GASTON LEROUX – The Phantom Clue. Macaualy, US, hardcover, 1926. Published earlier in the US as The Slave Bangle, John Long, hardcover, 1925, a translation by Hannaford Bennett of Le crime du Rouletabille (Paris, France: P. Lafitte, 1922).

   Eric, the damned and haunted “hero” of The Phantom of the Opera, is Gaston Leroux’s best known creation today, thanks to numerous films and television productions and the long running Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, but in his own day and time, Leroux was as well known for his thrillers featuring the frightening facial aspect of picaresque criminal Cheri Bibi, his weird novels, and the adventures of the arrogant genius, young journalist detective Joseph Rouletabille (an influence on Herge’s teen journalist Tintin almost certainly).

   If readers know of Rouletabille today it is for Leroux’s detective masterpiece, The Mystery of the Yellow Room, a famous and still effective application of the locked room mystery unraveled by the brilliant teen age sleuth (he’s only eighteen in his first case), Rouletabille.

   Most lists of the classics of the genre still include this tale, Leroux’s first venture into the detective novel, and it is in print currently from Black Coat Press and before that from Dover books. In France, Rouletabille had even greater success with films, a television series, and numerous graphic albums featuring his adventures.

   The Phantom Clue is the most personal of Rouletabille’s many adventures, beginning, surprisingly, with a situation closer to French farce than a mystery novel. It’s hard to imagine Philo Vance, Lord Peter, or Ellery Queen in quite such a predicament:

   Rouletabille has invited his friend Maitre Sainclair (in France lawyers are addressed by the title maitre), an older friend dating back to his first adventure, to join him and his wife Ivana at the seaside in Deauville at the Thatches where Irene is the medical research assistant to the famous (and infamous) Roland Boulenger, a medical research scientist both brilliant and arrogant (he has even challenged some of Pasteur’s research — unthinkable in France) who is pursuing a cure for tuberculosis.

   Boulenger, in addition to his arrogance and brilliance, is also a serial ladies man, and Ivana is his latest target, enlisted in this role with the approval of Madame Boulanger, Therese, as an “innocent” flirtation to divert her husband from a far more serious affair with the notorious femme fatale Theodora Luigi, who currently is involved with Prince Henry of Albania, and thus out of Boulenger’s sights.

   Sainclair, as his name suggests, sees clearly and warns Rouletabille of the dangers of the game. Rouletabille seems unconcerned, but in truth he is growing tired of this pretense despite his love for and trust of Ivana.

   Things come to a head when Theodora Luigi and Prince Henry show up in Deauville. After an encounter at the casino Madame Boulenger becomes distraught and Ivana redoubles her efforts to calm her, which finally pushes Rouletabille over the edge.

   Before he can act tragedy strikes. Madame Boulenger follows her husband to a rendezvous with Theodora — where Prince Henry commits suicide because of Theodora’s involvement with Boulenger, and Madame Boulenger is shot by her husband, heard by the policeman guarding Prince Henry to cry out just before the two gunshots that wound her — “Murder! Roland! Murder!”

   Madame Boulenger lives, saved by her husband, and the authorities are all too glad to cover up a potential scandal — ruling Prince Henry’s suicide an accident and Madame Boulenger’s injuries the same.

   Rouletabille insists Ivana return with him to Paris, but when the Boulenger’s return to Paris, Madame Boulenger fully recovered, Theodora is also there with her new lover, and Madame Boulenger again enlists Ivana’s help to distract her husband, this time against Rouletabille’s wishes.

   Ivana meets Boulenger in a small house in Paris and Rouletabille follows, but at the final moment decides to trust his wife and leaves. Then he learns Ivan and Boulenger have been murdered, shot, and he is arrested for the murder and thrown into a cell at Le Sainte, the city prison.

   At this point the book turns positively Hitchcockian. The police are anxious to frame Rouletabille for the crime not only to solve the case, but because Theodora Luigi is a valued agent of the French government, and they don’t want her role in the affair exposed in the volatile French press.

   Rouletabille escapes from Le Sainte with the elan and simplicity of Arsene Lupin, whom he sometimes resembles (*), and sets out to clear himself, which involves finding Theodora Luigi and a valuable witness and recovering a letter which proves she was at the rendezvous with Boulenger and Ivana.

   The police don’t dare to arrest him since he has the letter, so while he follows Theodora and her new lover out of Paris while tracking a witness who can prove she was near the site of the murder, he is stalked on the train by a retired pickpocket the police hire to steal the letter before Rouletabille can interfere with Theodora’s activities.

   Finally, Rouletabille, still a fugitive, the courts decide to try him in absence (legal under French law), but Rouletabille shows up in court for his trial, and presents his case — one of the most dramatic and surprising such chapters in the genre, with Rouletabille proving himself one of the great fictional sleuths of all time, reconstructing two crimes and revealing the murderer with a style both Ellery Queen and Perry Mason would have to admire.

   The revelation proves to be not only psychologically as well as physically sound, but in the best tradition of the genre, it would have been obvious all along if the reader had only read the facts with Rouletabille’s eye. It’s a neat bit of misdirection on both Leroux and the murderer’s part.

   Leroux is no exponent of the fair play mystery, and Rouletabille is closer to Arsene Lupin or even Sherlock Holmes than the classic form, but he had a fine sense of drama and the weird, and in the Rouletabille novels he constructed some well done mystery plots with clever solutions, which, in fairness, the reader has half a chance to figure out if he is paying attention.

   In addition the continental morality of France in the period mean the books are more modern in their attitudes than many English and American novels from the same time, although a good deal of melodrama does manage to sneak into the books.

   The Phantom Clue proved to be the penultimate Rouletabille adventure. His next book, The Octopus of Paris, was a delightful romp involving gypsies and Ruritanian adventure, with the chief mystery revealed mid way through the book and the rest of the novel mostly a tale of chase and pursuit.

   Even here, however, Leroux manages a triple header at the end with Rouletabille making the same revelation three different times (and its a dilly) and surprising the reader every time. (You’ll have to read it to see how, but it is a unique feat in the genre, and utilizes such a clever bit of misdirection that every time the reader guesses the truth he ends up dismissing it until the final revelation.)

   The series ends with a suggestion of an American adventure for Rouletabille which we sadly never get to read.

   Stick with The Phantom Clue past the soap opera and farce found in the early chapters, and it turns into a clever and exciting mystery with Rouletabille facing a far more personal dilemma than most of his competitors ever managed. It’s not a tour de force, but still worth reading, and Rouletabille’s summation of the facts and revelation of the real killer are well worth waiting for.

          ____

    (*) G. K. Chesterton was an admirer of Leroux’s Rouletabille, and suggested that Gaston Leroux (the red) and Maurice Leblanc (the white), creator of Arsene Lupin, might be the same person.

    They weren’t, but both had similar skills and backgrounds and constructed clever mysteries and charming adventures. That the two most famous French mystery writers of the era were “the red” and “the white” is only one of those odd coincidences no one can explain.

    To the world outside of France in the era before Simenon they were the French detective novel, and both are still in print in English and well worth reading today.

BILL CRIDER – Death on the Move. Walker, hardcover, 1989. Reprint paperback: Ivy, 1990.

   The beleaguered Sheriff Dan Rhodes returns in Bill Crider’s Death on the Move (Walker, $17.95). Widower Rhodes is inching his way to marriage with a very nice lady, Ivy Daniel, but criminous complications keep intervening.

   First of all, the eminently respectable undertakers of Dan’s town, Clearwater, Texas, have a problem: jewelry keeps disappearing off bodies set out for viewing, and the grieving survivors are sore displeased.

   Then someone is raiding houses down in a sparsely settled part of Dan’s county, and a corpse, well aged and most curiously wrapped, presents itself for Rhodes’ attention, while the humorists Dan employs as staff have their fun with all of this. A winsome novel in a rewarding series.

       The Dan Rhodes series —

1. Too Late to Die (1986)

2. Shotgun Saturday Night (1987)
3. Cursed to Death (1988)
4. Death on the Move (1989)
5. Evil at the Root (1990)

6. Booked for a Hanging (1992)
7. Murder Most Fowl (1994)
8. Winning Can Be Murder (1996)
9. Death By Accident (1997)
10. A Ghost of a Chance (2000)
11. A Romantic Way to Die (2001)

12. Red, White, and Blue Murder (2003)
13. A Mammoth Murder (2006)
14. Murder Among the O.W.L.S. (2007)
15. Of All Sad Words (2008)

16. Murder in Four Parts (2009)
17. Murder in the Air (2010)
18. The Wild Hog Murders (2011)

MIDSOMER MURDERS. ITV, UK. Season 13, Episodes 4-6. John Nettles (D.C.I. Barnaby), Jason Hughes (DS Ben Jones), Jane Wymark (Joyce Barnaby), Barry Jackson (Dr Bullard), Kirsty Dillon (WPC Gail Stephens).

   This past fall we had a burst of four new episodes of this long-running series (2 hours each, less adverts). I missed the first of these but the second, “The Silent Land” (03 August 2010) was a typical episode with a con man who leads a “ghost walk” around various sites in the Midsomer area.

   Of course when a body turns up he is able to attract more followers, though he clearly makes things up and Barnaby pooh-poohs all things ghostly. However the producers couldn’t resist, after all the crimes have been cleared up rationally, giving Barnaby a ghostly encounter of his own.

   The third, “Master Class” (06 October 2010), was, I’m afraid to say, even worse (possibly the worst episode ever, though there have been some pretty bad ones) with a totally barmy story based on a vision — yes really — that a young girl has, replaying an incident when she was a babe in arms.

   The characters, actions and motives were unbelievable and the whole was a complete mess. Unless you are a Midsomer completist you will do best to avoid this episode.

   Following that the fourth episode, “The Noble Art” (13 October 2010), though not the most intriguing of stories, maybe, was a return to the good old days with a story that made some sense and a villain that one could make out if the clues were picked up on. If only they were all like this.

   J. F. “John” Norris, whose several posts and many comments you have seen here on this blog over the past couple of months, has begun his own, as of today, and he’s off to a great start. If you’re interested in classic detective fiction and other similar literature from the musty past, I highly recommend it to you — and even if you aren’t!

   Going into more detail about it, he describes his blog as “a foray into the realm of the old-fashioned detective novel, the ghost story and supernatural novel of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the pulp adventure magazines of the 30s & 40s and similar dusty relics.”

   Along these lines John has already posted reviews of —

The Chinese Parrot – Earl Derr Biggers (1926)
The House of Strange Guests – Nicholas Brady (1932)
Murder on Wheels – Stuart Palmer (1932)
The Saltmarsh Murders – Gladys Mitchell (1932)
The Poison Fly Murder – Harriet Rutland (1940)
The Cut Direct – Alice Tilton (1938)
Death Turns the Tables – John Dickson Carr (1941)

    …but between you and me, I don’t think he can keep up the pace. (He must have storing these up. That’s all I can think of.)

   The full URL is http://prettysinister.blogspot.com/, and you can tell him I sent you.

IAIN PEARS – The Titian Committee. Harcourt Brace, hardcover, 1993. Originally published in the UK: Victor Gollancz, hardcover, 1991. Reprint paperbacks include: Berkley, 1999; trade pb, August 2002.

   This is the second novel featuring Flavia di Stefano of the Rome Art Theft Squad and art historian/dealer Jonathan Argyll. I haven’t read the first, The Raphael Affair.

   An American lady, a member of an international art committee meeting in Venice, is murdered there. More, because of politics than anything else, a member of the Art Theft Squad in the person of di Stefano is dispatched to Venice to “assist” in the investigation.

   In point of fact she is expected to do nothing, as is made quite clear to her by the local police. As one might imagine, however, she does a little more. When another member of the committee is found drowned, she pokes around still further.

   Argyll, with whom she has worked on a previous case, has been trying to buy a painting that was a matter of dispute among the members of the unfortunate committee as to its authenticity. It all sounds very complicated, and it is.

   This is an urbane, not exactly lighthearted but certainly not grim mystery featuring amiable investigators and a good bit of nice Venetian atmosphere and art lore. Di Stefano’s superior, General Bottando, is also an engaging character.

   It’s nothing you’re going to remember in any detail for long, but when you do think of it, your thoughts are likely to be pleasant. Pears writes smoothly and competently. A very nice read, and although I’m not going to strain any muscles doing it, I’ll probably hunt up the first in the series.

       The “Art History” series —

1. The Raphael Affair (1990)

2. The Titian Committee (1991)
3. The Bernini Bust (1992)

4. The Last Judgement (1993)
5. Giotto’s Hand (1994)
6. Death and Restoration (1996)

7. The Immaculate Deception (2000)

RAFE McGREGOR – The Architect of Murder. Robert Hale, hardcover, February 2009.

Genre:   Historical mystery. Leading character:   Alec Marshall; 1st in series. Setting:   England-1901/Gaslight Era.

First Sentence:   I’m not sure why I decided to return to London when I did.

    Major Alec Marshall served as a policeman prior to his joining the army and receiving the Victoria Cross. Alec has returned to England after learning of his sister, Dr. Ellen Marshall. Her close friend, Miss Roberta Paterson, believes Ellen was murdered and wants Alec to investigate.

    Supt. William Melville of Scotland Yard’s CID, is short of men owing to the upcoming coronation of Edward VII, would also like Marshall’s help. Cecil Rhodes, one of the wealthiest men in Great Britain has died. The witnesses to the last two codicils, two of whom are in London are needed in Cape Town.

    Assigned to work with Inspector Truegood, they find one of the witnesses murdered and uncover a plan set to impact the future of the British Empire.

    It is always wonderful to pick up a book which looks somewhat interesting and find it to be completely fascinating and exciting. McGregor has created interesting, substantive characters. The protagonist, Alec Marshall, is one of the most fully drawn characters I’ve read in awhile.

    Although initially it is challenging to put together the pieces of Alec’s background, particularly with people misrepresenting his rank, it does sort itself out. While he utilizes the logic and skills he learned as a policeman and a soldier, what I particularly liked was the breath of emotion given to Alec.

    Roberta Paterson has a career and supports the vote for women but is still aware of social conventions. Truegood is a cop’s cop; he’s unimpressed by Alec and distrustful of his motives but will cover his back when the situation requires it.

    Historical events and figures are incorporated in a realistic manner. Because of the number of characters, it could have been confusing. McGregor avoided that pitfall by reminding us of who the characters and their relationship to each other. Rather than this being redundant, it provides clarity and is well incorporated into the plot.

    McGregor employs Alec in conveying the sense of time and place. With his transition back into London, we witness his observations on telephones, the crowds, traffic, noise and the smell of the air. There are descriptions of the manners and multi-course meals of the period, with particular attention given to men’s attire and facial hair, and the various levels of economic and social strata.

    The tendresse which develops between Alec and Roberta is completely appropriate to the period. A lot of information had to be included for the story to make sense, but I was never bored.

    There are shocking revelations and very dramatic confrontations. The story was informative, educational, exciting, suspenseful, dramatic and altogether wonderful. I can’t wait for the next book.

Rating:   Excellent.

Editorial Comment:   If I may, I’d like to recommend an article online by Rafe MacGregor about the writing of this book; it appears online here on the Shots Magazine website.

      The bad news is that the book sold out its first printing very quickly and is now commanding high prices on the secondary market; that is to say, $80 and up, an amount I personally consider to be “high.” And at the present time, the author’s blog and website no longer seem to exist. Even with the success of the first book, I do not know if there will be a second one.

[UPDATE] 01-26-11.   Jamie Sturgeon has sent me the URL to Rafe McGregor’s new website, where what he has to say about his writing career is even more discouraging. Here’s the direct link to his “Pulp Fiction” page: https://sites.google.com/site/rafemcgregor/pulp-fiction-1.

GEORGE WORTHING YATES – The Body That Wasn’t Uncle. William Morrow, hardcover, 1939. Reprint paperbacks: Dell #52, mapback edition, 1944; Dell #645, 1952.

   When a man off the train at Princeton Junction [New Jersey] heads straight across the snow for the Villars farm, the number one question asked later is, did he ever get there before he collapsed and died of atropine poisoning? And why did Sidney Villars claim the dead man to be his long-lost brother, Stephen Small?

   Ex-Scotland Yard Inspector Hazlitt Woar, now a private eye at loose ends in Bermuda, is called in by Katheren Meynard, a friend of the family who suspects fraud, but not murder. Woar, who speaks in riddles and short, clipped sentences, does a capable job of detection and fulfills while doing so a romance evidently begun in an earlier entry in the series, the courtship finally ending in a most curious fashion indeed.

   There is a class of detective novel, however, and this is one of them, in which you keep getting the distinct impression that the author is deliberately withholding information solely to keep the reader from solving the puzzle. The merely mysterious is emphasized, and not the mystery.

   Or in other words, characters are murkier than they need to be, and with murkier motives. To no avail, this time: there’s only one person the killer could be. Strangely enough, New Jersey trooper Lt. Gurney could have come straight from the pages of Black Mask, and equally so the ambitious, high-minded D.A. named Hellenberger.

   As for Woar himself, though, he has a tweedy and entirely British charm all his own.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:   [Adapted from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

GEORGE WORTHING YATES. 1900-1975. see pseudonym Peter Hunt (books)

      There Was a Crooked Man (n.) Morrow 1936.
      The Body That Came by Post (n.) Morrow 1937.   [Hazlitt Woar]
      The Body That Wasn’t Uncle (n.) Morrow 1939.   [Hazlitt Woar.]
      If a Body (n.) Morrow 1941.   [Hazlitt Woar]

   In collaboration with Charles Hunt Marshall under the joint pen name of Peter Hunt, Yates also wrote three earlier works of detective or mystery fiction. Alan Miller, about whom I know nothing more, was the leading character in these, including the provocatively titled Murder Among the Nudists (1934).

[UPDATE] 01-25-11.   I can’t say this with any degree of certainty, but I believe it was the earlier Dell paperback that I read. What’s strange is that I’m almost sure that I remember the bookstore where I found the book, but all I remember of the story is what you’ve just read yourself in the review above.

[UPDATE #2] 01-29-11.   Murder Among the Nudists, I am pleased — and quite surprised — to be able to tell you, has recently been reprinted by Ramble House.   (Thanks for the tip go to Jamie Sturgeon.)

YOU’RE A SWEETHEART. Universal, 1937. Alice Faye, George Murphy, Ken Murray, Andy Devine, Charles Winninger, William Gargan, Frank Jenks, Donald Meek. Music director: Charles Previn; dances staged by Carl Randall. Director: David Butler. Shown at Cinefest 28, Syracuse NY, March 2008.

   Don King (Ken Murray), a bumptious promoter, hires waiter Hal Adams (George Murphy), to pass as an Oklahoma millionaire and drum up support for his Broadway show starring Betty Bradley (Alice Faye).

   Betty is unaware of the deception and falls in love with Hal who may be working as a waiter, but is a terrific song and dance man.

   The plan to keep the show afloat goes off track, but if you don’t think there’s going to be a happy ending, you should swear off musicals. Faye and Murphy are splendid co-stars, and the cast of talented supporting actors provides sterling support.

   Both Faye (at Fox) and Murphy (at MGM) will appear in bigger budgeted films, with more illustrious casts, but they’re just fine in this ingratiating musical comedy.

MY NAME IS MODESTY. Miramax, 2004. Alexandra Staden. Raymond Cruz, Fred Pearson, Eugenia Yuan, Nicolaj Coster Waldau. Screenplay by Lee Batchler & Janet Scott Batchler, based on the characters created by Peter O’Donnell and “In the Beginning,” the Modesty Blaise comic strip by Peter O’Donnell & James Holdway. Directed by Scott Spiegel.

   The history of this one isn’t very promising — Quentin Tarantino had acquired the rights to film the character of Modesty Blaise from the comic strip and novels by Peter O’Donnell, and in order to keep them he needed to get something on film. As a result he produced this made for DVD release feature as a sort of prequel to a real film.

   The good news is that it is better than any previous Modesty Blaise film or television appearance, and better than it had to be.

   In fact, for now, it is the definitive Modesty Blaise on screen. The story takes place before Modesty meets Willie Garvin, and before she became the “Mam’zelle,” mistress of the criminal organization known as the Network. This is very much the story of how she came to hold such a position.

   The film is short and the story succinct. Modesty Blaise (Alexandra Staden) is in Tangier working at the casino owned by her criminal mentor, the head of the Network. As the film opens he is planning a major drug deal (despite Modesty’s disapproval) and as a result the vault at the casino is filled with money.

   Myklos, (Nicolaj Coster-Waldau), a charismatic young terrorist with a grudge against her boss, kills him and takes over the casino after closing time taking Modesty and a handful of employees hostage.

   To keep herself and the other hostages alive, Modesty convinces Myklos that they must wait for her bosses second in command (Raymond Cruz from TNT’s The Closer) to return to open the safe, and engages him at the roulette wheel and in a desperate ploy: for every game he wins she will tell another chapter of her life beginning with how she came to be named Modesty Blaise, and for every three in a row she wins he will let a hostage free.

   Thus Modesty reveals the story of her origins as an orphan in war-torn Bosnia (updated from the original post WW II era) and how she met Lodz, the old man who became her teacher and traveling companion. As the suspenseful cat and mouse game proceeds Modesty carefully plays Myklos and reveals her compelling story from how she wandered over Southern Europe and North Africa to how she became involved with the Network after the old man’s death when she was caught stealing in the bazaars of Tangiers by her mentor in crime.

   Done on a small budget and with mostly unknown actors, this shouldn’t work, but ironically those things become virtues, and while Staden is too slight to really capture the Modesty of the comic strip and books, she has the exotic look, Khirghiz eyes, and screen presence to suggest both the complexity and strength of the character, and when at the end she rips off her skirt in the true Modesty style to go into action, the well-choreographed fight could have been story boarded from the panels drawn by artist James Holdway.

   Modesty wins the day, and even offers an ironic thank you to the dead Myklos, who has inadvertently delivered the Network into her hands. She cancels the drug deal, and informs her now second in command that they will deal with the problems that causes when it comes. The film ends as the legend is born.

   There is a nice touch, too, as one of the hostages, the bartender, who has overheard her life story as she recounted it to Myklos to stall him, asks her just how much of what she told them was true.

   With a Giaconda smile she replies: My name is Modesty.

   After the awful Joseph Losey film with Monica Vitti and Terence Stamp as Modesty and Willie, and the misguided television pilot designed to move the characters to California with Ann Turkel miscast, it is nice to finally see a respectful and intelligent adaptation of O’Donnell’s popular cult favorite.

   My Name is Modesty is nothing more than an appetizer, but as such it does what a good appetizer is designed for and whets the appetite for the main course.

   Even if the main course never comes, this remains a faithful and heartfelt tribute to the real thing and the DVD includes a nice making of video, insightful audio commentary by the screenwriters, director, and producer, a video interview with the late Peter O’Donnell on the creation of Modesty, and an illustrated retrospective of all her comic strip adventures replete with detailed synopsis.

   All in all this is a class act all the way, like the lady it celebrates. It is the real Modesty Blaise, and that’s all any of her fans have ever asked for.

CRAIG RICE – The Corpse Steps Out. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1940. Reprint hardcover: Tower Books, 1945. Reprint paperbacks: Pocket #476, October 1947; International Polygonics, 1989.

   Paperbacks published by International Polygonics Ltd. are worth noting for quality and variety. Recently IPL has been publishing Craig Rice’s series regarding John J. Malone, aided and abetted by Jake and Helene (nee Brand) Justus, and has already published her very scarce first novel, Eight Faces at Three.

   Now comes the almost as scarce and equally enjoyable second Malone mystery, The Corpse Steps Out (1940), a wild and wacky mystery set in pre-World War II Chicago. Appropriate to the time, many of the cast of characters work in radio, and their fear of sponsor censorship is important to the plot. (Chicago at one time was an important center of national radio.)

   This is a classic case of “murder without tears,” and even the incredible amount of booze consumed by the characters seems inoffensive, though, with hindsight, we know how harmful it is.

   Included is a brief biography of Rice by William Ruehlmann which is crammed with information. Rice had a terrible alcoholism problem which contributed to her death and “wrote the binge but lived the hangover,” according to Ruehlmann. Her brief, unhappy life ended at age forty-nine in 1957; her enjoyable mysteries live on.