UMBERTO ECO – The Prague Cemetery. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, US, hardcover, November 2011. First published: October 2010. Translated by Richard Dixon.

   â€œIf I have become French, it is only because I couldn’t bear being Italian.”

   I warn you this is not an easy book and when you know its subject, many of you may choose not to read it. If you appreciate literate, witty, and brilliant writing though, you should. It is one of the best books I’ve read in years once I recognized where Eco was going. That he pulls off the tightwire act that this book is will be reason enough to read it.

   The quote above is the voice of the narrator of Umberto Eco’s novel The Prague Cemetery, Captain Simone Simoini, the grandson of the actual historical figure Captain Simonini. Simone is our narrator, or one of them, and a worse human being is hard to imagine. Racist, jingoist, police spy, terrorist (19th Century style), propagandist, plagiarist …. keep that last in mind, because that last little skill will define Simone Simonini as one of the worst men whoever lived.

   The Prague Cemetery sweeps across 19th Century Europe from the revolutionary period of the late 1840‘s (1848 the key year) to 1895 with the turn of the century in view. Through it we follow Simone into every back corner, byway, narrow alley, and cordite-smelling conspiracy of that conspiratorial age, with a small army of historical figures such as his grandfather, Garibaldi, Leo Taxil, Serge Nilus, an alienist he insists on calling Froide who convinces him to reveal his story…

   Some of those names may not be familiar, but they would be if you knew the history of conspiracy in that era. All the while he is shadowed and haunted by the mysterious young Jesuit priest Abbe Dalla Picola, who shares the narration of the story and the author’s prejudices including his hatred and fear of women.

   It is a world of violence and lies. Italian freedom fighters allegedly strangle priests with their own intestines, the Freemasons plot against everyone and the Jesuits plot against them (“Jesuits are Mason’s dressed like women”), French anarchists plant bombs and celebrate blasphemous Black Mass while the turbulent history of Italian unification, the Paris Commune, and the Dreyfuss affair play their role.

   All through this the paranoid, backstabbing Simone wiggles like a serpent his sting along a trail of lies, half truths, and sheer hatred of everyone and every thing. He is a maestro of invective, hatred, vitriol , and paranoia and everything is clouded by the secret services of myriad European countries all conspiring and coming to believe their own lies.

   Eco, a leading semiotician, philosopher, and medievalist among other things, burst on the best seller scene with The Name of the Rose and has visited often since. His books are always literate and often informed by his considerable sense of humor. That wit and humor are the saving grace of this book.

   This is a very funny book — black humor, but funny. At some point the narrator’s invective takes on an almost Marxian (Groucho, not Karl) air as he lies, cheats, spies, betrays, murders, and schemes his way through a conspiratorial whirl that makes modern talk radio sound tame. The book would be surreal at times if it wasn’t all unfortunately based on facts.

   And at the heart of this novel is one of the greatest lies ever fostered on humanity, one that is still believed by prejudiced fools all over the world today, appropriately a scene plagiarized from socialist feuillitonist Eugene Sue’s massive Mysteries of the People (Sue is identified as the narrator’s favorite writer.)

   In Sue’s novel the scene describes a meeting in a cemetery of Jesuit conspirators (Sue distrusted and loathed the Jesuits) in the hands of our plagiarist narrator the cemetery is the one in Prague and the conspiracy nothing less than The Protocols of Zion, and it is not a chapter in a novel, but presented as an actual event witnessed by the author (Serge Nilus who first published the Protocols claimed to have been given them by a friend who witnessed the event, the basis for Eco to spin his tale).

   Simone Simonini for the purposes of this book is no one less than the author of one of the most influential lies ever told, one with an almost direct link to one of the greatest crimes ever committed. A more unlikely protagonist is hard to imagine, but he and his story compel you to turn the page.

   Eco brings this world to life with almost magical skill, exploring all those dark byways of the soul with what one review in the Chicago Tribune rightly called “voluptuous abandon.” It is a cautionary tale for our world of undigested news, rumor, and innuendo, a reminder that information age or not the world has always embraced the great lie with the same zeal it does today. That Eco at times manages to also thrill, horrify, and be laugh out loud funny while revealing those lies is a wonder in itself.

   â€œA German produces on the average twice the feces of a Frenchman.”

   â€œWith Germans, as with women, one never gets to the point.”

   â€œNo one is as rude as a French innkeeper.”

   â€œThe Frenchman doesn’t know what he wants, he only knows he doesn’t want what he has.”

   â€œThe Italian is an untrustworthy, lying, contemptible traitor, himself more at ease with dagger than a sword, better with poison than medicine, a slippery bargainer, consistent only with changing sides in the wind…”

   I should point out Eco is Italian.

   On the Masons: “They are like the Jesuits only more confused.”

   â€œI hate women, what little I know of them.”

   On the brasseries of Paris and their patrons: “They are inverts looking for perverts of either sex…”

   â€œCivilization will never reach perfection until the last stone of the last church has fallen …”

   Priests: “They are idle and belong to a class as dangerous as thieves and vagrants …”

   â€œI would say religion is also the cocaine of the people…”

   â€œWe do not know whether animal spirit and genital fluid are the same thing …”

   â€œSomeone said that women are just a substitute for the solitary vice, only you need more imagination.”

   That all literally from Chapter 1.

   As Eco points out in a brief afterward, Simone is a collection of different people, a convenience for the writer, and as he concludes, “still among us.” There is also a mystery or two and a revelation that may catch you completely off guard that Simone never quite manages to put together. At times you can almost hear the real author of the Protocols chuckling as he spins his murderous lies, even to himself.

   This is a powerful work for all the smiles at its excess. It is impossible to read without the images we are all familiar with of where The Protocols lead, not alone, but with its words scribbled in venom and blood. That this novel can be read as entertainment and at the same time a serious statement about hate and lies is one of the reasons to admire and praise Eco’s talents.

   As an added bonus the books is filled with illustrations from the age though not as colorful as those from Eco’s earlier novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Lorna.

   I warn you, this is not for everyone, and I understand why anyone might choose not to read it (it is also nearly 500 pages of small type), but if you do, if you take it as it was written, why it was written, what it has to say to us now and about us then I think you too will find it a remarkable novel despite the difficult subject and the protagonist.

   It’s a very funny book about what may be the bloodiest lie ever told, a deadly serious study in paranoia and hateful speech that will have you smiling, and a fascinating journey through the very heart of the conspiratorial urge in man.

GRAND JURY. Syndicated, 1959-60. Desilu Productions in association with National Telefilm Associates, Inc. / NTA Release. Cast: Lyle Bettger as Harry Driscoll, Harold J. Stone as John Kennedy, Douglas Dumbrille as Thomas Grant and Richard Travis as Bill Thompson. Created and produced by Mort Briskin.

   With Grand Juries in the news I thought it might be interesting to check out the forgotten TV series Grand Jury. A full-page ad for the syndicated series in Broadcasting (November 9,1959), Grand Jury was described as “…the new, exciting television, half-hour series…” and “This big-budget show offers the added prestige of “Public Service” program identification…” (Yes, the entire ad was that badly written.)

   The series featured two investigators for the Grand Jury. This allowed Harry Driscoll and John Kennedy to deal with all forms of crime. Other regulars featured the head of the Grand Jury, Thomas Grant and the Grand Jury lawyer, Bill Thompson. This was a typical syndicated crime drama of the era with simple plots, characters with little to no depth, humorless dialog, and stilted acting. While Desilu spent the money on sets and larger than usual guest cast, it never overcame the usual dull no surprises dramatic story problems of fifties TV half-hour crime dramas.

“Condemned.” (Title according to IMdb.) (1960) Written by Don Martin. Directed by Lee Sholem. Guest Cast: Wendell Holmes, Jack Orrison and Cindy Robbins. *** Investigators Driscoll and Kennedy hunt for the cause of a recent tenement fire that took twenty innocent lives.

   The sets are impressive and more interesting than many of the characters or actors. Together our heroes, bland and interchangeable Driscoll and Kennedy use standard police procedures and the villain’s stupidity to uncover the truth so the Grand Jury could bring those responsible for the fire to justice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtkuuM466oY

   The history of Grand Jury is not a simple one. According to Broadcasting (December 8, 1958) Desilu Productions had completed the pilot for Grand Jury six months before and it had nearly sold. But the buyer insisted on airing the series opposite of Desilu Theatre on CBS so Desilu turned the buyer down. The project was now back filming, but for only four episodes with hopes of selling it to a network as a January replacement series.

   March 31, 1959 issue of Broadcasting reported Grand Jury theme written by Ray Ellis would be released by MGM as a recording. This indicates the series was on the air, so January 1959 is the series most likely premiere date. It is also likely there was no interest from the networks for Grand Jury, as the series ended up syndicated through National Telefilm Associates.

   When Desilu announced its TV series lineup for the fall 1960-61 Season it included eighteen series one of which was Grand Jury (Broadcasting, May 23 1960). But soon Desilu would begin to have problems with NTA.

   The February 13, 1961 issue of Broadcasting reported that SAG (Screen Actors Guild) was pressuring Desilu to do something about the late residual payments from NTA for six series, Grand Jury, U. S. Marshall, Sheriff of Cochise, This Is Alice, Walter Winchell File and Official Detective.

   Broadcasting (May 1, 1961) reported the two companies had settled their differences. Distributor NTA agreed to buy the six Desilu produced series that had SAG residual problems. Grand Jury would end with 39 episodes completed and part of NTA syndication library.

   Several episodes are on YouTube at the moment. Two warnings – many of the episodes show up under more than one title (the episode above can be found as both “Episode 10” and “Episode 22”), and someone has copied the episodes and added them to its YouTube Channel. Those copies were done at the wrong speed so the voices are at a comically high pitch.

RAOUL WHITFIELD – The Virgin Kills. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1932. Quill, paperback, 1985. Apparently did not appear first in a pulp magazine. Currently available in ebook form.

   If you’ve never read the book, right now you probably have the same wrong-headed idea of what the title means as I did when I picked it up, not long ago. The Virgin is a boat; a yacht, to be precise. A murder is committed on board. The victim is the owner, a gambler named Vennell.

   And even before that another murder has taken place. The leading oarsman of the California shell is somehow poisoned, and he collapses just before the finish of the big Hudson River collegiate regatta. That California loses as a direct result has obviously a great deal to do with the plot.

   Vennell had just as obviously been expecting trouble, however. Along with the many society guests he has on board, he also has a newly-acquired bodyguard, a hard-boiled hoodlum by the name of O’Rourke. As a not-always-successful interface between the slick set and the underworld from which he clearly comes, Nick O’Rourke is the object of some amusement and conjecture. He is probably the best developed character in the book.

   The repartee is dated and, mired in subtleties no longer operative, it no longer has the bite it might once have had. The pace picks up considerably after the murders occur, and we have a full-fledged detective novel on our hands. Even though the story is complexly motivated, I might warn you that the obvious person did it.

   Note that that doesn’t mean that you’ll catch on at all, any more than I did!

Rating: B

   In the latter part of what is now last year, three women died, all of them in their nineties. Two were well-known mystery writers, the third was married to one of the best-known mystery writers of all time. Her name had been Rose Koppel, and she had been widowed for less than a year when she was invited to attend a New Year’s Eve party in Larchmont, New York and introduced to the only unattached man at the gathering, a man in his late sixties named Frederic Dannay whose spouse had also died recently.

   Something clicked between them and they began dating immediately. It was only somewhat later in their courtship that he told her that he was better known under the pen name of Ellery Queen. They were married in November 1975 at New York’s Plaza Hotel, although the marriage almost had to be postponed when the rabbi scheduled to perform the ceremony suddenly died of a heart attack.

   It’s not going too far to say that Rose saved Fred’s life. Fred and his cousin and collaborator Manfred B. Lee (1905-1971) had been fabulously successful writing as and about Ellery Queen, but Fred’s life had been far from a happy one. In 1940 he had been driving to Long Island to visit his mother when a car without lights and driven by a drunk, who turned out to be an AWOL serviceman without a license or insurance, hit his Buick head-on, leaving it unrecognizable.

   Fred had been so seriously injured that Walter Winchell on his national news program actually announced him as dead, and he had to spent months in the hospital recovering. That was a picnic compared to what happened next. In 1945 Fred’s first wife died of cancer, leaving him with two small children to raise. He married again a few years later and he and his second wife had a son who was born with brain damage and died at age six. In the early 1970s that wife also died of cancer. Fred began dating a woman he had known for a long time, and she too was diagnosed with cancer.

   Look at the photograph of him, taken around this time, that you’ll find on page 162 of my book Ellery Queen: The Art of Detection. Doesn’t he look like a character created by Cornell Woolrich, like a man without hope, waiting for the merciful release of death? Is it any wonder that when he and Rose met she found him so depressing and humorless? “I had never imagined such devastating loneliness,” she said. That is what Rose saved him from. Their marriage endured until his death, over the Labor Day weekend of 1982, at age 76.

   After they were married Fred and Rose seemed to be always together, and it was a rare occasion when I saw him without her at his side. She had been living in an apartment on 72nd Street in New York City since the early 1950s and insisted on keeping it after marrying Fred, a wise decision since it gave them a place to stay when they came into town for dinner or an MWA function or a show.

   She returned there after Fred’s death. On December 6 of 2014 she joined him. “Her death was quick and as painless as possible,” her daughter told me, “and my brother was there when she died… I was so lucky to have had a mother who could still recognize me and communicate with me and tell me she loved me every time we talked on the phone or saw each other.”

   Her memories of Fred did not die with her. Her account of My Life with a Man of Mystery (2010) includes a great deal of fascinating material on their meeting and courtship, their married life, their trips to California and Japan and Israel and Sweden, and his last days and death.

   I was there for a few of the events she describes, like the banquet at New York’s Lotos Club celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first Ellery Queen novel (The Roman Hat Mystery; 1929), and the occasion when Fred was awarded an honorary Ph.D., but for many of them her account is the only one we’re going to have.

   Clearly she misunderstood or misremembered a few things Fred told her, giving his best-known mystery anthology the title 101 Years of Entertainment, conflating a landmark EQMM story set in the black ghetto (Hughes Allison’s “Corollary,” July 1948) with another landmark story about all but openly gay characters (Philip MacDonald’s “Love Lies Bleeding,” November 1950) and telling us that the tale was published in 1943.

   But to most of what she describes Rose was a witness, and no one who loves Ellery Queen will want to miss her testimony. Her book doesn’t seem to be available on Amazon.com, but anyone interested in purchasing a copy should get in touch with Rose’s daughter, Dale Koppel. I’d prefer not to post her email address here, but leave a comment or contact Steve directly, and he’ll send it on to you.

   Of the two women mystery writers whose deaths occurred in the second half of last year, the one who died more recently was P.D. James, to whom I said goodbye in my December column. I didn’t find out until too late for that column that another of the great women of the genre, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, had died back in August at age 97.

   I didn’t know Dorothy well but had read her novels and stories with great pleasure, and both of us were among the speakers at the centenary symposium honoring the births of Fred Dannay and Manny Lee that was held at Columbia University in 2005. The last time I saw her was on a boat in the Hudson River, the site of an elegant MWA cocktail party which, in her late eighties or early nineties, she had driven from her home in Sneden’s Landing on the Palisades to attend. She and I and Ed Hoch and his wife sat together.

   Her most successful and perhaps finest novel was her third, A Gentle Murderer (1951). Late in life she told an interviewer that the idea for the book came to her when she noticed a man on the New York subway:

   A few months later A Gentle Murderer was finished. Interspersed with her novels were 20-odd short stories, most of them first published in EQMM and collected in Tales for a Stormy Night (1984). Apparently her last work of fiction was the 2007 short story “Dies Irae.”

   She had had to move to an assisted living facility about three years before her death but even after falling and breaking her hip she seemed to be doing reasonably well considering that she wasn’t that far from her own centenary.

   The lights go out, the lives go out. A new year begins. How many more?

BILL S. BALLINGER – The Chinese Mask. Signet D2715, paperback original; 1st printing, June 1965.

   Bill S. Ballinger wrote some thirty mystery, suspense, and espionage novels (as well as two films and over 150 teleplays) during his thirty-year career, many with unusual plots and construction. His first two novels feature private eye Barr Breed; his only other series character, hero of five paperback originals published during 1965 and 1966, is CIA agent Joaquin Hawks — multilingual, half Spanish and half Nez Perce Indian, and virile as they come.

   All five of the Hawks novels are set in the exotic Far East, in such locales as Communist China, Bangkok, Saigon, Angkor Wat, Laos, and Indonesia. They are as much spirited adventure stories as espionage novels, with graphically depicted backgrounds and plenty of harrowing jungle chases and narrow escapes.

   In The Chinese Mask, the first of the series, Hawks is assigned to rescue three Western scientists, all of whom have been working on a “psycho-gas that can paralyze the will and nerve of entire armies” and all of whom have been kidnapped from Berlin by the Red Chinese. Hawks crosses the Bamboo Curtain disguised as a member of a traveling Russian circus troop, infiltrates the headquarters of the Red Chinese Army in Peking, and eventually plucks the scientists out of an ” impenetrable” prison fortress and leads them to safety — all in clever and exciting fashion.

   This and the other four Hawks novels — The Spy in Bangkok (1965), The Spy in the Jungle (1965), The Spy at Angkor Wat (1966), and The Spy in the Java Sea (1966) are enjoyable escapist reading and, in the bargain, offer accurate political, sociologic, and geographic portraits of their various locales in the mid-1960s.

         ———
   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.

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE DIVORCE. 20th Century Fox, 1942. Lynn Bari, Mary Beth Hughes, Joseph Allen Jr., Nils Asther, Truman Bradley, Kay Linaker, Lyle Latell. Director: Robert Siodmak.

   There are some funny moments in this not-so-funny film, it is true, but not too many. What makes the movie worth watching, though, is any moment that Lynn Bari is on the screen. At least in my opinion, and since she is the leading lady, she is on the screen quite often, a stunning brunette with lots of close-ups.

   Mary Beth Hughes, a blonde bombshell whose whispery come-hither voice will remind you of Marilyn Monroe, even before the latter ever dreamed of making a movie, is second-billed, but if Lynn Bari never became a star, not of the household name variety, so alas did not Mary Beth Hughes.

   The idea behind this film is that in many a marriage (1940s style) the man of the house would resent it if the woman of the family is more competent than he in almost everything. To George Nordyke (Joseph Allen) the final straw comes when his wife Lynn (Bari) has a lower golf score than he has ever manged to have, and she has only started to learn the game, while he has been playing for years.

   Trying to nab him on the rebound, even before the divorce is final, is Lola May (guess who?), who is more than willing to play weak and dependent. To tie this in more solidy with the purported purpose of this blog, Lynn’s new would-be boy friend is bumped off, and to get George back (though I’m not exactly sure why), she takes the blame and lets George help her out of the jam.

   Not exactly the funniest premise in the world, but perhaps it fared better back in the early 40s. Even back then, though, I’m willing to wager that this movie came and went without making much of a fuss.

DOROTHY SIMPSON – The Night She Died. Scribner’s, hardcover, 1981. Bantam, paperback, 1985. Poisoned Pen Press, trade paperback, 1998, First published in the UK by Michael Joseph, hardcover, 1981.

   In the world of crime fiction, there seems to be an unwritten law that a new private eye has to have a gimmick, a little quirk of behavior, perhaps, that will help him (or her) stand out from all the others. There is a similar theory for policemen, and it holds that because of the nature of their job, they need humanizing: a loving family, perhaps. Teething babies. Bad backs.

   Inspector Thanet is lucky. He has all three.

   His current case involves a murdered woman. Who killed her? Her husband, with whom she was seeing a marriage counselor? Her thwarted, amorous boss? The determined ex-suitor?

   Thanet’s investigation also takes him back into the past, over his sergeant’s objections, to dig up an unsolved murder the victim may have witnessed as a child. The problem is that looking into this old case is as dry and uninteresting as poking around in a pile of dusty bones, and it’d be awfully easy to give the story up as routine right here.

   And this you shouldn’t do, as Simpson has a terrific surprise in store for the persevering reader who sticks it out to the end. I suspect there’ll be a good many people who’ll never reach it. Exquisitely plotted, and ploddingly told — a sad combination.

   
      The Inspector Thanet series —

1. The Night She Died (1981)
2. Six Feet Under (1982)
3. Puppet for a Corpse (1983)
4. Close Her Eyes (1984)
5. Last Seen Alive (1985)
6. Dead On Arrival (1986)

   
7. Element of Doubt (1987)
8. Suspicious Death (1988)
9. Dead By Morning (1989)
10. Doomed to Die (1991)

   
11. Wake the Dead (1992)
12. No Laughing Matter (1993)
13. A Day for Dying (1995)

   
14. Once Too Often (1998)
15. Dead and Gone (1999)

BILLY THE KID TRAPPED. PRC, 1942. Buster Crabbe, Al St. John, Bud McTaggart, Anne Jeffreys, Glenn Strange, Walter McGrail, Ted Adams, Jack Ingram, Milton Kibbee. Director: Sam Newfield.

   Let me say right off from the start that any movie with Anne Jeffreys in it can’t be all bad, but this one comes very very close. If only they’d given her something to do. As the sister of the recently deceased sheriff of Mesa City (gun poisoning), all she is allowed to do is stand around and direct admiring eyes at young and handsome Billy the Kid (Buster Crabbe), hinting at a possible romantic liaison between the two, even perhaps after the movie’s end, but young and handsome Billy does not even seem to notice.

   And the 10 to 12 year old boys who would made up the large part of viewing audience back in 1942 would have yelled something fierce if he had.

   Not that there aren’t possibilities in the plot, which begins with Billy and his two pals on the road being rescued from jail by a benefactor unknown. Set to be hanged the next morning for a killing they did not do, the three saddlemates are grateful but puzzled.

   Turns out (and this comes out early in the story) that the three, Bill, Fuzzy and Jeff, have been impersonated by three outlaws dressed up as them, and if they were to be hanged, there would be no one to blame the three outlaws’ crimes on.

   After this masterful plot is revealed, the rest of the story is a pure yawner. Lots of men on horses riding here and there, holding up stagecoaches, fist fights in saloons, gunmen lurking behind stable doors, the whole works. Me, no longer 10 or 12 years old, I fell asleep.

P. M. HUBBARD – The Dancing Man. Macmillan, UK, hardcover, 1971. Atheneum, US, hardcover, 1971.

   That evocative moment is the true voice of P. M. Hubbard, one of the most interesting thriller writers of his time and one too little known on this side of the Atlantic.

   Philip Michael Hubbard made his debut with the fine thriller Flush as May, and continued at the same high level throughout his career as a writer. Among his many books were the spy thriller Kill Claudio, the Gothic The Tower, Hive of Glass, High Tide, Whisper in the Glen and others.

   His novels have remarkably well drawn settings that are characters in themselves, Gothic atmosphere of the true definition of the term without a governess to be seen, often good bits about small sail boats, and interesting heroes who tend to be on the amoral side and not always the nicest of people. His secondary characters are often exceptionally well drawn and his villains human but with a Luciferian air.

   The Dancing Man is perhaps the best of his thrillers on all these accounts, the cast stripped down to a handful of individuals; the hero Mark Hawkins; his missing brother Dick; Merrion on whose land Dick has gone missing; Merrion’s virginal sister; Merrion’s sexy wife; and a local madman (according to fiction every village in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales has one) of the lurking threatening type.

   And of course two other characters: a Victorian house in northern Wales, and a megalithic statue on which is carved the figure of a dancing man: “Someone had carved a human figure, a matchstick man sketched in single strokes but still horribly alive. It danced on the stone holding its stick-like arms over its head and kicking its legs outward, its enormous penis stiffly in front of it.”

   Hubbard was a master of evoking and using settings, and here he has been compared to M. R. James and Arthur Machen in his ability to suggest something evil lurking just beyond the ken of the average man. A large neolithic circle also figures in the action, and a 9th century Latin edict.

   Hubbard also has a happy facility with words, calling the figure a “happy little ithyphallic manikin … consciously and deliberately devilish.” It’s a good example of the pleasure of reading the highly literate Hubbard, at once evoking the absurdity of the figure and the horror lurking behind it.

   Hubbard is a minimalist, his novels short, to the point, deftly drawn without burying the reader in extraneous detail. You learn just enough about Mark and Dick Hawkins and the people surrounding them to care what happens so that the suspense and atmosphere have real impact. Kill Claudio, a Buchanesque thriller, is practically a novella, and a hundred times more suspenseful than today’s overwritten over long thrillers. Above all the writing, the vivid settings, and often the hint of brimstone and sulfur lingering in the air make his novels unique among the thriller writers of his era.

   Dick Hawkins is fascinated by prehistory and the sinister megalith. Merrion is an archaeologist more interested in Medieval history and a Cistercian abbey that once stood near the house. The two men are at loggerheads in their obsessions. Into this walks Mark Hawkins, a catalyst like all Hubbard protagonists, who will trigger ancient violence and modern murder, and as in any Hubbard a novel hints of the erotic as obvious as that “ithyphallic manikin”, among the often amoral and violent set of characters. Merrion’s sister may be virginal but you can’t expect that to last in a Hubbard novel and may not mean quite the same as in other gothics.

   The Dancing Man builds to a fine creepy violent ending, happy of course, or as happy as Hubbard’s less than admirable heroes are likely to find.

   Anthony Boucher and other critics championed Hubbard, and with good reason. He was a superb writer and an exceptional storyteller capable of weaving a spell that held the reader for the short span of a Hubbard novel. If ever there was a ‘can’t put them down’ writer it was him. You may be grateful they are short, because I read most of them in one sitting.

   Flush as May, High Tide, and Kill Claudio all had American paperback editions, and The Dancing Man was a choice of the Mystery Book Club so those at least should not be too hard to find.

   If you don’t know Hubbard’s work look him up, I think you will be entranced by his dark atavistic world, amoral heroes, and sinister settings. He spun a good plot as well. I really can’t think of anyone to compare his work to, he’s an original, and unique in that I cannot think of another Gothic writer I would call a minimalist.

Editorial Note:   P. M. Hubbard, the man and his work, has also been covered on the primary Mystery*File website. Check it out here.

THE PLUNDERERS. Allied Artists, 1960. Jeff Chandler, John Saxon, Dolores Hart, Marsha Hunt, Jay C. Flippen. Director: Joseph Pevney.

   The Plunderers appeared on the scene at the tail end of a great decade for Westerns when the genre was beginning to show moderate signs of fatigue. It wasn’t necessarily that Westerns in the early 1960s were necessarily bad films or sub-par Westerns, not at all. It’s just that after the 1950s – a truly golden era for the Western – there wasn’t much new, in terms of plot or structure, under the sun.

   Not yet anyway.

   The genre, of course, would be reinvigorated soon enough, thanks in large part to (love ‘em or hate ‘em) Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, and Monte Hellman, auteurs willing to take Westerns into cinematic realms more daring, violent, or, downright quirkier, than those great late 1950s Ranown cycle films of Budd Boetticher and the first films of Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo trilogy. These directors who came to the fore in the 1960s built on the groundwork laid before them by directors such as William Castle, Andre De Toth, and Jacques Tourneur, among others.

   The TV Western in the early 1960s, of course, was another story altogether. There were still plenty to choose from on the air; many of them were quite good and stand the test of time.

   The Plunderers is best understood as a product of its historical context, coming as it did between the end of the 1950s Western and the dawn of the revisionist and Spaghetti Westerns. Directed by Joseph Pevney (Star Trek), The Plunderers, which feels more like an above average TV episode more than a feature film, stars Jeff Chandler as Sam Christy, a rancher wracked by doubt and self-loathing. Severely wounded during the Civil War, Sam was left with only one good arm and a chip on his shoulder the size of the West Texas.

   So it’s perhaps no surprise that when four marauding youngsters roll into Trail City and proceed to ravage the place, Sam’s natural response is to revert his gaze and pretend it’s not of his business. That, of course changes, when Sam realizes how much the townsfolk, particularly the lovely Ellie Walters (Dolores Hart), need him to take a stand.

    And take a stand he does. With a knife and with a gun, Sam decides it’s time to fight back against the four hooligans. Among the criminals is, Rondo (John Saxon), a cunning Mexican with some historical baggage on his mind. He has his eye, and occasionally his hands, on Ellie, including in one particularly brutal attempted sexual assault scene.

   Despite the semi-tired plot of townsfolk banding together to face down a threat, The Plunderers does have one great thing going for it. And that’s Jeff Chandler, whose acting skills are on full display here. Without much seeming effort, Chandler is able to vividly express the emotions of a man haunted by wartime trauma. He’s a man alone, but one who desperately wants human connection. He’s a fighter afraid to fight, and a lover afraid to love.

   When all is said and done, when Sam Christy decides to fight back, he’s not afraid to fight dirty. In an otherwise slow, but steady, paced movie, that’s when the action really begins. The Plunderers may not be the best Western out there, but it’s an solid film with very little working against it, apart from the fact that the cinematography is overall forgettable and the natural scenery all but not existent. But it’s nevertheless a good little morality play about courage and manhood.