SEE NO EVIL. Columbia Pictures, UK/US, 1971. British title: Blind Terror. Mia Farrow, Dorothy Alison, Robin Bailey, Diane Grayson, Brian Rawlinson, Norman Eshley, Paul Nicholas. Screenplay: Brian Clemens. Director: Richard Fleischer.

   Mia Farrow had already made Rosemary’s Baby (three years before) when she appeared in this movie, and even if she was 26 at the time, she could easily have passed for 16. Young, boyishly slim, ethereally beautiful, she might still have possessed a limited range as an actress, but no one could have doubted she was a movie star.

   And she’s the center of focus throughout this movie, recently blinded and forced to move in with her uncle, aunt and female cousin in their isolated English country mansion, she turns in a near tour de force of terror when a crazed killer leaves her unknowingly in a house full of blood and dead bodies.

   The emphasis is not on the killing, thankfully, but on her character’s reaction – I’ll take that back. It is the audience that is kept on the edge of their seats waiting for her to discover what they all know full well. Waiting and waiting, and then!

   Adjusting to becoming blind has to be one of the toughest tasks someone has to take on, and to be forced to undergo what Sarah does in her several mad dashes for escape, it is almost too much too bear. The killer is seen only from the waist down, in a series of low level shots not dissimilar to many seen in the definitive British TV spy series The Avengers, with which screenwriter Brian Clemens was long affiliated.

   Only the ending of See No Evil lets the viewer down, or at least this one, as Sarah is unaccountably left alone one last time, resulting in a fairly hair-raising one last encounter with the killer. All warning shouts to her boy friend, who’s just rescued her, go unheard. What a dummy!

[UPDATE] 10-19-09. Another movie with a similar theme is, of course, Wait Until Dark, 1967, with Audrey Hepburn as a young blind woman trapped in an apartment with a gang of hoodlums. I’ve been hoping someone else would mention it, as I haven’t seen it since it first came out, and I don’t remember any of the details — other than being scared to death for the heroine, who couldn’t see any of the dangers around her — but the audience could!

   Got a wild hair up my brain last month and started watching Othello: the 1965 film-of-the-play with Laurence Olivier, and the 1953 version done by Orson Welles, and now some    *** SPOILER COMMENTS ***

   I’m going to talk about the ending here because I assume most folks are familiar with it, or if you’re not, the full title, “The Tragedy of Othello” might tip you off.

   Olivier’s film is entirely too slow and stagy, especially the acting, which is rather too broad for a movie. The actors never seem to sit down and relax; they’re always standing (or posing, rather) to declaim their lines. Maggie Smith, Derek Jacobi and Frank Finlay (who plays Iago like a mean-spirited Peter Cook) inject some naturalism, but they’re woefully overridden by Laurence Olivier, grimacing gesticulating, eye-rolling, and yet somehow compelling as ever.

   Then the 1949/53 Welles film: Visually splendid, and for a bespoke egotist, Welles is very generous to his supporting players, but the film itself has the kind of dubbing one normally associates with Japanese rubber-suit-monster-movies, so given the tricky mise-en-scene and the floating sound track, it’s sometimes hard to figure out who’s saying what. Surprisingly, in the whole cast, Robert Coote stands out as a deftly comic Roderigo, cast effectively against Micheal MacLiammoir, who plays Iago like a petulant Dudley Moore.

   MacLiammoir wrote a book about the chaotic production of this film, which took about a year-and-a-half to make and another year-and-a-half to get released. Put Money in Thy Purse (Methuen, 1952) is required reading for fans of Shakespeare and Welles, and a treat for those who just love good writing.

   MacLiammoir masters that subtle, self-deprecating humor one finds in the best of Walter Albert, and his evocations of the film’s exotic locations (Rome, Venice, Casablanca, Morocco…) are vivid and hilarious at the same time.

   He also has a clever way with his anecdotes, setting up a situation, milking it for potential, then delivering the punch line like a witty prize-fighter. There’s an exceptional scene of a drunken actor with a thick Dutch accent auditioning for Roderigo, who keeps getting drunker, more energetic and less comprehensible as the audition goes on for hours, at the end of which, Welles turns to MacLiammoir and says, “We may have been in the presence of genius. However, I think what the part calls for is talent.”

   The most effective film of the story, however, may be Franco Zeffirelli’s 1986 Otello, from Verdi’s opera, with great sets, costumes, and color, plus fast pace and snappy performances. The music ain’t bad either.

   Verdi gives a fine duet to Otello and Desdemona (which is more than Shakespeare did) and Zeffirelli caps off the ending with cathartic energy — which, I’m afraid, is also more than Shakespeare did; the Immortal Bard had a tendency sometimes let his plays keep going when the story was over. (And I wonder: did savvy Elizabethans slip out of the Globe right after Hamlet died or Juliet croaked, to avoid the rush in the parking lot?)

   If I mentioned Peter Cook and Dudley Moore earlier, it’s because Othello is largely an extended double-talk routine between Othello and Iago, gullible stooge and fast-talking con man: like a Hope-and-Crosby “Road to…” movie gone tragically wrong without the comic timing, or Oklahoma! if Poor Judd had actually hanged himself in the first act.

   The story ends with Iago found out but basically triumphant, and Othello, who would have been a more compelling character if he had any brains, little more than his patsy. Some fine writing, but the story is weak at its core and ultimately unsatisfying.

   And if I can throw in just one more aside, my favorite Othello isn’t a film at all, but a radio production with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson as Othello and Iago, and Judy Dench as Desdemona.

   Brutally edited but fast-moving, it gives the listener no time to get bored, and those who only know Gielgud from his “old prig” roles in the movies will find his Moor simply astonishing: he sounds fierce, black and seven feet tall, and he and Richardson play off each other like … well, like a well-practiced comedy team.

GIRL WITHOUT A ROOM. Paramount, 1933. Charles Farrell, Charlie Ruggles, Marguerite Churchill, Gregory Ratoff, Grace Bradley, Walter Woolf [King], Sam Ash, Leonid Kinsky, Mischa Auer, Leonard Snegoff, Alex Melesh, John T. Murray, Spec O’Donnell, Edith Fellows, Harry Stubbs. Screenplay by Frank Butler and Charles Binyon, based on stories by Jack Lait. Director: Ralph Murphy. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   Farrell arrives on a scholarship in Paris to paint and rents a room in a boardinghouse filled with eccentric bohemian artists and expatriate Russians (including the Trotsky, Walksky, Galiopsky/Sitsky crew).

   There is a far-out Bohemian girl, “Nada”; a playgirl (Churchill) pursued by an alcoholic rich American but falling for Farrell; and Vergil Crock (Charlie Ruggles), master of the revelries, and mentor for the babe-in-the-wood Farrell.

   Back in 1989 I described this as a “funny, charming, delightful sendup of the ’30s avant-garde French art scene.” In the Cinecon program notes, it’s described as the kind of “sparkling, madcap entertainment that Hollywood once fashioned without breaking a sweat.”

   I have to admit that what I loved before, I found tiresome, with an array of good character actors bringing occasional bright moments among the madcap chaos. Actually, what I found most interesting about the film was the brief appearance of Spec O’Donnell, the talented participant in several of the brilliant and truly funny Max Davidson two-reel silent comedies, here reduced to playing a 30-second bit.

PHILIP MacDONALD – Persons Unknown. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1931; Collins Crime Club, UK, 1932, as The Maze. Paperback reprint: Collins #162, UK, 1938, also as The Maze.

   In his introduction to this documentary novel, Philip MacDonald says: “In this book I have striven to be absolutely fair to the reader. There is nothing — nothing at all — for the detective that the reader has not had. More, the reader has had his information In exactly the same form as the detective — that is, the verbatim report of evidence and question.”

   Anthony Gethryn is vacationing in Costa del Chica, Spain, when he receives from Assistant Commissioner Sir Egbert Lucas, C.I.D., the transcript of the coroner’s inquest into the death of Maxwell Brunton. Brunton had been murdered in his study one night, a crime that could have been committed only by someone residing in the house.

   Brunton, according to the testimony, was a philanderer and a man easily given to anger, but he also had many good points. Of the residents, some, particularly Brunton’s wife and son, had strong motives for doing him in.

   Others had weak or no discernible motives. The police investigation and the testimony at the inquest lead to no conclusion as to who might have committed the murder and why.

   It was Sir Egbert’s hope, although not his expectation, that Gethryn would be able to spot the murderer. Gethryn’s usual rule is to look for “oddnesses” in a case when he can find them; in this one, he finds many oddnesses.

   So Gethryn turns the process upside down and spots the culprit, who, he points out, will never be convicted by an English court.

   I didn’t spot the killer, but I should have, although the motive, unusual for a book of this vintage, would still have eluded me. Mystery novels don’t come any fairer-play than this one.

MARGARET ERSKINE – Give Up the Ghost.

Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1949. Hammond, UK, hc, 1949. Hardcover reprint: Unicorn Mystery Book Club, 4-in-1 edition, March 1949. Paperback reprints: Mercury 163, US, digest-sized, 1952, abridged; Pocket B26, UK, 1952.

   Margaret Erskine wrote the same book about Scotland Yard inspector Septimus Finch twenty-one times. In each one Finch is described as having a nondescript face and a proclivity for dressing all in gray. This repetition doesn’t enhance the inspector’s limited charms, although it could be argued that his stolidity and matter-of-factness are positive character traits.

   In Give Up the Ghost, crude and rather nasty drawings have been sent to the Camborough constabulary, but have been more or less ignored until the elderly housekeeper of the pompous Pleydon family is found murdered with another drawing pinned to her body.

   None of the Pleydons can suggest any reason for their household’s being singled out, yet several days later another woman connected with them is killed, another drawing near her body. A band of vigilantes is formed to prowl the streets.

   Meanwhile Finch, in spite of the Pleydons’ interference, investigates the family’s history and discovers their convoluted, almost forgotten web of financial skulduggery — just in time to prevent further murders.

   There are moments of humor amid the gore, such as when Finch installs young Constable Roark in the Pleydon household as a butler.

   Erskine — who has stated that writing thrillers was a revolt against her highbrow family — specializes in eccentric British families with long-held secrets, social pretensions, and heads of household who possess streaks of cunning.

   As a Scotland Yard officer, Finch solves crimes in Sussex, several seaside towns, and provincial villages. He remains as colorless through his last case, The House on Hook Street (1977), as he was in his first adventure, The Limping Man (1939). Erskine’s novels are definitely an acquired taste.

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   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.

MARGARET ERSKINE – The Woman at Belguardo. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, November 1961. UK edition: Hodder & Stoughton, hc, 1961. Paperback reprints: Penguin 2464, UK, 1966. Ace Star K-295, US, 1974; Bantam, US, December 1982.

   Margaret Erskine (a pen name) was the author of some twenty-one detective novels written between 1938 and 1978, all being cases solved by (Chief) Inspector Septimus Finch, he being promoted somewhere along the way.

   When reprinted by Ace in the 1970s, many of them were published as “gothic romances,” though I imagine those expecting a gothic romance when they bought one were rather surprised.

   While there are some sound observations about people in The Woman at Belguardo, and some deft turns of phrase, what reading the book has done for me is to have convinced me all the more that writing a detective novel is one of the hardest things in the world to do, if the goal is to do it well – and which is why so many mystery writers today steer Far Clear of the Real Thing.

   The plot first, though. A woman whose passion is life is obsessively tormenting the people in her life is (not surprisingly) found murdered in her home after returning unexpectedly from Europe with a new fiancé along with her, to the surprise of someone perhaps. (Someone more significantly surprised than everyone else, that is).

   But that may not be the only reason someone saw fit to kill her (and the cover the Crime Club novel is awfully explicit, if you can make it out – her head is smashed in by a huge potted plant after she’s been strangled).

   There are suspects galore, and Inspector Finch is hard pressed to follow all of the leads and make sense of them – most of them false ones, of course.

   I suspect that Margaret Erskine knew little about police procedure, or if she did, she allows Finch a slip-up or two in this case, which is one or two more than I would have allowed. She’s also weak in identifying the characters immediately, and also weak in allowing questions answered later, not when then should have been, which is when they occurred to me.

   But it’s the motive that seems the weakest to me, although I have to admit that it was foreshadowed quite well from the beginning — and who am I to judge the actions of a man who’s in a fit of rage? The essential clue, the one that clinches the case, though, seems especially poorly handled. It sits badly in my mind, and every time I try to think it through, the less well it sits.

   When it comes down to it, keeping in mind my comments up above in paragraph two, there is little more in this detective novel but the detection.

   Finch himself is a genial enough cipher. He handles himself well but with little indication of a personal life, makes small but quantum leaps of logic along the way, and I have the distinct feeling that I won’t read another of his adventures for another 20 or 30 years, which is how long it’s been since I read an earlier one.

STUART KAMINSKY – Murder on the Yellow Brick Road. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1977. Paperback reprints include: Penguin, 1979; Ibooks, 2000.

   Stuart Kaminsky is a film writer and critic as well as a mystery novelist, and he has put his expertise to good use in his series about 1940s Hollywood private eye Toby Peters.

   The novels are a blend of fact and fiction — that is, of real Hollywood personalities (now deceased) and fictional characters.

   Peters, investigator for the stars, is wise to the ways of Hollywood; he shares an office with a dentist, Shelley Minck, who provides much of the comic relief in these books; he eats abominably — burgers, Pepsis, milk shakes; he lives in “one of a series of two-room, one story wooden structures L.A. management people called bungalows”; and he has a running feud with his brother, Homicide Lieutenant Phil Pevsner (the real family name).

   Murder on the Yellow Brick Road concerns the stabbing of a munchkin — one of L.A.’s many “little people” (they prefer that label to that of midget) — on the set on which The Wizard of Oz was filmed.

   Judy Garland finds the body and calls Peters in a panic. Peters goes to MGM, where he meets Miss Garland, PR man Warren Hoff, Garland’s costume designer friend Cassie James, and Louis B. Mayer himself. Mayer hires Peters to conduct an investigation and divert any adverse publicity.

   What follows is an entertaining story of Hollywood in its heyday, the inner workings of the film community, and the brotherhood of the “little people.” Peters meets such luminaries as Raymond Chandler, and pays a visit to Clark Gable at William Randolph Hearst’s fabled San Simeon.

   Kaminsky does a good job of evoking both Hollywood of the Forties and the personalities of the various stars; his portrayal of the child/woman Garland is especially good.

   Other Toby Peters novels include Never Cross a Vampire (1980), which features Bela Lugosi and William Faulkner in his screen-writing days; and He Done Her Wrong (1983), in which Mae West calls on Peters to find her missing, sizzling autobiography; and Down For the Count (1985), which features fighter Joe Louis.

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   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.

STUART KAMINSKY, R.I.P. According to his obituary in the Chicago Tribune, Stuart Kaminsky “died of complications from hepatitis and a recent stroke Friday, Oct. 9, in Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis […] He was an Army medic in the 1950s, when his family believes he got hepatitis C.” He was 75 at the time of his death.

   Unusual for most mystery writers, Kaminsky was the creator of four distinctive series characters. Besides 1940s Hollywood PI Toby Peters, who appeared in 24 novels [see below] in which he rubbed shoulders with many movie stars of the day, Kaminsky also chronicled the adventures of (quoting again from the Tribune) “… Porfiry Rostnikov, a police inspector in Moscow [16 novels]; Abe Lieberman, a crusty but wise Chicago cop who works the streets with his younger partner, Bill Hanrahan [10 novels]; and Lew Fonesca, a former Cook County state’s attorney investigator now operating as a cut-rate private eye in Sarasota [6 novels].”

   Kaminsky also wrote two novelizations of the TV series The Rockford Files, three novelizations of CSI: New York, two stand-alone suspense novels, three story collections, and was the editor of two recent crime fiction anthologies.

   Without much fanfare, Stuart Kaminksy was without a doubt one of the more prolific mystery authors of recent years. He was a quiet giant in our field.

      The Toby Peters series —

1. Bullet for A Star (1977)

2. Murder on the Yellow Brick Road (1977)
3. You Bet Your Life (1978)
4. The Howard Hughes Affair (1979)
5. Never Cross a Vampire (1980)
6. High Midnight (1981)
7. Catch A Falling Clown (1981)

8. He Done Her Wrong (1983)
9. The Fala Factor (1984)

10. Down for the Count (1985)
11. The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance (1986)
12. Smart Moves (1986)
13. Think Fast, Mr. Peters (1987)
14. Buried Caesars (1989)

15. Poor Butterfly (1990)
16. The Melting Clock (1991)

17. The Devil Met A Lady (1993)
18. Tomorrow is Another Day (1995)
19. Dancing in the Dark (1996)
20. A Fatal Glass of Beer (1997)

21. A Few Minutes Past Midnight (2001)
22. To Catch a Spy (2002)
23. Mildred Pierced (2003)
24. Now You See It (2004)

WILLIAM HAGGARD – Powder Barrel. Cassell & Co., UK, hardcover, 1965. Ives Washburn, US, hc, 1965. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, January 1966. Paperback reprints: Signet D2991, US, 1966; Penguin, UK, 1967.

   William Haggard is, for my money the best of the later British thriller writers in the Buchan tradition, and one who wrote rings around Le Carre. Most of his books feature Sir Charles Russell of the Security Executive in the most civilized and ruthless thrillers you will ever read (roughly covering 1958 to 1991).

   Haggard’s a conservative — damn near a Tory — and he’s no doubt a bit of a snob, but it’s that civilized snobbery that marked Buchan and the best of the Buchan school.

   Indeed Russell is close to Buchan’s Edward Leithen, and like Leithen and Richard Hannay’s adventures the books are as likely to have a sympathetic or even heroic enemy — not to mention a charming Italian Madam (The Hard Sell), second story man (Slow Burn), blowzy but sympathetic courtesan (The Antagonists), or even Soviet agent (The Powder Barrel).

   None of the books run over 60,000 words, but they are masterpieces of economy, the characters well drawn, the plots intricate (but never overly so), and the suspense and action well choreographed.

   Among the non-series books his first novel The Telemann Touch and The Kinsmen are both exceptional entries, the latter having many of the qualities of a Hitchcock thriller. The Telemann Touch, about an apologetic assassin, ends on a wonderfully choreographed duel with bayonets.

   There are fine set pieces in the books too. The SF touch at the end of Slow Burn and a second story man’s seduction of a high priced call girl, an assassination on a gondola in The Venetian Blind, and a tense shootout on a ski lift in The High Wire. Haggard most resembles Victor Canning in that mastery of the clean simple and — there’s no other word for it — civilized style of thriller that seems so veddy British.

   In Powder Barrel, Ernst, aka Ernest, a likable, handsome, if none too bright, East German Soviet agent stationed in a vital Arab principality as the driver of playboy Shaikh (sic) Ali bin Hassan bin Ibrahim sets off a series explosive events when he takes it on himself, while in England for a Rolls Royce mechanic course, to try and kill British Foreign Secretary Vincent Gale.

   Vincent Gale is the man Her Majesty’s government has chosen to negotiate the new oil concessions in the shaikhdom (sic) known as the Oil Terminal along the Arab oil coast, a negotiation complicated by the fact that he had a discrete and passionate affair with the Shaikh’s sister Princess Nahid, known as ‘Madame.’ Just how he will be received by his ex-lover, an intelligent and willful woman, may be key to the powder keg growing in the shaikh’s country.

   It’s just the sort of explosive situation Russell (“He’s English of course, you have to watch them.”) handles with cool aplomb, so he sends his second in command Robert Mortimer along with Gale for security, and then is surprised when his opposite number in the Soviet government, the General, shows up to let him know that Ernst is a wild card determined to kill Gale without orders.

   Riots in the street, a hunt for the Soviet agent by the Shaikh’s handpicked Greek chief spy Stradvis, a playboy shaikh who takes his money and runs for the Riviera with Ernst’s help, and the renewal of a long term affair are some of the events that lead to Gale and a wounded Ernst alone in a villa with Madame in a taut confrontation at gunpoint between the diplomat and the oddly honorable assassin.

   As might be expected Russell pulls all the irons out the fire without anyone getting appreciably singed, and manages to get those oil concessions from the progressive Princess when she replaces her abdicating brother, but it’s a near run thing as the Duke of Wellington said of Waterloo, and the suspense runs down to the wire.

   Haggard was a civilized and intelligent writer of tautly wound thrillers that found a balance between the fantasy of Ian Fleming and the drab ordinary world of Le Carre. The Russell novels are exciting, literate, sexy, and understated in the best British tradition.

   His people are believable human beings whether good guy or villain, and Russell a likable protagonist of the old school who would have been equally at home in Buchan’s Rungates Club or Kipling’s India. Compared to today’s overblown, overwritten, and overlong thrillers they are perfect models of the form.

   As I do every year, I’ll be spending Columbus Day weekend in Cadillac, the small town in Michigan where I was born and grew up. My sister and her husband still live there, and my brother and his wife drive over from London, Ontario, where they live. (I fly, and I’ll be leaving mid-afternoon tomorrow.)

   I won’t be back until late on Tuesday, so of necessity the blog will be quiet until then. And I’m sure it will take me a few days to catch up on everything once I’m back. This current short but scheduled hiatus, in other words, is likely to be followed by a period of scattered and intermittent postings, I’m sorry to say.

   But will I run out of reviews to publish? Books and movies, both old and new? None of the above, and not any time soon, that’s for sure!

GEOFFREY HOMES – Forty Whacks.   William Morrow, hardcover, 1941. Paperback reprint: Bantam #117, 1947, as Stiffs Don’t Vote. Filmed as Crime by Night, Warner Brothers, 1944 (with Jerome Cowan, Jane Wyman, Faye Emerson, Eleanor Parker).

   Homes/Mainwaring created three completely different series detectives for his other eleven novels, each of them with unorthodox abilities.

   The first was newspaperman, Robin Bishop, who is featured in Homes’s first five titles, among them The Man Who Didn’t Exist (1937), which deals with the baffling suicide of a famous writer named Zenophen Zwick who seems never to have existed in the. first place.

   The second sleuth was Humphrey Campbell; an unconventional private investigator who, with his fat, lazy, and corrupt partner, Oscar Morgan, appears in one of the Bishop novels (Then There Were Three, 1938) and in four of his own.

   The third series detective was Mexican cop Jose Manuel Madero, “knitter extraordinary — not only of socks but of mysterious loose ends,” who stars in a pair of titles: The Street of the Crying Woman (1942) and The Hill of the Terrified Monk (1943).

   Chubby Humphrey Campbell is probably the best realized of the three; certainly his cases are Homes’s most intricate and satisfying detective puzzles. Forty Whacks involves Humphrey and Oscar in an ax-murder in the California town of Joaquin — “the second Borden case,” as Campbell refers to it.

   Humphrey, with grumpy Oscar watching out for any illegal dollar that might be made, sets out to prove that Joe Borden wasn’t responsible for the grisly remains found under the seat of an overturned rowboat floating down the San Joaquin River.

   Along the way he gets mixed up with a female artist’s representative; a successful concert pianist who gave up his career to hunt for gold; a tough lady newspaper publisher; a couple of mayoralty candidates; and a lot more bloody murder.

   The action in Forty Whacks is fast and furious, but there is a good deal more than that to recommend it: clever plotting, witty and remarkably good dialogue, and a lean style made lyrical in places by some of the most vivid descriptive writing to be found in all of mystery fiction.

   The other three Campbell-Morgan adventures — No Hands on the Clock (1939), Finders Keepers (1940), and Six Silver Handles (1944) — share the same qualities.

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   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.