PETER LOVESEY – Bloodhounds. The Mysterious Press, US, hardcover, December 1996; reprint paperback, September 1997. Trade paperback: Soho Crime, December 2004. UK edition: Little Brown, hc, May 1996.

Genre:   Police procedural. Series character:   Peter Diamond, 4th in series. Setting:   Bath UK.

First Sentence:   Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond was suffering in the rear seat of a police car scorching toward Bath along the Keynsham bypass with the headlamps on full beam, blue light pulsing and siren wailing.

   Peter Diamond is back with the Bath police as a DS in charge of homicide. The media and police receive a poem which seems to indicate that a valuable painting, in the town’s museum, by Turner will be stolen.

   Instead, it is the theft of a Penny Black, one of the world’s most valuable stamps. The stamp turns up in the possession of a member of the town’s mystery club, “The Bloodhounds,” and the body of another of the group’s ends up on the suspect’s boat.

   Lovesey’s wry humor and use of metaphors is always delightful. In this book, he does a wonderful send-up of book groups and on-line groups, and I thoroughly enjoyed the all the references to mystery authors and their books.

   Lovesey provides a very full construction of each character in very few words. He accurately depicts the pettiness, jealousy and fight for power which seem to be part of any group of people. He clearly exemplifies the tendency of those who are insecure to public degrade others in order to feel better about themselves.

   Diamond is a delightful character; he can seem brusque, yet is aware of his flaws and can be kind. I am particularly taken with his very understanding wife, Stephanie, and his young policewoman, Julie Hargraves.

   The story provides some interesting, amusing, and lesser known, history about Bath. The inclusion of those small details adds richness to the setting and a variance from the common inclusion of the Roman Baths.

   It is not all lightness, however, as there is murder and deception. As a John Dickson Carr fan, I found the set up of doing a locked-room — in this case “boat” — mystery and learning the solution to be fascinating.

   The plot was filled with red herrings and twists; so much so, I found the lead-up to the resolution a bit confusing, causing this to not be my favorite book in the series. I do, however, like the characters enough that I shall continue with the series.

Rating:   Good Plus.

Editorial Comment:   There are now ten novels in the Peter Diamond series, plus a number of short stories he’s also been in. Visit the Peter Lovesey’s website for a complete list of all his fiction, beginning with Wobble to Death in 1970. At the age of 74, he’s still going strong.

PAUL DOHERTY – The Spies of Sobeck. Headline, UK, hardcover/softcover, December 2008. St Martin’s, US, hardcover, February 2010.

   This is the seventh in Doherty’s dynastic Egyptian mystery series, with Amerotke, Chief Justice of the Hall of Two Truths, attempting to ferret out the instigators of a series of murders that threaten the stability of the regime of Queen Hatusu.

   Once again, Doherty recreates the pomp and circumstance of one of the great Egyptian dynasties, highlighted by the vivid characterization of Pharaoh’s Chief Justice.

   I will just note, in passing, that I’ve also read, and much enjoyed, the historical trilogy by Doherty that portrays the troubled and brilliant reign of the monotheistic Pharaoh Akenhaten, and that of his successor, Tutankhamen, through the eyes of Mahu, one-time Chief of Police and intimate of both pharaohs.

   These are not traditional mysteries, but there are always secrets at the heart of every empire, and Mahu, like Amerotke, is adept at uncovering them. For the record, the three novels are An Evil Spirit Out of the West, The Season of the Hyena, and The Year of the Cobra, all also published by Headline.

MARGARET MILLAR – Mermaid. William Morrow, hardcover, 1982. Paperback reprint: IPL, 1991.

   Tom Aragon, whose position as a junior member of a prestigious Southern California law firm has him largely doing legwork for the senior members, occasionally has the opportunity of adding detective duties to his list of chores. He’s no expert at it, by any means, but for an amateur he does pretty well.

   This case has to do with a runaway girl — which comes as no surprise, since the west coast must be full of them — but with a difference. Cleo Jasper is a member of a very wealthy family, she is pretty, if not beautiful, and she is exceptional.

   Mildly retarded, that is, and just beginning to become aware of her “rights.” As in all good drama, the characters in Millar’s panoramic novels are often a mysterious mixture of the comic with the tragic. While she does not realize it, unfortunately, Cleo Jasper is the supreme archetype of each.

[UPDATE] 05-10-10.   If I were to have written this review today, this afternoon, for example, I’m sure it would have been a whole lot longer. I didn’t have a set word limit when I back when I was writing reviews for the Courant, but I knew that I went way long on one, the others would have to be shorter or would be cut altogether.

   One reason for pointing this out is that when it appeared in The MYSTERY FANcier, I added a letter rating of an “A,” and I’m not sure that if I didn’t mention it now, you wouldn’t have known how highly I thought of it. Nor, at this later date, would I, and it’s certainly worth pointing out.

THE STRIPPER. A musical comedy based on the novel of the same title by Carter Brown. Details below:

   So there I was, browsing through the local weekly free paper when there was an article about Richard O’Brien, songwriter for The Rocky Horror Show, and how he had a musical being performed at the Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch.

   I idly took in that the production was called The Stripper, and my mind was trying to work out where I had heard that title before as my eyes got to the next bit “based on the book by Carter Brown.”

   Now I have spoken before of my attachment, from a relative early age, to the books of Carter Brown, and I quickly made my way up to the Carter Brown section of the loft where I found the 1961 Signet edition of the book (reviewed here ).

   I quickly found the Queen’s Theatre website and booked tickets for the Saturday matinee and then set to re-reading the book. Travel to Hornchurch, about 25 miles away, was very convenient by train so Helen and I had a leisurely journey followed by lunch in Hornchurch and a walk to the theatre.

   I bought a programme and read that Richard O’Brien had read lots of Carter Brown’s books. On entering the theatre, the first thing to see was a large rectangular book-shaped screen with, projected on to it, the Signet cover.

   As the show started the projection changed to the outside of the 15th floor of the hotel with Patty Keller perched on the ledge. From then on the action followed the book faithfully (although Sergeant Polnik is, unfortunately relegated to a walk-on part and, for some reason, Sherry Rand of the book is renamed as Sherry Mendez), with huge chunks of dialogue lifted verbatim until an understandable alteration to the ending that changed setting and timing but not culprits.

   This was interspersed with song whose lyrics would not, perhaps, compete on a Cole Porter level, but worked in the more lowly context of Carter Brown. A six piece band (with trumpet, sax and piano prominent), sited on a raised platform at the back of the stage, were excellent, playing the jazz-tinged score.

   Jonathan Wrather was terrific as Al Wheeler and Morgan Deare made a very acceptable Sheriff Lavers. Richard O’Brien, himself, took the role of Arkwright but the stand-out performance was perhaps Jack Edwards as Harvey Stem, in particular when his corpse rose up to sing the contents of his supposed suicide note, “I Confess.”

   Music was written by Richard Hartley, lyrics by Richard O’Brien and Carter Brown was credited, quite rightly, with the book.

   Richard O’Brien says in the programme that he was asked to write a musical for the Sydney Theatre Company back in 1980 and being familiar with the works of Carter Brown, a chance meeting with his daughter, turned his thoughts to using a Brown book as the source material. He originally intended, he says, to write another rock’n’roll musical but came to realise that Brown’s characters were more likely to listen to Ella Fitzgerald and Sinatra.

   After the performance, Helen (on my behalf, I’m a bit shy in that regard) asked if there were any spare posters for the production lying around and eventually a very kind lady produced one for me. At that point she said why don’t you get Richard O’Brien to sign it, he’s just coming down the corridor.

   So as I asked O’Brien to sign my poster, I confessed that I had been a Carter Brown reader since my adolescence. He told me that he had met Brown (Alan Yates) and had got to know his family quite well. Also that it was his copy of The Stripper (Signet, 1961) that had been used on for the pre-show image that was projected on to the book shaped screen.

   It wasn’t until I got home that further reading in the programme told me that he owned a lot of “pulp fiction” and he had collected it for years.

   A spot of Googling enabled me to find details of the original production in Sydney with one site listing all the original lyrics (though there had obviously been some revision since Polnik has a song in the original) and another on which the soundtrack LP could be listened to.

   I have to say that the whole production was excellent. The scene changes were smoothly and cleverly done, the cast were excellent, the songs were witty and the music enjoyable. The production, for which the best single word to describe it is perhaps ‘fun,’ was enthusiastically received by the audience and both I, as a Carter Brown veteran wanting a faithful interpretation of the book, and Helen, with no interest in the Brown or the comedy-pulp sub-genre, both thoroughly enjoyed the whole performance.

Editorial Comment: The webpage for the Queen’s Theatre production appears to have been archived, so perhaps the link will stay active for a while.

GASLIGHT. MGM, 1944. Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, Joseph Cotton, Dame May Whitty, Angela Lansbury, Terry Moore. Based on the play Angel Street by Patrick Hamilton. Director: George Cukor.

   It’s hardly necessary to go into much detail about the plot of this classic. Bergman is the daughter of a famous actress who was murdered and her jewels disappeared. Now she is married to the haughty and somewhat overly protective Charles Boyer, whose personality is as changeable as the weather — at one moment cloyingly concerned, at another insanely angry over the smallest of things — warm and affectionate at one turn, icy and cruel at another.

   Into the mix is added the wonderful Angela Lansbury in her film debut at only seventeen as a house servant of notable disrespect, and Joseph Cotton as a young man who works at Scotland Yard and suspects something is not right in the supposedly happy household.

   This is actually the second film of the play. It originated in London’s West End and then came to Broadway with Vincent Price in the Boyer role. In 1940 a British version of the play was made with Anton Walbrook, Diana Wynyard, Robert Newton, and Frank Pettingwell. In all fairness, this version is superior to the American version, and I don’t just say that because Diana Wynyard is a cousin. It is less static than the American version, with electrical performances and a fine sense of slowly dawning horror and madness.

   But the familiar version we are discussing here is a fine piece of film making with merits of its own. Bergman, Boyer, and Lansbury are at the top of their form (Bergman won an Oscar, though it may have been a consolation prize for the previous year’s Casablanca and For Whom The Bell Tolls), and Boyer seldom had a role as juicy as this (not even as Napoleon in Conquest with Greta Garbo). It’s hard to believe Lansbury’s assured and saucy performance is being given by a seventeen year old girl.

   Gaslight is a psychological drama that turns on Boyer gradually driving Bergman mad so he can have free access to the house they share where her murdered mother’s fortune in jewels is hidden. The fine irony is that Boyer himself is insane and with each twist of the noose going madder north by northwest than Hamlet on uppers himself, so the finale when he has broken Bergman and she turns on him as Cotton’s Scotland Yard man waits is beautifully staged melodrama.

   Cotton’s role in the film is much expanded from the play where Leo G. Carroll played the role as a much less romantic figure.

   Patrick Hamilton specialized in these overheated psychological dramas. Hangover Square is only a little less potent than Gaslight and an excellent film in itself directed by John Brahm and starring George Sanders and Laird Cregar, with Cregar’s concert pianist going mad by delightfully increasing murderous degrees. Hamilton also penned some all too seldom read novels that prefigure some aspects of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels though in a different vein.

   Gaslight is perhaps too familiar to have the impact it originally did on screen. The plot has become such a staple that the film has lost some of its glow, but it is still a fine piece of melodrama, and Bergman’s gradual descent into madness, and her worm turns scene when she realizes Boyer has been trying to kill her still has power.

   And while much of the attention has rightfully gone to Bergman and Lansbury, Boyer has a field day with his own descent into obsession and madness, though he lost out in the Oscar race to Bing Crosby’s singing priest in Going My Way.

   To give some idea of the impact of both play and film, there are few people even today who would fail to recognize the term ‘gaslighting’ as a metaphor for driving someone mad, even if they have never seen or heard of the film or play. It’s not often a film enters so firmly into the public consciousness.

[UPDATE] 05-11-10.   The 1944 version of Gaslight will be shown on TCM next Friday (May 14) at 10:30 am.

JAMES WARREN – The Disappearing Corpse. Ives Washburn, US, hardcover, 1958. Original published in the UK as The Runaway Corpse, hc, Collins Crime Club, 1957.

   James Warren is a late representative of the Golden Age puzzle plot story. His first mystery novel She Fell Among Actors (1944) was praised by Anthony Boucher.

   The Disappearing Corpse is a comic detective novel. The comedy is fairly gentle, poking fun at a bunch of eccentric characters in a tiny English town near Dartmoor.

   The book is consistently funny. The outrageously dated Victorian house is a good subject of satire. The bad weather is also a subject of much vivid comic and atmospheric writing.

   Most of the characters have actually moved into the district from London. While Warren makes them a target for humor, as well as the local roads and weather, he is careful not to ridicule the locals or Dartmoor culture. The book is lacking in malice, or anything that smacks of prejudice.

   The main murder problem in The Disappearing Corpse has an ingenious solution. So does the subplot about the antiques the hero is brought in to investigate. Both mystery puzzles have antecedents in Agatha Christie: not exact re-uses of plot ideas, one hastens to add, but plots in broadly similar kinds of traditions. (SPOILER: The antiques subplot recalls such Christie tales as the Mr. Quin “At the Bells and Motley” (1925) and the Miss Marple “Ingots of Gold” (1928). END OF SPOILER.)

   But there are also some plot problems:

   The disappearing corpse of the title is given the flimsiest of motives for its kidnapping. We are also asked to follow the wanderings of the corpse and its heisters in detail — but none of this ever amounts to a plot of much substance. They just seem like random, if funny, wanderings.

   Strange, hard to explain footprints show up early. But they are never mentioned again, let alone given any sort of explanation. When we first encounter the prints, it looks as if the book is going to be some kind of Impossible Crime novel. But it is not.

   The subplot of the bundle of clothes never makes too much sense.

   The description of a rural gasoline/petrol pump is unexpectedly interesting (Chapter Three). It is the kind of social or technological detail that sometimes turns up in mysteries.

   A year after its British publication, The Disappearing Corpse was brought out in the United States. There is a comment on the back of the book jacket from the Denver Post, describing its US publisher: “Ives Washburn has recently launched the Chanticleer series of mystery novels, at the rate of one a month. The covers are sturdy and attractively designed; the print is large and legible. The novels remind one of Christie or Queen. Intelligence, individuality of style and plotting.”

Editorial Comment:   Some information about the author, James Warren, and who the man was behind the pen name can be found here on the main Mystery*File website.

MICHAEL KORYTA – The Silent Hour. St. Martin’s Minotaur, hardcover, August 2009; reprint paperback, August 2010.

Genre:   Private eye. Series character:   Lincoln Perry, 5th in series. Setting:   Cleveland OH.

First Sentence:   He’d sharpened his knife just an hour before the killing.

   PI Lincoln Perry is on his own after his partner, Joe Pritchard, decided to spend the winter in Florida. Lincoln is receiving letters from a paroled killer wanting to hire him to find the missing daughter of mobsters. The woman and her husband disappeared a decade ago from a unique and valuable rural home where they ran an unlicensed half-way house for violent offenders.

   When the skeleton of the husband turns up, having a less-than-desirable client, and a case connected to the Mob, causes Perry to question his abilities and his commitment to being a PI.

   It is so frustrating to have an author whose previous books I’ve loved, write one I find disappointing. Perhaps because I liked the previous books so well, I didn’t notice them, but I did here: portents. I intensely dislike the use of portents, particularly where they broadcast the plot and thus, detract from the suspense or surprise of the story. They were unnecessary.

   The plot, itself, was interesting, but it bogged down in the middle. Lincoln’s introspection nearly overwhelmed the pace and appeal of the story, even though some of it was well done… “It stacked up on you, after a while. The violence.”

   I understand wanting to focus on a single protagonist in a series where the protagonists have been a team. In this case, having Lincoln without Joe reminded me of soda without carbonation: flat.

   I like Lincoln as a character. I appreciated learning more about is background, particularly his mother. At the same time, without Joe, an older, ex-cop who brought Lincoln into his PI agency, Lincoln’s inexperience showed in a frustrating way.

   The scenes where Joe is present are when the book came back to life. The biggest challenge was that beyond Joe, Lincoln and his girlfriend Amy, none of the rest of the characters was appealing or interesting. There was nothing in them to make me care whether the case was solved.

   If you’ve not read Koryta, I do recommend the first four books in the series and his standalone Envy the Night. Shall I continue reading Koryta? Probably, but I’ll hope the next book is much better.

Rating: Okay.

      The Lincoln Perry series —

1. Tonight I Said Goodbye (2004)

2. Sorrow’s Anthem (2006)
3. A Welcome Grave (2007)

4. The Silent Hour (2009)

Editorial Comment: Koryta’s next two books are scheduled to be stand-alones, as was Envy the Night, which LJ mentions. One wonders if, like Harlan Coben and Dennis Lehane before him, that’s the direction his career is taking him.

(1)   “New Murders for Old” (1939) by Carter Dickson. First appearance: The Illustrated London News, Christmas 1939. First collected in The Department of Queer Complaints (Morrow, 1940). Reprinted in EQMM, August 1966, as “New Murders for Old.” Found in: Alfred Hitchcock Presents 14 of My Favorites in Suspense, 1976.

COMMENTS:

    Tony Marvell, on the urging of friends and family, decides to go on an eight-month round-the-world cruise: Tony’s workaholic lifestyle has pushed him to the brink of a nervous breakdown, and his fiancee and brother insist on this rest cure.

    “It was the nightmare again. One of the worst features of his nervous breakdown had been the conviction, coming in flashes at night, that he was not real any longer; that his body and his inner self had moved apart, the first walking or talking in everyday life like an articulate dummy, while the brain remained in another place. It was as though he were dead, and seeing his body move. Dead.”

    Tony, however, will experience a real shock to the system when he does something few men ever have: read his own obituary in a newspaper. Someone, it seems, wants very badly to see him dead, and if necessary would willingly kill him twice.

    “One moment he was standing there with the automatic pistol in his hand, the noise of the engines beating in his ears and a horrible impulse joggling his elbow to put the muzzle of the pistol into his mouth and —”

NOTES:

   Dickson/Carr relies on a hoary gimmick to activate the plot, but he still keeps things moving, employing his trademark horror atmospherics but paying it all off with a perfectly rational denouement — although you should be prepared to believe at least two impossible things before breakfast about the character Rupert Hayes.

            ———

(2)   “The Silver Curtain” (1939) by Carter Dickson. First appearance: The Strand, August 1939. First collected in The Department of Queer Complaints (Morrow, 1940); reprinted in Merrivale, March and Murder (IPL, 1991), as by John Dickson Carr. Found in: Tricks and Treats, edited by Joe Gores & Bill Pronzini (Doubleday, 1976).

COMMENTS:

    Young Jerry Winton is having rotten luck at the baccara tables. Seeing his difficulties, Ferdie Davos offers Jerry a sizable sum. All he has to do is pick up some pills from a local doctor and collect ten thousand francs: a piece of cake.

    But on his way to the rendezvous Jerry witnesses a murder that couldn’t have happened — a man is stabbed to death when nobody else was anywhere near him — an impossible crime, certainly, and one for which the local gendarmes have a prime suspect: Jerry!

    “His tan topcoat was now dark with rain. His heels scraped on the pavement, for he had been stabbed through the back of the neck with a heavy knife whose polished-metal handle projected four inches. Then the wallet slipped out of his fingers, and splashed into a puddle, for the man died.”

    For the real killer, Jerry fits perfectly in the frame. For Colonel March of Scotland Yard, there really is no mystery, and elucidating this case is all in a day’s — or night’s — work.

NOTES:

    Be prepared to accept one or two highly unlikely aspects of the crime (the skill and timing of the murderer); if you buy those, the story should be enjoyable.

   Carr adapted this one for radio as “Death Has Four Faces,” but without Colonel March (Appointment with Fear, BBC, October 19, 1944). It was also filmed for the TV series Colonel March of Scotland Yard in 1956 with Boris Karloff as March and a very young Arthur Hill as Jerry. (A video of this episode may be found here.)

BERLIN EXPRESS. RKO Radio Pictures, 1948. Merle Oberon, Robert Ryan, Charles Korvin, Paul Lukas, Robert Coote, Reinhold Schunzel, Roman Toporow. Screenplay: Harold Medford, based on a story by Curt Siodmak. Director: Jacques Tourneur.

   The reason for watching this one, or mine at least, was the promise of a movie with a train ride, always an exciting prospect.

   This one I found disappointing, though, as the people making this film had other goals in mind. The fact that the first third, perhaps, takes place on a train (from Paris to post-war Frankfurt) and then again for about five minutes toward the end (bombed-out Frankfurt to an equally bombed-out Berlin) is almost incidental.

   Filmed on location, the actual aims of this film are, first of all, to show the devastation caused by Allied bombers during the war, as a cautionary measure, perhaps; then secondly but foremost to make a call for peace between the four nation occupiers of both the city of Berlin and the state of Germany. One can only rue the fact that such a wish was not to be, and not even a movie with the best of intentions could sway the day, politically speaking.

   But with World War II so long behind us, this film, when watched today, is a reminder that the occupation of Germany was not so easy as several pages in a history textbook might have you believe. (In my own experience with grade school and high school history classes, we never even made it to World War II, but perhaps students are better served today.) Survivors of the war and the earth-pounding air raids may not all have been Nazis, but neither were they occupied easily.

   Sorry. Didn’t mean to get all preachy on us, but rather than a top notch spy thriller, the essence of this film is rather a post-war cinematic plea for peace. Paul Lukas plays a man (German) heading for such a conference (in Berlin) with precisely such a plan, and he is nearly assassinated (on the train) for his efforts.

   In the middle of the movie, he is kidnapped (in Frankfurt) and must be rescued, successfully so, thanks to a four man effort headed by Robert Ryan’s character, who’s an American, with the assistance of an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Russian, the latter reluctantly but in the end quite capably. (There are some twists in the tale, but those I won’t tell.)

   But perhaps you see what I mean about the moral of the tale. Merle Oberon plays Lukas’s secretary assistant equally capably, but with no particular verve or elan.

   The photography, in black and white, is very ably done, and in fact even better than that, with lots of camera angles and striking set designs, but overall, while I stand the chance of being corrected, today this film is no more than a minor relic of the past.

   The train ride, while not essential to the plot, is nice while it lasts, though!

PostScript.   The movie’s been hard to find, or so I’ve been told, but it’s been recently released by the Warner Brothers Archive and is available through them, Amazon, and all of the usual outlets.

THE SILENCERS. Columbia, 1966. Dean Martin, Stella Stevens, Dahlia Lavi, Victor Buono, Arthur O’Connell, Robert Webber, James Gregory, Cyd Charisse, Roger C. Carmel, Nancy Kovack, Richard Devon, Beverly Adams. Screenplay by Oscar Saul, based on-the novels The Silencers and Death of a Citizen by Donald Hamilton; music by Elmer Bernstein. Director: Phil Karlson. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.

   I didn’t see any of the Dean Martin spy thrillers when they were released, but if this film is typical of the series, I didn’t miss much.

   There’s apparently a segment of the movie-going public that thinks that Dean Martin is a decent actor, but if he was, he wasn’t showing his chops in this gaudy, sexy, very dated entertainment. It’s a good cast, although most of the players are wasted.

   Even so, Victor Buono’s archvillain provides some intermittent pleasure, and Cyd Charisse, still looking smashing, dances for the last time in a feature. And then there’s Stella Stevens, the best reason for watching the film.

   She was this year’s third Cinecon guest, still looking good at 71, and in her screen role she’s incandescent, lighting up the proceedings with her beauty and comedic skill that go a long way toward making the often leaden, overlong proceedings (102 minutes), glide by with some grace.