DOOMWATCH. Tigon Films, UK, 1972. Released in the US as Island of the Ghouls, AVCO Embassy Pictures, 1976. Ian Bannen, Judy Geeson, John Paul, Simon Oates, Jean Trend, George Sanders. Screenwriters: Kit Pedler & Gerry Davis. Director: Peter Sasdy.

   Based on the popular BBC television series of the same name, Doomwatch follows the work of the eponymous fictional British government scientific agency tasked with investigating environmental threats. In this feature length theatrical release from Tigon British Film Productions, actors John Paul and Simon Oates reprise their roles as Dr. Spencer Quist and Dr. John Ridge, respectively.

   But the star of the proceedings is Scottish actor Ian Bannen who portrays Dr. Del Shaw, an intense man who doesn’t easily take no for an answer when it comes to his investigations. The plot follows Dr. Shaw as he probes into strange goings on occurring on Balfe, an isolated island off Cornwall. Initially sent there by Doomwatch to investigate pollution, he soon discovers that the islanders are not only an odd, insular sort, but also that they are hiding something dark and disturbing. His suspicions are readily confirmed when he encounters a dog that is unusually violent and a child’s body buried in a local forest.

   But what is really happening on Balfe? The locals seem to believe that somehow they are the victims of a cosmic hex or divine judgment.

   Good scientist that he is, Shaw thinks this is just superstitious and religious hokum. So he enlists schoolteacher Victoria Brown (Judy Geeson), an outsider to the island community who has been working as an educator there, to find out why the townsfolk are so darn secretive.

   As it turns out, the mystery itself is more captivating than the ultimate revelation. [SPOILER ALERT.] Many of the islanders are suffering from a disease caused by exposure to a toxic stew of chemicals and radioactive waste dumped in the local fishing grounds by an unscrupulous waste disposal company and the British Navy. This is nothing remotely supernatural happening on Balfe. Just all too human behavior: fear in the face of human villainy and greed.

The lead singer of this psychedelic rock group from the Rochester NY area is Anya Cohen. They recorded only this one self-titled LP for Verve in 1968. I do not believe it has ever been re-issued on CD.

WADE CURTIS – Red Heroin. Berkley X1723, paperback original; 1st printing, August 1969. Reprinted as by Jerry Pournelle: Ace Charter, paperback, October 1985.

   Even when this book first came out, it was no secret that the author was SF writer and early computer technology expert Jerry Pournelle. The copyright was in his name, on the reverse of the title page. But his fame came later. This was his very first book, written when he was only 36. It was the first of two adventures of an amateur counterspy named Paul Crane; the second was Red Dragon (Berkley, 1971).

   Crane, a consulting engineer by profession, is contacted by the CIA and asked to infiltrate the various counter-cultural groups hanging out around the fringes of a local Seattle university. Object: to find out who’s responsible for the importation of heroin into the US, an effort sponsored by the Chinese government to help recruit (and pay for) a network of undercover agents in this country.

   This is all off the books, of course. The CIA has no legal authorization to work anywhere inside this country’s boundaries. And more, truth be told, this is a very minor work. The first half of the book is somewhat interesting, as Crane, once married, but on the job, finds a new girl friend, an event he didn’t expect to happen. Still, the question he has is this: Is she as innocent of nefarious activity as she seems, or is she one of the higher-ups of the plot he’s trying to uncover?

   Unfortunately, the tale Curtis/Pournelle tells tails off badly from there. The second half was of no interest to me, I’m sorry to say. The story is as straight as a string, and unless you’re interested in learning a lot about sailing a small yacht in Puget Sound and along the coast of the Pacific Northwest, you may not find anything out of the ordinary in the final 80 pages or so either.

   What bothered me the most, though, was that a couple of Crane’s close friends die in this book, and there is no evidence that he cares. He says he’s angry, but it never goes beyond that. A few pages on, all is forgotten, even as a motivating factor, and it shouldn’t have been.

   What the book may be most famous for, though, is this quote from Robert Heinlein on the front cover: “The most convincing and realistic counterespionage story I’ve read in a long, long time — and besides that, a hell of a good yarn.” I wish I could say the same, but I can’t.

HE WALKED BY NIGHT. Eagle-Lion Films, 1948. Richard Basehart, Scott Brady, Roy Roberts, Whit Bissell, James Cardwell, Jack Webb. Director: Alfred L. Werker, with Anthony Mann (uncredited).

   He Walked by Night was one of those movies that I knew existed and had always intended to watch. But for some reason, I never seemed to get around to doing so. Until now, that is. The verdict is mixed. On the one hand, there’s some excellent staging and cinematography — particularly in the last 20 minutes or so — in this true crime-inspired police procedural/film noir.

   But the story, as far as it goes, is a particularly thin one, with far less character development than one would hope for in a movie so intently focused on the ways in which a criminal eluded the police for so long.

   Richard Basehart portrays Roy Martin (alias Roy Morgan), a loner with a penchant for electronics who commits a crime spree in the greater Los Angeles area in the late 1940s.

   Among his crimes is the cold-blooded murder of a LA police officer. It’s up to the LAPD to hunt him down and bring him to justice. Leading the effort is Sgt. Marty Brennan (Scott Brady) who gets some much-needed technical assistance from a police forensics expert (Jack Webb).

   You wouldn’t know it from watching the movie, which gives next to no explanation for the crimes depicted on screen, but the backstory to the criminal portrayed by Basehart in He Walked by Night helps shed some light as to his possible motivations in carrying out his reign of burglary, robbery, and murder.

   The character of Roy Martin was based on the real life criminal exploits of Erwin “Machine Gun” Walker, a former Glendale, California, police department employee who engaged in a crime spree in LA County in 1945-46. Walker, a Cal Tech drop out who witnessed Japanese atrocities during his service in World War II, was likely traumatized by his combat experiences and the subsequent guilt he felt for surviving an attack that killed many of his fellow soldiers.

   Because of this lack of character development, the film ends up being a middling police procedural that, with a little bit of tweaking, could have been a far more formidable crime film. Still, there are enough gritty moments, particularly during the final sequence in which the LAPD hunts down Roy Martin in tunnels under Los Angeles, which should please film noir fans.

J. JEFFERSON FARJEON – Death in Fancy Dress. Bobbs-Merrill, US, hardcover, 1939. First published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1934, as The Fancy Dress Ball.

   New Year’s Eve brings with it the Chelsea Arts Ball at the Albert Hall, where “ten p.m. till five a.m. sober folk discard their sobriety, flinging themselves into queer costumes and queerer mental activities in an attempt to forget the humdrum of existence.”

   The reader follows here several characters who attend the Ball: Henry Brown, nondescript impecunious, timid; the Shannon family, at the head of which is a mutinous mogul; Sally, made up as Nell Gwynn and with the correct mental attitude; Sam, Sally’s stupid and incompetent confederate; and Warwick Hilling, who had given “protean” performances before All the Crowned Heads of the World, now down on his luck and preparing to appear for pay as a Balkan prince.

   Much takes place at the Ball, though Hilling misses most of it, in this thriller — not “murder mystery,” as the publisher would have it. Indeed, there is no detective, either amateur or professional. If you can put yourself in the thirties’ mood and be willing to accept what would be regarded today as odd mental attitudes, you should enjoy the unlikely carryings on.

LES ROBERTS – The Cleveland Connection. Milan Jacovich #4. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1993; paperback, 1997.

   I think that over the last few years, Les Roberts has been quietly and unobtrusively become one of the best writers in the field. He now has nine books to his credit. five with the Californian Saxon, four featuring the Cleveland PI Milan Jacovich, and I think he’s gotten better with each book.

   Jacovich is asked by the now-husband of his ex-wife to help in locating an old man who had disappeared. While both he and the family he is to help are of Yugoslavian decent, they are Serbs, and he is a Slovene; a significant distinction, as readers of today’s newspapers will recognize.

   The old man, a survivor of a Nazi death camp, is eventually found, victim of an execution-style murder. Why was he killed? Do the answers lie in his present, or in his buried past? Ever the questing knight, Jacovich begins turning over the stones. At the same time, he must deal with a reporter friend’s being threatened by a local mobster.

   The Jacovich books seem the darker of Roberts’ series to me; reflective, somber, often grim, always infused with a sense if mortality and human frailty. Jacovich is the quintessential moral man, always bound by his own ideas of rightness regardless of the consequences to himself or anyone else. Roberts’ characterization is strong, and his creation stands out from the herd.

   I value a sense of place, and Cleveland is a palpable presence here. Roberts knows the city well, and if he doesn’t love it, he fakes it superbly. His prose is excellent, striking a balance between straightforward narrative and evocative description. The story came to a not unforeseen if not inevitable conclusion, but it was about journey as much as destination, anyway. This one is good.

Bibliographic Update:   There are now six books in Roberts’ Saxon series, and 19 in his books about Milan Jacovich, with two of the last three co-written with Dan S. Kennedy. The most recent was Speaking of Murder from 2016. Roberts has also written two books in a short series about Dominick Candiotti and one stand-alone novel.

THE BLACK CASTLE. Universal, 1952. Richard Greene, Boris Karloff, Stephen McNally, Rita Corday, Lon Chaney Jr. and Michael Pate. Written by Jerry Sackheim. Directed by Nathan Juran.

   A ripping yarn from producer William (Tarantula, Creature from the Black Lagoon…) Alland, this was marketed as a horror film, but it’s more like a swashbuckler with a few creepy elements.

   Richard Greene, who will always be Robin Hood to me, stars as an English aristocrat going undercover as a guest of Count Von Bruno (Stephen McNally) the tyrannical lord of a castle in the Black Forest, who had a somewhat checkered past in Africa (he still keeps an alligator pit to remind him of the good old days) and may have murdered two of Greene’s friends.

   And that’s pretty much all the plot there is here: Greene sneaks around trying to get the goods on McNally, romances his countess (Rita Corday) crosses blades with his toady (Michael Pate) and generally plays the doughty swordsman to the hilt (see what I did there?) as he exposes McNally’s villainy…. and gets coffined alive in the process.

   Boris Karloff has a supporting part here, but it’s an interesting one: the Castle Physician, whose loyalty (or disloyalty?) to the Count forms the linchpin of the story, as sundry poisonings, mysterious deaths and other nonsense peppers the plot. But it’s rather sad to see Lon Chaney Jr. lumbering around fat, drunk and grunting, particularly when I recall him playing so effectively off Karloff in House of Frankenstein (1944) a memory more poignant because most of the background music in Black Castle was lifted from the earlier film.

   But the show here really belongs to Stephen McNally, one of the best bad guys of his day, and he carries it off wonderfully, alternately baleful and leering, laughing maniacally when the occasion demands, and generally carrying on in the best Lugosi tradition. It’s the sort of part that’s hard to take seriously unless you’re a little kid (or a kid at heart) but McNally plays it without a trace of condescension, aided enormously by director Nathan Juran (7th Voyage of Sinbad, Attack of the 50′ Woman…) who keeps things moving and puts the action scenes across with inventive camera angles and an infectious sense of fun.

RUFUS KING – Holiday Homicide. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1940. Dell #22, paperback, mapback edition; no date [1943].

   This is a possibly dubious entry despite the title and the fact that the murder takes place on New Year’s Day.

   On board his yacht Coquina in New York City, Cotton Moon, private detective and nut — the edible kind — collector, is hit on the forehead by a sapucaia nut, a genuine rarity. It had been tossed inadvertently at him from, and brought his attention to, another anchored yacht, the Trade Wind, owned by a millionaire real-estate mogul, who had been shot in his bed, it appears, during the noisy revelry early on New Year’s Day.

   Moon investigates at a fee even Nero Wolfe wouldn’t sneer at and encounters another murder, an attempted murder, an earthquake and a hurricane.

   This book has its moments, but they are brief and sporadic ones. Apparently King himself was aware it wasn’t a completely successful idea since this is his only novel featuring Cotton Moon.