THE OCTOBER MAN. General Films, UK, 1947. Eagle Lion, US, 1948. John Mills, Joan Greenwood, Edward Chapman, Kay Walsh, Joyce Carey, Catherine Lacey, Frederick Piper. Producer-Screenwriter: Eric Ambler. Director: Roy Ward Baker.

   This modestly budgeted but sharply produced British thriller from the late 40s shows, I think, what a good directer and an excellent cast can do with a so-so story, which is to say, one that keeps the viewer watching with considerable interest, if not out-and-out edge of the seat suspense, from beginning to end.

   John Mills plays a man haunted by a bus accident in which he survived, albeit with a serious head injury, while the little girl who was accompanying him was killed. Trying to put his life as a chemist (not a British pharmacist) back together, he finds a place to live in a middle class boarding house, in which the residents essentially live together, knowing each other’s secrets, or they think the do, and when they don’t, they make up their own.

   When a young girl in the room next door whom Mills briefly befriended is murdered, the gossipers go hard to work, and the police, learning quickly of his previous head injury, even more quickly believe they have their man. Luckily Mills has found a girl friend (Joan Green wood) who still believes in him, even when it appears that all hope is lost.

   Photographed stylishly in stark shades of black and white, this is a movie that may have been made quite independently of the noir movement in the US, but all the ingredients are there. A solid piece of film-making.

AGATHA CHRISTIE – Poirot Loses a Client. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1937. First published in the UK by Collins, 1937, as Dumb Witness. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and paperback, including New Avon Library #10, 1945 (shown).

   This one starts out in much the same way as the previous Hercule Poirot novel reviewed by me on this blog, Funerals Are Fatal; that is to say, by introducing in some detail a family with a wealthy matriarch (in this case) and (also in this case) a younger set, all of whom can use some money. Needless to say, for at least one of whom, sooner is far better than later.

   Begun thus in similar fashion, the two books diverge from here. In Client, Poirot’s good friend, Captain Hastings is on hand to tell the tale, in first person. And Poirot is on hand much sooner, only 35 pages in. But not soon enough: the letter he receives from Emily Arundell, wishing to avail herself of his services, is too late. She has passed away, her death having occurred over two months earlier.

   Reading between the lines of the letter, Poirot takes it upon himself to investigate. By all accounts, Miss Arundell died of natural causes, although there is the matter of the near fatal accident she had had a week or so before.

   I think it helps to have Hastings along as a companion to Poirot on one of cases. Hastings is intelligent enough to tell the story carefully and well, with witty asides about incidents as they happen and the people they meet, but he’s not quite bright enough to put the facts together as swiftly as does M. Poirot. This is not an insult. Neither am I.

   Part of Agatha Christie’s success is how easily she makes it seem to describe people and who they are in a minimum of words. This is what makes it possible for Poirot to solve the case by relying almost solely on the conversations he has with all of the people involved. Some of whom are suspects, others not, but they all have different perspectives on the facts, and all are useful in determining who the killer or killers may be.

   Who this may be is revealed, in my opinion, too early, even before the family is gathered together for a final denouement. The solution is an anticlimax this time around, which is something not at all usual for Agatha Christie in my experience, but until then, there is plenty of story for the inveterate armchair detective to puzzle over. Those readers looking for lots of action, stay away.

LARRY BEINHART – Foreign Exchange. Tony Cassella #3, Harmony, hardcover, 1991. Ballantine, paperback reprint, 1992.

   Ex-PI Tony Cassella is now living in an Austrian ski village, on the run from the IRS, who have been sicced on him by powerful enemies made in earlier cases. He’s a budding entrepreneur with a string of laundromats, and a soon-to-be father with a pregnant ladyfriend.

   Asked to investigate a skiing death by avalanche, he finds the case all mixed up with international intrigue, Japanese business conglomerates, and various government agencies. Someone tries to kill him, his lady has the baby (a girl), both mothers in-law come to visit (from France and the USA), and it all just gets complicated as hell.

   The characters are the best part of the book; most of them are realistic, if not always sympathetic. The plot’s a little fanciful, though, and overall I’d give it only a fairly good plus.

       The Tony Casella series —

1. No One Rides for Free (1986)
2. You Get What You Pay for (1988)
3. Foreign Exchange (1991)

Note:  No One Rides for Free received the 1987 Edgar Award for Best First Novel.

  JOHN A. SAXON – Liability Limited. M. S. Mill, hardcover, 1947. Ace Double D-81, paperback reprint, 1954; published back-to-back with Too Many Sinners, by Sheldon Stark. Pulpville Press, trade paperback, 2009.

   This is the first of two recorded cases L.A.-based insurance investigator Sam Welpton happens to have been involved in. Both were published under Saxon’s name, but the second, Half-Past Mortem (Mill, also 1947), was ghost-written by famed pulp writer Robert Leslie Bellem after Saxon’s death that same year. (My guess is that they were friends, and Bellem stepped in to help fulfill a contract, but that is only a guess. I have no sources whatsoever to support this statement.)

   Whatever the circumstances, one could wish for a better book. It’s competently written, but the story is far too complicated and there’s no zip nor drive to it. What may keep you reading as it did me is the fact that there is an “impossible” crime aspect to it.

   Welpton is interviewing an interested party in a fatal accident when the fellow suddenly looks behind Welton, pulls out a gun, but before he can shoot, he dies with a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. What the problem is, as far as Welpton is concerned, is that the door behind him is chained in such a way it can open a few inches, and the shooter would have had to have been a contortionist to shoot with such accuracy at an impossible angle.

   That’s the interesting part of the tale. Not so interesting is the local chief of police who has a solid grudge against Welpton from a previous encounter, and if there were a means of pinning the murder on him, he’d do it. Since he can’t, he beats him up anyway.

   This all happens in the first 22 or 23 pages. There must be a connection between the murder and the fatal accident, but what? Welpton encounters a long list of other characters as he tries to clear his name, none more than mildly interesting, gets shot at, finds another dead murder victim, this one female, and so on. This is all competently done, to repeat myself, but even if you like reading old paperback mysteries solved by PI’s, even of the Hollywood variety, you can definitely do better than this one.

THE INITIATION. New World Pictures, 1984. Vera Miles, Clu Gulager, Daphne Zuniga, James Read, Marilyn Kagan, Robert Dowdell. Director: Larry Stewart.

   First thing you need to know about the The Initiation is that there’s gratuitous violence and nudity. It’s a mid-1980s slasher film geared toward a teenage audience, so what do you expect? Second thing you need to know is that the plot, which includes too many standard horror film tropes to count, doesn’t end up making a whole lot of sense.

   If you accept these two caveats and just go with it, you might find yourself as I did: surprisingly enthralled by a low-budget horror film that punches well above its weight and ends up being far memorable than it actually deserves to be.

   Clu Culager and Vera Miles portray Dwight and Frances Fairchild, an upper middle class suburban Texan couple. They seemingly have it all. He’s well known in real estate and is the owner of a large department store. She’s a little high strung, but there’s a good reason for that. She’s constantly worried about her college age daughter, Kelly Fairchild (Daphne Zuniga) who suffers from repeated nightmares. Vivid ones in which she sees herself as a young girl stabbing a strange man who is subsequently consumed in a horrific fire.

   Scary stuff made even scarier by the fact that this is a particularly stressful time for Kelly. You see, she’s pledged a sorority and this is Hell Week where new recruits have to run the proverbial gauntlet. Fortunately, she’s got a handsome psychology graduate student (James Read) by her side. And he’s not only a budding love interest! He’s also an expert in parapsychology who comes to suspect that Daphne’s bad dreams aren’t dreams at all, but rather are memories of something terrible that happened in her past.

   But what? Could Kelly’s traumatic visions have something to do with an escaped inmate who has come back to exact bloody revenge on her father and all those rebellious and rambunctious teenagers who get in his way? And what’s the deal with Kelly and her mother looking at their reflections in the mirror all the time? By the time the film wraps up, all such questions will be resolved. Whether or not you consider the answer to the great mystery about who Kelly is to be a satisfactory one, however, will largely depend on your tolerance for gaping plot holes and – how should I put this – “inventive” screenwriting.

   The Initiation isn’t a great movie, but it’s a good one for its genre. Plus it’s always a pleasure to see Clu Gulager in a horror movie. He steals every scene he’s in. That has to count for something.

W. ADOLPHE ROBERTS – The Haunting Hand. Macaulay, hardcover, 1926.

   Somewhat to her surprise, Margaret Anstruther has gotten a role in A Toreador’s Love, a silent picture produced by Superfilm Company. Her luck may be the result of the director’s lust for her physically, although he seems even more concerned about where she lives. And where she lives is interesting, since one night when she drops a match on the floor, a hand, with arm attached, comes out from under her bed and extinguishes the match.

   Later investigation proves that there could have been no one under the bed, but there is physical evidence that someone or something put out the flame. A policeman also sees the hand, but he’s Irish and you know about them.

   Our heroine investigates — she’s a science major, in addition to being a budding actress — and solves the problem with the help of another movie, The Masque of Life, directed by the same man who is in charge of A Toreador’s Love. Movies usually put Anstruther to sleep, but this one contains the clue that explains not all but a lot.

   W. Adolphe Roberts may have been the first black mystery writer. That I would contend, would be the only reason for reading this novel. The explanation for the hand doesn’t satisfy, and the writing is, to be kindly, second rate.

Bio-Bibliographical Notes:   For more on the author, who had quite an interesting life, check out this website, where he is said to have been a Jamaican journalist, novelist and travel writer. As the editor of Ainslee’s magazine, he published many of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s early poetry and not only that, fell in love with her. He wrote two other detective novels under his own name, plus two as Stephen Endicott, one listed as marginally criminous in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV.

From this jazz singer’s 2005 CD, Dreaming Wide Awake, which reached number one on the Billboard Top Contemporary Jazz chart. The song “Hit the Ground” was featured in an episode of the third season of House MD.

BRAINIAC. Mexico, 1962. Original title: El barón del terror. Abel Salazar, German Robles. Written by Federico Curiel and Adolfo Lopez Portillo. Directed by Chano Urueta.

   Not merely a bad movie, but a true alternative classic. In Bizarro World, this would be Gone with the Wind.

   But you have to admire their cheek. The makers of Brainiac took a hackneyed story, low budget and laughable special effects and just ran with it: A devil-worshipping aristocrat executed by the Mexican Inquisition in 1661 returns 300 years later (apparently on a comet… you can see the string on it when it “drops” to Earth!) to take revenge on the descendants of the judges who condemned him. It appears though that the centuries have taken their toll on his personal appearance, and he is now one of the silliest looking monsters in the movies, complete with clunky pincer-hands and a rubber head that pulsates in times of passion.

   In practically no time sat all we’re into the whole revenge thing, and we see where he got the name Brainiac, as the monster hypnotizes victims with his unworldly eyes (we know this because someone shines a flashlight on his face at odd moments) and they are rendered immobile as he shuffles forward, grabs them with his pincers and sucks their brains out with his two-foot forked tongue…. Ewwww!

   For purposes of plot the Baron can still assume his mortal appearance, and he has lots of money so he can dress well, get around and host lavish parties, where he sneaks a bite of Brain now and then as he pursues his diabolical revenge. The police, meanwhile, follow along and look suitably puzzled as they pick up light-headed corpses (“Another one with the brain sucked out!” “What a coincidence!”) and a handsome young Astronomer puzzles over the missing comet (“I would have sworn it landed near here!”)

   Okay, so it ain’t exactly subtle. But Brainiac is fast-moving and generally weird enough (one reviewer called it “low-budget surrealism done up as a horror film.”) to keep you watching, especially at the (WARNING! SPOILER ALERT!!) gripping finale, when the Brainiac advances on his last victim (who happens to be the young Astronomer’s lovely fiancée… what are the odds?) and the police finally figure the whole thing out and charge to the rescue.

   But first they have to stop off at the Police Station, so we get a lot of supposedly suspense-building cross-cutting of the Brainiac stalking the heroine, close-ups of her screaming, close-ups of his tongue sticking out, close-ups of the hero yelling “Stop! Stop it!” and then the two trench-coated cops plod in… wielding flame-throwers!

   Okay, so they didn’t stop at the station to get reinforcements. They didn’t put on any special gear or ask for technical advice, they just grabbed a couple flame-throwers from wherever they keep them at a Mexican Police Station and plodded to the rescue. But somehow that image of two dumpy guys in suits melting down a guy in a rubber mask seemed to encapsulate the charming absurdity of the whole piece.

   Brainiac may not be what you’d call a good movie, but I daresay you’ll never forget it.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Sulky Girl. William Morrow, hardcover, 1933. Pocket #90, paperback, 1941. Reprinted by Pocket many times. Ballantine, paperback, February 1992. TV episode: Perry Mason, 19 October 1957 (Season 1, Episode 5).

   This is the second of the Perry Mason novels, the first being The Case of the Velvet Claws, and one of the first I read soon after I was allowed into the grown-up section of the local library, right behind the main desk, when (I’m guesstimating) I was all of either 12 or 13.

   Do I remember it? No, not at all. I’ve read too many Mason novels over the years, all written to pretty much the same formula, and who could keep them all straight, even they wanted to? Even the episodes of the long-running TV series were scripted to clockwork. At 8:05 on the dot the courtroom proceedings were adjourned so Perry and crew could go out and get more evidence, after the break for commercials.

   The girl is not so much sulky in this early novel, as she is hot-tempered, which makes her difficult for Mason to handle when she’s first suspected of killing her uncle, then as she becomes the defendant in the courtroom battle that follows. It seems that according to her father’s will, she doesn’t get the money in his estate until she is 25, and if she marries before then, she may not get any at all, depending on what her uncle decides.

   She doesn’t tell Mason everything, of course — do any of his clients? There is a lot of money,, at stake, there’s no getting around it, and a lot of people want to get their hands on some of it, and they don’t care how they do it.

   I have read online that Sulky Girl was the first of Mason novels in which most of the second half of the book takes place in a courtroom. Whether this is so or not, the trial in this one is a good one. It had me flipping pages as fast as I could read them. It is no wonder that the Mason novels became so popular so quickly.

   Other than clothing and automobiles of the era, there is little to suggest how old this book is. Mason is described as talking in disinterested monotones quite often, with little facial expression. Della Street has only a small role, and Paul Drake even less. You will note that I am not even telling you who these characters are. If you are reading this blog, I am sure I am safe in assuming that you already know.

   The plot is good one, even if a bit unfair to would-be detectives at home, I thought. Mason doesn’t mess around with the physical evidence very much, as was his habit later on, but he certainly makes a spectacle of the courtroom drama. This one was a lot of fun to read.

DONALD MacKENZIE – Raven and the Kamikaze. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1977. No US paperback edition. First published in the UK by Macmillan, hardcover, 1977.

   When Raven’s roguish friend Count Zaleski drunkenly denounces a fellow exile as a member of the KGB, he unwittingly disrupts the man’s delicate plans for a final act of revenge aimed at the Russians, setting off a race against time to find the desperate man before he destroys his unknown target.

   Since retiring from Scotland Yard as a detective inspector, Raven has had several exciting adventures worthy of print, but while this affair has all the right ingredients — spies, counterspies, and a beautiful woman in love with the hunted man — it seems to rush headlong and downhill into an ending which comes as a total letdown.

Rating:   C plus.

Bibliographic Note:   In all, there were 16 books in MacKenzie’s John Raven series, published between 1974 and 1993.