You can’t go wrong with any of these. One of them, in fact is among my top five favorite movies of all time, The Narrow Margin. If you haven’t seen it, don’t miss it if at all possible.

6:00 AM They Live by Night (1949)
After an unjust prison sentence, a young innocent gets mixed-up with hardened criminals and a violent escape. Cast: Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donnell, Howard da Silva. Dir: Nicholas Ray. BW-96 mins, TV-PG, CC

7:45 AM Mystery Street (1950)
Criminal pathologists try to crack a case with nothing but the victim’s bones to go on. Cast: Ricardo Montalban, Sally Forrest, Elsa Lanchester. Dir: John Sturges. BW-93 mins, TV-PG, CC

9:30 AM Tension (1950)
A man who had planned to murder his wife’s lover becomes the prime suspect when somebody beats him to it. Cast: Richard Basehart, Audrey Totter, Barry Sullivan. Dir: John Berry. BW-91 mins, TV-PG, CC

11:15 AM Dial 1119 (1950)
A killer holds the customers at a bar hostage. Cast: Marshall Thompson, Virginia Field, Sam Levene. Dir: Gerald Mayer. BW-75 mins, TV-G

12:45 PM Cause For Alarm (1951)
A woman fights to intercept a letter in which her husband tries to prove her guilty of murder. Cast: Loretta Young, Barry Sullivan, Bruce Cowling. Dir: Tay Garnett. BW-74 mins, TV-PG, CC

2:00 PM No Questions Asked (1951)
A young lawyer’s primrose path to success gets him framed for murder. Cast: Barry Sullivan, George Murphy, Arlene Dahl. Dir: Harold F. Kress. BW-81 mins, TV-PG

3:30 PM Narrow Margin, The (1952)
A tough cop meets his match when he has to guard a gangster’s moll on a tense train ride. Cast: Charles McGraw, Marie Windsor, Jacqueline White. Dir: Richard Fleischer. BW-72 mins, TV-PG, CC

4:45 PM While The City Sleeps (1956)
Reporters compete to catch a serial killer. Cast: Dana Andrews, Ida Lupino, Vincent Price. Dir: Fritz Lang. BW-100 mins, TV-PG, CC

6:30 PM Nowhere To Go (1958)
A burglar on the run holes up with an innocent English girl. Cast: George Nader, Maggie Smith, Bernard Lee. Dir: Seth Holt. BW-87 mins, TV-G, Letterbox Format

8:00 PM Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)
A prizefighter who died before his time is reincarnated as a tycoon with a murderous wife. Cast: Robert Montgomery, Evelyn Keyes, Claude Rains. Dir: Alexander Hall. BW-94 mins, TV-G, CC

9:45 PM Angel On My Shoulder (1946)
The Devil sends a murdered gangster to Earth as a respected judge. Cast: Paul Muni, Anne Baxter, Claude Rains. Dir: Archie Mayo. BW-101 mins, TV-PG, CC

    Another grouping of authors’ entries from Part 34 of the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.

   Notable here is the addition of mystery writer Celia Fremlin, who died last June, and the untangling of the books credited to “John Mowbray,” the latter being the pen name used by two different writers quite independently of each other, as you’ll see below:

FREMLIN, CELIA (MARGARET). 1914-2009. Add year of death. Born in Kingsbury, Middlesex; died in Bournemouth, 16 June 2009. Sister of nuclear physicist John H. Fremlin. Married twice, first to Elia Goller in 1942 (died 1968), three children (all of whom predeceased her), then to Leslie Minchin in 1985 (died 1999). Author of 19 books of psychological suspense listed in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, three of them story collections. Her first novel, The Hours Before Dawn (Gollancz, 1958; Lippincott, 1959), reviewed here on this blog, was the winner of the 1960 MWA Edgar for Best First Novel of the Year.

HADATH, (JOHN EDWARD) GUNBY. 1871-1954. Born in Lincolnshire, England. Pseudonyms: John Mowbray, Shepherd Pearson, qq.v. Add biographical information: Born in Owersby, Lincolnshire, England. Journalist, correspondent for provincial papers, then London correspondent for Italian press. Under his own name, the author of more than 100 books for boys involving English public school life and wartime adventure, plus many stories appearing in periodicals such as Chums, Happy Mag., and The Captain. Other pen names used for his short fiction: James Duncan, Felix O’Grady, Shepperd Pearson. One of his boys’ adventure books is shown below (S. W. Partridge & Co., circa 1905).

MOWBRAY, JOHN. Pseudonym of (John Edward) Gunby Hadath, 1871-1954, q.v. Other pseudonym: Shepherd Pearson, q.v. Under the Mowbray byline, the author of five titles included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, three of them likely to be boys’ adventure stories. See below. This is now the author’s complete entry under this byline.
      The Frontier Mystery. Collins, UK, hc, 1940.
      The Megeve Mystery. Collins, UK, hc, 1941. Setting: France.
      On Secret Service. Collins, UK, hc, 1939. Setting: Europe. Probably intended for younger readers.
      The Radio Mystery. Collins, UK, hc, 1941. Probably intended for younger readers.

      -The Way of the Weasel. Partridge, UK, hc, 1922. Setting: England; Academia. Probably intended for younger readers.

MOWBRAY, JOHN. Pseudonym of John (George) Haslette Vahey, 1881-1938, q.v. Other pseudonyms: Henrietta Clandon, John Haslette, Anthony Lang, Vernon Loder & Walter Proudfoot. Under this pen name, the author of one crime thriller to be included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. Delete the other five titles in his previous entry; these should be attributed to (John Edward) Gunby Hadath, also writing as John Mowbray. See above. Below is now the author’s complete entry under this byline.
      Call the Yard. Skeffington, UK, hc, 1931. Setting: England.

PEARSON, SHEPHERD. Pseudonym of (John Edward) Gunby Hadath, 1871-1954, q.v. Other pseudonym: John Mowbray, q.v. Under this pen name, the author of one crime thriller included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. See below.
      The Second Count. Gifford, UK, hc, 1944.

VAHEY, JOHN (GEORGE) HASLETTE. 1881-1938 Pseudonym: John Mowbray, q.v. Other pseudonyms: Henrietta Clandon, John Haslette, Anthony Lang, Vernon Loder & Walter Proudfoot. Born in Belfast; educated at Foyle College, Londonderry and Hanover. Under his own name, the author of 14 crime novels included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, four of them marginally. Also criminous are a large number of books written under each of the pen names above.

   Rufus King’s last works were a series of short stories set among the rich in Miami and its environs; many of them were published by Ellery Queen in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

   Although King’s use of Miami has been compared to John D. MacDonald, it also recalls the Florida stories of Philip Wylie. In addition to setting, other Wylie-like features include an emphasis on botany and Florida plant life, amateur detectives who discover sinister conspiracies, and the use of international intrigue.

   Three of the more interesting of these stories are discussed below.

    “Malice in Wonderland” (EQMM, October 1957) contains some of King’s most magical atmosphere and mise-en-scéne. The tale is written as a sort of sinister fairy tale, full of events that can be given a supernatural interpretation.

   King used rich and brilliant color in these Miami stories, especially in his descriptions of deserts. In “Malice”, we see exotic ice cream dishes that are described in full color. By the way, “Malice in Wonderland” was originally the title of a 1940 novel by Nicholas Blake. When Ellery Queen first published King’s short story in EQMM, he thought the phrase would make a good title for the story, and he used it, with the permission of both Blake and King.

    “The Seeds of Murder” (EQMM, August 1959) is an impossible crime tale. There are clues that allow one to deduce who the killer is, at least after you have figured out how the crime was done.

   This is the paradigmatic detective situation in such Ellery Queen works as The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935). This story seems even closer to Queen than to Van Dine. It focuses on the sort of rich, eccentric, multi-talented extended family of adults that often pops up in Queen tales.

    “The Faces of Danger” (EQMM, November 1960) is written in a partly summarized style. This style recalls, to a degree, that used by Ellery Queen in his Q.B.I. stories and parts of his Calendar of Crime.

   However, King’s approach is less condensed than Queen’s. Queen used it to tell a whole story in less than ten pages, while King’s novella sprawls over forty. Both writers like to use the approach to invoke, and partially lampoon, the clichés of storytelling.

   In both, there is a certain sophistication of tone, a suggestion of sophisticated satire on conventional plotting. There is the feeling in both writers in which a game is being played by the author. In this game, the author tries to come up with the “best” response by the characters to each new situation.

   For example, a body might be discovered, and the next step in the story is tell what the characters are going to do. Sometimes this response is original, sometimes conventional. The more conventional responses are presented to the reader with irony, using a summarized statement to invoke the chief elements of the familiar situation.

   Less familiar responses are sometimes contrasted with the clichés of fiction, to underline the originality of the situation. So a description will contain both its true content, and its opposite.

   The whole effect is of a game the author is playing with the reader, challenging them to guess how the characters will behave in any new situation, suggesting a duel of wits between the writer and the reader over the most original response to any event in the plot.

   This is in keeping with, but further extends, the basic active reading approach of most mystery fiction. In most mystery tales, the reader is not supposed to sit back, and just let the events of the tale wash passively over them.

   Instead, the reader is challenged to deduce the true solution of the mystery at every turn. The reader, in turn, constantly monitors the author’s plot for logical consistency, and surprise. This sort of active readership is applied to every event in the mystery plot.

   In Queen and King, this approach is extended not just to the mystery puzzle plot itself, but every fictional development in the story: the characters’ attitudes, responses to events, social conditions and backgrounds, police procedure, the romance subplot, details of the social milieu such as butlers and mansions, in short, every aspect of the story. This allows active readership as a universal response to the tale.

   King always likes verbal fireworks in his tales; such an approach gives him many opportunities in that direction. It allows for an exuberant writing style, one filled with elaborate turns of phrase and much wit.

RUFUS KING – Holiday Homicide. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1940. Paperback reprint: Dell #22, mapback edition, 1943.

   Preceded by Murder Masks Miami (1939) the last Lt. Valcour novel, Rufus King’s Holiday Homicide introduces two new sleuths, high priced private detective Cotton Moon, and his secretary-assistant-narrator, Bert Stanley.

   The two are direct clones of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, and the novel as a whole is a pastiche of Rex Stout. Moon is a pleasant character; instead of raising orchids, like Wolfe, he collects rare nuts. The novel might be best read with a copy of Edwin A. Menninger’s Edible Nuts of the World (1977) on hand: a fun book, by the way. This zany hobby is typical of the book’s tongue in cheek approach: nothing is ever completely serious here.

   King’s pastiche of Archie Godwin is especially good. King has caught Archie’s bemused, intelligent, slightly smart-alecky tone of narration very closely.

   King has combined this tone with his own vivid writing style, to make a very interesting synthesis. The descriptions include King’s interest in rich concoctions, such as food, perfumes, and fluids.

   King also uses his typical examination of conventional story telling ideas here, constantly turning over stock phrases and situations, commenting on them all the while — this is an early use of a technique that will reach its apogee in King’s short story “The Faces of Danger” (1960).

   Since Archie is also a somewhat sardonic observer of the human scene, King can fuse his own meta-narrative approach with Archie’s “common man” take on the well to do world about him. Bert is a bit more bitchy than Archie usually is, in keeping with the campier tone of King’s fiction.

   While Holiday Homicide is well written, it has problems as a puzzle plot. There is no fair play: Moon identifies the killer because he discovers the killer’s fingerprints at a crime scene.

   This clue is not shared with the reader, and there is no logical way for the reader to deduce who the killer is. Nor is the mystery’s solution especially clever. It does succeed in making a logical story out of the book’s scramble of events and clues, and this shows a bit of ingenuity.

   Holiday Homicide has a similar status as Murder by Latitude in King’s career. Both books are 1) genuine whodunits, not suspense novels; 2) lack fair play in their solutions; 3) are well written, with special gifts of prose style and verbal adroitness; 4) show good storytelling.

WALTZ OF THE TOREADORS. Independent Artists, 1962. Peter Sellers, Dany Robin, Margaret Leighton, John Fraser, Cyril Cusack. Based on the play The Waltz of the Toreadors by Jean Anouilh. Director: John Guillermin.

   I don’t know if I’m alone in the US in this regard or not, but looking back through the IMDB credits for Peter Sellers, the first movie that he was in that I remember seeing was The Pink Panther, which came out in 1963. (I’ve never seen Lolita, which was also a 1962 release, so it looks as though I’m wrong. It’s a certainty that there were a few people who came in ahead of me.)

   Then came Dr. Strangelove (1964), which I loved with a passion and could not figure out why none of my college housemates agreed with me. Sellers had been around a while before Waltz of the Toreadors, of course, but I seldom watched British films back then, mostly because I needed subtitles to understand them.

   And yes, of course I’m exaggerating, but you know what I mean. They recently had an all-day extravaganza of Peter Sellers movies on Turner Classic Movies, and I taped most of them, telling myself that I couldn’t go wrong. Since I don’t lie to myself — well, hardly ever — I was right.

   In Waltz of the Toreadors he plays a retired British officer around the end of the 19th century who has a problem. His wife being a nagging invalid, he has nothing to look forward to in that regard, but even worse, the true love of his life (the beautiful Dany Robin), with whom he has had an unconsummated love affair for 17 years, is coming from France, where he first met her, to take, she believes, her rightful place in his life.

   The first half of this movie is then a comedy, with much mugging and horseplay and missed connections, male-female wise, or maybe that should be the first two-thirds. But quietly, it seems, and without much fanfare, the tone of the tale becomes more and more serious, and anyone who expected a happy (or happier) Hollywood ending in which all sides reconcile and make up and find true love — I think they’re going to be disappointed. Unmet expectations, and all that.

   Given that the ending is at least somewhat more serious than the rest of the movie, then I think that there at least two problems. Why on earth, one might ask, does Ghislaine (Dany Robin) waste 17 years of her life pining for this general who is hardly worth crossing the street for, one realizes in retrospect, that retrospect being confirmed by the second problem, that General Leo Fitzjohn (that’s Sellers) has no intention of changing his view of the world (and his place in it, including his incredibly womanizing ways), will not change and does not change? Not a budge, not an inch, even when given a truckload of opportunities to do so.

   English 101. How did this person’s character change during the course of this book? (Answer. Not at all. He’s as solid as brick.) I hated English 101, so maybe (an understatement) I’m still exaggerating.

   On the other hand — and of course, there always is one — that’s the point, I believe, right there in the nut of the shell. What could be sadder than someone who doesn’t change? Or maybe the key word here is “can’t.”

RUFUS KING – Design in Evil. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1942. Reprint paperbacks: Thriller Novel Classic #21, 1943; Popular Library #124, paperback, 1948.

   Design in Evil is the first of King’s non-series thrillers, after he abandoned the formal detective novel with Holiday Homicide (1940).

   The early chapters (1-13) are well written, with King showing in detail the trap that confronts his heroine. These chapters show King’s feel for sailing material, taking place on a sea going yacht.

   Unfortunately, the book as a whole is flat. Design in Evil is in the tradition of the “innocent young woman forced into a new identity” school. It follows such pioneering works as Helen McCloy’s The Dance of Death (1938), and Anthony Gilbert’s The Woman in Red (1941), the latter being made into a superb film directed by Joseph H. Lewis, My Name is Julia Ross (1945).

   The story is never plausible, unless everyone is in on this bizarre plot; yet King wants only one person to be guilty, and everyone else to be an innocent dupe. The later sections of the book contain a murder mystery. However, there are only two serious suspects, and the mystery is never developed into an interesting or even very elaborate plot.

   King indicates that Joseph Conrad is one of his hero’s favorite authors (Chapter 15). It certainly makes sense that King admires Conrad: both were sailors in real life, and wrote frequently about the sea, and both men wrote rich descriptive prose.

   King is of two minds about psychiatry, then becoming unfortunately fashionable in the media. Psychiatry is treated as a serious science, and yet the older psychiatrist is the book is shown as a completely mistaken dupe. This is at least more skeptical than the religious reverence with which psychiatry was usually held in this era.

Editorial Comment: You should go back, of course, and compare and contrast Mike’s review of this book with that of Bill Deeck’s, which I posted here earlier this morning.

   If you follow the link in the paragraph above, you’ll find a long section of Mike’s website devoted to reviews and analysis of Rufus King’s work. At the risk of overdoing a good thing, I’m planning on posting one or two more of those reviews on this blog. Look for them tomorrow, if all goes well.

  HELLO, FRISCO, HELLO. 20th Century Fox, 1943, Alice Faye, John Payne, Jack Oakie, Lynn Bari, Laird Cregar, June Havoc, Ward Bond. Dances staged by Val Raset and Hermes Pan; musical sequences supervised by Fanchon. “You’ll Never Know,” music and lyrics by Mack Gordon & Harry Warren. Director: H. Bruce Humberstone. Shown at Cinevent 41, Columbus OH, May 2009.

    “You’ll Never Know” won the Oscar for best song and the movie was Fox’s biggest hit of 1943. John Payne is Johnny Cornell, hot-shot small-time musical promoter, whose greatest asset is his long-suffering girlfriend and talented performer Trudy Evans (Alice Faye), with Dan Daley (Jack Oakie) and Beulah Clancy (June Havoc) filling out the quartet of long-time friends and fellow vaudevillians whose stories are the core of this sumptuous, plushy musical.

    Lynn Bari is the society dame who can offer Johnny everything he’s always wanted, wealth and position, everything but love, and without giving away any more of the plot, I’m sure you can tell how the film will end.

    I always liked Alice Faye, but I was never a great fan of the Fox musicals, which failed to satisfy me in the way the Astaire-Rogers and MGM musicals did.

    The movie made me wish that I had not missed the screening earlier that day of Nice Girl? (Universal, 1941), with a cast that included Deanna Durbin, Franchot Tone, Walter Brennan, Robert Stack, Robert Benchley, and Helen Broderick, a comedy with music that, by all the accounts I heard of it, had the charm and light touch that Hello, Frisco, Hello, for all its top-flight production values and talented cast, showed no trace of.

    And if you say that I’m comparing apples and oranges, you’re probably right. Let’s just say that I prefer the pungent taste of apples to the pulpy texture of oranges.

RUFUS KING – Malice in Wonderland. Doubleday Crime Club, 1958. Queen’s Quorum 117.

   Rufus King had two distinct “careers” in crime fiction. The first was as a writer of traditional Golden Age whodunits, beginning in 1927 and continuing until 1951. He produced twenty-two novels during this period, most of which are entertaining despite some stilted prose; they are marked by clever plotting, interesting backgrounds, and touches of gentle humor.

   King’s best work, however, is his short fiction, particularly that written during his second “career” in the 1950s and 1960s when he abandoned novels altogether and concentrated on stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

   Malice in Wonderland, the second of King’s four collections, was so highly regarded by the Mssrs. Queen that they included it in their Supplement Number One (1951-59) to the Queen’s Quorum.

   The eight stories here expose the violence and corruption of the fictional town of Halcyon, Florida — after the fashion, if not in the style, of John D. MacDonald. Queen said that in these stories King “pungently, almost maliciously impale[s] … the Gold Coast, that fabulous neon strip between Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale, with its cross section of natives and tourists, of greedy heirs and retired gangsters (alive and dead).”

   The best story in the collection, “The Body in the Pool,” traces the strange connection between the state of Florida’s electrocution of murderer Saul (“Stripe-Pants”) McSager and the selection of Mrs. Warburton Waverly as the county’s “Most Civic-Minded Woman of the Year.”

   Also excellent are the title story, in which a girl tries to decode a message from a long-dead playmate; and the long novelette “Let Her Kill Herself,” in which an unpleasant woman makes an extremely disturbing discovery.

   Some of King’s early short stories are collected in Diagnosis: Murder (1941). Two other collections of stories about Halcyon and the Florida Gold Coast, both of which rank with Malice in Wonderland, are The Steps to Murder (1960) and The Faces of Danger (1964).

         ———
   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.

RUFUS KING – Murder by Latitude. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1930. Reprint paperback: Popular Library #246, 1950. (Cover art: Rudolph Belarski.)

    Rufus King’s sole series character was a New York police detective, Lieutenant Valcour. A proper gentleman detective, Valcour’ s only unusual characteristic is that he is a French Canadian.

    Murder by Latitude is one of Valcour’ s more exotic cases. The Eastern Bay is a cheap passenger-carrying freighter making a Bermuda-to-Halifax run. Lieutenant Valcour boards the ship with the news that one of the passengers is a murderer.

    One of the victims is dead of strangulation, the other is in a New York City hospital; police are hoping this victim will recover to give a description of the killer. The murderer sabotages radio communication so police can not send the description of the guilty party, but Valcour has clues that indicate the murderer is aboard the Eastern Bay and he starts his investigation on his own among the bizarre menage of passengers.

    As the degrees of latitude sail by, the murderer strikes again, leaving such cryptic clues as a lump of wax, a stolen thimble, and a pair of scissors. Valcour achieves some impressive feats of detection to tie the clues to the culprit in classic fashion.

    Another recommended Valcour sea mystery is the fine Murder on the Yacht (1932). Valcour made an impressive debut with Murder by the Clock (1929) and went on to detective fame in a half-dozen novels, concluding with Murder Masks Miami (1939).

    Notable among King’s nonseries novels are A Variety of Weapons (1943), The Case of the Dowager’s Etchings (1944), and Museum Piece No. 13 (1946).

         ———
   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.

  RUFUS KING – Design in Evil. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1942. Reprint paperbacks: Thriller Novel Classic #21, 1943; Popular Library #124, paperback, 1948.

   Dr. Crowninshield, an authority in the psychiatric area who has reached an age and a level of experience that allows him to abandon doubt and uncertainty, has concluded, after no examination whatsoever, that Miriam Lake is really Jennifer Murcheson, wealthy and very peculiar even when normal, who mysteriously left her ranch In California and is now suffering from schizophrenia.

   Crowninshield’s assistant, Dr. Stone, is also convinced that Lake is Murcheson, but he is certain she is faking the alleged illness.

   By some dastardly plotting and a little arson, the Murcheson family — uncle, aunt, and cousin — get Lake aboard their yacht en route to the Caribbean. Ostensibly the purpose is to effect a cure. Lake, however, begins to realize that it is someone’s design to murder her at sea in order to gain the real Murcheson’s fortune.

   With the “scientists” aboard the vessel having their minds made up, her claims and attempts at proof are ignored. Thus her situation is both frustrating and perilous.

   The more I read of Rufus King’s novels, the more I am impressed by their general high level. His plotting is usually first class, the atmosphere of menace is almost always well done, his suspects are often few, something appreciated by this feeble-minded reader, and the clues are generally fair.

   While he has a weakness for polysyllables, so do I. Characterization sometimes is a bit weak, but King often makes up for it by his humor. In this novel, Lake’s amusing comments in the face of her obvious danger keep the novel from becoming just another damsel-in-distress type.