ROBERT BARNARD — At Death’s Door. Scribner’s, hardcover, 1988. Dell, paperback, 1989. First published in the UK: Collins Crime Club, hardcover, 1988.

    — Death and the Chaste Apprentice. Scribner’s, hardcover, 1989. Dell, paperback, 1990. First published in the UK: Collins Crime Club, 1989.

   In At Death’s Door, Cordelia Mason, the daughter of actress Dame Myra Mason, is writing a tell-all biography of her (still-living) mother and decides to visit her half-brother, who is caring for their senile father, once a successful novelist. Cordelia was the outcome of a brief affair between the two, and wants to go through her famous father’s private papers from that period.

   Her mother, anxious not to be painted as “Myra Dearest,” also visits, to keep Cordelia from going through with her plans. Shortly after a heated argument between mother and daughter, Dame Myra is found murdered.

   In The Chaste Apprentice, the Ketterick arts festival is staging an Elizabethan play, “The Chaste Apprentice of Bowe,” in the courtyard of an old English Inn and everyone involved in the production — plus a number of Arts Festival participants — is staying there.

   The one incongruous character in the entire milieu is the new manager of the Inn, who spends his brief hour upon the page butting into others’ affairs with unwelcome advice and/or ferreting out their secrets for psychological blackmail. I somehow managed to keep my jaw from dropping in astonishment when he turned up murdered in his room after the first performance.

   I don’t know, but it somehow seemed to me that Barnard couldn’t seem to hit his stride in either of these efforts. The characters are serviceable but hardly memorable, and neither story has any great originality, except for a slight twist at the end of Door, unrelated, alas, to the plot.

DANA STABENOW – Though Not Dead. St.Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books, hardcover, February 2011; paperback, November 2011.

Genre:   Licensed Investigator. Leading character:  Kate Shugak; 18th in series. Setting:   Alaska.

First Sentence:   The black death didn’t get to Alaska until November.

   Old Sam, a tribal leader and surrogate father to PI Kate Shugak, has died. He has made Kate his executor and primary heir but some of his bequests come as a surprise. Kate hadn’t known how much land Sam owned, including a homestead within gold-mining country.

   Then there’s the letter simply saying, “Find my father,” and how does this tie to a missing Russian icon which was a tribal artifact? Kate doesn’t know but something thinks she does as they keep trying to kill her.

   In the meantime, Kate’s lover, Sgt. Jim Chopak, has been summoned home for his father’s funeral. The relationship between him and his mother has always been chilly, but never more so than now that his father bequeathed Jim his locked writing box in which he finds a photograph of his mother and someone Jim has never before seen.

   It is nice to see Ms. Stabenow returning to a more serious style. Not that her trademark humor is not longer apparent — it is — but this story is more layered, complex and a bit more serious than previous, recent entries.

   Maps are a useful and wonderful way to provide the reader with a sense of location and perspective; I’m glad they are there. Complimenting them is an incredible ability to create a sense of places and people through Ms. Stabenow’s vivid descriptions:

   Okay, I’ll admit being partial to that particular description as I loved the “Angelique” books, but the scene of Kate’s wolf/dog Mutt interacting with wild wolves against the snow under a full moon also becomes one you are not reading, but seeing.

   Characters come to life as well: “Judge Singh…had such immense dignity that she always seemed to be attired in her robes…” and “At the desk sat Jane Silver, who looked like she out to be hunched over a steaming cauldron chatting in chorus with the other two weird sisters.”

   The people and relationships are real, including Kate’s relationship with Mutt, which adds, funny, touching and fearful moments to the story. The inclusion of a surprising and unexpected character only adds to the story.

   The story itself is very good and very much about relationships. They really are the point from which the various lines of the story evolve.

   It’s not a perfect story. At times, it felt as if there was one thread too many and it bogged down. I found myself wanted to skip portions, although I didn’t, but it did feel overly long; too many scenes with Mutt, not enough “mystery” or flow to the story as I’d have hoped. Perhaps it’s just a case of my expecting more from an author who is so good.

   Don’t misunderstand; I enjoyed the book very much for its characters, humor, sense of people and place, and tense scenes of strength and determination to survive. Although the plot could have been a little tighter, I’ll be right there read to buy the next book in the Shugak series.

Rating: Good Plus.

I’VE GOT YOUR NUMBER. Warner Brothers, 1934. Joan Blondell, Pat O’Brien, Allen Jenkins, Glenda Farrell, Eugene Pallette, Gordon Westcott. Director: Ray Enright.

   This light and lively (and just a little risque) pre-Code comedy is well worth your time and money, if the opportunity should ever come your way. Pat O’Brien and Allen Jenkins, his somewhat dour sidekick, play a couple of telephone company repairmen, and I’ve Got Your Number is filled to the brim with tales of their various adventures.

   Among which are being asked to install longer cords in a luxury apartment inhabited by a coterie of beautiful call girls (if I can fill the gaps, then you should be able too, but one blonde’s backless dress goes a long way in giving it away); unmask a phoney medium (Glenda Farrell) who’s using her phone line to flimflam her clientele who think she’s connecting them to their dearly departed: and finding a new job for a good-looking hotel switchboard operator (Joan Blondell) who lost her job playing along with a practical joke that turned out not to be so funny.

   And it also turns out that Pat O’Brien is quite the operator himself. Getting Joan Blondell to agree to go out for dinner with him is quite a task, but it’s one that he’s more than up far – what with his very persuasive rat-a-tat non-stop vocal ability. It is great, as always, to see a man with a way with women in action, even if he is so good-looking.

   Allen Jenkins claims to hate the ladies, but when he turns up later on with Gloria Farrell as his lady friend on a double date with the other two, we are not surprised (and, I have to admit, just a little jealous).

   Most of the tale is centered on Joan Blondell and her propensity for getting into trouble. It’s not her fault – well, not completely – when some bonds go missing while she’s on duty at the switchboard on the new job O’Brien gets for her, and getting her out of trouble again takes all of her brash young suitor’s formidable abilities.

   What makes the story the most fun, though, is that the players seem to be enjoying themselves as much as they’re hoping the members of the audience will, and I think they must have.

FRANK THOMAS – Sherlock Holmes and the Treasure Train. Pinnacle, paperback original, March 1985.

   Frank Thomas was — just in case you’re wondering if he might have been — the movie actor who gained considerable fame playing the lead role in the Tom Corbett, Space Cadet series on the small screen, a role so well known that I’m sure it stayed with him the rest of his life. After his TV days were over, though, he also became an expert on the game of bridge and (most relevant to us here) a mystery novelist.

   Besides a handful of short stories about Sherlock Holmes, Thomas wrote four novels about the character, of which this was the third. Watson, of course, in all of them as well, as the purported narrator, and so is Mycroft Holmes – at least in Treasure Train – but (as far as I recall) never onstage. He’s only referred to, and as it so happens, quite often.

   There are a couple of other short cases to deal with at first, but the crux of the matter of hand is the theft of £500,000 in gold that has been stolen from a well-guarded and armored railroad car as it’s being transported across the English countryside. If it sounds like an “impossible crime” to you, it did to me at first as well, but Holmes makes quick work of that part of the mystery, alas.

   The problem, then — having become one of whodunit, not how — loses momentum quickly as the intricacies of international finance and banking come into play. Thomas does his best to keep things interesting through the middle of the book, but I found my eyelids getting heavier and heavier throughout the denser chapters, of which there were, unfortunately, too many.

   Thomas also does his best to make the reader believe his characters are the same as those created by Conan Doyle, but while solidly done, he never convinced me. Two gentlemen. good detectives each, with the same names and outer mannerisms as the real Holmes and Watson? Yes, I found myself going along with that, but I also regret to report that clones, even above average ones, are seldom little more than stand-by replacements for the real thing.

      The Sherlock Holmes novels by Frank Thomas —

Sherlock Holmes and the Golden Bird. Pinnacle, pbo, 1979.

Sherlock Holmes and the Sacred Sword. Pinnacle, pbo, 1980.

Sherlock Holmes and the Treasure Train. Pinnacle, pbo, 1985.
Sherlock Holmes and the Masquerade Murders. Medallion, pbo, 1986.

THE NAKED KISS. Allied Artists, 1964. Constance Towers, Anthony Eisley, Michael Dante, Virginia Grey, Patsy Kelly, Marie Devereux, Karen Conrad. Screenwriter/director: Sam Fuller.

   The Naked Kiss is every bit as cheap as Murder by Contract [reviewed here ], but more passionate and brilliant by far. Sam Fuller, the writer/producer/director of this thing, is often described as a primitive Genius — sort of a filmmaker savant — but I have always been impressed by his sophistication; Fuller had an uncanny ability to mix metaphors and genres almost at will without ever putting a foot wrong, that seems anything but Primitive.

   The Naked Kiss starts off like a mid-60s Porno Film, with a hooker beating her pimp (make that ex-pimp) nearly to death, and ends up with a soapy, sentimental scene that looks to have been lifted from Peyton Place.

   Along the way, it provides some of the bluntest and most disturbing imagery you can encounter in the movies, juxtaposing crippled children, Beethoven, crooked cops, Goethe, prostitution and… well, not Redemption but Self-Respect.

   This one is photographed by Stanley Cortez, the very best Cheap Photographer in Hollywood, whose credits include The Magnificent Ambersons, Shock Corridor, Night of the Hunter, Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd, and They Saved Hitler’s Brain. Fuller and Cortez were kindred spirits, it seems, and together they turned out a film consistently fascinating to watch as well as to look at.

   Equally remarkable is Constance Towers’ performance as Kelly, the reformed hooker whose efforts to find a place in society initiate the plot. Her face, lovingly framed by Fuller and photographed by Cortez, is one of those miracles that sometimes occur in very good movies: Strong, smooth, intelligent features around the coldest, saddest eyes this side of Marley’s Ghost.

   With a look like that, Towers doesn’t even need a script, much less any acting ability, but the fact that she is here given a role worthy of her talents makes it all the better.

   Fuller’s script is as goofy as ever, a rapid-fire panoply of lines that read more like ultimatums than dialogue, but he and Towers somehow make it all seem extraordinarily Not Dumb.

   Only Fuller could get away with having a hooker who quotes Goethe but mispronounces the name, or showing her vanquished pimp falling on a calendar marked at July 4th (Independence Day, get it?) without seeming unbearably pretentious. Perhaps it’s because he has something to be pretentious about.

CHARLES ALVERSON – Goodey’s Last Stand. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1975. Playboy Press, paperback, 1977, 1979.

   Joe Goodey’s career as a private investigator is launched when he mistakes the mayor’s cousin for a gunman and shoots him, an error that forces his resignation from the San Francisco Police Department.

   His boss, Chief of Detectives Ralph Lehman, promises to wangle Goodey a PI’s license as soon as emotions cool, and Goodey takes off — for Mexico, he thinks — stopping at a seaside motel just over the county line. But by the next morning, Lehman tracks Goodey down and forces him to take his first case, dangling the promise of an immediate license.

   A stripper named Tina D’Oro — whom Goodey knew slightly but San Francisco mayor Sanford F. Kolchick knew altogether too well — has been stabbed to death, and the mayor wants the homicide cleared up quickly without involving his name or risking his reelection.

   Goodey begins by studying Tina’s diary, which has been stashed in the safe of Deputy Chief of Police Bruno Kolchick (by no coincidence, the mayor’s brother), but finds little to go on. “You could pick up more gossip on a bus ticket,” Goodey concludes.

   Goodey’s investigation takes him to the strip clubs of North Beach; into the back alleys of Chinatown; to the offices of a plastic surgeon who claims to have “created” Tina’s body; to the posh home of the mayor himself (who inexplicably lives outside the city in Marin County across the Bay); and even, for a while, to jail. Along the way he finds a Chinese girl asleep in his bed, a dead man on his stair landing — and his true calling as a private eye.

   This book is rich in San Francisco background and colorful characters, and includes a nice ongoing bit about Goodey’s Chinese landlord, but Goodey’s wisecracking manner and lone-wolf posture make him virtually indistinguishable from scores of other stereotypical fictional private eyes. Goodey has appeared in one other adventure, Not Sleeping, Just Dead (1977).

         ———
   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.

[UPDATE] 02-02-12.   And the two books of Joe Goodey’s adventures were all there were. For more about the author, check out his entry on Wikipedia here, where you’ll also find this description of Goodey’s Last Stand in a review in The New Yorker, where the novel is called “the next best thing to finding a new and unsuspected Raymond Chandler phantasmagoria.”

PITFALL. United Artists, 1948. Dick Powell, Lizabeth Scott, Jane Wyatt, Raymond Burr. Based on the novel The Pitfall by Jay J. Dratler. Director: André De Toth.

   Call this one “suburban noir,” if you will, and as I’ve seen it described as by at least one other reviewer, but “noir” it is, there’s no doubt about it. This was co-star Lizabeth Scott’s sixth film, and while her first one. You Came Along, [reviewed here ], was an uneasy combination of comedy and sentimental romance, most of the movies she made from there on were noir all the way, beginning with her second, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946).

   Dick Powell plays an insurance executive in Pitfall, but even though he has a beautiful wife (Jane Wyatt) and a young son at home, somewhere in the greater Los Angeles area, he’s starting to feel caged in, as though life is slipping away, that his opportunity for some adventure in his everyday existence is about to pass him by.

   Enter Raymond Burr, a private eye who’s found the girl friend (Lizabeth Scott) of a guy who’s in jail for embezzlement. The company Powell works for is responsible for the loss, but most of the money was spent on fancy things to give her.

   Powell pays her a visit, and while she agrees to return everything she can, she mocks him lightly for being such a dull, company-oriented guy. Thus challenged, a date for drinks turns into an overnight stay. This does not go well with Raymond Burr’s character, who has had his own eyes on the blonde beauty, and he has already told Powell so.

   Burr beats Powell up rather badly, and when Mona (Lizabeth Scott) discovers the latter is married, she wants the affair to end. Powell agrees, but as far as Burr is concerned, he is not the kind of fellow that takes no for an answer.

   I have discovered that whenever Lizabeth Scott is in a movie like this, she is always the center of attention in the film, as far as I’m concerned. Not quite so, this time. She’s an innocent victim this time, her only fault being that of attracting the wrong type of guy: from the embezzler, to the family man looking for a fling, or Raymond Burr’s character, an ugly hunk of a man whose glowering, hate-filled eyes demand your full attention throughout the film, even though he’s billed only fourth.

   There’s no sympathy in this film for Dick Powell, whose character is shallow and weak and in over his head as far as extracurricular activity is concerned, and he soon comes to know it. But he’s essentially an honest man and he does do his best on Mona’s behalf.

   I can’t tell you how the ending comes out – even whether it’s a happy one or not, for example – but when the tale is over, it is very very clear who – no, sorry, I can’t tell you that either.

   If you’re a fan of film noir, don’t miss this one.

T. J. MacGREGOR – The Seventh Sense. Kensington, hardcover, 1999. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 1999 [?]. Pinnacle, paperback, March 2000.

    When author Trish MacGregor is not writing mysteries, she’s busy doing books on astrology, the interpretation of dreams, love spells and charms, and the tarot. Which goes a long way in explaining why many of her recent books of crime fiction have more than a hint of the supernatural or paranormal in them as well.

    (She seems to have abandoned her novels in the Quin St. James/Mike McCleary series, of which there were ten, and since I haven’t read any of them, I can’t tell you how much they depended on psychic phenomena in terms of plot material, nor what the books she’s written as Alison Drake are like. Follow the link above for a list of all her books.)

    But picking this one up to read, I have to tell you, is like picking up a downed electrical wire and not being able to let go. In the opening scene an up-and-coming attorney, infuriated at not being able to land a client, succumbs to the worst case of road rage that you’ll ever read, and if you can put the book down right then and there and not continue, you’re a stronger person than I, by far.

    The fatal victims of this deliberate attack are the husband and unborn child of (guess what) an FBI agent on maternity leave, Charlie Calloway, who can’t let the killer just walk away, and she doesn’t. Is it justice she’s looking for, or simply revenge?

    This a tough story, enhanced to near incandescent level by Charlie’s newly developed seventh sense. She’d always worked well on hunches; when she died for a few minutes after the accident, her powers became even more. On page 87, her friend Rain is explaining it all to her:

    I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, so I can go along with this, but if truth be told, this would be one heck of a suspense thriller, even without the inclusion of the “new consciousness.”

    Occasionally over the top, as if you haven’t been able to tell by now, this is a wild, careening trip into the deep utter blackness that emotions (and their aftermath) can produce. Not for everyone’s taste, I don’t imagine, but while it lasts, it’s quite a ride.

[UPDATE] 02-01-12.   From the author’s website, some more information about her various series and characters: Quin St. James and Mike McCleary are two private detectives (male and female) who “plied their trade in the dark underbelly of Miami in the late 1980s.”

    Of the Alison Drake books (four of them), she says “the most significant aspect in those books was the creation of Tango Key, an island 12 miles west of Key West, where the anomalous geography is as mysterious as the island’s legends and lore of mermaids, UFOs, converging ley lines, ghosts and hauntings.”

    Tango Key was also used as a setting in the author’s five book Mira Morales series.

REHEARSAL FOR MURDER. Made for television. CBS-TV. First broadcast May 28, 1982. Robert Preston (Alex Dennison), Lynn Redgrave (Monica Welles), Patrick Macnee (David Mathews), Lawrence Pressman (Lloyd Andrews), William Russ (Frank Heller), Madolyn Smith (Karen Daniels), Jeff Goldblum (Leo Gibbs), William Daniels (Walter Lamb). Writers: Richard Levinson, William Link. Director: David Greene.

    And it’s likely this movie will surprise you. Of all the productions Levinson and Link did for television, this one comes off as probably their best. While there are several twists in the tale that seemingly come out of nowhere, in retrospect we must admit we were prepared for them with carefully placed clues.

    It has been a year since Alex Dennison (Preston) lost the love of his life, Monica Welles (Redgrave). The coroner had ruled her death a suicide, but from the night she died until tonight Alex has had his doubts. He’s convinced it was murder, and he’s determined to catch her killer.

    So Alex calls together everyone who was involved in the production in which Monica was appearing on that fateful evening, ostensibly to discuss a new play fresh from his typewriter but in reality to set a trap. Call it, if you will, the Hamlet gambit, a stratagem which several of the suspects tumble to early on:

    Exactly — but to discuss the plot any further would be to spoil the fun. You can watch Rehearsal for Murder on YouTube here — but beware of popup ads!

    It almost goes without saying that Richard Levinson and William Link dominated American television crime dramas throughout the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, either as writers, producers, and/or creators of some of the most fondly remembered programs of the era, among them: 7 Alfred Hitchcock episodes; 3 Burke’s Law; 3 Honey West; Prescription: Murder, the Columbo pilot film, plus 66 more episodes; 194 Mannix; 23 Ellery Queen; several non-series TV movie mysteries, including Murder by Natural Causes and Guilty Conscience; the pilot for Tenafly; and 264 installments of Murder, She Wrote.

    You might recognize William Daniels by his speech. He was uncredited as the voice of K.I.T.T., the supercar, in 84 episodes of Knight Rider.

    Patrick Macnee will forever be identified with the character of John Steed in 160 episodes of The Avengers, as well as 26 segments of The New Avengers reboot.

    Regular TV viewers might remember Lawrence Pressman from 97 episodes of Doogie Howser, M.D.

   It’s only January but I find it hard to believe that the remaining months of this year will produce a bio-critical book in our genre more fascinating than Blood Relations.

   Published by Perfect Crime Books, edited by Joseph Goodrich and with a foreword by master TV mystery series creator William Link, this labor of literary love brings together much of the correspondence between Frederic Dannay and his cousin Manfred B. Lee, the creators of Ellery Queen, between 1947 and 1950 when they lived on opposite coasts.

   What a treasure! It’s long been known that Fred and Manny had endless bitter disputes about their work, and Jon L. Breen presented a cross-section of this material in “The Queen Letters” (EQMM, February 2005). Now we have thousands of words more, letters that offer literally a blow-by-blow account of the creation of three of the strongest Queen novels — Ten Days’ Wonder (1948), Cat of Many Tails (1949) and The Origin of Evil (1951).

   Even the most knowledgeable Queen fans will be surprised by some of the revelations. With regard to EQMM, Fred (on page 61) boasts to Manny that he’s “done one hell of a lot of rewriting” on the stories he’s published, “including the best of them,” and claims to “have improved many a story, as the original authors have … conceded.”

   Any reader of the magazine who’s wondered about the number of motifs from the EQ novels and stories that are also found in many a story by EQMM contributors now knows the answer: Fred put them there. Manny in turn tells Fred (on page 64) that he has a “tremendous resistance” to the magazine, which he says has been “a vast sore spot with me for years.”

   Among the recurring subjects of their correspondence is their view of the vast differences between them. “I have a drive toward ‘realism,’” Manny writes on January 23, 1950 (page 112), defining the word as “conformity to the facts and color of life and the world as we live in it….”

   He accuses Fred of creating plots “in which vastness and boldness of conception is nearly everything — the colossal idea, planned to stagger if not bowl over the reader. Since such ideas rarely if ever exist in life, they necessarily lead you, in working out the details of the story, into fantasy… [T]he bigger the conception, the more fantastic becomes the story. I then face this plot, with my compulsion toward reality, and the trouble begins.”

   This is 100% consistent with what Manny’s son Rand Lee once heard his father say after a heated phone conversation with Fred: “He gives me the most ridiculous characters to work with and expects me to make them realistic!”

   Personally, I see Fred as spiritual kin to the great Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, who was a Queen fan (almost certainly of Fred’s side of the equation rather than Manny’s) and whose stories like “The Garden of Forking Paths” and “Death and the Compass” are set in the same kind of self-contained Cloud Cuckoo Lands as so many of Fred’s plot synopses were.

   Manny’s soul brother on the other hand was the character Joel McCrea played in Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941), a Hollywood director who hates the hit comedies he’s helmed and burns to create a Steinbeck-like “social consciousness” epic called O Brother, Where Art Thou?

   If ever there were a real-life Odd Couple, Fred and Manny were it, with the difference that their lacerations of each other aren’t funny. “Why am I writing to you?” Manny asks Fred on November 3, 1948 (page 81). “Why are you writing to me? We are two howling maniacs in a single cell, trying to tear each other to pieces… We ought never to write a word to each other. We ought never to speak. I ought to take what you give me in silence, and you ought to take what I give you in silence, and spit our galls out in the privacy of our cans until someday, mercifully, we both drop dead and end the agony.”

   The miracle is that they managed to stay together, and produce such excellent novels and stories, for so many years.

   Or was it a miracle? One of the most surprising aspects of these letters is that side by side with the mutual lacerations are moments when each of these highly sensitive men empathizes with the other in times of personal trouble.

   Of all the crosses that Fred was forced to bear, the heaviest was the birth of his son Stephen with brain damage. (He died in 1954, at age six.) “He has been getting insulin injections for about a month…[but] there is hardly any flesh on Steve into which the needle can be plunged,” Fred writes on February 20, 1950, adding that he and his wife “live from day to day, not daring to look ahead to the day after.” (Page 127)

   Manny’s reply is dated February 24. “I can only imagine — and that inadequately — what all this is doing to you, this unremitting worry, nervous drain, shock, etc. Keep up your strength. Don’t give up hope. Grit your teeth… This siege on top of what you went through a few years ago would be too much for even the most stable individual. From somewhere you must find the strength to fight it.” (Page 130)

   It’s passages like these that illustrate what Fred said after Manny’s death. “We were cousins, but we were closer than brothers.”

   I was privileged to know and work with Fred during the last thirteen years of his life. I would have given much to have known Manny better but he died in 1970 after we had exchanged a handful of letters and met once. What an amazing pair they were!