THE MECHANIC. United Artists, 1972. Charles Bronson, Jan-Michael Vincent, Keenan Wynn, Jill Ireland, Linda Ridgeway, Frank DeKova. Director: Michael Winner.

   For the first sixteen minutes, there is no dialogue. None. Just a sequence in which we see Charles Bronson or, more accurately, a character portrayed by him, plan and execute an assassination of an older man living in a rundown Los Angeles hotel room. But there’s music accompanying the action, a score composed by Jerry Fielding. Unfortunately, the music overwhelms everything else, making it more obtrusive than artistic.

   In many ways, this initial sequence is indicative of the film as a whole. It tries to be artistic and deep, but fails nearly on every level. And the overwhelming, out of place soundtrack doesn’t help matters, either.

   Now, some may see this criticism as overly harsh. After all, what’s not to like about the pairing of Charles Bronson and a youthful Jan-Michael Vincent as a skilled hitman and his apprentice? Both are good actors for the genre, and there’s actually some personal chemistry between the two (an earlier version of the script apparently hinted at a forbidden romance between these two men who live outside societal norms).

   But it’s not the acting, nor the script per se that makes this a rather dreary affair. It’s the fact that The Mechanic tries so hard, so very hard, to say something profound about what it must be like to be a hitman that it verges into self-parody. Bronson’s character, the titular mechanic, is a brooding, philosophical sort who lives alone in a giant Hollywood Hills home and who has a penchant for martial arts and seemingly little connections with other people, aside from a girlfriend portrayed by Bronson’s wife Jill Ireland. By trying too hard to make a statement, The Mechanic ends up saying very little.

DOUGLAS McLEISH – The Valentine Victim. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1969. Popular Library, paperback reprint, no date stated [1970?].

   While Lori Weston is at the office of the Ontario Provincial Police detachment in Farnham on Valentine’s Day reporting a possible molester as well as an aborted break-in of her home, her stepdaughter Aileen, readying herself for the Valentine’s dance, is shot six times by an exceptionally brutal murderer.

   Was the murderer the threatening figure her stepdaughters had seen, or did one daughter kill the other? Or was it possibly one of the step-daughters’ fiancés or a former boyfriend with monetary gain in mind? What is one to make of the astounding coincidence of the time of the murder, with Lori Weston provided a wonderful alibi by the police?

   While the Canadian setting isn’t particularly recognizable — the murder could have taken place anywhere in North America — that would be the only criticism I have of this novel. The investigation by Inspector John Rodericks, a fully realized character, is an excellent one. As both police procedural and fair-play novel, this one excels.

Bio-Bibliographic Notes:   Dougal McLeish, the pen name of Donald James Goodspeed (1919-1990), wrote one other mystery, that being The Traitor Game (Houghton, 1968) in which the Canadian prime minister is assassinated. Inspector Rodericks apparently does not appear. Goodspeed, a lieutenant-colonel in the Canadian Armed Forces, and Senior Historian in the Canadian Defence Force’s Historical section, also wrote several books on Canadian history.

Jonathan & Leigh were a male-female folksinging duo consisting of Jonathan Alden and Sandy Roepken. Third and Main was their only LP, released by Vanguard in 1967.

THE PHANTOM OF CRESTWOOD. RKO Radio Pictures, 1932. Ricardo Cortez, Karen Morley, Anita Louise, Pauline Frederick, H. B. Warner, Mary Duncan, Sam Hardy, Tom Douglas, Richard ‘Skeets’ Gallagher, Aileen Pringle. Director: J. Walter Ruben.

   There have been old “dark and stormy night” movies before and since, complete with spooky mansions with a group of assorted people trapped inside with an unknown killer, but Crestwood, I believe, is a benchmark for others to compare with, if not an out and out classic.

   This film has the added cachet of providing the solution to a series of radio programs that told the same story as dramatized here, but leaving the listeners to provide their own endings. There are plenty of suspects to choose from. The leading lady of the film is Jenny Wren, played by Karen Morley, beautiful and appropriately slinky. She is also a blackmailer, with the real goods on a number of gentlemen (married or about to be) with whom she has had brief but now profitable affairs, or so she hopes.

   She calls them all together, as well as their wives, to give them her demands. Planning on retiring from the gold digger business, she instead ends up dead. I don’t imagine that this will come as any surprise to anyone watching this film. Adding to the mystery, there are luminescent faces in the dark, passageways behind walls, plus plenty of thunder and lightning, a cliff at the edge of land behind the mansion, and of course at the appropriate time, the lights go out.

   Besides having plenty of suspects with obvious motives, there are those on hand with motives yet to come to light. Doing the detective work — and this is different — is Ricardo Cortez, a gangster who along with members of his gang knows full well they will be blamed for the killing if caught at the scene. (He is on hand to retrieve some letters in Jenny’s possession.)

   It’s difficult to go wrong in watching this type of movie, and when it’s done with a decent budget and some pizzazz, as this one is, it makes it a lot of fun to watch.

NICHOLAS BLAKE – The Beast Must Die. Harper, hardcover, 1938. US paperback editions include: Crestwood / Black Cat Detective Series #7, digest-sized, 1943; Dell D227, Great Mystery Library #15, 1958; Berkley F971, 1964; Perennial Library, 1978. First published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1938.

   British Poet Laureate (1968-72) and novelist Cecil Day Lewis, writing as Nicholas Blake, published a score of popular detective and suspense novels from 1935 to 1968, all but four of which feature an urbane amateur sleuth named Nigel Strangeways. For the most part, the Blake novels are fair-play deductive mysteries in the classic mold and are chock-full of literary references and involved digressions, which makes for rather slow pacing. But they are also full of well-drawn characters and unusual incidents, and offer a wide variety of settings and information on such diverse topics as sailing, academia, the British publishing industry, and the cold war.

   The Beast Must Die is considered by some to be Blake’s finest work and a crime-fiction classic. When the young son of mystery novelist Felix Cairnes (a.k.a. Felix Lane) is killed by a hit-and-run driver, Lane, who doted on the boy, vows to track down and kill the man responsible. A trail of clues leads him to a film star named Lena Lawson, who was a passenger in the death car, and finally to its driver, George Rafferty, the obnoxious part owner of a Gloucestershire garage.

   Lane insinuates himself into Rafferty’s household as Lena’s new lover, and makes preparations to exact his revenge via a sailing “accident.” But things don’t quite go as he (or the reader) anticipates. And when murder finally does strike, it does so in a wholly unexpected fashion.

   The plot is tricky and ingeniously constructed: the first third is told first-person in the form of Felix Lane’s diary; there is a brief middle section, called “Set Piece on a River,” which is done third-person from Lane’s point of view; and the last half is a straightforward, third-person narrative that introduces Nigel Strangeways (and his wife, Georgia, and Inspector Blount of Scotland Yard) and follows Strangeways as he unravels a tangled web of hatreds and unpleasantries. Blake builds the suspense nicely in the first half, makes good use of a subplot involving Lane’s affection for Rafferty’s own son, Phil, and even spices his narrative with a little sex — an unusual ingredient for mystery novels during the Golden Age.

   But The Beast Must Die also has its share of flaws. The manner in which Lane tracks down Rafferty — and the ease with which he is able to meet and seduce a popular actress seem both convenient and contrived; once Strangeways (who is something of a colorless and priggish sort, at least in this novel) arrives on the scene, the narrative becomes talky and slow, diluting suspense; a physical attack on Strangeways is poorly motivated; and the final revelations, intended as a stunning surprise, are neither stunning nor particularly surprising.

   This is a good novel, certainly, one worth reading — but it’s not a mystery classic.

   A film version of The Beast Must Die was produced in France in 1969 under the title This Man Must Die. Directed by Claude Chabrol, it is faithful to the novel except in one major (and curious) point: It excludes Nigel Strangeways completely and tells the tale as a straightforward thriller.

         ———
   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.

W. GLENN DUNCAN – Rafferty: Wrong Place, Wrong Time. Fawcett Gold Medal, paperback original; 1st printing, July 1989.

   This is the fourth of six recorded adventures of a Dallas-based PI named Rafferty, all published by Gold Medal in the late 80s and early 90s. There is some similarity in the stories to another PI based in Boston in that he is a rather macho guy, has a steady girl friend with whom he gets along very well, including lots of friendly banter, and a buddy named Cowboy (with all that that implies) whom he calls on whenever he gets himself into a jam and needs help.

   It is also a book that is fun to read for most of its way — until, that is, you start getting the “is that all there is?” feeling about two-thirds of the way through. Both of the cases Rafferty is working on turn out to be very light ones, even though the first results in a case of murder almost immediately: a guy posing as a bounty hunter hires Rafferty to distract his intended victim, and succeeds.

   The second, that of an elderly gentleman being harassed by neighbor kids, is amusing but nothing more, even if the older man, who starts out being a devout curmudgeon, turns out to have had a life well worth living, much to Rafferty’s pleasure.

   I mentioned earlier the existence of another PI working the Boston area, and the similarities between the two sets of characters. Echoes of the other series with this one are obvious, but to tell you the truth, I think I heard Robert Urich’s voice in the first person commentary than I did the other fellow’s. Not that that’s entirely a bad thing, you understand, but your mileage may vary.

       The Rafferty series —

1. Rafferty’s Rules (1987)
2. Last Seen Alive (1987)
3. Poor Dead Cricket (1988)
4. Wrong Place, Wrong Time (1989)
5. Cannon’s Mouth (1990)
6. Fatal Sisters (1990)

ROBERT B. PARKER – Paper Doll. Spenser #20. Putnam, hardcover, 1993. Berkley, paperback, 1994.

   Most of us bring a lot of baggage to the table when it comes to reviewing a new Spenser, probably to the reading of it as well, but certainly to reviewing. With the 20th, I’m going to do my damnedest to forget all the very good and egregiously bad about the first nineteen, and consider PD as though it were written by a brand-new author. And good luck to me.

   Spenser is hired by a wealthy Bostonian to investigate the murder of his wife, who has been bludgeoned to death on the street in what the police believe to have been a random act of violence. The grieving widower doesn’t necessarily doubt this, but feels he has to know.

   So Spenser, lacking any other avenue of approach, begins to look into the murdered woman’s past for clues to her demise in the present. All the rocks under which he peers furnish surprises, and before he can get off a bon mot he ends up in South Carolina among some fairly hostile inhabitants, being hassled by the local law and making the acquaintance of some local faded aristocrats. Parker’s South is … different.

   Remember what I said I as going to try to do? Couldn’t do it. If I could’ve, though, I would have said that this was an excellently written book with intriguing characters, a pretty light-weight plot, and not-too-believable end. Given that I couldn’t, I’ll tell you that it was the least violent Spenser in ages, maybe ever. Of course, that meant that Hawk was hardly around at all, and I missed his bad ass. Susan and Quirk were both present, however.

   Parker can’t write a book that isn’t almost compulsively readable, and this is no exception. If I could have believed in the ending a little more I might have given it an A. I’ll give it a solid B minus, anyway.

Medicine Head was a British blues rock duo active in the 1970s. This song hit #11 in the UK after its release as a single in 1973:

TRIGGER FINGERS. Monogram, 1946. Johnny Mack Brown, Raymond Hatton, Jennifer Holt, Riley Hill, Steve Clark, Eddie Parker. Director: Lambert Hillyer.

   For a former football player, Johnny Mack Brown was a pretty good actor. He appeared in a few straight dramas over a career of 40 years or so, but he found his niche in Hollywood as a western star, mostly of the “B” variety, and was always a favorite of mine, starting when I was 8 or 9 years old.

   You can forget the title of this one. “Trigger Fingers” could have applied to several hundred of these crank-em-out westerns, and it would have worked just the same. This one starts when a young cowboy shoots a man who has tried to cheat him at a game of cards, then has to make fast tracks out of town thinking he’d killed the fellow.

   It turns out that he only winged him, as he intended to do, but for reasons nefarious (blackmail), a plan is cooked up by a gang of local bad guys to make everyone think the gunman he shot is dead. Enter Johnny Mack Brown to the aid of the young man’s father (Raymond Hatton).

   This one starts out slow, but before the less than an hour’s running time has gone by, there have been enough twists in the story to satisfy any 8 or 9 year old boy’s wish for a stirring whiz bang of a Saturday afternoon at the movies. I think the lack of any time taken out for a song or some not very funny comedy routines may have had something to do with that.