EDDIE MULLER – Shadow Boxer.   Scribner, hardcover; 1st printing, January 2003.

   There’s only one thing wrong with this throwback to the 1940s era of sports-based pulp fiction. Well, make it two. While Billy Nichols, who tells the story, is a crack San Francisco sportswriter nicknamed Mr. Boxing, there is not much in this book about either boxers or the fight game.

   What it’s really about is the continuation of the murder case begun in Muller’s first novel, The Distance. It may be that the man Nichols brought to justice in the early book is not entirely guilty. The dead woman was the wife of boxer Hack Escalante — and not so incidentally, she was the also the one Nichols was having a secret affair with.

   It’s a complicated tale, and if this is a new trend in detective fiction, it ought to stop right now. Without having read the first book, it’s impossible to know exactly who is who, and why or why not, and to whom. As detective fiction, it’s spinach, and I hate spinach.

   As a writer of historical fiction, Muller has San Francisco and its seedy (and not-so-seedy) environs down cold. As a writer of hard-boiled pulp fiction, Muller certainly gives you your full money’s worth. Or even double, considering Nichols’ single paragraph longer-than-one-page rant on pages 152-153. Boiled down, it’s a long improvised version, with several choruses, of the old adage, “No good deed ever goes unpunished.”

   This impromptu interjection is a work of noirish perfection, verging on Raymond Chandler territory, but the story that surrounds it is only better than average. What’s missing is an essential if not absolutely vital ingredient, a self-contained coherency. It’s too bad. It could have been a contender.

[UPDATE] 08-31-09.   I’ve always meant to, but so far I haven’t done the obvious thing and start over by reading the two books about Billy Nichols in the right order. But I haven’t — in fact, I’ve yet to read the first one — and my review is based on the fact that Shadow Boxer is the only one I have.

   Wondering, though, why this book never came out in paperback, and why there was never another book in the Billy Nichols series, I found out why on Eddie Muller’s website, in which he says, in part:

THE MUMMY’S TOMB. Universal, 1942. Lon Chaney Jr., Dick Foran, John Hubbard, Elyse Knox, George Zucco. Director: Harold Young.

THE MUMMY’S GHOST.. Universal, 1944. Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, Robert Lowery, Ramsay Ames, Barton MacLane, George Zucco. Director: Reginald Le Borg.

THE MUMMY’S CURSE.. Universal, 1944. Lon Chaney Jr., Peter Coe, Virginia Christine, Kay Harding, Dennis Moore. Director: Leslie Goodwins.

   The Mummy (1932; reviewed by Steve way back here) is one of the great romantic films, and The Mummy’s Hand (1940) is a snappy little programmer, but the three Mummy films with Lon Chaney Jr. are the plodding, proletarian work-horses of the Monster Movie.

   Slow-moving, badly-cast and sloppily-written, they have always struck me as examples of what a day-to-day Grind a Monster’s life must be. Kharis stumbles along playing out his curse with no joy, no sign of satisfaction, preying on the Old and Slow-Moving like he was stamping out Widgets on an assembly line, which is a very apt description of the way these films were produced.

   Ben Pivar, the producer responsible for the series, was by some accounts a man of legendary Bad Taste, a filmmaker whose idea of Art was a story that could incorporate as much stock footage and as few sets as possible.

   Indeed, his Mummy movies seem to be made up mostly of clips from earlier films, like youngsters devouring their parents.

   Yet the Kharis films taken as a whole, convey a theme of surprising perversity: alone among Movie Monsters, Kharis fulfills his destiny. He destroys the defilers of Ananka’s tomb and twice reclaims his reincarnated Princess.

   Yet, like the hero of a David Goodis novel, he never succeeds on his own terms. Each film ends with him joylessly sinking back into the grimy milieu from whence he came at the start, no wiser, no happier, and no longer loved.

   Which is a pretty odd message to come from a low-brow producer like Pivar. Just a pity the films themselves are so damn boring.

MICHAEL INNES – Death by Water.

Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1968. Paperback reprints include: Berkley, 1969; Perennial, 1991. UK title: Appleby at Allington: Victor Gollancz, hc, 1968.

   Michael Innes, from whom I have come to expect great things, did not enchant me with a recent non-series mystery, Money from Holme. But Sir John Appleby returns in the present book, and the Innes magic is still operating.

   Sir John seems to have retired to the country from Scotland Yard, and should be (as he recalls) “engaged in moving decently from bedtime to bedtime, from lunch to dinner.” One of these dinners is as a guest of Owain Allington, who has put some recently obtained wealth to the task of reacquiring the ancestral mansion.

   The evening sees the discovery of the first of a series of bodies, all apparently accidentally deceased. Appleby, against his own inclinations and contrary to his own reasoning, finds himself drawn into the affair and smelling an unpleasant odor therein, and after a false start or two tracks the problem to its solution.

   Death by Water is peopled with some wonderful comic characters, and others not so comic. Innes clearly enjoys playing with words, and fortunately his enjoyment is richly shared by the reader.

   Do try Death by Water — it’s a pleasure.

THE DARKENING TRAIL. Mutual Film Corp. 1915. William S. Hart, Enid Markey, George Fisher, Nona Thomas, Louise Glaum. William S. Hart, director; Thomas H. Ince, producer; written by C. Gardner Sullivan. Shown at Cinevent 41, Columbus OH, May 2009.

    William S. Hart, in his third feature film, plays Yukon Ed, hopelessly in love with Ruby McGraw (Enid Markey), owner of the local saloon, who has refused his offer of marriage dozens of times.

    When Jack Sturgess (George Fisher), fleeing from his father’s wrath after he has wronged and abandoned a woman he refuses to marry, arrives in the small Alaskan town, Ruby, seeing in him the knight in shining armor she’s been waiting for, takes up with him.

    Yukon Ed, willing to give the newcomer a chance, but ever watchful for any wrong done to Ruby, is there when Ruby, gravely ill, is waiting for the doctor who will never come because Jack, after promising to bring him, detours for a dalliance with a dancehall girl.

    The intertitle “Requiem of the Rain” announces the grim conclusion and captures the dark poetry of this striking film.

LIONEL DAVIDSON – The Rose of Tibet. Victor Gollancz, UK, hardcover, 1962; Penguin, UK, pb, 1964. Harper, US, hardcover, 1962. Reprint US paperback editions include: Avon, 1965; Perennial, 1982; St. Martin’s, 1996.

   In a recent posting (The Spy Who Parodied, Part 3) I reviewed Agent 8 3/4 based on the novel Night of Wenceslas by Lionel Davidson.

   Davidson, a British thriller writer, wrote only a handful of critically acclaimed novels, mostly in the spy story tradition. Among them were some of the best spy/adventure novels of the 20th century, and among those the outstanding work is The Rose of Tibet.

   Davidson himself is a character in The Rose of Tibet, appearing in the framing sequence as he tries to put together the story of Charles Houston (pronounced ?Uston), a British journalist who traveled to remote Tibet at the time of the Chinese incursion there in the years after WW II. It is Houston’s story Davidson tells, and quite a story it proves to be.

   It is difficult to discuss this book without mentioning other writers, Try to imagine James Hilton’s Lost Horizon written with the canny political eye of Eric Ambler, or H. Rider Haggard as re-imagined by Ian Fleming, perhaps a Harold Lamb novel written by Graham Greene (incidentally I mention Fleming and Greene with good reasons, both were admirers of Davidson and highly praised this book, as did Daphne du Maurier who asked in print if he was not the new Rider Haggard), John LeCarre in collaboration with Charles Crichton and T. E. B. Clarke, who penned many of the classic Ealing comedies.

    The Rose of Tibet is all of that. It is a grand adventure, by turns very funny, very sexy, erotic, exotic, angry, honest , and above all compelling. Charles Houston, the most unlikely of heroes, proves to be the only hope of a remote Tibetan nation, one of those lost civilizations that writers like Hilton, Haggard, Burroughs, and others used to dot all over the wild places of the planet.

   Davidson gives us a highly believable one, but no less enticing or exotic for that. The early scenes in this savage and exotic Eden, a sort of sensual paradise, are among the best such scenes you will encounter in fiction. It is strange yet familiar, exotic, erotic, yet completely believable. It is a splendidly evocative world.

   Houston arrives in this remote, gentle, strangely savage, and doomed place on the eve of the Chinese invasion of Tibet, and as the PRC presses forward, a reluctant Houston finds himself chosen for the most delicate and dangerous mission of his life — to smuggle out a small boy and a young woman from this small Shangri La. The boy, a living god and the hope of the small nation, and the girl the repository of all that is erotic and beautiful, the rose of Tibet.

   Their journey, accompanied by a small mountain pony, across the roof of the world one step ahead of the PRC, is the bulk of the book’s narrative. Treachery, his unworldly companions, the narrow roads and deadly mountain paths, murderous and unpredictable weather, a deadly encounter with an Asian brown bear, and the ultimate fate of Houston’s mission make up the rest of the novel, which ends with a delightful twist I won’t even begin to suggest after one of the most harrowing journeys in literature.

   Literate and yet capable of spinning a tale with the best, Davidson’s works are a treasure trove for readers willing to delve into them. Night of Wenceslas, The Menorah Men (aka The Long Way to Shiloh) about a Raiders of the Ark kind of quest for the True Menorah.

   And then there’s The Sun Chemist, Making Good Again, The Chelsea Murders, Kolymsky Heights, Smith’s Gazelle (a young adult novel), Under Plum Lake, and three more young adult novels as by David Line are among some of the best and most delightful books of the era.

   Not a very great output for a period from about 1962 to 1998, but each and every one of them is a gem of great beauty.

   Davidson deserves to be read, and almost certainly once you have read him you will reread him.

   Among these gems The Rose of Tibet stands out. It is a perfect book of its kind, and I don’t really think you are likely to forget it once you have read it. Unlike many thrillers, it is one you will return to and enjoy time after time.

   The Rose of Tibet belongs on that very small shelf of favorites that are equal in your heart as in your head, a curious mix of epic adventure, international intrigue, wild romance, Ealing comedy, and satiric commentary.

   It is all that and more — little wonder Ian Fleming, Daphne Du Maurier, and Graham Greene fell under its powerful spell. I can honestly say that over the years everyone I have introduced the book to has ended up adding it to their list of favorite books of all time. It is certainly one of mine.

   And don’t worry, I couldn’t possibly oversell it. It really is that good.

T. T. FLYNN – Ride to Glory: A Western Quartet. Five Star, hardcover; 1st edition; 2000. Reprint paperback: Leisure, March 2004.

   I’ll list the titles of the four novelettes and short novels it contains, and that’s all you’ll need to have a perfect picture of what this book’s all about: “Ghost Guns for Gold”, “Half Interest in Hell”, “The Gun Wolf” and “Ride to Glory.”

   Action, that is, pure pistol-packing action. First appearing in the pages of old pulp fiction magazines such as Star Western (1935), Dime Western (1945 & 1949), and Western Story Magazine (1938), this marks the debut of these tales in hardcover.

   And whenever there’s room to breathe between the rounds of gunfire, there’s always a chance that romance will work its way into the story, one way or another. According to the creed of the day, or so it’s implied — if not outright stated — it’s the love of good women that gives men the courage to risk their necks against the crooked ranchers, conniving Mexican despots, and other assorted outlaws found inhabiting these pages, and by extension, the entire American west.

   If these stories succeed, it’s by sheer story-telling power, not by the grace or elegance of the writing. While T. T. Flynn was the contemporary of such western writers such as Max Brand and Zane Grey, it’s plain to see that he simply wasn’t in their league, at least not in terms of word-slinging ability.

   But if you can sit back, turn off your critical eye, and allow these yarns of yesteryear to simply take over, what you’ll be in for is four installments of the ride of your life — and I ask you: What could be better than that?

[UPDATE] 08-29-09.   I’ve recently had to drop out of a western fiction apa called Owlhoots — a pure lack of time — but in the ten or so issues I did for it, there are some articles and reviews I did that I’ll gradually be reprinting here on the Mystery*File blog.

   I regret to say that at the moment, I don’t have access to the book itself, and I seem to have made no record of it at the time. Right now, except for one story, I can’t tell you which one came from which magazine. When I come across the rest of the information, I’ll add it later:

       Half-Interest in Hell, Dime Western Magazine, July 1945.

      

[UPDATE #2]   Later the same day. Walker Martin has come to my rescue. See comment #1.

FAY GRISSOM STANLEY – Murder Leaves a Ring.

Dell 662; paperback reprint; no date stated, but circa 1953. Cover art: James Meese. Hardcover edition: Rinehart & Co., 1950. Hardcover reprint: Unicorn Mystery Book Club, 4-in-1 edition, January 1951.

   It’s difficult to make out from the image I found, but if I’m reading what’s in the small circle on the cover of the hardcover edition correctly, this book was the winner of a “Mary Roberts Rinehart Mystery Contest.”

   It was also one of only two mystery novels Fay Grissom Stanley, 1925-1990, wrote. The other was a paperback original from Popular Library in 1975, a gothic romance titled Portrait in Jigsaw, as by Fay Grissom.

   There is a short online autobiographical sketch by her daughter, Diane Stanley, an illustrator and author herself, in which she talks about her mother (follow the link), and mentions other books she wrote. Her mother was taken ill by tuberculosis for several years, which may explain the long gap between the two books, and perhaps why there were only two.

   Murder Leaves a Ring is pure detective fiction, and the cover (as you will have seen for yourself) falls into the “body in a bathtub” subgenre. It’s told by the primary protagonist, Katheryn Chapin, a would-be mystery writer herself, as we learn on page one: she’s working on the manuscript of a novel called “Murder on Monday,” just before climbing into a tub, where she first must clean the ring left behind by one of her two roommates, a showgirl named Iris McIvers.

   Later on, during a party of fellow Manhattanites, many in the world of the theater, it is Iris’s body who’s found in the very same tub, fully clothed, but with a stocking knotted tightly around her neck. It is learned soon after that Iris had been doing a brisk business of shakedown if not out-and-out blackmail – among other secrets that Katy and Bonnie, the other roommate, had not known about her.

   One of Iris’s recent meaner tricks was that of stealing Katy’s fiancé from her, a writer of plays named Mark, and it is her that Katy tries to protect when questioned by the police in the form of Captain Steele, who castigates her quite vigorously on pages 76-77 for both her lack of observation (significant, he suggests, for someone who hopes to write mysteries) and/or her lack of cooperation (for which at least the reader knows the reason).

   There is a long laundry list of suspects in Murder Leaves a Ring – all to the good! – all with varying degrees of conflicting interests, a map of the three girls’ apartment even before page one – and it’s needed! – and an elaborate trap for a suspected killer toward the end. And if I were to mention several twists in the tale along the way, I hope you will forget that I said that, as the pleasure’s in the reading, and not in the reading about it.

   The opening chapters do not flow as well as they should – it was not surprising, after the fact, to learn that this was the author’s first book – but as the story picks up some momentum, so does Miss Chapin’s narrative, which becomes noticeably smoother and easier as her encounters with the police and the killer grow more and more serious.

   Captain Steele is something of a conundrum, married to his job and seemingly hard-boiled through and through, but by the end he seems to have thawed out considerably, even to the extent of becoming perceptibly human.

   If he and Miss Chapin had ever been in a second mystery novel together – and there is a hint of something in the air at the end, and perhaps with young Dr. Harrison, too – I’d snatch it up in an instant.

THE PHANTOM EMPIRE. Mascot, 1935. [12-episode serial] Gene Autry … Gene Autry, Frankie Darro, Betsy King Ross, Dorothy Christy, Wheeler Oakman, Charles K. French, Warner Richmond, J. Frank Glendon, Smiley Burnette. Directors: Otto Brower & B. Reeves Eason.

   Viewing [and reviewing] Batman led on to The Phantom Empire, but I couldn’t start that till I read James Churchward’s 1931 opus The Lost Continent of Mu.

   Churchward’s book is non-fiction, of a sort, dealing with his discovery of ancient clay tablets in Burma telling of an advanced civilization somewhere to the East, which he compares to inscriptions from the Mayans and Aztecs locating the cradle of civilization somewhere to the West.

   He then takes similarities in oriental picture-writing, Egyptian hieroglyphics and pre-Columbian artifacts from the New World, and concludes that there must have been an advanced society somewhere in the Pacific that spread its culture over the world, then sank into the sea, which he calls Murania, or Mu for short.

   Well, I don’t know about you, but for me that’s kind of a stretch. Churchward spends the book supporting this theory, but I keep running into phrases like, “geologists are wrong…,” “Egyptologists are wrong…,” “archaegeologists are wrong…” till I wonder how he got a monopoly on Truth.

   And as his story gets more and more embroidered, with details about the advanced civilization, its people (Who, he insists, must have been white.) and the aftermath of its fall, this sounds less like Science and more like the ramblings of Siegel and Schuster.

   Closing the book, I had to wonder why anyone ever took it seriously in the first place, but apparently someone did, and still does, because the book and its sequels keep getting reprinted.

   All the reference books say The Phantom Empire was clearly based on Churchward’s work, but I couldn’t see it myself. Empire deals with Gene Autry’s efforts to save Radio Ranch from unscrupulous land-grabbers trying to get to a secret uranium deposit on the property, and the people of Lemuria who inhabit an advanced underground civilization (also called Mu for short) which can be reached only by an elevator which opens up somewhere near the uranium deposits on Radio Ranch.

   Yeah, it’s kind of Out There, particularly with Gene Autry constantly trying to escape from the bad guys in time to get back to the ranch and do his weekly mortgage-paying radio show, but I found it no harder to ingest than Churchward’s hoke, and considerably faster-moving.

   Mascot serials were never believable, but they were somehow always fun, and the underground kingdom, with its robots, death rays and sexy queen offer a lively time for anyone who can descend to their level. As for The Lost Continent of Mu, I have to say that for a book about an advanced civilization sinking into the sea, there are some awfully slow spots.

    

   Previously on this blog:

      Part I:   Where the Spies Are (1966).

      Part II.  The Liquidator (1965).

AGENT 8 3/4.   J. Arthur Rank, 1964. Originally released in the UK as Hot Enough for June. Dirk Bogarde, Sylvia Koscina, Leo McKern, Robert Morley, Roger Delgado, John LeMessurier. Based on the novel Night of Wenceslas by Lionel Davidson. Director: Ralph Thomas.

   The earliest of the Bond spoofs and still one of the best, this bright comedy has a reluctant Bogarde drafted into service in the British Secret Service for a dangerous mission in Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia, where he finds himself seduced, pursued, and never quite sure what he is doing there.

   Unlike the other films I’ve been discussing, this was not a series novel, but one of only a handful written by Lionel Davidson, one of the most critically praised spy novelists, whose books The Rose of Tibet, The Menorah Men, The Sun Chemist, and Kolymsky Heights are among the best thrillers of the 20th century. Davidson is not prolific, but enthusiasts know that every one he pens is a jewel.

   Bogarde is always worth watching when allowed to play to his humorous side, and between the gorgeous Koscina and the droll black humor delivered by McKern and Morley, this film succeeds as a bright and witty charmer. It is a little short on action and perhaps relies more on comedy than the others reviewed here, but it is also well worth finding and viewing.

   This is far more comedy than the others, and the satirical barbs are somewhat sharper. In some ways it is closer to an Ealing comedy or even The Mouse That Roared than a Bond spoof, though there are certainly references to Bond beyond the title.

   Davidson’s novel is largely a place for the script to take off from, but some of the humor is still derived from it, and it is hard not to see Bogarde as the personable hero who’s in over his head…

      In conclusion:

   The spy film craze went from the sublime to the ridiculous, and too soon even the Bond films turned to cannibalizing themselves, but it also produced some bright, funny, attractive films like this and the others reviewed here. At their best they hold up better than many more serious films from the era, and they often feature lesser known players or character actors like McKern, Morley, and others in outstanding performances.

   No one is claiming them as great art, but they are a snapshot of an era, and even today, with Bond still around and now competing with Jason Bourne and Mission Impossible franchises and the Austin Powers films (inspired by the American Bond spoof, Our Man Flint), they are a reminder that everything old really is new again — eventually.

       

STANLEY CASSON – Murder by Burial. Hamish Hamilton, UK, hardcover, 1938. Paperback reprint: Penguin, UK, 1943. US hardcover edition: Harper & Brothers, 1938.

   Col. Theodore Cackett, R.E., D.S.O., has formed in Kynchester the Roman Guard for the Regeneration of Britain and is now planning [to] erect a monument to the memory of the Emperor Claudius in recognition of the civilizing influence that the Romans brought to the Isles.

   On the other hand, Canon Burbery knows that the early Britons were a great deal more civilized than commonly supposed. It is his plan to begin an archaeological dig to prove that Kynchester was the stronghold of King Cunobeline (or Cymbeline, as Shakespeare would have it). He hopes that the citizens of the city will take the claims in behalf of the Romans less seriously after they have been shown their heritage.

   A rivalry of this sort is bound to create bad feelings. Add to it the Canon’s blackballing of Cackett at the learned Augusteum Club and Cackett’s becoming involved in a plot to arm the landowners of England to defend against a possible revolution, and anything can happen.

   In this case a death occurs. Following a fortuitous investigation by a professional archaeologist, questions are raised whether the death was Indeed “an act of God.”

   Well written, quite literate, amusing in parts, informative on both archaeology and numismatics. The dialogue sometimes seems more lecture than conversation, but the lectures are interesting and thus tolerable.

   Fascinating also is Miss Boddick’s expatiation on Holmes’s view of the country as a scene of crime: “You Londoners will never realise the depths of depravity of the countryside Why, the English countryside is one congealed mass of intrigue and petty spite. That is why almost every murder story is placed in a country town or in some remote village, where all the natural passions have free play.”

       Bio-Bibliographic Data:

   This is the only mystery that the author wrote. From an online website comes the following information:

   Stanley Casson (1889-1944) was a multi-talented art scholar and army officer who read Classical Archaeology at Oxford, served as Assistant Director of the British School at Athens, Special Lecturer in Art at Bristol University, and was Director of British Academy Excavations at Constantinople in 1928-1929. His publications include numerous articles and books on the subject of Classical Antiquities.