DONALD E. WESTLAKE – Somebody Owes Me Money. Hard Case Crime , softcover, June 2008. First published by Random House, hardcover, 1969; and Signet Q4800, paperback, 1971.

   It is difficult to realize that this comedy romp from one of the grand masters of comedy romp mysteries will have its 50th anniversary next year. The funny thing is that there’s almost nothing dated about it. Except for some technological advances such as iPhones that are missing, this wacky caper could have taken place yesterday, and what’s more there’s nothing in this plot that would have gone another way even if anyone did have an iPhone.

   Not that the plot is all that complicated, either. A cabbie named Chet Conway is given a tip on a horse that pays off at 27-to-1, but when he stops by his bookie’s apartment to get his money, he finds the bookie shot to death. Question: who’s going to pay him his $900?

   Major problem: his bookie was playing both sides of two rival crime gangs, and they both think Chet did it. Forget the money. Can Chet get out of the scrape he’s in alive? Aiding him is Abbie, the bookie’s sister, illustrated superbly on the book’s cover. (See above.) Not only is she luscious to look at, but she’s also a card sharp from Las Vegas.

   Minor problem, at least as far the story is concerned, is that the warfare between the two gangs, not all of whom are all that bright, which is where the comic element comes in, goes on a few pages too long. And of course after exhausting all of the plot possibilities so far suggested — and most of the participants — everyone eventually comes to realize that neither gang is responsible for the killing.

   This is a good thing, as it allows the tale to perk up again with a “gather all the suspects together” kind of ending which polishes off all the loose ends most satisfactorily.

   There are lots of copies of the Hard Case Crime edition around, so the book is not hard to find. Even though it’s almost 50 years old, you have no excuse for letting this one slip by.

HIGHWAY DRAGNET. Allied Artists, 1954. Richard Conte, Joan Bennett, Wanda Hendrix, Reed Hadley, Mary Beth Hughes, Iris Adrian, Frank Jenks. Screenplay by Herb Meadow and Jerome Odlum. Director: Nathan Juran.

   It’s the cast and the filming locales that make the somewhat predictable Highway Dragnet worth watching. Produced in part by Roger Corman, this programmer is directed by Nathan Juran, who is perhaps best known for his work in the fantasy and science fiction genre.

   The movie stars Richard Conte as Jim Henry, a Korean War veteran falsely accused of the murder of a former model he meets in a Vegas bar. It’s only when he realizes that Las Vegas Police Lt. Joe White Eagle (a perfectly cast Reed Hadley) is playing for keeps that he decides to make a break for it and begins a life on the lam with the goal of finding the one man who could provide him with an unshakable alibi.

   What Henry doesn’t know is that one of the two women he has decided to hitch a ride with may actually be the real killer. Most of the movie follows Jim as he joins up with a saucy photographer (Joan Bennett) and her next top model (Wanda Hendrix) as they make their way across the Nevada border and into the sparse California desert. There’s some great scenery here and from what I can ascertain, at least a portion of the movie was indeed filmed in California’s Coachella Valley, a location now known more for its annual music festival than anything else.

   Overall, it’s a fun ride for the viewer. Conte may not have been the best actor for this specific part, but his work on screen is always generally solid and Highway Dragnet is no exception. Perhaps it was due to the film’s meager running time (71 minutes!), but one of the key plot points is given away in expositionary dialogue rather than in a cinematic form, something that detracts from the movie’s impact.

   But it’s really not worth that much complaining about. The movie works for what it was designed to do, namely to tell a story, raise the stakes, and provide a satisfactory conclusion in which the good guy clears his name and wins the girl.

JOHN D. MacDONALD – Deadly Welcome. Dell First Edition B127, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1959. Cover by Robert McGinnis.

   An unsolved murder in a small western Florida town is causing the Pentagon some difficulties, and to help resolve the situation, they call on Alex Doyle of the State Department. Although it’s his home town, Doyle’s problem is that when he left, it was not voluntarily, so not only must he solve the murder, he must also confront his past.

[NOTE] This review as originally written had two final closing statements. Here is the first:

   JDM was a gifted writer, but at times he was not a very subtle one. The girl is too obviously meant for Doyle,the villain too brutish and nasty, and the solution is far too easy.

    And here is the afterthought I included as a footnote to the review:

   That last line is far too negative. As you read it today not only does this book take you back in time to 1959 and the sights and sounds of what amazingly is now a bygone era, but Doyle’s problems take him back an additional 15 years as well, filling the book with the sad sweetness of coming home and seeing what has become of the place where you once lived, and the people (some of them) who still live there.

   The murder that has occurred is a part of this, but in many ways — believe it or not — it’s not even of primary interest in the story.

Another song I challenge you to listen to and sit absolutely still:

JOHN LESCROART – Poison. Dismas Hardy #17. Atria Books, hardcover, February 2018.

First Sentence:   If opening day wasn’t the happiest landmark in Dismas Hardy’s year, he didn’t know what was.

   San Francsico attorney Dismas Hardy is recovering from two gunshot wounds and thinking about retirement. The murder of Grant Wagner, the owner of a successful family business, changes his plans. Abby Jarvis was a former client of Hardy’s and is the prime suspect. She was Wagner’s bookkeeper and was receiving substantial sums of cash off the books, but she claims she is innocent. The further Dismas digs into the family relationships, the more precarious his own life becomes.

   If you’ve not read Lescroart in a while, or ever, this is a good time to change that. He is a true storyteller. He engages the reader from the beginning with his style and humor— “Part of it, of course, was AT&T Park, which to his mind was essentially the platonic ideal of a ballpark. (Although, of course, how could Plato have known?)”

   There is a fair number of characters in the story, but Lescroart is adept at introducing them all and making them distinct enough not to become confused. Having the perspective of the victim’s family is an interesting approach.

   In addition to a good recounting of the past case which caused Hardy to be shot, there is an excellent explanation of the steps and process of the law. Rather than its being dry reading, it involves one as if they are the defendant. Early on, it is revealed that poison was the cause of Wagner’s death, and interesting information on wolfsbane is provided. The link made from the first murder to the second is nicely done as it then becomes personally dangerous to Dismas.

   The mention of food and family— “Hardy made them both an enormous omelet in his black cast-iron pan… They discussed the irony that he’d spiked the eggs with a cheese from Cowgirl Creamery named Mt. Tam, and that Frannie was going out to climb the very same Mount Tamalpais with her women’s hiking group in the next half hour or so.” —local landmarks, and all the San Francisco references, add realism to the story. Another such touch is the mention of a fellow author— “…C.J. Box novel, stopping on a high note when he laughed aloud after coming across the line ‘Nothing spells trouble like two drunk cowboys with a rocket launcher.’”

   Lescroart not only shows what happens on the defense side of a case, but also with the homicide team and, somewhat, with the prosecution team. The crisis within the Hardy household is realistically portrayed. Lescroart has a very good way of subtly increasing the suspense.

   Poison is an extremely well-done legal thriller filled with details which can seem overwhelming yet are interesting and, most of all, important. The well-done plot twists keep one involved and the end makes one think.

      The Dismas Hardy series —

1. Dead Irish (1989)
2. The Vig (1990)
3. Hard Evidence (1993)
4. The 13th Juror (1994)
5. The Mercy Rule (1998)
6. Nothing But the Truth (1999)
7. The Hearing (2000)
8. The Oath (2002)
9. The First Law (2003)
10. The Second Chair (2004)
11. The Motive (2004)
12. Betrayal (2008)
13. A Plague of Secrets (2009)
14. The Ophelia Cut (2013)
15. The Keeper (2014)
16. The Fall (2015)
17. Poison (2018)
18. The Rule of Law (2019)

ED McBAIN – Another Part of the City. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1986; paperback, April 1987.

   I wonder if this was ever intended to be the first of a new series for McBain, or if it was never meant to be more than the one-shot it is. All of his 87th Precinct stories take place in Isola, a purely fictional borough of a larger unnamed city. As a change of pace, perhaps, Another Part of the City, still a police procedural in the same vein as the other series, definitely takes place in Manhattan.

   The primary detective in this one is a homicide detective by the name of Bryan Reardon. He has a partner and fellow officers, but all of the others seem to disappear ito the cold December air, except when they show up every so often in the underheated squad room on their own cases and pieces of his, as needed.

   Which leaves Reardon pretty much on his own to tackle the case of the shooting of a Italian restaurant owner in his precinct’s part of town — all the way downtown. Tied in somehow, as McBain relates the tale, are the various members of an uptown family — part of the rich and powerful elite of the city — as they busily try to accumulate millions of dollars in ready money to help seed a billion dollar project they have in mind — and one they strongly prefer to keep a secret.

   And what connection does Reardon’s case have to do with them? Quite a bit, of course. This is the kind of story in which the twain definitely do meet. We’d be more surprised if they didn’t.

   Quite a bit of Reardon’s private life is revealed to us as well. He is going through a divorce, unwanted on his part, with the custody of his six-year-old daughter at stake. A bit of romance with a female member of a jury which allowed the defendant got free — a rapist who Reardon helped haul in — seems unlikely when it begins, but by book’s end, things seem to be moving along quite well in that regard.

   McBain/Evan Hunter is such a good writer that it’s easy to miss how slim and trim the book is, under 200 pages long, but that’s no complaint as far as I’m concerned. I was bothered quite a bit more by the fact that Reardon resorts to reading old newspaper accounts of the murder of the man whose death connects Story A with Story B. I don’t know why he didn’t get in touch with the officers in charge of the case. I think it would be to be a lot more effective way to go about it.

[WARNING: PLOT ALERT] But in the end, he has untangled all of the various plot strands, and he knows who done it and why. But can he prove it? In true noirish style, that is the question. (And hence the title of the book.)

THE FASTEST GUN ALIVE. MGM, 1956. Glenn Ford, Jeanne Crain, Broderick Crawford, Russ Tamblyn, Leif Erickson, John Dehner, Noah Beery Jr. Written by Frank D. Gilroy and Russell Rouse from an original teleplay (The Last Notch, 1954) by Gilroy. Directed by Russell Rouse.

FIVE GUNS TO TOMBSTONE. United Artists, 1960. James Brown, John Wilder, Walter Coy, Robert Karnes, Della Sharman, Willis Bouchey. Written by Richard Schayer and Jack DeWitt, from an original screenplay (Gun Belt, 1953) by Arthur E. Orloff.

   Two films I happened to watch back-to-back, and they go me to thinking….

   The Fastest Gun Alive was based on an early television drama, and it has the pared-down self-importance of that time. Where Shane mythologized the clichés of the Western, this seeks to codify them, with Glenn Ford as the eponymous pistolero, trying to resist his addiction to firearms until called on to save his community.

   According to the story, if anyone is known as a fast gun, every other gunfighter in the known universe will come after him, and they will meet on Main Street with guns holstered for a fair fight. Pure bosh of course, conveyed with a great deal of talk, but MGM saw fit to stretch the thing out by ringing in Russ Tamblyn for an acrobatic and completely extraneous dance number. There’s also the usual nod to High Noon, with the townsmen cowering for safety (and more talk) in a church as they hide from fast-gun Broderick Crawford and his back-up group.

   On the plus side, Director Russell Rouse opens it out well, Glenn Ford delivers a fine performance, and there are a lot of familiar B-Western faces around. Best of all, there’s John Dehner in a very well-written part as Brod’s lieutenant owl-hoot. This, with Man of the West, puts Dehner at the top of my list as Best of the 2nd-String Bad Guys.

   Five Guns to Tombstone, on the other hand, boasts no self-importance at all, and the players will be familiar only to the most devoted of B-Western fans. Directed by that veteran hack Edward L. Cahn (The She Creature, It: The Terror from Beyond Space) it moves with an uncomplicated simplicity that celebrates, rather than solidifies, the familiar paces of its story.

   The story? Ah yes. Something about another ex-gunfighter (James Brown) trying to get along peaceable-like until his outlaw brother drags him into a Wells Fargo robbery fraught with treachery and sudden endings. No memorable acting here, but everyone is more than competent, and the parts only require as much depth as a strip of celluloid – that and the ability to ride, fight and shoot convincingly. And speaking of shooting: In this movie, everybody, good guys and bad, pull out their irons at the first sign of trouble and go in shooting.

   Five Guns is hardly memorable, but as I watched it zip through its allotted time, after listening to Fastest Gun talk its way along, it was like a breath of fresh and simple Western air. Not a great western, maybe not even a very good one, but I found it refreshing.

   In the comments following Steve Lewis’s review of Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret novel, The Bar on the Seine, he asked about my favorite non-Maigret novels. I see from my notes that I spent most of 2015 reading Simenon’s psychological crime novels. I read most of the hundred or so novels and even thought of writing an article for Mystery*File about my experience. But I couldn’t figure out how to discuss 75 or so novels in an article without making it into a long book.

   But now that the question has come up again, here’s a short answer. For anyone interested in Simenon’s non-series crime novels, I recommend that you buy an omnibus of four novels titled A Simenon Omnibus (Hamish Hamilton, UK, 1965). Here are my notes on all four:

MR. HIRE’S ENGAGEMENT. This was one of the first of his serious non-Maigret novels. Told from the viewpoint of a very strange man, a peeping Tom. Made into two movies: Panique (1947, France) and Mr Hire (1989, France).

SUNDAY. Told from the viewpoint of a guy plotting to poison his wife. Looks autobiographical to me especially in regard to his relationship with the girlfriends. Simenon said more than once that he had thousands of sexual encounters.

THE LITTLE MAN FROM ARCHANGEL. Excellent tale of a second hand book store owner and stamp collector who makes the mistake of marrying a slut 16 years younger. He’s 40 and she is 24. Needless to say, this does not have a happy ending. The book and stamp details are fascinating.

THE PREMIER. Also known as The President. Not only a study of politics and the political life but also a look at old age and the impact it has not only on the famous but also every man. I was so impressed by this novel that I reread most of it immediately. Made into a 1961 movie starring Jean Gabin (Le President).

   I consider all these novels excellent and there are many more titles that impressed me, too many to list here.

THE TEXICAN. Columbia Pictures, 1966. Audie Murphy, Broderick Crawford, Diana Lorys, Luz Márquez, Aldo Sambrel, Anthony Casas, Gerard Tichy. Director: Lesley Selander.

   I feel as though I liked The Texican far more than I deserved to. Perhaps that’s a strange way to begin a film review, but it seems apt in this case, mainly because, all things considered, this Audie Murphy vehicle has a lot of noticeable flaws. First of all, there’s the score, which fits perfectly in a quirky late 1960s paella Western but which completely overwhelms this movie and feels gratuitously out of place. Then, there’s the dubbing of voices. And not just the Spanish actors, but also that of Broderick Crawford, whose voice was likely dubbed into Spanish and then back into English. Much like the film soundtrack, it seemed out of place.

   What won me over, I confess, was seeing Murphy in a Western role that was far less squeaky-clean than many of the programmers he starred in throughout the 1950s. Not that he always played perfect heroes in the past. But in The Texican, it also seemed as if being physically out of Hollywood and no longer on a studio lot allowed Murphy to portray a world-weary gunfighter in a more convincing manner than he could have when he began his acting career. Sadly, Murphy would pass away five years later in a tragic plane crash in Virginia.

   There’s also Broderick Crawford, whom I mentioned above, who is a superbly intimidating physical presence, even without his trademark growly voice. He portrays a heavy (pun semi-intended) by the name of Luke Starr who has the town of Rimrock under his thumb. That is until Jess Carlin (Murphy) begins to investigate the mysterious death of his brother Roy, a newspaperman who was a thorn in Starr’s side.

   The plot, for a 1960s Western, is rather conventional, but sometimes it’s good to revisit traditional narratives. Not every movie has to deconstruct the Western mythos. From what I have ascertained online, The Texican is a reimagining of Lesley Selander’s 1948 film Panhandle, also co-written by John C. Champion, in which Rod Cameron took top billing. I haven’t seen that one, but it’s now on my list.

   As far as The Texican goes, your cinematic life won’t be lacking if you never end up catching up with it But for simple escapist entertainment that checks all the boxes, you could do a lot worse.

MAUREEN SARSFIELD – Murder at Beechlands. The Rue Morgue Press; trade paperback; 2003. Originally published in the UK as Dinner for None, Nicholson & Watson, 1948. First published in the US as A Party for Lawty, Coward-McCann, 1948.

   I wonder how many of you have ever heard of Maureen Sarsfield before starting to read this review? Not many, I don’t imagine, and yet, on the basis of my reading this one just now, perhaps you should have.

   Not much is known of the author. She wrote two mysteries and one mainstream novel, Gloriana, the latter never published in the US and good luck on finding a copy. For the sake of completeness, her other mystery is:

   Both mysteries feature the same detective, Inspector Lane Perry, but I’m getting ahead of myself. When the folks at Rue Morgue Press, Tom and Enid Schantz, publish a book, their introductions always provide in-depth looks not only at the book itself but also at the author, chatty and informative. Maureen Sarsfield has them stumped, this time. The lady seems to have disappeared without a trace, leaving behind her all sorts of questions, such as, why only the two detective novels and no more?

   Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV happens to have a piece of data the Schantzes don’t include in their introduction to Murder at Beechlands, and that is that the author’s real name was Maureen Pretyman. (On the Rue Morgue website, I see, however, that they do mention that she wrote children’s books under that name, so it isn’t something they don’t know.)

   One of the ways of coming up with a detective novel is to reinvigorate the well-used idea of the isolated mansion house where murder has occurred, with any one of the people in the house capable of being the guilty party. Beechlands is such a mansion, sort of. What it is really isa drab but dowdy hotel in Sussex, and the blizzard that snows in all of the guests (some paying, some not), staff and servants is the same storm that forces Inspector Parry’s car off the road, just in time to have him witness the discovery of a body during an outdoor snowball party.

   Soon enough the phone lines are cut, reducing drastically the chances that the dead man either fell or jumped out of the window on his own, but the burglar alarms are left on, making sure that no one can escape without being noticed. Every so often a recap (of who may have done what to whom, and who was where when) is offered, which was not a bad idea on the author’s part, because that is 99% of what this detective novel is about.

   After a while, in fact, you may even get the idea, if this is your kind of story to begin with, that too much of a good thing is not so good after all.

   But the author’s sure hand on keeping the reader’s eye away from what is essential is also a key ingredient, which is a small inside joke on my part, because as soon as the key to the hotel safe is found, all of the mystery immediately begins to unravel. The characters themselves are minor beings, Lane Perry included, but some of the readers of this story may eventually find themselves becoming wistful about some of them.

   The England in this story is long past, and so is the type of mystery this is. One certainly may wonder why Maureen Sarsfield never wrote more than the two detective novels she did, but on the other hand, the day for detective novels like this one was waning as soon as it was first written. If this is the kind of mystery story you like, however, you will really like this one.

NOTES:   Enid Schantz died in 2011, and while I don’t know the exact date, Rue Morgue Press closed down operations shortly thereafter. The website referred to in this review is no longer active.

   Bill Deeck reviewed this same book earlier on this blog. You can read his comments here.