison and smuggling him out of England to Russia. It was a good story as true spy stories go, demonstrated by the fact it was the basis for Desmond Bagley’s Freedom Trap (John Huston’s The MacIntosh Man) and would have been the basis for a Hitchcock film had he lived.

   It made headlines and Bourke’s book was a bestseller, optioned but not filmed itself.

   Of course nothing is ever that simple in any spy novel, much less suspense novel, and the same is true of this one.

   Complicating things farther is the source of the Home Secretary’s blackmail, Irina Mortimer, a discrete dominatrix who has reasons of her own to keep his secrets from destroying her access to a very elite clientele in Europe and England.

   The escape proves the easiest of Ryan’s tasks, which escalate when Romano kidnaps Rafferty in order to get the papers for himself, leaving Ryan to rescue Rafferty, retrieve the photographs, and get Rafferty and Kathy O’Hara out of England and well away from the Home Secretary, all complicated by Ryan’s growing hate of Rafferty and desire for Kathy, and Cameron-Harvey himself on the thin edge threatening to collapse under the threat.

    Vice Isn’t Private is a tight and lean book, under two hundred pages, far from today’s bloated thrillers. There isn’t an extraneous word or missed beat, the violence shocking and sometimes sadistic, the suspense palpable, and Ryan a fascinating protagonist torn between his violent past and glimpses of a world away from it he can never quite reach, all told in tough and sometimes poetic prose by Cleeve, who later went on to write bestselling historical fiction.

BACKLASH. Universal International, 1956. Richard Widmark, Donna Reed, William Campbell, John McIntire, Barton MacLane, Harry Morgan, Robert J. Wilke, Jack Lambert, Roy Roberts, Edward C. Platt, Robert Foulk. Screenplay: Borden Chase, based on the novel Fort Starvation by Frank Gruber, reviewed here. Director: John Sturges.

   Here’s a gaudy little B-movie which I found enjoyable out of all proportion to its actual merit. Written by Borden (Red River) Chase, directed by John Sturges (Great Escape, Magnificent Seven) and done up in lurid Universal Technicolor, this is in every inch a “B,” never mind the budget, cowboys, Indians, lost treasure and what-all else you need for a Saturday afternoon.

   The plot hangs loosely on the peg of Richard Widmark looking for the man who killed his Pa — or more precisely, the an who let Dad and four others get butchered by Indians instead of going for help, then took the gold they were carrying out of Indian country.

   To this end, Widmark does some exemplary sleuthing, poring over old testimony, double-checking witnesses, exploring the crime scene and wisecracking in the best PI tradition (“There’s something I’ve wanted to tell you since we first met — Goodbye!”) with “tough gal” Donna Reed, who plays the possibly treacherous female lead like Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo or The Killers.

   There are suggestions here that this could have been a better movie, though perhaps less fun: as the story progresses we find that Widmark is not so much pursuing his dad’s killer as he is trying to live up to a father whose love he never knew. Anthony Mann or Delmar Daves would have pursued the oedipal complexities of this, but Sturges just shrugs it off and brings on the Indians.

   And the gunfights, fistfights, and chases with the lean technical skill typical of him, and even a certain amount of humor. I particularly enjoyed the spirited thesping of third-billed William Campbell: he’s only in the movie for a few minutes, but he plays a black-clad giggling gunfighter just like Richard Widmark’s Tommy Udo of a decade earlier.