ADAM HALL (ELLESTON TREVOR) – The Tango Briefing. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1973. Dell, paperback, 1974. First published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1973.

QUILLER. “Tango Briefing.” BBC One; September 5, 1975. Written by Adam Hall, based on characters he created. Cast: Michael Jayston as Quiller and Moray Watson as Angus Kinloch. Guest Cast: Nigel Stock as Loman, Prunella Gee as Diane, Reg Lye as Chirac and Paul Angelis as Vickers Designer: Peter Blacker. Produced by Peter Graham Scott. Directed by David Sullivan Proudfoot.

   My experience with Quiller is limited. I began with the disappointing film QUILLER MEMORANDUM, then the good but nothing special book NINTH DIRECTIVE. Recently I read the book TANGO BRIEFING and watched a rare copy of the British TV episode based on the book.

   Both versions of TANGO BRIEFING were written by Adam Hall (Elleston Trevor) and featured Quiller searching for a lost plane in the Sahara desert. A mission that had already cost lives.

   I enjoyed the book, and even though it was fifth in the Quiller series it felt like an introduction story to the character. Narrated in first person by the character Quiller, and while he remained a self-effacing enigma, the book was filled with many details about his job and his life (which amounted to the same thing).

   Actor Michael Jayston (TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, 1979) was well chosen for the role, better than the film’s version played by George Segal. Quiller has a lack of respect and trust for authority figures. Segal played it with more Connery-as-Bond-like humor, while Jayston had a meaner, rude touch.

   The book TANGO BRIEFING was a well-written thriller full of tension and excitement. The TV episode was loyal to the book, but due to time and budget, made a few changes, changes that stripped the story of much of its suspense and drama.

   Few have ever seen the QUILLER TV series. Even in the collectors market the series is difficult to find. Apparently only three episodes of the series thirteen survive. Luckily TANGO BRIEFING was one of them. The short-lived series aired only once on the BBC and was never shown again. Its episodes met the same fate of many BBC genre series of that era such as DOCTOR WHO, and ADAM ADMANT LIVES (reviewed here ) when the stuffy old men at BBC in a fit of snobbery purged its entertaining non-socially conscious series from its warehouse.

   Anyone aware of the TV series probably best remembers it for its popular theme song written by Richard Denton and Martin Cook (HONG KONG BEAT, THE GREAT EGG RACE).

   The song was released on a 45 record with “General Direction” from QUILLER soundtrack on the B-side.

   The mission in TANGO BRIEFING was to recover the cargo of a downed plane in the Sahara desert. The mission had gone bad and The Bureau sends Quiller in to complete the job. He was not told why the plane’s cargo was so important or what it was, but he realized it was vital to the British government that he reach the plane before the local Algerian government or anyone else who might be looking for it.

   His “director” on the mission was Loman. Loman would make the plans and handle all the details while “the executive” or “ferret” Quiller was out in the field. The two had worked together before and neither liked the other or approved of the other’s methods.

   After Quiller met with Loman there is an attempt on his life. In the book Quiller barely escaped alive and was physically weakened for the rest of the adventure, while in the TV episode he escapes with no injuries as a young native sets off the trap. I am not sure why writer Hall made the change but it was an important one.

   The book Quiller is a superspy, a man able to do what few men can. Forced to overcome his injuries, Quiller goes beyond the average spy. From watching the three available episodes, the TV series producers seemed to want to make Quiller a more fallible realistic human but keeping Quiller’s arrogance and attitude. Unlike the book Quiller the TV Quiller was an unlikable one-dimensional character.

   Every scene in the book added to the risks for Quiller, with time running out and others getting closer. TANGO BRIEFING the book makes powerful use of time and its passing. But the TV episode limited by its hour length could not fit it all in and what was used often felt contrived.

   Four of the book’s characters made it from book to TV episode. Besides Loman, the other member of Quiller’s support team was inexperienced radio operator Diane. The character served a better purpose in the book with Quiller’s disapproval of her inexperience and concern for her youth adding tension and jeopardy to the story. The character of Diane was badly misused in the TV episode. TV Quiller was fast to forgive her inexperience and shook her hand accepting her to the team, there were G-rated hints of possible romance, and a scene was clumsily dropped in where she beat up a bad guy who attacked her in the radio room.

Two local characters, Chirac, the man who flies Quiller to the desert, and Vickers, the freelance oil driller, make it to the TV episode. Chirac goes from the book’s lovable old ex-war hero to the TV episode’s weak link. Vickers was a minor character in the book. His appearances in the TV episode were obviously forced by the need to foreshadow the TV’s version different ending.

   Then there is the desert search for the plane that takes up much of the book and the TV episode. The TV version greatest mistake was to abandon the book’s first person narration. The scenes in the desert are among the highlights of the book. Quiller’s narration allows us inside the character, fleshing him out. We may not learn his real name or details of his past but we do learn how he thinks and feels. This is where Quiller becomes someone we care about.

   In the TV episode, plot information and characterization was limited to the radio conversations between Quiller and Diane and Loman at the radio base in Kaifra. Without Quiller’s explaining his thoughts and exploring the details of his situation, we never feel his fear and stress as we do reading the book. This left the story in the TV version underdeveloped and less powerfully dramatic.

   While the QUILLER theme song is great, the episode soundtrack was awful and let down the episode. The desert scenes could have worked better if the soundtrack had supplied the emotions of the scenes that the narration gave readers in the book.

   Director David Sullivan Proudfoot (WARSHIP) did his best. His highlight was a shot of the shadow against a desert dune of a vulture circling over an unconscious Quiller.

   The two versions differed in endings. The book’s final scenes would have made an exciting end for a theatrical film. The TV ending was weak, contrived and obvious.

   The book is well worth reading. It is hard to believe the same man who wrote the book wrote the TV version. I suspect Hall’s final draft was not the final shooting script.

            SOURCES:

Action TV: http://www.startrader.co.uk/Action%20TV/guide70s/quiller.htm

The Unofficial QUILLER website http://www.quiller.net

The Encyclopedia of TV Spies by Wesley Britton (BearManor Media, 2009)

C. A. HADDAD – Caught in the Shadows. Becky Bielski #1. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1992. Worldwide, paperback, 1994.

   Carolyn Haddad has written several other books, none of which are typical murder mysteries; as is the case here. Becky Bielski is a computer hacker working for a “research firm” that digs dirt out of data banks. She has a somewhat murky,past, with a long-dead mother convicted of killing Becky’s stepfather. While working on a current case, she comes across her almost forgotten stepbrother, and soon is digging into her own past.

   I liked this considerably. Haddad is an excellent storyteller with a humorous but effective style, and a real flair for characterization.. Becky is a thoroughly appealing heroine, and, mirabile dictu, the plot was tight and credible. A good read.

Bibliographic Note:   The second, and last, of C. A. Haddad’s Becky Bielski series was Root Canal (Severn, 1994). She also wrote five other crime and suspense novels that are included in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV.

FACE OF THE SCREAMING WEREWOLF Diana Films, 1960. Jerry Warren Productions, 1964. Lon Chaney Jr, Yolanda Varela, Rosita Arenas and German Valdez (Tin Tan.) Written by Juan Garcia, Gilberto Martinez Solares, Alfredo Salazar, Fernando de Fuentes and Jerry Warren. Directed by Gilberto Martinez Solares, Rafael Portillo and Jerry Warren.

   Some films amaze the viewer by the very fact of their existence; they stretch the boundaries of Cinema and Reality to become not just movies but memorable experiences in themselves. Thus it is with Face of the Screaming Werewolf.

   A bit of backstory here: In 1960 popular Mexican comedian Tin Tan (German Valdez) starred in La Casa del Terror, as a sleepy wax-museum worker whose boss is actually a mad scientist trying to raise the dead. (His failures get covered in wax and put on display; well, what else would you do with them?)

   The mad doctor brings a mummy (Lon Chaney Jr.) back to life only to find that it was actually a mummified werewolf (also Lon Chaney Jr.) Got that? Hilarity ensues as the werewolf goes on a rampage and everybody chases everybody else around in the South-of-the Border equivalent of Abbott and Costello Meet Godzilla. “And so much for that movie,” you might think.

   But a few years later, American Producer Jerry Warren bought Casa del Terror, cut out almost all of Tin Tan’s scenes, spliced in some footage from The Aztec Mummy (1957) re-dubbed the whole mess into English (of sorts) and sprang it on an unsuspecting public as Face of the Screaming Werewolf.

   The results recall the eerie surrealism of early Cocteau melded with the gritty feel of Italian neo-realism. A bit of synopsizing is in order here, so I’ll insert a “SPOILER ALERT!” even though I have see the film twice and still can’t figure it out.

   We open with a couple of doctors hypnotizing Rosita Arenas into recalling a past life as an Aztec Princess. A young boy sneaks into the lab to eavesdrop and later stows away with the doctors and Rosita when they explore the lost temple (actually a Mexican tourist spot) and find the Aztec Mummy. Who is the boy and how does he figure in the interrelationships of the other characters? We never know because he drops out of the story as the scientists discover another mummy (Lon) and take them both back to civilization for study.

   Then, as the Scientists are exhibiting their mummified relics (to other scientists I guess; the writers never bother to tell us) the lights go out, shots are fired and gangsters make away with the Lon-mummy, which turns up in the Mad Doctor’s laboratory/wax-museum, is brought back to life and promptly turns into a werewolf. Occasionally we get a glimpse of someone sleeping in the Museum, whom I later discovered was Tin Tan.

   Are you following things so far? Good, because at this point it all gets a bit confusing. The werewolf is subdued by a flashlight and locked up in the lab where it turns back into Lon Chaney Jr, looking sad and agonized as ever. Meanwhile the Aztec Mummy (remember him?) also comes back to life and carries off Rosita (remember her?) and they both get run over in traffic.

   We now cut to a pair of detectives investigating all this and we find out Rosita has a sister (Yolanda Varela.) Lon turns back into the Wolfman, breaks out, carries off Yolanda and Tin Tan charges off to the rescue.

   Clearly this is a complex story, and one that will take several viewings to fully comprehend and appreciate. I should note that the DVD I watched had some jarring breaks and hesitations toward the end that tended to vitiate the experience. I consoled myself by reflecting philosophically that I could have paid more for a better copy, but it would still be Face of the Screaming Werewolf.

   A British cult favorite, The Jazz Butchers released a new album earlier this year entitled Last of the Gentlemen Adventurers. You can check it out and their history at their website here.

   The band’s name has had several different variations and members. Those most associated with Jazz Butchers are Pat Fish, Max Elder and Owen Jones.

   Their music features odd songs with darkly humorous lyrics such as “The Devil Is My Friend,” “Death Dentist,” and this salute to Peter Lorre…

TIM HEALD – Let Sleeping Dogs Lie. Stein and Day, US, hardcover, 1976. Ballantine, US, paperback, 1981. First published in the UK by Hutchinson, hardcover, 1976.

    “Nothing can go wrong. It’s out of the question.” When Simon Bognor says this, it is time for the person spoken to to increase his insurance and to climb a tree, preferably pulling it up after him.

    As an employee of the Special Investigations Department of the Board of Trade, Bognor is assigned — and he’s not happy about it as he is never happy about his assignments — to investigate charges that an international gang is smuggling dogs out of England and back in again to take part in shows and breeding. In this way, the dogs do not have to undergo quarantine on their return to England as required by law.

    Not only does Bognor not like the assignment, he also has another problem: He loathes dogs. Indeed, “He had been known to kick out at perfectly inoffensive animals when the owners weren’t looking.” Nonetheless he starts visiting kennels and dog shows; at the end he likes dogs even less than he did.

    Despite what I felt was an abrupt ending, this is another wonderfully amusing episode in the career, if that’s the correct word, of one of mysterydom’s woefully inept detectives.

Bibliographic Notes:   This is the fourth of thirteen recorded adventures of Simon Bognor, beginning with Unbecoming Habits in 1973 and continuing through Yet Another Death in Venice, which appeared in 2014 (with a gap of some 22 years between #10 and #11.)

   Four of the first five books, including Let Sleeping Dogs Lie, were telecast on British television as part of the series Bognor (ITV, 1981-82), starring David Horovitch in the title role.

ROBERT LESLIE BELLEM – Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective. Bowling Green University Popular Press, softcover, 1983.

   Anyone whose sense of humor leans toward the ribald, the outrageous, the utterly absurd is liable to find himself convulsed by the antics and colloquialisms of Dan Turner, Robert Leslie Bellem’s immortal “private skulk,” who fought, shot, wenched, and wisecracked his way to the solutions of hundreds of pulp-magazine cases from 1934 to 1950.

   The list of Bellem admirers is long and distinguished and includes humorist S. J. Perelman, who in a New Yorker essay titled “Somewhere a Roscoe …” called Turner “the apotheosis of all private detectives” and said he was “out of Ma Barker by Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade.”

   Although Bellem wrote a handful of novels, none features Dan Turner. Turner, in fact, appeared only in a few scattered anthologies until the publication of this collection of seven of his vintage cases from Hollywood Detective, Spicy Detective, Speed Detective, and Private Detective Stories.

   All are set in Hollywood, most deal with the (highly romanticized and inaccurately portrayed) film community, and all are wild, woolly, quite terrible, and very funny. “Drunk, Disorderly and Dead,” for instance, contains such typical Bellem lines as “A hulking lug in chauffeur’s uniform … barged out of the limousine’s tonneau and planted his oversize brogan on my running board. He had an improvised handkerchief mask over the lower section of his pan and a blue-barreled automatic in his duke. He said: ‘Freeze, snoop, or I’ll perforate you like a canceled check.'”

   And from “Dump the Jackpot”: “A thunderous bellow flashed from Dave Donaldson’s service .38, full at the propman’s elly-bay. Welch gasped like a leaky flue, hugged his punctured tripes, and slowly doubled over, fell flat on his smeller.”

   This delightfully wacky collection also contains an introduction, headnotes, and a biographical sketch of Bellem by John Wooley.

   Bellem’s novels, for the most part, are forgettable. The only exception is his first, Blue Murder (1938), which features a Dan Turner-like private eye named Duke Pizzatello and contains some of the same slangy, campy mangling of the English language.

———
   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.

PATRICIA MOYES – Black Widower. Henry Holt & Co., US, hardcover, 1975. Penguin, US, paperback, 1977. Owl / Holt Rinehart Winston, US, paperback, 1985. First published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1975.

   When the racy Lady Ironmonger, wife of the new Tampican ambassador to the United States, promises to become a distinct political liability to her husband’s career, it occurs to someone that murder can sometimes become a necessity. It’s a long way to Scotland Yard from the Georgetown section of this nation’s capital, but since Tampica is a newly independent British colony, the few minutes of delicate diplomatic maneuvering that it takes to get Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett involved are easily managed.

   A deal for a U.S. naval base on the island turns out to be quite important, and with the scene jumping back and forth between Washington in springtime and the breath-taking vistas of the Caribbean, one looks forward with anticipation to the eventual unraveling of all the little secrets that the staff of a minor embassy can possess.

   However. Moyes seems to be greatly out of her depth working with a motive depending so greatly on high finance and international politics. The feeling is overwhelming that she’d feel much more at home with the domestic malice of the “body in the library” sort of tale. Some characters, never well defined, remain murky to the end, and with such an obvious clue as to the killer’s identity, I can only say I wasn’t overly impressed.

Rating:   C plus.

From Dianne Reeves’ 1997 album That Day:

   Everyone has heard of the rivals of Sherlock Holmes. Sir Hugh Greene (Graham’s brother) is best known for having compiled some anthologies of “Rivals” stories that later became the basis of a popular British TV series. Very few would disagree that the most eminent and durable of Holmes’ rivals is Nero Wolfe: the brilliant detective, the Watson, the unforgettable place where sleuth and narrator live, and so on. But are there any rivals of Nero Wolfe? Every so often one finds a character, usually obese and irascible, whose first name comes from Roman history and his last from an animal: Trajan Beare, say, or Tullius Dogge. But if that sort of name were necessary, Wolfe would have few rivals indeed.

   Back in the Thirties and Forties Robert George Dean wrote a series about Tony Hunter, a PI working for an agency at whose head sits one Imperator Schmidt. What makes this series distinctive is that Tony does both the legwork and the brainwork and Schmidt is never seen, at least not in the few Hunter novels I’ve read.

   Then there’s a pulp series by D.L. Champion about an acerbic and sardonic investigator named Rex Sackler. This character is not fat and intellectual like Wolfe but pathologically thin and a compulsive pennypincher. He spends money “with all the ease of a bantam hen laying a duck’s egg” and is addicted to maneuvering his legman Joey Graham (whose narrative style is vaguely Archie-esque) into poker games at which he wins back most of the poor schnook’s salary.

   But for my money the most notable of the Wolfe-and-Goodwin rivals is the duo created by Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A.A. Fair: the team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, whose debut dates from 1939, five years after Wolfe’s debut in Fer-de-Lance.

   Bertha is certainly obese and irascible enough for a Wolfe rival, but she’s also foul-mouthed and money-mad and not at all brilliant but dependent on her legman and later partner for brainwork. Donald Lam is certainly no match for Archie Goodwin when it comes to brisk crisp narration but the way he tells his stories is far livelier than the relentless business English of Gardner’s Perry Mason novels.

   One rarely finds law as a central element in a Nero Wolfe novel (although 1959’s Plot It Yourself has a lot to do with copyright law and reflects Stout’s years of work with the Authors’ Guild), but it’s a rare Cool & Lam novel which doesn’t revolve around law in one way or another.

   Gardner was no expert on the history of the kind of fiction he wrote but he clearly knew Melville Davisson Post’s “The Corpus Delicti” (1896), which introduced criminal lawyer Randolph Mason. The heart of that classic story was the attorney’s ability and willingness to advise a client how to commit a cold-blooded murder, admit the deed in open court and walk away free. Gardner developed the core of Post’s story into The Bigger They Come (1939), first and perhaps finest of the C&L novels. Here’s the crucial conversation between Lam and his new employer.

   After such a buildup I’d be a toad if I didn’t explain Lam’s scheme without, I hope, ruining The Bigger They Come for those who have never read it. I commit a murder in California. Then I drive across the state line into Arizona where I proceed to frame myself on a charge of obtaining property under false pretenses, although leaving open a legal escape hatch for myself.

   I then drive back to California, run through the quarantine station at the border, get chased and caught by California cops who lock me up in the border town of El Centro. In due course I am legally extradited to Arizona to face the false pretenses charge. Once I clear myself and that charge is officially dropped, I confess to the California murder. But when California moves to extradite me, I file a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that on these facts I can’t be compelled to return.

   Except that he doesn’t actually commit a murder, this is exactly what Donald Lam does in The Bigger They Come: “The only authority which one state has to take prisoners from another state comes from the organic law which provides that fugitives from justice may be extradited from one sovereign state to another. I am not a fugitive from justice….[A] man is not a fugitive from a state unless he flees from that state. He doesn’t flee from that state unless he does so voluntarily and in order to avoid arrest. I did not flee from California. I was dragged from California. I was taken out under legal process to answer for a crime of which I was innocent. I claimed that I was innocent. I came to Arizona and established my innocence. Any time I get good and ready to go back to California, California can arrest me for murder. Until I get good and ready to go back, I can stay here and no power on earth can make me budge.”

   Is this good law? Gardner’s good friend John H. Wigmore, dean of Northwestern Law School, first scoffed at the argument. Then, after Gardner had literally written a brief for him on the issue, he admitted that the loophole had greater possibilities than he had first supposed. But I wouldn’t advise anyone to try it today. The principal case on which Gardner relied was all but overruled by the California Supreme Court in 1966, a few years before his death.

   Perry Mason was portrayed by many different actors in the movies, on radio and of course on TV. As far as I can determine, Cool and Lam have appeared in the media only three times. The second novel in the series, Turn on the Heat (1940), was the basis for an episode of ABC Radio’s U. S. Steel Hour, June 23, 1946. Who played big Bertha remains unknown but Donald was portrayed by, of all unlikely people, Frank Sinatra.

   During the golden age of live TV, The Bigger They Come was adapted for the 60-minute CBS anthology series Climax! with Art Carney as Donald and Jane Darwell as Bertha. The date was January 6, 1955, my twelfth birthday. I don’t remember if I was drinking coffee at that age but if I had been, I’m sure it would have come pouring out my nose like the waters of Niagara at sight of Ed Norton from The Honeymooners playing a PI.

   Finally, in 1958 Gardner’s own company, Paisano Productions, produced a 30-minute pilot for a projected C&L TV series, directed by Jacques Tourneur, with ex-jockey Billy Pearson as Lam and Benay Venuta as Cool. Gardner himself introduced the characters from the Perry Mason office set but the pilot failed to attract any sponsors, although it can be seen today on YouTube.

   Personally, I regret that the role of Donald was never offered to the young Steve McQueen. He wasn’t pint-sized like Billy Pearson but short enough, and judging from his role as Western bounty hunter Josh Randall in Wanted — Dead or Alive he would have been great at projecting Donald’s cockiness and insolence. Any dissenting opinions?

THE SHEPHERD OF THE HILLS. Paramount Pictures, 1941. John Wayne, Betty Field, Harry Carey, Beulah Bondi, James Barton, Samuel S. Hinds, Marjorie Main, Ward Bond, Marc Lawrence, John Qualen, Fuzzy Knight. Based on the novel by Harold Bell Wright. Director: Henry Hathaway.

   Directed by Henry Hathaway and filmed in glorious Technicolor, The Shepherd of the Hills is an ambitious melodrama that, despite its best intentions, misses the mark. While the film boasts a superb cast and a series of conflicts that propel the plot forward, it nevertheless comes across as both too stagey and extraordinarily dated in terms of both dialogue and subject matter.

   Deep in the Ozarks lives the Matthews family, a superstitious clan of moonshiners who believe that they’re living under a curse stemming from Young Matt’s (John Wayne) father abandoning his wife, Sarah, as she lay dying. For years, Young Matt has been indoctrinated with hate for his missing father and has even gone so far as to swear a blood oath to kill the man, if and when he should find him.

   So when an urbane stranger from the city by the name of Daniel Howitt (Harry Carey) arrives in the Ozarks and purchases some Matthews land, it doesn’t take long to figure out that our Mr. Howitt is Young Matt’s long lost father returning to make amends. Making matters even more complicated for Wayne’s character is his begrudging love for Sammy Lane (Betty Field), a goodhearted young woman. She is the first to figure out that Daniel Howitt is actually Young Matt’s long lost father.

   Although some scenes in the film are far better than others, both in terms of acting and in staging, The Shepherd of the Hills really doesn’t have any memorable lines or scenes that remain ingrained in a viewer’s mind for very long. This movie isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, John’s Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, also released in 1941. If you’re a John Wayne fan and haven’t seen this particular film, by all means go right ahead. But just don’t go into it expecting the type of Hathaway-Wayne movie magic that was still years in the making.