SON OF DRACULA. Universal Pictures, 1943. Lon Chaney Jr., Robert Paige, Louise Allbritton, Evelyn Ankers, Frank Craven, J. Edward Bromberg. Story: Curt Siodmak; screenplay: Eric Taylor. Director: Robert Siodmak.

   Lon Chaney Jr., last mentioned for his performance of Witch Woman [reviewed here], also starred in of one of Universal’s more successful chillers, Son of Dracula directed by Robert Siodmak, who went on to create some iconic films noir, including The Killers and Christmas Holiday.

   Siodmak handles the tale of Count Dracula coming to modern-day America in search of fresh blood with authentic creepiness, possibly remembering the expressionist German Horror films of his youth and bringing them to America as well.

   Aided by John P. Fulton’s special effects, he gives the film a splendidly gothic look, with eerie mists and floating coffins, and even elicits an off-beat performance from Chaney fils, whose hulking vampire suggests some of the virility Chris Lee brought to the part years later.

   I should also note that Robert Paige, as the hero of the tale ranks a few notches above the average bland leading man in a monster movie. Classic horror films have a perversity that has always appealed to me, in that the Monster is generally more sympathetic, or at least more interesting, than the putative good guys.

   Not here. As Son of Dracula develops, Paige becomes not so much hero as patsy, set up by a scheming girlfriend for a grisly fate, and struggling throughout with forces that outmatched him from the start.

   In fact, Siodmak reused the plot in basic outline in one of his grimmer noirs, Criss Cross (1950) with Burt Lancaster, Yvonne De Carlo and Dan Duryea in the thematic roles done here by Paige, Louise Allbritton (very effective as a literal femme fatale) and Chaney Jr. And Paige (who had a title role in the Monster and the Girl a couple years earlier) invests the part with real pathos.

   In keeping with this moody, fatalistic feel, Son wraps up on a haunting note, with the hero still wanted for murder and haunted by a love that he betrayed.

   It makes me wonder what the little kids thought of all this as they left the theater back in the 40s, particularly since Son of Dracula was double-billed with Universal’s The Mad Ghoul, a surprisingly classy B-feature with echoes of Caligari and an ending that copies the opening of a 1937 Woolrich story, “Graves for the Living.”

SHE ASKED FOR IT. Paramount, 1937. William Gargan, Orien Heyward, Vivienne Osborne, Richard Carle, Roland Drew, Harry Beresford, Miki Morita. Director: Erle C. Kenton.

   William Gargan is well-known name to long-time classic movie fans, even though I remember him most (and first) as PI Martin Kane on the radio. The rest of the cast is all but unknown to me.

   Orien Hayward, for example, who’s married to William Gargan’s character at the beginning of the movie, if you ever expect to see her in a movie, it will have to be this one. Except for a small uncredited part in one other, Her Husand Lies (also Paramount, 1937), she never made another.

   I don’t know why. She’s a pert young blonde who more than holds her own as Penelope, the female half of the Stafford family. She’s married to Dwight Stafford (that’s Gargan), and a more profligate and wastrel couple you cannot imagine, living high in society solely on the basis of a monthly allowance from Dwight’s (very) rich uncle.

   When the check doesn’t arrive at the beginning of one month, they are in deep financial trouble. They rush over to the uncle’s home, only to find that he has just died, the victim of a hit-and-run accident, the other party unknown.

   Forced by bitter necessity to make a living on their own, his cousin having shut the horn of plenty (and their only flow of income) down on them, Dwight, a big fan of mystery fiction, decides to become an author. The first big twist in the tale is that he does, and in a big way. The second big twist is that after several successful books, Dwight tells Penelope he’d rather go fishing than write another book. (His literary muse is gone.)

   And so is Penny, off to Reno for a divorce. Dwight, on the other hand, decides to pose as his own character and go into the detective business, and after a considerable amount of muddling around, he solves the case, the first one that comes in the door.

   I’ve gone into more detail than I might for some movies for two reasons. First of all, it’s an interesting set-up, and secondly this is a relatively difficult movie to find. There’s a long synopsis on IMDB (one which will unfortunately tell you everything, and if you read it, you will absolutely never need to see this movie), but at this point in time, there isn’t a single comment that’s been left, nor an external link, except one to this blog, as soon as it can be done. (It usually takes a couple of days.)

   Should you go to a more than usual amount of effort to find this movie? My advice is no, don’t bother, unless I’ve made the set-up sound as interesting as I tried to. But when I said that the case itself is muddled, I meant it, and more: all the way through, the vibes are off.

   The Staffords’ problems, that of the lazy rich, are difficult to identify with, to put it politely but succinctly, and most of the other characters are only crudely drawn, with one of them being out-and-out repulsive.

BYRON PREISS, Editor – Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1988. Softcover editions: Perigee Press, 1990; ibooks, 1999. [Note that the latter adds a new introduction, two new stories, and a map of Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles.]

   Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration may be the only anthology I choose to list in my Crime Fiction Bibliography. Chandler was born in 1888, created Philip Marlowe, and the world — at least the crime fiction world — has never been the same. So some of the current top practitioners here pay tribute to both.

   Marlowe stars in all twenty-three stories, set explicitly in years from 1935 to 1959, and they resonate not so much with Chandler’s writing style (which most of the authors don’t try to imitate) as with the times and places, with the ambiance of the private eye on the Chandlerian mean streets.

   Some stories are distinctly more effective than others, but in the main this is quite enjoyable. And at the end, in “The Pencil,” Chandler himself shows us all how it should be done.

TORBEN NIELSEN – An Unsuccessful Man. Harper & Row, US, 1976; published in Denmark in 1973 under the title Galgesangen, translated by Marianne Helweg.

   A young man hangs himself, on the face of it the result of unrequited love. Detective Superintendent Ancher has a suspicious mind, however, and digs up the remarkable facts that the dead man was singing as his head, went into the noose, and that his fiancee was expecting his quick return to her apartment.

   The story is Danish modern in tone and attitude, polished and uncluttered. Ancher is another Maigret, with the same unmistakable traits of patience and unyielding tenacity. A sex killer, crazed and despicable, confuses matters slightly but not yet nearly so much as an ending that needs much more explanation to be wholly satisfactory.

[UPDATE] 01-23-11.   Nielsen had one other mystery translated into English: 19 Red Roses (Collins, UK, 1978), a translation of Nitten Rode Roser, (Denmark, 1973; no US edition).

    I’ve been omitting my old reviews as short as this one is, especially when they’re of books as unknown as I suspect this one to be. I decided to include An Unsuccessful Man to demonstrate that publishing Scandinavian mysteries is nothing new. What’s new is that they’re popular and publishers are making money with them.

MILWARD KENNEDY – Poison in the Parish. Victor Gollancz, UK, hardcover, 1935. No US edition.

   After a late death certificate and six months of rumor, the odious Miss Tomlin, who died at the Guest House — “a boarding-house where the inmates pay high for insufficient fare in order to avoid damage to their gentility” — is disinterred.

   Since an unusual amount of arsenic is found in the body, the police suspect murder. To get help in their investigations, the Chief Constable asks Francis Anthony to listen to the local gossip and report on his findings.

   Idled by a game leg and messed up intestines, Anthony at first is loath to take part. Only the fact that his beloved niece is enamored of Miss Tomlin’s nephew, who, along with his sister, may be a suspect, induces Anthony to accede to the Chief Constable’s wishes. Anthony hopes to prove that Miss Tomlin’s death was either accident or suicide.

   In his dedication, the author says to a “friend”: “In your omniscient superiority you have pointed out that in all my books, of which you have read so few, the characters are unpleasant: here is an attempt at something different.”

   The characters are quite pleasant, although [one] Miss Figgis is not exemplary. Fair play is lacking, but the astute reader — not that any such bother to peruse my reviews — will note an early oddity and begin building a case against one individual.

   Well written and amusing.

Bibliographic notes:   Of the sixteen books published by the author (Milward Kennedy Burge, 1894-1968), including one as by Robert Milward Kennedy, this seems to have been the only mystery tackled by Francis Anthony. Two were cases solved by Inspector Cornfold; Sir George Bull was the sleuth of record in another pair.

   Kennedy also wrote two books as by Evelyn Elder, one of which, Murder in Black and White, has recently been reprinted in the US by Ramble House.

THE GOOSE AND THE GANDER. Warner Brothers, 1935. Kay Francis, George Brent, Genevieve Tobin, John Eldredge, Claire Dodd, Ralph Forbes, Helen Lowell. Director: Alfred E. Green.

   If I were still keeping up the pretense that this blog covers crime films only, I could get away with covering this short but very funny screwball comedy because, in fact, there is a crime involved. But I gave up that particular restriction or limitation some time ago, as regulars visitors to this blog have long ago realized, right along with me.

   So forget about the crime for a minute – I’ll get back to it – and let me tell you instead that this is a very funny screwball comedy. Maybe it came along too early to be officially classified as the latter, but it is very funny, so it’s a comedy, and once I tell you about the story line, you will be awfully hard pressed to not call it one of the screwball variety.

   It’s rather complicated, the story line, that is, but I’ll give it my best shot. Georgiana Summers (Kay Francis) is divorced from Ralph Summers (Ralph Forbes), who was stolen from her by the new Mrs. Summers (Genevieve Tobin), whom she (the first Mrs. Summers) overhears making plans for a weekend getaway with Bob McNear (George Brent). Hoping to embarrass the pair, especially the new Mrs. Summers, she makes plans to trap them in her home (thanks to a phony gag about a smallpox quarantine) and (setting it up even further) having her ex find them there.

   Foiling her plans, however, are the two crooks alluded to earlier in this report, the Thurstons (John Eldredge and Claire Dodd) a married couple who are also jewel thieves and who get trapped in the same snare at Georgiana’s home that she set for the cheating pair she intended it for.

   I am perhaps not telling this funnily enough. Trust me on this, but maybe you have to be there, too. There is some serious explaining to do on the part of everyone involved to keep all of their secrets from each other, each one trying to outdo the other, with lots of squirming and wriggling going on as they do so, especially when the local police yokels come calling. Making matters worse, Georgina and Bob McNear (George Brent, as you may recall) find themselves attracted to each other.

   Two additional points. There is more than a hint of the risque in the events that unfold in this film, with infidelity one of the major points of the plot. Other reviewers have noted this too, even going so far as to suggest that the story line was written before the Code came in under full enforcement, only to have it tamed down a little, or perhaps even a lot. They may be right.

   Secondly, depression era movie audiences must have loved seeing how the rich folks lived, and they must have loved it even more when these very same rich folks made fools of themselves.

   Which they do several times over in The Goose and the Gander, and the result is very funny, as I may have mentioned before. I laughed out loud several times, and I almost never do that, especially when I am watching a movie alone, as happened to me this time.

   If you’re a Kay Francis fan, she’s in fine form in this one, and you shouldn’t miss it. If you don’t know who Kay Francis is, then The Goose and the Gander is a fine one to begin with.

WILD HORSE MESA. Famous Players-Lasky, 1925. Jack Holt, Noah Beery, Billie Dove, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., George Magrill, George Irving, Edith Yorke, Bernard Sigel, Margaret Morris, Eugene Pallette. Based on the novel by Zane Grey. Director: George B. Seitz. Shown at Cinefest 28, Syracuse NY, March 2008.

   The fellow who introduced the film referred obliquely to a very warm relationship between Zane Grey and female star Billie Dove. You can’t blame Grey. She’s very appealing, and after some initial palling around with Fairbanks, she finally settles on the character’s older brother (Jack Holt) when he shows up to get the plot really moving along.

   Noah Beery is the totally reprehensible villain, but he’s matched (if not in charisma, at least in villainy), by another of Dove’s admirers, Bert Manerube (played by George Magrill).

   Manerube conceives the dastardly plan of driving horses into a canyon whose exit is blocked by a barbed wire fence that he argues will bring the horses up short. They won’t, he claims, run into the fence in their eagerness to escape their pursuers.

   When Holt points out the fallacy in this plan, Manerube joins forces with Beery and the action doesn’t let up until the final romantic fade-out. Among the film’s many pleasures are the performance by the magnificent white stallion who leads the wild horses and the beautiful photography by Bert Glennon, who would be a member of John Ford’s regular crew, with Stagecoach among his credits.

WENDY HORNSBY – The Paramour’s Daughter. Perseverance Press, trade paperback, 2010.

Genre:   Unlicensed investigator/Journalist. Leading character:   Maggie MacGowen; 7th in series. Setting:   Los Angeles/France.

First Sentence:   “My dear girl!”

    When documentary filmmaker Maggie MacGowen is approached by a woman who claims to be her mother, it is disturbing enough. When that woman is then killed in a deliberate hit-and-run and Maggie learns the woman’s claim is fact, it changes everything. Maggie travels to meet her French family and soon becomes immersed in their lives, problems and threats.

    Wendy Hornsby’s books have always been character driven with an element of suspense, and that is still true. Imagine finding out your past isn’t what you thought. Imagine being introduced to a completely new family about which you’d never known.

    Hornsby does a wonderful job conveying Maggie’s thoughts and feelings at suddenly being put in this situation. The characters become real, as does the occasional awkwardness of Maggie’s situation. But we see Maggie progress and begin to recover from her recent tragedy, including a possible new beginning for her.

    The descriptions are wonderfully visual, both when she is in Paris and in the countryside, and the food, such as real croissant and strawberry jam, is delectable. As always, I love learning something new and here I learned about cheese and about Calvados (French apple brandy); both good things.

    The suspense is there, particularly once we learn the initial accident wasn’t an accident, but there is a wonderful subtlety to it and balance within the story. While I may not feel this is the best of Hornsby’s book, it was still a very good, solid read. She retains her place on my “must buy” list.

Rating:   Very Good.

        The Kate Teague & Lt. Roger Tejada series —

1. No Harm (1987)     (*)
2. Half a Mind (1990)

        The Maggie MacGowen series —

1. Telling Lies (1992)

2. Midnight Baby (1993)
3. Bad Intent (1994)
4. 77th Street Requiem (1995)

5. A Hard Light (1997)
6. In the Guise of Mercy (2009)
7. The Paramour’s Daughter (2010)

(*) According to Al Hubin’s Revised Crime Fiction IV, Maggie MacGowen makes at least a cameo appearance in No Harm.

[UPDATE] 01-23-10.   For a complete bibliography for Wendy Hornsby, add to the list of books above the following collection of short stories. The title story won an Edgar for Best Short Story in 1992. [Thanks to Jeff Meyerson who reminded me of this book in Comment #1. Also note the discussion that follows in #2 and #3.]

Nine Sons and Other Mysteries. Crippen & Landru, 2001.

[UPDATE #2] 01-24-11.   I’ve passed the word along to Al Hubin that Maggie MacGowen does not appear in No Harm. See the comments!

NEAL BARRETT, JR. – The Hereafter Gang. Mark V. Zeisling, hardcover, 1991. Mojo Press, softcover, 1999.

   What this is, part of it anyway, is your quintessential nostalgic Texas road novel, sort of like something Dan Jenkins might write if he’d been holed up with a bottle and Thomas Wolfe for a week or two.

   It’s not for your genteel audience, you understand; hell, it may not even be for anybody who can spell genteel. Byt Joe Bob Briggs, now, he’d like it a whole lot. There’s a good bit of drinkin’ and fornicatin’, a fair amount of of drivin’, and more puredee Texas-style talk than you can shake a dead armadillo at.

   There’s this 50-odd year old guy who tells people he’s around 30 and looks it, ’cause he periodically covers himself up with good old mother earth. He just sorts of drifts along, lives a lot in the past and lets the present mostly take care of itself. His momma’s dead and his daddy used to run a lumberyard, but he’s a few boards shy of a stack now and in one of those homes.

   Well, our hero’s wife Earlene dumps him for one of those TV preachers with a lot of hair just ’fore he was fixin’ to leave her, so he gets stoned, walks off his advertisin’ job, hooks up with this underage carhop named Sue Jean, and they take off in a stolen Nazi car, and … aw, hell, you don’t need to know any more about the plot.

   It’s about Life, is what it is, and Death, and a bunch of other stuff, and it’s probably not quite like anything you read before. You’ll know after 20 pages if you’re gonna like it or not, and if you do, you’re gonna like it a lot.

   Y’see, Barrett’s got himself one of those really unique voices. Billy Clyde Crider put me onto it, and it’s a dandy. Now if you can’t trust me and old Billy Clyde, who can you trust?

TODD RITTER – Death Notice. St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books, hardcover, October 2010.

    Though the serial killer novel has been done to death and beyond, it’s still nice to see one take a different tack and do it successfully.

    Death Notice is a mystery/suspense entry set in Perry Hollow, Pennsylvania, where Police Chief Kat Campbell is raising her son and settling in for the quiet life — until two crimes strike — someone has stolen the local florist’s delivery van (“Perry Hollow was the kind of town where you could park a car and leave the keys in the ignition and know it would be safe. Until now.”) and someone has left a coffin on the side of the road … and not an empty one.

    The coffin turns out to have a body of a local man in it, murdered in a gruesome manner, and when Henry Goll, who does the obituaries for the local paper, reports he received a death notice for the victim before the man was murdered, the state police show up in the person of Nick Donnelly.

    Donnelly is the head of a task force assigned to track down the serial killer known as the “Betsy Ross Killer” because he embalms his victims alive and sews their lips shut while they are still breathing in the manner of the Perry Hollow victim.

    A second death notice arrives and then a second victim in Perry Hollow, but when the Betsy Ross Killer is caught, there is yet another murder in Perry Hollow.

    Kat has her own personal serial killer on her hands, and it is someone she knows. Before it is over, the whole town will be in terror and Kat and her son in particular, while Donnelly finds his life and career in jeopardy, and Henry Goll discovers he is more than merely the messenger where these killings are concerned..

    Anyone who has ever worked for a small town paper or written obituaries will appreciate the insiders view of the job from a journalist for the New Jersey Star-Ledger.

    My only caveat is that since Ritter points out in the book that the first line of any obit is known in the business as “the Death Sentence,” that should have been his title. A minor complaint, and likely imposed by an editor or a publisher instead of the writer.

    The setting and setup may be cozy, but there is nothing cozy about this well written and twisty suspense novel that uses many of the tropes of the serial killer novel and the cozy, while creating an atmosphere of dread and terror counter balanced by good police procedure and likable well drawn characters (hopefully we will see more of Kat and Nick).

    Ritter manages the whole small town milieu without resorting to eccentrics or “characters,” which alone is enough to set him apart, and handles the grue and gore without falling into the trap of exploitation or reveling in them in the semi-pornographic manner of many better known writers in the field. His prose has the journalistic virtues of being crisp, analytical, and controlled.

    I didn’t buy the killer’s motive or reasoning completely, but Ritter handles it all with skill and a bit of panache so I am more than willing to give him this small conceit for the sake of an entertaining read.

    A new writer to watch, a good book with a well drawn setting and well drawn characters, and something a bit different in the over crowded serial killer field gets this one the highest of recommendations.