Lone Justice was a country rock band formed in 1982 featuring lead singer Maria McKee, who later went on to a solo career. “You Are the Light” is a song on their self-titled debut album, which was released in 1985.

   I’ve asked Greg Shepard, publisher and editor-in-chief at Stark House Press, to tell us what’s come out from them recently or what will be showing up soon. He has most graciously agreed:

   This year Stark House Press will celebrate being in business for 20 years. Our first book was a hardback collection of fantasy stories by Storm Constantine. We followed that with a few more Constantine projects, then jumped into Algernon Blackwood territory, a supernatural sidestep on our way to crime.

   Twenty years in the publishing business has brought us full circle; in January, 2019, we published the definitive biography of Algernon Blackwood by Mike Ashley — The Starlight Man. This is not only the first paperback edition, but also the most complete version, since Ashley added back in all the bits his UK hardback publisher asked him to take out back in 2001, with lots of new pictures as well.

   Although our primary focus has mainly been “men’s” hardboiled, noir fiction of the 40s to the 60s — our lead title for January was Lead With Your Left and The Best That Ever Did It by Ed Lacy, two gritty, New York cop mysteries — we recently began adding more of the women’s suspense authors from that era, too. In November of 2018 we issued End of the Line by Bert & Dolores Hitchens as part of our Black Gat series. This is one of five railroad mysteries that Dolores wrote with her rail-detective husband, Bert. But Dolores also wrote a lot of fine standalone mysteries during the 1950s, and we will be bring six of those back over the next couple years, starting with Stairway to an Empty Room and Terror Lurks in the Darkness next fall.

   In February, we will be proudly publishing two novels by the incomparable Jean Potts. She won the Edgar Award for one them, Go, Lovely Rose, and was nominated for the other one, The Evil Wish. Both are excellent novels of psychological suspense, the first story dealing with the murder of a woman whom everyone in town hates, the second concerning a murder that is planned but not executed, leaving distrust and suspicion in its wake. Booklist has already labeled these “two masterpieces” and we’re excited to be bringing them back, with more to come.

   Stark House will also be reprinting the works of Bernice Carey and Helen Nielsen. Back in November of 2016 we reprinted Woman on the Roof by Nielsen, and in May we have two more of her clever Southern California mysteries to offer: Borrow the Night and The Fifth Caller. Also in May we will be publishing (for the first time in paperback) Carey’s The Man Who Got Away With It and The Three Widows. Carey set her novels in small town California where she lived, often peppering them with her own brand of social justice. As Curtis Evans says in his introduction, “the most significant contribution of Bernice Carey to mid-century crime fiction was her commitment to exploring realistic social conditions in her novels.” She also created some very interesting characters.

   Over in the noir camp is one of my personal favorites, Gil Brewer. We published two of his noir thrillers, The Red Scarf and A Killer is Loose, back in October. Brewer was the master of momentum. He’d create a desperate situation for this protagonist—usually involving lots of cash and a young, willing woman — and turn him loose to frantically pursue each with equal amounts of sweat and lust.

   This year, we are reprinting Redheads Die Quickly, the definitive collection of Brewer stories edited by David Rachels back in 2012, with five new ones added. And later this year we will be complementing this volume with two new Brewer collections: Death is a Private Eye, set for August, and Die Once — Die Twice, tentatively scheduled for early 2020; each volume edited and introduced by David Rachels.

   In March, Stark House is following up its Carter Brown program with three more Al Wheeler mysteries: No Law Against Angels, Doll for the Big House and Chorine Makes a Killing. If you don’t recognize these titles, that’s because No Law was published here as The Body (the very first Brown book to be published in the U.S.) and Doll as The Bombshell.

   Back in the late 1950s, when Brown’s Australian publisher started to populate the world with his books, the feeling was that they needed Americanizing. So these first few Wheeler stories were revised for the U.S. audience. I thought it’d be more fun to reprint the original Australian versions, so that’s what we’re doing. In fact, Chorine has never been published in the U.S. at all, so that’s a first for most American readers.

   Those are just a few of the highlights. There’s more: Jeff Vorzimmer has edited the mammoth The Best of Manhunt and will be discussing it in a separate post. That’s our big summer title, set for July. I am also working on a second trio of Lion Book noirs, another two-fer of Barry N. Malzberg satires (The Spread and The Social Worker), our final Peter Rabe volume (New Man in the House and Her High School Lover), plus lots of odds and ends over at Black Gat Books, including authors like Noël Calef, Ovid Demaris, Fredric Brown and Louis Malley.

  MURDER AT 3 AM Renown Pictures, UK, 1953; Ellis Films, US, 1955. Dennis Price (Inspector Peter Lawton), Peggy Evans, Rex Garner, Philip Saville, Leonard Sharp. Director: Francis Searle.

   Save for a trickle of recognition for Dennis Price, the leading man in this low budget British semi-thriller, the cast of Murder at 3 am was totally unknown to me. I think you may have had to be there — England in the early 1950s — for any of them to have made a lasting impression on you.

   Not that they didn’t do a professional job of ii. The budget may have been small and the story riddled with clichés, but there’s nothing in this film that you can lay any criticism of the cast to.

   The last of a series of robberies of well-to-do women, their money and jewelry stolen from them at the doorsteps as they arrive home at night, has ended in the death of one of them, putting a lot of pressure on Scotland Yard in general and Inspector Peter Lawton in particular.

   What the robberies have had in common is that they all took place at 3 am, and the women were all coming home alone in cabs from various night clubs in the area. What the new fiancé of the inspector’s sister, a budding mystery writer, discovers, however, is that the first letters of the names of the night clubs spell out P-L-A-Y-…, which suggests where the killer may strike next.

   We are traipsing on Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen territory here. Unfortunately additional clues start pointing to the fiancé himself as the one responsible for the crimes. I spoke of clichés up there earlier. The denouement is one of the oldest in the books.

   But what can I tell you? I both noted the limitations of the story and then ignored them, and I enjoyed the movie anyway.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER “Lost, Strayed and Stolen.” Lester Leith #44. Novelette. Detective Fiction Weekly, 24 February 1934. Never reprinted, though I’d welcome being corrected on this.

   It might be possible to characterize Lester Leith as a private eye, except for one small detail, or maybe two. He never had a PI license, and as far as I know, his only client was himself. What he realty is is difficult to describe. What he does is scour the newspapers for details on crimes that have been committed and tries to find a way to cut himself in on the proceeds.

   He is so successful at this that there is no “tries” about it. The police do not take his activities lightly. They think he is a crook himself, although they have never been able to prove it.

   To this end, however, they have inserted one of their men, a chap named Beaver, into Lester Leith’s household in the guise of his personal man servant. Leith calls him Scuttle, and of course Leith is fully aware that Scuttle is a easily fooled spy for the equally inept Sgt. Ackley of the police department.

   Which is where half the fun of reading the Leith stories comes in. He simply delights in teasing both Scuttle and Ackley along, giving them just enough information to get them going in one direction while off he goes in the other. The other half of the fun is watching Leith do exactly that, which in this case involves setting up a totally bogus Citizens’ Committee on Civics Efficiency, complete with stationery, buttons and badges, although Leith himself is the only member.

   Goal: to obtain a valuable diamond necklace that the husband of a well-known society woman claims was stolen from him. With the use of an exact but worthless replica and the hiring of a young woman living down the hall from him who is low on funds, Leith manages to get both the police and the couple whose necklace was stolen both totally confused and bamboozled, and badly, to the total delight of the reader.

   I thoroughly enjoyed this one, from beginning to end.

BLACK RAINBOW. Miramax, 1989. Rosanna Arquette, Jason Robards, Tom Hulce. Screenwriter-director: Mike Hodges.

   A father and daughter pair make a meager living traveling from town to town setting up shows in local churches as clairvoyants and preying on their audiences’ desires to make contact with loved ones on the other side. Martha Travis (Rosanna Arquette) is very effective at this. Dressed all n white, she is able to assure everyone who has lost someone close to them that they are happy where they are now and that all is well with them.

   It is all a fraud, of course.

   Until, that is, the spirits she is in contact with begin not to be dead yet. Even more, in her visions, she can even see (and can describe in detail) the manner of their passing, including as it turns out, the murder of a would-be whistle blower at a nearby chemical plant. Even more, she claims she saw who the hitman is.

   When a local reporter (Tom Hulce) gets wind of this, skeptical as he is, the story gets into the newspaper, and thinking there just might be something to it, the owner of the plant puts his hitman back to work again.

   The story of Martha, the reporter, and her alcoholic father (Jason Robards) is all that’s of interest here. The outside criminal element that Martha accidentally eavesdrops upon, that’s pretty much by the numbers. Martha, a lovely young woman in her early 20s (I’m guessing) is not the virginal gateway to the other end of the rainbow as her role is in church. Far from it, as the reporter soon learns. And besides these new abilities, she is now also beginning to realize how much her father stole her life from her.

   Forget the hit man, and keep your eyes on Rosanna Arquette’s performance. I found it mesmerizing, especially toward the end when she chastises her audience for being relying on their belief in the happiness that awaits them once they’re gone. If we knew for sure that life is lived only once, she suggests, perhaps we’d try to be better people while we’re here. The ending is quite remarkable, too, as the film verges even further into the supernatural and the unknown.

   Is this film a diamond in the rough? No, not really, but you may find it parts of it as fascinating to watch as I did.

IRWIN SHAW – Nightwork. Delacorte Press, hardcover, 1975. Dell, paperback, 1976. Further reprint editions exist.

   Doug Grimes is a pilot with a stutter and not much of a future when he discovers he has a rare eye disease that won’t blind him, but certainly grounds him. Now he works as night man at the St. Augustine hotel, a dangerous enough job, but at thirty-three, though fit and smart, Doug Grimes is headed nowhere fast.

   Men at crisis, any sort of crisis, middle age, ennui, marriage, family, divorce, business, are the stuff of many books and stories by Irwin Shaw, the bestselling story teller whose fiction from The Young Lions to Rich Man Poor Man chronicled life in the latter half of the 20th Century, primarily for the male half of the population in novels like Two Weeks In Another Town, Evening in Byzantium, Top of the Hill, and gem perfect stories like “Tip on a Dead Jockey” — and those are just some of the ones made into movies.

   Few writers did it half as well as Shaw, with half the grace or style, and because his stories covered the whole of life, once in a while crime played into that. In Nightwork he chose to do something a bit lighter and more playful, and it should come as no surprise that he did so with panache.

   It begins, not surprisingly, with a woman. A woman who shows up at Doug’s desk in the St. Augustine on a cold January night to inform him there is the body of a naked old man upstairs. Beside him is a cardboard tube Doug decides to hide from the police, and inside the cardboard tube is $100,000 dollars in ones.

   And being at sixes and sevens, Doug does what almost anyone in a Shaw novel might do, he quits his job, leaves town, gets a passport in a hurry with a help of friend he used to ski with, and gets the hell out of Dodge headed for Switzerland and the skiing, but not until he discovers the manager of the St. Augustine is in the hospital after two men roughed him up for no reason.

   And it is there, in St. Moritz, he meets Miles Fabian, and the game is on.

   Nightwork, I should mention, is a novel and not a thriller or caper. However much it flirts with the conventions of the genre, it is not about plot half so much as character, about a sort of late coming of age for the hero, and the magic brought into his life by the fabulous and not entirely scrupulous, Miles Fabian. Shaw is a much different writer, but this may remind you of some of the lighter novels of Graham Greene and Eric Ambler.

   Nightwork is a delight, smart, playful, real, human, and yet bubbly as good champagne with the kick of a Rye chaser. It is a heartfelt novel, one to read if you are in a sour mood or down on the world, Shaw’s idea of an old fashioned good read, and frankly mine too. As Shaw has his hero comment near the end of the book; “There’s nothing like a good deed for shining in a naughty world.”

    Nightwork is a good deed in a naughty world.

  LESTER del REY, Editor – Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Second Annual Edition. E. P. Dutton, hardcover. 1973. Ace, paperback, December 1975.

   #2. ROBERT SILVERBERG “When We Went to See the End of the World.” First published in Universe 2, edited by Terry Carr (Ace, paperback, 1972). First collected in Unfamiliar Territory (Scribner, hardcover, 1973). Reprinted many times. Nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, 1973.

   Picture a cocktail party taking place in 1972, or perhaps in the near future from that time, for time travel on a commercial basis exists and is just becoming affordable for the kinds of swinging couples who attend such parties as this. Marijuana, free love, and the discussion of various current disasters around the world are all part of the scene, as well as a little not-so-subtle one-upmanship are all going on.

   In the latter regard, as it turns out, everyone who’s signed up for and has taken a trip to see the apocalypse — the end of the world — has a totally different tale to tell. This is very puzzling, and it helps mitigate the sense of loss each couple feels when they discover that they weren’t the first kids on the block to have taken the trip after all.

   I can’t say that the explanation they come up with is on solid ground. What kind of scientific basis could there be for it? For the reader, though, the interesting part of the evening is how they all manage to ignore the fact that the world is already falling apart around them — with all kinds of scenarios as to which particular disaster may befall them. And for sure, that’s the point.

   What I generally find in Robert Silverberg’s stories, and this one’s no different, is that there is something hidden in each of then that’s never spoken aloud or so stated in the story itself. An undercurrent that you sense that’s not really there, but it is. Or maybe I just imagined it, but this time around I don’t think I did.

   Have I mentioned that this is a funny story, well told? If I haven’t, then I just did.

       —

Previously from the del Rey anthology: LARRY NIVEN “Cloak of Anarchy.”

Q & A. TriStar, 1990. Nick Nolte, Timothy Hutton, Armand Assante, Patrick O’Neal, Jenny Lumet. Based on th ebook by Edwin Torres. Screenplay and director: Sidney Lumet.

   Long after you’ve forgotten the labyrinthian plot of Q & A, you will remember Nick Nolte. In Sidney Lumet’s gritty film, Nolte’s character isn’t so much an actor as he is a force of nature. Brutal, strong, domineering, and aggressive are just several words to describe NYPD Lieutenant Mike Brennan. A man so devoted to his career that he seems to have no identity beyond it, Brennan is not just a blatant racist and homophobe.

   He’s a dangerous killer, a man who has been so thoroughly corrupted that, at some level, he no longer knows who exactly he is supposed to answer to. Is it the corrupt lawyer in the DA’s office who has dirt on him? Is it the Mafia boss whose dirty work he is willing to do, if it means murdering a Puerto Rican drug dealer, a man no one in respectable society is going to miss anyway?

   When Brennan starts feeling the heat from Assistant DA Reilly (Timothy Hutton), he becomes unhinged with rage. Willing to do next to anything for the sake of self-preservation, Brennan embarks upon a brutal murder spree that takes him from the mean streets of Harlem to sunny San Juan. In his sights is drug lord Bobby Texador (Armand Assante), a stereotypical bad guy with a conscience, who is now living with Reilly’s former flame (Jenny Lumet).

   While the first half of the movie is quite compelling, the latter hour ends up getting bogged down in multiple plot threads that become somewhat difficult to follow. Everything eventually ties up together, but in such a manner that makes one realize that certain scenes either weren’t absolutely necessary to make the film work (think: the love triangle between Hutton, Assante, and Lumet) or went on too long.

   It is after all the scenes with Nolte that makes this lesser known Lumet feature worth watching. Apparently, he gained forty pounds for the role, believing that his character needed to be a physically imposing presence. It was a good decision. Nolte’s Mike Brennan belongs in the pantheon of cinematic corrupt cops. He’s that memorable a character. Loud, vulgar, and brash, he’s terrifying to the two detectives tasked with investigating him. For good reason.

FACE OF A FUGITIVE. Columbia, 1959. Fred MacMurray, Lin McCarthy, Dorothy Green, Alan Baxter and James Coburn. Screenplay by David T Chantler and Daniel B Ullman, based on the short story “Long Gone” by Peter Dawson (Zane Grey’s Western Magazine, March 1950). Directed by Paul Wendkos.

   In a decade supposedly marked by conformity, and in a genre supposedly bound up in cliché, I’m surprised sometimes by how many off-beat, idiosyncratic and just plain weird westerns came out of the 1950s: Terror in a Small Town, 40 Guns, A Day of Fury, Ride Lonesome…. I could go on and on, but then I’d be going on and on.

   Face of a Fugitive may not as bizarre as some of the others, but it’s sufficiently off-beat and well-made to stay in the memory. Or this memory, anyway.

   Face opens with Fred MacMurray as an affable outlaw being escorted to jail by a Deputy unequal to the task. In the first few minutes Fred overpowers him and is making his escape when his younger brother (Ron Hayes) shows up, kills the deputy, and is himself mortally wounded in the shoot-out.

   Now wanted for murder, Fred buries his brother by sewing him in a mail sack and dumping the body in a river. Then he insinuates himself into the closest town, passing as a traveling businessman, feigning acquaintance with the locals, and looking for some way to split the scene before Wanted Posters show up with his picture on them — in 24 hours.

   MacMurray is in fine form here. In the years before Disney and “My Three Sons” his persona was bluff and likeable bit not always trustworthy. Check him out in The Texas Rangers, Double Indemnity, The Apartment and others to see what I mean. Here he uses both sides of his acting face as the outlaw on the run masquerading as a respectable citizen, and he does it quite well, befriending the local barber, horse trader, store clerk, and sheriff, but always with an eye out for the main chance.

   Of course it’s not that simple. Nor is the Sheriff, whose deputies have the town bottled up pending the arrival of the posters. Always the smoothie, Fred wangles himself a job as a Deputy — only to find himself embroiled with the Sheriff in a range was against local cattle baron Alan Baxter, and his henchman James Coburn.

   The writers handle all this quite capably, setting up the situation, ratcheting up the tension, and pausing for some truly affecting moments when Fred sees them fish his brother’s body from the river and later watches him lowered into an unmarked grave. They also flesh out the minor characters, particularly Coburn: lithe and lethal, but essentially a cowboy, not a killer.

   Back in the day, director Paul Wendkos made a splashy debut with The Burglar (1957) then retreated into television and the Gidget movies, until finally overtaken by obscurity. Still early in his career here, he imparts a sense of pace and humanity to the proceedings, particularly in a slam-bang run-and-jump shoot-out in a ghost town, making the most of the settings and Coburn’s athleticism vs. Fred’s stoic efficiency. And he caps it all with a line (which should have been the final line) I will remember for some time.

   This is a film to enjoy—and come back to.

  LESTER del REY, Editor – Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Second Annual Edition. E. P. Dutton, hardcover. 1973. Ace, paperback, December 1975.

   #1. LARRY NIVEN “Cloak of Anarchy.” First published in Analog SF, March 1972. First collected in Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven (Ballantine, paperback, 1975).

   Some time in the near future, when “modern transportation systems” have made automobiles obsolete, the question is, what should be done with all of the roads in the United States that are no longer needed?

   The answer, as far as Los Angeles and the 405 (the San Diego Freeway) is concerned, is to cover it over with dirt and grass and make a people’s park of it. Anyone can do do anything there, except for one rule: no violence is allowed. This rule is monitored and enforced by a large number of basketball-sized “copseyes” floating in the air above the park.

   What happens, though, when the monitoring system breaks down? It isn’t instantaneous, but you can imagine it yourself, and it isn’t pretty. Niven’s touch is largely light-hearted, though, up to a certain point, and the story is filled with all kinds of well-defined characters, even if most of them do not have much screen time.

   The basic theme: Anarchy isn’t stable. Or, absolute freedom is highly overrated. The story itself is chock full of ideas, bouncing all over each other and all over the place, and all of them are interesting. Example: What was it the replaced the automobile? Who is the beautiful girl with the fifteen feet of flowing cloak?

        —

NOTE:   Over the next few weeks, I plan to continue working my way through this Best of the Year anthology and reporting on each of the stories in it. I think the era of the early 1970s was a good one for the kind of SF I like to read. As I go forward, let’s see how true that statement is and whether or not you agree.