LAURIE KING – Grave Talent. Alonzo Hawkins & Casey Martinelli #1. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1993. Bantam, paperback reprint, 1995.

   There are so many first novels appearing now, in both hardcover and paper, that it’s a wonder to me that any of them get bought. How do you choose? I usually don’t, barring a free review copy, but for some reason this caught my attention, and I did.

   The ingredients are familiar: crusty old San Francisco homicide detective (Alonzo Hawkins) is assigned a newly promoted female partner (Casey Martinelli) to work on a brutal and sensational child murder, as much for political reasons as anything else.

   Then a second and third child are murdered, and all are found to center on a rural colony outside San Francisco. One of the residents of the colony is a famous artist living incognito there, who also happens to have been convicted of and served a sentence for child murder. Too obvious? Maybe, maybe not; certainly many things are not as they seem.

   This was an interesting book, and overall a good one. It wasn’t a typical procedural, but neither was it a let’s-get-touchy-feely-with-the-characters-and-to-hell-with-police-reality type.

   The story is told mostly from Martinelli’s viewpoint, and really has two main focal points other than the mystery proper: the tortured life of the artist, and the relationship between the detectives.

   Martinelli and Hawkin are both complex and interesting characters that I think will bear the weight of a series, though it isn’t clear if there will be one. The writing is quite good. This isn’t one of those books that shouts that a new star is born, but it’s considerably better than the first-novel norm, and I think the lady has a future.

   Recommended.

Editorial Comments:   Barry was right on the money on two counts. First of all, Grave Talent won the Edgar Award for Best First Mystery in 1994. Barry must have been among the first to read, review and recognize that the book was “considerably better” than most first mysteries.

   And yes, Laurie King has had a future, and yes, Grave Talent was the first of a series. (Does that make three counts?) There are five in the series now, the most recent being The Art of Detection (2006).

   If anything, though, Laurie King is more well-known for her second series of mystery novels, the one in which Mary Russell meets and befriends Sherlock Holmes at a young age (hers). He becomes her mentor in solving several crimes, then later her partner and companion; in fact, they later marry. There are eleven in this series, the most recent one being Pirate King (2011).

   While most UK TV viewers surrendered to the spell of the Scotland Yard detective series during the 1950s, another sub-division of the TV genre was attracting something of a mini-following in Britain. The thriller serial.

   Once settled into the post-war comfort of its role in British life, BBC Television began to develop the format of drama series and serials in earnest. A television serial template was struck, conforming at first to the nervous frenzy of “live” TV production and then to a uniform house style (the half-hour, six-part format).

   When Francis Durbridge emerged in television in 1952 with the six-part thriller serial The Broken Horseshoe, the first of this type of programming, he combined the psychological thriller with the multi-part mystery.

   The two notable genre-related forms had first appeared in the autumn of 1951: the single play Night of the Fourth (a detective story with a psychological theme; adapted from the German play Sprechstunde) and C.A. Lejeune’s six-part series of adaptations of Sherlock Holmes stories (presented as a series of self-contained, 35-minute plays). It is interesting that these two elements should form the basic structure of what became in the 1950s (and continued through into the 1960s): the BBC Durbridge mystery-thriller serial.

   Durbridge was a radio writer (he had introduced BBC listeners to his amateur sleuth Paul Temple in 1938 [Send for Paul Temple]) whose name on the television credits could be relied upon to raise high hopes.

   He treated his themes — murder, smuggling, treachery — with an unsentimental, civilised levity. There was in the writing a blend of the ironic and the ruthless, a switch in mood from amusing bafflement to disturbing seriousness, that was tartly refreshing in itself while requiring the utmost concentration and evenness of style in the direction.

   While some type of criminal activity was usually embedded into the narrative (be it race fixing, dope smuggling, kidnap), it was the psychological bewilderment of the hero that was often the focus. The Teckman Biography (1953-54) and Portrait of Alison (1955) both move around characters who are supposedly dead but who mysteriously reappear, alive and informed and involved in a criminal enterprise.

   In Melissa (BBC, 1964; remade 1974) it is the “wrong” person who is reported dead. A sense of timeliness was displayed in his Operation Diplomat in late 1952, concerning the mysterious disappearance of a top secret diplomat, and seemed to be perfectly keyed to the 1951 defection to Russia by British intelligence officers Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean (although Durbridge claimed coincidence).

   The BBC’s treatment, with its rococo embellishments and general atmosphere of menace thickened by producer-director Martyn C. Webster’s staging in the early days (by producer-director Alan Bromly in later years), was as assured as any TV viewer at that time had a right to expect.

   On the other hand some of the subsidiary scenes and characters were, if anything, under-developed. But the serials’ main weakness was the absence of expressive cutting and visual flow. As a result, certain half-way stretches of dialogue became tedious to watch; and the essential awareness of the writer’s shifting tensions yielded disappointingly to the easier mannerisms of any conventional thriller.

   The typical Durbridge world of the thriller is comfortably middle class (of the post-war era), breezing with terribly English country-inn-and-gin types, often with the hero a self-sufficient artist or a writer, and always with the inevitable, and dependable, Scotland Yard man on hand when necessary.

   Heavily dependant on dialogue and an end-of-episode hook, the serials were often little more than televised radio scripts, but this was to the serials’ advantage in the early days. In the Durbridge universe, everyone is tainted with a suggestion of menace or deceit. Absolutely no one is to be taken on face value. Information is deliberately withheld from the viewer, as well as the hero, almost to a point of irritation.

   These complicated, intellectual crime riddles tended to overshadow his clearly stock characters (always in search of that elusive depth), somehow making him the ingenious master of the television mystery serial for almost two decades, until the times changed and the old-fashioned formula evaporated.

   It wasn’t long before the UK TV schedules were thick with mystery-thriller serials, all designed and delivered in the Durbridge mould. Author Michael Gilbert studied the Durbridge form and wrote the underworld thriller The Crime of the Century (BBC, 1956-57); screenwriter Jimmy Sangster turned in the murder mystery Motive for Murder (ITV, 1957), and The Assassin (ITV, 1958), involving the hunt for a killer-for-hire; and Anthony Berkeley’s 1937 novel Trial and Error, about a murderer setting out to prove the innocence of a wrongly accused man, was adapted as the six-part Leave It To Todhunter (BBC, 1958).

   Rival channel ITV’s serial master was Lewis Greifer, a prolific radio and TV writer whose work in the serial format (in collaboration with producer-director Quentin Lawrence) was not too far removed from the Durbridge world of psychological terrors. The hero faces an identity crisis in the murder mysteries Five Names for Johnny and Web, both 1957; and in The Man Who Finally Died (1959) is confronted with the return of a “dead” man, leading to a convoluted Durbridge-style unravelling of the past.

   Astute enough to notice the secret agent genre forming on television by the beginning of the 1960s (with the growing popularity of ITV’s Danger Man; the 1960-62 half-hour series), Durbridge created the lengthy serial The World of Tim Frazer (BBC, 1960-61) featuring a working-class engineer who is recruited by a shadowy government department into acting as an undercover agent.

   The unprecedented 18-part serial was surprisingly well-received and even heralded as the successor to the still-popular (via radio) Paul Temple. The detached and skeptical Frazer (performed by a brooding Jack Hedley with insolent confidence) was essentially an outside observer of events who had licence to move through the well-heeled Durbridge milieu with barely-concealed contempt of what was by now stock 1950s British types.

   The peculiar success of Tim Frazer continued Durbridge’s celebrity as the master craftsman of the British thriller serial (other contemporary thriller serials were gauged on their ability to render the “Durbridge touch”; Lynda La Plante would receive similar genre worship during the 1980s).

   Whether he was blinded by the celebrity or simply coerced by BBC producers hungry for more of the same, Durbridge pressed ahead into the following decades (up until his last serial, Breakaway, in 1980) by giving the viewer (and the producer) more of what he thought they wanted: long, drawn-out, unnecessarily complicated plots populated by thinly developed 1950s-type characters, leading up as always to a sudden surprise revelation in the final episode.

   In a television-viewing age that had already experienced by this time a post-Z Cars (BBC, 1962-78) world of stark social realism (explicit violence, police corruption, race conflict, etc.), Durbridge proceeded, seemingly quite oblivious of events around him, to turn out facsimiles of his 1950s plots.

   What was at one time the electrifying anticipation of the coming of “another Durbridge thriller” in the 1950s and 1960s had developed by the 1970s into a non-event of bafflement and disappointment.

Note:   The introduction to this series of columns by Tise Vahimagi on TV mysteries and crime shows may be found here, followed by:

Part 1: Basic Characteristics (A Swift Overview)
Part 2.0: Evolution of the TV Genre (UK)
Part 2.1: Evolution of the TV Genre (US)
Part 3.0: Cold War Adventurers (The First Spy Cycle)
Part 3.1: Adventurers (Sleuths Without Portfolio).
Part 4.0: Themes and Strands (1950s Police Dramas).

MARK DE CASTRIQUE – Fatal Undertaking. Poisoned Pen Press, hardcover/trade paperback, October 2010.

Genre:  Police Procedural. Leading character:  Barry Clayton (5th in series). Setting:   North Carolina.

First Sentence:   “You want to borrow a casket?”

   Deputy Sheriff Barry Clayton, had been a city police officer but moved back to Gainesboro, a small town in North Carolina in which his family runs a funeral parlor.

   Working for the sheriff’s department and helping with the family business can lead to interesting situations such as loaning a casket to the Jaycees for a Halloween haunted house and having it end up with a murdered body inside. Complicating Barry’s case is the question whether the victim was the one actually intended and having his reporter ex-wife return to town.

   It is always a pleasure to read a new book by Mark de Castrique. He brings us into this small North Carolina town, not so much by detailed descriptions of the environs, but by conveying the closeness of the town’s citizens and with the reality of the town’s politics and insularity.

   His dialogue is excellent, including humor — “As he left the diner, I saw the press corps following after him like a gaggle of geese, honking “Sheriff” with every step.” and the use of colloquialisms — “In here we’re two size-ten shoes in a size-four shoebox.” — add contrast to the serious elements of the plot.

   The characters are representative of all those you find in any town, but are far from being stereotypical. Sheriff Tommy Lee Wadkins is a man who has seen too much violence and knows you have to have humor, particularly when situations may be serious, to survive.

   Barry is dedicated to his family, loyal to his friends, but he’s not perfect. He makes costly mistakes during the investigation and realizes the impact of them. That makes him more realistic than the usual ‘perfect’ detective.

   The story draws you in from its seemingly light beginning but turns quickly to dark with the first murder. Yes, first; there is more than one murder, but the story is neither noir nor serial killer in approach. Instead, it is a very well done police procedural.

   The plot is full of twists, interspersed with humor, suspense, and tragedy; with a shocking climax and affirming ending; as is life. That is one of the appeals of de Castrique’s writing to me; they are a reminder that life is filled with twists and tragedy, yet also with hope and that it is important to always remember that which is most important

   I was happy to read that de Castrique has many more investigations in mind for Barry. I look forward to reading each one of them.

Rating:   Good Plus.

       The Buryin’ Barry mystery series —

1. Dangerous Undertaking (2003)

2. Grave Undertaking (2004)
3. Foolish Undertaking (2006)
4. Final Undertaking (2007)
5. Fatal Undertaking (2010)

● CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN. Universal, 1943. Acquanetta, John Carradine, Evelyn Ankers, Milburn Stone, Lloyd Corrigan. Director: Edward Dmytryk.

● JUNGLE WOMAN. Universal, 1944. Acquanetta, Evelyn Ankers, J. Carrol Naish, Samuel S. Hinds, Lois Collier, Milburn Stone, Douglass Dumbrille. Director: Reginald Le Borg.

● JUNGLE CAPTIVE. Universal, 1945. Otto Kruger, Vicky Lane, Amelita Ward, Phil Brown, Jerome Cowan, Rondo Hatton. Story & screenplay: Dwight V. Babcock. Director: Harold Young.

   Among movie studios, Universal is fondly remembered for classic horror films like Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman and the sequels they spawned, but the studio put out a good number of lesser efforts, and even a few second-string series, haunted by bush-league monsters who somehow never hit the big time.

   One recalls (not fondly) the Spider Woman and the Creeper, both spawned by the superior Sherlock Holmes series, and both duller than dishwater. But perhaps the most persistent of the minor monsters was Paula the Ape Woman.

   Captive Wild Woman (1943) initiated the series and it opens with a credit thanking Clyde Beatty for his “inimitable talent and contribution to this film.” Said contribution consists of stock footage from an old circus serial, and why they refer to Beatty as “inimitable” I don’t know, because Milburn Stone imits him all through the movie, as a lion tamer whose every foray into the cage becomes a long-shot of the back of Beatty in the earlier film.

   In defense of Milburn Stone, who became a respected character actor on Gunsmoke, I have to say that he puts in a very convincing performance when called on to play Beatty’s back, and it’s only when he goes through the tame leading-man motions that interest flags.

   Unfortunately, there’s rather much of this, as the plot of Captive Wild Woman meanders its way from a circus milieu to the den of a mad scientist (John Carradine) experimenting on the sister (Martha Vickers) of leading lady Evelyn Ankers, who put up with quite a lot of that in those days.

   Carradine extends his research so far as to steal a gorilla from the circus and turn it into a near-human woman (Acquanetta, “the Venezuelan Volcano”) using glandular injections from Vickers, whereupon the writers decide to get silly and have Carradine take Paula the Ape Woman back to the circus, where she promptly falls in love with Stone and becomes part of his act.

   But Stone is already engaged to Ankers, and when Paula gets jealous she morphs into a half-ape and must return to Carradine who is eager to extend his research even further, resulting in a four-sided triangle reminiscent of the lovers in Midsummer’s Night Dream, but without the class.

   All this is handled with some amount of style by Edward Dmytryk, a director going places (like Murder, My Sweet and The Caine Mutiny) who throws in the occasional camera angle or bit of moody lighting, but to little effect; Captive struts and frets its brief 60 minutes on the screen, signifying very little indeed.

       

   But any movie with a title like that was bound to draw customers, and returns on Captive were strong enough for Universal execs to order a sequel. Thus Jungle Woman appeared the next year.

   This is a strange one, even by B-movie standards, as if, pressed for time, producer Ben Pivar decided to simply re-run the fist movie. About a third of Jungle Woman is lifted bodily from Captive Wild Woman, as stars Milburn Stone and Evelyn Ankers reprise their roles from the first film in a framing device centered around testimony at an inquest involving another mad scientist (J. Carroll Naish this time) and a dead ape-woman (Acquanetta again) found on the grounds of his sanitarium.

   Said framing takes up the whole first part of the Jungle Woman, with Ankers and Stone recalling events in flashback from the earlier film, which appear in no particular order, making this thing look like a Resnais film, as the past rises to feebly haunt the present with little coherence or cohesion.

   Finally, re-runs exhausted, a new cast appears, and they proceed to tell a story in flashback (did some of this anticipate film noir?) filling out the running time with an account of how Naish, visiting the circus sometime during the first film, was impressed enough to acquire the body of the ape woman, revive her, and start a movie of his own, leading to the unpleasantness that awaits those who dabble in things man wasn’t meant to etc, etc..

   Well, sixty minutes pass in this manner, leading to a wrap-up that would have been fairly shocking, had anyone been paying attention. As it is, the final scene gets tossed off like the rest of the movie, and I, for one, was left wondering what they must have been thinking of when they committed this crime against Cinema.

   Somehow, though, Universal thought the concept was worth another try, and the next year saw the release of Jungle Captive. This is marginally better than Jungle Woman, and if you look up the term “faint praise” in the Dictionary, you may find the words “marginally better than Jungle Woman.”

   Actually, Captive benefits from the appearance of Otto Kruger as this year’s Mad Scientist, who begins by electronically reviving dead rabbits and, with the reasoning of his ilk, decides the next logical step is to steal the body of the Ape Woman from the morgue and revive that.

   Kruger handles all this with commendable restraint, and somehow puts Real Feeling into lines like “I need your blood,” though things get a bit much when he decides his ape woman (played by Vicky Lane this time) needs a new brain and proceeds to check out his predecessor’s brain-transplant instructions (written on a 5×8 note card) and borrow a book titled Brain Surgery!

   Maybe because it eschews the flashbacks, Captive seems to move at a faster pace, with some creepy support from Rondo Hatton as “Moloch the Brute” and effective makeup for the ape woman.

   There’s also an appearance by Jerome Cowan (of whom more later) playing his usual clueless role as a detective, and Vicky Lane, though she gets no lines and has little to do, is a distinct improvement as the new Ape Woman: her strong features and large, expressive eyes remind one of the girls in drawings by Gene Bilbrew, and make me wonder what sort of career she might have made for herself with better luck than this.

       

GOOD GIRLS GO TO PARIS. Columbia Pictures, 1939. Melvyn Douglas, Joan Blondell, Walter Connolly, Alan Curtis, Joan Perry, Isabel Jeans. Director: Alexander Hall.

   A decent screwball type of comedy, one with a complicated plot, relatively speaking, and one that’s actually quite funny. Not of the side-splitting slapstick variety, but one that’s amusing all the way through.

   Melvyn Douglas plays a tweedy sort of visiting professor from England who befriends a waitress (Joan Blondell) who works at a hamburger joint close to campus.

   Her goal in life: to coerce a male student with a rich father who objects to their friendship to pay up with a trip to Paris. Blackmail? Yes, and Professor Brooke (that’s Douglas) tries his best to make her see the error of her ways.

   But here’s where a “flutter” somewhere inside her helps. That’s her conscience talking.

   And here’s where it gets complicated. Brooke’s future brother-in-law is Jenny Swanson’s next target, and somehow she works her way into his home (and Brooke’s fiancée) before Brooke himself gets there before the wedding – mostly by ingratiating herself with the patriarch of the upscale Brand family, played with the utmost gusto by Walter Connolly, who’d rather be back home in Minnesota than in New York City and having to deal with the pair of spoiled socialites he has as children.

   It is difficult to say exactly how this not very unique storyline leads itself to humor, but it does. Both Melvyn Douglas and especially Joan Blondell lend their physical talents to the proceedings as well as using their lines to good advantage, acting and reacting.

   That Melvyn Douglas and Joan Blondell end up with other may come as a surprise to perhaps one or two viewers of this film, but it will be obvious to everyone else within the first five minutes. Nonetheless it is touch and go for them for a good long time.

[UPDATE]   Later the same day.   As perhaps even intermittent readers of this blog will recall, Douglas and Blondell also appeared together in There’s Always a Woman. It came out the year before (1938), and I reviewed it here.

   But I watched this one first, wrote this review, and forgot to post it until now. (This was back in April when I was having problems with my hip.) I thought the earlier film was a little too mean-spirited, but it was obviously the story and not the two co-stars, since (as you’ve just read) I found this one to be exactly what screwball comedies are supposed to be: a little wacky and fun to watch.

   Having also now read the comments on both movies posted on IMDB, there is also the possibility that I am out of step with (almost) everyone else. As the old saying goes, “Humor is a funny thing.”

   And, for whatever it’s worth, a note on IMDB says “Originally titled Good Girls Go To Paris, Too, but the censors objected.” Hmm. You’ll have to think about that one — but not too long.

DEPARTMENT S. Syndicated in United States. ITC Production. 28 episodes. 60 minutes. 1969 through 1970. Created by Monty Berman and Dennis Spooner. Executive Story Consultant: Dennis Spooner. Produced by Monty Berman. Creative Consultant: Cyril Frankel. Musical Director: Edwin Astley. Cast: Peter Wyngarde (Jason King), Joel Fabiani (Stewart Sullivan), Rosemary Nicols (Annabelle Hurst), Dennis Alaba Peters (Curtis Seretse). Available on DVD but not in Region One format for the US.

   In the 1960s the Beatles were not the only British to invade American pop culture. “Mod” fashions from London and the British TV and Film spies quickly followed. James Bond led the way, followed by The Avengers and a group of ITC-produced TV spies/detectives such as those in Department S.   * (See FOOTNOTE.)

   Department S was a small branch of Interpol made up of four people dedicated to solving the unsolvable crime. Or to quote a BBC2 introduction to the series (available on YouTube as “Department S: The Gen”), “If its too hot for the cops, a might complicated for the military, call Department S.”

   Jason King was a flamboyant, best selling mystery writer who had a love for women and liquor. His fictional detective Mark Caine was in a series of books with such titles as Don’t Look Now But Your Clutch Is Slipping. King would often use Caine’s intuitive methods to help solve the mysteries facing Department S.

   Jason King was played by Shakespearian actor, Peter Wyngarde, who Sir John Gielgud said was England’s most underrated actor. Wyngarde was a fan favorite, especially with women. The popularity of Wyngarde’s Jason King would lead to the character getting his own series in 1971.

   Stewart Sullivan was the team’s field leader. A man of action, his methods were more procedural such as questioning the suspects.

   Annabel Hurst was the beautiful computer scientist whose beliefs in the scientific method of crime solving often put her in conflict with Jason’s more human deductions. Her clothes, what little she wore, were the latest in 1960s fashion.

   Curtis Seretse was the bureaucrat in charge of Department S. According to the BFI website Screenonline, the use of a black actor for the part was “a bold piece of casting for its time.”

   The four characters set up the ultimate conflict of mystery’s solving methods, with one method always successful in explaining the strangest twist.

   Department S shared some characteristics with the more popular and famous The Avengers. Both featured the wild fashion of 60s London and highly stylized writing and direction. Most obviously, both series had a fondness for over the top bizarre plots.

   In the first episode, “Six Days” (written by Gerald Kelsey and directed by Cyril Frankel), a commercial plane arrives at a London airport with all on board believing they are thirty minutes early, when they are really six days late. This episode can (for now) be seen on YouTube and is highly recommended. (The link will take you to Part 1 of 4.)

   While still fun to watch, the cult favorite has its flaws. There were the typical television mystery annoyances such as a chase because no one thought to guard the exits. But the biggest problem for the modern viewer is what the viewers at the time enjoyed most, the now camp character of Jason King.

FOOTNOTE:   The ITC series was made for the American television market, even using the American commercial format and length. It might have appeared in the U.S. first. This would explain why IMDb and BFI have different air dates for the series.

   IMDb has the series lasting two seasons. Season One lasted eight episodes from March 9, 1969 through April 27, 1969. Season Two lasted twenty episodes from October 1, 1969 through March 24, 1970.    BFI has the series lasting two seasons but starting September 3, 1969 and ending April 3, 1970.

THE TEXAN. Paramount, 1930. Gary Cooper, Fay Wray, Emma Dunn, Oscar Apfel, James Marcus. Based on the story “The Double-Dyed Deceiver” by O. Henry. Director: John Cromwell. Shown at Cinecon 44, Hollywood CA, Aug-Sept 2008.

   Another film from the vaults that has probably not been seen since its initial release. Gary Cooper plays the Llano Kid, an outlaw with a price on his head, who falls in with a crooked lawyer who persuades him to join him in a scam to rob a South American widow by persuading her that the Kid is her long-lost son, returning to his mother after years of wandering.

   The plan goes well until the Kid develops a conscience and wants to back out of the agreement. Emma Dunn plays the mother, Senora Ibarra, with Fay Wray her niece, with whom the Kid, predictably, falls in love.

   There’s a nice O. Henry twist to resolve the story (no, the Kid does not turn out to be the son) and it’s a good-looking production that lets the characters and their relationships build slowly before the action-packed climax.

Editorial Comment:   The cover illustration based on the film, shown above, was done by Norman Rockwell. The original painting recently sold at Sotheby’s for nearly six million dollars.

   If you own a copy of the Library of America’s Dashiell Hammett volume Crime Stories & Other Writings (2001) and also a copy of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for July 1945, then, whether you know it or not, you have two different versions of Hammett’s Continental Op story “The Tenth Clew” (Black Mask, January 1, 1924).

   The first difference between the two leaps out: the last word of the title is spelled “Clew” in both Black Mask and the Library of America collection but Fred Dannay changed it to the more common “Clue” when he reprinted the tale in EQMM.

   To appreciate the final difference between the two requires a little knowledge about the story’s plot. Leopold Gantvoort, a 57-year-old widower whose net worth is around $1,500,000, is planning to marry a much younger woman, but he’s murdered before the marriage takes place and also before he’s signed a new will leaving half his fortune to her.

   The Op exposes her as a confidence woman and the murderer as her scam partner, who’s been posing as her brother. Here are the last few sentences as Hammett wrote them.

   What’s wrong here? Since Gantvoort was killed before either changing his will or marrying the woman, there’s no way on earth she could have inherited half his estate! Fred Dannay obviously caught this flub, and spared Hammett some potential embarrassment by taking it upon himself to rewrite those lines.

   Very shortly after this story appeared in EQMM, Fred included it in the digest-sized paperback original collection The Return of the Continental Op (Jonathan Press pb #J 17), which was published in the first week of July 1945, a month or two before Hammett came back to the U.S. from Army service in the Aleutian Islands during World War II.

   If any reader of this column has a copy of that edition, which I don’t, I’d love to know whether the text of this story is Hammett’s original or Fred’s revision. (My hunch is the latter.)

   Settled back into civilian life, Hammett started teaching an evening course on mystery writing at the Jefferson School of Social Science, a Communist-affiliated institution on New York’s Sixth Avenue, and Fred joined him regularly as unofficial co-instructor.

   When Return was reprinted in ordinary paperback format (Dell pb #154, 1947), the last paragraph of the story was unaccountably back in its original form. Had Hammett objected to Fred’s bold attempt to spare him a few blushes?

   Erle Stanley Gardner’s pulp stories of the early 1930s, and his early novels as well, were hugely influenced by Hammett although in later years he resented having the fact pointed out.

   In Chapter 20 of one of those early novels, the non-series whodunit This Is Murder (1935, as by Charles J. Kenny), a suspect has just been exposed as an ex-con. “Where was your first conviction?” he’s asked. “In Wisconsin.” “You served a term there?” “Yes, sir, at Waupum.”

   In fact the name of the town is Waupun, which locals unaccountably pronounce Wau-PAN. According to Wikipedia the place was supposed to have been named Waubun, which is a Native American word meaning dawn of day, but some state bureaucrat misspelled it and the mistake has never been corrected.

   The town’s chief industry is prisons — three of them! — but it’s also known for having more outdoor sculpture per capita than any other city in North America. The most famous such piece in Waupun is the “End of the Trail” sculpture: a young warrior on his horse contemplates the end of life as his people had known it.

   I saw it when I passed through the town years ago. The Library Bar on Waupun’s Main Street served the finest fries I’ve ever eaten. My buddy Joe Google tells me it’s no longer there. Drat!

   I am finishing this column on June 27, two days short of what would have been the 100th birthday of my favorite American composer. The centenary of Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975), who’s best known for having scored films like Citizen Kane, Vertigo and Psycho, is being celebrated throughout the music world, and Varese Sarabande Records has just made a huge contribution to the festivities by releasing The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Volume One.

   Herrmann wrote original scores for 17 Hitchcock Hour episodes during the program’s second and third seasons (1962-64), and this handsome two-CD set contains eight of them, more than two and a half hours of primo Herrmann never before available in audio form. Volume Two, let’s hope, will bring together the other nine — and soon. As I wrote in an earlier column, no one does ominous like Herrmann does ominous.

DASHIELL HAMMETT – The Dain Curse. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1929. Reprinted many times since.  TV movie: 1978 (with James Coburn as “Hamilton Nash”).

   Not all Hammetts were created equal. Case in point: Hammett’s second novel, his famous family slaughter saga, The Dain Curse. Less viscerally organic than his first crime tale, Red Harvest (1929), it is also, in my opinion, vastly inferior both to his immediately following works, The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Glass Key (1931), and even to his last novel, the slick (if rather facile) The Thin Man (1934).

   I am hardly the first person to note flaws in The Dain Curse. A quarter-century ago, in his entry on the novel in 1001 Midnights, Bill Pronzini observed that The Dain Curse was “overlong and decidedly melodramatic.” Indeed it is!

   Where in Red Harvest the gang violence culminating in massacre that Hammett chronicles seems to rise naturally out of the darkest strains of indigenous Americana, in The Dain Curse the bloodletting is tied to an impossible plot that resembles the more absurd Golden Age British detective fiction that Hammett purportedly despised.

   If you were to ask me which 1929 detective novel is the more ridiculous when looked at objectively, The Dain Curse or S. S. Van Dine’s The Bishop Murder Case (though Van Dine was not British, he clearly was heavily influenced by the sort of classical detective story we associate most with British writers), I would be hard pressed to name the latter title, even though it involves an unbelievably baroque plot involving multiple slayings carried out on the basis of nursery rhymes.

   At one late point in the The Dain Curse, Hammett’s detective, the Continental Op, stops to list for a friend the myriad acts of bloody mayhem that have occurred around him of late. I have to say I found this list hilarious:

   This passage makes Philo Vance’s “psychological” lectures at the end of The Greene Murder Case (1928) and The Bishop Murder Case seems overwhelmingly convincing by comparison. Unfortunately, it is reflective of the many pages in the novel given over to the Op’s inevitably tedious explanations of an extremely convoluted but ultimately not very rewarding mystery plot.

   To be fair to Hammett, with The Dain Curse (as with Red Harvest) he was faced with the task of stitching together a novel from short stories. To make The Dain Curse stick together in one piece he was forced to use as glue the criminal mastermind gambit.

   This device usually is not convincing in Edgar Wallace novels either, but then Edgar Wallace is not universally acclaimed today for having heroically and almost single-handedly (with some help from Raymond Chandler) introduced realism to the Golden Age mystery story.

   This is not to say that there are not interesting points to The Dain Curse. There are times when one pleasingly can hear the wisecracking voice of Philip Marlowe and that smart ass legion of private eyes who jauntily followed Hammett’s Continental Op and Sam Spade down those mean streets:

   And then there is simply the thrill in The Dain Curse of Hammett’s sharp and direct depictions of drug dependency and pure, elemental brute violence (which in 1929 must have been really thrilling — or appalling, depending on the reader):

   Although I think that, in contravention of academics who have given much serious study to it, Hammett’s treatment in The Dain Curse of a religious cult is more pulp fiction than deep thinkin’, nevertheless I was greatly amused by this sardonic observation from the Op:

   They brought their cult to California because everybody does, and picked San Francisco because it held less competition than Los Angeles.

   Too bad Hammett (and the Op) missed the Swinging Sixties!

   Overall, however, I would say that The Dain Curse is neither a great crime novel nor even a very good one, really — though it undeniably has importance both in the study of Hammett’s development as a writer and in the development of American detective fiction.

   But when it comes to melodramatically and improbably cursed genteel families and wildly overcomplicated murder plots, give me S. S. Van Dine any day of the week. Indubitably, his Philo Vance is the go-to guy when one is faced with that sort of the case.

DANIEL STASHOWER – The Adventure of the Ectoplasmic Man. William Morrow, hardcover, 1985. Penguin, paperback, 1986. Titan Books, trade paperback, 2009.

   I’m a sucker for Sherlock Holmes stories written by hands other than Conan Doyle not because I think they’re good, but because I’m always hoping they will be. I had read some good things about this book so with fingers crossed I decided to try it.

   Watson, on the death of Houdini, sends Houdini’s widow a manuscript detailing the adventure where Holmes untangled, in 1910, a plot to discredit Houdini, who was performing in London, and blame him for murder and crimes against the state.

   The book could be described, I suppose, as a romp rather than an accurate pastiche. Holmes is larger that life, naturally, but his techniques seem a little far-fetched and it was surprising that he knew how to fly a plane. Still it was a light and fast read, and I have to say I quite enjoyed it, without, for a moment, taking it seriously.

Bibliographic Notes:   (1) Ectoplasmic Man was nominated for an Edgar (Best First Novel) by the MWA in 1986.

   (2) Several years after this book appeared, Daniel Stashower wrote a series of three novels in which Harry Houdini himself was the primary detective:

      The Harry Houdini series —

1. The Dime Museum Murders (1999)

2. The Floating Lady Murder (2000)
3. The Houdini Specter (2002)