EDWARD S. AARONS – Girl on the Run. Gold Medal #424, paperback original; 1st printing, August 1954. Reprinted several times, including d1772, 1967.

   My chronology may be a little bit off, bit I believe this is the book Aarons wrote just before beginning the series he’s most famous for, the Assignment series starring rugged CIA agent Sam Durell. It shows, too, since it contains much of the same style, settings and overall flavor of the series books that came next.

   Something changed for Aarons as a writer in the early to mid-50s. After a short career writing for the pulps, mixed in with a number of ordinary detective thrillers written as Edward Ronns and taking place on the US, his books shifted their focus to that of international intrigue, mostly for Gold Medal. These later books are always filled with local color and details of life abroad that only someone who’d been thee could know (or so it seems), and his heroes are always convincing.

   And although the problems his heroes run into do have far-reaching international significance — in this case either the treasure or the uranium deposit that Harry Bannnock’s French girl friend’s father has discovered will help restore France’s place in the community of nations — it is on the personal level that Aarons’s stories make their greatest impact. Aarons was no John le Carre or Len Deighton, with massive plots and counterplots that overshadow everything else in the tale, but I still read Aarons’s books, and I haven’t been reading theirs.

   When I devoted one of last year’s columns to John Roeburt’s Jigger Moran novels, I didn’t promise to do another column on Roeburt but suggested that I might. Since then I’ve decided that he deserves not one but two more. This month for space reasons I’ll limit myself to the rest of his hardcover books.

   His first two novels, JIGGER MORAN (1944) and THERE ARE DEAD MEN IN MANHATTAN (1946), I discussed before. I wish I could say more about his third, SENECA U.S.A. (Samuel Curl, 1947), but I’ve never seen a copy and it’s a hard book to find. What this stand-alone novel is about becomes fairly clear from the Kirkus review:

   â€œPortrait of a small town, almost any small town, and the postwar forces of unrest, labor union and racial, reflected in the story of Shep Ward, newspaper editor and party line follower of a rich, reactionary publisher….” Shep’s wife “leaves him thinking he has lost all decency of point of view.” Then the publisher is shot and a Jew is charged with the murder, “only because of anti-semitism. Shep, forfeiting caution for the truth, airs the whole thing in an edition of his paper.” The reviewer’s conclusion: “The intentions here are worthier than the actuality—which is only mediocre.”

   Critic Irving Howe covered SENECA and four other novels with similar viewpoints in an essay for Commentary (January 1, 1948), opining that all five “range from the bad to the downright ludicrous….” What he thought about Roeburt’s book specifically I can’t say because only the first page of his essay is downloadable on the Web.

   As if scared out of the mainstream by reactions to his third novel, Roeburt returned in his fourth to the tough-guy genre and a character modeled on the later Bogart. Like any respectable roman noir, TOUGH COP (Simon & Schuster, 1949) opens at night. Johnny Devereaux, 41 years old and just retired after twenty years on the NYPD — although he somehow has a month or so to use his badge any way he pleases — is about to drive off from a 52nd Street nightclub when a lovely young woman flings open the passenger door of his Buick convertible and begs for his help.

   Jennifer Phillips was raised by and lives with an obese old man, known for his scathing reviews of Broadway plays, who claims to be her father. But as she’s matured from age ten to twenty, his interest in her seems to have become, let’s say, non-paternal. Devereaux agrees to talk to the woman who raised Jennifer as a child but finds her dead in her hotel room and gets slugged by someone hiding in her closet, who turns out to be a small-time subway pickpocket recently paroled from Sing Sing after serving 14 months on a firearms charge.

   The drama critic who claims to be Jennifer’s father and supposedly “used rattlesnake venom for ink” (although the two samples of his reviews that Roeburt gives us strike me as cutesy rather than venomous) turns out to be “a sybarite, unnatural, an obscene and gilded pervert.” Homosexual, of course.

   I need hardly add that this “dandified and dissolute sensualist” talks like Sydney Greenstreet. Shadowing him and enlisting PI Sam Solowey to pursue other leads, Devereaux discovers that a number of the people he encounters — -a publisher of hate pamphlets, an ex-boxer turned nightclub owner — share with Jennifer Phillips and her alleged father the fact that nothing is known about their origins. (Could any writer get away with that premise in today’s high-tech age?)

   In due course he finds himself looking into a 20-year-old murder and payroll robbery from which the loot was never recovered. Only one of the criminals was caught and that one was “accidentally” scalded to death in the shower at Sing Sing while the hood who slugged Devereaux was serving his sentence in the same prison. Trying to trace the backgrounds of all the people he’s run into takes Devereaux to a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg district and into several chapters of investigation that show Roeburt at his best.

   At the climax he falls back on the most hackneyed “surprise” ending in the world of noir, but despite that and a few gaffes here and there — the former boxer is described as both a bantamweight and a middleweight, the dancers at Radio City Music Hall are called the Roxettes, and our old buddy the St. James Bible crops up at least twice — TOUGH COP is by far the most rewarding of the Roeburts I’ve read to date, with prose and plot kept under tight control from first page to last.

   That book was followed by the third and final Jigger Moran exploit, CORPSE ON THE TOWN (1950), which I discussed a few months ago. From that point forward, radio, movie and TV work apparently occupied Roeburt full-time for a while. In the second and final Devereaux novel, THE HOLLOW MAN (Simon & Schuster, 1954), two years have passed since Johnny’s retirement and he’s vegetating at a $1000-a-week job hosting dramatized true-crime stories on live TV when, as in TOUGH COP, a lovely woman begs him to help her.

   Five years earlier, struggling actress Nina Troy had secretly married boxing champ Rocky Star (born Rocco Starziano) and borne him a son. But Rocky vanished into thin air soon after the child’s birth, and Nina, now a huge success on radio and TV, is terrified that her marriage will be found to be invalid and her child illegitimate. (The only conceivable legal problem with the marriage is that Rocky had used a false name. New York law requires that people getting married have to prove their identities to the official or clergyman performing the ceremony, but I find it hard to believe that a detail of this sort would invalidate a marriage and turn any child of that marriage into what used to be called a bastard — the politically correct term today is nonmarital child — and Roeburt spends zero time exploring the legal issue. So much for any claim that he had a law degree!)

   But apparently someone doesn’t want the disappearance reopened: both Nina and the sportswriter she’d previously asked for help have been savagely beaten, and soon after agreeing to look into the case Devereaux too takes some lumps, although of course they don’t stop him or even slow him down. Like CITIZEN KANE, this novel is an investigation into a vanished or (in Kane’s case) recently deceased legendary figure: Was he a Saint or was he a Swine? (Anyone wondering why I capitalized those nouns will find out shortly.)

   Except for the beatings and a few shots taken at Devereaux as he and his PI friend Solowey look into Rocky’s past, there’s no crime until late in the game when one of the people closest to the missing champ is poisoned. Our tough cop, who isn’t a cop any more but unaccountably carries a badge and continues to beat up the ungodly without mercy, doesn’t crack the case until he recognizes the guy who’s been taking shots at him, after which the revelations come thick and fast.

   What makes THE HOLLOW MAN unusual is the utter weirdness of Roeburt’s style. First off, he can’t seem to tell a noun apart from an adjective or verb. “…transmuting her into something gross, and chicane, and murderous.” “…a busy quarter-century of detectiving.” “[C]ould he loom the fabric?” “…{A] wisping smile could even be read on his mouth.” At least three times in the first four chapters he twists the same noun into a verb: “You jackassed every one of them,” Devereaux tells another character.

   As if that weren’t enough, the pages are pockmarked with irrelevant religious allusions: crown of thorns, mote in his eye, consecrated, adoration, genuflection, incantation, resurrection, martyr, blasphemy, absolution, prayer, the list goes on and on, world without end Amen. To give one concrete example: “The truth, unholy or not, will pour like an almighty flood.” That makes three religion words out of eleven!

   If you thought two types of gaffe were enough, Roeburt offers a third by capitalizing nouns no one else would: Director, Youth Monitor, Host, Narrator, Scripter, Agency Men, Control Room, Account Men, Mother, the Universe, Shadow Men, a Case, a Mourner, the Law, the Sports Page — it’s as if inside the author there were an inner German (name of Scheisskopf?) clawing to get free.

   Naturally enough, wackadoodle sentences and phrases abound like warts on a — well, if you don’t know what amphibian I was about to name, you haven’t been reading these columns. Let me provide a few specimens:

   In his review for the New York Times (June 13, 1954), Anthony Boucher said that Roeburt “might well be called the Theodore Dreiser of the mystery novel, both because he tries harder than most to see the sociological meaning behind murder and because he couches his well-conceived novels in an almost willfully strained and graceless prose…. I found the novel as compelling as it is tortuous.” The reference to Dreiser, of whom H. L. Mencken once said that he “came into the world with an incurable antipathy to the mot juste,” makes a lot of sense but, even though I hate to disagree with Tony, to my taste THE HOLLOW MAN is somewhat less than compelling.

   By the mid-1950s radio was dying and apparently Roeburt didn’t get enough television work to keep him as busy as he’d been, so he returned to writing novels, although none of them featured Devereaux or Jigger Moran or any other series character. Only two appeared in hardcover. THE LUNATIC TIME (Simon & Schuster, 1956; reprinted as DID YOU KILL MONA LEEDS?, Crest pb 3213, 1956) was described by Boucher in his Times review (August 19, 1956) as “unconventional, difficult and curiously compelling. An unsuccessful journalist, a psychotic dipsomaniac, half-involuntarily turns detective for a girl whose brother is in danger of the chair. His ultimate discovery should not surprise you, but this is one of those rare cases in which anticipation of the ending makes the novel, if anything, more fascinating.”

   Tony again mentions Roeburt’s “tortuous and somewhat strained writing” but stresses his “strong individuality and a certain morbid power.” Thanks to his review, and the longer discussion by Marcia Muller in 1001 MIDNIGHTS (1986), I think I know who killed Mona Leeds already. But I have a copy of the book and have made a date with myself to read it one of these days.

   I don’t own a copy of THE CLIMATE OF HELL (Abelard-Schuman, 1958; reprinted as THE LONG NIGHTMARE, Crest pb #246, 1958) but there’s enough information on the Web to provide a good idea of what it’s about. I’ll start by quoting the Kirkus review, unnecessary dashes and all:

   â€œLarry Stevens, a fisherman in Florida, is brainwashed into the identity of Kirk Reynolds, taken — by three men — to New York to live the life of a gilded bum, to renew his marriage with Laura, a lush, and to witness the murder of his presumed father — before his will is changed. Running away — to give himself up — -he must finally face the revelation of his own responsibility in the situation to which his sick, truant conduct has led. Up from the pulps, loud and lewd and lurid.”

   Tony Boucher’s Times review (May 25, 1958) is so much more positive it tempts me to track down a copy. He calls it “as headlong, urgent, read-in-one-desperate-sitting a narrative as has come my way in quite a while…. Roeburt’s odd, individual prose and his psychological variations on the theme give it freshness; and the perils of the impostor and the sheer evil of his criminal masters make a memorable nightmare of menace.”

   As chance would have it, while roaming the Web for more information on THE CLIMATE OF HELL I stumbled upon David Seed’s BRAINWASHING: THE FICTIONS OF MIND CONTROL: A STUDY OF NOVELS AND FILMS (Kent State University Press, 2004), which blithely gives away the surprise Roeburt was building up to. Well, I still might try to track down a copy.

  FREDERICK C. DAVIS “Death to the Witness.” Show-Me McGee #6. Novelette. First published in Detective Fiction Weekly, 24 February 1934. Advertised as “The Hand of Doom” on the front cover. Published separately in the UK in paperback by Sharman Ellis Ltd., sometime in the 1930s.

   Almost without fail a series character in the old pulp magazines had to have a gimmick — something that made him different from all of the others, something that made him stand out in the reader’s mind so that they’d recognize him when they came across the next of his adventures.

   Some of these gimmicks were awfully minor ones, though. Show-Me McGee’s was exactly that. Hailing from the “Show Me” state of Missouri, Detective Lieutenant John McGee was one of those policemen who had to see the evidence and be convinced of what it told him before he ever went into action.

   As gimmicks so, this is a mere trifle. I have an idea that by the time this one came out, the sixth in the series, even the author had gotten tired of it or he’d run out of ways to build it into the stories he was writing. There’s only one paragraph in this one that it’s really brought up.

   And speaking of the story, this one’s about a cleaning lady in a large office building who witnesses a murder, one committed by a mysterious criminal mastermind, and she is the only one who can identify him. Trouble is, she’s in a coma in a hospital bed, and the killer has ordered all the members of his gang to get in and bump her off.

   The title on the cover, “The Hand of Doom,” is actually the more appropriate one, and in a way, in 1934, it may have been science fictional. Show Me McGee manages to save the day by the judicious use of liquid oxygen, freezing the killer’s hand so that it breaks off just before he is able to detonate several sticks of dynamite.

   Well, howdy. As perhaps you can tell, this is a story that’s filled with action from beginning to end. Even if this happens to be a mug of your favorite brew, it’s deeply flawed, though. Why, you might ask, even at the time, didn’t the killer knock off the cleaning lady as soon as he saw that she had seen him? He slugs her on the head instead, and dumps her into a nearby closet. To his regret later on — for the rest of the story, in fact.

       The Show-Me McGee series —

Hell on Wheels (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Sep 30 1933
Murder Without Motive (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Oct 7 1933 (*)
The Killer in the Tower (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly Nov 18 1933
The Devil’s Dozen (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Dec 2 1933 (*)
The Three Doctor Jekylls (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Dec 30 1933
Death to the Witness (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Feb 24 1934 (*)
Stone Dead (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Jun 9 1934
The Eye in the Wall (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Jul 21 1934

   (*) Reprinted by Sharman Ellis Ltd. in the UK, probably all as 64 page paperbacks. Fellow blogger Morgan Wallace has recently posted a long review of The Devil’s Dozen, which also includes a photo image of the cover. Follow the link.

  MANNING STOKES – Murder Can’t Wait. Vincent Donnellen #1. Graphic #117, paperback original, 1955. Never reprinted.

   To call Vince Donnellen a private eye is stretching it just a bit, since when Murder Can’t Wait begins, his license has recently been suspended. According to him, it was for “getting a little tough with some punk who turned out to have political connections.”

   Not only that, but Yvette, his steady girl friend, has just dumped him, but he seems to regret the loss of the license more than he does her. The latter isn’t completely sore at him, though, since she hooks him up with a job offered by her new boy friend, a wealthy socialite who needs someone (Vince) to take his niece to a dry-out (alcoholic rehab) clinic in Indiana. She’s managed to elude every one else who’s ever tried.

   And for $50,000 if she happens to die along the way, so much the better. (She’s due to come into her million dollar inheritance in the next month or so.)

   Vince wants the money, and he’s determined to get it, but he’s not so keen on the other part of the job, even though he agrees to take it on. Question: How can he find another dead body he can pass off as Lee’s? Of course, he also has to sober her up first. He needs her help. It’s not a plan he call pull off on his alone.

   While there’s nothing that’s absolutely new here, Stokes was a good story teller, and this one’s just far enough off the beaten path to keep the reader reading, or at least it was for me. The last couple of chapters are as action-packed and suspenseful as anything other thriller I’ve read recently. A good movie in the making, I think. It’s only too bad that the ending is, well, so ordinary, but then again, so were the endings of a lot of movies from the 50s that are called noir today.

PostScript:   No, in case you were wondering, there wasn’t a Vincent Donnellen #2.

Also Note: For more on the author himself, who was usually billed under his full name, Manning Lee Stokes, see my review of The Dying Room, first published by Phoenix Press in hardcover in 1947. Be sure to read the comments as well.

LEN DEIGHTON – The Ipcress File. “Harry Palmer” #1. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1962. Simon & Schuster, US, hardcover, 1963. Fawcett Crest, US, paperback, 1965. Reprinted many times.

THE IPCRESS FILE. Rank Films, UK, 1965. Universal, US, 1965. Michael Caine (Harry Palmer), Nigel Green, Guy Doleman, Sue Lloyd, Gordon Jackson, Aubrey Richards. Based on the novel by Len Deighton. Director: Sidney J. Furie.

   The screenwriters of the stylishly downbeat film The Ipcress File made the correct decision by introducing the notion of the eponymous file to the audience in the first half of the film’s running time. One structural problem in Len Deighton’s otherwise exceedingly compelling work of espionage fiction is that it’s not until the very tail end of the text that the author discloses what “IPCRESS” really means and how it fits into all that has transpired.

   Somehow it lessens not only the impact of the word, but also the terrifying possibilities it portends for both the story’s protagonist and Western democracy as a whole.

   To no one’s surprise, particularly those who are familiar with tropes from the spy genre, IPCRESS is an acronymm in this case for “Induction of Psychoneuroses by Conditioned Reflex under Stress.” That makes perfect sense, since Len Deighton’s work is Cold War fiction at its best. It is also fundamentally a thriller about mind control, particularly the West’s fear that the Eastern bloc as well as its more dogmatic and revolutionary Maoist cousins would develop a means of reprogramming Westerners into docile communist agents.

   In the movie adaptation, British agent Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) comes across the word IPCRESS fairly early on during his investigation into the disappearance of a British physicist. He’s not sure what it means, but when a colleague who uncovers the true meaning of the word is murdered, he knows that he’s up against individuals willing to destroy people psychologically for the sake of their ideology or money or both.

   Fundamental to the story is Palmer and how he fits, or alternatively doesn’t fit, into the mold of a spy. A military officer with a troubled past and a penchant for insubordination, Palmer is the anti-James Bond. He’s working class and lives a far from glamorous lifestyle. There are no exotic locales filled with beautiful women, yachts, or sports cars for him.

   While the novel features sequences in both Lebanon and the South Pacific, the filmmakers made the right call and set the movie entirely in London, emphasizing the city’s persistently gray sky and its foreboding industrial spaces. Caine, with his Cockney accent and devil may care attitude, is a perfect fit for the role. Audiences must have agreed for Caine reprised the role in two other Palmer films in the 1960s: Funeral in Berlin (1966) and Billion Dollar Brain (1967).

   In both the novel and the film version of The Ipcress File, Palmer’s investigation into the man allegedly responsible for both kidnapping and reprogramming British scientists so that they would be unable to work eventually leads him straight into the lion’s den. He gets captured and is forced to endure the mind control techniques that have wreaked havoc on some of England’s finest scientists, figuratively turning their brains into mush.

   This is where the film gets psychedelic, very much akin to a scene toward the end of The Venetian Affair (1967), a movie similarly about communist brainwashing techniques, in which Robert Vaughn’s character is subject to an equally sinister method of mind control at the hands of a villain working for Communist China.

   Sidney J. Furie’s direction, with his use of strange, unsettling angles, lends the film a disquieting feel. There’s not a lot of sunlight on display here, either literally or metaphorically. Palmer’s not doing his duty for Queen and Country as much as he is for his pay check and to avoid a military prison for transgressions he committed while serving in Germany.

   In this film everyone is expendable and no one can be trusted. John Barry’s jazzy score gives this cynical and bleak alternative to the James Bond franchise a hip London vibe without the heroic fanfare.

RAYMOND CHANDLER “Guns at Cyrano’s.” Ted Carmady #1. Novelette. First published in Black Mask January 1936 (with the leading character named Ted Malvern). Collected in: Five Murderers, Avon, paperback, 1944; Red Wind, World, hardcover, 1946; The Simple Art of Murder, Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1950; Pick-Up on Noon Street, Pocket, paperback, 1952; Stories and Early Novels, Library of America, hardcover, 1995. TV episode: Season 2 Episode 4 of Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, 18 May 1986 (with Powers Boothe as Philip Marlowe).

   â€œGuns at Cyrano’s” is one of the many short works written by Raymond Chandler for the pulps between 1929 and the publication of his first story “Blackmailer’s Don’t Shoot” and 1938 and the publication of The Big Sleep, the first Philip Marlowe novel. It is neither the best nor the worst of the lot (certainly not as good as the John Dalmas stories, particularly “Red Wind”), not even the best of the stories written in the third person (“Spanish Blood” and “Nevada Gas” are both better).

   I’ll go further, it isn’t even the best of the stories featuring Carmady (here known as Ted Carmady).

   I am not damning with faint praise though, because it is my personal favorite of the early stories, a pulpy B-movie of a boozy rainy noir tale replete with women no better than they have to be, a hero who isn’t so noble he’s boring or hard to believe in, a few innocents, and of course that famous man who walks into the room with a gun just as the lull starts to set in.

   Carmady, at least as presented here — and you will be forgiven if you question if this is the same Carmady of “Killer in the Rain” — has money and lives well, unlike anyone else in Chandler’s oveure he is not a private detective (he used to be, and even identifies himself as one at one point, but a rich private eye goes against almost everything Chandler ever wrote elsewhere) nor a good cop or house dick, but instead the son of a father who got his money in a clearly stated illegal way, meaning his son knows a lot of shady people and has a romantic notion that maybe he ought to make up for his father’s sins by helping people in trouble:

   Here he is headed for the hotel room he lives in when he spots a victim lying in an open doorway.

   Frankly at this point you wouldn’t be too shocked if Carmady turned out to have a sobriquet like the Saint or the Toff. Only the language is different, and maybe the attitude, the milieu is pretty much the same.

   The Dame, all women in these stories are some shade of Dames, good, bad, classy, murderous, or saintly, is a chanteuse named Jean Adrian (“I do a number at Cyrano’s.”), no better and no worse than life and men have made her, who likes his whiskey and is loathe to admit she was sapped or explain the.22 he finds beside her.

   Seems Miss Adrian has a boy friend who is a fighter, Duke Targo, and the Boys would like him to drop a fight, and they are trying to get to her through him. Naturally no Chandler hero can let that knightly quest go unmet.

   Of course that knightly quest is far from simple this being Chandler, involving a State Senator being blackmailed, a fixer named Doll Conant (His clothes looked as if they had cost a great deal of money and had been slept in.), an innocent victim to be avenged, and that gunfight at Benny Cyrano’s club from the title.

   Before it is over there is more gunplay (more in this single story than all the Marlowe novels put together), a few beatings, plenty of the kind of tough poetic dialogue Chandler was famous for, and a moral of sorts. It all makes for a satisfying pulp tale with the air of a good B movie and with those little touches that make even early Chandler such a pleasure to read.

   As I said, I like this story much more than it deserves for what it is. I’ve even seen it suggested it is the weakest of the Chandler stories, but it just happens to fit me for some reason, which is all any of us can ask of any story.

   If, like me you are a sucker for that particular brand of music, “Guns at Cyrano’s” hits all the notes on key, sonata for Thompson Machine Gun in B-Flat.

BACKSTREET JUSTICE. Prism Entertainment Corporation, 1994. Linda Kozlowski (Keri Finnegan), Paul Sorvino, Hector Elizondo, John Shea, Tammy Grimes, Viveca Lindfors. Written and directed by Chris McIntyre.

   I’m not sure, but while this film has some rather well-known names in the cast, I believe that it was released straight to video. I taped it from cable nearly 25 years ago, and a couple of evenings ago I finally got around to watching it.

   Linda Kozlowski, best known for her work in the Crocodile Dundee movie series, plays Pittsburgh-based private eye Keri Finnegan. She’s been hired by the residents of a crime-ridden section of town to find the person responsible for the recent deaths of three residents of the area, the police apparently having given up on the crimes.

   As it turns out, Keri’s relationship with the police is absolutely none. Her father, a police officer who died in a deadly shootout several years ago, was assumed to have been on the take, and Captain Phil Giarusso (Paul Sorvino) will have nothing to do with her.

   Her investigation takes some twists and turns, but eventually it comes down to a mysterious corporation who’s been taking advantage of the deaths to buy up property in the area. I’m not exactly clear on the details, since the story line is rather muddled, to say the least. There are a couple of twists toward the end that maybe make sense, as the acting is at least OK and the photography even better.

   There is also one lengthy and quite graphic sex scene between Ms Kozlowski and her sometimes boy friend (John Shea), but I’d have to admit that it’s gratuitous enough that I can’t recommend your trying to track down the movie for that reason alone — it’s apparently on Amazon Prime, but otherwise it is rather hard to find.

   All in all, though, Ms Kozlowski is quite glamorous in this film, but perhaps too much so to be totally convincing as a private eye. For most of the film I gave up on the story line and watched her instead.

   Headline: “Country icon Tom T. Hall is among the songwriters who will be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2019.”

   Question: What the hell took so long?

   In addition to Hall, John Prine, Dallas Austin, Missy Elliott, Jack Tempchin and Yusuf (Cat Stevens) will be inducted at a ceremony in New York City in June.

FRANCIS DUNCAN – So Pretty a Problem. Mordecai Tremaine #5. John Long, UK, hardcover, 1950. Sourcebooks, US, trade paperback, 2018.

   It’s strange, but I have a feeling that Francis Duncan’s detective novels are selling now as well as they ever did, if not a whole lot better. Four of his six novels are back in print, and in the list of the titles at the end of this review, I’ve added the current Amazon sales ranking. They may not look spectacular, but believe me, they are — especially for detective fiction. Most of the books I have listed for sale on Amazon have rankings in the 3 to 8 millions. I don’t have any books there over 20 million.

   For an author no one had even heard of a year ago at this time, that’s quite an achievement.

   Duncan’s series character is a chap named Mordecai Tremaine, a retired tobacconist whose hobbies are reading romance novels and solving crimes. He’s done so well at the latter that’s he’s on a first name basis with several policemen at Scotland Yard, and they don’t mind in the least if he does some investigating for them on his own.

   The structure of So Pretty a Problem is an odd one, especially at first glance. Part I consists of the murder and the immediate investigation. This section is about 90 pages long, and it serves largely as a prologue to Part II, all of which takes place before the murder. This portion, over 160 pages long, consists entirely of Tremaine’s interactions with the murder victim and his wife and all of the other suspects-to-be. Ordinarily this section would come first, chronologically speaking, but 160 pages in a detective novel before the first murder occurs is an awfully long time to keep a reader’s interest at a high edge of anticipation.

   Part Three reverts to real time and Tremaine’s meticulously worked out explanation, including one of those “gathering the suspects together in one room” types of detective story expositions. Since this section is over 130 pages long, any complaints that current mysteries are longer than than they used to be will fall on deaf ears when you compare them to this one.

   Dead is an extremely successful high-society artist. He is found shot to death in his isolated home off the coast of England, connected to the mainland by means of only a single footbridge that an invalid lady is constantly watching. The only person found in the house except for the dead man is his wife, who tells two obviously false stories to the police, who believe neither one, but neither do they believe that she is the killer.

   I enjoyed this one. What impressed me the most about the story is how well Duncan made the explanation fit the facts so precisely, and yet before the explanation, there does not seem that there is one that’s possible. Knowing human character is a big asset for Mordecai Tremaine, and if this is an example of how he unravels a mystery as complicated as this, I’m going to go on and read all of his other cases in solving crimes.

       The Mordecai Tremaine series –

Murderer’s Bluff. Jenkins 1938
They’ll Never Find Out. Jenkins 1944
Murder Has a Motive. Long 1947 (*) #600,815
Murder for Christmas. Long 1949 (*) #119,807

So Pretty a Problem. Long 1950 (*) #192,556
In at the Death. Long 1952 (*) #88,764
Behold a Fair Woman. Long 1954 (*) #123,776

   Those marked with a (*) have been recently been reprinted in the US by Sourcebooks.

LADY IN THE DEATH HOUSE PRC, 1944. Jean Parker, Lionell Atwill and Douglas Fowley. Screenplay by Frederick C. Davis and Harry O. Hoyt, [based on the former’s story “Meet the Executioner” in the June 1942 issue of Detective Tales]. Directed by Steve Sekely.

   Well, it’s different.

   The story opens with Jean Parker walking that last mile to the Electric Chair. Then, as the door closes, we fade to Lionel Atwill as an avuncular criminologist, telling the tale of how he solved the baffling case of…. And we fade again into the first of many – many! — flashbacks.

   It seems Parker was a secretary working under an assumed name for the self-righteous moral crusader (George Irving) who railroaded her dad into prison and suicide years before. She uses her position to get Irving’s old file on her dad…. But never mind that; the writers soon forget about it.

   Parker is also being blackmailed by her sister’s shady boyfriend, who may have been responsible for the crimes pinned on her Dad. But don’t worry about that either, since the writers wander off on another tangent about halfway through.

   What they concentrate on is Douglas Fowley (bad guy in more than 100,000 B-movies and the harassed director in Singin’ in the Rain) who is in love with Ms Parker. She loves him right back, but is put off by his employment: Whenever somebody on Death Row gets the Hot Seat, it’s his job to flip the switch. Things get even stickier when Jean is convicted of murdering her sister’s boyfriend (remember him?) and now it’s Doug’s job to pull the rug out from under the woman he loves.

   BUT … it seems Doug also has a sideline as a research scientist, working on a way to restore life to the dead! And….

And nothing. Zip. Nada. Bupkis. Zilch. The writers once again wander off to different, if not necessarily greener, pastures, and Lady in the Death House eventually devolves into a desperate race against the clock to etc. etc.

   I am reminded here of Harry Stephen Keeler’s trick of building a story by drawing scraps of plot and sub-plot from a hat. Anyway, Steve Sekely directs all this with as much style as he can muster, given PRC’s meager resources. He had his moments (Hollow Triumph) and gives this thing a sense of pace and even a flash or two of visual elegance.

   What he can’t overcome is the crucial sequence where Parker is arguing with her sister’s beau, and their silhouettes are seen in incriminating outline from the street below. The more Sekely cuts from the street to the apartment, the more we see that the two of them ain’t nowhere close to that window – well, such are the vagaries of filmmaking at PRC.

   I will add though that Fowley and Atwill seem delighted at playing good guys for a change and make the most of it. In fact, their thesping and Sekely’s desperate efforts at directing kept me watching, even as I wondered what the writers were smoking and where I could get some for myself.