Does anyone still read Christopher Bush, or even remember him?

   Dean Street Press, a small English publishing house, is determined to make sure that both questions are answered Yes by setting out to reprint every single one of Bush’s detective novels, each with a superb general introduction by Curtis Evans based on information from Bush’s grandniece. The introduction is comprehensive enough that I need do no more than hit a few high spots here.

   Most print sources give the year of Bush’s birth as 1888, but according to Evans, he was born to farm-laborer parents in Norfolk, East Anglia, on Christmas Day of 1885 and given the rather odd name of Charlie Christmas Bush. Early in the 20th century he obtained a job as instructor at Wood Green School, a co-ed institution in Oxfordshire. He served in World War I, being stationed for one year in the Middle East, and returned to his schoolmaster position when the war was over, retiring in 1931 to write full-time.

   Between 1926 and 1968 he turned out a total of 63 detective novels, most of them published in the U.S. as well as England, many of them centering around a “perfect alibi” gimmick, all featuring a character named Ludovic Travers. He died at age 87, in September 1973.

   In THE PLUMLEY INHERITANCE, published in 1926 but set in 1919, Travers is a relatively minor character, an invalided war veteran serving as private secretary to wealthy financial wizard Henry Plumley, who kills himself after making a cryptic speech. The hero of this debut novel is Geoffrey Wrentham, a Bulldog Drummond type who enlists Travers in the search for Plumley’s missing money.

   In Bush’s second novel, THE PERFECT MURDER CASE (1929), Travers has come up in the world. “After an exceptionally brilliant career at Cambridge he had written that perfectly amazing Economics of a Spendthrift, a work not only stupendous in its erudition but from the charm of its style a delight in itself. Then had come World Markets, now a textbook in the schools, and finally with The Stockbroker’s Breviary a return to the whimsical style of his best known work.”

   Thanks to inherited money and huge royalties he doesn’t need to work, but he’s taken a position as head of the financial department of Durangos Limited, a firm of “expert consulting and publicity agents for the world in general….” Funnily enough, Durango House also boasts a Detective Department, headed by John Franklin, who in Bush’s next several novels is something of a co-protagonist with Travers as they team with Scotland Yard Superintendent George Wharton to solve various bizarre murders. By 1934 Durangos has vanished and Travers has morphed into a wealthy dilettante and amateur sleuth.

   I first discovered Bush sometime in the latter half of the 1950s. I was in my late teens at the time and spent most of my leisure hours haunting the shelves in the mystery section of the public library in Roselle, New Jersey. The only Bush novels the library had were the relatively recent ones, dating from the late Forties and the Fifties, all narrated by Travers who has launched his own private detective agency after World War II, all dull as dishwater. After four or five tries I gave up on both author and character. At that time I had no idea that the earliest Bush novels dated back to the late 1920s and, until the outbreak of war, had been without a first-person narrator.

   A few years later, thanks to various secondhand bookstores, I discovered some of those novels and began buying and reading them—and found them much more satisfying than the pedestrian products of the postwar years. One of them, THE CASE OF THE MISSING MINUTES (1937; US title EIGHT O’CLOCK ALIBI), struck me decades ago and still strikes me now as one of the finest detective novels of England’s Golden Age. But I’ve read many more from that period than I’ve discussed in this column, and recently I decided to re-read a few of them and see how they stood up today.

   Beginning in 1932, the titles of all the Bush novels began with THE CASE OF, but his American publishers, perhaps fearing confusion with the Perry Mason novels which had been launched in 1933, changed most of the titles, so that THE CASE OF THE THREE STRANGE FACES (1933) became THE CRANK IN THE CORNER and THE CASE OF THE 100% ALIBIS (1934) crossed the pond as THE KITCHEN CAKE MURDER. For some unknown reason the English titles remained intact on a few, including THE CASE OF THE CHINESE GONG (1935) and THE CASE OF THE TUDOR QUEEN (1938). I’ve reviewed both of those in an earlier column so let’s move on to another pair.

   In THE CASE OF THE DEAD SHEPHERD (1934; US title THE TEA TRAY MURDERS) Travers happens to be visiting Wharton in his Scotland Yard office when the walrus-mustached Superintendent invites the bespectacled amateur of crime to come along and help him investigate a murder at Woodgate Hill County School, an educational institution for boys and girls between the ages of 12 and 18, located in one of London’s outer burbs.

   History master Charles Tennant has been found dead in the Masters’ Common Room, apparently of oxalic acid poisoning, his hand clutching a huge 1910-era catalogue of chemical apparatus. (No, this is not an Ellery Queen-style dying message, and its meaning is impossible to figure out until Bush gets good and ready to tell us.) The headmaster, Mr. Twirt, is strangely absent from the school even though he had arranged a meeting with several people including a constable at four o’clock.

   His absence is soon accounted for when he’s found murdered too, in the shrubbery outside the school, apparently by a heavy sledgehammer lying nearby. “[A] miserable specimen of a man” Travers calls him, based on nothing but the look of his dead body. It quickly becomes apparent that Travers’ opinion of Twirt is shared by virtually everyone at the school:

   â€œHe was humbug personified,” says his colleague Maitland Castle. “I generally alluded to him as the bastard.” Later Castle calls his former boss “a loose talker, a liar, and generally unscrupulous” and “an egomaniac….[W]hen people ventured to protest he’d say he had a disloyal staff, and threaten them with the sack.” (Sound like anyone we see every day in the news?) He was “the most loathsome little swine I’ve ever met….[I]n his love for himself, he was the most devoted of men….It was consoling to think of Twirt as dead, it didn’t matter a damn how.” As for the women instructors, “[h]e used to bully them unmercifully.”

   All the other present and former school personnel that Travers and Wharton interview pay similar compliments to their erstwhile boss. Mr. Godman: “When Twirt got his knife into anybody, he was absolutely unscrupulous in making that person’s life hell….He was the filthiest little squirt I ever ran across.” Miss Holl: “He was the dirtiest little rat.” Mr. Furrow: “The man was a public danger….He’d driven more than one of us to the edge of a breakdown.” Mr. Lustiford: “If ever there was a poisonous swine, it was he.”

   It’s a wonder that no one refers to him as a toad, but then the English have always had a soft spot in their hearts for the inoffensive and sweetly singing little critter known to biologists as Bufo bufo. The crimes are solved not by rational deduction but rather by a series of inspired hunches, culminating in Travers’ attending an outdoor performance of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM where a few Shakespearean lines turn on the light bulb in his head, so to speak, and enable him to reach the ultimate solution.

   Twirt’s murderer is rather easily guessable, and one or two maps of the grounds around the school would have been helpful supplements to the two diagrams of the building’s innards that Bush provides. But DEAD SHEPHERD is one of the better Bushes I’ve read, and one of the most personal. His portrait of the County School and its denizens—or should I say inmates?—leaves no room for doubt as to how he would have described his schoolmaster years. In a word, hellish.

         Remember remember the fifth of November
         For gunpowder treason and plot.
         We see no reason why gunpowder treason
         Should ever be forgot.

   This is one version of the first lines of a poem dating back to around 1870. The Gunpowder Plot was a conspiracy in 1605 among a number of Catholic terrorists, the best known of whom was Guy Fawkes, to blow up the Houses of Parliament during an address to that body by the Protestant King James I. The plot failed and Fawkes was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered (although he escaped that grisly fate by falling off the scaffold and breaking his neck), and the Brits have memorialized the plot every November 5 by lighting bonfires all over the countryside.

   If you aren’t familiar with that event in English history you’ll be lost in Bush’s THE CASE OF THE BONFIRE BODY (1936; US title THE BODY IN THE BONFIRE), which begins with what turn out to be multiple coincidences and climaxes with more of the same.

   On a foggy November 4 afternoon, Travers is driving back to London after attending an auction. As he’s passing the outer suburb of Garrod’s Heath he sees a man running wildly beside the road and pulls over. Rev. Giles Ropeling, who’s also the local scoutmaster, has a gruesome story to tell. He and two scouts were rebuilding the amateurish bonfire they had prepared for Guy Fawkes Day when they discovered inside the bonfire structure a man’s body, naked and with its head and hands cut off.

   Travers hangs around until the local police arrive, then continues on to London. Later, in Wharton’s office at Scotland Yard, he shows the Superintendent what he picked up at the auction, a rare silver coin known as the Limerick Crown which is worth about £60, a small fortune back in the Thirties. On the way home he sees a beggar selling matchbooks outside the old Piccadilly underground station and gives him what he thinks is a half-crown but just might be the rare coin he’d bought earlier that day, which he can’t find when he gets home.

   Soon after he’s back in his flat he gets a phone call from Wharton, inviting him to come along and help investigate the stabbing murder of a doctor. Would you believe that all three of these incidents turn out to be interconnected?

   At the denouement Travers exposes another round-robin of coincidence: the murderer “knew the old story that if a man stands all his life in Piccadilly Circus, sooner or later the man he’s looking for will pass by under his nose.” In this case the murderer was looking for two men. Would you believe they both passed by under his nose, and that he recognized both of them even though he hadn’t seen either man for roughly ten years?

   Much of the novel is taken up by dueling speculations on the part of Travers and Wharton—speculations which have nothing in common except a lack of factual basis. But the final chapters feature more physical action than one usually finds in Golden Age detective novels, and despite the orgy of coincidences I found it an absorbing read, full of alibi gimmicks devised by Bush with fiendish delight.

   Thanks to Curtis Evans and Dean Street Press, anyone interested in English detective novels of the Golden Age can learn a great deal about Bush’s life and read all 63 of his novels. Personally, I’ve read enough for a while. No one — well, almost no one — would call Bush one of the greatest names of that noble era but he does deserve to be remembered, and at least a few of his books to be read.

POUL ANDERSON “The Martian Crown Jewels.” Short story. Freehatched Syaloch #1. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February 1958. Reprinted in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1959; in A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, Volume One, edited by Anthony Boucher (Doubleday, hardcover, 1959); and in (among others) Ellery Queen’s Murder — in Spades! (Pyramid, paperback, 1969) as “The Theft of the Martian Crown Jewels.” Collected in Call Me Joe: The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson #1. (NESFA Press, hardcover, 2009).

   If you are roughly the same age as I, and if you’ve read the story yourself, there’s a good chance that you did so in the two volume set of the Treasury edited by Anthony Boucher (see above) and given out as a premium to untold new members of the SF Book Club back the 1960s and for many years beyond. It’s also been reprinted many times; I didn’t begin to list them all.

   One reason for the story’s popularity, I think, is that there really aren’t many examples of combining traditional detective stories with hardcore SF, and this is a good one. The detective on the case is Martian private detective Freehatched Syaloch, but this seems to have been his only appearance in print. Missing are the Martian Crown Jewels, which have been on display on Earth, but on their state secret return to Mars, via Phobos, one of the planet’s moons, they have completely disappeared.

   The rocket they were on was unmanned. They were definitely loaded onto the ship on Earth, but once the ship landed on Phobos, they are nowhere to be seen. The chances of the ship having bee being boarded along the way in the vast expanses of space is impossible, but yet, they are nowhere on the ship, which is hastily taken apart, piece by piece, to be sure.

   While he wrote a few out-and-out mysteries, Poul Anderson was far better known as the writer of hundreds of both fantasy and science fiction stories, but this is no fantasy. As a combo of both mystery and SF, it’s far stronger as SF, with just enough skill on Anderson’s part to cover its somewhat weaker standing as a impossible crime puzzle. Are all the facts the reader needs to solve the theft on his or her own? The answer is yes, if you follow the basic rule that when all the possibles are eliminated, keep on looking!

I finished three books yesterday. It might have been more, but I ran out of crayons.

E. V. CUNNINGHAM – Sylvia. Alan Macklin #1. Doubleday, hardcover, 1960. Crest d789, paperback, 1965. Also published as by Howard Fast: Carol Publishing, hardcover, 1992.

SYLVIA. Paramount Pictures, 1965. Carroll Baker, George Maharis, Joanne Dru, Viveca Lindfors, Peter Lawford, Edmond O’Brien, Aldo Ray, Ann Sothern, Lloyd Bochner, Jay Novello, Nancy Kovak. Screenplay by Sydney Boehm, Howard Fast (E. V. Cunningham), based on the latter’s novel.  Directed by Gordon Douglas.

   That’s the voice of private eye Alan Macklin (if it sounds familiar both Lew Archer and Philip Marlowe say close to the same thing), who specializes in digging into people’s past, whether they want to be uncovered or not. His love is ancient history, and it makes him good at digging into the history of the people he is hired to investigate. Luckily this looks like one of the nicer cases he might be called to exercise his skills on, one of those “moderately filthy jobs”.

   His client is one Frederick Summers, a cool piece of work, wealthy, patrician, attractive, and cultured and anxious to investigate his fiancé Sylvia West— No object on earth is so rigged with weary sound than the face of a beautiful woman, and with Sylvia it was the quality of the face not the measurement of it. She did not look like anyone else, she looked like herself.

   There isn’t much to go on, either. Reasonably a man engaged to a woman might expect her to have a history, family, even distant family, but Sylvia appeared out of nowhere a year earlier, became engaged to Summers, the story she told him about who she was is a lie, and Summers wants to know the real story. He’s the scion of big money, oil money, and he wants no surprises popping up after he marries.

   She writes poetry, indifferently, she speaks Chinese, but with a child’s vocabulary, she can mimic a faint British accent, she is well read, she has a passion for roses, and she has a peculiar way of phrasing things almost as if English wasn’t her first language.

   Summers simply wants to know who she is, and he wants Macklin to do the job without ever meeting her. He doesn’t want her suspicious he is looking into her past. If she knew it would be the end of their engagement.

   If it sounds like a variation on Laura it is. Macklin is going to delve into Sylvia’s past and the more he learns, the deeper the mystery and the closer he comes to being obsessed with and then in love with the woman and the mystery.

   E. V. Cunningham was novelist Howard Fast who was a bestselling mainstream writer of books like April Morning, and wrote science fiction (under his own name) and a number of mysteries under various names, including Mirage which became a suspense film with Gregory Peck and Walter Matthau. His later books as Cunningham featured a Japanese-American policeman, but he also wrote a series of suspense novels all named after women, Sally, Penelope, Sylvia… several of which were filmed (all three of those named), and were often book club and Reader’s Digest choices.

   Sylvia was filmed with Carroll Baker in the title role, George Maharis as Macklin, and Peter Lawford as Summers. It looks pretty much like a television production, and features a cast of stars who often appeared on television as the suspects Macklin encounters while digging into Sylvia’s past. It’s not bad, but Maharis never quite registers as tough, world weary, and cynical as Macklin in the book, and Baker, a fine actress normally, is far too earthy and real for the mysterious Sylvia, who to be fair, turns out to be closer to Baker at books end as Macklin falls for the real Sylvia as opposed to the shadow Summer’s wants to possess.

   Despite how it might sound, I like the movie. It at least tries to be something more, thanks to the script by Boehm and Fast. It’s just that the structure of the movie is too much of a gimmick to sustain the promise of the novel. It becomes one of those which star will pop up next projects that too many films devolved into in that period.

   And Macklin does finally solve both the mystery of Sylvia, and because Fast, under any name, is too good not to, it is Alan Macklin who proves to be more interested in being a decent human than a detective, and pretty much stamps all over all the Archers, Marlowes, and others who put loyalty to a client above the law and all else.

   Sylvia is almost an anti-private eye novel. The ending throws the whole genre for a loop.

   It’s that ending that makes this something more than just another hard boiled private eye novel, and a good one at that. Sylvia is ultimately a novel about a private eye and not a private eye novel.

G. K. CHESTERTON – The Incredulity of Father Brown. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1926. First published in the UK by Cassell, hardcover, 1926,. Many reprint editions exist.

   As several critics have observed, the Father Brown stories are small gems to be relished sparingly. If too many are read at one time, the effect is lessened and one might even begin to pick holes in their logic. But as detective stories, they are still masterpieces, and the most lasting of all the writing Chesterton produced in his prolific career. Their influence upon later mystery writers — especially John Dickson Carr – was enormous, and Carr’s major detective character, Dr. Gideon Fell, was patterned after Chesterton himself.

   The Incredulity of Father Brown is not the best of the five Brown collections, but it is unique in that seven of its eight stories contain locked rooms or impossible crimes as a part of their plot. One of these, “The Oracle of the Dog,” is perhaps the best of all Father Brown stories, and one of the best detective short stories ever written. The stabbing death of Colonel Druce while alone in .a summerhouse whose only entrance is under constant observation, together with a dog that seems to howl at the moment of the colonel’s death, sets up a classic situation in which the impossibility of the crime is linked to a seemingly supernatural event. It was a situation to be explored often by Carr and other writers that followed, but their solutions have rarely been us ingenious as the one Chesterton offers here.

   The other six impossible-crime stories in the book are “The Arrow of Heaven,” in which an American millionaire is killed by an arrow inside a guarded room; “The Miracle of Moon Crescent,” featuring the disappearance of a man from a guarded apartment; “The Curse of the Golden Cross,” about a curse on defilers of an ancient tomb; “The Dagger with Wings,” in which a strange cloaked figure is found dead in unmarked snow; “The Doom of the Darnaways,” involving a locked-room poisoning: and “The Ghost of Gideon Wise,” wherein Father Brown is confronted with a ghostly appearance. In all, the atmosphere of the inexplicable is brilliantly realized.

   ———
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.

ROBERT BARNARD – Death of a Perfect Mother. Scribner’s, US, hardcover, 1981. Dell/Scene of the Crime #52, paperback, 1982. Published preciously in the UK as Mother’s Boys (Collins, hardcover, 1981).

   To tell the truth, as a second thought about the title might tell you, Lill Hodsden is something less than perfect as a mother, and as a wife. She is the loud, vulgar type, the victim of an over-indulgent self-love, and a haggard creature of sexual cravings and wiles – or so she’s pictured. It is no wonder her two sons are planning to kill her.

   Nor are they the only ones. Upon Lill’s untimely passing, the fatal victim of a “mugging” attack before her boys can do more than plan, the spotlight falls on the motives of at least a dozen others as well.

   A detective story of sorts does evolve as a result, but it’s a detective story steeped in large amounts of delightfully unmitigated cynicism. And contempt. as well, especially for middle-class conventions, as exemplified best by the fairly incompetent inspector who’s been placed in charge of the case.

   I don’t really know what the minimum daily requirement for well-regarded misanthropism in everyone’s diet may be, but there must be one, and in this book Barnard seems to be at odds enough with the world for all of us. Most certainly, for all its inherent honesty, this is not quite the book to be read and appreciated on Mother’s Day.

   Rating: B

JOHN S. ENDICOTT “Double Murder.” Novelette. First published in Thrilling Detective, November 1942. Reprinted in Thrilling Detective Pulp Tales, Vol. 1, edited by Jonathan W. Sweet (Brick Pickle Media, paperback/Kindle, 2019).

   Even though John S. Endicott has dozens of story credits for the detective pulp magazines, it wouldn’t be of much help for me to print a list of then all. “Endicott” was a house name, used as a cover by many authors. For what purpose, I don’t really know, but some of the authors whose stories are known to have been published under that byline are Norman Daniels. George A. McDonald and Donald Bayne Hobart.

   For almost of its run of over 20 years and 213 issues, Thrilling Detective was a second or third-rate pulp magazine, but “Double Murder,” whoever wrote it, is a solid notch better than average. The hero is a police detective named Mortimer Tracy who treats a bum to a meal but is suspended from the force when the guy turns out to be an escaped homicidal maniac who knifes two people to death after absconding with a knife from the diner. (Tracy, whose only appearance this probably is, does his best to be known only as Tracy.)

   Working on his own, Tracy is not that sure about what actually happened, and decides to investigate on his own. The rest of the story is a well-written combination of a hardboiled tale with a puzzle story. The first is to be expected in a pulp story from the early 40s; the second not as much. It makes a story all the more pleasurable when it catches you a bit off guard like this.

   The publisher, Brick Pickle Media, already has three collections such as this one, with (I am hoping) more in the works. Even if not all the stories are as good as this one, the Kindle editions are inexpensive enough that I’m quite sure I will be purchasing and downloading more of them as time goes on.

   Other stories in this first collection are: “Murder’s Mandate,” by W. T. Ballard; :Murder Trap” by Johnston McCulley; and “Shed No tears fo Me” by Frederick C. Davis.

MURDER CITY “The Critical Path.” ITV/Granada Television, 18 March 2004 (Season 1, Episode 1). Amanda Donohoe (DI Susan Alembic), Kris Marshall (DS Luke Stone), and a large ensemble cast. Guest Cast: Mac McDonald, Stephen Martin Walters. Writer: Robert Murphy. Director: Sam Miller.

   The large ensemble cast consists of a group of actors playing various members of a homicide squad in a single station based somewhere in London. I have read that many of these players take turns having leading roles as the series went on (it lasted for two seasons and a total of ten episodes), but for the most part it the the mismatched couple of Detective Inspectors Susan Alembic and Luke Stone who were most commonly paired off, as it is in “The Critical Path,” the pilot episode.

   Susan is in charge of one case, that of a missing teen-aged girl, with the assistance of a self-described psychic magnificently cast heavy set Mac McDonald, who steals the show with his innocent but craggy expressive face. That he seems to have knowledge of the case he could not really have disgusts Luke Stone no end – he being a detective who builds his cases on facts, not ESP or worse.

   Which comes into play on his own case, very much a counterpoint to Susan Alembic’s. A man is shot and killed by an arrow in an all but deserted office building in which the surveillance cameras are all working but show absolutely no sign of anyone entering or moving throughout the building. Stone has a suspect, a egotistical man who simply dares Stone to find out how he did it.

   I do not know if the contrasts in techniques and procedures will continue through the rest of the series, but I’ll be watching to find out. I enjoyed this one. It helps considerably when all of the actors are as top notch as they are in this very first episode.

   
PETER CHEYNEY – This Man Is Dangerous. Lemmy Caution #1. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1936. Coward McCann, US, hardcover, 1938. Reprinted many times. Film: Sonofilm, France, 1954, as Cet Homme Est Dangeureux.

   Peter Cheyney (1896-1951) never visited the United States in his life and knew next to nothing about Americans, but in the late 1930s he became an instant success in his native England and in Europe, especially France, a writer or fake-American hard-boiled novels. In This Man Is Dangerous and ten subsequent titles, he chronicled the adventures of rootin’-tootin’-two-gun-shootin’ Lemmy Caution, an indestructible FBI agent who downs liquor by the quart, laughs at bullets flying his way, romances every dame in sight, and blasts away at greasy ethnic-named racketeers and (in thelater novels) Nazi spies.

   Americans, of course, saw these ridiculous exercises for what they were, and only the first few were ever published here.

   Certainly no one would read Lemmy Cautions for their plots, which are uniform from book to book — all 1hc nasties double-crossing each other over the McGuffin — nor for their characterizations, which are pure comic strip. But mystery fans with a taste for lunacy may be attracted by Cheyney’s self-created idiom. Lemmy narrates his cases in first person and present tense, a wild-and-crazy stylistic smorgasbord concocted from Grade Z western films, the stories of Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon, eyeball-poppers apparently of Cheyney’s own inventor (like “He blew the bczuzu” for “He spilled the beans”), and a steady stream of British spellings and locutions.

   Nothing but quotation can convey the Cheyney flavor. From This Man ls Dangerous:

   I says good night, and I nods lo the boys. I take my hat from the hall and walk down the stairs to the street. I’m .feeling pretty good because I reckon that muscling in on this racket of Siegella’s is going to be a good thing for me, and maybe if I use my brains and keep my eyes skinned, I can still find some means of double-crossing this wop.

   From Don’t Get Me Wrong (1939):

   Me — l am prejudiced. I would rather stick around with a bad-tempered tiger than get on the wrong bias of one of these knife-thrown’ palookas. I would rather four-flush a team of wild alligators outa their lunch pail than try an’ tell a Mexican momma that I was tired of her geography an’ did not wish to play any more.

   From Your Deal, My Lovely (1941):

   Some mug by the name. of Confucius – who was a guy who was supposed to know his vegetables – once issued an edict that any time he saw a sap sittin’ around bein’ impervious to the weather an’ anything else that was goin’, an’ lookin’ like he had been hit in the kisser with a flat-iron, the said sap was suffering from woman trouble.

   Lemmy Caution became. so popular on the Continent that Eddie Constantine, an American. actor, portrayed him in a series of French films. These films were so successful that Jean Luc Godard used Constantine as Caution in his New Wave film Alphaville.

   Eventually Cheyney launched a second wave of novels, written in a spare ersatz-Hammett style and featuring Slim Callaghan, London’s toughest PI. But for those who love pure absurdity, and appreciate the wild stylistic flights of Robert Leslie Bellem and Henry Kane and Richard S. Prather, a treat of compatible dimensions is in store when they tackle the adventures of Lemmy Caution.

———
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.

ONE BODY TOO MANY. Paramount Pictures, 1944. Jack Haley, Jean Parker, Bela Lugosi, Blanche Yurka, Lyle Talbot, Douglas Fowley. Director: Frank McDonald.

   There’s no way of getting around it. One Body Too Many owes more than a lot to The Cat and the Canary, the movie with Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard that came along five years earlier. Not that that’s a bad thing, but any movie reviewer worth his salt has to point out things like this.

   In this one leading actor Jack Haley plays an insurance salesman who finally has an appointment with a wealthy recluse to sell him a $200,00 life insurance policy. Little does he know that by the time he gets there, the man is dead and his relatives, almost all of whom he had despised in his lifetime, have gathered around to hear the reading of his will.

   All they get, however, is a preliminary statement from the lawyer, which in essence says that if he is buried above ground, the estate is divided one way, but if he is buried under ground, the bequests will be distributed in the reverse order. (Don’t ask.) More, all the relatives are required to stay in the house together until such time as the burial occurs.

   When he arrives, Haley is mistaken for the PI the attorney has hired the watch the body, the PI having been met and disposed of just as he arrived. This causes a lot of happy confusion, as you might expect, before that particular matter is all straightened out. In the meantime, Haley and Jean Parker, the dead man’s favorite niece, have become attracted to each other, and he decides to stick around to give her what assistance he can.

   There are lots of hidden passages, sliding panels, trap doors, and eyes that watch rooms through the eyes of paintings on the wall, not to mention a sudden thunderstorm and lights that go on and off. The body itself seems to come and go at will, and the butler, superbly played by Bela Lugosi, acts even more suspicious than the other relatives, a greedy lot all.

   Jack Haley, I think, was underrated as a comedian, probably because he never goes as over the top as a Bob Hope, say, or heaven forbid, at least as far as this film is concerned, a Red Skelton. Haley is far more subtle here than either of those gentlemen, and he’s a huge factor in making the movie as much of a success as it is, if this is the kind of movie you like as much as I do. That said, at 75 minutes, it runs maybe 15 minutes too long. If it had been up to me, although I was only two at the time, I’d have trimmed the scene in which the coffin, with Haley inside, was tossed in the pool. Your opinion may vary.