JAMES W. ZISKIN – Cast the First Stone. Ellie Stone #5. Seventh Street Books, softcover, June 2017.

First Sentence:   Sitting at the head of runway 31R at Idlewild, the jet hummed patiently, its four turbines spinning, almost whining.

   Los Angeles. 1962. Tony Eberle, a boy from upstate New York, is about to appear in his first Hollywood film and small-town reporter, Ellie Stone, has been sent West to do a story on Tony. One problem: Tony is missing, the director is desperate, and the producer has been murdered. Can Ellie solve the murder and find a hopefully innocent Tony?

   Ziskin has truly captured the time and details of the early 1960s. How refreshing to not have cell phones, GPS, the internet, and all the rest of today’s technology. Instead, there are pay phones, telegrams, Thomas Bros. Guide maps, and good old legwork. And twenty-five cent tips; an element that is really is overworked. There are excellent cultural references to the music, actors, and locations of the time, as well as emerging stories of the homosexuality of Rock Hudson, Tony Perkins, and others.

   Ellie is a really well-drawn character; she’s smart, clever, independent, and resourceful. As she is also the author’s narrator, she is also the voice of some great lines— “The same waitress from the day before asked me how my fairy tale had worked out. I shook my head and said it had turned grim.”

    Cast the First Stone has a very good plot with unexpected twists, including the killer one doesn’t predict. What was particularly nice was that there was never an obvious suspect, and the ending was delightful.

       The Ellie Stone series —

1. Styx & Stone (2013)

2. No Stone Unturned (2014)      Nominated for Anthony, Best Paperback Original.
3. Stone Cold Dead (2015)      Nominated for Barry, Best Paperback Original.
4. Heart of Stone (2016)      Nomintated for Anthony & Edgar, Best Paperback Original.

5. Cast the First Stone (2017)
6. A Stone’s Throw (2018)

GEOFFREY NORMAN – Deep End. Morgan Hunt #3. William Morrow, hardcover, 1994. Avon, paperback, April 1995.

   Norman’s tales of the ex-con turned private eye in the Florida Panhandle have gotten some pretty good press. I do wish the publicists would stop the comparisons to John D. MacDonald and Travis McGee, but faint hope of that, I’m afraid.

   Hunt was sent to prison for beating his sister’s husband to death after a long history of her being a battered wife. Released early through intervention of a lawyer for whom he now works occasionally, he obtained a PI’s license with the same lawyer’s help.

   As the story opens, he has nothing in particular going, and is out for a pleasure dive with a casual friend when the friend’s boat is stopped by the Coast Guard for a drug search. The Coast Guard people are arrogant and destructive, and Hunt is barely able to hold his temper in check.

   Though the friend is disposed to let it go, Hunt decides to see if he can cause the Coast Guard some trouble, and find out why a man such as his friend should be targeted. The trail leads to a lawyer that his friend has mortally offended. He resolves the problem to everyone’s satisfaction, but then his friend — who has all sorts of financial problems — takes a quasi-legal job diving for sunken treasure, and then he disappears.

   All right, I’ll admit it — there is a faint flavor of Travis McGee in the way Hunt operates and looks at the world, at least in this book. As I’ve said before, Norman is a very good writer even if he isn’t another John D. He has created appealing charcetrs in Hunt, his Cajun lady Jesse Beaudreaux, and the lawyer Nat Semmes.

   The first-person narrative is excellent, as is the feel for the Florida landscape. The story this time is nothing particularly special, but neither is it offensive. If you like hardboiled fiction, Norman consistently furnishes you with high-quality examples.

       The Morgan Hunt series —

Sweetwater Ranch (1991)
Blue Chipper (1993)
Deep End (1994)
Blue Light (1995)

THE THIRD MAN “One Kind Word.” BBC, UK, 02 October 1959 (episode 1, season 1). Syndicated, US, 03 September 59 (?). Michael Rennie, (Harry Lime), Rupert Davies (Inspector Shillings). Guest cast: Mai Zetterling, George Pastell, Eric Pohlmann. Based on characters in the novel The Third Man by Graham Greene and on the 1949 film of the same title starring Orson Welles. Director: Cliff Owen.

   Before this TV series, there was also a spinoff on British radio called The Adventures of Harry Lime (broadcast in the US as The Lives of Harry Lime), also starring Orson Welles. Produced by Harry Alan Towers, it lasted for one season, 1951-52, and 52 episodes, most readily available to listen to today. Although well remembered by OTR fans, the television series lasted longer, from 1959 to 1965, for a total of 77 30 minute episodes.

   The radio series took place before the film, but the TV series covered Harry Lime’s post-war activities, after (if I understand it correctly) he had become a legitimate import-export dealer in both London and New York. Most of this first episode, however, consists of a flashback to a time in Vienna just after the war, when Harry was still deeply involved in the underground and a huge assortment of black market activities there in the British zone.

   Beginning in London several years after the war, this episode finds Harry being called to a hospital where a woman (Mai Zetterling) is near death after being rescued from the Thames River. It turns out that he had met her twice before, once during the war in Cairo, and the second time in Vienna immediately afterward, when she was involved in a smuggling operation she tried to lead Harry to and have him join up with them.

   She obviously did not lead a happy life, and as the title of the episode suggests, one kind word at the right time, ibe hat she never received, may have made all the difference. This is a very moody piece, with lots of dark shadows, tight closeups and mysterious men hidden in doorways, some with guns.

   Not to mention the trenchcoat Harry seems always to be wearing, and the inevitable zither music, always at the appropriate moment. Many of the 77 episodes are available on the collectors’ market, and if this one’s a good example, I’m going to see about obtaining them.

THE WONDERFUL COUNTRY. United Artists, 1959. Robert Mitchum, Julie London, Gary Merrill, Albert Dekker, Jack Oakie, Charles McGraw, Leroy ‘Satchel’ Paige, Jay Novello, Tom Lea. Based on the novel by Tom Lea. Director: Robert Parrish.

   An American gunman who has lived in Mexico since killing man as a youngster takes an inquisitive trip into Texas, breaks his leg in an accident involving a tumbleweed and his horse, and is almost persuaded to stay. The wife of the lieutenant in charge of a cavalry post is one of the main attractions.

   There is also a good deal of political activity going on, both n the US and Mexico, but the story that’s worth caring about is a personal one. Mitchum is always always effortless in the roles he does on the screen, but he does more acting here than in a dozen other movies he’s been in. He portrays Martin Brady as a slow, cautious, and possibly thick-witted man, but one greatly in demand for the speed of his gun hand, and that’s wher all his troubles lie. In other words, this is strictly a Robert Mitchum picture, but Julie London still somehow manages to make the most of her rather limited role.

PostScript:   Tom Lea, who is said to have a small part, I wouldn’t recognize if I saw him, and I guess I did. Satchel Paige is, of course, the baseball pitching legend, and I never knew he was also in demand by anyone in Hollywood. Charles McGraw, a long-time favorite of mind, had a part too short to suit me, but I was glad to finally out a face on the voice of Jay Novello — better known in this house, at least, as Rocky Jordan’s old fried and enemy, Captain Sam Sabaaya of the Cairo police.

SABAKA. United Artists, 1954. Originally released as The Hindu in 1953. Nino Marcel, Boris Karloff, Lou Krugman, Reginald Denny, June Foray, Peter Coe, Jay Novello. Several sources say that The Hindu was an outgrowth of the “Gunga Ram” episodes originally seen on TV’s Smilin’ Ed’s Gang (later known as Andy’s Gang). Written produced & directed by Frank Ferrin.

   A real cut-and-paste job by a guy who also wrote, produced & directed two episodes of Andy’s Gang featuring this film, and how’s that for street creds?

   Actually Sabaka isn’t all that bad. Not very good either, but… well we’ll get to that later. For now, just to dispense with the preliminaries, the story such as it is, is about young elephant jockey Gunga Ram, played by Nino Marcel, a young actor in the Sabu mold, who gets involved with a cult of fire-devil worshipers. When the baddies kill his sister and her husband he vows to track them down — does some of this anticipate The Searchers? — which he (SPOILER!) manages with the aid of his loyal elephant and pet tiger.

   On the plus side, this was photographed in color, entirely in India amid some splendid scenery and a few rather tacky sets. The costumes splash gaudily across the screen, crowd scenes loom truly epic in scope, and the animals seem to actually interact with the people around them. Someone took care too to make the fake forest fire seem not-quite-so-fakey, and Boris Karloff as a sinister-looking police type delivers his lines with accustomed relish — unlike many cheap foreign films, this one features the actual actors saying their lines.

   Also to its credit, Sabaka offers some obscure bit players doing their thing skillfully as usual. Lou Krugman, Peter Coe (in his 2nd film with Karloff) and Jay Novello aren’t exactly household names, but they pitch right in there along with better-known Reginald Denney and Victor Jory, strutting their stuffy and evil acts respectively.

   But alas, there’s a movie to contend with here, and Sabaka ain’t much. The story moves in fits and starts, pausing frequently for the characters to stand around and explain the plot to each other, and it stops dead still for several minutes whenever a parade goes by.

   Sabaka, however, offers one unique treasure to delight in: a rare live screen appearance by the remarkable June Foray, in a meaty role as the evil high priestess of the Flame Devil. She gets to kill Victor Jory, gloat at the hero, preach violence to her minions and try to immolate an elephant, all with enthusiasm that far outstrips the meager movie around her.

   I can’t really recommend Sabaka, but I have to say I enjoyed it.

MILES BURTON – Dark Is the Tunnel. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1936. First published in the UK by Collins as Death in the Tunnel, hardcover, 1936.Reprinted by Poisoned Pen Press, US, softcover, 2016, under the British title.

   During his thirty-seven-year career, tirelessly prolific British writer Cecil Street published almost as many novels under his Miles Burton pseudonym as he did under his more popular pen name of John Rhode. All but two of his sixty-three Burton titles feature the detective team of Inspector Arnold of Scotland Yard and his friend and amateur criminologist Desmond Merrion.

   These are traditional mysteries with emphasis on deduction rather than police procedure. Emphasis is also on the stories themselves the mechanics of the puzzle — with the result that Street’s characters tend to be sketchily drawn and in many cases two-dimensional. Arnold and Merrion are not exempt; in no book do they come across as much more than puzzle-solving agents, bereft of those human characteristics that make a series sleuth distinctive and memorable.

   Still, Street’s plots are carefully crafted and fairly clued, and offer the reader a variety of settings (many of them English country and seaside locales), as well as interesting back-grounds and themes.

   A good example is Dark Is the Tunnel, which features that ever-popular mix of murder and trains. The tunnel referred to in the title is a railway tunnel outside London-the two-and-a-half-mile Blackdown Tunnel. It is halfway through the Blackdown that the 5:00 p.m. train from Cannon Street unexpectedly comes to a stop. Apparently someone was working on the line, for the engineer saw a blinking red light, signaling him to stop, and then a green light, signaling him to proceed. But the odd thing is, there had been no report of workers in the tunnel.

   Almost simultaneously with the stop, an elderly gentle-man named Sir Wilfred Saxonby is found in his locked compartment, dead of a gunshot wound. A suicide? Perhaps, although nothing in his background suggests such a possibility.

   Arnold and Merrion follow a tangled skein of motives and of clues that include a pair of wallets, a rhododendron bed, and the movements of a garage repair truck over a thirty-six-hour period, and come up with the solution to the mystery. There is little action along the way, and Street’s prose tends to be on the dry and dusty side. But the puzzle is baffling enough to provide armchair detectives with a couple of hours of pleasurable escapist reading.

   Other titles in the same vein include the first Arnold and Merrion case, The Menace on the Downs (1931); The Platinum Cat (1938); Death Visits Downspring (1941), a livelier tale than most of the Burtons, in which Arnold and Merrion solve the wartime mystery of the murdered butler and the missing radio station; and Look Alive (1950), the last Burton novel to appear in the United States, although twenty-one additional titles were published in England between 1950 and 1960.

   Two other Buttons of note are The Secret of High Eldersham (1930), a tale of witchcraft in which Merrion appears alone; and The Hardway Diamonds Mystery, published that same year, which marks Arnold’s likewise solo debut.

         ———
   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.

MY FRIEND IRMA GOES WEST. Paramount Pictures, 1950. John Lund, Marie Wilson, Diana Lynn, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Corinne Calvet, Lloyd Corrigan, Don Porter, Harold Huber, Kenneth Tobey. Screenplay: Cy Howard & Parke Levy. Director: Hal Walker.

   Marie Wilson, who made a career of playing ditsy blondes, will be remembered best for her portrayal of Irma Peterson, the impossibly vacuous New York City secretary with a mind the size of a paper clip. This was the second film to feature Irma, who began her career on radio in 1947, but as usually the case, of all the people who were in the cast on the radio program, only Marie Wilson managed to make the transition into the movies.

   And even though creator Cy Howard was also involved in the movie production, much of the magic her character created in her original form is gone. In fact, Irma is on the screen far less than the up-and-coming comedy team of Martin and Lewis. Incidentally, they also appeared in the first Irma picture as well — their screen debut, no less.

   The plot is simple enough — Dean Martin, who plays the boy friend of Irma’s friend Jane, gets a shot at Hollywood, or so he thinks, and the whole gang goes along. It;s to bad that, unknown to them, the boys in the white suits come along afterward to pick up the “producer” who hired him. (But what about the French actress with eyes for Dean?)

   Irma continued on the radio for four more years, until 1954, but there weren’t any more movies. It’s no wonder why. When writers lose the roots of their own creations, chances of a successful transplant are next to none.

WILL THOMAS – An Awkward Way to Die. Cyrus Barker & Thomas Llewellyn. Minotaur Books, eBook, novelette, 85 pages. August 2017.

First Sentence: The telephone set jangled on the corner of Cyrus Barker’s desk, and we both turned our head to stare at it.

   The personal tobacconist to Private Inquiry Agent Cyrus Barker has died. He was murdered in his shop. His body found in his humidor. It is up to Scotsman Barker, and his Welsh assistant Thomas Llewellyn, to find the killer.

   If one has not previously read Will Thomas, this is a wonderful introduction to his Barker and Llewelyn series.

   Thomas’s dialogue and subtle wry humor are always a pleasure to read— “Someone had died,” I stated. “Aye,” the Guv answered, “It is Vasilos Dimitriadis.” “Your tobacconist?” “The same.” “Isn’t he the one who blends your tobacco for you but won’t say what is in it?” “Not ‘isn’t,’ Mr. Llewelyn. ‘Wasn’t.’ Scotland Yard has required our presence immediately. Come along.”

   With the story set in Victorian England, Thomas cleverly calls out the dismissiveness toward women and prejudice towards foreigners— “It was always easier to blame a foreigner, as if England had no criminal class of its own.” —demonstrating that little has changed over time.

   â€œAn Awkward Way to Die” is a clever story with the solution proving that it’s all about noticing the details. It is a delight to read, as is the entire series.

DAVID HEWSON – The Sacred Cut. Nic Costa #3. Delacorte Press, US, hardcover, December 2005. Macmillan, UK, April 2005.

   There are not many types of mysteries that I do not read, but there are a few. I remember once expressing my disinterest in detective stories with horses in them, which at the time caused a mini-uproar among Dick Francis fans, among others. Well, Dick Francis fans need no longer worry. I’ve read a couple of his books, and they were pretty good. Especially the parts that did not have horses in them.

   At one time I had no interest at all in historical mysteries. Now I read them all of the time. Except for those that take place in ancient Rome. I think that relates somehow to my distaste for Latin in high school. Ixnay, I say.

   I still do not read mysteries in which children are the victims. It’s bad enough to have to read about such incidents in the newspapers almost every day. Mind you that I am not saying that mysteries in which children are the victims should not be written, if they are written with the right motive in mind, but if children are hurt or killed in a work of fiction, it had damn well better be the right motive in mind.

   I seldom read books about serial killers, either, which gets us closer (finally) to the book at hand. The determining factor in this sub-genre is how much blood and gore gets splattered around. Generally speaking, my rule of thumb says to assume that when a book is about a serial killer, the author somehow is going to depend on blood and gore to get his (or her) point across, that this is one nasty guy and somehow he has to be caught. Well, sure. And I’ll pass on it and read something else.

   And so The Sacred Cut had a couple of strikes against it, even before I began, given the front cover of the Advance Reading Copy:

   You recall what I said about ancient Rome? Well, that’s not really the setting here, but in a sense it is. The setting is as contemporary as it can be, given that the various US invasions of Iraq are to blame for the events behind the scene described in the blurb above. But generally speaking, as the blurb suggests, history does play a big part of the story, with the multi-faceted city of Rome being one the most important players.

   There is, in fact, a large ensemble cast of players, and as long as the focus stays on police officers Nic Costa and his partner Gianni Peroni; their superior, Inspector Leo Falcone; the female pathologist Teresa Lupo; the female FBI agent-in-training Emily Deacon; and Laila, the youthful (female) waif refugee from Iraq who witnesses the scene in the blurb above, then all is well.

   Better than merely “well.” This is as intriguing a police procedural as I’ve read in a long time. (Even if you keep in mind that for some reason, I have not read a police procedural in a long time, this is still a true statement, and I stand behind it with no qualifiers at all. (I almost said with no qualification at all, but I thought better of it.))

   I have to tell you, though. After reading page 116, when the killer snaps and his scalpel starts flying and he begins flaying away, along with a handy supply of meat saws and cleavers nearby, I very nearly did not read page 117.

   More of the same, I thought, and I have better things to do. My advice to you, however, is the same I gave myself. Keep on reading. You won’t regret it.

   The killer is largely known; his motives are not. Either way, he’s far from the most interesting factor of the novel. It’s Falcone’s superiors who are; Emily Deacon’s superior who is; it’s the relationship between Costa and Peroni and Lupo and Deacon and (surprisingly) Laila which is. Humorous when it needs to be, sad when it needs to be, philosophical when it needs to be, and real all of the time, this is a long novel which you will wish was even longer.

   What came as a surprise to me, when it was over, as I was happily sitting where I sat, doing my own wishing for more, was the discovery that this is the third in a series of Nic Costro novels, and that the fifth will be published next year. I knew that author David Hewson had written a quite a few other books I’ve seen at Borders, but they all looked like standalones to me. Filled with serial killers and/or grotesque killings.

   It looks like I’ll have to go looking for them.

DAVID HEWSON – The Villa of Mysteries. Nic Costa #2. Delacorte Press, hardcover, January 2005. Dell, paperback, August 2005.

   If you haven’t read David Hewson’s literate and well written thrillers about Rome’s forensic pathologist Teresa Lupo and detective Nic Costa, you are in for a treat.

   The pair debuted in A Season for the Dead, which was filmed with Mira Sorvino, and now they are back in another dark and forbidding outing with echoes of Dan Brown and the Da Vinci code school, true Gothic atmosphere, conspiracy theory, the detective novel, and taut suspense.

   In The Villa of Mysteries the body of a long dead young woman found partially mummified in a bog leads Teresa and Nic into a similar case that has just happened. How the two cases connected and why spins out of control into violence, Italian history, and adds a twist to the serial killer novel with sacrificial murder and the rituals of a secret society involved.

   The finely detailed background, authentic research, a combination of human drama, and a plot that is complex but never static and combined with a taut line of suspense make Hewson one of the best writers to explore this sub-genre of the thriller.

   Even if like me the words serial killer are enough to turn you off most thrillers, this one is truly different, and if you have grown weary of the Da Vinci Code school and the parade of forensic pathologist sleuths, this offers much more than either. The view of police work in Rome, the use of the cities dark corners, and long buried ancient evils is palpable in Hewson’s writing making his books much more than a rehash of what has been done before.

   For superb use of setting and atmosphere, intriguing plots, believable and attractive (and not so attractive) human characters, and fine writing you can’t go wrong with David Hewson or The Villa of Mysteries.

       The Nic Costa series —

1. A Season for the Dead (2003)

2. The Villa of Mysteries (2004)
3. The Sacred Cut (2005)
4. The Lizard’s Bite (2006)
5. The Seventh Sacrament (2007)

6. The Garden of Evil (2008)
7. Dante’s Numbers (2008) aka The Dante Killings
8. The Blue Demon (2010) aka City of Fear
9. The Fallen Angel (2011)