In the last of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels adapted for U.S. television, Death of a Doxy (1966), Archie finds a rude surprise on a personal errand: ex-showgirl Isabel Kerr with a marble ashtray that presumably dented her skull. Orrie, returning from a tail job for Del Bascom’s agency—last mentioned in, I believe, Might as Well Be Dead (1956)—says he didn’t do it, so Archie agrees to keep silent; the body is found by her sister, Stella, whose husband, Barry Fleming, teaches math at Henry Hudson High School. Held as a material witness, Orrie calls attorney Nathaniel Parker, letting Archie decide how to handle it, and a summons from Wolfe extricates him from a poetry reading at Lily Rowan’s penthouse.

   Per Archie’s report, Isabel was “rescued” from showbiz by Avery Ballou, president of the Federal Holding Corporation, now paying her rent, but has set her sights on Orrie, whose baby she claims to be carrying. To derail his engagement to airline stewardess Jill Hardy, she threatens to reveal pictures, letters…and his license, lifted from his pocket, hence said errand. Wolfe says that if he did it, he’s Parker’s problem; other ’teers Saul and Fred are uncertain, but the four vote that he didn’t, and Wolfe is “constrained not only by his long association with me but also by my self-esteem. You must know that I have no affection for him; he has frequently vexed me…But if he didn’t kill [her], I intend to deliver him.”

   Archie invites a disbelieving Jill to the brownstone, putting her in the front room, whence she exits, when Cramer comes to get Wolfe’s stance and hint darkly about Isabel’s diary; Jill denied knowing of her, so Archie visits and jars Stella with the titular term for Isabel, hotly disavowed, learning only that she lived another life with her “circle.” Archie visits Orrie, not yet charged, at the City Prison, and learns of her best friend, Julie Jaquette (née Amy Jackson), a singer at the Ten Little Indians club. A business card inscribed, “There was a diary in the pink bedroom and the police have it” brings Ballou to the brownstone, where Wolfe points out that helping identify the killer might obviate divulging his name.

   He seems to have nothing to offer, except money declined by Wolfe. Julie agrees to tell all about Isabel if shown the orchids, claiming she neither knows the identity of the man paying the rent nor has met Orrie, but told the police he killed her, although she believes Stella “thought Isabel would be better off dead” and says the family physician, Theodore Gamm, was fixated on her. “I wish you well. I have the impression that your opinion of our fellow beings and their qualities is somewhat similar to mine,” Wolfe says, actually standing as she leaves, yet a list of mutual “friends” Julie supplies is hopeless, so Archie contrives to see Minna Ballou (née Minerva Chadwick), who has the only known motive.

   With a pretext of getting advice for Lily on acquiring an Irish wolfhound, on which she is an expert, he writes off the languid, forgetful Minna. They are visited by Gamm, to state that the strain endangers Stella’s life, and Ballou, to admit being blackmailed by “Milton Thales,” i.e., Greek mathematician Thales of Miletus, pointing to Barry, who presumably learned of Ballou from Stella, and killed Isabel for threatening to tell her sister what he’d done. Withholding Ballou’s name, Archie has Julie write to Barry, revealing knowledge of “Thales” and the blackmail, and guarantees full-time protection; with Archie present at the meeting, Barry agrees to return the money in two days, begging Julie not to tell Stella.

   Shots are fired, one hitting Fred’s leg, as they transport her to her hotel from the club, so Archie puts her in the South Room, above Wolfe’s, where she spins a tale in response to Cramer’s questions. Ballou had offered $50,000 to keep him out of it and—hidden from Julie—stops by, agreeing to pay her the same if she can help them do so. They summon Stella, who wants to protect Isabel’s name even more than he does his own, so on arrival, Archie takes a gun from her handbag and, as Wolfe listens in, shows her a copy of Julie’s letter; then it’s Julie’s turn in the alcove as Cramer reports that Barry has shot himself and left a note confessing to Isabel’s murder, with a falsified motive that totally omits Ballou.

   One of three episodes of NBC’s Nero Wolfe series directed by Edward Abroms, “What Happened to April” (3/20/81) was scripted by Stephen Downing, as was “Death on the Doorstep” (1/23/81). He replaces Orrie with Saul (George Wyner), nabbed seeking his effects in the titular “floater’s” apartment after Cramer (Allan Miller) calls in midtown Det. Barney Cross (Gavin Mooney); he doesn’t recognize her, but Saul—riding along on a job—does, telling Wolfe (William Conrad) she was just a friend with whom he stayed occasionally. Downing renames Ballou (as Chester Winslow; Richard Anderson), Julie (now Keen; Deborah Fallender), and Stella (as Donna MacKenzie; Laurie Heineman).

   Math professor Donna is happy to accept drowning as the tentative cause of death and close the case, but M.E. Andy Davis (Mario Roccuzzo) wants tests to explain the pupil dilation. Julie tells Archie (Lee Horsley) that Donna was ashamed of her lack of success as a singer, despite efforts by Julie’s manager, Paul Cummings (Thaao Penghlis), to find her a gig; engaged to department head John Stewart (Bob Carraway), Donna says April’s lifestyle killed their father. Next into the river is Andy, his sample missing, but colleague Dr. Lydia Proctor (Julie Carmen) took it to continue his work, and after Winslow makes his offer, revealing the blackmail, she proves that April had died from insulin poisoning.

   After making Cramer wait while he and Fritz (George Voskovec) prepare a 200-year-old recipe for yak veal—complete with yak milk flown in from the Himalayas—to be served in a week for the first time in North America, Wolfe asks him to identify the man tailing Archie and fingers Donna as “Thales.” Archie enlists Julie, who survives being injected by a masked man at the stage door before going on at Chez Petite, yet Cramer’s men not only were watching Donna, but also saw her inject herself as a ruse. Archie’s tail (Mark Russell) confirms that Paul, his employer, blackmailed Winslow to pay gambling debts, and out of love for Paul, Julie helped with the scheme to deflect suspicion toward Donna.

   Directed by co-executive producer/star Timothy Hutton, “Death of a Doxy” (4/14/02) was the two-part second-season premiere of A&E’s A Nero Wolfe Mystery, adapted by consulting producer Sharon Elizabeth Doyle. Hutton, playing Archie, sets the effective initial confrontation in Orrie’s (Trent McMullen) apartment in almost total darkness, an apt visual metaphor for his inevitable suspicion. First seen in her recurring role of Lily, as she hosts the dreaded Poet (Julian Richings)—several passages of whose hours-long “epithon” Doyle gamely supplies—Kari Matchett then assumes the part of Julie; fellow frequent repertory player George Plimpton makes his first of two appearances as Parker.

   Well and faithfully staged, the confab that Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) convenes with Saul (Conrad Dunn) and Fred (Fulvio Cecere) is an interesting character study, with none of them leaping unhesitatingly to Orrie’s defense, yet voting to help. After the visits by Jill (Janine Theriault) and Cramer (Bill Smitrovich), Archie sits outside the Flemings’ door, suspiciously asked, “Are you waiting for someone?” by a hefty, broad-shouldered woman (Araxi Arslanian), then admitted by the arriving Barry (Carlo Rota), to Stella’s (Christine Brubaker) dismay. Ballou (James Tolkan) says that non-physical contact with Isabel was restricted to reading her the poems of Rudyard Kipling, Robert Service, and Jack London.

   One of the most interesting women in the canon, Julie serenades the unimpressed Wolfe with her flamboyant rendition of “Big Man Go-go” (lyrics presumably original to Stout), and we are treated to her number with the Little Indians. Doyle eliminates a superfluous Gamm, while Mrs. Ballou (Nicky Guadagni) is portrayed with maximum eccentricity, as she strokes one of the huge wolfhounds only alluded to on the page. We briefly glimpse Isabel (Hayley Verlyn) in a flashback as Wolfe reads Barry’s confession; as in the novel, after Cramer leaves, Archie flips a coin, telling Julie, “I am deciding something that can’t be decided any other way. Tails. Stella killed her husband herself,” and Orrie weds Jill.

   After 1967, the first year since Stout’s wartime hiatus in 1945 during which no new Nero Wolfe book was published, he produced four more novels, starting with The Father Hunt (1968), a natural bookend to The Mother Hunt (1963). Hired to help Lily research a book on the father who’d “made a pile building sewers and other items and had left her enough boodle to keep a dozen penthouses,” Amy Denovo now hires Wolfe to find her own—but discreetly, aided by the grateful Ballou. As cover, he claims to be investigating the death of her mother, Elinor (a presumed alias), a three-month-old hit-and-run in which Cramer seems to have an unusual interest…especially when he learns that Wolfe has one as well.

   Echoing Death of a Doxy and “Death of a Demon” (1961), Death of a Dude (1969) is set in and around Lame Horse, Montana; back from “The Rodeo Murder” (1960) are Harvey Greve, now the boss of Lily’s Bar JR Ranch, and Mel Fox, filling in when he is jailed for shooting daughter Alma’s impregnator, St. Louis newspaper scion Philip Brodell. Wade Worthy is outlining A Stripe of the Tiger: the Life and Work of James Gilmore Rowan, and fellow guest Archie is certain but unable to prove Harvey is innocent. So, per Lily, “The mountain comes to Mohammed,” with Wolfe pulling some strings to get himself and Archie credentialed as special investigators by county attorney Thomas R. Jessup.

   Following a record four-year gap, in Please Pass the Guilt (1973), Wolfe does Vollmer a favor for his friend, crisis-intervention psychiatrist Irwin Ostrow, seeking to learn if there is any basis to a pseudonymous patient’s Lady Macbeth syndrome. Quickly identified as Kenneth Meer, he is chief assistant to Amory Browning of the Continental Air Network; fellow VP Peter J. Odell, Browning’s rival to succeed retiring president Cass R. Abbott, was blown to bits while opening a drawer in Browning’s office. The obvious question is whether Meer really does have metaphoric blood on his hands…but was the bomb meant for Browning, reputedly dallying with secretary Helen Lugos, or truly targeted at Ordell?

   Guilt and A Family Affair (1975) feature both developments with recurring characters and Stout’s customary carelessness about names; the former’s climax reveals that a suspect’s sister is married to Wolfe’s bête noire, Lt. J.M. (hitherto George) Rowcliff. In the latter, Rusterman’s waiter Pierre Ducos arrives, afraid for his life and insisting on seeing Wolfe, so Archie stashes him for the night in the South Room, where he is killed by a bomb in an aluminum cigar tube he’d presumably discovered in his coat pocket. The last name of the maítre d’hôtel who ran Rusterman’s under Wolfe’s trusteeship, Felix, is variously Martin in The Black Mountain (1954), Courbet in “Poison à la Carte” (1960), and finally Mauer.

   Pierre served at the dinner hosted by Harvey H. Bassett, president of National Electronics Industries—shot shortly afterward—to address how Watergate “debased…the equipment for electronic recording.” We learn that Wolfe has “hankered…to have an effective hand in the disclosure of the malfeasance of Richard Nixon,” yet per the title (“since there was no client and no prospect of a fee, this was all in the family”), the truth is closer to home. This time, Orrie is guilty of killing Pierre and his daughter, who attempted blackmail, and Bassett, whom he cuckolded; the jig up, he uses a bomb on himself on Wolfe’s doorstep.

   A month after that was published, Rex Stout passed away at the age of 88 on October 27, 1975, in Danbury, Connecticut, where my lovely bride and I first set up housekeeping in 1988. That brings us to the end of the long road down which I’d started some two years ago with my post (2/13/23)—the first of 24, by my count—on Fer-de-Lance (1934) and its screen incarnation, Meet Nero Wolfe (1936). I’ve hugely enjoyed revisiting the series, my memories of first devouring the books in 1981 back in high school (where I also met said lovely bride) totally undiminished, and hope you’ve enjoyed getting (re)acquainted with what rank among the greatest characters and partnerships in all of detective fiction.

      Editions cited:

Death of a Doxy: Bantam (1967)
The Father Hunt: Bantam (1969)
Death of a Dude: Bantam (1970)
Please Pass the Guilt, A Family Affair, in Seven Complete Nero Wolfe Novels: Avenel (1983)

      Online sources:

      [link above mislabeled “Might as Well Be Dead”]

RUSSELL HOBAN – Turtle Diary. Jonathan Cape. UK,hardcover, 1975. Random House, US, hardcover, 1976. Reprinted many times. Film: Rank, UK, 1985, with Glenda Jackson & Ben Kingsley.

   So it’s a sweet and sad little caper novel.

   William’s in his mid-forties. He’s a bookstore clerk. Used to be an ad man. Used to have a wife and kids. But that’s all gone now. He lives alone in a London rooming house. He’s aimless and alone.

   Naera’s also in her forties. She’s written a series of popular children’s books about personified small animals, living in a hovel, drinking tea, daintily and quaint. She also is alone, and suffering writer’s block.

   During their solitary wanderings, they visit the zoo. In the reptile building three full grown sea turtles share a small tank.

   There’s some genetic homing device within the soul of a sea turtle, beckoning them to breed on some faraway island to which they’ve never been. But somehow, they know the way. And will go there, danger and distance be damned.

   To Naera and William it suddenly seems of the utmost importance that these sea turtles be released to the sea to achieve their predestined teleology.

   Naera and WIlliam finally meet when Naera seeks an obscure sea turtle book at William’s bookstore. And they covertly hatch a plan to kidnap the sea turtles and release them to the sea.

   Which they do. Releasing the sea turtles at the simulated Cornish fishing village of Polperro, formerly a real fishing village, now surviving on tourism and verisimilitude.

   And then they part, William and Naera, released back into the world. With no preprogrammed teleology. To map their way on their own. Without a compass.

   A minor classic.

WYOMING OUTLAW. Republic Pictures, 1939. John Wayne, Ray Corrigan, Raymond Hatton, Donald Barry, Pamela Blake. Directed by George Sherman.

   The Three Mesquiteers ride again in George Sherman’s Wyoming Outlaw, a surprisingly effective entry in the Republic Pictures series about the three Old West adventurers. John Wayne, just on the cusp of stardom, portrays Stony Brook, the titular leader of the outfit. Ray Corrigan reprises the role of Tucson Smith, while Raymond Hatton plays the third Mesquiteer, Rusty Joslin.

   When the three adventure heroes drive their cattle through dustbowl country, they stumble upon a small town where Joe Balsinger (LeRoy Mason), the local corrupt government boss, is doling out jobs for campaign contributions. Worse still, he’s extremely vindictive and has driven the Parker family into poverty.

   This explains why tempestuous, politically radical Will Parker (Don Barry) has been illegally poaching animals on government land and even went so far as to steal one of the Mesquiteers’s cattle! Circumstances get even rougher and Parker   eventually goes on the lam, hiding out from the sheriff and the Cavalry alike. He becomes the titular Wyoming outlaw with a rifle and a willingness to kill.

   Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. An comparatively early John Wayne movie from Republic? Must be clunky and dated. Let me assure you: it isn’t. Although the story is simple, it’s delivered in a sophisticated manner that isn’t dumbed down for mass consumption or a young audience. There are no silly songs or goofy humor here. With fistfights aplenty and Wayne’s rugged charm, this somewhat downbeat programmer is hard not to like.

RICHARD S. PRATHER – The Amber Effect.  Shell Scott #40. Tor, hardcover, 1986; paperback, 1987.

   The ingredients of today’s private eye fiction are brooding and corruption, mangled relationships and a soiled world. But there was a time when, if you picked up a PI book by one particular writer you’d be grabbed by plot situations wild and woolly as a bighorn ram, by characters straight off the nut tree — including a bevy of nubile bubbleheads sans clothes or sexual inhibitions –and by narrative and dialogue eccentric enough to pop the eyeballs.

   For this particular writer the private eye novel wasn’t a Film Noir in prose, it was a hoot, no more believable or substantial than a comic book but outrageously, bawdily funny while it lasted. His name was Richard S. Prather and his principal character was Shell Scott, a big ex-Marine PI with the white hair cut Camp Lejuene style and the angular eyebrows and the Cad convertible and the tropical fish.

   Scott was the first major private eye whose adventures were published as paperback originals, and roughly 40,000,000 copies of those escapades were sold between his debut in 1950 and the mid-1970s. Then, for reasons too complicated to go into here, Prather shut down his word factory. The good news is that production has started up again — this time in hardcover — and that none of his inspired looniness has been lost.

   Prather plots defy summary. Suffice it to say that The Amber Effect kicks off with Scott finding the doorway of his L.A. apartment graced by an undraped lovely who is both the winner of the Miss Naked California contest and the target of a gaggle of hit men, including a human clam, an ex-Rams linebacker, and a half-senile gun-for-hire known in the trade as One Shot.

   In time Scott finds the connection between the lady and a weirdo scientist who, before he was murdered, invented something potentially worth billions. All trails lead to a pair of unforgettable wacked-out action scenes where. without a gun and assisted only by several three-dimensional holograms of himself, Scott takes on the entire cast of bad guys.

   The Amber Effect isn’t way out there in the stratosphere with alternative classics like Prather’s 1964 The Trojan Hearse, but — insane story-line, juvenile double entendres, Fifties mammary fixations, and all — -it’s a tour de farce of the sort no one in the world but this particular writer could have turned out, and it’s wonderful to have him back at work.

A CANTERBURY TALE. Archers, UK, 1944. Eric Portman, Sheila Sim, Dennis Price, and John Sweet. Written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

   A true original, made by England’s premier filmmakers at the height of their genius. A wartime film infused with… well… not so much with patriotism as with a deeply-felt but unspoken love of a country and its people. Plus a hint of romance and a dollop of detection, played to perfection by a cast that radiates charm but never oozes with it.

   What mystery there is concerns a small-town villain known only as The Glue Man, who stalks young girls out late at night, sneaks up on them in the dark (this was the time of blitzkrieg and blackouts) and pours glue in their hair.

   Sounds like very little to hang a movie on, and in fact the filmmakers tip the audience off early on as to the identity of the sticky miscreant. And while the cast goes through the motions of detection and pursuit, the movie itself dawdles innocently on the quiet charm of simple folk rooted to the soil or uprooted by War.

   The principal roles are wonderfully played, But Powell and Pressburger take as much care over characters whose hour upon the screen is brief indeed — to wonderful effect!

   From a pugnacious Station Man unseen in the dark, to a beefy, pipe-puffing sergeant at a lecture, a garage owner, an organist at a cathedral…. We watch the stars play out the story against a background of characters who seem to be stars of their own movies in some alternative cinematic universe.

   This is, in short, a film you must not miss— Yes You: that guy out there peering at the screen. I’m talking to you, Buddy. Find this movie and watch it!
   

DICK FRANCIS – Odds Against. Michael Joseph, UK, hardcover, 1965. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1965. Berkley X-1370, US, paperback, 1967. Reprinted many times since.

   In most of his books, Dick Francis uses an ordinary man (usually connected with the racing world) as his protagonist, caught up in events that are so overwhelming and out of control that he must make heroic efforts to sort them out. But in Odds Against, Sid Halley has a job as a detective — the obvious choice for a tough man to right the world’s wrongs.

   He’s been doing the work for two years, and when he’s shot (on page one of the story), he realizes that a bullet in the guts is his first step to liberation from being of “no use to anyone, least of all himself.” He was a champion steeplechase jockey, that’s what makes him tough. A racing accident lost him the use of his hand and self-respect simultaneously.

   The action breaks from the starting gate and blasts over the hurdles of intrigue, menace, and crime. Halley is cadged by his shrewd and loving father-in-law into confronting Howard Kraye, “a full-blown, powerful, dangerous, big time crook.”

   On the track he encounters murder, mayhem, plastic bombs, and torture. But he endures, in some part to regain his self respect, and in some part because he believes in racing, the sport, and in putting it right. A fascinating chase through an empty racecourse defies the villain. In the end, despite his tragedy, Sid Halley sees himself as a detective and as a man.

   Dick Francis was so taken with the characters in this book that he went on to use them in a television series, The Racing Game (shown on Public Broadcasting). A second Sid Halley novel, Whip Hand, won the British Gold Dagger A ward in 1979 and another Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America.

———
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.
   

       The Sid Halley series —

   by Dick Francis …

Odds Against (1965)
Whip Hand (1979)
Come to Grief (1995)
Under Orders (2006)

   by Felix Francis …

Refusal (2013)
Hands Down (2022)

FINGER MAN. Allied Artists, 1955. Frank Lovejoy, Forrest Tucker, Peggie Castle, Timothy Carey. Director: Harold D. Schuster.

   Frank Lovejoy stars in Finger Man, a decidedly average 1950s crime film, about a career criminal who gets a chance to go straight – with a catch. After getting nabbed by law enforcement, Casey Martin (Lovejoy) is given a choice: either serve life in prison or collaborate with the Treasury Department to nail bootlegger and syndicate leader Dutch Becker (Forrest Tucker). After seeing what Becker’s goods — presumably heroin — have done to his very own sister, Casey decides that he’ll take the deal and work to bring down Dutch.

   Unfortunately, the movie is slow to get going. It takes a while for the premise of the film to come clearly into focus. Fortunately, however, things do get moving with the introduction of Peggy Castle as Gladys Baker, a former “employee” of Dutch’s who is now Casey’s love interest and Timothy Carey as Lou Terpe, Dutch’s sadistic enforcer. Both characters play a pivotal role in the plot. After the sociopathic Terpe (Carey) kills Gladys (Castle) at the behest of Dutch, all bets are off. Casey no longer wants to bring down Dutch for the cops. He is out for blood.

   As far as the cinematography, there’s nothing especially noir about it. In fact, this black and white movie often feels visually flat. Surely some more style could have been injected into the film to give it more of a shadowy look?

   All told, Finger Man is a gritty little crime film that tells a fairly basic story about a man at the crossroads of his life. It’s got some good parts and solid acting, but it’s not a “must see” by any means. There’s nothing particularly new under the sun here.
   

WORLDS OF FANTASY #1, 1968. Editor: Lester del Rey, Cover art by Jack Gaughan. Overall rating: ***½.

JOHN JAKES “Mirror of Wizardry.” Brak the Barbarian. Novelette. Brak the Barbarian is of course based on Conan, but that doesn’t make his adventures any less enjoyable. This time Brak’s escape through the mountains is hindered by a wizard hunting the girl he has befriended. (4)

BILL WARREN “Death in a Lonely Place.” A vampire who preys on prostitutes shows that he has a heart. (4)

ROBERT SILVERBERG “As Is.” Novelette. A computer salesman buys a car with a mysteriously sealed trunk. Easy to read, but not believable, with a miserable ending. (3)

MACK REYNOLDS “What the Vintners Buy.” Trust Reynolds to put a lecture on hallucinations into a fantasy. (2)

LIN CARTER & L. SPRAGUE de CAMP “Conan and the Cenotaph.” Novelette. According to [Webster], a cenotaph is a monument for someone whose body is buried elsewhere. The one Conan is lured to is magnetic, and the home of a slime-monster. (4)

PARIS FLAMMONDE “After Armageddon.” Suppose the last man in the world had happened to have found the Fountain of Youth. (3)

ROBERT HOSKINS “The Man Who Liked.” Before the bombs fell, Death was a happy person. (1)

ROBERT E. HOWARD “Delenda Est…” Hannibal’s ghost comes to life to help a barbarian’s attack on Rome. Obsessed with historical background. (2)

ROBERT LORY “However.” Novelette. Hamper the However’s trip from Balik to Overnon by way of [grath (?)] is hampered by his lack of magical powers, However, if people believe that one has these powers, what difference can it make? (3)

DICK FRANCIS – Blood Sport. Michael Joseph, UK, hardcover, 1967. Harper & Row, US, hardcover. 1968. Berkley, US, paperback, 1969. Reprinted many times since.

   From the winning world of British steeplechasing (where he was Champion Jockey in 1954), Dick Francis moved effortlessly into crime fiction with his first novel, Dead Cert, in 1962, and continues to be a front-runner. He has written twenty-some excellent thrillers full of old-fashioned moral polarity with strains of humor. These “adventure stories” (as Francis calls them) have amazing plots of clever evilness and feature nonrecurring heroes familiar with the racing game.

   Flawed, uninvolved, and soulless, each central character finds the value of vulnerability and returns to the land of the living through courage and love. As a central theme, it can be compared to that of the works of Ross Macdonald. As critic John Leonard said, “Not to read Dick Francis because you don’t like horses is like not reading Dostoevsky because you don’t like God.”

   In Blood Sport, death lurks on a simple Sunday sail on the Thames. An American visitor is almost drowned, and his rescuer is convinced that it wasn’t simply an accident. Gene Hawkins, the rescuer and hero, is an English civil servant, a “screener” who checks employees in secret-sensitive government jobs, His training permits him to spot details that make “accidents” phony, and his knowledge of guns and listening devices comes in handy.

   The rescued man asks for help in locating a stolen horse that has just been bought for a huge price. Hawkins is relieved to use his vacation time to hunt for missing horses, because he is despondent, filled with a “fat black slug of depression.” This is the only part of his character that doesn’t ring true-after all, it’s only a failed love affair.

   The pace picks up, and the scene changes to the U.S.A. From the farms of Kentucky, the trail is followed to Jackson, Wyoming. Along the way. Hawkins gets people together for some psychological reconditioning and exposes a bloodline scam as the scene shifts to Santa Barbara, Las Vegas, and Kingman, Arizona. The U.S. tour is fast moving, and Francis docs not dwell on local-color background, especially not to make any points. He just gives the graphic, journalistic details of a place that push the story along.

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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.

JUROR #2. Nicholas Hoult, Zoey Deutch, Megan Mieduch, Toni Collette, J. K. Simmons, Kiefer Sutherland. Director: Clint Eastwood.

   Juror #2 starts with a premise and then runs with it to the very end. Magazine writer and recovering alcoholic Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is called for jury duty in Savannah, Georgia. It doesn’t take him long, however, to realize that the defendant, former drug dealer James Michael Sythe (Gabriel Basso), is most certainly innocent, and that he himself was the accidental perpetrator of the crime in question.

   The state’s official version of events is that Sythe, after a public fight with his girlfriend (Francesca Eastwood), followed her down a dark, rainy two lane highway, bashed her head in, and dumped her in a ditch. What the state doesn’t know is that Kemp, juror number two, accidentally killed the victim that same night, thinking that he had hit a deer with his vehicle.

   That’s the set-up. What follows for the next ninety minutes or so is a taut courtroom drama and thriller that doesn’t waste a minute of your time. The viewer gets to witness not only the jury deliberations, with Kemp trying to bend the jury to his will, but also the contest between an ambitious prosecutor (Toni Collette) and the overworked public defender (Chris Messina), tasked with a thankless job.

   Filling out the cast are J.K. Simmons as a juror who turns out to be a retired police detective from the Midwest who has doubts about the case, Kiefer Sutherland as a lawyer who is also Kemp’s Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, and Zoey Deutch as Kemp’s pregnant wife who wants to believe that her husband is a good man. All three are excellent in their roles. One only wishes Simmons had a more prominent role. His character simply disappears after a while.

   Overall, a solid, comparatively apolitical work by director Clint Eastwood that doesn’t remotely dumb things down for a mass audience. It’s a mature, sophisticated film that is able to both appeal to both one’s emotions and intellect without being pretentious or preachy. It’s not flashy and there’s not a lot of action, but it’s worth your time.