CRIME BY NIGHT. Warner Brothers, 1944. Jane Wyman, Jerome Cowan, Faye Emerson, Charles Lang, Eleanor Parker, Stuart Crawford, Cy Kendall, Charles Wilson. Based on the novel Forty Whacks by Geoffrey Homes (Daniel Mainwaring). Director: William Clemens.

   All of the fire power in this 1940s private eye movie is on the female side: Jane Wyman, who receives top billing: four Oscar nominations, one win (Johnny Belinda, 1948); Faye Emerson: two Emmy nominations; three Oscar nominations, one Emmy nomination, one Golden Globe nomination.

   Jerome Cowan, who plays PI Sam Campbell (named Humphrey Campbell in the book), gets my nomination in a Top Five William Powell look-alike contest, but he has little else going for him but more than enough charm to get by. I regret to say that I haven’t read the book itself, unless I read it long ago when it was reprinted in paperback by Bantam as Stiffs Don’t Vote way back in 1947, so I can’t tell you one way or another about the similarities (or the lack thereof), but one thing I can tell you is that there’s plenty of plot.

   And not all that much comedy relief, I am relieved to be able to tell you, but Cy Kendall as the semi-corrupt local Sheriff Max Ambers, overweight and alternately a jovially unctuous sycophant then a resentful small town cop, nearly steals the show. Sam Campbell is supposed to be the kind of guy who girls can’t keep their eyes off of, including the girl at the hotel switchboard who can’t keep her eyes on the job, but I’ve decided to simply chalk that up as just another Hollywood fiction.

   Dead is the father of Campbell’s client’s ex-wife, with whom he’d had a vicious argument some time ago (and losing a hand by means of an axe in that particular incident).

   This is motive enough, one supposes, and according to the local law, it is, but (a) clients are supposed to be innocent, and (b) there is another matter of some secret chemical formulas that are missing as well.

   There is a pretty good attempt on the killer’s part to leave both a false trail and a delightful assortment of false clues. As I say, there’s plenty of plot, and plenty to enjoy in this movie, another highlight of which is …

   I forgot to tell you. Jane Wyman plays Robbie Vance, Sam Campbell’s very charming and very possessive assistant in this movie, and you should see the claws come out when she thinks Faye Emerson’s character is poaching on her territory. Rowrrrr …

              

[UPDATE]   Later the same day.   As soon as I can get to it, I’ll post Bill Pronzini’s review of Forty Whacks from 1001 Midnights. As I suspected, there’s only a brushing acquaintance between the book and movie, or as my family used to say when I was growing up, they’re only shirttail cousins.

SHARP SHOOTERS. Fox, 1928. George O’Brien, Lois Moran, Noah Young, Tom Dugan, William Demarest, Gwen Lee, Josef Swickard. Director: John G. Blystone. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   A modest effort in which George O’Brien dallies with a French dance-hall girl (Moran) before he leaves her, protesting eternal love, with his comrades Young and Dugan for their next port in the states.

   When Moran finds him, he’s already dallying with another dilly and not too pleased to see her. Young and Dugan, exercising what passes for a moral example, maneuver him into an unwanted marriage.

   Then, as you might suspect, anger turns to something much warmer, and the film ends on a very happy note. Demarest is the cad who tries to separate the two.

   A nice, undemanding entertainment for the start of the first full day of screenings.

JEREMIAH HEALY – Swan Dive. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1988. Pocket, pb reprint, 1989, 1991.

   In terms of name recognition, John Francis Cuddy is the Avis of Boston PI’s and Spenser is the Hertz, but the latest novel by Jeremiah Healy is all but guaranteed to be a better read than the latest Robert B. Parker, and Swan Dive is no exception.

   As a favor to a lawyer friend, Cuddy agrees to bodyguard Hanna Marsh, who has, left her sadistic husband and is seeking both a divorce and the luxurious marital home. Roy Marsh, who is not only a wife-beater and womanizer but deals cocaine on the side, tries to persuade Hanna to drop the suit by disemboweling their daughter’s cat.

   Cuddy goes outside the law to teach Roy a lesson in litigation etiquette, but a few nights later when Roy and a prostitute are murdered in a fleabag hotel, all the evidence points to Cuddy, who is menaced not only by the police but by Roy’s coke-dealing colleagues hunting for a missing shipment of their stock in trade.

   Healy carefully balances whodunit and mean-streets elements, draws vivid characters (although too many of them speak Ethnic English), gives us the usual sharply observed tour of metropolitan Boston, and even imparts some movement to Cuddy’s long-stalled relationship with the lovely assistant D.A. whom he refuses to sleep with out of loyalty to his dead wife.

   I still think The Staked Goat (1986) is the best of Healy’s four novels to date, but Swan Dive is my choice for second best.

WILLIAM DENBOW – Chandler. Belmont Tower, paperback original, 1977.

   A while ago back, Bill Crider said something in his blog about Chandler, by William Denbow. The cover says it’s “…the toughest novel since The Maltese Falcon and Farewell, My Lovely,” but it’s more like a cheap attempt to exploit the success of Joe Gores’ Hammett (1975).

   Like any responsible critic, Crider savaged the book, but I remembered buying it at a grocery store when it first came out, and I remembered thinking it wasn’t awful. And that’s all I remembered — I’m afraid I was quite drunk at the time. So I figured I’d try reading it sober and see what it was really like.

   Well it just ain’t that bad. It ain’t that good, either, but somehow it didn’t strike me as completely awful.

   For starters, I should warn potential readers (both of you) that there’s a lot of flat-footed explication here, some of the characters don’t exactly come to life on the page, and there’s a truly dreadful conversation between the fictional Raymond Chandler and the fictional Dashiell Hammett where Hammett comes up with the name ‘Philip Marlowe,’ and while I was getting through it, I seriously considered ripping my own eyes out rather than reading another line, it’s that bad. So you’ve been warned.

   On the other hand, as I say…

   Well, the plot moves along quickly, probably because it has to in a hundred-and-fifty-page paperback; the bad guys are engagingly nasty; one or two of the characters do come to life on the page; there’s some good research, and author Denbow occasionally comes up with bits like:

   I don’t care what anybody says, that’s good writing. There’s also a vivid shot of a stint in a Mexican jail, and an interview with a half-drunk widow just enough like the scene with Jessie Florian in Farewell, My Lovely to evoke it without imitating it.

   In all, what you’ve got here is a book that doesn’t merit a lot of praise, and I’m not going to lend it out to my friends, but when I finished reading it, I put it back on my shelf.

   Which I guess is something.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA: William Denbow, according to Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, was the pen name of George Stiles. Chandler is his only entry in CFIV under either name. Nothing else is known about Stiles. (He does not appear to be the British composer of such stage and screen musicals as Honk! and Peter Pan, as the latter was born in 1961).

PHILIP MacDONALD – Mystery at Friar’s Pardon. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1932. Collins Crime Club, UK, hc, 1931, as by Martin Porlock.

   Friar’s Pardon, built in the reign of King James the Second, had had five mysterious deaths of the owners of the house. In the last one, a doctor swore that the owner had died of drowning, though he was upstairs and there was no water in or near the room, and no evidence of water on his clothes or person.

   Despite these overtones of the supernatural, Mrs. Enid Lester-Greene, best-selling author of, among other titles, Sir Galahad Comes Home, Oasis Love, and Paradise for Two, buys the house and plans to occupy the room where the mysterious deaths took place as her study.

   She does this in the face of warnings by friends and family and despite reports of a sometimes mischievous and sometimes nasty poltergeist active in the house.

   All this build-up would be rather disappointing if nothing happened to Mrs. Lester-Greene, so something does. In a locked room about four minutes after having made a phone call crying for help Mrs. Lester-Greene is found dead, drowned, according to the medical examiner, though there is no water in the room.

   The solution to the locked-room aspect will probably be familiar to those who read widely in that subgenre, and the murderer may be a little too evident to the reader, but not to the police, who lean toward the supernatural explanation.

   An interesting amateur detective — the recently hired estate steward who never has a chance to do any of the work for which he is employed — the unusual murder method, a fair amount of the occult, and some amusing minor characters make this a novel well worth finding.

   And since the supernatural, or what seems the supernatural, plays a significant role in the crime, the seance to ask the murdered woman who and how is a fitting climax.

ALAN HUNTER – Gently by the Shore. Cassell / Crime Connoisseur Book, UK, hardcover, 1956. Rinehart & Co., US, hc, 1956.

   This is a book that I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. Way back, I read Gently with the Ladies (1965) but was not impressed enough to continue with the series.

   However Hunter comes from Norfolk, my home county, and this book, his second, is set in the fictional seaside resort “Starmouth,” which Hunter makes clear in a foreword is based on a real seaside resort, clearly Great Yarmouth (often just called Yarmouth), which is where I was brought up (and still frequently visit).

   Unfortunately the book was a disappointment. The story, involving the body of a foreigner found on the beach, did not involve me and Gently’s investigation (he is called in from Scotland Yard) is not very interesting.

   Worse, the depiction of Yarmouth (sorry, Starmouth) doesn’t seem particularly accurate. True, there are two piers (though they are given new names), and the pleasure beach with its wooden “scenic railway,” but the roads mentioned are fictitious, and it just didn’t seem right.

ROBERT BARNARD – A Little Local Murder. Charles Scribner’s Sons, US, hardcover, 1983. Collins Crime Club, UK, hc, 1976. US paperback reprints: Dell, March 1984, Scene of the Crime Mystery#70; Foul Play Press, 1995.

   I can’t prove there are more characters living in small British villages than elsewhere in the world, but reading mystery fiction makes me suspect so. Certainly Robert Barnard’s A Little Local Murder , recently reprinted in paperback by Dell, adds weight to that belief.

   Barnard gives us a village called “Twytching” and a devastatingly funny picture of its local residents. A British radio station has come to Twytching to do a documentary broadcast, and they let some skeletons out of the closet, bringing out the worst in people — and causing murder.

   Showing another side to his writing, Barnard makes us care quite a bit about the murder victim. This is close to Barnard at his best, and that is very good indeed.

BARTHOLOMEW GILL – McGarr on the Cliffs of Moher. Charles Scribner’s Sons, US, hardcover, 1978. Robert Hale, UK, hardcover, 1980. US paperback reprint: Penguin, 1982; reprinted as The Death of an Irish Lass: Avon, pb, 2003.

   Quite remarkably, when three young people from the same small village in County Clare, Ireland, come to New York City, they find nearly equal amounts of success. When it happens that they all return home at the same time, their troubles and their angers are brought with them, and one of them, the girl reporter after the truth about the IRA, dies, having been stabbed to death with a pitchfork at a lovely spot overlooking the sea.

   McGarr is Ireland’s top cop. Why he’s on this case from the beginning is never made clear. And with background of this sort assumed and never properly filled in, and with the failure of McGarr to investigate immediately the questions the reader wants asked (well, the ones I did), it’s no wonder that my mind wandered, having distinctly gotten the feeling that the mystery was only incidental.

   What we do have is a very Irish, very picturesque novel about the problems troubling Ireland today. As a worthy reflection on the objectives that the IRA should have (and doesn’t), you probably cannot do better. I wish that I had found it more interesting, but I am nearly ashamed to say that I did not.

[UPDATE] 10-05-09. It isn’t fair, I know, but on the basis of reading only the one book by Gill, it remains the only one I’ve read. He wrote a few of them over the years, and I’ll submit to you a list below. If I were to read another, which should it be?

       The Peter McGarr series, by Bartholomew Gill ––

1. McGarr and the Politician’s Wife (1977) aka The Death of an Irish Politician

2. McGarr and the Sienese Conspiracy (1977) aka The Death of an Irish Consul
3. McGarr and the Cliffs of Moher (1978) aka The Death of an Irish Lass

4. McGarr and the Dublin Horse Show (1979) aka The Death of an Irish Tradition
5. McGarr and the P.M. of Belgrave Square (1983)

6. McGarr and the Method of Descartes (1984)
7. McGarr and the Legacy of a Woman Scorned (1986)
8. The Death of A Joyce Scholar (1989)
9. The Death of Love (1992)
10. Death on A Cold, Wild River (1993)

11. The Death of An Ardent Bibliophile (1995)
12. The Death of An Irish Sea Wolf (1996)
13. The Death of An Irish Tinker (1997) aka Death of a Busker King
14. Death of An Irish Lover (2000)
15. Death of An Irish Sinner (2001)
16. Death in Dublin (2002)

ELYESA BAZNA, with Hans Nogly – I Was Cicero. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1962. Paperback reprint: Dell, 1964.

   In I Was Cicero Elyesa Bazna relates how he angled himself a job as valet to the British Ambassador in Turkey so he could spy for Germany in 1943 under the code name “Cicero” — employment that became famous in 1950 when L. C. Moyzisch, his German contact man, wrote Operation Cicero, and even more famous in ’52 when Joseph L. Mankiewicz filmed it as 5 Fingers.

   But it was “Cicero” who became famous, not Bazna. So I guess Bazna, toiling in obscure poverty in Turkey, looked around at everyone getting rich off his story and decided to cash in on it if he could. I Was Cicero (co-written with Hans Nogly) never found the popularity of 5 Fingers, but it’s a generally engrossing and often insightful look inside the mind of a spy.

   Bazna cherishes no illusions about himself; he admits from the start that he was a lower-class working man of minimal education, with no polish, little imagination and unprepossessing appearance, who had the ambition to take a chance when he had it, and the smarts to get out when the going got dangerous. He was also cheated outrageously by his Nazi paymasters, for whom he insists he worked in good faith.

   So where Moyzich’s Operation Cicero is mostly about Moyzisch and his growing realization that his superiors in Berlin were mad — and the moral dilemma of trying to serve his country in such times — Bazna’s I Was Cicero is just about a guy doing a job that happens to be incredibly dangerous.

   And though Bazna was stealing secrets instead of robbing banks, he admits, like Alvin Karpis, to getting hooked on the excitement of it, and the sheer visceral pleasure of having money. Like Karpis, he makes no excuses for his work; he just takes pride in a job well done.

   Afterword: When Joseph Mankiewicz filmed 5 Fingers (1952) he pretty much cut out Moyzisch’s part, added some incidental characters and a sub-plot to move things along, plus a suspense-evoking score by Bernard Herrmann to lend the whole thing a creepy mood.

   His biggest change, though, was to turn the character of working-class schlub Elyesa Bazna into the suave, classy James Mason, who played the part to sinister perfection.

   Basically, Mankiewicz turned the story inside out, and no one complains because he made a good movie out of it:

5 FINGERS. 20th Century-Fox, 1952. James Mason, Danielle Darrieux, Michael Rennie, Walter Hampden. Based on the book Operation Cicero by L. C. Moyzisch. Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz

CRIME RING. RKO Radio Pictures, 1938. Allan Lane, Frances Mercer, Clara Blandick, Inez Courtney, Bradley Page, Ben Welden, Charles Trowbridge, with (uncredited) Paul Fix, Byron Foulger, Tom Kennedy. Director: Leslie Goodwins.

   For a fellow who ended his career as the voice of a talking horse, Allan (Rocky) Lane sure had a long and varied one, beginning, believe it or not, in 1929.

   As a young lad I knew him most as the B-western movie star, and after Roy and Hoppy, I think I might have ranked him number three. I never cared all that much for Gene’s movies, but (come to think of it) Charles Starrett as the Durango Kid has got to be up there quite high as well.

   But I digress. Lane was several years from the saddle when he made this one, a crime film of little major significance, but moderately entertaining enough for me to have watched it twice, once this week and once about seven years ago, when I first recorded it from TCM.

   Lane plays a Joe Ryan, a good-looking newspaper reporter in this one. (The “good-looking” part of the role came naturally.) Aiding him in finding out who’s heading the gang of hoodlums who’re pulling the protection racket on his city’s cadre of fortune tellers and phoney mediums are two lovely ladies from a group of dancing girls he rescues from jail. (I believe they were dancing girls, stranded somehow by their manager, and while I am not sure, I refuse to believe otherwise.)

   And either though phoney mediums are also on his target list, he sets up Judy and Kitty (Frances Mercer and Inez Courtney) as a pair of phoney mediums. Once well established in the town’s circle of fortune tellers, one of whom is about to swindle a wealthy woman (and a good friend of Ryan’s) out of her considerable wealth, they’ve got the foothold they need to bust up both rackets.

   You learn several things from watching low budget crime movies like this. One is that (as the old saying goes) there is no honor among thieves. The other is that you should trust phoney mediums no farther than you can throw them, and I hope a large portion of the audiences who watched movies like this in the 1930s got the message loud and clear.

   And with the message, they got 70 minutes of entertainment to boot. It’s not nearly as entertaining today, I don’t imagine, not for most audiences, but on the other hand (and as for me), read that third paragraph again!