DONALD WOLLHEIM, Editor, with Arthur W. Saha – The 1989 Annual World’s Best SF. Daw #783, paperback original; 1st printing, June 1989. Cover art by Jim Burns.

   #1. DAVID BRIN “The Giving Plague.” Short story. Interzone, Spring 1988. Also reprinted in Full Spectrum 2, edited by Lou Aronica et al. (Doubleday, hardcover, 1989). First collected in Otherness (Bantam, paperback, 1994). Nominated for a Hugo (2nd place).

   I may have missed one, but I believe that David Brin has won three Hugos and one Nebula award. The complete list of his nominations and other wins fills two or three pages of my computer screen on the ISFDb website. And yet, and I’m not sure why, this is the first work of his I’ve ever read, long or short.

   I read most of the science fiction magazines in the 60 and 70s, but by the time the 80s came along, I kept buying them, but I just wasn’t reading them any more. The same was true for novels — not only Brin’s — and even more so. I don’t think I’ll ever catch up on all the novels, but by taking my “Best of” anthologies out of storage and making my way through them, my hope is that I can finally read what was considered the Best at the time.

   I found “The Giving Plague” to be a strange one. It’s filled with to the top with scientific information that since it deals primarily with viruses and the way they spread, most of the diagrams and other details went way over my head, zip zip zip. But not only does Brin know his science, he also has the ability to explain it at a high enough level that it all makes sense to the reader, or seems to.

   And enough so that when he hypotheses a new kind of virus, one that’s called ALAS for short (Acquired Lavish Altruism Syndrome) and which propagates itself through blood transfusions by making people enjoy giving, it goes down awfully easily. This is what I think you’d agree is a Brand New Idea, and the story Brin builds from here is an awfully good one, well told.

   I don’t think I’ll be reading any of Brin’s novels right away — I’m too far behind for any hope of that — but his shorter work? Yes, indeed. I was impressed by this one.

      —

Note:   In the same way that I’ve been working my way through Lester del Rey’s 1972 Best of the Year anthology, I thought I’d do a parallel investigation of what Donald Wollheim thought were the best stories of 1989, and see what a difference 17 years make. So far one thing sticks out, a minor one and maybe only important to me, but I’m a lot less familiar with the authors, sometimes even their names.

OPERATION FINALE. MGM, 2018. Oscar Isaac, Ben Kingsley, Mélanie Laurent, Lior Raz, Nick Kroll. Director: Chris Weitz.

   The Israeli hunt for, and capture of, Adolf Eichmann is a story that has been told numerous times in memoirs, historical accounts, and in visual media including in Operation Eichmann (1961) reviewed here. Although the television movie The House on Garibaldi Street (1979) directed by Peter Collinson remains, to my mind, the standard by which other cinematic representations of this particular intelligence mission should be measured, Operation Finale (2018) is nevertheless a compelling and suspenseful feature film that merits a look for those interested in the topic.

   Perhaps the strongest aspect this recent theatrical release has going for it is the presence of British actor Ben Kingsley. Unlike Collinson’s TV movie, in which Eichmann was presented as a man far too banal to be truly evil, in Operation Finale, Kingsley gives the Nazi architect of the Final Solution a sociopathic charm and a sense of malice. He’s a master manipulator, a natural predator capable of finding his opponent’s weakness and exploiting it.

   In the film it’s Mossad operative Peter Malkin (Oscar Isaac) who ends up as Eichmann’s psychological sparring partner. After the Mossad successfully kidnaps Eichmann and holds him in a safe house in Argentina, they learn that El Al will agree to fly Eichmann out of the country and to Israel only if the SS officer voluntarily signs a form agreeing to stand trial in Jerusalem.

   This, rather than the actual operation to identify and to kidnap Eichmann, is the core of the film’s emotional and narrative thrust. Malkin, haunted by his sister’s death during the Holocaust, is tasked with the goal of coaxing an agreement to stand trial out of Eichmann, a man who would rather die at the hands of his captors than be forced into a courtroom, let alone one in the Jewish State.

   Although there’s nothing truly groundbreaking in Operation Finale, it’s overall a solid production that handles its sensitive historical material with care. My one main complaint with the film is that the Israeli agents, with the notable exception of Lior Raz, the Israeli actor who portrays Mossad head Isser Harel, are just a little too polished for their roles, both in terms of dress, makeup, and tone.

   Isaac is a talented actor and he delivers a strong, serious performance that isn’t marred by Hollywood melodrama. It just does not compare with Topol’s haunting performance in The House on Garibaldi Street in which he infuses the role of Peter Malkin with such hatred for the Nazis that it nearly drives his character mad.

   Look for French actress Mélanie Laurent (Inglorious Basterds) as a female Mossad agent in love with Peter Malkin.

MURDER IN THE PRIVATE CAR MGM, 1934. Charlie Ruggles, Una Merkel, Mary Carlisle, Russell Hardie, Porter Hall, Burton Churchill — and Ray Corrigan as Naba the Gorilla. Screenplay by Ralph Spence, Edgar Allen Woolf, Al Boasberg, and Harvey Thew, from a play by Edward E. Rose. Directed by Harry Beaumont.

   If you only watch one movie in your entire life, it should be Murder in the Private Car.

   Charming Charlie Ruggles, in a rare star turn, plays Godfrey D. Scott, Crime Deflector (i.e., he deflects crimes before they happen). Scott, in his own off-hand way, involves himself with the case of Ruth Raymond (Carlisle) who has recently been identified as a missing heiress and subject to all sorts of dire attempts, especially since she boarded the private car of an eastbound train to meet her father (Churchill) along with her friend and former co-worker Una Merkel.

   Ah yes, Una Merkel, an over-underrated actress normally stuck in supporting roles as the heroine’s best friend. Here she plays… well, she plays the heroine’s best friend again, but in this case the part is a co-starring one as she sneaks zingers at Charlie Ruggles and looks amusingly askance at his bumbling antics. Indeed the two of them play off each other so well, I wonder no one thought to co-star them in a series.

   Car doesn’t give them much time for witty repartee, though. Not with a plot that moves like an express train (sorry!) once the principals get on board the private car, only to find one peril after another hurled at them as fast as Charlie can deflect: A kidnapping attempt, secret passages, hands clutching in the dark, threatening notes and sinister whispers, a murder or two, and an escaped Gorilla just to liven things up a bit.

   I’m not familiar with the original play this was based upon, but knowing the work of Ralph Spence as I do, I’m sore tempted to attribute the sliding panels and gorilla to him, and I think anyone who’s seen any version of The Gorilla will agree. And I’ll wrestle anyone in the crowd who says it ain’t. Any takers? I thought not!

   Getting back to the movie, it chugs along nicely to a marvelous climax with the principal characters trapped in a runaway car filled with nitroglycerine hurtling down the tracks toward the approaching Westbound Express (The folks at MGM knew how to pile it on.) a sequence done in obvious back-projection, but done so well I found myself gasping, jumping, and laughing with relief at the climax.

    Murder in the Private Car lacks the star power to make it remembered much these days, but it’s a film that once seen & enjoyed, will not be forgotten.

   Particularly if, as I say, it’s the only film you ever see in your entire life.

EMMETT McDOWELL – Stamped for Death. Jonathan Knox #1 . Ace Double D-329, paperback original, 1958.

   I used to collect stamps. I’ve never been able to explain what the fascination is, but even though I sold my collection some time ago, for no good reason, the urge has never quite gone away. I never had any like the ones at the core of this story, though, a set of rare Hawaiian “missionary” stamps.

   Louisville auctioneer Jonathan Knox has an eye for rare collectibles, too. After a few stories for the pulps (*), this is his first book appearance. I’m sorry to say that it shows. Lots of incoherent action, in a naive sort of way, although the topless belly dancer does have her charms.

   The other half of this Ace Double is entitled Three for the Gallows, and consists pf three novelettes by Emmett McDowell, the first featuring Jonathan Knox as well. It’s reprinted from a 1953 appearance in Triple Detective Magazine (“All She Wants Is Money,” Summer 1953).

   The remaining two stories, neither of them with Knox) were first published in 1949 in King Features Syndicate’s Great Mystery Novelettes series, and that’s all I can tell you about that. Does anyone know anything more. (*) I also have not been able to identify another Knox story that appeared in the pulps, so the use of the plural in this regard in the original review may be in error.

        The Jonathan Knox series —

Stamped for Death. Ace 1958
Bloodline to Murder. Ace 1960
In at the Kill. Ace 1960
Portrait of a Victim. Avalon 1964 (no paperback edition)

DAVID GOODIS “The Blue Sweetheart.” Novelette. First published in Manhunt, April 1953. Published as a Kindle eBook by Peril Press, November 2013.

   The setting may be different, but the milieu and the predicament of the hapless hero of this novelette from the legendary digest Manhunt, is pure David Goodis, the poet of the down and out, the hopeless, and the lost. You may know him best from his novels or the films made from them (Dark Passage, Nightfall, The Burglar, The Burglars …), but chances you know him as the author of grim down to the bone tales that could give Cornell Woolrich a run for their doomed kismet haunted protagonists.

   What you may not know is Goodis also had a good run in the pulps, particularly in the aviation pulps. Aside from his fatalistic novels he also wrote tales of adventure and intrigue, and this novelette from Manhunt is much closer to those works than his better known novels, though hints of those works can’t help but slip in.

   Not that Clayton, the protagonist of this tale, would feel out of place beside the doomed heroes of most of Goodis novels. As the story opens he is in a very shady bar in a foreign port knowing simply leaving will likely cost him his life, and the back story is no prettier about Russ Hagen, a brutal power that be in Colombo who stole Clayton’s woman and fortune in gems and booted him out of Ceylon a year earlier.

   Now Clayton is back, his fate seemingly sealed, all because of Alma who had laughed with Hagen as Clayton lay beaten and bleeding at Hagen’s feet, and because of a large sapphire, the “blue sweetheart” of the title which is Clayton’s hope for redemption and revenge.

   Cast this one in the movie of your mind as you will, Glenn Ford, Rita Hayworth, and George Macready (Gilda) or Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, and Brad Dexter (Macao), this is the familiar adventure tale of countless pulp stories filtered through a film noir lens and peppered with a certain shabby hopeless elegance unique to Goodis voice and gift for painting unforgettable word images:

   And this little exchange when he sees Alma again for the first time in a revealing dress standing in his bedroom and it all comes back to him:

   It’s hard not to see that one in cinematic terms.

   â€œThe Blue Sweetheart” is no classic, and it reads with an easy familiarity, but it also hits all the right notes, a perfect jazz rift played with ultimate skill from a well worn Fake Book by a master whose fingers almost autonomously caress the keys with grace and style.

   Muted horns playing, gradual fade …

JAMES McKIMMEY – Winner Take All. Dell First Edition A185, paperback original, 1959; cover art by Darcy. Stark House Press, trade paperback, December 2017 (published in combination with Perfect Victim).

   Now let’s suppose. A little bit of make believe. You’re alone in San Francisco. You’re a field engineer, and you’ve just returned from Saudi Arabia. There’s a knock on the door of your door. You say, what the hell, and you decide to open it. The man standing there looks almost exactly like you.

   He’s your twin brother, he says. It’s a long story, but he convinces you. And he has a proposition for you. He owes a crooked gambler in Reno $100,000, and all he’s been able to come up with is $60,000. What he wants you to do (for a $10,000 fee) is pose yourself off as him and offer the gambler half of what he owes. He’s a coward, he says, and you’ve been around. You’re tough and can handle yourself.

   Question: Would you take him up on the offer? You can use the money. Would you say yes?

   Well, Mark Steele does just that, and thereby the tale. No, of course it doesn’t go well. In fact he goes as badly as you might think, even if you were writing the story.

   James McKimmey, who was actually the one who wrote it, not you or I, was awfully good with dialogue, and the action-packed finale, while even more far-fetched than the opening couple of chapters, goes by in a flurry of turning pages. Or at least it did for me.

   In a interview with the author by Allan Guthrie in 2004, published as the introduction to the Stark House edition, McKimmey said he wrote the book (50,00 words) in ten days. If I were to tell you that it reads like it, I absolutely also need to add that I do not men that in a bad way. This was a joy to read, knots in the logic and all.

Turn this one way up. The neighbors won’t mind.

NOTORIOUS. RKO Radio Pictures, 1946. Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Louis Calhern. Screenplay: Ben Hecht. Director: Alfred Hitchcock.

      A lot of ink has been spilled on interpreting Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, the romantic thriller starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. Some critics have posited that the film is primarily a romance in which love, despite numerous obstacles, ultimately triumphs at the end; others that it belongs in that every amorphous cinematic category known as “film noir.”

   Others have focused less on the film’s plot and more on its signature visual style and the manner by which Hitchcock creates and refines the very language of cinema. The one through which he is able to tell the story through both the placement of inanimate objects and the imposition of meaning to them.

   All of the above, I think, are valid ways in which to interpret Notorious. I personally have my doubts whether this particular RKO release should be considered a proper film noir. Yes, it’s on the more cynical side of things and its subject matter – in which the U.S. government through the persona of one of its agents, T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant), essentially prostitutes Alicia, a deeply damaged young woman and the daughter of a convicted Nazi spy (Ingrid Bergman), persuading her to infiltrate a group of Nazis in postwar Brazil – is obviously less pure than many of the morale boosting films put out by the major studios during the Second World War. But it’s a far cry from the cynical and gritty lower budget crime dramas that are now rightly considered films noir.

   For me, the film is essentially about losing and winning, both on the personal level (romance) and on the political (thriller). It’s the universalism of this subject matter that makes it compelling to viewers seventy some odd years after it first premiered. The plot, as Hitchcock himself agreed, boils down to a man who is forced to choose between his emotions (his love for Bergman’s character) and his duty to his country.

   More significantly, it’s about Devlin’s desire to win at nearly any cost. He wants to win Alicia over his competitor, the Nazi industrialist (Claude Rains) whom she has been spying on for Uncle Sam. He wants his country to win over the Nazis even after the war has ended. There’s rarely a moment in the film in which Devlin ceases to want to win on both a romantic and political level. There is no “dark night of the soul” for Devlin in which he questions his ultimate desires and goals.

   If we are to see Alicia as the film’s main character – and I think she is – then the question becomes whether Notorious is fundamentally all that different from other motion pictures about women who want to change their lives. As the film’s title indicates, she’s notorious. She drinks and has numerous love affairs with men. Devlin knows this. Yet he’s deeply conflicted about it, which is why he is alternatively madly in love with her and deeply cruel to her.

   By the end, she thinks that she has changed, that she has found her white knight in Devlin who carries her down the stairs and out of harm’s way. But no one realistically thinks that this is a fairy tale ending. Once the mission is complete and Devlin realizes he has won against the Nazi villain in two ways, will he want to stick around to “make things work,” as modern family therapists would say, or will he be poised for the next assignment?

   I should note that I recently watched the brand new Criterion Collection blu-ray release of this Hitchcock classic. There are some truly worthwhile supplemental features including an illuminating 2009 documentary about the film in which the political context at the time of the film’s writing and release is discussed by leading film critics and historians.

   Of note is the fact that soon after the Nazi concentration camps were liberated, Hitchcock directed a short documentary film about the horrors discovered there. This was one of his main completed projects before working directing Notorious, which of course features Nazi industrialists who have relocated to South America after the war’s end.

   In 1946, the Cold War hadn’t yet made West Germany a vital ally to the United States so Nazis, rather than the communists, were still the villains. It’s doubtful whether such a film would have been of as much interest to studio executives had screenwriter Ben Hecht and Hitchcock pitched the film in 1950.