LAYNE LITTLEPAGE – Murder-by-the-Sea. – Murder-by-the-Sea. Doubleday, hardcover, 1987. Worldwide, paperback, 1989.

   Layne Littlepage is a singer, performer, voice coach and the author of one mystery novel, Murder-by-the-Sea, which is set in Carmel CA, which (not surprisingly) is also where Ms Littlepage’s voice studio is located.

   With that as a background, it is no surprise she set her mystery novel against a backdrop of a stock company theater, an enterprise for which she shows a deep knowledge and affection. The leading protagonist is still glamorous Vivienne Montrose, a former movie star who has found a home for herself in Carmel, but when one of the players in the town’s latest theatrical production is found drowned, she also finds herself playing detective, a role she finds she doesn’t mind at all.

   There is a list of all of the speaking characters before the story begins, and this is a detective story that most definitely needs one. Ms Littlepage not only knows the ins and outs of both being on the stage but behind the scenes as well. Even more importantly, perhaps, she also knows the kinds of people who invariably show up for xasting calls and rehearsals.

   This is fascinating stuff, but I also have to tell you that the detective end of things is far from the story’s strongest point. The dead woman was unliked, true, but for most of the book, there is no reason she was so unlikable as to be murdered. Some business about poisoned pen letters is finally brought up, but they come into play far too late to be as useful in solving the crime as they might have been.

   So read this, if ever you do, for the setting, that of the world of amateur theater and the town itself, the charming town of Carmel-by-the-Sea.

THE PRETENDER. Republic, 1947. Albert Dekker, Catherine Craig, Charles Drake, Alan Carney, Linda Stirling and Tom Kennedy. Written by Don Martin and Doris Miller. Photography by John Alton. Produced & directed by W. Lee Wilder.

   I read someplace that film noir was a genre in which even lesser talents could shine, a premise borne out convincingly by this film, because if ever there were a definitive Lesser Talent, it was surely Billy Wilder’s brother: William “W. Lee” Wilder.

   In fact, The Pretender isn’t bad at all, and in places it’s surprisingly good, coming from the auteur of Killers from Space and The Man Without a Body.

   Albert Dekker’s usual noir persona was as the Criminal Boss a little too intelligent for his own good, to be brought down by his less-mentally-encumbered underlings in films like Suspense, The Killers, and Kiss Me Deadly. Here he’s an investment broker who’s been pilfering from a client (Catherine Craig) and plots to cover the theft by marrying her.

   But it seems Ms Craig has marital plans of her own, and is about to be engaged to Charles Drake. Dekker doesn’t know the identity of her prospective fiancé, but figures if he can put whoever it is out of action, he can catch Craig on the rebound. And he knows a guy (Alan Carney, just split from his godawful comedy-team-up with Wally Brown at RKO) who knows a guy who can eliminate the inconvenient beau—if Dekker can tell him who it is.

   Here’s where Don Martin’s script gets tricky. Dekker arranges for Carney’s hit man to rub out the rival when his name and picture show up in the Society Column. Whereupon fickle Ms Craig has a change of heart and elopes with Dekker—who finds his name and picture in the papers!

   I’ve mentioned Screenwriter Don Martin before, in connection with the movie Arrow in the Dust (which, come to think of it, also deals with mistaken identity) and he does a fine job here of fleshing out the characters, laying the groundwork for plot twists, and papering over the implausibilities.

   When it comes to establishing mood, though, I must tip the hat to cinematographer John Alton, whose work includes The Big Combo, Reign of Terror, He Walked by Night, and big-budget things like Elmer Gantry and The Brothers Karamozov. Alton fills the screen with striking compositions, looming shadows and those just-slightly-strange lighting effects that can cast an eerie atmosphere over an otherwise mundane moment.

   This off-beat approach extends to the casting, with Dekker going from stodgy to desperate quite convincingly. Charles Drake projects his usual bluff nothingness, and he does it well, Christine Craig is really quite good as the middle-aged socialite bent on marriage, but the big surprise is Alan Carney, as the sleazy middle-man for murder. There’s just something about his performance here that makes you wonder how a fat man like him crawled out from under a rock. Add Serial Queen Linda Stirling in a showy part as a vengeful moll, and you have a colorful ensemble indeed.

   It’s a combination even a flat-footed director like Wilder can’t mess up, and The Pretender comes off as an enjoyable and even memorable noir worthy of your attention.

   This extended July 4th weekend, I decided to revisit one of the few horror movies set during this holiday season, I Know What You Did Last Summer. Based on the eponymous 1973 young adult novel written by Lois Duncan and with a screenplay penned by Kevin Williamson (Scream), the movie is a surprisingly effective, if somewhat vacuous, thriller.

   It’s perfect summer candy. Fun while you enjoy it, but nothing overly memorable. The trailer, with its voice-over narration, gives away the basic plot. Four friends accidentally run a man over and leave him for dead. But that’s not where their story ends. A year later, on Independence Day weekend, the man they thought had died returns with a vengeance.

   The vibe of the trailer is much like the movie: young and hip with a powerful soundtrack. My one complaint is that the trailer doesn’t fully capture how much Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy The Vampire Slayer) rather than Jennifer Love Hewitt carries the film. Without her, the movie really wouldn’t have worked.

   For NCIS fans, there is a special treat waiting for you in this one. Muse Watson, who portrayed the gruff Mike Franks on the show, plays the villain in this feature.

  WILLIAM E. BARRETT “Skeleton Key.” Novelette. First published in Ace-High Detective, August 1936. Probably never reprinted.

   To pulp readers of long standing, William E. Barrett is best known for his fifteen stories in Dime Detective Magazine about a chap nicknamed Needle Mike. As described in relation to all fifteen being reprinted in two volumes by Altus Press, Needle Mike was “[A] millionaire playboy with a yen for excitement, young Ken McNally disguises himself as the gray-haired, gold-toothed, jaundiced-looking proprietor of a seedy tattoo parlor in the ‘tenderloin’ district of St. Louis. His unusual occupation frequently brings him into contact with underworld denizens who, willingly or accidentally, embroil him in criminal activities.”

   Totally outrageous and totally unforgettable. William E. Barrett, the author, however, were no mere pulp writer. He later became a well-known bestselling novelist, with [according to Wikipedia] three of his books made into films:

      The Left Hand of God, starring Humphrey Bogart.

      Lilies of the Field based on his novel The Lilies of the Field, featuring Sidney Poitier.

      Pieces of Dreams, based on The Wine and the Music.

   “Skeleton Key” was never made into a film, but perhaps it could have been. It begins on a dark and stormy night (not Barrett’s words, but is true) as a young fellow named Jeff Madison is forced to stop at an isolated cabin for shelter and finds himself confronted with a very strange scene: a dead man with three knives in his chest sitting at a table across from a skeleton. On the table are a pair of dice.

   One man is there before him, and two more in separate automobiles soon stop, also forced to stop in the storm, or so they say. With no way to contact the authorities, all five go to bed for the night. Which of course is when the action begins.

   That’s the setup, and it’s a good one. The explanation is much more complicated, and after all the resulting gunfire ended, Jeff Madison finally learns what was behind it all. Did I forget to tell you that Madison has a secret of his own? On his way to the cabin he found a suitcase filled with $50,000 in cash. I’m afraid I did. How do you like that? Not surprisingly, it is the key to everything.

        —

Previously reviewed from this first issue of Ace-High Detective: FRED MacISAAC “The Corpse Goes East.’

JOHN CREASEY – Sons of Satan. Dr. Palfrey #11 (*). John Long, UK, hardcover, 1947. Arrow, UK, 1963, as Palfrey versus Sons of Satan (on cover). House of Stratus Ltd, UK, softcover, 2015, as The Sons of Satan. No US edition.

   The mission statement for Dr. Septimus Palfrey and Z5, the worldwide secret service he will soon command, as stated in one of Palfrey’s earliest adventures. The Sons of Satan is the eleventh novel in the thirty-four volume series that is notable for expressing Creasey’s Post-War political views and being his deepest venture into science fiction, if only the kind found in thrillers.

   This one opens with Bruce Mallen, an expatriate Brit returning from South America encountering the beautiful Lady Veronica Howell, who slips a strange object into his luggage to be smuggled into England. Soon Mallen has encountered the mysterious and wealthy Colonel George Wray who is tied to Lady Veronica and finds himself a suspected agent of something and someone called Abba and is soon confronted by Z5 agent Stefan Andromovich and Dr. “Sap” (Septimus Alexander) Palfrey himself.

   As in the earlier Gordon Craigie series, the Palfrey series often introduces an “innocent” protagonist or one of Palfrey’s agents who only appear in the single book. Here, Mallen, who proves a capable protagonist, finds himself over his head caught between Z5 and the dangerous Abba.

   Abba had been a code-word first discovered when a little group of reactionaries had been found in Haifa a few months earlier – neither Jews nor Arabs, but fostering unrest among the races. By devious means they had discovered that Abba was a code-word used elsewhere also; in Trieste for a while, in Milan, in Warsaw and in Prague. Agents had sent their reports in, and so Abba had become to them as Brett and Palfrey were to the world at large – a legendary figure. Who he was, exactly what he was trying to do, they did not yet know. They did know that he worked mostly through religious factions, creating fanaticism out of fervour and madness out of piety.

   These megalomaniacal madmen willing to kill millions to achieve their goals remain a staple of the Palfrey adventures rather than spies or agents of other nations. In Dark Harvest, the tenth book in the series, Palfrey and his agents had defeated a madman trying to starve the world through famine. That apocalyptic tone would continue and come to dominate the series with Palfrey battling deadly fogs, world wide forest fires, drought, flood, famine again, infertility, and even alien invasion, surely influencing wirters like John Christopher and J.G. Ballard and possibly even Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass.

   Read today in light of the current concerns of climate change the series seems more contemporary than when it was written.

   This is the last book to feature the Marquis of Brett as Palfrey’s boss, with Sap soon replacing him as head of Z5, an obvious decision, one that it seems curious it took Creasey eleven books to reach.

   Palfrey is a ruthless chief, and agents often sacrifice themselves to the greater good, sometimes at Palfrey’s reluctant but certain order.

   Palfrey, Mallen, and Lady Veronica track Abba to his lair in San Palino in Spain, in the Monastery of Azzen where Abba and his Golden Friars spread their religion of hate.

   The Palfrey books are formulaic, so you would not want to read many in a row. There is a mystery that gradually grows more horrible in its implications, the embattled agents of Z5 seem outnumbered and powerless, Palfrey doubts himself and almost gives up, and then at the last moment saves himself and the world, but not without consequence to his agents, the world, and his own conscience.

   Readers tend to either love or hate the Palfrey series, and admittedly they can show the best and the worst of Creasey as a writer with Palfrey far less attractive than the Baron, the Toff, Roger West, or George Gideon, but I have a soft place for this very pulp-like series and I suppose a taste for apocalypse, at least fictional ones.

   Sons of Satan is an early example of Palfrey at his best.

        —

(*) Editor’s Note: Different sources count this as either #9 pr #10, as well as #11.

FRITZ LEIBER “Lean Times in Lankhmar.” Published in Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Book Four. Epic (Marvel) Comics, 1991. Adaptation & script: Howard Chaykin. Pencils & inks: Mike Mignola & Al Williamson. Also in this same issue: “When the Sea King’s Away.” Note: “Lean Times in Lankhmar” was first published in Fantastic SF, November 1959. Reprinted many times.

   Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser are a pair of adventurous rogues living day by day if not moment by moment in the swords and sorcery setting of the city of Lankhmar on the world of Nehwon, just west of the Great Salt Marsh and east of the River Hlal. Fafhrd is a tall powerful barbarian, while the Gray Mouser is a small hotheaded thief extraordinarily good at swordsmanship.

   Their first story, “Two Sought Adventure”, appeared in the pulp magazine Unknown in August 1939, but the story of how they first met was “Ill Met in Lankhmar,” did not appear until the April 1970 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

   They usually team up well, but at the beginning of this story they have split up, perhaps arguing over the spelling of Fafhrd’s name. (I have trouble, too.) Fafhrd becomes an acolyte of Bwadres, the sole priest of Issek of the Jug, while the Gray Mouser goes to work for a local racketeer named Pulg, who offers protection to “priests of all godlets seeking to become gods — on pain of unpleasant, disturbing, and revolting things happening at future services of the defaulting godlet.”

   And of course in the course of their new occupations, the two heroes’ paths are about to cross. Many consider this story to be one of the funniest sword and sorcery stories ever, and you can count me as being one of them.

   I enjoyed the comic book version, and I do recommend it to you. The structure and setting of the stories, as well as the flashing charisma of the heroes themselves, are perfect for adaptation to graphic novel format, but I kept wondering whether I’d have enjoyed it as much if I didn’t already know the story itself ahead of time.

   The art is fine, but there was a day, back into the 1960s, where to get the story told, the captions and word balloons took almost all the space in the pages of the comic books of the day. No more. The art is now supposed to tell a lot more of the story, but it takes a lot of coordination between writer and artist to make it so. It may very well be the best that could have been done, but I don’t think it happened here. There were several times when if I hadn’t know what was supposed to be happening, I’d have had no clue.

   Or maybe I’m an old dog struggling with new tricks.

VOODOO ISLAND. United Artists, 1957. Boris Karloff, Beverly Tyler, Murvyn Vye, Elisha Cook, Rhodes Reason, Jean Engstrom. Screenwriter: Richard Landau. Director: Reginald LeBorg.

   There’s not a whole lot you can say about a horror movie that just isn’t scary, even with the presence of Boris Karloff at the top of the billing. But not only is Voodoo Island not scary, it’s boring.

   Boris plays a gent named Phillip Knight, one of those guys who debunks legendary ghosts and monsters on his TV show, and he’s hired in this film to go to a mysterious island in the South Seas by a real estate developer who’d like to build a luxury resort hotel there, if it weren’t for thefact that several others have gone there before, and only one has come back.

   And he’s in a walking catatonic trance.

   But this is the tamest voodoo island that you can ever imagine. True, there are natives lurking in the brush, and man-eating plants and other exotic flora, but most of the film is taken up by endless scenes of our intrepid explorers hacking their way across the island. I also don’t think there was ever much in the way of voodoo in the South Seas. From all I know about it, it’s a Caribbean sort of thing.

   To fill up the time, although it takes a while for them to warm up to it, there is the beginning of romance between two of the characters, and more than a hint of a lesbian overture by one of the female members of the expedition to another. I don’t think that Boris Karloff’s character knew that any of this was going on, but then again I’d like to think he was open-minded enough not to have cared.

   But to end this review where I began it, while Mr. Karloff is the only reason for anyone to see this movie, on any scale you can think of, it can’t possibly rank as among one of his better ones.

   Roots music at its most enjoyable:

THE PRESIDENT’S ANALYST. Paramount, 1967. James Coburn, Godfrey Cambridge, Severn Darden, Joan Delaney, Pat Harrington, Barry McGuire, Jill Banner, Will Geer, William Daniels and Joan Darling. Written and directed by Theodore J. Flicker.

   This will open with a rant, so skip the first few paragraphs and scan down till you see the words “The President’s Analyst” again. Got that? “The President’s Analyst.” I mean the next time you see it. Not now, further down. Okay? Now the rant.

   Last month I cut the cable with ATT DirecTV and switched internet services. Getting the new service hooked up and my TV set switched to Antenna was fairly simple. Getting away from ATT was not.

   Working on instructions from ATT, FedEx handled the return with aplomb, ATT acknowledged receipt of the Modem — but not the Cable stuff.

   My “whuzzah?”call to ATT began an acquaintance with “Brian,” “Jessica,” “Donald” and others (American names must be popular in India.) who said my ATT service was “concert” but they couldn’t credit me for the equipment until the end of the “birring cykor.”

   Turns out ATT policy said I’d be charged for the next month for the very good reason that it was ATT policy to cancer (?) service at the end of the month following notice. After some telephone pinball, someone — “Trixie,” I think — allowed me to speak with a supervisor about this, and after 10 minutes on hold, cut me off.

   To make a long story a little less long, I went through this a few more times, with “Larry,” “Moe” and “Aditya” before reaching a supervisor (“Bonnie”) who said she couldn’t alter ATT “Pohsee” and anyone who could was by definition too important to talk to me.

   So anyway, I related all this to a friend, who responded “Three words, Dan: The President’s Analyst.”

   Aha!

   It took me back to my Senior Year of High School, when adulthood beckoned with a coy wink, and the World was falling apart. Somewhere in the midst of this gaudy chaos, James Coburn was emerging as a movie star, and The President’s Analyst solidified his image as a somewhat off-beat persona in a film that never quite makes up its mind what it wants to be about — and is all the better for it.

   It starts out as a one-joke movie: Coburn is retained as the POTUS’ on-call shrink, and finds himself growing paranoid — or is he really being watched? Well of course he is. What kind of movie would you have if he wasn’t?

   So when he cracks under the strain and goes on the run, TPA shifts from Political Comedy to Spy Spoof as our hero finds himself pursued by the Secret Agencies of every government on Earth and takes cover: first with a family of militant liberals (deftly played by William Daniels and Joan Darling) then, less amusingly, with Barry McGuire’s hippie band.

   I should pause here to mention Godfrey Cambridge and Severn Darden as an American agent and his Soviet counterpart, both roles well written and feelingly played, notably in a fractured and melancholy reminiscence about departed enemies. Later on, Daniels and Darling do a hilarious bit of suburban self-defense, then there’s a balletic sequence of Coburn plucking the gowans fine with a fair young maiden in a field of wildflowers — while being stalked by scores of assassins, agents and assorted men in black.

   All that though is just writer/director Flicker showing off his stylish wit as TPA changes course once again. Finally captured by Darden’s Russian Spy, Coburn realizes that his best weapon is the one he was trained to use, and he sets about escaping from Darden by understanding him — a ploy used earlier in films like Blind Alley and The Dark Past, but never to such humorous effect.

    Whereupon (you guessed it) the movie bounces off a wild wall, and the sinister agency behind the whole thing is revealed as… Well if you didn’t guess it, I won’t reveal it now, but Pat Harrington plays the PR man for Artifice Trapping & Treachery with a cozening cheerfulness just wonderful to watch. Even better, his little show is followed by a noisy burst of gunfire, explosions & derring-do just as satisfying in its own brainless way.

   The President’s Analyst is no classic. It’s just a little too trendy for its own good. But it’s also unlike any other film you’re likely to see, and worth a look.

   And by the way, I found out that BBB trumps ATT, and got a Happy Ending all my own.