REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

W. R. BURNETT – High Sierra. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1940. Paperback reprints include: Bantam #826, 1950; Carroll & Graf, December 1986; Zebra, November 1987.

Films: Film: First National, 1941 (with Ida Lupino, Humphrey Bogart; director: Raoul Walsh). Also: Warner Bros., 1949, as Colorado Territory (with Joel McCrea, Virginia Mayo; director: Raoul Walsh). Also: Warner Bros., 1955, as I Died a Thousand Times (with Jack Palance, Shelley Winters; director: Stuart Heisler).

    “Early in the twentieth century, when Roy Earle was a happy boy on an Indiana farm, he had no idea that at thirty-seven he’d be a pardoned ex-convict driving alone through the Nevada-California desert towards an ambiguous destiny in the Far West.”

    Thus begins what is, in effect, the biography of Roy Earle, a fictional creation who reflects the lives of several eminent American outlaws of the 1920s and 1930s.

    The structure and texture of the opening sentence signals the reader that this will be much more than simply a genre piece of tommy guns and molls. Burnett will attempt nothing less than a definitive appraisal of a bandit’s life as Earle leaves prison, falls in love, and works toward the robbery that will doom him.

    For many, Sierra is probably more familiar as the finest of Bogart’s films (with the arguable exception of The Treasure of Sierra Madre). In the film version, John Huston sought to create a romance, a complex variation on the Robin Hood myth, but Burnett creates a novelistic portrait of Roy Earle that is full of fire and contradiction.

    Chapter 37 is the key scene in the book. In the space of 3000 words, Roy Earle expounds on himself (?I steal and I admit it”); on his inability to trust (?The biggest rat we had in prison was a preacher who’d gypped his congregation out of the dough he was supposed to build a church with.”); and on the failure of the common man to fight for himself (?Why don’t all them people who haven’t got any dough get together and take the dough? It’s a cinch.”).

    He is, throughout the novel, idealistic, naIve, ruthless, and doomed in a way that is almost lyrical. Not unlike Studs Lonigan, Roy Earle becomes sympathetic because his faults, for all their outsize proportion, are human and understandable, and his humility almost Christ-like. “Barmy used to talk to me about earthquakes,” Roy says; “he said the old earth just twitched its skin like a dog. We’re the fleas, I guess.”

    Far from the myths created by J. Edgar Hoover’s biased attitude toward the criminals of the 1930s, Burnett gives us a sad, sometimes surreal look at a true outlaw. High Sierra is filled with every possible kind of feeling, from bleak humor to a pity that becomes Roy Earle’s doom.

    The book’s theme of time and fate is worthy of Proust. If you want to know what made the work of “proletariat” America so powerful in the 1930s, all you have to do is pick up this novel.
         ———

   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.

LAW AND ORDER. BBC, 4-part mini-series, 6 April through 27 April 1978. Peter Dean, Derek Martin, Deirdre Costello, Billy Cornelius, Alan Ford, Ken Campbell, Fred Haggerty. Screenplay: G. F. Newman. Director: Les Blair.

   Not the long-running Dick Wolf series or one of its spin-offs, this was a British four-part series from 1978. Back then I had no video recorder, and I had a sort of method for screening tv programmes of not watching new ones but waiting to read reviews and then catching them on the repeats.

   When this series aired there was such a furor of complaints that the series was, to the best of my knowledge, never repeated, leaving me to regret my selection methods.

   Now thirty-one years later we have had a repeat on BBC 4, the BBC’s least watched digital channel.

   The series was written by G.F. Newman, a man who has developed a reputation as an anti-establishment figure (and the man behind the more recent and upmarket Judge John Deed).

   In the first story, “A Detective’s Tale” we meet London D.L Fred Pyle, a sly, mix-with-the-criminals type of detective, who is seen taking a sizable bribe from a major villain to look the other way. Pyle hears from an informant that Jack Lynn, a career criminal, is about to stage an armed robbery and makes it his job to catch him.

   In the second episode, “A Villain’s Tale” the focus starts on Lynn as he sets up his armed robbery, however, soon, he suspects that the police are on to him and abandons the prospect. Meanwhile four other criminals stage an armed robbery and when three of them are caught, Pyle plants evidence that Lynn is the fourth man.

   In the third episode, “A Brief’s Tale”, we follow the legal system, firstly Lynn’s solicitor, whom we see given secrets to the police for return favours, and then the barrister he employs. The barrister is more concerned with how much money he will make but does actually put on a spirited defence until the judge, outraged by the barrister implying police corruption, forbids him from pursuing that line of defence.

   It is no surprise when the three guilty villains are found not guilty but Lynn, a career criminal but entirely innocent of this offence, is found guilty.

   In the final part, “A Prisoner’s Tale”, we see Lynn, a proud and angry man, as he tries to resist the prison system but is forced to compliance through bent and violent prison guards, incompetent and uncaring officials, and the system. This is by far the bleakest of the four programmes — and that’s saying something — and it leaves one with a feeling of helplessness.

   Of course it’s probable that the system is not as bad as Newman is making out, but it seems likely that some corruption of the kinds he indicates is inevitable. This is a powerful if depressing series, and I’m pleased that finally I have been given a second chance to see it.

DETOUR. PRC, 1945. Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake, Edmund MacDonald, Tim Ryan. Story & screenplay: Martin Goldsmith. Director: Edgar G. Ulmer.

   I hadn’t seen the movie Detour for quite some time, so I pulled it out the other night and gave it a look. And I’m glad I did. It’s even better than I remembered it.

   For those who are unfamiliar with this 1945 classic film noir (and I hope there aren’t too many), it’s all told in flashback by an unshaven, despondent Tom Neal, who laments everything that has happened to him in recent weeks.

   All he wanted was to hitchhike from New York to Los Angeles to be with his cutesy-poo girlfriend who was trying to “make it in pictures,” but wound up slinging hash instead. That’s all he wanted.

   But what he got was Ann Savage. I’ll just leave it at that.

   Detour was directed by Edgar G Ulmer, and was made at PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation) Studio, the last stop on poverty row in 1940s Hollywood. Filmed in six days on a budget of $30,000, and using the cheapest sets and production values imaginable, Ulmer crafted a haunting tale of people at the bottom of society’s pyramid. To put this budget into perspective, Avatar, the new James Cameron bloatbuster, cost 10,000 times as much.

   Drowning in desperation, the characters try to hold on to what they have, and never seem to have enough.

   When these people are confronted with extraordinary circumstances and emotions, they, like all of us, will alter their mode of behavior. Some will even cross the line, the line that separates legal from criminal, moral from immoral, good from evil, Tom Neal from Ann Savage.

   Film noir is generally associated with sinister characters moving through shadowy lighting. Much of Detour takes place under bright light: sunny rides in an open convertible, a well-lit apartment, and so on, but Ulmer’s direction and the interplay between the two leads give the film a very claustrophobic feel, like it was shot in a phone booth. The relentlessly grim story line follows Neal’s character as his life spirals ever downward to the unusual finale.

   While Detour might be considered classic crime fiction, it’s important to note that no crime was ever committed during the movie.

   There’s a scene where Neal takes money and clothes from a dead man, but you know that if he didn’t take the dough, the cops would when they found him. I don’t put that in the crime category.

   This is definitely a movie that’s worth another look, noir fans. A great story, with both Neal and Savage delivering unforgettable performances in what has to be the finest hour for each of them.

   And if you haven’t seen it, by all means buy it. You can get it online for six or seven dollars. You won’t be sorry.

   And you�ll never pick up another hitchhiker again.

BIRDS OF PREY. ABC, made for TV movie; first telecast: 30 January 1973. David Janssen, Ralph Meeker, Elayne Heilveil, Harry Klekas, Sam Dawson, James W. Gavin, Paul Grace, Wayne D. Wilkinson, Larry Peacey. Aerial supervisor: James W. Gavin; director: William A. Graham.

   The first and only time I saw Birds of Prey was thirty-seven years ago, and it blew me away. As action films go, I still think it’s superior to many; and the fact that it was made for television on a minimal budget makes it even more remarkable.

   David Janssen plays an ex-World War Two Flying Tigers fighter pilot whose aviation career is winding down; he’s now relegated to being a traffic reporter flying over Salt Lake City, and he’s quietly going nuts from boredom.

   One day he happens to observe a bank robbery in progress, which he duly reports to his good pal from the war (Ralph Meeker), who is now a police captain with the Salt Lake City PD. But Meeker doesn’t believe him at first, thinking it’s another one of Janssen’s middle-aged pranks.

   That’s all it takes: Janssen sees it as a challenge — and the chase is on. From this point forward, the film is indeed one giant chase sequence. The bad guys transfer themselves, their loot, and a hostage to a helicopter only to be relentlessly harried by Janssen every step of the way. The pacing is terrific.

   In addition to two good performances from Janssen (settling into his world-weary “Harry O” character) and Meeker, the helicopters are also the stars. This was long before CGI (computer-generated visual effects); when the choppers swoop under freeway overpasses with a foot or less separating the rotor blades from the concrete abutments, it’s the real thing.

   Another amazing sequence happens INSIDE an aircraft hanger, when Janssen corners the bad guys’ copter; this needs to be seen to be believed. The margin for error, with both copters swaying uncertainly in a Mexican standoff, has to be two or three inches at most.

   Kudos to the late James W. Gavin for these sequences. Whenever Hollywood needed a master pilot who could also deliver lines in an acceptable fashion, Gavin was their go-to guy. He did lots of screen work in films and TV series such as Adam 12.

   If you really get into the characters in this film — as I did — then the final line will be especially poignant: “Damn you, Walker! I didn’t ask you to do that!”

   Tech note: If I remember it correctly, Janssen’s chopper was a Hughes 500D, while the criminals had an Aerospatiale Alouette — but it has been almost four decades.

   Further note: Birds of Prey is available on video, but many customers complain that the Second World War-era Big Band music featured in the film’s network broadcast — music that is integral and meaningful to the two lead characters — has been replaced with something different, so be aware that you’re not getting the original film.

TRANSATLANTIC. Fox, 1931. Edmund Lowe, Greta Nissen, John Halliday, Myrna Loy, Jean Hersholt, Lois Moran, Billy Bevan. Story: Guy Bolton; photography: James Wong Howe. Director: William K. Howard. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   Another rough print (the program notes warned of this) and hardly of the interest of The Letter (reviewed here ) this “Grand Hotel on an ocean liner” (as the notes more or less put it) was an entertaining trifle, owing to a good cast, some fine photography by James Wong Howe, and a serviceable, melodramatic story.

   Edmund Lowe is a gent of dubious moral values who’s skipping out of the country but who ironically finds himself becoming the moral center of a series of little dramas, shot through with crime and attempted murder.

   The most striking part of the film is a climactic chase up and down and around the massive structures of the ship’s boiler room. A really nice print of this might show off the film to better advantage but I’m not convinced that it has (as the program notes claim) “all the ingredients for one of the greats!”

   N. B.:   Charlie Shibuk commented to me that he saw the screening of a beautiful 35mm print some 15 years ago at the Museum of Modern Art, and he still agrees with my summation.

JUNE THOMSON – Not One of Us. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1971. UK edition: Constable, hc, 1972.

   This is an early Thomson, one which displays well her ability to write a quiet, underplayed story of murder, while at the same time delving into the character of those in major roles. John Smith is a “man of mystery,” a retiring, educated Englishman who lives alone in a cottage on the edge of a village.

   The villagers are suspicious of anyone who is reclusive, and Smith will not play the good fellow with them. He is happy to live alone with his dog. Then the body of a fifteen year old girl from a neighboring village is found in a wood I not far from Smith’s cottage. She has been strangled, and the autopsy shows that she is six months pregnant.

   Inspector Finch suspects Smith, and yet feels that he and Smith have something in common. Gradually Smith’s background is revealed, as the villagers grow more and more hostile. There is subtlety in Thomson’s handling of character.

   Finch is changed by his encounter with Smith; so is Smith. We may hope that the people of the village also are changed, but we’re given no reason to believe so.

Editorial Comment:   Inspector Finch was renamed Inspector Rudd for most of June Thomson’s books when they appeared in the US — there being another Inspector Finch who appeared in Margaret Erskine‘s books. This being the first in the series, it’s interesting to see that Finch remained Finch in this one.

   There are now twenty books in the Finch/Rudd series, the most recent being Going Home (2006). As the author is now 79, it is possible that this will also be the last.

   Over the past several years, June Thomson has also been writing collections of Sherlock Holmes pastiches, the first of these being The Secret Files of Sherlock Holmes (1990). There are now six books of these, the first few of which I own but (alas) have yet to read.

   Whenever a discussion of current and latter-day authors who write in the Golden Age tradition breaks out, for some reason June Thomson’s name seldom comes up, and I think it should.

JANE HADDAM – Quoth the Raven.

Bantam, paperback original; 1st printing, September 1991.

   This is the fourth “holiday” adventure of retired FBI agent Gregor Damarkian, the holiday this time around being Halloween. Location: a small school called Independence College, somewhere in southeastern Pennsylvania.

   As someone wiser and far more knowledgeable once told me, the reason academic politics are conducted so fiercely is that the stakes are so low. The victim is obvious from the word go: an obnoxious new professor with ambitions of becoming a new Program Head.

   But small surprises are in store. First of all, he’s not the first victim. Before that happens, a woman in the college cafeteria line is poisoned to death — with lye. Since the only item on her tray is a cup of tea, this is a puzzler. As Gregor knows fully well, lye fizzes on contact with any form of water. It couldn’t be an accident, but who’d want to harm a mere secretary?

   Haddam is a perceptive writer who makes many wickedly sharp observations along the way, and yet the incident above occurs on page 94 and for the next 150 pages, very little seems to happen.

   What it all amounts to, in the end, is that this small bizarre mystery is far too intense to be entertaining, and the one small element of the impossible is just too fragile a base to support the grand total of 276 pages of high angst that otherwise prevails.

   Not recommended, unless you’re in an offbeat sort of mood anyway.

Editorial Comment:   Reviewed here by me earlier on this blog was Cheating at Solitaire (2008), also a case for Gregor Demarkian.

DAVID GOODIS – The Blonde on the Street Corner. Lion #186, paperback original; 1st printing, 1954. UK edition: Serpent’s Tail, softcover, 1998.

    “Ralph stood on the corner, leaning against the brick wall of Silver’s candy store, telling himself to go home and get some sleep.”

    That’s the opening line of The Blonde On The Street Corner, a 1954 novel written by David Goodis. Of course, Ralph doesn’t go home. Instead, he spots a blonde across the dark street and gawks at her. She eventually calls him over to light her cigarette, which he does.

    Now, at this point, one might expect that Ralph would be lured into a tight web spun by this dazzling femme fatale, resulting in his eventual moral destruction, if not death. But Goodis doesn’t write that way. In fact, the blonde is fat, sharp-tongued, and lives in the neighborhood. Ralph knows her, and knows that she’s married. She propositions him right on the corner, but he rejects her. “I don’t mess around with married women,” he tells her. Then he goes home.

    Much to the reader’s surprise, this encounter does not trigger the plot of the novel. In fact, it would be right to say that the novel has no plot, in the usual sense. Ralph returns to his impoverished Philadelphia home and spends the rest of the book wallowing in misery with his friends, all of whom are in the same boat as he: in their thirties, usually unemployed, and filled with unrealistic dreams.

    One of his friends says he is a “songwriter,” but no one has ever recorded any of his songs. Another wants to be a big-league baseball player, but lasted only a week on a class D minor league team.

    They spend most of their time leaning up against buildings, wearing only thin coats against the bitter Philadelphia winter, and wishing they had more money. They talk a good deal about going to Florida, where they can get jobs as bellmen in a “big-time hotel,” convinced this would jump-start their desperate lives.

    The book goes on like this pretty much all the way through, with no moving story line, but it’s Goodis’s prose that keeps you riveted to the page. No one can paint a picture of a hopeless world better than he can.

    For Goodis, Philadelphia is a desolate place, whose bleak streets offer little in the way of promise. Many of his novels were set there, and they all shared that common trait. Life in that city is, for him and his characters, usually an exercise in futility.

    These are people who walk around with twenty or thirty cents in their pockets, who cold-call girls out of the phone book asking for dates, and for whom escape to Florida is always right around the corner. The finale provides the mortal body blow to Ralph, stripping him of the last shred of his dignity.

    The Blonde On The Street Corner is a potent novel, filled with the passions and despair of its characters. All through this book, you find yourself longing to run into characters whose lives mean something. Then, you realize there aren’t any.

Hi Steve,

1. The Wolfe Pack is screening one of the infamous widescreen Missing Minutes episodes of the A&E Nero Wolfe television series this Friday, Dec. 4th, in NYC: “Prisoner’s Base.” There’s a downloadable brochure online on the Wolfe Pack’s Home Page, which describes the event, and also in the Missing Minutes section of the website:

www.nerowolfe.org

http://www.nerowolfe.org/htm/AE/missing_minutes/missing_minutes.htm

2. The Jim Hutton-David Wayne Ellery Queen series is reportedly getting a legitimate release next year:

http://tvshowsondvd.com/n/13043

Cheers,

Tina Silber

GEORGES SIMENON – Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett.

First published as The Strange Case of Peter the Lett: Hurst, UK. hardcover, 1933. First US edition: Covici Friede, hardcover, 1933. Translation of “Pietr-le-Letton” (Fayard: Paris, 1931). Also published as: Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett, Penguin, pb, 1963.

   And so we meet Jules Maigret in his too small office in the Quai des Orfevres, a large and deliberate man who always seems a little outside of his environment, a little uncomfortable in it.

   The first of Maigret’s cases finds the good Commissar at the top of his game. Pietr the Lett is an international criminal that Interpol identifies as headed for Paris. Maigret heads for the train station at the Gare du Nord to intercept Pietr only to find a man fitting his description dead in the train toilet.

   Inside the dead man’s pocket Maigret finds a photograph and a lock of red hair. Maigret and his man Torrence lunch at the Brasserie Dauphine behind the Place de Justice for the first time and discuss the case. It will become a familiar scene. Is Pietr dead, or two men — or more? Soon a virtual army of Pietr’s aliases present themselves.

   With the help of the police lab at Quai de Orfevres, Maigret is lead to a couple, the Mortimer-Levinson’s, staying at the Hotel Majestic, millionaires and friends of one Oswald Oppington, and he follows the trail of one Olaf Swann, a Norwegian merchant marine officer to Mme Bertha Swann living in Fecamp.

   Maigret has his man Torrence posted at the hotel and he travels to Fecamp where he follows a Russian, Fedor Yurovich, a Russian drunk, back from Mme Swann’s to the Jewish Quarter of Paris where he is living with a dancer, Anna Gorskin, physical age 25, but with a much older and more tarnished soul:

   For the first time we see Maigret in his familiar form, cold, wet, and tired, even his famous pipe wet watching the goings and comings of the criminal classes. He is watching and waiting. He is biding his time, and soon he will act. But only when the time is right.

   Later Maigret is wounded while following the Mortimer-Levinson’s from a night club. He rushes to the Hotel Majestic to find Torrence murdered, both attacks the work of the dancer Anna Gorskin.

   Now Maigret tightens his web in the pursuit of the Lett, who has re-emerged, and finally tracks down the killer, revealing the mystery of the enigmatic criminal known as Pietr the Lett. Maigret, taking a note from the classical detective novel, allows the defendant an easy out.

   And then he goes home to Mme Maigret. Until the next case.

   From the beginning Maigret is something different. The writing is controlled and succinct. There is little extra verbiage, and Maigret himself is not given to colorful action or dress. He is a drab policeman enshrouded in a fog of pipe smoke, sipping Calvados, a beer, or a glass of Pernod at some small brassierie, steady, patient, and as inevitable as the dawn as he moves forward toward the truth through the lies, self delusion, and human frailties of the men and women he must investigate and pursue.

   This is the famous method of Maigret, the gradual cajoling, bullying, empathizing with the suspect as he uncovers the truth one layer at a time.

   This is Maigret as Hemingway first encountered him, writing as Sim or sometimes Simenon, a Belgian journalist whose stories flowed from his pen in seeming endless progression growing darker, deeper, and more psychologically complex as time passes.

   The Maigret novels invite us into a world that is at once familiar and foreign. Like Holmes’s London or Chandler’s L.A., Maigret’s Paris is a living place, a character itself, and realized so deftly that though in the background it is ever present in our unconscious mind.

   But few debuts in crime fiction are as assured and complete as this one, and the remarkable thing is that it is the same voice and the same character we will know so much more about some eighty books later. Maigret, unlike many great fictional characters, comes to life fully formed sprung from the forehead of Simenon complete and instantly recognizable.

   Few great detectives emerge so fully imagined on their first outing. For most there are stumbles, missteps, false starts. But Maigret, pipe puffing away, is here, as always, one with his world and ours, patiently nursing a glass of Calvados, his pipe smoke curling about him, his overcoat a bit too heavy for the weather, his great mind waiting to leap upon the truth, his great soul ready to embrace the frailties of the human beings he must deal with on a daily basis. This, too, is the method of Maigret.

   Note:   While I don’t think this book was adapted as one of the Maigret films. it was adapted as as an episode of at least three of the many international television series based on the character, including the best known British series with Rupert Davies (see above).