DAY KEENE – Wake Up to Murder. Avon 660, reprint paperback, 1955. First publication: Phantom Book #513, digest paperback, 1952. Later printing: Berkley G258, paperback, 1959; cover art: Robert Maguire.

   Keene continues to impress me as a writer. Don’t be thrown off by the sleazy cover of an overripe playgirl about to fall out of her snuggies. It isn’t (and yet is) that kind of story.

   Mostly it’s he story of an everyday joe, earning a crummy $62.50 a week doing legwork for a criminal attorney, trying to make ends meet on a GI mortgage. He’s fired on his birthday, which his wife doesn’t remember, and he goes out on a drunk, waking up with $10,000 is a hotel room with a girl not his wife.

   The nightmare continues. Murder, kidnapping, the mob, the cops — he’s caught in between, given just enough rope. There is not the overbuilding sense of catastrophe of Woolrich, but the quieter despair of failure, the misery of loneliness and rejection. One must plod on. Keene gives a nudge to the little guy. And comes up with an ending that might catch you with your pants down.

[UPDATE] 02-15-11.   The only editing I did was to replace a badly situated comma by a dash, and a change of one preposition to another. Do I remember this book? No, not at all, more’s the pity.

   If it wasn’t obvious from the description, it was the Avon paperback that I read, but I’ve supplied you with images of all three covers. For whatever reason, I kind of like the Avon one.

STRANGE ILLUSION. PRC, 1945. James Lydon, Warren William, Sally Eilers, Regis Toomey. Director: Edgar G. Ulmer.

    Much better on all counts than Fear in the Night [reviewed here ] is Edgar Ulmer’s remarkable Strange Illusion, an ultra-cheapie from PRC with James Lydon, Sally Eilers, Warren William and Regis Toomey, that would have been a forgone Disaster in lesser hands.

    Ulmer could always dress up the most threadbare of tales in positively sardanapalean splendor, and here he turns a well-worn mystery plot into a Modern-Dress Hamlet, with Lydon getting a message from his recently-departed father to protect his mother from opportunists.

    Next thing he knows, Mom’s being swept off her feet by Warren William (clearly way past his prime here, and looking marvelously suited to his sleazy role) who, it turns out, may have caused Dad’s death. And the only way young Lydon can think of to prevent the nuptials is to feign insanity — which puts him in the hands of William’s Polonius-like understrapper, who runs a “Rest Home.”

    I mentioned once that Ulmer’s films sometimes amaze one by the very fact of their existence, and this is no exception. He can do more with L-shaped sets, inadequate actors and bad scripts than most filmmakers could manage with the cast and budget of Lawrence of Arabia.

    Here he plays off Lydon’s typecast callowness against William’s lethally seedy charm and even brings off a totally unexpected — and rather disturbing — ending, which I won’t reveal.

Editorial Note:   For Mike Grost’s in-depth commentary on this film, check out his website here.

[UPDATE] 02-15-11.   Every Tuesday on Todd Mason’s blog, he lists an assortment of “Overlooked Films” offered up as Prime Examples by other bloggers on their own
blogs. This week on Dan’s behalf I suggested Strange Illusion. For the rest of this Tuesday’s recommendations, please give Todd’s blog a look-see.

MONK. USA Cable Network. Seasons 1-4: 2002-2006. Tony Shalhoub (Adrian Monk), Jason Gray-Stanford (Lt. Randall Disher), Ted Levine (Captain Leland Stottlemeyer), Traylor Howard (Natalie Teeger), Stanley Kamel (Dr. Charles Kroger), Bitty Schram (Sharona Fleming).

   As an extremely devoted admirer of Golden Age mystery fiction — just read last week’s Lee Thayer review! — I perhaps have a tendency to not give credit where credit is due to more modern work.

   Yet I will freely admit that my favorite American television mystery series is one of recent vintage: the magnificent Monk, which ran from 2002 to 2009. My nephew John Hendricks prevailed upon me to watch this series, and I am glad that he did.

   In Monk, the eccentric Great Detective of grand, old tradition is alive and well (well, perhaps not entirely well). As brilliantly created by three-time Emmy award winner Tony Shalhoub, consulting detective Adrian Monk, traumatized by the murder of his wife, Trudy, is a teeming mass of compulsions and phobias, yet he is also utterly brilliant and indispensable to the San Francisco police, who, in classical tradition, clearly would not have a prayer of solving one of their sixteen yearly murder cases without him.

   Representing the San Francisco police force in each episode are the imposing but perhaps not overly percipient Captain Leland Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine, otherwise most familar to me from his creepy performances in the genre films The Silence of the Lambs and Shutter Island) and his bumbling, overgrown boy scout assistant, Lieutenant Randy Disher (as broadly though amusingly played by Jason Gray-Stanford, he seems to have graduated from a police college surely located somewhere on Gilligan’s Island).

   Completing this band is Monk’s personal assistant (and essential caretaker), the brassy and sometimes abrasive former nurse Sharona Fleming (Bitty Schram), who is later replaced midway through season three by the rather sweeter-natured (I think she has the patience of a saint) Natalie Teeger (Traylor Howard).

   Appearing more occasionally is Monk’s psychiatrist (I think he has the patience of a saint), Dr. Charles Kroger (Stanley Kamel). Dr. Kroger’s therapy sessions with Monk are themselves often mini-masterpieces of humor (Kamel sadly died after season six, but thankfully he appeared in nearly half the Monk episodes filmed during his life).

   Season one of Monk has some inspired episodes (I particularly liked one that played a brilliant variation on G. K. Chesterton’s “The Invisible Man”), but also some clunkers. The series seems to have had a smaller budget (it looks more studio bound) in the first season and characters who had not quite gelled, as is common in debut seasons of series.

   Season two, on the other hand, seems to me nearly flawless. The ingenuity of the mystery plots often is quite remarkable, in my view, for forty-five minute television shows.

   Some highlights from various episodes include: perfect alibis (“Mr. Monk Goes Back to School” and “Mr Monk and the TV Star”); a locked exercise room murder (“Mr. Monk Meets the Playboy”); a bizarre case of a parachutist drowning in mid-air (“Mr. Monk Goes to Mexico” — this is not quite fair play but still very clever and wonderfully outre); a murder committed by a man in a coma (“Mr. Monk and the Sleeping Suspect”); and the classic situation of the murder committed during the performance of a play (“Mr. Monk Goes to the Theater” — this crams novel length complexity into a small space).

   With their impossible situations and miracle problems, many of these episodes successfully invoke the brilliance of the Golden Age of the detective novel, as penned by such past masters as John Dickson Carr, Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode.

   There is also an episode, “Mr. Monk and the Three Pies,” that was surely intended as an homage to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Clearly modeled on Jacques Barzun’s favorite Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons,” “Pies” also introduces a brother for Adrian Monk (the gifted Oscar-nominated actor John Turturro), who in turn is obviously influenced by Sherlock’s brother, Mycroft (he’s not fat, but he’s even smarter than Adrian and, more phobic as well, he’s essentially immobile, never leaving his house).

   Often in addition to being clever, the series is extremely funny. Mr. Monk confronting a rather less than five-star motel in Mexico should have you in stitches, as should his being forced to sham marriage with Sharona (in “Mr. Monk Gets Married,” which involves another classic Golden Age plot, the treasure hunt).

   Season three strikes me as not quite up to the sheer perfection of season two. There was a particular plot structure that, while clever, became overused in this season and there seemed, in the middle of it, to be evident problems with the actress playing Sharona. (She was entirely written out of one episode and apparently was either fired or quit.)

   After Sharona was abruptly and completely written out of the series, a replacement for her, the chipper Natalie, had to be written in, and her relationship with Monk did not really gel until season four.

   Another problem from my perspective is that the series started to indulge a bit much in the psychodrama of Monk’s obsession with his dead wife, Trudy (she even starts to appear to him in physical manifestations). A true Golden Age traditionalist likes the writer to stick a bit more to the plot!

   However, there are some excellent episodes in season three, including one of the very best in the series, “Mr. Monk Gets Cabin Fever,” which takes a remarkably original and delightful approach to the classical “drawing room lecture” (where the Great Detective reveals all to the assembled suspects).

   Also compelling are “Mr. Monk Gets Stuck in Traffic,” a clever inverted mystery (where we know who committed the murder) unfolding entirely within a highway traffic jam, and “Mr. Monk Goes to Vegas,” which revolves around the strangling murder of an unwanted wife while she was alone in an elevator (this one is reminiscent of a classic John Dickson Carr-John Rhode novel).

   Season four nearly maintains the level of season two, with a raft of clever episodes: Monk confronting a rival detective who somehow is smarter than he his (“Mr. Monk and the Other Detective”); Monk reuniting with his brother to confront a really baffling murder problem (“Mr. Monk Goes Home Again”); a case involving the teasing question of why someone would break a stock analyst’s right hand (“Mr. Monk Goes to the Office”).

   More from season four: A variation on the Paris Exposition “Lady Vanishes” problem (“Mr. Monk Gets Drunk”); a variation on Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo (“Mr. and Mrs. Monk”); a variation — okay, seemingly total theft from — Anthony Berkeley’s classic poisoning short story, “The Avenging Chance” (“Mr. Monk and the Secret Santa”); a comedic variation on the amnesia plot (“Mr. Monk Bumps his Head”); another perfect alibi case (“Mr. Monk and the Astronaut”) and Mr. Monk solving a present-time murder while serving on a jury (“Mr. Monk Gets Jury Duty”).

   Once again, some of the episodes are extremely funny, especially “Mr. Monk Goes to the Dentist,” with it hilarious parody of the Laurence Olivier-Dustin Hoffman “Is It Safe?” scene from the film Marathon Man. Some are funny and poignant, like “Mr. Monk Goes to the Office,” because we realize that behind the humor of Monk’s eccentricities are really mental disorders that set him apart from humanity and make him a very lonely man. As Monk regularly pronounces, his genius truly is “a blessing — and a curse.”

   Simultaneously successfully portraying the amazing deductive genius of the classical Great Detective and making us see as well his human side in the modern manner makes Monk a pure blessing.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. ( Män som hatar kvinnor, literally “Men Who Hate Women.”) Sweden, 2009. Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace. Screenplay Niolaj Arcel, Rasmuss Heisterberg. Based on the novel by Stieg Larrson. Director: Niels Arden Opley.

   I won’t go much into the complex plot of this international best selling thriller, the posthumous first of a trilogy by Swedish journalist Stieg Larrson. This Swedish film of the book, part of what is known as the Millennium Trilogy (The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest are the other two), introduces the protagonists Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist and publisher of Millennium, an expose magazine, and Lisbeth Salander, a gifted violent and almost feral computer researcher.

   To summarize the plot as simply as possible (and leaving a good deal out) Blomkvist faces ruin after a libel suit following his expose of a prominent industrialist’s criminal activities. While waiting a possible jail sentence and financial ruin he is commissioned by Henrik Vanger, the former CEO of Vanger Industries to find out what happened to his niece Harriet, who disappeared forty years earlier, under the guise of researching a history of the Vanger family. Vanger believes someone in the family murdered Harriet, and taunts him by sending him a framed flower every year on his birthday as Harriet once did.

   Vanger makes no bones about his family. They are a bad lot, but Harriet was one bright spot among the twisted monsters around her.

   Meanwhile unknown to Blomkvist, Vanger has him investigated, the research done by Lisbeth Salander, the girl of the title, a mysterious young woman with a photographic memory and rare skills in her field. Lisbeth is hostile, violent, paranoid, defensive, and dresses in semi Goth outfits, black jeans and pullovers (her nose is pierced too) and rides a motorcycle. She is being sexually extorted by the man who runs her trust fund, but after a brutal rape turns the tables on him.

   Lisbeth has dark secrets that Rapace echoes largely like a silent star, mostly with her eyes.

   Eventually Blomkvist discovers Lisbeth, and they join forces, uncovering a history of sexual abuse and murder — a possible serial killer — dating back forty years (the sins of the past that haunt the Vanger family could almost come from a Ross Macdonald novel). Their descent into Vanger family history becomes steadily more disturbing until Blomkvist faces torture and murder and is saved only by Lisbeth’s timely arrival.

   But the death of one killer is only the beginning, and there are dark secrets and the fate of Harriet Vanger still to be uncovered, nor is Lisbeth willing to leave Blomkvist to his fate.

   There is a good deal more than this going on. The book could easily be a cross between Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Andrew Vachss, Mickey Spillane, and a Swedish William Faulkner, with a bit of de Sade and Henry Miller thrown in to boot.

   There are enough literary analogies and references for a few dozen dissertations in it without even touching on the social, political, sexual, and psychological depths, but the film manages to capture the feel and the mood of the book even without the benefit of some of its more literary pleasures.

   The film version takes a bit to get started, being faithful to the novel with a 152 minute running time. You may find yourself confused how the two narrative tracks are going to join, or wonder when and if they are, but Nyqvist is well cast as the middle aged moral hero and Noomi Rapace is perfect as Lisbeth Salander, who has her own demons.

   It is a difficult role, physically and mentally demanding, a sort of female Mike Hammer with a tortured soul and Rapace’s large dark eyes staring out from the face of a child woman will stay with you long after the film ends. Few actresses expose themselves both physically and psychologically as naked as Rapace does in this film

   When the film does get going, it is uncompromising, violent, dark, and yet neither exploitative nor merely sensational. Director Opley’s hand is certain, even gifted, and the film is both stunningly shot and sharply written and staged.

   It can’t have been easy shaping Larrson’s unwieldy, in length anyway, very literary work into a taut film, but the effort pays off in a stunning film adaptation that is as good a translation of a big dense book to the screen as I’ve seen in many a year.

   This is not a feel good film, but it is satisfying, and surprisingly the hero and heroine come across as human and vulnerable when they could easily have been preachy and self-satisfied in light of the book and movie’s themes of corporate corruption, sexual violence against women, traces of Nazi fascism lingering in the underbelly of wealthy Swedish society, the darkness at the heart of a supposedly perfect society, and generations of sexual abuse and despair.

   That Blomkvist and Lisbeth emerge as people you actually care about is a tribute to both the script and the actors playing the roles.

   I’ll be watching the sequel The Girl Who Played With Fire in a few days The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest has yet to be released on DVD, but I look forward to it, If they keep up this level of work it may prove the best such series of films since The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter films.

   The American version of the film is in production, but I don’t have high hopes for it. It could hardly look any better, and I can’t imagine an American actress exposing the same mix of vulnerability and toughness while maintaining a core of humanity as real as Rapace’s. No doubt we will get a kick ass Lisbeth much more conventionally pretty and glamorous, but not half as real as Salander.

   Even if you were indifferent to the book, or just have no urge to read it, see this film. Don’t wait for the American version — I can virtually assure you it won’t tackle half the subject matter or half as graphically. I do warn you, this is violent, sexually graphic, and certainly adult, but it is never sensational or exploitative, and the two characters at its heart prove to be someone you care for in a way rare to any thriller.

   The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is one of the best thrillers I’ve seen in ages — adult, complex, and uncompromising. I actually kept the NetFlix DVD an extra day and watched it again. It’s that good. The Girl Who Played With Fire is next in the queue and I look forward to it.

   See this one, but be prepared. It is visceral experience unlike any thriller I’ve seen in many years. It comes at you and refuses to be ignored or just watched, but insists on being experienced. You may well have the urge to pull away a few times while watching it, to distance yourself a bit, but when the credits roll I suspect you will have the same reaction I did.

   Damn good movie.

STIEG LARRSON – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2008), The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009), The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2009).

   I have read and heard much about this, the first of the much lauded Swedish trilogy. I had determined to resist, though, mainly because I couldn’t face embarking on a 1845 page marathon. But one day we were in a charity shop and there was the first of them and so I bought it.

   I have to say though, that it took me a while to get into the book. If I used a fifty-page rule — and knew nothing about the book — I would probably have given it up. Indeed it was some 200 pages before I was picking the book up eagerly and wanting to know what was going to happen next.

   The story involves an investigating journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, who has been found guilty of libel and is hired, on the promise of information that will clears him, to investigate the disappearance in 1966 of a 16 year old girl from a small town in northern Sweden.

   To help him in his task he hires the girl of the title, Lisbeth Salander, a young — probably autistic — girl who is a computer wiz, and together they attempt to unravel the mystery.

   The story comes to climax with about 70 pages to go and in some ways, though these final pages round the story off nicely, the rest is a little anticlimactic.

   So my verdict is that this is a good, not great, book (where have I heard that before) but good enough for me to move straight on to the second.

   The second and third books are really just one continuous story starting a year or so after the conclusion of the fIrst book. Salander has withdrawn trom contact with Blomkvist who is supervising an expose on the sex trade to be published in his journal, Millenium.

   When the writer of the piece and his girlfriend are murdered Salander is the prime suspect and goes into hiding. Blomkvist begins investigating to clear her name, but Salander investigates with deeper motives stretching back into her history.

   I have to confess I got very involved with this story and towards the end of the third book I was eager to continue reading at every possible moment. There are, I think, one or two plot devices which are rather far-fetched, but overall the books (especially books 2 and 3) are a delight, and I’m glad I read them.

RALPH DENNIS – Deadman’s Game. Berkley Z3003, paperback original; 1st printing, January 1976.

   Dennis was previously the author of Popular Library’s “Hardman” series, now apparently defunct. Although not so indicated, this could be the start of a new series. (Can the cover numbering system no longer be a selling point?)

   Kane is a cashiered government assassin in Deadman’s Game, with an impaired memory and a new identity, but with the same killer-for-hire instinct, and now working privately. There are those who think him a danger, and so his business puts him in the middle, both hunter and hunted.

   In this first adventure he avenges a brother’s death. He’s more on the side of the right than the law would say, but the amount of blood involved is disturbing.

   The first chapter or so I found overwritten, but Dennis writes free-flowing dialogue and action from that point on. Funny thing is, I don’t like what Kane does, but I do like him in his underlying innocence. No kidding.

Rating:   B minus.

[UPDATE] 02-13-11.   I don’t know if you know what an apa (amateur press association) is, or if you’d heard of DAPA-Em, the mystery apa that started up in 1974 or ’75, but I was a member, on and off, over the past 35 years.

   The final mailing, #216, arrived at my door this past week, a sad day indeed. For more on this, if you’d care to, including more details about how the apa worked, you could do no worse than to check out George Kelley’s post on the event over on his blog.

   Going through a stack of past mailings in my upstairs closet yesterday afternoon, I came across an envelope of zines that comprised mailing #11, which included a copy of Mystery*File #9, which I don’t believe I’ve seen in over 30 years, and this is one of the reviews that was in it.

   I hope you don’t mind the small amount of editing I did on the review. I didn’t change any of the ideas. Just a trifle bit of tinkering with the wording, nothing more.

   As for the book itself, if it was meant to be the first of a series, the series didn’t happen, for whatever reason. Poor sales, is my guess. There are only two copies offered for sale anywhere on the Internet, both on Amazon, and both for $16.65.

   And this means no cover image, unless you or someone else can supply one. I still have my copy, but alas, I don’t have access to it. (But I do know where it is.)

[UPDATE #2]   Later the same day.   Other members of DAPA-Em, along with one long-time former member (*), who have blogged about the last mailing are (listed alphabetically):

Bill Crider: http://billcrider.blogspot.com/2011/02/dapa-em-r-i-p.html

(*) Evan Lewis: http://davycrockettsalmanack.blogspot.com/2011/02/last-dapa-em.html

Bob Napier: http://capnbob.blogspot.com/2011/02/final-dapa-em.html

Richard Robinson: https://brokenbullhorn.wordpress.com/2011/02/10/an-ending-of-something-great/

   If I’ve missed others, let me know!

STREET CORNER. J. Arthur Rank, 1953. Released in the US as Both Sides of the Law, Universal Pictures, 1954. Peggy Cummins, Terence Morgan, Anne Crawford, Rosamund John, Barbara Murray, Sarah Lawson, Ronald Howard. Screenplay by Muriel Box & Sydney Box. Director: Muriel Box.

   I don’t know how common it was for a British film in the early 1950s to have a female director, but I have a feeling there weren’t many of them. Looking at Muriel Box’s list of directing credits, and there were 15 of them, the only one that catches my eye is Rattle of a Simple Man (1964), and that the last one she did.

   Street Corner was the second, and I don’t know what the title means, but I purchased this on DVD as being a noir film, and to tell you the truth, I’m not so sure about that either. What Street Corner is, when it really comes down to it, is a rather nitty-gritty portrayal of London’s women police as they go about their everyday duties, told in stark black-and-white documentary style.

   Let’s get back to the word “noir,” though. Life in Britain after the war was often a struggle, and this movie, shot every so often on outdoor locations, reflects that struggle a lot more than you’d able to learn about it from only reading books about it.

   Cramped quarters, when you could find quarters, vacant lots, life on the make (and on the take) and even life without much hope, that was England in 1953, even without a scriptwriter concocting up a story to go with it.

   The women who are policemen in Street Corner are largely anonymous. In these early days of the very concept of female officers, in this film they are treated as though they were the women’s auxiliary.

   I couldn’t match any of their names (fictitious) to the actresses (real) who played them, perhaps by design. The stories – three of them, otherwise unconnected – are what’s designed to catch the viewer’s interest:

   (1) A young married woman (Peggy Cummins) with a small child and her husband on the road is tempted into world of far more glamour by a young hoodlum looking for a score. (2) A young girl goes AWOL from the Army to come to the assistance of her ill new husband. (3) A three-year-old girl is left alone to fend for herself in a dingy apartment by her uncaring father and stepmother.

   Peggy Cummins, last seen and written about by me for her role in Escape (reviewed here ), continues to impress me as an actress. Her career didn’t go all that far, however. It was essentially over in 1961 when she was only 36.

WILSON TUCKER – The Man In My Grave. Rinehart & Co., hardcover, 1956. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, February 1956. No paperback edition.

   It is to Rocky Knoll, Illinois, that Benjamin Gordon (Beejee) Brooks comes to check out the grave in which he is supposedly buried. The grave and the headstone are indeed extant, but he somehow feels he isn’t in the plot. After all, he argues, here he is above ground some twenty-five years after the alleged interment.

   The discovery of his premature burial was brought about by someone pointing out the epitaph in a printed collection of the wisest and wittiest. Besides the epitaph’s being inaccurate, Brooks claims it doesn’t scan, by which I think he means doesn’t rhyme.

   Still, it seems that Brooks has other graves — actually, the lack of them — in mind. For Brooks is a field representative of the Association of American Memorial Parks, and he and his organization believe that burking is rife in the area. As defined by Brooks, burking, named after the infamous William Burke, is the providing of cadavers to medical schools under suspicious circumstances, although murder does not necessarily play a role.

   An interesting detective in an unusual line and a somewhat frenetic investigation put this in the enjoyable entertainment class.

Bio-Bibliographic Notes:   While Tucker was the author of 14 novels in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, three are primarily science fiction novels, a field in which his reputation more fully lies. He became a SF fan in 1932 and won a Hugo for best Fan Writer in 1970. As a writer of science fiction, his novel The Year of the Quiet Sun was nominated for a Nebula, also in 1970.

   For more on Wilson “Bob” Tucker, his Wikipedia page is a good place to start.

  ●   A PHILISTINE IN BOHEMIA.   Vitagraph, 1920. Nellie Spaulding, Edna Murphy, George de Winter, Rod La Roque. Based on a story by O. Henry. Director: Edward Griffith. Both this film and the one following were shown at Cinefest 28, Syracuse NY, March 2008.

   A charming short film in which Kate, whose mother runs a boarding house, is taken with Mr. Brunelli, a roomer who has the airs of an aristocrat. One day he invites her to dinner at the Restaurant Tonio where everybody seems to know him and confirms Kate’s suspicion that he must be a count.

   To her surprise, he reveals himself to be Tonio, the restaurant owner and chef, a spaghetti “prince” but not a true aristocrat, a species of disreputable roomer with whom the Irish boarding-house owners have had most unpleasant experiences.

   Relieved, Kate allows Tonio to kiss her, delighted that she has found a plebeian suitor that her mother will accept.

   Edward/Edward H./E. H. Griffith had an extensive list of directorial credits for silent films, and was also the director of the first version of Holiday (1930), which a good friend has told me he finds superior to the Cukor remake with Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant.

  ●   THE VIOLIN OF M’SIEUR.   Vitagraph, 1914. Etienne Girardot, Clara Kimball Young, James Young, Napoleon the Dog. Director: James Young.

   When violin teacher Pere (Etienne Girardot) is separated from his beloved daughter Yvonne (Clara Kimball Young) by the FrancoPrussian war, he wanders for years until a chance encounter leads him to his daughter, now grown, married and the mother of a child, and a happy and prosperous future.

   I know you’ll want to know this: the dog saves the day. I’m glad he got a credit.

   A question came up on the Yahoo PulpMags group earlier this week. Why, it was asked, didn’t Thrilling/Popular Library convert their pulp magazines to the smaller digest size in the mid-1950s?

   As a magazine collector I’ve often thought about this topic. I also like Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories and I guess one reason as to why they did not make the change to digest was that they simply did not see that the digest era was upon them.

   The pulp format had been very successful for 50 years and maybe they figured they could continue somehow. But the digest format swept everything aside (excepting Ranch Romances).

   Maybe they figured even the digest format would not survive. They had seen Street & Smith convert all their pulps to digest in 1943 and then finally give up on the digests in 1949 (except for Astounding).

   Same thing with Popular Publications. They changed most of their pulps to a slightly larger digest format but it was a failure also They then switched back to pulp size but within a couple years killed all their SF, detective, western, sport, love pulps.

   Look what we are going through now. Newspapers and magazines are all suffering from declining circulations. The digital, online format may be next since they cannot continue to lose massive amounts of money with the hardcopy, print format.

   My hometown paper, The Trenton Times, has made so many editorial and staff cuts, that the paper is a shadow of its former self. This is happening across the country to many newspapers and magazines.

   The digest era now appears to be just about over. Very few outlets bother to carry the magazines at all. In the the Trenton area, the only place left for me to buy the SF or mystery digests is Barnes & Noble. My Borders superstore bit the dust recently and that chain appears doomed.

   I checked the circulation figures in the January or February issues of the SF digests:

       ANALOG SF — 30,000 average
       ASIMOV’S — 23,000 average
       F&SF — 15,000 average

   The above figures are a fraction of what these magazines used to announce. The downward decline has been going on now for years and in the future people may say how come the SF digests did not see that the digest era was over. Is digital the answer? Asimov’s I believe has already started. Maybe the others are also available on Kindles, etc.

   But I have no interest in e-readers or reading fiction online. I have a houseful of pulps, digests, slicks, literary magazines. Like Startling and Thrilling Wonder I’m in for the duration and like them I’ll be holding out until I die.

   So as collectors and readers, our battle cry has always been “Remember the pulps!” Soon we will add another cry which will be “Remember the digests!” Will the book format be next?

   Not for me, and my final words will be “To hell with the e-readers!”

Previously on Mystery*File:   Part Six — Are Pulp Collectors Crazy?.