JOHN EDWARD BRUCE – The Black Sleuth. Northeastern University Press, hardcover, 2002. Edited by John Cullen Gruesser. First serialized in McGirt’s Magazine, circa 1907 to 1909.

   Sadipe Okukenu is a black sleuth, working for the International Detective Agency at the first turn of the 20th Century, chasing down jewel thieves.

   The majority of the book though is I guess what edumacated people call a bildungsroman. That is to say, we start off in West Africa, with Sadipe as a young man. He is from a family of scholars and excels in mathematics and languages.

   To further his education he decides to sail to Maine to learn what he can of America. He gains even more facility in math and languages, and the town decides to pay his way to a Tuskegee lookalike to study with a Booker T. Washington ringer.

   On the train down South, once they pass the Mason-Dixon line, Sadipe starts to be treated as sub-human, despite his purchase of a 1st class ticket. He’s not allowed in the dining car. And the conductor tries to force him back into the stinking back car reserved for animals and Blacks (though ‘Blacks’ is not the word used by the conductor — as Sadipe is fond of pointing out, the N-word has two g’s in it because the imbecilic whites who use the term think that ‘negro’ has two ‘g’s.).

   A retired general happens to be in the car, and decides to lend Sadipe a hand. And a revolver.

   Sadipe tells the conductor that he purchased a 1st class ticket, and that if he wants to force him back to the Black car, he’ll have to kill him first and move his corpse back there. At this, the black porters turn on the conductor, and the northerners traveling south start cheering. The conductor gives up and lets Sadipe be.

   The retired general is suitably impressed by how Sadipe handles himself — and says if he ever gets sick of Tuskeegee, to let him know: He’s got friends in interesting places.

   Arriving at Tuskegee, greeted by the Booker T. clone, Sadipe is shocked by the racial epithets hurled their way by the rednecks as they make their way to campus. Booker T. says it’s always best to ignore those folks. Sadipe says he’s not so sure he can do that. It’s the first sign that this matriculation is in trouble.

   At the Saturday service at the church, a white Methodist pastor who served an African missionary, gives a sermon about the heathens and savages of Africa and how lucky the world is to have white Christians to save their putrid souls.

   Sadipe has heard enough:

   
   Sadipe’s address is published in the white paper in an emergency edition, insinuating that a lynching must quell the uppity in the town’s midst. Sadipe is able to escape with his life to Washington D.C., where the general from the train arranges for a job with the International Detective Agency.

   Sadipe, with his intelligence, his multilingualism, and his black skin is a perfect fit for the Agency. White criminals are just as racist as anyone else. And their casual racism blinds them to the fact that the Black servant in their midst might comprehend their blueprints, their use of French and German. Playing up to Jim Crow might just be a perfect disguise for a savvy detective. And Sadipe’s out to prove it.

   And prove it he does, enwebbing and ensnaring four near-smart international jewel grifters in the act. Probably…..

   Yet this is where it ends. Weird. Because the book isn’t advertised as ‘unfinished’. But it appears that that is just what it is: Unfinished. The story was published serially in a small circulation newspaper between 1907-1909. Was there more? Not that anyone has been able to find.

   I sought out this book after reading Kevin Burton Smith’s Thrilling Detective entry on Three Gun Terry:

   
   However, Sadipe is no hard boiled detective. He’s too intelligent and speaks English in far too literate a fashion to fit in much with Sam Spade, Mike Hammer and their ilk. Perhaps he fits in better with Marlowe and Spenser. But still, his prey are international gentlemen (and a gentlewoman) thieves, and he has little time or inclination to hang with the salty underbelly of the criminal world and to engage in their hardboiled vernacular.

   The book was fairly enjoyable. But I would have been both less likely to have read it and less disappointed to have done so had there been a fair warning that the story was incomplete. As it is, it’s a good reminder that Jim Crow existed long before Rosa Parks. The groundwork for a pretty good international detective is laid here. But laid here merely to rest for over a century — with nary a crime to solve.

   So yeah. Disappointed? Yeah — a bit. But still I’m glad to have read it. And if I had read ahead of time that the thing was only of historical interest I would not have read it. Because I don’t read for history. I read for fun.

DAPHNE Du MAURIER – Rebecca. Victor Gollancz Ltd., UK, hardcover, August 1938. Doubleday, US, hardcover, September 1938.  Reprinted many times. in both hardcover and paperback.

   The title character of this immensely popular novel never appears “on stage,” since she is dead long before the story starts. Her persona, however, is the moving force behind the narrative, and she is so well realized that the reader comes to feel he has met her many times. The other characters, including the protagonist, fail to measure up to Rebecca, and this creates a peculiar imbalance that makes one wonder why one is reading about them when she is obviously much more fascinating.

   The heroine of the story — referred to after her marriage as only “Mrs. de Winter” and before that as nothing at all — holds a position as lady’s companion for an American woman who is vacationing on the Cote d’Azur. Invoking a distant connection, the old woman, Mrs. Van Hopper, strikes up an acquaintance with Maxim de Winter, owner of the grand English estate of Manderley and recent widower.

   When Mrs. Van Hopper becomes ill, her companion continues the acquaintance and falls in love with de Winter. They marry and return to Manderley, where the hostility of the housekeeper, who was devoted to Maxim’s first wife, Rebecca, and continual reminders of the beautiful, strong-willed woman she has succeeded cast a pall over the marriage.

   The new Mrs. de Winter fears she can never compete with such a paragon as Rebecca, but gradually the truth about the woman emerges, and she must confront a greater, unexpected horror. There is an irony about the ending, which leaves the heroine stronger and wiser, yet immersed in a sorrow from which she will never escape.

   Rebecca was made into an excellent film in 1940, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, and Judith Anderson. Du Maurier’s 1951 novel My Cousin Rachel was also filmed (1953). In addition, she produced such popular books as Jamaica Inn (her first novel and also a Hitchcock film, in 1936) and The House on the Strand (1969).

         ———
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.
   

(Give Me That) OLD-TIME DETECTION. Autumn 2023. Issue #64. Editor: Arthur Vidro. Old-Time Detection Special Interest Group of American Mensa, Ltd. 36 pages (including covers). Cover image: The White Elephant Mystery by Ellery Queen, Jr.

   If you like detective fiction in any or all of its permutations then you can’t go wrong with Old-Time Detection. The new mingles with the old (which means, in most cases, the classic), leaving plenty for the reader to feast on.

   Among the delectations: an interview with a science fiction/fantasy/detective story author; plenty of well-researched background on the creator of the world’s most famous criminal lawyer; the latest (at the time) paperback reprints from the seventies; a review of a collection of stories by the master of noir; a long-lost Dr. Poggioli story and a witty and amusing self-assessment by its author; a view of the “master conjurer” of fair play detection and a look at how he lived; news about the creator of Poirot and Marple and how the current generation is handling (and, in too many cases, mishandling) her works; a glance at how today’s publishers seem to be on some sort of nostalgia kick, which is good news for detec-fic aficionados; words about the undisputed “king of the classical whodunit”; and the editor’s appraisal of a kids’ novel that even adults can enjoy.

   In it you will find:

(1) A 1976 interview with Isaac Asimov in EQMM: “I was the comic relief …”

(2) Francis M. Nevins gives us the first part of a multipart essay (2010) about Erle Stanley Gardner; however: “Those wishing to read about Gardner’s Perry Mason character must wait for Part Two.”

(3) Charles Shibuk continues his summary (1973) of the “paperback revolution” in detective/mystery publishing that was occurring half a century ago, focusing on Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Amanda Cross, Carter Dickson (otherwise JDC), Erle Stanley Gardner, Frank Gruber, Ngaio Marsh, Bill Pronzini, Rex Stout, Julian Symons, and Charles Williams.

(4) This is followed by Shibuk’s review (1975) of Nightwebs (1971), a collection of Cornell Woolrich’s “mainly unfamiliar works,” edited by Francis M. Nevins, Jr.: “Some of these stories are of extremely high quality, but alas, there is also much dross.”

(5) The issue’s centerpiece story is T. S. Stribling’s “The Mystery of the Paper Wad” (EQMM, 1946), which hasn’t been seen generally since first publication, followed by Stribling’s own “The Autobiography of an Ingenious Author” (1932): “The criminologist smiled at the illusion held by every man that with him all things, crimes and virtues, are possible.”

(6) In “The Full Mandrake” (2023), Rupert Holmes offers us “an appreciation of John Dickson Carr”: “If the classic fair play detective story is the magic act of literature, then John Dickson Carr is forever its master conjurer . . .”

(7) Douglas G. Greene’s assessment (1995) of JDC’s A Graveyard To Let (1949) (“. . . still, the swimming-pool gimmick is beautifully handled”), as well as Carr’s lifestyle as a New Yorker: “While he wrote in his attic study, Carr smoked continuously and tossed the cigarette butts on uncarpeted parts of the floor . . .”

(8) Dr. John Curran’s “Christie Corner” (2023) looks at what’s happening to AC’s heritage and finds all is not well, warning us about one project: “AVOID IT AT ALL COSTS.”

(9) Michael Dirda’s survey of the current scene, “Classical Mysteries Are Having a Moment” (2023): “. . . for devotees of old-time detection, recent publishing does seem surprisingly retrospective, even nostalgic.”

(10) Jon L. Breen’s article “Edward D. Hoch: King of the Classical Whodunit” (2008): “He practiced the increasingly lost art of the classical detective short story better than all but a handful of writers in the history of the genre.”

(11) There’s a mini-review of The White Elephant Mystery (1950) by Arthur Vidro: “It’s well-plotted and well-written . . .”

(12) As usual there’s a puzzle (and it’s a dilly).

(13) The issue ends with the sad news of Marvin Lachman’s passing: “Without Marv, we [at OTD] would have lacked the participation of leading professionals.”

      ____

   Subscription information:

   Published three times a year: spring, summer, and autumn. – Sample copy: $6.00 in U.S.; $10.00 anywhere else. – One-year U.S.: $18.00. – One-year overseas: $40.00 (or 25 pounds sterling or 30 euros). – Payment: Checks payable to Arthur Vidro, or cash from any nation, or U.S. postage stamps or PayPal. – Mailing address: Arthur Vidro, editor, Old-Time Detection, 2 Ellery Street, Claremont, New Hampshire 03743.

Web address: vidro@myfairpoint.net

THE MANDARIN MYSTERY. Republic Pictures, 1936. Eddie Quillan (Ellery Queen), Charlotte Henry, Rita La Roy, Wade Boteler (Inspector Queen), Franklin Pangborn, George Irving, Kay Hughes, William Newell. Based on the novel The Chinese Orange Mystery by Ellery Queen. Director: Ralph Staub. 

Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and YouTube (see below, but I think the running time on the latter has been cut).

   Remarkably enough, the actor who plays Ellery Queen in the bottom basement of a movie has the same initials, but alas he has absolutely no other credentials for playing the role. Eddie Quillan had a long successful career in making movies and in television, but in The Manadarin Mystery he plays the part of Ellery Queen as a brainless twit, more interested in getting a date with the girl in the leading role than solving a mystery.

   The girl being Charlotte Henry as Josephine Temple, owner of a rare, one-of-a-kind Chinese stamp worth thousands of dollars, and that was back in 1936. Obviously with a small piece of paper worth that kind of money, there are many others who wouldn’t mind having their hands on it, and one of them does so badly that they don’t mind committing a couple of murders to accomplish it.

   The movie follows the book, sort of, with a dead man found in a room with with his jacket on backwards and held upright with two long poles through his clothes. But with a running time of just over an hour, there’s no way to stuff all the complexities of the original text in, and the whole affair ends up being, in technical terms, a muddled mess.

   I can’t tell you to whom this movie was meant to appeal to, but it certainly wasn’t those who read and enjoyed the early day Ellery Queen books, written about strange mysterious affairs, true, but with clues and alibis that really meant something.

   Nothing at all like that here. Only cheap banter and little more. When I say “avoid,” I mean it.

   Have a wonderful day everyone!

BEHIND GREEN LIGHTS. 20th Century Fox, 1946. Carole Landis, William Gargan, Richard Crane, Mary Anderson, John Ireland, Charles Russell, Roy Roberts, Don Beddoe, Bernard Nedell. Screenplay: W. Scott Darling & Charles G. Booth. Director: Otto Brower. Currently streaming on YouTube (see below) and Amazon Prime.

   There really is a PI in this movie, but his part is so small that the actor who plays him (Bernard Nedell) does not even get on-screen credit. Besides being a PI, he also dabbles in blackmail on the side, which makes him an ideal victim of a blackmailee as well, making his role in the film exceedingly small.. Quite remarkably his body is found in a car left in front of the local police station, which causes the lieutenant in charge (William Gargan) all kinds of problems.

   It seems as though a young girl (Carole Landis), who is the daughter of the reform candidate for mayor in an upcoming election, had an appointment with the dead man just before his body was found, and all kinds of political pressure is placed on the cops to book her, at least for being under suspicion, if not for the murder itself.

   The pacing is fast. I think the whole movie takes place all in one night, without much of a letup. It’s a black-and-white crime movie, so it’s probably called a noir film by viewers who don’t know better, but it isn’t. Well, I’ll take that back. The lighting and the camera work is often the same as in true film noir.

   What makes the movie really enjoyable, though, is the acting and story line, both glossier and more professional than for any of the so-called Poverty Row productions. That’s what having a movie produced by 20th Century fox will do for it. As for the two leads, I confess I do not see William Gargan as a leading man in any film that has a hint of romance in it (and yes, it’s there), but any movie graced by the presence of Carole Landis in it makes it very easy to recommend this one.

PostScript: I do not know from whence the title comes. Perhaps the lights in the globes beside the front door of the police station are green, but who would know in a black-and-white movie?
   

   This is not really a review because what use is there of talking about a good old-fashioned game of charades? On one side are the challengers: Raymond Burr, Barbara Hale, William Hopper, and William Talman, versus the Stump the Stars All-Stars: Sebastian Cabot, Hans Conried, Beverly Garland, and Ross Martin.

   A good time was had by all, including me, when I watched this last night.

   Three for the Chair (1957) is a somewhat transitional work, containing the last two Nero Wolfe novellas originally published in The American Magazine  —  as all others had been: “Immune to Murder” (November 1955) and “A Window for Death” (as “Nero Wolfe and the Vanishing Clue,” May 1956). Rex Stout’s longtime outlet ceased publication with its August 1956 issue, so “Too Many Detectives” (September 14, 1956) debuted in Collier’s (which ironically followed suit soon after). “Window” concerns a murder committed in the Churchill Towers, and thus occasions mentions of “Tim Evarts, assistant house dick, security officer to you,” although Archie himself later repeats the “house dick” reference.

   â€œDetectives” also marks the first appearance in the canon proper of early female P.I. and occasional employee Theodolinda “Dol” Bonner, who after a solo effort, The Hand in the Glove (1937), figured in the Tecumseh Fox novel Bad for Business (1940), but ended up on the cutting-room floor when the latter was rewritten as the Wolfe novella “Bitter End” (1940).

   â€œI am against female detectives on principle,” Archie begins, but “there are times when a principle should take a nap, and that was one of them.” In Albany, he meets Dol and operative Sally Colt when all 590 private detectives licensed by the state, including a typically tetchy Wolfe, are summoned for questioning due to the “wiretapping scandals.”

   Three confreres from the Association of Licensed Private Detectives of New York State (ALPDNYS) — Steve Amsel (fired by Del Bascom), Jay Kerr, and Harland Ide — are also waiting to follow as Albert Hyatt, a special deputy of the secretary of state, questions our heroes. A man purporting to be Otis Ross had hired them to tap his own phone, which is legal, and disappeared when they learned he was not; Hyatt tells Wolfe he has a surprise, and gets one himself when the client, waiting in another room, is found strangled. Leon Groom, Albany’s chief of detectives, arrests them as material witnesses in the murder of William A. Donahue, who claimed Wolfe knew his identity…and that the tap was illegal.

   Bailed out by Stanley Rogers at the behest of Parker, and compelled to take a room at the Latham Hotel, Wolfe gathers the confreres/suspects to pool knowledge and resources; he learns that each had similar experiences but Amsel, who says he refused a tap-request by Donahue using his own name. Those tapped and his target manqué constitute the Charity Funds Investigating Committee, and Wolfe has the 48 operatives they collectively supply look into any connections with Hyatt, who had arranged for all seven to be there that day. The counsel for one of the suspect fund-raising organizations, Hyatt planned to scapegoat Donahue, believed safely out of the state, and killed him after he appeared unexpectedly.

   â€œImmune” finds Wolfe and Archie as guests at River Bend, the Adirondacks mountain lodge of Hemisphere Oil Co. (Hemoco) tycoon O.V. Bragan, at the request of Assistant Secretary of State David M. Leeson; Ambassador Theodore Kelefy, of “a foreign country with which our country wanted to make a deal,” has asked to catch a brook trout and have it cooked by Wolfe. A friend/advisor, financier Spiros Papps, identifies the others as oil-syndicate representative James Arthur Ferris and spouses Sally Leeson and Adria Kelefy. One of the five anglers doesn’t get to sample the baked brook trout Montbarry: Leeson, whom Archie finds in the river, his skull smashed in, while landing his own “supertrout.”

   Noting that the Kelefys and Papp enjoy “diplomatic immunity from arrest or detention,” D.A. Jasper Colvin says the evidence points to murder by somebody at the lodge, with a club from the woodpile, and the obvious inference a connection with the rivalry between Bragan and Ferris over Kelefy’s oil rights. Wolfe (weight-watch: Archie specifies his as 278 lbs.), who refuses to explain why the 20 trout he cooked included none caught by the ambassador — as verified by cook Michael Samek — wants only to go home. As all await the arrival of state A.G. Herman Jessel, Wolfe reluctantly tells Kelefy, “it amuses me to twist the tails of highly placed persons…I thought it would be nice touch of mockery…”

   Wolfe tells Jessel, Colvin, and Sheriff Nate Dell he’s ready to identify the murderer, but only with everyone present — and after a call to the Secretary of State, in which he reveals the true reason: Kelefy’s trout had been caught prior to the others, allowing him time for the murder. Having conferred by phone (in French, as a trooper listened) with Parker, he knew he might risk imprisonment if Kelefy were maltreated by “officers of the law,” thus the call to Washington. The motive is revealed to have no “relation to his public mission or the negotiations” but was purely personal, as Sally confirms that her husband had been seduced by Adria while he was the embassy secretary in their unnamed fictional country.

   Directed by John R. Pepper, and also broadcast in a double-length international version, “Immune to Murder” (8/18/02) was the final episode of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, and the only one adapted by Stuart Kaminsky. The prolific, Edgar Award-winning novelist, film professor/biographer, Mystery Writers of America president, and occasional scenarist  —  e.g., Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in America (1984) — specifies Kelefy (Giancarlo Esposito) as the “Vezenhuegan ambassador.” Local law has been scrambled somewhat, with Colvin, Dell, trooper Lt. Hopp, and Jessel recombined into Captain Colvin Jasper (sic; Richard Waugh), trooper Nate (Matthew Edison), and D.A. Jessel (Steve Cumyn).

   A faux news report kicks off the episode, identifying Bragan (David Schurmann), Ferris (Seymour Cassel, previously seen in “Before I Die” [6/16/02]), and Papps (Carlo Rota),  on camera. A reporter (Adam Reid) interviews Leeson (Robert Bockstael), who calls the gathering “an experiment on how being in nature — away from the secretaries, the pens and paper, [and the] long tables of formal diplomacy…may actually be able to change people’s minds,” explicitly compared with Ike’s then-imminent use of Camp David. In his narration, Archie (Timothy Hutton) notes that, “Twenty years ago…Wolfe [Maury Chaykin] got the papers that made him a U.S. citizen,” and thus agreed out of gratitude.

   Here, Papps has a predetermined “migraine,” sitting out the angling with Sally (Susannah Hoffmann) and Adria (Manon von Gerkan), as the Cook (George Plimpton) makes an ill-advised joke to Wolfe about his recipe requiring salt and onion. The credits are typically careless: Waugh’s character is addressed as Captain Colvin in the dialogue, and Cassel’s identified as, respectively, “Janus” and “James” in the opening and closing titles. Sadly, the series does not end on a high note, with pervasive scenery-chewing by, e.g., Waugh, Schurmann, and even Chaykin, as he bellows (via Kaminsky, not Rex Stout) about being in “a nightmare, dime-store, frontier theme park filled with bacteria-infested animals…”

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: “Christmas Party”

Edition cited  —

      Three for the Chair: Bantam (1958)

Online source —

DASHIELL HAMMETT – The Dain Curse. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1929. Reprinted many times since, in both hardcover and paperback.  TV mini-series: CBS 1978 (starring James Coburn as “Hamilton Nash”).

   The Dain Curse is a bad novel cobbled together from four interlinked stories from Black Mask. I disliked the novel when I first read it many years ago. Then after a recent debate on the Rara-Avis listserve about its merits, I resolved to read it again. This time reading the four stories as originally published to see if that improved my experience. It didn’t.

   Taking the four stories separately, however, there are some ebbs and flows of merit. It is Hammett after all. And bad Hammett is still better than a lot of stuff out there. I just wouldn’t recommend a re-read is all.

Story 1: “Black Lives.”  (Black Mask, November 1928)

   The Continental OP is hired by an insurance company to investigate stolen diamonds. Edgar Leggett had been loaned the diamonds by a local jeweler for the purpose of conducting some experiments adding hue to the stones. The OP begins to suspect that there’s something fishy about the so called theft.

   And bad things happen to Leggett and his family. Leggett’s daughter, Gabrielle, is informed by her step mother that all of the badness can be traced to a family curse (her mother’s maiden name was Dain): The Dain Curse: “[Y]ou’re cursed with the same rotten soul and black blood…all the Dains have had, you’re cursed with your mother’s death on your hands before you were five; you’re cursed with the warped mind and the need for drugs that I’ve given you in pay for your silly love since you were a baby. Your life will be black as…mine [was] black; the lives of those you touch will be black”.

   In the end the OP solves the crime of the missing diamonds, the insurance company is happy. But the Dain Curse remains!!

Story 2: “The Hollow Temple.” (Black Mask, December 1928)

   By far the best of the four stories, in this one Gabrielle Leggett joins a cult and goes missing. The OP is hired by her fiancé to recover the girl — which he does — but not before crushing the hollow temple forged by a charismatic charlatan out of morphine, laughing gas, sight gags, and mullah.

Story 3: “Black Honeymoon.”  (Black Mask, January 1929)

   Once Gabrielle Leggett is saved from the hollow temple, her fiancé elopes with her. The honeymoon does not go well, and the OP is called in to pick up the shards.

Story 4: “Black Riddle.” (Black Mask, February 1929)

   The so called riddle is this: If you don’t believe in Dain curses, why are all these bad things happening to Gabrielle Leggett? In this horribly told story, the OP mansplains for all to hear the solution to the three prior stories.

   He doesn’t show us. He tells us. Giving us a bunch of undisclosed information based on unsupported guesswork that just so happens to be completely right and confessed to by the criminal mastermind. It’s absolutely the worst kind of ending of a mystery. No fair play. No show don’t tell. Just a boring dispositive lecture telling you the answer in a terribly unsatisfying way.

         —

   So yeah. Hated it. Almost couldn’t finish it. Upon starting the book I immediately remembered who the ‘criminal mastermind’ was. This made my experience of the book infinitely worse as I could witness the lack of fair play in real time as the story unfolded.

   If Fast One is ODTAA (thanks, Roger) – -for whatever reason Hammett eschews ODTAA, insisting on a criminal mastermind to tie all of the miscreants and their collective miscreantry together. It’s an unnecessary conceit that spoils the whole thing. Ironically the curse of the Dain Curse is that there’s no Dain Curse.

   If Hammett had simply allowed the curse to linger all might have been okay. But Hammett takes such pains to dispel the curse that he destroys whatever mystery is left. Rather than solving the case, the whole thing crumbles in a monologue that neatly ties up everything in a bow. But what results is neither trick nor treat. Turns out the Dain Curse is the cursed book itself.

   I’ve lost a lot of time and energy to a stubborn UTI since Thursday, but after being on meds since Friday, I think my wheels are finally back on track. Back in action soon!

(*) If you don’t know what a UTI is, incurred by me following a semi-annual bladder checkup the week before, you can Google it. But even if you do know, what I know is that you don’t want to have one…