RON ROSENBAUM – Murder at Elaine’s. Stonehill, hardcover, 1978. No paperback edition.

    Elaine’s is said to be the hottest literary hangout in Manhattan, lionized by all the most ultra-sophisticates of western society. The lights go out, except for a silencer a shot rings out, and there on the floor is the former publisher of Media Confidential.

    Motive: a literary feud? Or is it some ramification of the dope rackets?

    This old-fashioned murder mystery was previously serialized in High Times Magazine, and a more unlikely blend is difficult to imagine.

    Solved in passing is the well-known Dickens/Edwin Drood case, and revealed as well is the ending of a famous Agatha Christie novel.

    The “in” crowd will gobble this up, which hardly makes it an automatic must for the true mystery fan. Still, part of the plot are those missing eighteen minutes from an infamous White House tape. Wouldn’t you really like to know who done what to whom?

RIP Elaine Kaufman:   This celebration of her life from the “Diner’s Journal” section of The New York Times says it all, certainly better than I, having never seen the outside of Elaine’s, much less the inside. From the obituary page:

    “Elaine Kaufman, who became something of a symbol of New York as the salty den mother of Elaine’s, one of the city’s best-known restaurants and a second home for almost half a century to writers, actors, athletes and other celebrities, died Friday in Manhattan. She was 81.”

J. S. FLETCHER – Todmanhawe Grange.   Thornton Butterworth, UK, hardcover, 1937. US title: The Mill House Murder, Alfred A. Knopf, 1937.

    The final mystery novel by the extremely prolific mainstream and mystery genre novelist J. S. Fletcher, Todmanhawe Grange was published posthumously, two years after the seemingly indefatigable author’s death in 1935 at nearly seventy-two years of age.

    Completed by Edward Powys Mathers, aka Torquemada, the infamous crossword puzzle creator and crime fiction reviewer for the London Observer (who himself died at the age of forty-six four years later), Todmanhawe Grange is, surprisingly enough, given that it came at the end of a long line of over eighty Fletcher mystery novels, the best Fletcher crime tale I have read.

    J. S. Fletcher turned to the mystery and thriller genre in 1901, after enjoying some success as a mainstream novelist, particularly as a regionalist in the manner of Thomas Hardy and Eden Phillpotts. Though Fletcher continued to write mainstream novels (largely about his native Yorkshire), mystery tales increasingly dominated his output, especially after the publication in 1919 of The Middle Temple Murder, the mystery famously praised by President Woodrow Wilson.

    Alfred Knopf, Fletcher’s canny American publisher, never tired of reminding the reading public of this fact; and whether because of this or some other reason (Knopf’s publicity campaign probably was the best by an American publisher prior to Charles Scribners’ promotion of S. S. Van Dine in the second half of the 1920s), Fletcher became known for a time in the United States as the greatest English mystery writer after Arthur Conan Doyle (this view was not shared in England).

    Fletcher, who naturally enjoyed the money this publishing success was bringing in, responded by producing ever more works of mystery fiction, both novels and short story collections. Many of his earlier, pre-Middle Temple Murder mystery novels that had not originally published in the United States were reprinted at this time as well (without informing readers that they were reprints), resulting in the regular publication of four or more Fletcher mystery volumes a year. Not for nothing did critics refer to the “Fletcher Mill.”

    By the 1930s the Fletcher vogue had passed and Fletcher was seen even in America as a passe, unexciting writer. Better detective novelists like S. S. Van Dine, Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, John Rhode, J. J. Connington, and Freeman Wills Crofts had become well-known, and simultaneously Fletcher’s mysteries, never the most inspired in truth, largely had become ever more mechanical and dull.

    After his death, his books quickly fell out of print and today he survives in mystery genre history essentially as a one-work writer, the author of The Middle Temple Murder (praised — did I mention? — by Woodrow Wilson).

    So imagine my surprise when I read Todmanhawe Grange and found that it was quite good, succeeding both as a puzzle and a crime novel of atmosphere and local color.

    Surely some of the credit for the merit of the puzzle must go to Torquemada (Fletcher tended to be a loose mystery plotter, often eschewing the fair play convention of the Golden Age), yet the novel is as well the most atmospheric and engrossing crime tale that Fletcher had written in some years.

In Todmanhawe Grange, we read of the last exploit of Ronald Camberwell, a private inquiry agent introduced by Fletcher late in his writing career, in 1931. Camberwell himself is not particularly interesting, but the setting, a Yorkshire mill town, is very well-conveyed, as are the people residing there.

    The murder centers around the affairs of James Martenroyde, head of wealthy textile manufacturing family. Martenroyde, affianced to a much younger woman, contacts Camberwell’s firm to investigate certain delicate matters. The blustery night of Camberwell’s arrival in the mill town, John Martenroyde is found dead in the mill weir. His death, of course, is not a natural one.

    Two additional murders follow — as well as Fletcher’s much-loved lengthy inquests — and the reader is kept engaged throughout all these events, even the inquests (much of the second inquest was written by Torquemada, who provides excellent material and forensic detail that Fletcher himself tended to scamp in his mysteries).

    The tale takes a rather Gothic twist and ends up bearing some resemblance, interestingly, to something out of the mind of Ruth Rendell (writing as Barbara Vine).

    As pointed out earlier, a goodly share of the credit for the success of Todmanhawe Grange must go to Torquemada, yet he wrote, according to his own admission, only the final quarter of the tale (except for the very last line, which followed Fletcher’s last dictates; the rest of the conclusion followed an outline).

    For whatever reason, Fletcher seems to have put some extra effort into the last work, and the effort shows.

DWIGHT V. BABCOCK – A Homicide for Hannah. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1941. Pulp magazine reprint: Two Complete Detective Books, November 1941. Paperback reprints: Avon Murder Mystery Monthly #10, 1943; Avon #68, 1945; Avon #332, 1951.

   Dwight V. Babcock was a prolific contributor to the pulps in the 1930s, and among the best of the writers developed by Joseph T. “Cap” Shaw, Black Mask’s editor from 1926-1936 and the guiding force in the development of the type of fiction he called “hard, brittle … a full employment of the function of dialogue, and authenticity in characterization and action.”

   In 1944, after publishing two of his three mystery novels, Babcock went to work for Universal Studios, for which he scripted numerous films; he also did promotion work for Disney’s The Great Locomotive Chase and worked on other Disney productions.

   The heroine of all three of his novels, Hannah Van Doren, has an angelic appearance that would lend itself to a Disney movie; this innocent facade, however, is at great odds with her connoisseur’s passion for murder and mayhem.

   Not for nothing is she known as “Homicide Hannah, the Gorgeous Ghoul” — even though her interest is purely professional (she writes for True Crime Cases magazine) and her background made that interest inevitable (her father was an L.A. homicide cop).

   In this, Hannah’s first adventure, she teams with Joe Kirby, an out-of-work custom-car salesman, to solve the murder of Steve Wurtzel, a gambling buddy of Joe’s who turns up knifed in his (Kirby’s) apartment on Christmas Day.

   The situation is further complicated by two facts: one, on Christmas Eve Kirby rescued a beaten (and very naked) young woman from an alley and gave her shelter, but she has now disappeared; and two, in her place is Wurtzel’s corpse and a Christmas present left by Kirby’s wealthy girlfriend, Veronica Smith (“Miss Gotrocks” ), whom he is afraid committed the murder.

   When Hannah learns of these events, she reacts as if Joe has given her a Christmas present: a homicide for Hannah. She and Joe chase all over Hollywood and environs, bucking heads with, among others: wisecracking reporters; hard-boiled cops; the idle (and not so idle) rich; a man with a face that looks like a skeleton; frequenters of the track at Santa Anita (where Veronica’s horse, Princess Pat, is running on opening day); and a chemist who works for a firm that manufactures “Protexu,” a patented sanitary toilet seat cover.

   Babcock’s style here is less hard-boiled than in his Black Mask and other pulp work: there is plenty of breezy humor to go along with the fast action, and some delightful glimpses into the mad social whirl of Hollywood just prior to World War II.

   Hannah is a lively and irrepressible character — and as it turns out, a very good detective. A Homicide for Hannah is good fun from start to finish.

   Hannah’s other two adventures are The Gorgeous Ghoul (1941), in which she and Joe set out to collect a fat reward by returning a missing college boy to his family and in so doing run afoul of murder, a crazy inventor with the instincts of a Peeping Tom, and a very unusual matriarch named Sybil; and Hannah Says Foul Play! (1946), in which Hannah and Joe travel to Palm Springs during its annual western-days celebration and become mixed up in the murder of a Hollywood gossip columnist.

   The latter title was published only in digest paperback form, as part of the Avon Murder Mystery Monthly series. Babcock’s only other novel is a collaboration with fellow pulp writer Day Keene — Chautauqua (1960), a mainstream historical with strong suspense elements, published under the joint byline of Day Keene and Dwight Vincent.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

CAGE OF EVIL. United Artists, 1960. Ronald Foster, Pat Blair, Harp McGuire, John Maxwell, Doug Henderson, Helen Kleeb, Robert Shayne. Director: Edward L. Cahn.

   A standard entry black-and-white crime movie that more than likely wasn’t considered noir when it was made, but there’s no doubt that it was (or is) one.

   Passed up for promotion too many times, when police detective Scott Harper (Ronald Foster), somewhat of a hothead, is assigned to get close to blonde nightclub hostess (and good friend of gangster Kurt Romack) Holly Taylor, played to icy perfection by Pat Blair, he ends up getting a little too close, and it doesn’t take much more to get him started down the path to ruin.

   At first it’s only a small fortune in uncut diamonds that’s at play, but after two murders are committed, the stakes are raised a whole lot higher. Harper is smart but not lucky, and eventually, without giving away more than I should, his own brand of fortune runs out.

   The story plays fast and loose on the details regarding proper police procedure, I should like to believe, and looking back at the last hour and ten minutes it took to watch it, there really isn’t a lot of action in this small budget crime film.

   Nor do any of the cast have any name recognition, I don’t believe, but all of them have long resumes. (Pat Blair, the very lovely femme fatale in Cage, did have a long run on Daniel Boone, married to Fess Parker.)

   They all know their marks, in other words, and while no new territory is broken, I wasn’t bored, either. There’s been no official DVD release, but the movie has played on TCM, so copies should be easy to find on the collector-to-collector circuit.

KATE ELLIS – The Bone Garden. St. Martin’s Press, US, hardcover, July 2003. Originally published in the UK: Piatkus, hardcover, 2001; paperback, January 2010.

Genre:   Police procedural. Leading character:  Sgt. Wesley Peterson; 5th in series. Setting:   England.

First Sentence:   The man stared at the shape lying beneath the faded cover on the ancient iron bed and took another sip of wine.

    Not only weeds are dug up during the restoration of a 17th century Devon garden at Earlsacre Manor, but skeletons. The first is of a woman who was buried alive, standing up.

   While not of investigative concern to the Tradmouth police, the body in the caravan is. The only clue to the identity of the victim is a link to Earlsacre. And what about the murder at the cricket pitch. Is that linked as well?

   It’s the characters that keep me coming back to Kate Ellis’s books. With each book, we learn more about the main characters and we see their lives change and develop.

   In this book, Wesley is a new father and both he, and his boss Gerry Heffernan, are promoted. Although the books are marketed as “A Wesley Peterson Crime Novel,” in some ways I find Heffernan the more interesting character, but they balance each other nicely. I love some of Heffernan’s expressions and he’s the kind of boss you’d love to have.

   Add to the characters the plot, which is well done and contains excellent twists. I am never able to anticipate where the story is going or how it will end up. That’s always a very good thing. A series containing both ancient mysteries and contemporary ones could be formulaic.

   Yes, the threads of having the present mirror the past are contrived. But they are also, beautifully woven, interesting and in this case, cleverly related to one of the principal characters.

   With each book, I look forward to learning of the murders in each time period and how they will tie together. With ten more books and counting in the series, I am a happy reader, indeed.

Rating:   Very Good.

Editorial Comment:   A complete listing of the Wesley Peterson books may be found following LJ’s review of The Merchant’s House, the first in the series.

ONE GIRL’S CONFESSION. Columbia Pictures, 1953. Cleo Moore, Hugo Haas, Glenn Langan, Ellen Stansbury, Burt Mustin. Written, produced & directed by Hugo Haas.

   And if Hugo Haas could have played Cleo Moore’s part, he’d have done that, too. But since she’s a hard-featured, statuesque blonde, it think it’s just as well that he didn’t try.

   Statuesque in the Anita Ekberg sense. Bodies like this don’t seem to be in favor today, but back in 1953, I’ll bet this movie was the trash equivalent of Gangbusters. This was long before nudity was acceptable on the screen, but there are a lot of open blouses with frilly lingerie underneath to (almost) make up for it.

   Anybody who’s honest about it knows exactly why this movie was made. And yet — even though at times it reminded me of the cinematic equivalent of a Gold Medal novel — when it comes down it, this movie is as moral as a Sunday morning in church.

   Mary Adams is a waitress who robs her employee and long-time benefactor of $25,000, and goes to jail for it, without telling anyone where she hid the money. As bad it sounds, it’s not, since the money was part of the rackets, and her boss at the restaurant is also the crook that cheated her father many years ago. This, at last, is her chance to get even.

   Crooked money is cursed, as they say, however, and when she’s paroled after only three years of good behavior, she finds this out. When she finds a need for the money, the plot suddenly doubles back on her. After some travail, justice finally wins out.

   The plot is flawed — how could anyone believe that Mary Adams would be as trusting as she is? — but the essential point is that she is really a Fine Person at Heart. You may not believe it from the screen images you see here, but Cleo is a marshmallow in this film, and so is Hugo Haas.

[UPDATE] 12-01-10.   You’d think with all that this movie has going for it, I’d remember it, but I don’t, and I have no idea why.

   This is a problem with a solution, however. This film was released on DVD earlier this year as part of the Bad Girls of Film Noir, Volume II collection, a set I purchased as soon as it was out.

R. C. ASHBY – Death on Tiptoe. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1930. Greyladies, UK, paperback, December 2009. No US edition.

    A house party in a 12th century Norman castle in Wales is the setting, and the characters make up quite a Christie-like cast: young dissolute and irresponsible heir; portrait artist/womanizer; flirtatious heiress; pouty melodramatic young woman jilted by the artist; lovestruck governess; two bratty children; vengeful British Major; reserved and sensible barrister; failed diplomat who is an utter twit; his wife who is love with someone else; and the host and hostess, Sir Harry and Lady Undine Stacey.

   It is Lady Stacey — a transplanted French woman with pretensions to becoming a great baronial estate holder — who is the victim. The opening chapters quite brilliantly plant the seeds for her cruel murder, and there are at least four characters who outright threaten her prior to her body being discovered three weeks later in a chest in the attic where she had hid during a game of hide and seek (an entertainment for her guests).

   Cleverly done, fairly well clued, with quite a bit of misdirection. Melodramatic ending with a somewhat surprising culprit and an intriguing motive. Ashby would later expand the idea of this Gothic detective novel in He Arrived at Dusk (reviewed earlier here ), a far better book with more effective use of folklore, legends and supernatural content.

ALICE CAMPBELL – They Hunted a Fox. Scribner, US, hardcover, 1940. Originally published in the UK: Collins Crime Club, hc, 1940.

   Tom Boldre, owner of Chenrys, an estate in deep financial trouble, has no interest other than horses and, in season, fox hunting. On one hunt, Boldre falls from his horse and suffers a concussion. Two weeks later he falls again and breaks a thigh, which, it seems, causes a heart attack and death.

   When Boldre’s tenant who had helped him on his first fall is shot and killed shortly after Boldre dies, Scotland Yard, in the form of Inspector Headcorn, is called in. Headcorn is a dogged investigator, always seeming to be on the spot when something turns up. He discovers that Boldre died in a most unusual and unnatural way.

   Despite the attempts by all concerned to conceal evidence and mislead Headcorn, putting themselves and others in jeopardy since the murderer is, if I may put it this way, foxy, the killer is unmasked. Above average in plot and writing.

Bibliographic Data:   Alice Campbell, 1887-1976?, was the author of 19 mystery and detective novels between 1928 and 1950. Inspector Headcorn was in five of them:

      Death Framed in Silver. Collins 1937 [Colin Ladbroke also appears]
      They Hunted a Fox. Collins 1940 [Alison Young & Colin Ladbroke also appear]
      No Murder of Mine. Collins 1941
      The Cockroach Sings. Collins 1946
      The Bloodstained Toy. Collins 1948 [Tommy Rostetter also appears]

   I can’t tell you anything more about Campbell’s other series characters. Alison Young and Colin Ladbroke appear together in one book without Headcorn, while Tommy Rostetter is also the star of three solo adventures. The twosome of Geoffrey MacAdam and Catherine West appear in two others, including No Light Came On, 1942, but neither with Headcorn.

   There is very little additional information about Alice Campbell on the Internet. There is a list of her mysteries here, and another short mention of her can be found earlier on this blog in the comments following this post.

  CLUB HAVANA. PRC, 1945. Margaret Lindsay, Tom Neal, Don Douglas, Marc Lawrence, Eddie Hall, Renie Riano, Ernest Truex, Eric Sinclair, Gertrude Michael, Paul Cavanagh, Pedro DeCordoba, Carlos Malina, and Isabelita. Director: Edgar G. Ulmer. Shown at Cinefest 28, Syracuse NY, March 2008.

   The program notes referred to this as a bargain basement Grand Hotel, with direction by Ulmer continuing his tradition of making sparsely budgeted films look good. (Maybe somebody should do a book on directors who were consistently better than the films they directed.)

   The setting is a vaguely Art Deco night club, with a Latin band, and undistinguished musical numbers that add little to the interlocking stories.

   The main plot involves a gangster (Marc Lawrence), suspected of a murder but released when a witness goes missing.

   Club Havana is his hangout and he learns that a young musician (Eric Sinclair) saw the murder, has called the police and will identify Lawrence when they arrive.

   The mounting suspense as Lawrence arranges for a hit on Sinclair is interspersed with music and comic turns (rich, ugly widow Renie Riano agreeing to marry gigolo Paul Cavanagh and both knowing exactly what they’re getting into; Ernest Truex attempting a reunion with his indifferent wife) prolonging the thin plot.

   This is entertainment by the ’40s numbers, with a little cinematic gloss provided by Ulmer’s ingenious camera and smooth direction of his competent cast.

Editorial Comment:   This somewhat hard to find movie has also been reviewed by James Reasoner over on his blog.

● FRANK GRUBER – Fort Starvation. Rinehart & Co., hardcover, 1953. Pennant P43, paperback, 1954; Bantam, pb, 1970. Filmed as Backlash: Universal International, 1956.

● BORDEN CHASE – Red River. Bantam #205, paperback, September 1948. Originally published as Blazing Guns on the Chisholm Trail: Random House, hardcover, 1948. Filmed under the paperback title: United Artists, 1948.

   Some time back I watched a modest little western/mystery called Backlash from 1956 where Richard Widmark goes looking for the owlhoot what left his Paw to be murdered by Injuns, with surprisingly dramatic results.

   Well, the credits tell us the screenplay by Borden Chase was based on a novel by Frank Gruber, but it took a lot of looking to figure out the book they were talking about is Fort Starvation (Rinehart, 1953) and it’ s interesting to see how it served as the starting-point for the movie.

   Gruber was a competent screenwriter, with films like Mask of Dimitrios (1944) and Dressed to Kill (1946) to his credit, but he never rose above competence, and that’s the kind of book Fort Starvation is: adequate but nothing special.

   John Slater gallops across the West sifting the ground for clues, re-checking witnesses, going undercover at one point with an outlaw band, and generally embroiling himself in a panoply of western cliches till Gruber arbitrarily decides to wrap things up with a “surprise” considerably less dramatic than that of the film.

   The characters are never more colorful than the black-and-white prose, nor deeper than the thickness of pulp paper, and while I’m glad I satisfied my morbid curiosity tracking down and reading this thing, I can’t recommend it to anyone else.

   After reading this, I picked up Borden Chase’s novel Red River, originally serialized in the Saturday Evening Post as “Blazing Guns on the Chisolm Trail.”

   If you’ve seen the film, the basics of the story are all there in the book, but Chase’s writing is nothing like the wry, laconic scripts he wrote for films like Winchester 73, Vera Cruz and Bend of the River.

   Here, the prose is overblown, straining to be poetic but barely approaching doggerel. I’ll grant it a certain fruity appeal, perhaps even an operatic intensity at times, but mostly it’s just hammy, and disappointing from a writer who put such fine work on the screen.