CHRISTOPHER B. BOOTH – Mr. Clackworthy. Chelsea House, hardcover, 1926.

   What I know about Booth is that he was a prolific writer for the pulp magazines in the 1920s and 30s, with just under three and a half pages of entries in Cook and Miller’s Mystery, Detective, and Espionage Fiction. These are only the detective stories. On Bill Contento’s FictionMags site, I also see a smattering of western stories for him, and these are only the tip of the iceberg, as relatively few of the western magazines have been indexed yet.

   According to Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, Booth wrote ten novels under his own name, all from Chelsea House, and eight more as by John Jay Chichester, also all from Chelsea House. Also to his credit is one book on which he shared the writing duties, and that was with Isabel Ostrander, another long-time writer for the pulps.

   To point out that you can not always trust the Internet for factual information, some sites suggest that Christopher B. Booth was a pseudonym for Isabel Ostrander. Not so, even though Ostrander (who died in 1924) really was the lady behind ‘Robert Orr Chipperfield,’ ‘David Fox,’ and ‘Douglas Grant.’

   Chelsea House was the hardcover publishing arm of Street & Smith Publications, which also produced Detective Story Magazine, where most (all?) of the novels were serialized first.

   Or cobbled together out of short stories, as was the book at hand, Mr. Clackworthy. There are nine of them in this volume. Of the book which was the sequel to this one, Mr. Clackworthy, Con Man, I do not know if the same is true. Hubin in CFIV does not say yes, which may very well mean no. (I suspect the answer is yes, however.)

   Enough of the general background, I suppose. To get down to business, you should know first of all (or based on the second title, you may have already deduced) that Mr. Clackworthy was one of those protagonists so often on the wrong side of the law in the 1920s, a con man. I imagine someone could write a thesis if not a dissertation on such individuals in the world of crime fiction.

   Here is an off-the-wall question. What character in what novel(s) would qualify as the last in the line of such con men, preying mostly on the rich and unscrupulous, but not necessarily giving to the poor, of which Mr. Clackworthy does not make a general practice?

   I am not an expert, so nor will I even attempt to list any of the other characters who would fall into the category. If you can help, please do, otherwise we shall leave the matter to someone who needs a thesis if not a dissertation on their academic record. (Of course such a someone then would be also obliged to put into perspective WHY con men who preyed mostly on the rich and unscrupulous were so prevalent in the 1920s. One can guess, though.)

   As a start to such a project, it belatedly occurs to me, if you will allow such an interjection such as this, may be Yesterday’s Faces #3 : From the Dark Side, by Robert Sampson (Bowling Green Press, 1987), a rollicking account of all sorts of bad guys who inhabited the pages of the pulp magazines.

   And by the way, before it slips my mind and we head off into the review itself, I would like to point out that in the pages of Detective Story Magazine Mr. Clackworthy met another of that magazine’s regular characters, Johnston McCulley’s lisping pickpocket, Thubway Tham, on at least one occasion: “Mr. Clackworthy and Thubway Tham” (Detective Story Magazine, March 4, 1922). Even though Cook-Miller suggests that only Booth was the author, this may be the first team-up on record between two characters created first by two separate authors. (Does one count, however, Arsene Lupin Versus Holmlock Shears, by Maurice LeBlanc, Richards, 1909? One must posit some ground rules, one supposes.)

   Further investigation into the subject reveals another story of interest: “Thubway Tham and Mr. Clackworthy,” by Johnston McCulley (Detective Story Magazine, February 18, 1922, or two issues earlier). You can read this story in the recent edition of Tham thtories from Wildside Press, Tales of Thubway Tham, although in that edition the story is called “Thubway Tham Meets Mr. Clackworthy.”

   One source does suggest that the team-up was a three-part serial. This may be so, but if indeed it is, I have not yet uncovered a third tale in the triptych, and to this date, the matter rests, for now.

   Let’s get on with the review. The best way to do that, I decided the moment I started reading it, is to quote the opening paragraphs, right from the beginning:

   All con men naturally work on the concept of greed, as many a Nigerian knows full well today. Booth’s prose style is not all that dissimilar to that of his contemporary (at the time), Erle Stanley Gardner, whose Lester Leith stories for Detective Fiction Weekly started out in very much the same fashion.

   Most of Mr. Clackworthy’s victims well deserve it — greedy bankers, swindlers, unscrupulous investors, and so on – getting their comeuppance in a rough and tumble sort of justice, in a naive, twinkle-in-the-eye sort of way, but even innocent banks sometimes fell afoul of his various and sundry plots and plans. (But were banks truly innocent of wrongdoing in the 1920s? Perhaps Booth’s readers did not really think so.)

   In any case, these stories were written, read and enjoyed in a different time and place. If you’re read this far into the review and other commentary, however, I see no reason why you shouldn’t read and enjoy them, too, even if no one is writing them like this any more.

UPDATE #1: Thanks to the eagle-eyed Monte Herridge, one of the nine stories has been identified so far. It is “Mr. Clackworthy Tells the Truth,” from the October 19, 1920, issue of Detective Story Magazine, the cover of which is shown here to the right. If and when others are identified, you will read about it here first.

   This particular story, amazingly enough, can be read online. (Follow the link.) What is interesting is that some editing was done when the story appeared in book form. Small descriptive sentences and paragraphs were removed. If you want to read the complete text, in other words, you have to go back to the primary source.

UPDATE #2. Very early on this blog, some 10 years ago now, I posted the results of my continued research into the stories in the three collections of Clackworthy stories, identifying as many as possible of the stories contained in each. (The third collection was published by Wildside Press in 2006.) You can read the post here.

FURY AT FURNACE CREEK Fox, 1948. Victor Mature, Coleen Gray, Glen Langan, Albert Dekker, Reginald Gardiner. Written by Charles G. Booth, Winston Miller and David Garth. Directed by H. Bruce Humberstone.

   An unexpected delight from a team of generally undistinguished writers and a director best known for his work on Charlie Chan and Tarzan movies.

   FaFC starts out with both barrels blazing, as a mysterious order from General Blackwell reroutes a cavalry patrol, leading to the destruction of a nearby fort by hostile Indians in a well-staged melee. Fast-forward a few months, there is now a boom town near the site of the massacre, General Blackwell has died in disgrace, and his wastrel son (Mature) hits town, out to prove his dad never gave the disastrous order.

What follows is more than an hour of fast-paced action, mystery, and noirish cat-and-mouse as Mature maneuvers with and against the ruthless town boss (Albert Dekker), plots with a nervous witness marked for a quick back-shooting (Reginald Gardiner, very effective in an off-beat part for him), and faces down Dekker’s hired nasties (Roy Roberts, Fred Clark, Charles Stevens) — and then there’s Jay Silverheels as a murderous renegade circling around the scene……

   I don’t want to over-praise this thing, so let me hasten to add that Furnace Creek has none of the emotional resonance of a John Ford movie. Visually however, it’s right up there with Stagecoach and My Darling Clementine, particularly in a nighttime chase through the dark back alleys of a seamy mining town, a horseback pursuit across the plains, and a fine shoot-out in the ruins of the fort where it all started, as the wounded Mature crawls after the bad guys like a limping dog looking for the man that shot his paw.

   Two other things I want to mention: Coleen Gray, an actress who went from Red River to The Leech Woman, with stops along the way for Kiss of Death and The Killing, does remarkable work as the feisty heroine, and Charles Kemper (Uncle Clegg in Wagonmaster) contributes enjoyable comic relief as a guy who carries a tree trunk around with him.

   And finally, I just love the way gunshots always sounded in the old Fox Westerns; they had a flat, authoritative bang that was somehow evocative of danger and sudden death. Listen for them.

SZU-YEN LIN “The Miracle on Christmas Eve.” First English translation published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, May 2016. Reprinted in The Realm of the Impossible, edited by John Pugmire & Brian Skupin (CreateSpace, softcover, August 2017).

   The Realm of the Impossible is an anthology of — guess what? — locked room mysteries and other tales of impossible crimes, both new and old, written by authors from all over the world. If you’re a fan of the genre, as I am, if you don’t have have copy already, don’t hesitate. Put it on your Christmas wish list right now.

   Szu-Yen Lin is a young author from Taiwan with one detective novel already translated into English, that being Death in the House of Rain (2017), which I have not seen, but from the description, is filled with impossible crimes of all kinds.

   In this particular story, though, a father helps his young son stand up to the ridicule of his friends who do not believe in Santa Claus. Inviting them all for a Christmas Eve sleepover, they close up the boy’s room by sealing up the door and single window. Then all the boys and the father go to sleep on mats in the narrow hall just outside the locked door of the bedroom.

   They are awakened to the sound of music in the room. Entering the sealed room, to their wondering eyes they find: a Christmas tree, a dozen gifts in wrapping paper and a music box still playing. Even the non-believers are now convinced that, yes, indeed, there is a Santa Claus!

   While there certainly is no crime involved in this story, it certainly is a mystery story. One could only wish that the spooky magic of this cleverly contrived tale did not disappear as quickly as amateur detective Ruoping Lin comes up with his explanation, but that is totally mitigated by the secondary story of the relationship between a father and a son he loves (or a daughter, equally well).

   There is no instruction manual that hospitals give out to new fathers, but if you know of any such, this story will serve that purpose like few others I can think of.

   I’m going to take a two or three day break from the blog. Back soon!

   Have a great holiday everyone!!

TONY ROME. Twentieth Century Fox, 1967. Frank Sinatra, Jill St. John, Richard Conte, Gena Rowlands, Simon Oakland, Jeffrey Lynn, Lloyd Bochner. Screenplay: Richard L. Breen, based on the novel Miami Mayhem by Marvin H. Albert writing as Anthony Rome (Pocket, 1960). Director: Gordon Douglas.

   Tony Rome is sunshine noir at its best. Although the plot is somewhat (I suspect deliberately) muddled and convoluted, the film works extremely well in portraying a private investigator doing his best to maintain his own personal standard of decency in a corrupt society where outward appearances obscure deception and internal turmoil.

   Frank Sinatra portrays the titular Anthony “Tony” Rome, a former Miami cop who is now working as a PI. And like many private investigators portrayed in fiction and on screen, he’s very much a loner. Aside from his bookie and a police lieutenant still on the force (Richard Conte), Rome doesn’t seem to have many stable relationships in his life.

   But that’s not to say that he couldn’t socialize more if he really wanted to. Enter Ann Archer (Jill St. John), a flirtatious divorcee living in Miami Beach, who ends up providing Rome with extensive information about a gangster who may be responsible for the death of Ralph Turpin (Robert J. Wilke), his former partner.

   Rome meets Ann for the first time after doing a big favor for Turpin, now working in hotel security. He ends up taking a girl who passed out in a hotel room home to her father. As it turns out she’s the daughter of a wealthy construction magnate married to a woman (Gena Rowlands) who is guarding a deep secret about her previous marriage. And Ann Archer is at the house, having slept there the night before.

   If it sounds somewhat confused, that’s because in many ways it is. But confusing doesn’t mean that there isn’t any clarity in the movie. Because at root, Tony Rome isn’t about plot as it is about as character and atmosphere. The viewer goes along on a journey with Rome as he travels through a city and a society reeking with corruption, deception, and greed. He’s not a white knight as much as he is a flawed knight. one who is tasked with battling modern society’s proverbial dragons.

JOE R. LANSDALE – Mucho Mojo. Hap Collins & Leonard Pine #1 [actually #2; see below]. CD Publications, hardcover, limited edition, 1994. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1994; paperback, 1995. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, softcover, 2009. TV: Reportedly serves as the basis for Season Two of the Hap and Leonard television series (Sundance, 2016-2018).

   Lansdale is well-known (at least to Bill Crider and me), but primarily for horror, in which field he’s a multiple award winner. This is his first “traditional” crime novel to my knowledge. Mysterious thinks it’s a breakout.

   Hap Collins is white, fortyish, and working in the rose fields of East Texas. Leonard Pine is black, the same, and gay (but not very cheerful) on top of it. They’re tighter than ticks on the proverbial redbone, and Leonard has a bad leg gotten saving Hap’s life during some shady doings.

   They are sort of drifting along when Leonard’s Uncle Chester dies and leaves him a hundred grand and his house, which changes a lot of things. They discover that Uncle Chester was going senile before he died, and had hinted to the local police that somebody was murdering black children. Then, while putting his house in shape, they dicover a bunch of kiddie porn magazines and dig up the bones of a 10-year-old child buried in a box under the floor.

   The police think Uncle Chester did it, but Leonard doesn’t believe it, so he and Hap begin to dig deeper. So to speak.

   This is an entertaining book, and Hap and Leonard are interesting and refreshingly different characters. I don’t know that they’re all that believable; 40-year-old field hands with as much on the ball as our dynamic duo strike me as more than a little unlikely, but hey it;s a story, right?

   And a good one, too. Lansdale knows how to spin a yarn. He’s got a good East Texas “voice”, and Hap narrates the story effectively, with a fair share of quips and country sayin’s. There’s a lot of dialogue, and not much of the brooding atmosphere you might expect from Lansdale. It won’t be everybody’s cup of tea, but you won’t know if it’s yours ’til you try a sip.

The Hap Collins & Leonard Pine series —

1. Savage Season (1990)

2. Mucho Mojo (1994)
3. The Two-Bear Mambo (1995)
4. Bad Chili (1997)
5. Rumble Tumble (1998)

6. Captains Outrageous (2001)
7. Vanilla Ride (2009)
8. Devil Red (2011)
9. Honky Tonk Samurai (2016)
10. Rusty Puppy (2017)
11. Jackrabbit Smile (2018)

Bibliographic Notes: Unknown to Barry, who described this as the first in the series, there was one that had come out four years earlier, that being Savage Season, published by Mark V. Ziesing, a small press publisher based in California. Barry also seems to have assumed that the first edition of Mucho Mojo was done by Mysterious Press, but another small outfit called CD Publications, based in Baltimore, gets credit for that.

THE UNDERWORLD STORY. United Artists, 1950. Dan Duryea, Herbert Marshall, Gale Storm, Howard Da Silva, Michael O’Shea, Mary Anderson, Harry Shannon, Roland Winters. Based on a story by Craig Rice. Director: Cy Endfield.

   There are two good reasons to watch this not-quite-noir crime film, and one of the them is Dan Duryea. As reporter Mike Reese, as brash as they come, he is bounced and then blacklisted from all of the big city newspapers. Taking a loan from mobster Howard Da Silva, the second reason to see this movie, he fast-talks his way into being a partner in a small weekly paper out in the suburbs, one owned by Gale Storm’s character.

   She hesitates, but you know Dan Duryea, or you probably do. She’s o match for his affable gift of gab, while all he while you can tell what he’s thinking: what it is that’s in it for him? When a black maid is accused of killing her employer, the wife of the son of one of the owners of one of the big city newspapers, he sees his chance to make a name for himself, and grabs it. No moss under this guy’s feet.

   Duryea’s character will keep you off balance all of the way through the movie, Just when, you wonder, will he cross all the way over and be “good”? In spite of the title, this is more of a murder mystery than it is a gangster film — but not a detective story, not at least as far as the viewer is concerned, since we know whodunit almost as son as he’s done it. It takes a while for Duryea and Storm to figure it out, though.

   And in case you’re wondering, there is a trace of romance in the air, but not much more than a trace. Every time you think the story’s going there, Duryea does something that simply snaps Gale Storm’s head back. Literally.

JULES AND JIM. Cinédis, France, 1962; originally released as Jules et Jim. Janus Films, US, 1962; subtitled. Jeanne Moreau, Oscar Werner (Jules), Henri Serre (Jim), Vanna Urbino, Serge Rezvani, Anny Nelsen. Screenplay: François Truffaut, based on the novel by Henri-Pierre Roché. Director: François Truffaut.

   A film seen recently for the first time in many Years: Jules and Jim, Francois Truffaut’s achingly elegiac look at Love and Friendship, and a film which vividly recalls for me some very dear and painful memories, which explains why a jaded, alopecic, former Cop should find himself blinking back tears once again to watch an old movie.

   Looking at the film objectively, I could note that some of the stylings that were daring and innovative when Truffaut did them in ’61 have become standard and even cliché by now, but I’d have to say they’ve never been better or more appropriately used since he first strutted them out. In particular, his monotone narrator is positively heart-rending at times. Of course the casting is a once-in-a-lifetime ensemble (whatever happened to Henri Serre?) and every bit player and future star gets shown off to marvelous advantage.

   Yet even I must admit there are one or two moments that don’t really work and –alas! — they are crucial moments indeed. They come, fortunately, too late to actually ruin the movie, but they vitiate its effectiveness more than a bit. So I’d have to put this one in a class with fine films like The Tall T or Johnny Guitar, a film of truly remarkable depth and feeling, if not of unalloyed brilliance.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – Castle Skull. Henri Bencolin #2. Harper & Brothers, hardcover, 1931. Reprint editions include: Pocket #448, paperback, 1947. Berkley G-412, paperback, 1959; F960, paperback, 1964. Zebra, paperback, 1987.

   Carr’s writing career began with a sports column in a local newspaper at the age of fourteen. During his prep-school years at the Hill School, he was already writing locked-room stories and an Oppenheim-style serial. At Haverford College he worked on the college’s literary magazine, The Havelfordian, and it was here that the first stories about his Parisian magistrate-detective, Henri Bencolin, appeared.

   When he wrote his first full-fledged mystery novel, it was only natural that he should use Bencolin as his detective. Bencolin’s debut in book form was in It Walks by Night (1930), and three other books in the series followed within the next two years.

   Castle Skull is the second of Bencolin’s recorded exploits. The setting is Schloss Schadel, a castle on the Rhine River near the city of Coblenz. The castle had been the home of the world-famous magician Maleger. Some time before the start of the story, Maleger had disappeared from a railway carriage that was under constant observation; his drowned body later turned up in the Rhine.

   In his will he left Castle Skull jointly to his two friends, the actor Myron Alison and the financier Jerome D’Aunay. Now Alison has been murdered in spectacular fashion: “The man’s vitality was apparently enormous. He had been shot three times in the breast, but he was alive when the murderer poured kerosene on him and ignited it. He actually got to his feet and staggered out in flames across the battlements before he fell.”

   Bencolin, on vacation from his official duties, is persuaded by D’Aunay to investigate Alison’s death. He is accompanied on the case by his “Watson,” an American writer named Jeff Marle, who narrates the story.

   This is the young Carr in full flight: a meticulously constructed formal detective story cloaked in extravagant melodrama and exuberantly macabre trappings, peopled by doom-laden characters. The relative smoothness and restraint of Carr’s later work is little in evidence, but there is no denying the power and fascination of the story.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

HOT ROD RUMBLE. Allied Artists, 1957. Leigh Snowden, Richard Hartunian, Wright King, Joey Forman, Brett Halsey. Director: Leslie H. Martinson.

   This one’s a surprisingly entertaining oddity, a juvenile delinquent exploitation film featuring a lead actor who never made another film before or since: Richard Hartunian, an effective method actor with more than a passing similarity to Marlon Brando. He portrays Big Artie, a hot-tempered mechanic affiliated with the Road Devils, a local racing outfit. He’s got his mind dead set on local beauty Terri (Leigh Snowden, who portrayed a character named Cheesecake in Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly) and is more than willing to throw a punch or two to get his girl back after she tells him it’s over.

   So it’s no surprise that when Terri and another guy get run off the road, all the attention turns to Arnie. Even his parents seem to think he’s capable of such reckless and deadly behavior. With nowhere to turn, Arnie seeks the assistance of fellow Road Devil, Ray Johnson (Wright King). Arnie does not realize that it was Ray who was responsible for running Terri and her friend Hank off the road. Terri survives the incident, but Hank does not. This makes Arnie the primary target of his fellow Road Devils. They are ready to get their revenge.

   At times the film feels more like a teenage melodrama than a crime film. But there’s enough grittiness and small town teenage angst as well as the obligatory final car race to make Hot Rod Rumble a worthwhile movie to seek out. Add to that the exceptional jazz score by Alexander “Sandy” Courage (you can listen to the main theme here), and you’ve got yourself a movie that is as much a time capsule as a work of commercial popular entertainment. Not great by any stretch of the imagination, but better than you might expect, and a movie that deserves a proper commercial DVD release.