RICK BOYER – Pirate Trade. Doc Adams #8. Ivy, paperback original, 1995.

   I’ve been wondering what happened to Boyer; this is the first from him since 1991’s Yellow Bird, and he’s obviously lost his hardback contract. Yet another HWMA (Hardboiled White Male Author) takes a shoot to the crotch. Oh well, he’s still being published, which is more than Benjamin Schutz can say.

   Doc buys his wife Mary a purse decorated with real ivory from a sore on Nantucket, but he soon wishes he hadn’t. The ivory turns out to be illegal — illegal ivory is Big Criminal Business — and Mary is enlisted by the Feds to help with a sting operation. Doc doesn’t like this even a little bit, but Mary wants to do Something On Her Own.

   Due as much to his interference as anything else, both of them end up facing some real real danger, and Doc’s mercenary friend, Rozantis, is pressed into service.

   These are basically crime/adventure books, and my taste for such seems to be waning lately. On top of that, I think this is the least of the eight Adams’s, with a plot that seemed disjointed and narration more than a bit episodic. The characterization of Adams and his supporting cast has been fairly strong over the length of the series, but there was nothing here to add to it.

   All in all, it was a reasonably quick and pleasant read — but nothing that would send you running to Half-Price to find the earlier books. Boyer and Adams may have hit the wall with this.

       The Doc Adams series —

Billingsgate Shoal (1982)
The Penny Ferry (1984)
The Daisy Ducks (1986)
Moscow Metal (1987)
The Whale’s Footprints (1988)
Gone to Earth (1990)
Yellow Bird (1991)
Pirate Trade (1994)
The Man Who Whispered (1998)

“Orange Blossom Special” is one of those songs that every band who plays it tries to do it faster and better than every other band that’s ever played it. Most bands fall far short. To my eyes and ears, this group comes awfully close to the top.

THOMAS POLSKY – Curtains for the Copper. “Scoop” Griddle #3. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1941. Handi-Books #5, paperback, 1942. Dell #29, mapback edition, no date stated [1944]; Dell #700, paperback, 1953.

   While Polsky wrote one additional non-series book in 1952, Curtains for the Copper is the last of three cases that ace newspaper reporter L. F. “Scoop” Griddle worked on shortly before World War II. The cop who dies is a rookie on the beat, shot and killed during a raid on a gambling house.

   There are lots of suspects on the scene, including a good-looking girl and a police chief with a IQ of 62. In fact it is only the sorry excuse for police work that makes the final scene possible. Nothing more than a good imitation of George Harmon Coxe, only the latter did it better.

       The L. F. “Scoop” Griddle series —

Curtains for the Editor. Dutton 1939
Curtains for the Judge. Dutton 1939
Curtains for the Copper. Dutton 1941

HOLLYWOOD STORY. Universal Pictures, 1951. Richard Conte, Julie Adams, Richard Egan, Jim Backus, Fred Clark, Henry Hull, Paul Cavanagh. Screenplay and story by Frederick Kohener (story as by Frederick Brady). Directed by William Castle.

   A surprisingly good mystery that is a bit plot heavy and would have benefited without Jim Backus’s jovial press agent narration, but otherwise posits a fair Hollywood mystery. Richard Conte plays Larry O’Brien, a successful New York film producer, lured West by money-man and friend Sam Collier (Fred Clark).

   When he goes to visit his new studio, once home of silent films, he discovers it is where famed silent film director Franklin Ferrera was murdered in 1929 in his cabana in an unsolved mystery. Despite being warned off, O’Brien decides to look into the old murder as the subject of his first film and begins nosing around.

   He even hires washed-up screenwriter Vincent St. Clair (Henry Hull) who worked with Ferrara to write the screenplay, and attracts the attention of Lt. Lennox (Richard Egan) who reminds him there is no statute of limitations on murder, and cops might come in handy.

   Not everyone is happy about the case being reopened. Sally Rosseau (Julie Adams) is the daughter of silent star Amanda Rosseau (Adams appears in a dual role but is billed as Julia Adams in it) who was involved with Ferrara and would as soon leave the whole thing in the past with her late mother’s memory. So would O’Brien’s friend Sam Collier, and former male lead Roland Paul (Paul Cavanagh), the latter the suspect whose career was ruined because everyone believed he murdered the director over Amanda. And when someone takes a shot at O’Brien at the studio late at night it seems as if someone is willing to kill to keep the past silent.

   Of course O’Brien and Sally will become romantically involved and secrets that hurt the innocent and the guilty will emerge, including a missing male secretary named Rodale who shows up willing to sell information and turns up murdered in his cheap hotel room.

   Despite the setting, direction by William Castle, Richard Conte in the lead playing at amateur private eye, and black and white photography, this is in no way film noir. Instead it’s a fair mystery with suspects and clues that unfolds more like the kind of thing done later on television on shows like Burke’s Law or Ellery Queen than what you might expect on the big screen from this era.

   There are lulls, the Jim Backus narration is a pointless distraction, and while it is nice to see them, brief cameos by silent film stars like Francis X. Bushman and William Farnum are more awkward than nostalgic, but get past that aspect, and there are actual clues here (the main one not shared with the viewer), a dangerous killer, and even a frame-up of not one but two innocent men.

   It’s a short fairly complex mystery, and if you solve it before the hero, it is likely based more on being familiar with the genre than anything else, and I have to say there is one clue shown early and right out in the open that proves key to unraveling the mystery that is good enough for any mystery.

   In fact the biggest mystery about this one is that they didn’t take that cast and story and make it into a noir. It wouldn’t have taken much effort to make the difference between a decent little mystery film and maybe a very good one. The problem here is that a pretty good idea is actually tossed off by everyone involved.

Live on the Late Show with David Letterman, preceded by the ending of “I Will Always Love You.”

PICTURE SNATCHER. Warner Brothers, 1933. James Cagney, Ralph Bellamy, Patricia Ellis, Alice White, Ralf Harolde, Robert Emmett O’Connor. Director: Lloyd Bacon.

   What this above average little semi-crime drama has going for it most of all can be summed up in two words: James Cagney. An an ex-con looking for a new life, he’s on the screen for most of the movie and in none of those scenes is he sitting or standing still. He’s on the go every minute. Although short in stature, he can make you tired just watching him, as he kids and connives his way around his new career as a news photographer for a sleazy bottom-of-the-barrel newspaper.

   Aiding him in his new life, after he’s dumped the mob he was once the leader of, is Ralph Bellamy as the paper’s sympathetic city editor. Lusting for him — no other word will do — is Alice White, the paper’s “sob sister” writer who — surprisingly enough really is a damned good rewrite person in her own right.

   But Danny Kean (Cagney) has eyes only for the daughter of the cop who ran him in three years ago, and all kinds of complications ensure from this one small remarkable coincidence, the kind that oculd happen only in movies like this.

   Being a pre-Code movie, there some fairly explicit innuendos between Cagney and Miss White, plus some revealing shots of the latter in her lingerie. All the more bonus, you’d have to say, to Cagney’s bold, bravura performance in this one.

THE CONSPIRATORS. Warner Brothers, 1944. Hedy Lamarr, Paul Henreid, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Victor Francen, Joseph Calleia. Based on the novel by Fredric Prokosch (Harper, 1943). Director: Jean Negulesco.

   Marketed on DVD as part of Warner Brothers’s Film Noir Archive Collection, The Conspirators isn’t really what most cinephiles would consider to be film noir. This film doesn’t take us down Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” in the way that the grittier Columbia and RKO releases of the late 1940s do. Yes, there’s a protagonist who is caught up in a web of deception and is falsely accused of murder. And there are cinematic shades and shadows thanks to director Jean Negulesco. But the overall flavor of this espionage thriller is more “romance in wartime” than an unforgivably capricious world spiraling out of control.

   Paul Henreid, who in real life was an avowed anti-Nazi, portrays Vincent Van Der Lyn, a member of the Dutch resistance who flees to Lisbon, Portgual. The Gestapo on his trail, Van Der Lyn is set to sail from Lisbon to England where he will rendezvous with the Dutch Air Force. By a sheer happenstance, he ends up getting mixed up with the personal and political affairs of one Irene Von Mohr, a beautiful and mysterious French woman (Hedy Lamarr) married to a Nazi official.

   Throughout the film, both Van Der Lyn and the audience are forced to wonder where Irene’s loyalties lie. It is clear that Van Der Lyn is quite smitten with her. Unfortunately, these romantic scenes are by far the weakest part of the picture, a fatal flaw when the characters’ romance is supposed the core of the film. There’s something so dated, so artificially tender about them. And the dialogue between the two would-be lovers is noticeably forgettable. Casablanca (1942), with its famously quotable lines, this is not.

   If Henreid and Lamarr, the two top-billed stars of the movie, don’t captivate one’s attention, it doesn’t necessitate that The Conspirators isn’t worth watching. Far from it. The supporting cast is, in a word, outstanding. There are some great character actors showcasing their work here. Even though they don’t get nearly as much screen time as Henreid and Lamarr, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet simply steal the show. Lorre, too short and too “ethnic” to be a leading man in a Hollywood romance, takes the role of Jan Bernazsky, a Polish resistance fighter who discovered an ingenious method to kill Nazis.

   Sydney Greenstreet, reunited once again with Lorre, portrays Ricardo Quintanilla, the ringleader of an anti-Nazi conspiracy. Flamboyant and determined, Quintanilla ends up being a far more compelling character than Van Der Lyn (Henreid). Joseph Calleia, the Maltese born actor who had notable roles in The Glass Key (1942), Gilda (1946), and (later on) A Touch of Evil (1959), likewise overshadows Henreid. He portrays a Lisbon police inspector who is alternatively convinced and skeptical that Van Der Lyn is a murderer.

   These three fine actors, when they are on screen, lend the film a world weariness that serves as a most welcome counterpart to the film’s maudlin romantic elements.

From Wikipedia:

   “Reggie Grimes Young Jr. (December 12, 1936 – January 17, 2019) was an American musician who was lead guitarist in the American Sound Studio house band, The Memphis Boys,and was a leading session musician. He played on various recordings with artists such as Elvis Presley, Merrilee Rush, B.J. Thomas, John Prine, Dusty Springfield, Herbie Mann, J.J. Cale, Dionne Warwick, Roy Hamilton, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, the Box Tops, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Merle Haggard, Joey Tempest, George Strait, and The Highwaymen.”

   From Reggie Young’s only solo album, Forever Young, released in 2017:

DAN AUGUST “The Murder of a Small Town.” 30 September 1970. Season 1, Episode 2. Burt Reynolds, Norman Fell, Richard Anderson, Ned Romero, Ena Hartman. Guest cast: Ricardo Montalban, John Marley, Anna Navarro. Writer: Robert Dozier. Director: Harvey Hart.

   As a follow up to my review of The House on Greenapple Road, the made-for-TV movie that became the pilot film for the Dan August television series, I have now watched the first two episodes of the series itself.

   The first episode, “Murder by Proxy,” had its moments, but overall was no better than the average cop or PI series of the time. Burt Reynolds acquitted himself well, and perhaps if I hadn’t been looking for them, I might have missed the occasional screen shots in which they asked him to look pensive about the case while at the same time looking a bit like Marlon Brando. (I believe someone pointed this possibility out in the comments to the earlier review.)

   The overall gimmick to the episode and hence (I assume) to the series being that Dan August was now a cop in his own medium-sized home town, a fact which causes him some difficulty, dealing as he must with people he’s known all his life. Now of course it is under totally different circumstances. He, in fact, happens to have had a personal altercation with the murder victim the week before, suggesting to some that he might even be a suspect.

   The story in episode two is very different, and I thought even a bit daring. A strike by the Hispanic orange grove workers in town has gotten ugly, and when an accident to a school bus injures several children, with one small girl killed, all Mexician-Americans, tempers threaten to burst out of control. Anglos vs. Spics, the signs say.

   At opposite poles are John Marley, the owner of the town’s orange groves, and labor organizer Ricardo Montalban, with Dan August right in the middle, especially when it looks as though someone deliberately tampered with the bus’s brake lines. A small plot thread involving a romance between Marley’s daughter and Montalban seems forced and unnecessary, and is thankfully dropped.

   A lot of anger that’s been simmering in the town pf Santa Luisa is shown. This is definitely not your usual TV cop show. While the incident with the bus is resolved, the writers and producers of the show could not solve the larger problem, not even in the hour’s time they were given.

JOHN SPAIN – The Evil Star. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1944. Detective Novel Classics #44, digest-sized paperback, no date stated [1940s]. Popular Library #239, paperback, 1950.

   John Spain was an alias for a hard-boiled pulp writer named Cleve F. Adams, who wrote mostly tough PI stories, of which this is not one. Instead its the only book appearance pf homicide detective Steve McCord, who gets mixed up with triplets in this one.

   Their names? Faith, Hope and Charity. Yes. Hope seems to be the bad one. Charity is the one McCord falls for, but the ending is why you should read this one. The twist I spotted on page 125 is pointed out by Faith’s lawyer on page 137, but I never saw the second one coming.

  PostScript:   The Golden Age of Mysteries was really Golden if even a rather ordinary book such as this has an ending that will make your head swivel as much as this one does. Plotting a decent puzzle type mystery is something too many of today’s wriyers seem to think is old hat and old-fashioned.

   If what you’ve been reading lately seems to be missing something, ask yourself if the ending knocked your socks off or not. (Sometimes you can even ask yourself if it made sense.) Too many of today’s mystery writers just don’t have it, in comparison to Agatha, Ellery or the master of them all, Mr. John Dickson Carr, and nobody can tell me they do.

   What’s worse, too many of them don’t have it in comparison to John Spain, who — there’s no two ways about it — was hardly one of the biggest names that the world of mystery fiction ever produced.