ISAAC ASIMOV – Tales of the Black Widowers. Doubleday, hardcover, June 1974. Fawcett Crest, paperback, August 1976.

   Until the early 1970s, Isaac Asimov was best known to whodunit devotees as the writer who virtually invented the science-fiction mystery. In his novels The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957) and in the short stories collected as Asimov’s Mysteries (1968), he masterfully bridged the gap between the two genres and proved that genuine detective fiction could be set in the future as well as In the present or past.

   Although he had previously written one contemporary mystery novel, The Death Dealers (1958), Asimov’s best-known crime fiction of the non-futuristic sort is the long series of Black Widowers tales that debuted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1972 and is still going strong today after four hardcover collections’ worth of stories.

   The Black Widowers are five middle-aged professional men — Avalon the patent lawyer, Trumbull the cryptographer, Rubin the writer, Drake the chemist, and Gonzalo the artist — who meet once a month for dinner at an exclusive New York club. Each month one member brings a guest and that guest brings a problem, sometimes but by no means always criminal in nature.

   The narration of the dilemma is interrupted frequently by cross-examination and highbrow cross-talk among the Widowers, who like Asimov himself are inordinately fond of puns. After each of the five club members has tried to solve the conundrum and failed, a solution — invariably on target — is proposed by Henry, the ancient and unobtrusive waiter who has been serving dinner and drinks throughout the dialogue. Everyone then goes home both intellectually and gastronomically satisfied.

   The Black Widowers stories stand or fall on the quality of the puzzles and their resolutions. Characterization and setting are minimal, and too many of the tales are either unfair to the reader or wildly incredible, but the occasional gems are clever indeed, and those who share Asimov’s fondness for oddball facts, logical probing, and the spectacle of cultivated men scoring intellectual points off one another will delight in even the weaker links in the chain.

   The four collections published to date are Tales of the Black Widowers (1974), More Tales of the Black Widowers (1976), Casebook of the Black Widowers (1980), and Banquets of the Black Widowers (1984). Asimovians might also look into the author’s book-fair whodunit, Murder at the ABA (1976), and his short-story collection The Union Club Mysteries (1983).

         ———
   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.

Note:   Since this review first appeared, there have been two additional collections of Black Widowers stories: Puzzles of the Black Widowers (1989) and The Return of the Black Widowers (2003), the latter posthumously.

   PulpAdventurecon has been held in Bordentown NJ every November for quite a few years now. Hosted by Rich Harvey, it’s an annual gathering point for collectors and dealers of pulp magazines, vintage paperbacks, DVDs of old movies and TV series, artwork and in general anything old made of paper. It’s been a few years since I’ve been able to get away for one, but it’s where I’ve been this past weekend.

   It’s a one-day show, but I drove down the Friday before with my friend Paul Herman, where along the way we met Gary Lovisi and his wife Lucille in Morristown NJ, plus LA paperback collector extraordinaire Tom Lesser, who’d flown in just for the occasion.

   After the five of us had scoured The Old Book Shop clean of anything of value, Paul and I went to Walker Martin’s home in Trenton, where we also met Ed Hulse, Nick Certo, Digges LaTouche, Scott Hartshorn, and Matt Moring. After several hours of chatting and catching up, we watched a western movie together, sans Digges, who had to leave early.

   The movie was a George O’Brien epic called Mystery Ranch, of which IMDb has to say: “An undercover ranger investigates a deranged rancher who acts as a law unto himself, finding a girl held as a prisoner until she agrees to marry the madman.” You may find me reviewing it here on this blog sometime soon.

   Paul and I left after dinner for the Ramada Inn where the convention was to be held the next day, and luckily Paul was able to unload his car and set up his wares for sale early. I say “luckily”as it rained poured most of the next day.

   I didn’t take any photos that came out well on Friday, but here are some I took on Saturday. I’ll welcome any errors in identification and name spelling, and make the necessary corrections later.

   This first photo will show you the general layout of the room. There may have been 30 dealers, maybe less, and perhaps 100 walk-in buyers, or slightly more. When this photo was taken, around noon, two hours after the dealers’ room was open, it was filled with people. There was no program, nor were there any invited guests.

   In this photo, from left to right, are Walker Martin, Nick Certo, a dealer from somewhere north of New York City, and Paul Herman. Paul may be telling the others about the cache that got away.

   About 30% of the wares offered were pulps, another 30% paperbacks, 30% also for DVDs, with the remaining 10% split between hardcovers and original artwork or prints. John Gunnison brought the most pulps for sale, as you can see by the wall behind his tables. I believe that is Cowboy Tony, a dealer from New Hampshire, looking in the boxes, but I am not sure.

   In this photo Gary Lovisi is talking to Paul Herman. Gary took this year off after putting on the New York City paperback show for 30 25 years, but there is a possibility he will give it a go again next year.

   I don’t know who that is that Scott Hartshorn is talking to on the left. Originally a native of the area, Scott drove up for this show from Florida. He is also a lot younger than I am.

   This is Walker Martin, close up and personal. He is about to show me his latest purchase. You can tell from his smile that he’s happy to be its new owner.

   And this is it, an interior black and white piece of art by John Fleming Gould, I believe, whose son had a table at the show with several other of his father’s works of art for sale. I will let Walker tell you more about his purchase in the comments.

   This is not a good shot of him, but the gentleman squatting down sorting through boxes of books on the floor is Tom Lesser, who has put on a paperback show in the Los Angeles area for the past umpteen years. It is rare to find Tom in positions other than this, but there is a better one of him coming. I went through this same boxes later, but I found nothing left of value. I also found it very difficult to stand again.

   This is Cowboy Tony behind his tables. I think he’s wondering if he remembered everything that he meant to bring to sell.

   This is Paul negotiating a deal with someone, but I don’t recognize whose table it is. The second person in the background to the left of Paul is Ed Hulse, who otherwise seems to have managed not being in any of my other photos.

   The tall young fellow in the photo below is Matt Moring, who is the head honcho at Altus Press and responsible for bring out tons of books reprinting stories from the pulps. The big news is that he has just obtained the rights to publish stories from most of the Munsey and Popular Publications magazines, which is really, really bad news for my checking account.

   Behind Matt at his table in the blue sweater is Martin Grams, who besides being responsible for the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention every year, also sells movies and old TV series on DVD at smaller shows such as this one. He also is very hard on my checking account, so I try to stay away from his table. I didn’t succeed, though.

   This is Gary Lovisi and Tom Lesser, soon before they headed back north to New York City in the rain. That looks like Paul Herman in the background on the telephone, probably telling his wife he wouldn’t be back home until around 11:30. Which he was. I had my car parked there waiting for me, so it took me only another 30 minutes to reach home again myself.

THE UNINVITED. Paramount Pictures, 1944. Ray Milland, Gail Russell (debut), Ruth Hussey, Donald Crisp, Alan Napier, Corneila Otis Skinner, Dorothy Stickney, Barbara Everest. Screenplay by Dodie Smith and Frank Partos, based on the novel Uneasy Freehold by Dorothy Macardle. Music: Victor Young (“Stella by Starlight”). Cinematography Charles Lang. Directed by Lewis Allen.

   First a a huge SPOILER WARNING in flashing red lights if you don’t know the film or the novel. Things are given away here you should see the first time in the film or read in the book.

   The Uninvited is a whodunnit — at least a whohauntedit, a murder mystery.

   Well, partially.

   The Uninvited is a romantic comedy.

   Parts of the beginning certainly and there are light touches throughout.

   The Uninvited is a psychological thriller.

   Getting closer.

   The Uninvited is a modern gothic.

   Almost there.

   The Uninvited is a ghost story.

   No, that’s an understatement, The Uninvited is the film ghost story.

   Robert Osborne, hosting an episode of the Essentials on TCM with Drew Barrymore that featured Robert Wise’s The Haunting, put it best. The Uninvited is the best ghost story ever filmed. It was then, it is now. All the special effects, all the pyrotechnics, all the leap out of your seat and scream movies made before or since pale beside this simple little tale of love, jealousy, and murder beyond the grave — with a human assist.

   Because The Uninvited has something no other ghost story has, something as uncomplicated as this: The Uninvited has absolute unshakable conviction. These are ghosts you will not laugh at. Whatever your beliefs, however rational you are, this movie will do its damnedest to at least convince you for its short running time that Stella Meredith (Gail Russell) is under siege by a spirit beyond the grave eager to take her life in an act of other worldly revenge. And for most people, viewers and critics alike, it succeeds — it more than succeeds.

   Is it Stella’s goddess-like mother, Mary Meredith, or the foreign model, and her father’s mistress, Carmel comforting Stella, threatening Stella? Which spirit weeps for Stella Meredith, and which wants to drive her to suicide? You will care if you watch this one.

   And you will consider sleeping that night with the lights on.

   I suppose this film won’t mean much to the gore and goo fans, there is nothing in it to make you throw up or gag, but its scares are deep and real, the frisson they induce a deep soul chilling hair on the back of the neck crawling kind of fright that for me has only been approached a handful of times on screen — the final moments of Hitchcock’s Psycho, the ending of John Farrow’s Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Robert Wise’s The Haunting, The Innocents, Val Lewton’s best, and too few others; it is the genuine fright and nerve chilling presence of supernatural evil the inexplicable, the hidden, the uninvited. It’s a stunning debut for both Gail Russell and director Lewis Allen.

   It is the best ghost story ever filmed, and that opinion is shared with no few critics. Critics who don’t like anything anyone else praises love this film because it is so unpretentiously and perfectly exactly what it wants to be — a chilly tale of ghosts to follow by a warm fireplace with the lights left on.

   I saw this for the first time at age ten (the same age I saw Ghost Breakers, a good year) on the late movie on a Friday night with my mother after a stormy night had passed and neither of us could sleep. When my father got home the next day he wanted to know why we were sleeping so late and every light in the house was turned on.

   Rick (Ray Milland, Roderick in the book) wants to write music, and with his sister, Pam (Ruth Hussey), and their dog Bobby, he spies an old cliff side house on the rocky moody Devon coast. They could never afford it of course, but it turns out the Commander (Donald Crisp) wants rid of it at a price they can just hope to pay. He’s unfriendly and downright hateful, and apparently a snob as well, for he wants his grand-daughter Stella — a moody fey girl who lies to Milland and Hussey to keep them from buying the house — to have nothing to do with the new tenants — and to stay away from the house at all costs. He is selling it in hopes of keeping her away.

   You know that won’t work. Ray Milland is going to London to arrange the move while Hussey stays behind, and feeling pity for Stella, whom he took an instant dislike to, he tries to cheer her up falling in love with her as he does. He, at least, is haunted by Stella Meredith, no matter who haunts Stella.

   Milland comes back with their housekeeper Lizzie (Barbara Everest), her cat in tow, and there is something Pam has learned she has to tell him.

   The house is haunted. And that night he hears the weeping of the ghost.

   Milland: “Does it come every night?.”

   Hussey: “No, just when you start to think you dreamed it, it comes again.”

   A haunted house, what a lark, but not to Hussey There is something. Maybe that’s why the housekeeper’s cat is freaked out. Maybe that’s why their loyal dog runs away, maybe that’s why the housekeeper won’t stay in the house overnight and frets over the two young people she virtually raised living in such an evil place.

   Or maybe it’s that beautiful room with the north light, Stella’s artist father’s studio, now Milland’s music room, maybe it’s because it gets so cold sometimes, or the way it depresses people and seems to drain them. Neither Milland or Hussey notice the first time they sit in the room that they suddenly become depressed, or the flowers that wilt while they aren’t looking.

   And then it might be the weeping woman who keeps them up all night. Maybe it’s just a depressing old place and that’s why Milland can’t quite finish his opus, “Stella by Starlight,” written for Stella Meredith, but suddenly so sad and so haunting when that wasn’t what he meant at all. Maybe it’s just them.

   Not in this movie. Unlike Robert Wise’s The Haunting, these people aren’t haunting themselves. What walks in this house does not walk alone. There is never the least hesitation about it: ghosts are real, and not merely psychological interpretations of impressionable minds.

   Then there’s that cheap scent, lovely, but nothing the elegant and perfect Mary Meredith would have worn, mimosa …

   Old houses, they have drafts, funny noises, there are cliffs and they are on the sea, winds blow, there are caves, there are stories …

   Commander: “Stella will never enter that house!”

   Milland: “Great Scott, you believe it’s really haunted!”

   And there is Stella, drawn to the old house by forces and needs she can’t explain, but somehow so vulnerable in that old place as if the house itself was both a warm loving mother inviting her and a cold murderous bitch trying to destroy her.

   After they have to send for the local doctor, Alan Napier, when Stella is overcome after running blindly toward the cliff where the old dead tree stands, where her parents both died, they learn Bobby is now living with him, and find a new ally in solving the mystery of the house and Stella Meredith.

   There was a scandal, the doctor explains; Meredith had a model, a fiery foreign type named Carmel, a Spanish gypsy. Carmel died a week after Mary Meredith was killed while trying to prevent her husband’s suicide on the cliff. Meredith was a scoundrel it seems and poor Stella has art in the blood, something she seems relieved about compared to the perfect Mary Meredith.

   Stella: “Between you and me and the grand piano father was a bit of a bad hat.”

   When Stella is better, and against her grand-father’s wishes, they invite her back for a seance. Milland and Napier plan to control the seance and convince Stella there is no spirit. Not as good an idea in practice as it may have sounded in theory. Again they sense the strange scent of mimosa, again Stella feels nurtured and warmed — and again something attacks.

   Whatever, it is clear now, the house is haunted — by two ghosts, one Stella’s loving mother, the other a vengeful spirit who is a real threat to her.

   But when the Commander discovers what they have been up to he decides to send Stella away to a home run by her mother’s closest friend and companion, a formidable and cold woman who worships the ground Mary Meredith’s angelic feet hardly touched, Miss Holloway (Cornelia Otis Skinner who ironically Gail Russell played in the film version of her book Their Hearts Were Young and Gay and its sequel) who created the Mary Meredith Home for Women.

   She worships Mary Meredith a bit too much perhaps because there is a hint of lesbianism you could drive a semi through, never exactly said. They hint the hell out of it though. Big fairly explicit lead booted hints, yet maintaining the perfect balance that is the reason this film is great.

   Miss Holloway: “… her skin was perfect, and her bright bright hair, she was lovely …” Anyone who doesn’t figure out this relationship is painfully naive.

   Just by coincidence the trained nurse caring for Mary Meredith and Stella the night of the tragedy was a certain Miss Holloway.

   Stella hates and fears her.

   Milland and Hussey visit Miss Holloway and hear her version of the story. Carmel tried to kill Stella, Mary Meredith saved her but fell to her death. Meredith killed himself.

   And then in the strangest of coincidences, the wind just happens to blow open the journals of the old doctor Napier replaced to the notes on Mary Meredith and Carmel, a quite different tale than the one they have been led to believe. Mary Meredith was a cold murderous bitch, who the old doctor suspected murdered Carmel by leaving windows open so the pregnant woman caught pneumonia — while she was pregnant with Meredith’s child, Stella.

   Mary Meredith wasn’t murdered by her husband. They fell to their death while he struggled with her to keep her from throwing herself and Stella off the cliff in a fit of vindictive and murderous jealousy. Mary Meredith is a monster of epic proportions. Miss Holloway murdered Carmal as far as the old doctor was concerned.

   Don’t screen this one on Mother’s Day.

   This is the secret the Commander has held all these years. The secret Miss Holloway would kill to protect, the secret of the old house, Mary Meredith’s secret. Stella isn’t really his grand-daughter, and the goddess Mary Meredith was a murderous harridan, but the old man truly loves Stella, he gives his life trying to save her.

   Mary Meredith wants to finish what she started.

   Compel Stella to throw herself from the exact spot where she fell, she has already tried once, the cliff by the dead tree.

   Revenge from beyond the grave.

   Murder from beyond the grave.

   And only Carmel, her real mother, stands between them, and Mary defeated her once already; all she can do is comfort and try to warn her child.

   Not really enough standing against Mary Meredith.

   Thank God Stella is with that monster Miss Holloway. But she’s not. Skinner has gone mad as a hatter and sent Stella home, home to the embrace of Mary Meredith. Mary wants her, and Mary shall have her. And when Stella finds the Commander dying of a stroke at the house, by the sea he tries to tell her, warn her, but too late. Mary Meredith has the hated child within her grasp alone at last, and Stella flees her, running in blind fear towards the very place Mary and Meredith fell to their death.

   Stella: I’m not afraid of anything here.

   Commander: “Then be afraid, be very afraid!”

   Skinner gives a finely tuned performance with an impressive scene of madness. No wonder she was one of the great ladies of the stage and American theater.

   Milland, Hussey, and Napier have gone to take Stella from Miss Holloway. They are rushing back, but can they reach Stella in time?

   The final confrontation with the hated Mary Meredith remains the single best scene of its type ever filmed. Milland, alone on a darkened stairway confronting a murderous spectral form with nothing but a candle for protection, is an image you won’t forget and the final reckoning with Mary Meredith the perfect ending. But don’t be too surprised if your courage cracks a little the way Milland’s voice does. Mary Meredith is something else.

   And, by a narrow squeak, it’s a happy ending. But as Wellington said of Waterloo, a near run thing. As a shaken Milland points out, he might have had Mary Meredith as a mother-in-law. Stella’s relieved too, she’d much rather be the illegitimate daughter of Meredith and his mistress, Carmel, than have Mary Meredith’s cold blood running in her veins. Spanish gypsy beats the cold murderous Mary Meredith by a mile.

   I can’t say as I blame her.

   The title has multiple meanings. Milland and Hussey are uninvited intruders; Stella is uninvited at the house and uninvited into the world; Carmel, the Spanish mistress ,was uninvited,; the Commander is uninvited to the seance and at the end to the house, his death uninvited at that moment; he is clearly uninviting to Milland and Hussey; Milland’s attentions to Stella are uninvited, even their dog shows up uninvited at one point and chases a squirrel who is himself uninvited; the doctor treats Stella and investigates uninvited; Bobby showed up on his doorstep univited; death was uninvited; the spirits dwelling there are uninvited. About the only people actually invited in this film are the viewers.

   If at any moment in this film there had been a single misstep, a single false moment, the whole delicate intricate facade would have collapsed on its own weight, but that mistake is never made. The Uninvited never takes itself too seriously, it never takes itself too lightly. It is never merely heavy, the humor is never just thrown in; it is vitally needed, or this film would be unrelentingly depressing.

   The spirits are just distinct enough to perceive as more than just light and shadow, but never more, they are a presence, but never quite of this world. They have influence over the living, but their power is that of suggestion and mood. At best they can make a rooms atmosphere change, close a door, cry in the night, fill a room with warmth and scent, or with malevolence, turn the page of a vital book at the right time. Even at the end you could just explain them away. Not easily, but if you needed to convince yourself…

   And you might.

   The cast, direction, effects, and script are uniformly perfect with a particular nod to Milland, Hussey, Russell, Crisp, and Skinner who all outdo themselves; especially Milland who does this so effortlessly you may miss how much of this films success depends directly on his performance, his connection with the audience, and his perfectly keyed emotional responses.

   Milland’s timing as light comic actor, his more substantial talents, and his ability to play the hero are all on display. The finale of this film would not work if not for Milland’s ability to effortlessly switch from light comedy to intense fear in the same scene, virtually the same moment — making his defeat of Mary Meredith ironically perfect. Watch also for Dorothy Stickney, one of Miss Holloway’s patients, Miss Bird; it is a great bit part.

   This was a major hit, though a follow up based on another Dorothy Macardle novel, The Unseen with Russell and Joel McCrea, isn’t anywhere near as good despite a Raymond Chandler screenplay, and the same director and production team.

   Do yourself a major favor and find a copy of McArdle’s novel Uneasy Freehold (published in the US as The Uninvited). The film is very close, and the book is also one of the best of its kind ever written. I’ve seen too many ghosts to believe in them, but this movie and the novel always make me think about leaving a nite-lite on. There are more things in heaven and earth than Horatio, or I, care to think about.

   And as frosting on the cake, “Stella by Starlight,” the haunting number Milland’s Rick is working on, was a major hit, much like “Laura” from that film. It is still a beautiful piece, and runs through the movie as a subtle musical cue leading the viewer to that cliff by the house and those final moments on a darkened staircase confronted with pure malevolence.

   Cinematographer Charles Lang won a well deserved Oscar for this. His work is impressive.

   Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, the Wolfman, they have nothing on Mary Meredith. Mary Meredith would unsettle Hannibal Lecter, the demon in The Exorcist would have been possessed by her. Mary Meredith like Du Maurier and Hitchcock’s Rebecca haunts this film even though you never see her save in a cold and forbidding portrait. She is a palpable presence; beside her Norman Bates mother was mother of the year, Joan Crawford was just a little strict, and Medea was having a bad day when she ate her children.

   It is no easy trick to do that with a character who never fully materializes on screen.

   The Uninvited is without question the finest ghost story of its era and for my money the finest ghost story ever filmed.

   This isn’t Stephen King, Clive Barker, Peter Straub, V. C. Andrews, or Anne Rice. There are no vampires, there is no CGI, no fake blood is let on screen, no green pea soup expelled, nothing leaps off the screen at you. The Uninvited, just wraps it’s chilly hand around the base of your spine with frisson after frisson as visceral as a gut punch. Like Mary Meredith herself, once it has you it won’t let go long after the silver shadows on the screen have faded to nothing.

   I have never watched this alone in the house at night. and quite frankly, I don’t intend to.

   If that isn’t a tribute to a ghost story, I don’t know what is.

   And try walking upstairs with only a candle to light your way when you have finished watching it.

KEN ROTHROCK – The Deadly Welcome. Major Books, paperback original, 1976.

   No matter how obscure a book or an author may be — and I believe this one qualifies on both counts — if there’s a PI in it, I will probably read it, or at least give it an all out try.

   Rick North, who tells the story in first person, qualifies as a private detective, barely. He’s low man on the totem pole at Taber, Kline and North, an artist’s management firm based in LA, but he’s about to be booted out of the firm unless he finds out who has been threatening the life of Rory Maclaine, one of their clients and a comedian who’s just hit the big time.

   Threats are one thing, but when Maclaine collapses and dies on stage after finishing his new act, North, who used to be a comedian himself until he found his career going nowhere, now finds he must solve the case, or else.

   After a slightly shaky start, the tale that follows is solid enough, but a clutter of too any characters, all of whom seem to be acting individually in various and sundry ways, slow the story down to a near crawl around the two-thirds point. It has to be hard, in my opinion, for a new writer to maintain his (or her) momentum for the entirety of a full-length novel, no matter what kind of twist you plan on ending it with. And so it is here.

   As for the author, Al Hubin in Crime Fiction IV, says that Ken Rothrock is probably Harley Kent Rothrock (1939-1999), but Google reveals no more. This was his only work of detective fiction, a good effort, but cliched. Maybe if North had been better at a quip (he isn’t), the ride would have been a little less bumpy.

DR. RENAULT’S SECRET. 20th Century Fox, 1942. J. Carrol Naish, John Shepperd, Lynne Roberts, George Zucco. Director: Harry Lachman.

“THE MASTER PLAN OF DR. FU MANCHU.” An episode of The Adventures of Dr. Fu Manchu. Original air date: 2 June 1956. Glen Gordon (Dr. Fu Manchu), Lester Matthews (Sir Dennis Nayland Smith) Clark Howat (Dr. John Petrie), Carla Balenda, Laurette Luez, John George. Guest Cast: Alan Dexter, Steven Geray (Mr. X). Based on characters created by Sax Rohmer. Director: William Witney.

   One of the most terrifying tasks (in a good way) that a successful horror/thriller director can do is to transport the viewer into a claustrophobic, eerie, and self-enclosed celluloid universe in which evil both lurks in the shadows and hides in plain sight. And you don’t even need an oversized budget to do it and to do it extraordinarily well.

   The trick, it would seem, is to keep the running time short, the atmosphere creepy, and the plot concerned with human physicality gone awry.

   Such is the case for two gems I watched this Halloween week.

   The first, Dr. Renault’s Secret, stars J. Carrol Naish and George Zucco in a cinematic admonition against tampering with the evolutionary demarcation that separates man from ape. Zucco portrays the eponymous Dr. Renault, an egotistical, sadistic, and downright creepy French scientist with a beautiful niece, Madeline (Lynne Roberts).

   Naish, in a chillingly sinister role, portrays Noel, Renault’s simian-like assistant, a man of unbridled rage and murderous intent. From the moment you see him lurk about on the screen, you know there’s something just so terribly not normal about this tragic character. John Sheppard rounds out the main players as Dr. Larry Forbes, Madeline Renault’s American fiance.

   Directed by Harry Lachman, Dr. Renault’s Secret has that I-know-it-when-I see-it film noir aspect to it. Light and shadow are utilized to convey meaning, there are numerous camera shots from oddly distinct angles, and Noel can certainly be considered to be the film’s doomed protagonist, a man trapped in an out-of-control world.

   Also look for the noir-like mise-en-scene, the numerous staircases, doorways, and pathways that play prominent roles in conveying a story about Renault’s psychological descent into madness and Noel’s descent into savagery.

   In “The Master Plan of Dr. Fu Manchu,” an episode of the television show, The Adventures of Dr. Fu Manchu, a physician is pressured into performing plastic surgery on a man long thought dead but who is very much alive: Adolf Hitler.

   Fu Manchu, Satan incarnate, kidnaps Dr. Harlow Henderson, a friend of Petrie, and under the threat of torture, forces him to change the face of Hitler into the visage of an ordinary looking man, a person of unspeakable evil who could then safely hide in plain sight.

   Directed by William Witney, this thrilling episode has it all: murder by tarantula, Cold War paranoia, Nazis in an underground South Pacific hideaway, and the psychologically discomforting notion that physicians, with the use of surgical implements, could fundamentally re-alter a man’s physical identity.

   The last five minutes or so of this episode showcase Witney’s strength as a director of action sequences. After all, we get the thrill of witnessing Smith shoot and kill Hitler!

BASIL DAVENPORT, Editor – Deals with the Devil. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1958. Ballantine 326K, paperback, 1959 (abridged to only 12 stories).

   I don’t deny the existence of a God, but I haven’t felt much need of one since I became a grown-up, so I leave the Almighty to those who do. But though I have never longed to find God, I have often wished there were a Devil.

   Old Nick has brought so much to our culture that I feel some disappointment that His Satanic Majesty lacks the flesh-and-blood basis given to legends like Wyatt Earp and Richard III — and never have I felt this longing more keenly than while reading Basil Davenport’s excellent anthology Deals with the Devil.

   In the excellent introduction to this volume, Davenport cites the Devil’s unique contributions to folklore and literature, from Genesis (Satan’s role in the Bible is small and open to debate, but he was always a rock star in the Christian church.) through Marlowe, Goethe and Stephen Vincent Benet.

   Were he writing today, he might have included Ira Levin, William Peter Blatty and Stephen King, but I prize this collection for its antique charm, as Davenport lays out a spicy buffet of authors like Dickens, Dunsany, De Maupassant and the ever-popular Anonymous, to Asimov, Boucher and the underrated John Collier.

   Davenport points out in his introduction that of the twenty-five tales collected here, the Devil loses out to God and Man in thirteen and wins in twelve. I also noted a tinge of sly humor running through the pages, perhaps best exemplified in Collier’s line, “Seated on a red-hot throne suspended over that pit whose bottomlessness I shall heartily envy.” (That one took a minute to sink in and be appreciated.)

   The effect, however is to make the un-funny stories seem much more grim and unsettling, as Satan is sometimes depicted as an ethical square-dealer (albeit a sharp one) and sometimes as brutal, duplicitous and (worst of all) a bit stupid.

   Whatever the case, a reader looking for a bit of atmospheric Halloween reading won’t go wrong here. As for me, I cherish the fantasy that when Steve posts this and my words light up the computer screen, I shall notice a bit of smoke in the room, a faint smell of sulphur, and hear a deep, ominous chuckle at my back….

WATERFRONT. PRC, 1944. John Carradine, J. Carrol Naish, Maris Wrixon, Edwin Maxwell, Terry Frost, John Bleifer, Marten Lamont, Olga Fabian. Director: Steve Sekely.

   Sometimes casting one actor rather than another really can make or break a film that, on the surface at least, does not appear to have that much else going for it. In the case in Waterfront, a taut 1944 spy thriller about Nazi spies and German expatriates in wartime San Francisco, that actor is John Carradine.

   Directed by Steve Sekely, a Hungarian filmmaker who made numerous low-budget American films, Waterfront stars Carradine as Victor Marlow, a ruthless dark-clad Gestapo agent tasked with hunting down the men responsible for stealing a list of Nazi spies in America from one Dr. Karl Decker (J. Carrol Naish), an optometrist with a waterfront practice.

   The story begins with an armed robbery in the fog. The rather unobtrusive Decker, who we soon come to realize is a Nazi spy, is held up by a waterfront hoodlum. Too bad for him, as something far more valuable than money is taken from his possession. The thug takes his master spy book, a veritable listing of the Nazi agents in America.

   Enter Marlow (Carradine), a lean, mean Nazi who will do whatever it takes to get the book back. He also, we soon learn, seems to have his eye on Decker’s position as head honcho in the San Francisco Nazi underworld. Marlow intimidates a local German woman who runs a boardinghouse, forcing her to provide him with lodging. As it turns out, the landlady’s daughter’s boyfriend has a pending business deal with one of the local, anti-fascist Germans involved with the theft of Decker’s book.

   If it sounds complicated, it is and it isn’t. Suffice it to say that if you think too much about the plot, you begin to realize how preposterous it all is to have all these characters interacting in one small neighborhood of a large West Coast city.

   Indeed, all things considered, Waterfront could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered a remarkably well-crafted spy tale. It does, however, benefit from a noir-like atmosphere and some exceptionally well-filmed sequences when the lanky Carradine, with his unmistakable voice, demonstrates just how well he portrays menacing characters. It’s a slightly clunky low-budget affair from PRC Pictures, but for what it is, it’s an enjoyable little wartime spy thriller.

HUGH DESMOND – Death Walks in Scarlet. Wright & Brown, UK, hardcover, 1948.

   Superintendent Alan Fraser, the leading detective in Death Walks in Scarlet is, I suspect, about as unknown a character who appeared in over 40 works of crime fiction as there could possibly be. Nor would even the most ardent reader of detective mysteries recognize the name of the author, who wrote several hundred of them — which is only a rough estimate. I didn’t take the time to count.

   In other words, this is my candidate for the most obscure author of the month, although without looking back, I have a feeling there may be some strong contenders. The author’s real name was Kathleen Lindsay, who wrote crime novels under her own name, as Hugh Desmond, Elizabeth Fenton, Nigel MacKenzie and Mary Richmond. In fact one of the Alan Fraser novels was by Nigel MacKenzie. She was so prolific that she has her own Wikipedia page, which begins thusly:

   In case you’re wondering, no, I hadn’t heard of her either, before I tried to see if I couldn’t find out more about “Hugh Desmond” and coming up with a whole lot more than I expected.

   I might have guessed that the author was a woman, if I hadn’t done the research mentioned above before I finished the book, but I was leaning that way, since the female characters in the story are all strongly depicted and play such key roles in the mystery. The superintendent’s wife, for example, does more in Death Walks in Scarlet than fix her husband’s supper when he comes home late at night after a long, hard day on the job.

   Nor is she a mere sounding board for his concerns. It is at her suggestion that they go to a dinner party where they meet an invalid woman who is cared for by a trusted servant female and who has recently taken charge of a niece, who has come to live with them after the death of her father in France.

   All strongly depicted characters, but what do they have to do with the gang of burglars who have become the bane of Fraser’s existence, especially once they have added murder to their long list of crimes? Fraser suspects they are former members of British military who, after the war, cannot find non-criminal employment to use their newly obtained talents on, and have thus turned to crime.

   The connection between the two parts of the story is a key one, and even though the novel turns into more of a thriller — one including many deaths and more than one kidnapping — than a puzzle to be solved by pure deduction, it is a suspenseful one, with a twist that I almost but didn’t really see coming. I enjoyed this one.

A DANGEROUS PROFESSION. RKO Radio Pictures, 1949. George Raft, Ella Raines, Pat O’Brien, Bill Williams, Jim Backus, Roland Winters. Director: Ted Tetzlaff.

   First of all, I have to confess that I don’t understand George Raft’s popularity as a movie star, and I assume he had to have been popular at the time, or how did he manage to be given leading roles in as many movies as he was? His demeanor is stiff and wooden, he barely breaks a smile now and then, and when his does, his eyes don’t seem to match what his mouth is trying to convey.

   But I will concede that he’s better in this low budget movie than others I’ve seen him in. The first part of A Dangerous Profession is also rather interesting, so let me tell you about that before getting into what eventually does go wrong, which it does, or at least I thought so.

   Raft plays Vince Kane, the lesser partner in a bail bondsman company, the other partner, the one with the money, is Pat O’Brien, who is mostly out of the picture (figuratively as well as literally) for the first part of the movie. The husband of the woman that Kane once had a brief affair with (Ella Raines) has been picked up by the police in connection with a bond security robbery, which also left a policeman dead.

   Bail is therefore set high, $25,000, and the man’s wife (and Kane’s former flingmate) and her lawyer can come up with only $4000. But out of the blue another lawyer who claims to be representing her brings in another $12,000. She says she doesn’t know anything about it, but Kane chips in another $9000 of the firm’s money, thus incurring Pat O’Brien’s wrath.

   It’s a neat setup for a good story, and so it seems doubly so when the husband gets bumped off, and the police in the form of Jim Backus’s character isn’t happy about that. George Raft, in the guise of Vince Kane, is caught in the middle.

   But the story goes downhill from here. The crooks are are dumb as Shinola, and whoever wrote the script had no idea what to do with Pat O’Brien’s character. He’s all over the map in terms of what his role is in this movie, good, bad or indifferent, and I’m not sure the fellow who wrote the script knew either. I kind of like guys who choose sides, or whose side is chosen for him, and we know whose side he’s on, especially when the movie’s over, if not before.

   Nor do I, as a brief postscript, think that Ella Raines should be happy with whoever was in charge of photographing her. Only briefly are glimpses are seen of of her in full noirish beauty.

VICTOR NORWOOD – Night of the Black Horror. Badger Books, paperback, 1961.

   This is perhaps the finest novel ever written in the English language. Or perhaps not. Certainly it can’t be judged by the criteria we apply to most fiction: originality, prose, characterization or plot, yet I found it one of the most compulsively readable books I’ve opened this year.

   A bit of research revealed that the first part of Night/Horror was stolen from a short story, “Slime” by Joseph Payne Brennan, and I mean Stolen, with characters and situations only slightly modified, as a formless, blob-like (Brennan got a cash settlement from the makers of that movie) deep-sea Thing gets blasted out of the ocean depths and lands in a swamp somewhere in the southern USA — one of those isolated rural burgs beloved in the Horror Genre, with the added twist that Author Norwood sometimes has his yokels lapse into British colloquialisms, as when the Sheriff tells everyone to park their cars with the bonnets close together.

   Given such literary larceny and idiomatic ineptitude, Night of the Black Horror should have been a total waste, but — no kidding — I found myself completely gripped in its spell as the formless thing begins to creep out of the swamp at night, absorbing swine, ’gators, and the occasional landed gentry.

   In short order it attracts the attention of a vacationing scientist, his handsome young assistant and (surprise!) beautiful daughter. A few more folks come to a (literally) sticky end before the Army comes in (“We’ll try it with flame-throwers and I’ll have men standing by with bazookas…”) and things get really nasty.

   Norwood shows real flair for moving a story along quickly, and he writes the nasty bits just visceral enough to be vivid without getting disgusting. And if the characters seem a bit pat, I had fun visualizing their cinematic counterparts. I could almost see John Agar, Faith Domergue and that grand old man of Sci-Fi, Morris Ankrum, strutting across pages I couldn’t turn fast enough.

   Great literature? Hardly. But for a fast, fun read you couldn’t ask for better.