LAND BEYOND THE LAW. Warner Brothers, 1937. Dick Foran, Linda Perry, Wayne Morris, Harry Woods, Irene Franklin, Frank Orth, Cy Kendall. Director: B. Reeves Eason.

   Walker Martin sent me an email yesterday morning, suggesting that I give you all a heads up on TCM’s lineup of B-Western movies they were going to show all afternoon, all oaters with “Law” in their titles.

   Of course I didn’t see his email until just before the first movie started, but I did get it in time to make sure my tape machine was properly set up and the cable box was set to the right channel. This is the first of the four.

   Plot synopsis: Cowpoke “Chip” Douglas (Dick Foran) is persuaded to become sheriff when his father is killed by rustlers. Complicating matters before his father’s death was the fact that Douglas was riding for the man (Cy Kendall) who’s secretly responsible for all of the gunplay and violence in the area. (Not that it’s much of a secret.)

   Dick Foran is billed as “The Singing Cowboy,” and indeed the chunky, jovial-looking actor has a voice like Nelson Eddy. No wimpy Roy or Gene is he. The opening scene, with the ranch hands riding into town singing like a grand chorus a song that might have been written by Sigmund Romberg, is a sight to be seen, and something even more spectacular to hear.

   This movie is pure horse operetta, through and through. And as thoroughly enjoyable, too, with plenty of plot, lots of action, and a spanking scene to boot!”

MY SISTER EILEEN. Columbia, 1955. Betty Garrett, Janet Leigh, Jack Lemmon, Robert Fosse, Kurt Kasznar, Dick York, Lucy Marlow, Tommy Rall, Horace MacMahon, Hal March, Queenie Smith, Richard Deacon.

Screenplay by Blake Edwards and Richard Quine from the play by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov, based on the stories by Ruth McKenny. Songs: Jule Styne and Leo Robin; choreography: Robert Fosse. Director: Richard Quine. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   The inevitable question was asked of Betty Garrett after the screening: Why wasn’t the great Leonard Bernstein score for the Broadway success Wonderful Town used? The answer was that it was economics, that it was cheaper to commission a new score than pay for the use of Bernstein’s.

   Undoubtedly a minus, since the replacement score is undistinguished, but the gorgeous wide-screen technicolor, the charming performances by the cast (especially Garrett, Leigh, Lemmon, Fosse and Rall), and the solid merits ofthe McKenny stories contributed to a smashingly entertaining 72 minutes, with a number by Rall and Fosse, danced in an alley, that lit up the screen with some of the most exciting dancing that side of West Side Story.

   Garrett said that she most missed not being able to sing “Ohio” from the Bernstein original, but she played in the Bernstein musical on Broadway and on the road and didn’t lack for opportunities to sing it.

   I’m still a bit put off by the gradual encroachment of post-1940 films at these conventions, but the opportunity to hear Garrett talk about her career and to see such a splendid example of the fifties film musical pretty much put those concerns to rest.

EDWARD S. AARONS – Assignment-Angelina.

Gold Medal #749, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1958.

   Like many writers from the period 1920-50, Edward S. Aarons began his career in the pulp magazines. He also wrote three mystery novels in the late Thirties, and several more in the late Forties. But it wasn’t until the paperback original boom of the early 1950s that he achieved major success and recognition, with his “Assignment” series of espionage novels featuring the action-packed adventures of CIA agent Sam Durrell.

   Along with exotic locales across the globe, violence is the main ingredient of the Durrell series; a great deal of blood is spilled in a great many different ways, both by Durrell and the various villains he encounters. Assignment-Angelina is typical.

   It begins (rather irresistibly) with the coldblooded murders of four men in four different sections of the country: a filling-station owner in, Arizona, a building contractor in Indiana, an advertising copywriter in New York, and a fisherman in Louisiana.

   We know from the first who is responsible — a trio named Mark, Corbin, and Slago — but we don’t know why. Durrell’s search for the answer leads him to a beautiful woman named Angelina, who may or may not be an ally, and into the usual muddle of James Bondian political intrigue.

   It also leads him from Washington to the bayous of Louisiana (where Durrell is right at home; he is part Cajun) to New York City and ultimately to a mountaintop in the rugged Poconos where the slam-bang finale takes place.

   Despite all the violence and melodrama, this and other Durrell novels are compulsive reading. Aarons, was an accomplished writer, with excellent descriptive abilities (particularly in depicting the various locales of his stories) and an expert sense of narrative pacing.

   A total of forty Sam Durrell books were produced by Aarons from 1955 to 1975, among the more noteworthy of which are Assignment to Disaster (1955), Assignment Stella Marni (1957), Assignment-School for Spies (1966), and Assignment-Sumatra (1974).

   After his death in 1975, a number of additional Durrell novels appeared by Will B. Aarons, said to be his son. Two of Aarons’s non-series books, Escape to Love (1952) and Girl on the Run (1954), are good examples of the paperback-original suspense novels of the early 1950s. A 1948 hardcover, Nightmare, is notable for its high level of tension and drama.

   Aarons also published numerous novels under the pseudonym of Edward Ronns, among them Terror in the Town (1947) Gift of Death (1948), and Catspaw Ordeal (1950); most these were later reprinted in paperback under his own name.

         ———
   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.

Editorial Comment: On the primary Mystery*File website there is a long comprehensive overview of the “Assignment” series by Doug Bassett. Following the article is a long list of all the books in the series, plus a full description of the investigation that took place several years ago which finally discovered the true identity of Will B. Aarons. (Follow the link provided.)

   Two other books in the Sam Durrell series previously been reviewed on this blog are:

       Assignment Stella Marni.

       Assignment Zoraya

SUSAN KANDEL – Christietown. Harper, trade pb, May 2007. Avon, pb, June 2008.

   As in the three previous books in this series, the city of Los Angeles and the life and work of a mystery writer are nicely integrated into the plot. Cece Caruso is writing a book about Agatha Christie this time around, and she’s supplementing her income with events for a housing development called Christietown. And then, murder happens.

   As the plot unfolds, the Christie connection lessens while parallels and references to the movie Chinatown become more significant, lending more of an edge to the proceedings.

   As much as I am an all-too-willing suspender of disbelief, it is terrifically implausible that anyone anywhere, let alone in southern California, would create a housing development with an Agatha Christie theme. And Cece’s personal life is very, very messy. (How does she have time to get anything accomplished?)

   Conclusion: readable but gimmicky.

Editorial Comment / Bibliographic Data: Walter Albert reviewed the same book here about a year ago, and at the end I provided a list of all the books in the series. The good news is that due out on October 27th is the next book in the series, Dial H for Hitchcock (originally to be titled Vertigo a Go Go).

LAURENCE GOUGH – Serious Crimes.

Viking Press, US/Canada; hardcover, 1990. Paperback reprint: Penguin, Canada, 1991. British editions: Gollancz, hc, 1990; pb, 1992 (shown).

   As far as police procedurals go, if they’re published in Canada by a Canadian author, not to mention ones that take place in Vancouver, BC, they might as well have never been written at all, as far as American readers are concerned. Generally speaking, of course.

   Which is not to say that none of Laurence Gough’s thirteen books in his “Willows and Parker” series have not been published in the US, but most of them haven’t, or if they have, it was barely.

   Take the test for yourself (assuming you live in the US). Take a look at the thirteen books below, for some of which the covers have been provided, and see how many of them you recognize. An easier test: Raise your right hand if you’ve heard of Laurence Gough. I hope you have, but I have a feeling that he’s all but unknown in this country.

   There is a little bit of soap opera going on along with the cases that Jack Willows and his partner Claire Parker are assigned to. Just how much, I couldn’t tell you, as this is the first one of them I’ve happened to read. But in the opening few chapters of Serious Crimes, Willows’ wife has left him, along with their two kids, and he’s getting ready to sell his house.

   There is something going on, I think, between him and Parker, but if it is, it’s awfully subtle and/or it simply doesn’t come up this time. A little investigation on my part has revealed, however, that things heat up in the books that follow. Parker, by the way, is all but completely invisible in this book. She’s always around whenever Willows is; other cops look at her when she’s with Willows with ogling eyes, and that’s about it. Tune in for more next time, or so it appears.

   Dead is a local Chinese businessman, found frozen in a pond covered with several layers of ice. A botched kidnaping? It looks like it. Interspersed with the two cops’ investigation are the adventures of two young hoodlums, one of whom falls in lust with one of his victims, a bored housewife who seems (unknown to him) to have similar feelings about her attacker.

   There’s not much in the way of detection involved, which is par for the course as far as work of most homicide cops is concerned. But the tale the author weaves is as gripping as it is understated, as paradoxical as that may sound. The case (or cases) are never boring, and more, at least one of them ends in a blazing hell-raiser of a finale.

      The Willows and Parker series —

    1. The Goldfish Bowl (1987)

    2. Death on a No. 8 Hook (1988)
    3. Hot Shots (1989)
    4. Serious Crimes (1990)
    5. Accidental Deaths (1991)

    6. Fall Down Easy (1992)
    7. Killers (1993)
    8. Heartbreaker (1995)

    9. Memory Lane (1996)
   10. Karaoke Rap (1997)

   11. Shutterbug (1998)
   12. Funny Money (2000)
   13. Cloud of Suspects (2003)

THE CAPTIVE. Lasky-Paramount, 1915. Blanche Sweet, House Peters, Page Peters, Jeanie Macpherson, Theodore Roberts, Billy Elmer, Marjorie Daw. Original story by Cecil B. DeMille and Jeanie Macpherson; director: Cecil B. DeMille. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   A Balkan drama about a Montenegrin/Turkish conflict and its unforeseen (well, meant to be unforeseen) consequences when the captured Turkish bey played by House Peters is given to Blanche Sweet to help her work her farm after the death of her older brother in the war.

   The writer of the program notes (Bob Birchard, one of the organizers of the convention and author of a recent book on DeMille) states that the film seems to have been “designed to take advantage of the costumes already used for The Unafraid,” another Balkan drama filmed in the same year.

   An irreverent (if somewhat amusing) comment that doesn’t really prepare the viewer for a nicely developed romantic drama that brings together an unlikely couple and makes their eventual reconciliation believable.

   Peters plays the role with a light touch that makes his character appealing and contrasts with the more intense performance of the attractive Sweet. Not major DeMille, perhaps, but an intelligent, hopeful handling of cross-cultural antagonisms that demonstrates that ancient enmities need not endure.

KAZUO ISHIGURO – When We Were Orphans. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover; first edition, September 2000. Trade paperback: Vintage, October 2001. British edition: Faber & Faber, hc, 2000.

    When We Were Orphans is a novel about a detective, but not a detective novel. Christopher Banks was born in Shanghai, his parents disappeared when he was only nine, and he was sent to live in England by his Uncle Philip.

    Leaving public school, he set his mind on the curious career of amateur sleuth, one he soon accomplished brilliantly. He became a famous figure in London with an international reputation despite his youth.

   But a quite simple case introduces him to Sarah Hemmings, and it is she who draws him back to Shanghai, a city quite different from that of his childhood as the Sino-Japanese War is now raging and threatens to engulf the whole world in its brutality and madness.

   Shanghai on the eve of World War II is no place to pursue a budding romance, and it is a world both too real and too brutal for professions such as Christopher Banks, much to real for a young man who determines to uncover the mystery of his own past and finds that the one thing he cannot do is escape his own preconceptions, his own childhood memories, and the complexity of truth, guilt, and even innocence, including the secret of a Chinese warlord Wu Kang, the shadowy criminal known as the Yellow Snake, and the loss of his parents.

   He must also face the loss of Sarah and a shocking betrayal hidden from him by his own childhood illusions.

   Ultimately Christopher solves his greatest case, but as in life such solutions are not always satisfying, and sometimes the only thing to do is to keep on. Christopher is ultimately a figure both tragic and successful. He solves his mysteries, but he cannot change who he is.

   Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and came to England as a youth. His brilliant novels have earned him a Booker Prize and the title of Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France. His best known book, Remains of the Day, was made into a major film with Anthony Hopkins. Since When We Were Orphans he has also written Never Let Me Go, a major novel and an important literary work that uses elements of both science fiction and horror. He is a writer who bears watching.

   When We Were Orphans is a major novel. It is also a compulsively readable one, but it should not be mistaken for a detective story, at least not one where the question of who-dunit bears much of the weight of the story.

   As in real life, solutions to mysteries don’t always bring satisfaction, and there are mysteries that cannot be solved by deductive reasoning or without the risk of a wounded heart.

THE CIRCUS QUEEN MURDER. Columbia, 1933. Adolphe Menjou, Greta Nissen, Ruthelma Stevens, Dwight Frye, Donald Cook, Harry Holman, George Rosener. Based on the novel About the Murder of the Circus Queen (1932) by Anthony Abbot. Director: Roy William Neill.

   More stylish than Dear Murderer [recently reviewed here ] but less intelligent, The Circus Queen Murder offers Adolphe Menjou as Anthony Abbott’s Thatcher Colt, crusading District Attorney essaying that pre-doomed enterprise, a vacation from crime.

   Colt and his Gal Friday (An actress with the unlikely name Ruthelma Stevens, very good in a Glenda-Farrell-ish way.) quickly hook up with a traveling circus that just as quickly turns into one of those hotbeds of passion celebrated in cheap movies and paper-backs: threats, killing, more threats, murder and impersonating-a-cannibal ensue before things sort themselves out.

   Under the sure hand of director Roy William Neill (he of Universal’s “Sherlock Holmes” series) this moves along quickly and with a certain amount of class, filled with catchy camera angles and some surprisingly subtle touches.

   I particularly liked Stevens reporting a conversation to the investigators: “He called her a lying little [micro-pause] cheat,” and a few minutes later, Menjou looks at her knowingly and says, “So he called her a lying little [same micro-pause] cheat, did he?” leaving our fertile minds to conjecture just what he really called her.

   Unfortunately, there’s more style than sense here. I kept waiting for the legendary Thatcher Colt to come up with some brilliant deduction, surprise us with some clever twist or maybe just shoot something, but (WARNING!) there are no bombshells here: no surprise about the killer, the victim, none of that, and we pretty much just watch Adolphe Menjou watch things turn out the way they would have if he’d never stepped in.

   Something does finally lift Circus Queen out of its rut, though, and that’s Dwight Frye, the spiritual progenitor of Elisha Cook Jr. and a cult actor if ever there was one, here cast perfectly as the maniacal cuckold.

   Frye was perhaps a limited actor, but he was unforgettable in Dracula and Frankenstein, and here, given a meaty part, he takes it in his teeth and runs with it, turning this into a pretty satisfying time.

ANTHONY ABBOT – About the Murder of the Clergyman’s Mistress. Covici Friede, US, hardcover, 1931. UK title: The Crime of the Century, Collins, hc, 1931. Also published as: Murder of the Clergyman’s Mistress. Popular Library #286, 1950.

   Fulton Oursler is best remembered as a magazine editor, for Liberty in the 1930s and Reader’s Digest in the late Forties and as the author of the religioso blockbuster The Greatest Story Ever Told (1949). But in younger days he also contributed to the mystery genre, using the by-line Anthony Abbot for eight detective novels starring New York City police commissioner Thatcher Colt.

   The format of the first six is clearly borrowed from S. S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance series. Each title falls into rigid About the Murder of pattern; Colt is portrayed as wealthy mandarin intellectual; his cases are narrated and signed by his faithful male secretary; his familiars include a stupid district attorney, a crusty medical examiner, and dignified butler; the novels tend to begin with a body found under bizarre circumstances, with strange clues pointing to a host of suspects; the investigation is punctuated by conferences at which, in the spirit of Socratic debate, the detectives offer alternative reconstructions of the crime; and a second murder usually takes place about two-thirds of the way through the book.

   Like those of the young Ellery Queen, Abbot’s variations on the Van Dine framework are better written and characterized and somewhat livelier than the Philo Vance books themselves, although Abbot unfortunately followed Van Dine in declining to play fair with the reader.

   The second and perhaps best in the Thatcher Colt series was About the Murder of the Clergyman’s Mistress, which like many Van Dine novels was based on a famous true crime. In this version of the Hall-Mills case of the 1920s the bodies of a respected Episcopal minister and of a beautiful singer in his choir are found floating down the East River in a rowboat.

   Colt quickly takes over personal command of the investigation, with a huge assortment of peculiar clues — nine dumbbells, a bloody-pawed cat, Chinese sumach leaf, a bag of dulse — implicating various members of the minister’s and the singer’s households.

   Staying in full control of a stupendously complex plot, Abbot also treats us to vivid glimpses of early-1930s New York and to a sardonic portrait of the WASP clergy.

   Most of the Thatcher Colt novels are cut from the same pattern, including About the Murder of Geraldine Foster (1930), which launched the series; About the Murder of the Circus Queen (1932), with its background of a circus playing Madison Square Garden; and About the Murder of a Startled Lady (1935), with its intimations of the occult.

   The last two Anthony Abbot titles, The Creeps (1939) and The Shudders (1943), lack Van Dine elements and are believed to have been ghosted by another writer.

         ———
   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.

Editorial Comment: The other writer has been tentatively identified as Oscar Schisgall. See the comment following the previous review.

ANTHONY ABBOT – The Shudders. Farrar & Rinehart, US, hardcover, 1943. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, February 1943. UK title: Deadly Secret: Collins, hc, 1943.

    “The author requests that in discussing The Shudders readers and reviewers do not give away its plot.” An understandable request by Anthony Abbot (who in reality was Fulton Oursler), one must admit, since the plot is asinine.

    Still, a reviewer must mention something about the book, besides declaiming that Anthony Abbot, the narrator and Watson for Thatcher Colt, is an even bigger twit than S.S. Van Dine, the narrator and Watson for Philo Vance, which is a claim many won’t believe until they encounter Abbot the narrator.

    Briefly then — and I hope that Abbot’s shade does not come back to haunt me — Thatcher Colt, New York City Police Commissioner, more detective than administrator, has been responsible for the conviction of a villain who poisoned his boss and mentor and made off with two million never-located dollars.

    The evening he is to be executed, the poisoner asks Colt to visit with him. He warns Colt that an even greater villain — a Dr. Baldwin — who kills for sport and who kills undetectably is lurking about ready to do untold damage.

    The poisoner is executed, with Colt looking on, and then Colt begins an unsuccessful three-year search for Baldwin. One day the former warden of the prison at which the poisoner was executed rushes into Colt’s office to tell him that he has met Dr. Baldwin, that the poisoner’s executioners are dying off, and that the warden is to be next.

    He also has more important information to impart, but he’s too busy talking about side issues to do so, and then he dies — of apparently natural causes.

    Why is Dr. Baldwin seemingly avenging the executed poisoner? It’s all too silly and impossible to narrate, even if the author’s request was to be flouted even more than I have, already.

    Skip this one.

Editorial Comment:   I’ll post a review by Mike Nevins of Anthony Abbot’s About the Murder of the Clergyman’s Mistress next. At the end of his comments, he points out that the last two Abbot mysteries, The Creeps and The Shudders, are said to have been written by someone else.

    And, yes, it appears to be so, or at least it’s highly conjectured to be true. In Part 7 of the online Addenda to his Revised Crime Fiction IV, Al Hubin names Oscar Schisgall as the probable suspect.

    Which makes me curious, of course. Why should Fulton Oursler have farmed off his series character to someone to write up his last two adventures? If anyone knows or learns more, please elucidate!