MARTIN M. GOLDSMITH – Detour: An Extraordinary Tale.

O’Bryan House, Publishers; trade paperback, 2005. Hardcover edition: Macauley Co., 1939.

   The people behind O’Bryan House, and that includes Richard Doody who wrote the introduction, have done the fans of noir fiction a tremendous favor in reprinting this book. If you are thinking, “What book?” and I imagine many of you are, you are in exactly the same position I was when I first heard about it.

   Now of course there is the Movie Version, which perhaps you have heard of. If there ever were a poll of noir film fans, the film that is based on this book would have to rank in the top two or three of all time. Forgive me, though, if I don’t review the movie, although I will have to admit that scenes from it were continually in my head when I was reading the book. I’ll review the book, though, if you so allow, and whatever movie you’re thinking of, I never heard of it.

   Let me get back to the “favor” that I mentioned in the first paragraph. There are [at the time of this writing] two copies of the First Edition on ABE, neither of which has a dust jacket. The asking price for the first is $2500, and no, I did not lose the decimal point, so you can get up off your hands and knees and stop looking for it. The second copy is a mere $3500, but that one is signed by Mr. Goldsmith, who died in 1994, with a long inscription, so it is probably worth the money.

   There may be other ways to obtain the paperback edition, but one good way may be to order it from Amazon, and at an even more reasonable $14.95. There should be other outlets where it’s available, and it’s a bargain price, no matter the venue.

   To get started on the review, though, I hope that you don’t mind if I simply start off by quoting to you the first four paragraphs or so.

   Once again, if you are a fan of noir fiction, and if you were to tell me that you could put the book down after reading this, most of the first page, frankly, I wouldn’t believe you.

   One way or another, you’d be lying to me. Either you’re no fan of noir fiction, or you’re picking the book back up again when I’m not looking.

   Telling this first part of the story is a down-on-his-luck jazz musician named Alex Roth. He is heading for California, and Hollywood in particular, since that is where his former live-in girl friend, Sue Harvey, has headed before him, only a week or ten days before they were to have gotten married. (She is the impulsive type, Alex tells the reader.)

   Picking him up in the grey roadster is Charles Haskell, who has a wad of money in his billfold and who is not long for this world. His untimely death is an accident, but Alex knows that no one will believe him, given that small incident (thirty days) in Dallas, and given that he and Haskell do look alike… Well, you get the picture.

   Backing up just a little, from page 32:

   In the meantime, Sue herself is not doing so well. From pages 47-48, she expresses to the reader her distinctly discouraged view of Hollywood, where she is getting by (barely) as a waitress, and not as the star she had thought she was destined to be.

   Or if so, not yet:

   Goldsmith is less convincing as the voice of Sue Harvey than he is speaking as Alex Roth, but his portrayal of her is solidly etched in weariness and desire, and if one of the two of his two leading characters were to be considered hard-boiled, you have to know that it is not Alex.

   And returning to that half of the story, the reader’s brain will yell out in warning (but to no avail) when Alex, in turn, picks up a hitch-hiker, female, a woman named Vera, and man, does the story explode from there, eventually taking a leap with one staggering coincidence that exceeds even the often crazy incoherence of a Cornell Woolrich short story or novel, but in this kind of story, the stops are usually pulled all of the way out, and if they weren’t, you’d complain.

   Backing up one more time, from page 84, after Vera has agreed to the lift, saying as she gets in, “Los Angeles is good enough for me, mister.”

   These are the players. What you have just read includes considerably more quoting than I usually do, but there is little here, I guarantee you, that you will not glean from reading the few sentences of descriptive material on the back cover. There is plenty of story left, and on very nearly every one of the 158 pages in this book, there is another passage as quotable as any one of these.

   To my mind, this is the great undiscovered American novel, told from the underside, and somehow in its understated raciness, marvelously reminiscent of those rather notorious pre-Code days at the movies. Which brings us back around to one of my opening comments. They did make a movie out of this book, did you know?

   Although Martin M. Goldsmith was a successful novelist, screenwriter and playwright, the details of his private life are not well known. By all accounts Goldsmith preferred it that way. When his publisher asked him what they should tell their readers about his life, the author replied that it was enough to say that he was there yesterday, here today and “… God knows where I’ll be tomorrow.”

   What is known is that Martin Goldsmith was born in New York City in 1913. Over the course of his life he rarely lived in one place for long and in 1928, while still in his mid-teens, he left New York “via the thumb route” to see the rest of America. His writing career began a few years later with the publication of several short stories. By the late 1930’s Goldsmith was in Mexico, where he wrote his first book, Double Jeopardy, a crime novel published by the Macaulay Company of New York.

   In 1938, the author moved to Hollywood, hoping to write for films. To break into the film industry he took a job as a stage hand and used the opportunity to see how films were made. During his first year in Hollywood, Goldsmith completed work on the manuscript that would become Detour. Unlike the film version of Detour, the novel features two characters who live on the fringes of the Hollywood dream – Sue Harvey, a would-be actress working as a waitress at a local drive-in and Raoul Kildare, a bit-player who plans to leave Hollywood to try his luck on Broadway.

   In its final form the book has a tough and hard-boiled writing style, one often identified with the likes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. When Detour was published by Macaulay in January of 1939, the New York Times called it “… a red hot, fast-stepping little number…” and favorably compared it to the works of James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity.

   In 1944 Goldsmith sold the film rights to Detour to the Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), with the understanding that he would be hired to write the screenplay. The author finished writing the screenplay before the hiring of director Edgar G. Ulmer, the person most often credited with the film’s success. Operating under a tight budget and with little known actors, Ulmer shot the fIlm in less than a week, relying heavily on Goldsmith’s detailed script. Released in 1945, the film version of Detour is recognized as a masterpiece of film noir. In 1992 the film was selected by the Library of Congress for entry into the National Film Registry.

   In all, Goldsmith received screen credit for work on twelve films including Dangerous Intruder, Blind Spot, Shakedown, and Hell’s Island. He wrote two other novels, Shadows at Noon, a fictional account of an enemy attack on Manhattan, published in 1943, and a comic novel, The Miraculous Fish of Domingo Gonzalez, published in 1950.

   In 1952 he received an Academy Award nomination for contributing the story for the crime film, The Narrow Margin. During these years he also wrote for television, turning out episodes of The Twilight Zone, Gunsmoke and Playhouse 90.

   Despite his success as a screenwriter, Goldsmith eventually tired of writing for films and television and in the mid 1960’s he gave it up to spend more time traveling with his wife and writing books. His last works included an unpublished autobiography and a play entitled Night Shift, which ran for 24 performances at the Labor Theater in New York in the fall of 1977. After a long period of declining health, Martin M. Goldsmith died on May 24, 1994.

NOTE: This short biography of Mr. Goldsmith is also the foreword to the current reissue of Detour by O’Bryan House, Publishers LLC, the first American paperback edition of this classic crime novel. It is reprinted here with the permission of Mr. Doody.

NINE GIRLS. Columbia, 1944. Ann Harding, Evelyn Keyes, Jinx Falkenburg, Anita Louise, Leslie Brooks, Lynn Merrick, Jeff Donnell, Nina Foch, Shirley Mills, Marcia Mae Jones, Willard Robertson, William Demarest. Based on the play by Wilfred H. Pettitt. Director: Leigh Jason.

   Supposing that you knew that tomboyish Jeff Donnell was sometimes billed as “Miss Jeff Donnell,” or that she played George Gobel’s wife ‘spooky old’ Alice on The George Gobel Show in the mid-1950s, I wouldn’t blame you if you counted up the number of female stars in this movie and found that there were ten. (Alice, by the way, was neither spooky nor old.)

   There is an easy explanation, of course. The nine girls of the title are sorority sisters (including two soon to be pledged), while Ann Harding plays Miss Thornton, their favorite teacher and sorority mother. Anita Louise (playing Paula) has the shortest role in the movie. She’s one of those ultra-cultured creatures who manages to make herself intensely disliked if not hated by each of the other eight girls, and hardly above a little non-sisterly blackmail to get her way.

   Willard Robertson is the State Police officer who investigates Paula’s murder (if you ever see the movie, you will know how infinitely inevitable that event is), while William Demarest plays his dim-witted (and leering) assistant. There is quite a bit to leer at in the movie, too, as all of the girls have quite a variety of clothes to wear, including swim suits. I can’t tell you that this movie, made on a small B-movie budget, was a smash hit at the box office, but with nine girls in it, if it was, I can tell you who the attractions were.

   What I can’t tell you is which girl played what part. Some, those who had larger roles, I can, if you’re interested, but Evelyn Keyes (of Johnny O’Clock fame, among others) had a large portion of the dialogue, and so did tall statuesque Jinx Falkenburg, who probably had the shortest movie career of any of them.

   Lynn Merrick, whom I didn’t know before now, does a smash-up imitation of Katharine Hepburn, but only when there’s a man in the vicinity.

   Nina Foch (also later in Johnny O’Clock) did not have a high billing this early in her career, but she was perhaps the most noticeable of the eight girls, all suspects, cooped up together in a vacation lodge while the police do their thing. (She’s the mousy girl with glasses who was forced by the dead girl to write papers for her.)

   Personally, from the mystery end of things, I think the killer’s identity was revealed 10 or 15 minutes too early, but on the other hand, detection in an isolated manor house is or was not the primary reason this movie was made. View it as a light-hearted high spirited comedy instead, with lots of spooky moments during the night and silly antics and corny jokes all of the rest of time.

   If you enjoy silly antics and corny jokes, you’ll like this movie as much as I did.

AARON MARC STEIN – The Case of the Absent-Minded Professor. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1943. Digest-sized paperback reprint: Mystery Novel Classic #82, no date stated (mid-1940s).

   In this, apparently their fourth, investigation, Tim Mulligan and Elsie Mae Hunt, archaeologists, are at an “appendage to a football stadium that called itself a university” to check the authenticity of pre-Columbian gold ornaments recently donated to Ihe school. The only real scholar at the university is the absent-minded Alf Chambers, professor of anthropology.

   Although alcohol presumably makes him deathly ill, he seemingly becomes drunk one evening, during which time he believes he committed a murder. If he didn’t, somebody else definitely did. Mulligan and Hunt clear things up in a rather blah novel.

Editorial Comment:   Bill was correct in his assertion that this was the fourth of the Tim Mulligan / Elsa Mae Hunt mysteries. There were 18 in all, the first being The Sun Is a Witness (1940) and the last Moonmilk and Murder (1955). After this long run, Stein switched to engineer-for-hire Matt Erridge as a series character, the latter appearing in 23 novels, beginning in 1958.

   Note: This quickie summary does not include the long list of books Stein wrote as George Bagby, most of them featuring Inspector Schmidt of New York City Homicide, he of the long-aching feet; and another 18 “Gibby and Mac” books he wrote as Hampton Stone. See one of Mike Nevins’ earlier columns on this blog for more details.

    I received the following email notice from Barry Traylor yesterday. He’s one of the co-chairs for PulpFest 2010 …

    “Our guest of honor at PulpFest 2010 will be William F. Nolan, best known as the co-creator of Logan’s Run. The author of more than 80 books and 750 magazine and newspaper pieces, Mr. Nolan is best known in pulp circles for The Black Mask Boys, an anthology drawn from and history about Black Mask magazine, celebrating its 90th anniversary in 2010.

    “Additionally, he edited and compiled Max Brand: Western Giant, a bio-bibliography of one of the most prolific authors to emerge from the pulp industry, and one of the best biographies of Dashiell Hammett, a founder of the hardboiled detective story. Mr. Nolan was recently named one of the 2010 recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award, presented annually by the Horror Writers Association.”

    PulpFest 2010 will be held at last year’s venue, the Ramada Plaza Hotel and Convention Center in Columbus, Ohio. The show will begin on Friday, July 30th, and run through Sunday, August 1st. Clicking the link in Barry’s first paragraph will take you directly to the PulpFest 2010 website, where additional information may be found, including a FAQ page and a registration form.

JANE EYRE. 20th Century-Fox, 1944. Orson Welles, Joan Fontaine, Margaret O’Brien, Peggy Ann Garner, John Sutton, Sara Allgood, Henry Daniell, Agnes Moorehead, Aubrey Mather, Edith Barrett, Mrs. Fairfax, Barbara Everes, Hillary Brooke. Screenplay: John Houseman, Aldous Huxley, Robert Stevenson & Henry Koster (the latter uncredited), based on the novel by Charlotte Brontë. Director: Robert Stevenson.

   Last night as I sat up until 2:00 a.m. engrossed in a showing of the 20th Century Fox version of Jane Eyre, I alternately cursed the frequent interruptions for the promotion of albums like Motels & Memories and local entrepreneurs like Mother’s Pizza (“Just like you remember it, only it really wasn’t ever this good!”) and revelled in the superb Dickensian detail of the sequences at Linwood School dominated by Henry Daniell’s marvelous portrayal of the sadistic religious fanati,c, Broadhurst.

   I was moved by the moody, romantic sweep of the episodes at Rochester’s estate, with the brilliant portrayal of mad Mrs. Rochester’s husband by Orson Welles, supported by one of composer Bernard Herrmann’s finest scores.

   The film is one of those meticulous re-creations of a literary classic that David Selznick, in particular, was gifted in bringing to life on the screen, but it has, at moments, something which such films often do not have: imaginative camera work which makes portions of the film seem as fresh as they did thirty-five years ago and confirms for me the rumors that Welles, coming to this project after Citizen Kane and the abortive Magnificent Ambersons, co-directed certain scenes.

   I thought I detected Wellesian touches in Jane’s introduction to Rochester at the manor; in the handling of the brief scene with Agnes Moorehead at the beginning as the camera in a sardonic low-angle shot accented the self-satisfied cruelty of Jane’s aunt and cousin; and in the exterior shots of the great house that squats malevolently at the film’s center, with its battlements and moody lighting that inevitably remind the viewer of Kane’s estate.

   You will get some idea of the quality of the team that was assembled for this film when I tell you that two of the script-writers were Aldous Huxley and John Houseman and that, in addition to Welles, Daniell, Moorehead, and Joan Fontaine (as Jane), there are splendid performances by a group of actors that can only serve to remind us of the talent that was still available to the major studios in the early forties: Elizabeth Taylor, Peggy Ann Garner, Margaret O’Brien, Sara Allgood, John Sutton (in an uncommonly fine portrayal of Broadhurst’s sympathetic alter ego, Dr. Rivers), and other players whose names are less familiar but whose faces are indelibly imprinted on our memories of films of the period.

   I was struck by the beauty of a line delivered by Welles as he described Jane’s first sight of Mrs. Rochester, “Look at Jane, all grave and silent at the mouth of Hell,” and bothered by the jarring modernity of another line describing Mrs. Rochester after her fatal leap as she “lay smashed on the pavement.”

   I was riveted by a shot of Moorehead looking like a grinning Medusa and by the long shot of the wedding ceremony with the ominous entrance of an unseen “Guest” glimpsed only at first as a shadow slipping by against a shaft of light suddenly striking a sacristy wall.

   And I was intrigued by the obvious attempt to introduce fairy-tale elements into the narrative, with the climax clearly using devices from “Beauty and the Beast” that could not have been accidental.

   In short, I was overwhelmed by the intelligence, craftsmanship, and beauty of this film and reminded that film history is filled with superb movies that are often only entries in an edition of Movies That May Be Seen as Interruptions of Late-Night TV Commercials.

Excerpted from an online obituary at Zenit.org:

       Ralph McInerny Dies at Age 80

SOUTH BEND, Indiana, JAN. 29, 2010 – Prominent Catholic author, professor and cultural commentator Ralph McInerny died today at the age of 80.

Ralph McInerny was a professor of philosophy and the Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Notre Dame

He was an acknowledged expert on the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, and a prolific author. He penned over two dozen scholarly books, many more scholarly essays, and over 80 novels.

He wrote the popular book series Father Dowling Mysteries, which became a successful television program starring Tom Bosley and Tracy Nelson.

          …

   Here’s a list of his Father Dowling books. There isn’t much doubt that in our world of mystery fiction, these are the ones he’ll be remembered for the longest:

     The Father Dowling series —

1. Her Death of Cold (1977)

2. Bishop as Pawn (1978)

3. The Seventh Station (1977)
4. Lying Three (1979)
5. The Second Vespers (1980)
6. Thicker Than Water (1981)
7. A Loss of Patients (1982)
8. The Grass Widow (1983)
9. Getting a Way with Murder (1984)

10. Rest in Pieces (1985)
11. The Basket Case (1987)
12. Abracadaver(1989)
13. Four on the Floor (1989)
14. Judas Priest (1991)
15. Desert Sinner (1992)
16. Seed of Doubt (1993)

17. A Cardinal Offense (1994)
18. The Tears of Things (1996)
19. Grave Undertakings (2000)
20. Triple Pursuit (2001)
21. Prodigal Father (2002)
22. Last Things (2003)
23. Requiem for a Realtor (2004)
24. Blood Ties (2005)

25. The Prudence of Flesh (2006)
26. The Widow’s Mate (2007)
27. Ash Wednesday (2008)
28. The Wisdom of Father Dowling (2009)
29. Stained Glass (2009)

   As Monica Quill, he wrote 10 books in a series of equally light mysteries solved by Sister Mary Teresa, and under his own name: six books about lawyer Andrew Broom, 13 mysteries with the University of Notre Dame as the background if not an active participant itself, two books with Egidio Manfredi as the leading player, and most recently (2009) two books in his Rosary Chronicle series. Not to mention another long list of standalone novels and story collections, and three anthologies edited, including Murder Most Catholic (2002) with Martin H Greenberg.

   The television series Father Dowling Mysteries of the TV series (and add Mary Wicke to Tom Bosley and Tracy Nelson as one of the continuing stars) was first aired as an NBC made-for-TV movie in 1987 and its weekly run did not begin until 1989. After one season the show moved from NBC to ABC, where it lasted another two season.

   Tom Bosley played Father Dowling, while Tracy Nelson played his assistant in solving crimes, Sister Stephanie ‘Steve’ Oskowski. Also appearing in all 44 episodes was Mary Wicke as Father Dowling’s always fussing housekeeper, Marie.

   The series has not yet been released on commercial DVDs — and why not?

   Not only has Old Time Radio collector and historian Randy Riddle posted an episode of Casey, Crime Photographer I’d not heard before, but it’s a locked room mystery to boot. Casey, played by Staats Cotsworth in this program, was based on the character created by mystery writer George Harmon Coxe.

   Here’s Randy, as he describes it on his podcast/blog:

    “In this post, we hear ‘Woman of Mystery,’ program 61 in the series, broadcast on the Armed Forces Radio Service as Crime Photographer and originally heard on CBS on November 9, 1950. It’s one of those ‘locked room’ mysteries, where Casey’s keen sense of observation come in handy to discover how a woman was murdered.”

   Unfortunately Casey solves the mystery only seven minutes into the program — or does he? Listen and see.

LUCAS WEBB – Eli’s Road. Doubleday, hardcover, 1971. Reprint paperback: Popular Library, no date stated.

    I went back to the used book store to buy the copy of Green Ice they’ve had there for years, and got distracted once again. This time by a novel called Eli’s Road, by Lucas Webb.

    Considering the quality of this thing, I’m surprised Webb and his novel aren’t better known. It starts off a bit awkward, but soon gets the reader involved in a 1st person narrative spanning ante-bellum Kansas to 1880s Wyoming.

   Webb does a remarkable job of keeping his narrator believable from the time he writes as a callow teen-ager till he ends up in stoic middle-age, quite a feat of style, and the story: Bloody Kansas, rogue mountain men, orphan girls, pro-slavers, store-keepers, abolitionists, border ruffians, emigrants, freed slaves … and the mysterious Brother Frank.

   Seek it out.

[Editorial Comment]   I wish I had a copy of the paperback reprint to show you. The jacket of the hardcover edition, which perhaps sold to libraries and no one else, is rather plain and uninspiring, to say the least. The paperback is a lot more colorful and inviting, if you’re a fan of western sagas, and it has a quote from noted author Stephen Longstreet to boot:   “The Best Novel of the American West since The Big Sky.” No small praise.

     Lucas Webb is stated on the Web to be the pen name of Michael Burgess. Burgess is also well-noted as bibliographer R. Reginald (Cumulative Paperback Index, 1939-1959, among many others).

   But while Burgess did use Lucas Webb at least once as a pseudonym, an online bibliography for him does not include either Eli’s Road or one later novel under the Lucas Webb byline, a book called Stribling (Doubleday, 1973), about which I have found very little to date, only one quote:   “But there was no place to go to farm or settle; the farms were being deserted, the big combines tractoring out the shacks and the little fields…”

“The Rise and Fall of Eddie Carew.” An episode of Kraft Suspense Theatre (Season 2, Episode 30). First air date: 24 June 1965. Dean Jones, Sheilah Wells, Alan Hewitt, Jerome Cowan, Harry Townes, Ken Lynch, Stanley Adams, Ian Wolfe, John Hubbard, Barry Kelley. Story: Robert Thom; adaptation: Don Brinkley. Director: Joseph Pevney.

   Senile nonagenarian Ellis Stone (Ian Wolfe) manages to get himself locked in the vault of his own bank; unless he’s very good at holding his breath, by the time the electronic lock opens the door three days hence he’ll be very dead.

   The bank manager, in full panic mode, phones Sam Becker (Jerome Cowan), the public relations man for “our party.” He immediately sees the PR disaster (not to mention the financial catastrophe) that he and his cronies would suffer if dotty old Stone, a million-dollar-a-year party contributor, were to go toes up.

   In a moment of inspiration, he plumps for making use of the talents of Eddie Carew (Dean Jones), “The Human Can Opener,” currently serving time in the state pen.

   But Dr. Farley (Harry Townes), the prison psychiatrist, has been making progress weening Eddie away from his compulsion to steal and is flatly opposed to letting Eddie anywhere near piles of money. It would be, as he says, like having an alcoholic become a wine taster.

   The prison warden (Alan Hewitt) overrules the doctor, however, and takes Eddie to the bank. Before he goes, Eddie tries to warn everyone of what could happen; but even his girlfriend, Sally McClure (Sheilah Wells), encourages him to do this because she has faith in his rehabilitation.

   Eddie is now in a position to call the shots: no prison uniform (“something in charcoal gray” would be nice) or handcuffs, deciding who can be present when he does the job (others can be a distraction), and especially having “the best jelly man in the business,” Pinky Ferguson (Stanley Adams), assist him.

   Yes, you guessed it: Eddie has ideas that go way beyond rescuing the old guy, which he almost betrays when he first lays eyes on the safe. (“Well,” says Becker, “is he going to open it or make love to it?”)

   What Eddie doesn’t know is that before the sun rises he will have to crack this same safe three times: once out of greed, once out of duty (and self-interest), and once out of love ….

   This one has a great comic cast as well as normally serious actors doing a humorous turn. Dean Jones is well-known for the many Disney films he’s appeared in. Stanley Adams always seemed to be an affable fast-talker just on the other side of the law (e.g., Cyrano Jones in the immensely popular Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles”).

   And Ken Lynch must have played a cop hundreds of times over the years. Jerome Cowan was a low-rent version of William Powell; he could do light comedy (Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.), but most movie fans remember him as Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon and the spineless architect in The Fountainhead.