PHILIP KERR – If The Dead Rise Not. Putnam, hardcover, March 2010. Penguin, trade paperback, April 2011. First published in the UK by Quercus, hardcover, 2009.

   Combine the worlds of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene with that of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald and you begin to have something that resembles the world of Philip Kerr’s Berlin private eye and ex-cop Bernie Gunther, whose mean streets are those of Nazi Germany and the Post War world.

   Bernie made his debut in what by now is the almost legendary Berlin Noir trilogy (March Violets, The Pale Criminal, The German Requiem) about a private eye in Nazi era Berlin. While Bernie’s voice echoes that classical American eye in the tradition of Philip Marlowe or Lew Archer, Bernie is something more than a lonely knight in a violent broken world, his mean streets meaner and more dangerous, and it is not always enough to be a good man; at times it is even a disadvantage. He is a complex man, surviving in a complex world, his muscular prose reflecting a morally gray world and a layer of sophistication and depth rare to the thriller, certainly these days.

   Bernie is too self-aware for his own good, and his passion for justice can be inconvenient to say the least in the world and time he inhabits. Cynical one liners and a pure heart won’t even buy a cup of coffee, much less keep him alive.

   The book takes its title from a passage in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer: “…if the dead rise not again? Let us eat, and drink, for tomorrow we shall die.”

   It is 1934 and in Berlin the Nazis have taken hold of both government and the public imagination. Only a handful of people dare to speak of the madness to come, and they are too dangerous to be around. Berlin is readying itself for the 1936 Olympiad, the centerpiece of Adolph Hitler’s great vision of the Third Reich, and with Avery Brundage, head of the Olympic committee, there is a conspiracy of silence about the parties anti-Semitism designed to make sure the games are well attended and not boycotted.

   A Jewish boxer has been murdered, and Bernie is encouraged to quietly find the culprit before it becomes complicated, which leads him to American crime figure Max Reles, currently in Berlin. He also meets an attractive American journalist of Jewish heritage, Mrs. Noreen Charalambides:

   It proves a messy murder case and an even messier conclusion and Bernie has to let the killer go in order to save Noreen. Max Reles walks and Noreen gets out of Germany safely and Reles promises to keep her that way in return for Bernie’s silence and Bernie has to live with how and why.

   Nothing subtle about Max Reles.

   Twenty years later Bernie is in Havana, Cuba. His welcome wore out in Buenos Aires, and Havana is a good place to be. Among other things Bernie ended up in the SS in Russia through no fault of his own, and if not a war criminal isn’t entirely welcome either. Fidel Castro is in prison, Hemingway is in his last days of greatness, Batista, with CIA help, has just seized power, and the American mob has a strangle hold on the gaming industry burgeoning there, and Bernie Gunther isn’t the sort to settle in too peacefully no matter how much he tries. When Noreen Charalambides shows up and old feelings are stirred it gets complicated because Max Reles is back as well. Max Reles who murdered a good man in 1934 Berlin, and threatened Noreen’s life to buy Bernie’s silence …

   Bernie’s victory, or sorts, makes for a suspenseful and dark novel that relishes that ‘poetry of violence’ and an authentic voice from the darkness.

   If you want something that echoes the stark beauty and dark revelation of the noir style, you won’t do better than Philip Kerr or Bernie Gunther. This was his sixth outing, and there were more to follow, and you could do much worse than to find and read all of them. I can say with conviction I haven’t read a hard-boiled novel that effected me this much since James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss, certainly not in this century. Philip Kerr and Bernie Gunther are both someone lovers of the hard-boiled school of mystery fiction should get to know.

NAVY SPY. Grand National Pictures, 1937. Conrad Nagel, Eleanor Hunt, Judith Allen, Jack Doyle, Phil Dunham, Don Barclay, Howard Lang, Crauford Kent. Directors: Crane Wilbur & Joseph H. Lewis (the latter uncredited and unconfirmed, according to IMDb).

   According to the American Film Institute, Joseph Lewis was the director of retakes. I haven’t checked it out any further than this, so if anyone knows more, you can tell me about it in the comments. The reason it is worth mentioning is that if so, this movie would be Lewis’s first director’s role.

   But it isn’t much of one, I have to admit, the movie, I mean. I enjoyed Yellow Cargo, the first of four low-budget films starring Conrad Nagel and Eleanor Hunt as a pair of federal agents.

   In that one their task was bringing to justice an illegal immigrant racket, and reviewed here, but while the two stars do their best, there’s not much they can do with a story as weak as this one is, the second in the series.

   Which has to do with a scientist with a formula for a new advanced fuel, for airplanes, I believe, who is lured off a ship by a femme fatale and straight into the arms of a gang of bad guys. Problem is, the formula exists only in the head of the kidnapped scientist, and nothing is going to make him talk. And what kind of security would allow a note from the lady to be brought in, and the doctor be allowed to walk right off the boat?

   Part of what was intended to make this amusing and fun to watch is that Nagel’s character is determined to keep Hunt’s character off the case, simply because she’s female. Bobbie Reynolds is not a woman to be denied easily, however, and at every stage of the way, she’s there before Alan Reynolds (Nagel) or just behind him, ready and able to lend more than moral support.

   But otherwise the chase is dull and uninteresting, and not even the witty byplay between the two leads can make a souffle out of nothing more than good wishes.

BRIAN STABLEFORD – The Werewolves of London. Carrol & Graf, hardcover, 1992; paperback, 1994. First published by Simon & Schuster, UK, hardcover, 1990.

   I don’t read too much fantasy that I like any more, and much less that impresses me. This did. Stableford has been around awhile, and wrote a good bit of stuff I liked for Ace and DAW many years back, but this is quite different from his early work.

      It’s set in 19th century London, in the main, and involves the Werewolves of London, demons, angels, the Sphinx, aspiring saints, and any number of other interesting characters. It really isn’t a werewolf story, though. It deals with the conflict of evolution and creationism, how we look at the world, and what it’s really all about, Alfie.

   It presents a view of creation that’s a bit different and wholly intriguing. The characters are quite believable, even the non-human ones, and Stableford tells his story in a sometimes leisurely, sometimes rapid-paced, always entertaining way.

   It’s a big book, and I was sorry to see it end. Though the first in a trilogy, it‘s quite self contained. Unless period fiction and/or fantasy really turn you off, you ought to give this one a try. It’s good.

        The David Lydyard (Werewolves) trilogy —

The Werewolves of London. Simon & Schuster, UK, July 1990.
The Angel of Pain. Simon & Schuster, UK, August 1991.
The Carnival of Destruction. Pocke, UK, October 1994.

EDWARD RONNS – Catspaw Ordeal. Gold Medal #133, paperback original, November 1950. Also: Gold Medal, #766, May 1958.

   This was the third book Ronns had published by Gold Medal, the two earlier ones being Million Dollar Murder (Gold Medal #110) and State Department Murders (Gold Medal #117), all three published right after each other in 1950. The first Gold Medal to appear under his own name, Edward S. Aarons, Escape to Love, appeared in 1952, and the first in his long series of Sam Durell spy novels was Assignment to Disaster, came out in 1955.

   There’s no spy activity in Catspaw Ordeal, however. It takes place in the wealthy southeastern corner of Connecticut, popularly know as the state’s Gold Coast, where Danny Archer, as in all true noir novels, finds himself in a perfect storm of double (or triple) disasters, none of which (in this case) are his fault. It’s only how he decides to handle them that makes this noir, where he finds himself off stride from the first event, making him an easier victim to the others.

   And causing him to make bad decisions. After an argument with his wife who then leaves him, two people from his past unexpectedly enter his life again, one of them the girl he was in love with at one time, the other a good friend whom he presumed dead after an attack at sea during World War II. Turns out that he’s alive, and not very much of a friend any more.

   Quite a few bodies turn up in this book, and Archer is hard pressed to stay ahead of the police, who are hard on his heels throughout most of the tale. By the time the ordeal is over, Archer is more than happy to settle down in peaceful but dull suburban life. His restlessness is cured for good.

   Even though Connecticut is far removed from the exotic places that Sam Durell’s adventures took him later, the descriptions of the sights and sounds of suburban life are picturesque and very effective. What doesn’t work out quite as well is the mystery itself, as even with most of the threats against having been nullified, the identity of the primary killer remains to be solved.

   Ronns puts it off as long as possible (otherwise of course the book would be a lot shorter than it is) but it’s not done as smoothy as it should have been. The book is told in the third person, but solely from Archer’s point of view, and given that Archer knew what we the reader aren’t told at the beginning, it seems as though he should have known the killer a lot earlier than he says he did.

PHANTOM LADY. Universal Pictures, 1944. Franchot Tone, Ella Raines, Alan Curtis, Aurora Miranda, Thomas Gomez, Fay Helm, Elisha Cook Jr. Based on the novel by Cornell Woolrich. Director: Robert Siodmak.

   [Phantom Lady, based on the novel by Cornell Woolrich] is a handsomely staged but wildly improbable tale of an architect (Curtis) who is wrongly convicted of his wife’s murder and of his Girl Friday’s attempt to track down the real murderer.

   Curtis is, as usual, bland, and G .F. Raines overacts (something of a feat for someone with very modest acting talents), but Tone has some good scenes as a charmer with a flaw and Elisha Cook’s murder is well-staged. At its best, Woolrich’s world in which shadows seem to pulsate with threats and menace is splendidly captured in this uneven film with its uneasy blend of glibness and implicit peril. Woolrich can’t be beat for texture and atmosphere, and Siodmak and his team have managed to get some of that on film.

  ELIZABETH DALY – Death and Letters. Dell/Murder Ink #21, paperback, 1981. First edition: Rinehart & Co., hardcover, 1950. Also: Mercury Mystery #165, digest-sized paperback, 1951. Berkley, paperback, 1963.

   It’s nice to see some of Elizabeth Daly’s work back in print again. Her books are increasingly hard to find in used paperback shops, and the demand for them is high, as Carol Brener, the proprietress of Murder Ink [in part responsible for this line of paperbacks], most assuredly well knows.

   And I’ve known it, too, for quite some time now, and yet I’ve never gotten around to reading anything by her until now. This book, written toward the end of Miss Daly’s writing career, was my introduction to Henry Gamadge, and do you know, from reading it I’m still not sure what it is exactly that he does for a living. Private eye work, apparently, but dealing primarily with bookish matters, perhaps?

   Which certainly doubles the appeal to mystery fans, most of whom are collectors and savers of one sort or another.

   In this case, a message via a crossword puzzle, and a Gamadgian response, with a little help from G.K. Chesterton, help spring a lady whose family has shut her up in her room as mentally incompetent. It seems she suspects something wrong about her husband’s “suicide.” One of the family knows for a fact there was. The others are merely afraid of scandal.

   At first Daly’s storytelling methods seem rather dry and aloof, more British in tone than American, but the effect begins to diminish as the characters and the proceedings start to sort themselves out a bit. The quiet little climax/resolution only serves to reinforce the obvious statement. Here is the ultimate antithesis of the Mickey Spillane school of writing!

“THE BEARDED LADY.” An episode of Hetty Wainthropp Investigates. BBC, UK, 3 January 1996. (Season 1, Episode 1.) Patricia Routledge, Derek Benfield, Dominic Monaghan, John Graham-Davies. Based on characters in the book Missing Persons by David Cook (also co-screenwriter). Director: John Glenister.

   The book Missing Persons itself had been adapted for television nearly six years earlier (30 May 1990), also starring Patricia Routledge in the leading role. It was the pilot for a proposed series by Yorkshore TV, but the project went nowhere until it was finally picked up by the BBC in this series and later shown in the US on PBS.

   This first episode begins with Hetty Wainthropp waking up on her 60th birthday, married but with no pension of her own, and two years short of qualifying for one. She decides on the spot to go to work, and while on the job as a postal clerk, she finds herself intrigued by the mysterious death of a local homeless woman.

   Assisting her (reluctantly) is her elderly husband (Derek Benfield) and 17-year-old Geoffrey Shawcross (Dominic Monaghan), whose street smartness gives the new private detective agency a dimension that Hetty herself, with an inborn curiosity and a knack for putting details together, soon realizes she is lacking.

   The characters are wonderful, especially Benfield’s puzzled reaction to his wife’s new vocation. He is at first vehemently opposed, but he gradually (and grudgingly) finds himself assisting, while his wife and their new ward go off detecting, using buses and the occasional motor scooter for transportation.

   As for Hetty herself, she’s what I can only call a middle class Miss Marple, and quite active for her age. Her environment is that of a midsize city, crowded and a bit rundown, with plenty of ethnic minorities (definitely unlike Midsomer Murders). No scenic villages or large manors for her. What ever the opposite of the word “posh” is, that’s the word I think would fit best.

   While the detection is fun (and more than a little dangerous), this first case is, in all honesty, not very interesting (something to do with mollusks) and worse, more than a little muddled. The ending came much too abruptly, before all of the loose ends had been tied up, or so I thought. Some of the accents were tough to follow, though, so I admit that I may have missed something.

   But it is the characters that make or break shows like this one. It went on from this first episode for four seasons, so the original viewing audience seems to have become attached to them fairly quickly. All quibbles aside, both major and minor, I’m willing to watch more of them myself.

FEMALE ON THE BEACH. Universal International, 1955. Joan Crawford, Jeff Chandler, Jan Sterling, Cecil Kellaway, Natalie Schafer. Director: Joseph Pevney.

   There’s that infamous scene in The Hustler (1961), the one anybody who’s ever watched the film will not easily forget. Where Piper Laurie’s character uses lipstick to scribble on a bathroom mirror, following a seedy dalliance with George C. Scott’s character and just prior to taking her own life. The words: PERVERTED. TWISTED. CRIPPLED. Those words speak volumes about the lurid, seedy, sad atmosphere that permeates Robert Rossen’s masterpiece.

   And that’s the same type of environment that seems to exist in the 1955 thriller, Female on the Beach, in which a (miscast) thirty-something Jeff Chandler portrays Drummond Hall, a rather uninspiring character who falls for, and marries, a fifty-year old sauced up widow, Lynn Markham (Joan Crawford). For most of the movie, we are led to believe that “Drummy” (Chandler) murdered the previous tenant of Markham’s beach house and that he ultimately has his eye on Markham’s life as well. Notice that I say: “seems to.” That’s because the story, the characters, and the atmosphere never quite gel into a coherent, believable cinematic whole.

   But it’s not for a lack of trying.

   In fact, the movie tries too hard to be something that it’s not: a compellingly watchable murder mystery. And don’t let the black and white cinematography fool you, for it’s not noir, either. Not remotely. Instead, it’s a middling thriller with some good moments, over the top acting from Joan Crawford, and a lurid, psychologically twisted claustrophobic Orange County, California beach house setting. I guess that’s worth something.

   The push-and-pull, cat-and-mouse love affair between Chandler and Crawford is alternately bizarre, off-putting, and unintentionally hilarious. Check that: maybe it was intended to be funny, or at least tongue firmly in cheek. Make no mistake: Female on the Beach is a strange movie about strange characters doing strange things on the beach. But ultimately, despite Chandler’s best efforts at portraying a character quite different from those larger than life heroes he often portrays, it’s not a particularly engrossing film.

CAROLYN WELLS – The Clue of the Eyelash. J. B. Lippincott, 1933; A. L. Burt, reprint hardcover, no date; Triangle, reprint hardcover, 1938.

   Fleming Stone, called the “ubiquitous” by the publisher most bafflingly, but maybe they mean he has appeared in many books, is dining at the home of Wiley Vane, dilettante collector of old coins, rare books, etc, along with a number of other guests. One of his relatives finds Vane shot in the head, but dinner goes on nonetheless. Wouldn’t want to announce his murder and ruin a social event, would we?

   The only clue Stone has is a false eyelash, an item that he is not acquainted with, but that he and we become all too familiar with as the novel progresses, if that is what it does indeed do.

   The murderer was evident early on to this reviewer, who doesn’t spot many, although the motive wasn’t transparent. But I fancy my incorrect theory of why the crime was committed a lot more than I do the murderer’s alleged reason.

   A tedious investigation by Wells’s Fleming Stone, but interesting in that Stone is twice given strychnine by the murderer and survives. Stone, knowing that the murderer would try to dispose of him in this fashion — how he knows this is never provided to the reader and why he takes the poison is another secret — has his doctor’s word that a tumbler of “strong spirits” taken shortly before the strychnine will make the poison ineffective.

   The author says this is a fact, and I’m not going to experiment to disprove it. The murderer tries to poison Stone again, in a triumph of hope over experience, but Stone once more has taken strong drink rather than demur at taking the poison.
One does wonder who the human guinea pigs were who tested this counteragent and what might have been the fate of those who drank only, say, a half tumbler.

   A novel for those who will read anything.

LAWRENCE KINSLEY – The Red-Light Victim. Tower, paperback original, 1981.

   The title and the cover design (multiple shots of a half-nude dancer) are a trifle misleading. Yes, I know that in the world of paperback promotion this is hardly anything new, but here the publisher had a glorious opportunity to cash in on the anti-nuclear movement that’s sweeping the country, and what do they pick out as the essential ingredient in this book instead? Sex, that’s what. Can you dig it?

   Jason O’Neil is the hero, a Boston-based private eye who’s hired by his former girl friend’s roommate to find her. She’s a physics major and a top student at B. U., and she’s suddenly disappeared. The trail leads O’Neil to the Combat Zone all right, but only briefly. (But long enough for the cover shots to be taken, right?)

   Jennifer (that’s her name) was also a high echelon member of the campus anti-nuclear organization, which, mixed with a little Cosa Nostra involvement, happens to be enough to fill out the rest of the book, with a long ways to go. It seems the group plans to … but that’s for you to read and find out, isn’t it?

   As a mystery, the book rambles on for too long (over 300 pages), but its tone, wholly pessimistic about the age of the atom, is probably more effective in its purpose than a truckload of slogan-spouting rock stars, movie actresses. and other uninformed but self-proclaimed experts.

   Nevertheless, and all social significance aside, the characters are vividly drawn, and the detective work is effective enough to suggest that Jason O’Neil is worthy of an encore. You’ll have to give him some time, though. He was pretty emotionally wrapped up in this one.

Rating:  B minus.

   
Bibliographic Note:   Not only was this Jason O’Neil’s solo appearance in print, it is also the author’s only entry in Al Hubin’s bibliography of crime fiction.