EVERYBODY WINS. Orion, 1990. Nick Nolte, Debra Winger, Will Patton, Judith Ivey, Jack Warden. Screenplay: Arthur Miller, based on his play of the same title. Director: Karel Reisz.

   Overall, I’d say I did — win, that is — even considering how unflinchingly flat the ending of this PI drama taking place in good old Connecticut is, but on the other hand, Leonard Maltin in his book on the movies calls this film a BOMB, and if so, either he or I are out of kilter, and I don’t think it’s me.    [FOOTNOTE 1.]

   PI Tom O’Toole (an appropriately scruffy but sometimes rather vacuous-looking Nick Nolte) is called in on the case by a woman named Angela. She’s a friend of the defendant, the nephew of the dead man, a well-known doctor who was brutally murdered in his home several months before. Already convicted and in jail, the nephew is a weakling who will probably not survive incarceration much longer.

   O’Toole is reluctant, but Angela’s charms prove too comely to overcome. Debra Winger (as Angela) is appropriately ditsy ad alluring all at once, and only gradually does she reveal that she knows more and more about the case — each time O’Toole is on the verge of withdrawing, she comes up with another shred of the story that keeps his interest, um, aroused.

   Angela is also the town whore, as O’Toole discovers too late, but he is too much in fascination with her to quit on the case, even if he wanted to. And the longer the case lingers on, the higher the corruption in the town (the cop cars say Highbury) seems to go. The crazed owner of a village garage slash motorcycle shop — he wants to start his own church, and he already as the beginnings of his own gang of disciples — seems to have confessed to the crime at one time, but it was still the doctor’s nephew who was railroaded into prison.

   All is not what it seems, or so it seems, and Twin Peaks has a lot to answer for. With all he quirky behavior involved, my greatest fear was that there would be no ending at all, but as I implied earlier, here I was wrong. The ending is one in which, as Angela says, “everybody wins,” and everyone and everything is satisfied, except justice (and just perhaps) Tom O’Toole. Just like real life.

   Whatever lack the story may have in a final punch, however, is at least partially made up for by the photography. New England never looked lovelier.    [FOOTNOTE 2.]

FOOTNOTE 1.   The point is this. How could anybody lump this film into the same category as Plan 9 from Outer Space and The Man Who Turned to Stone? I mean, give me a break.

FOOTNOTE 2.   Or so I thought until I saw the closing credits. Apparently the movie was filmed, at least in part, in Wilmington, North Carolina. All is not what it seems, all right.

[UPDATE] 03-26-14.   IMDb now tells me that some of this movie was filmed in Connecticut — Norwich, to be precise, a fact I hadn’t realized when I wrote this review.

DONOVAN. Granada TV, UK, 2004. 2 x 90 minute episodes. Samantha Bond, Ryan Cartwright, Tom Conti, Kara Wilson, Rhea Bailey, Jonathan Beswick, Anthony Edridge, Martin Scoles, David Fleeshman.

   Donovan was a one-off story with Tom Conti as the titular forensic scientist. Ten years ago he had a breakdown and resigned after a convicted murderer was acquitted on appeal after Donovan had been fond to have suppressed some evidence.

   Now a body is found with an identical method to the original crime. Donovan is pursuing a successful career writing about crimes he has investigated, but because of this connection is called in to do some forensics alongside the new scientist.

   (I would have thought that because of this connection he would have been the last person called in to do the work — but this is typical of the way that the obvious is simply glossed over to allow the situation to develop.)

   Some DNA is found at the scene and it turns out to be Donvan’s: he claims it is planted, but at first it is thought that he has carelessly left it while investigating.

   Later, when the victim turns out to be one of his wife’s lovers, it is used as evidence of Donvan’s guilt. Worse, he is suffering memory losses, especially of items that are important to the plot. Could he have committed the murder and forgotten about it?

   This had a strong cast, though Conti chose to play his part without any discernible emotions, and in truth I quite enjoyed it, but it just wasn’t plausible. It was done in all seriousness and presumably we were meant to take it seriously.

Editorial Comment:   This two-parter story has been packaged with three additional episodes from 2005 and is available on DVD in the US as DNA. See the image above.

EMMA LATHEN – Murder to Go. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1969. Pocket, paperback, September 1971 [the copy I read]. Several later printings.

   Counting A Shark out of Water, which appeared in 1997 and was the final one in the series, there were 24 “Emma Lathen” books in all — all of them featuring John Putnam Thatcher, senior vice-president of the Sloan Guaranty Trust, “the third largest bank in the world.”

   Whether he was ever promoted, I do not know. While I’ve read several of the books in the series over the years, I’d have to say it’s been twenty since last I did, and perhaps even thirty.

   And when I was a young man, what did I know of banking and investments, takeovers and mergers – the stuff, in other words, of the world of finance? Darned near nothing, and that’s reason I back then never did appreciated Thatcher’s adventures in mystery investigation anywhere nearly as well as I should have, I am sure.

   Before I get on any further with this review, let me add right here the fact that Emma Lathen was the byline of two ladies, Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Hennisart. You may be able to discern where the joint pseudonym came from, but from whence their alternative one, R. B. Dominic? (I seem to remember reading about it, and I think it was Jon Breen who uncovered this second identity of theirs, so maybe it was written up somewhere or another.)

   Queries: Is John Putnam Thatcher the first investment banker to be a repeating character in a series of detective stories? Query: Is Murder to Go the first instance of murder (fictional) related to a fast food franchise? (In this case, the Chicken Tonight Corporation.) Is Murder to Go the first fictional mystery involving mass poisoning via a commercial product? (The notorious Tylenol tampering case did not occur until 1982, so in this regard, it seems, the ladies Lathen were well ahead of any real-life case I can think of.)

   It is thus that the first death was accidental. The second, however, is decidedly not, and Thatcher, whose bank has a substantial stake in Chicken Tonight, is squarely in the middle of it.

   Lathen, which is how I will refer to both authors (and as female and in the singular) has a good eye and ear for how people really behave, both in the high echelons of the business world, and the lower – the franchisees who (of course) end up taking the heat – and the loss of business – the most. She also has a subtle “looking down the nose” and (through Thatcher) a non-approving way of looking at many situations, often to me in surprisingly humorous fashion. (Whoever thinks of bankers as stand-up comedians?)

    Here’s a lengthy quote from page 27:

   In this crisis situation that the head of Chicken Tonight is facing, Thatcher gives him high marks. From page 150:

   As a detective, Thatcher is blessed with both curiosity and a penchant for tidying up loose strings. See page 161 for a longer analysis along these lines. Unfortunately, there is only a small coterie of suspects, and with one of them behaving most curiously out of character, naming the killer is a feat that should be within the grasp of even the leisurely of armchair detectives. Such as myself, I hasten to add, and the rest of the novel is equally if not even more entertaining.

WILBUR DANIEL STEELE – The Way to the Gold. Doubleday, hardcover, 1955. No paperback edition.

THE WAY TO THE GOLD. 20th Century Fox, 1957. Jeffrey Hunter, Sheree North, Barry Sullivan, Walter Brennan, Neville Brand, Jacques Aubuchon, Ruth Donnelly. Based on the novel by Wilbur Daniel Steele. Director: Robert D. Webb.

   Buried somewhere deep inside the three hundred and seventy-five pages of Wilbur Daniel Steele’s The Way to the Gold, there’s a taut adventure tale screaming to get out, and it’s just too bad it didn’t make it, poor thing.

   The story starts out like a Gold Medal Original, with Joe Mundy, a young loner embittered beyond his years, jailed for a killing he never done. Joe’s cell mate turns out to be legendary outlaw Ned Glaze, the last of the old-time train robbers, who still holds secret the hiding place of his last haul, a hundred thousand in gold taken in a heist that cost the lives of his partners.

   And over the course of about a hundred pages we get to where we knew we were going all along: Joe is a free man, out of jail and on his way to the gold.

   Things, of course, just ain’t that simple. Joe’s passport to the small town where the loot is stashed turns out to be a genial, cherubic and very mysterious character named Hannibal, and Joe very quickly finds himself parked in a boarding house populated with surviving relatives of Ned Glaze’s old gang, who seem to think they have a claim on the money. There’s also a hard-boiled waitress with a soft spot for embittered loners and a tough-but-friendly cop who’s clearly got cards he ain’t showing.

   Steele takes these promising characters, and over the course of the next hundred-and-some pages, does nothing very much with them as Joe and the story get swallowed up in the trivia of getting along in a small town. And I mean “trivia”. And I mean “swallowed” as The Way to the Gold seems to lose its way somewhere in a novel of suburban life in the mid-50s.

   By the time we actually get on our way to the gold, a couple hundred more pages have grunted their way past in constipated movement — at which point we get to where I suspected we were headed all along, and if you didn’t see it coming a long ways back, you just wasn’t looking.

   Two years later, Twentieth Century Fox turned this into nothing more than a run-of-the-mill movie with a low-voltage cast, but they did rather well by it. Direction was entrusted to Robert D. Webb, whose films were never all that memorable, but the writing chores were handed to one Wendell Mayes, a writer whose name should be better known.

   Mayes was responsible for blockbusters like The Poseidon Adventure and The Spirit of St. Louis, but he also brought in smaller, quirkier efforts like The Hanging Tree and From Hell to Texas in fine form.

   Here he trims away the fat and returns the story to Gold Medal Original country, where it really always belonged. Gone is the minutia of small town life and endless domestic complications, replaced by a tight, fast-moving narrative that still takes time to appreciate the characters.

   Jeffrey Hunter comes off well as bitter, untrusting Joe Mundy, played off against Sheree North in full Kim-Novak-mode as the hard-boiled waitress. Barry Sullivan shows off his type-cast toughness as a local lawman who seems too smart to be hanging around this one-whore town, but pride of place must go to the family of dim-wit bad guys, winnowed down to four by writer Mayes, and perfectly realized by Walter Brennan as a senile old crackpot, Ruth Donnelly as a matriarch in the Lady Macbeth mode, Neville Brand as the brawn of the outfit, and especially Jacques Aubuchon, a busy actor you never heard of, absolutely perfect as the totally inadequate “brains” of the gang.

   Given Maye’s ability to impart fast touches of character, and director Webb’s gift for getting out of the way, this cast runs quite capably with a story that really moves, somehow giving the impression that there are real people involved in this paperback plot and bringing things to a fast, satisfying conclusion. The Way to the Gold turns out as a fun thing to watch and a film much much better than its source.

MY FAVORITE SPY. RKO Radio Pictures, 1942. Kay Kyser, Ellen Drew, Jane Wyman, Robert Armstrong, William Demarest, Harry Babbitt, Ish Kabibble. Director: Tay Garnett.

   I don’t have much to say about this movie. Either you like band leader and long-time radio star Kay Kyser in the role of a movie hero, or you don’t. His overripe meekness and exaggerated gestures of astonishment and surprise can wear on you awfully quickly.

   He’s no Pee Wee Herman, though. I think of him as an early Woody Allen type, southern style. Utterly cornball, in other words, but still funny.

   His orchestra plays only a minor role in this one, as Kay is asked by the army to help unroot some spies working out of the night club where he and his band are playing, The only problem is that he’s not able to tell his wife what he’s doing, and their honeymoon is constantly being interrupted. You can see what this means, and you can take it from there.

MARIANNE MACDONALD – Die Once. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, May 2003. No US paperback edition. Published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton, hardcover, 2002.

   Antiquarian book dealer Dido Hoare loses a recent but good customer in an apparent suicide. Of course, things are never what they seem, so when the suicide is investigated, Dido finds herself involved as she inventories his collection for the firm of lawyers that’s handling the estate and gets increasingly drawn into the maze the case turns into.

   The book dealing is nicely integrated, as usual. The plot is somewhat too intricate (and perhaps too drawn out) to be completely involving, but this is certainly a recommended bibliomystery.

       The Dido Hoare series —

1. Death’s Autograph (1996)

2. Ghost Walk (1997)
3. Smoke Screen (1999)
4. Road Kill (2000)
5. Blood Lies (2001)

6. Die Once (2002)
7. Three Monkeys (2005)
8. Faking It (2006)

BARRY PEROWNE – Raffles Revisited, The Adventures of a Famous Gentleman Crook. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1974. Hamish Hamilton, UK, hardcover, 1974.

   E. W. Hornung only wrote three collections of short stories about amateur cracksman A.J. Raffles, and a disappointing novel (Mr. Justice Raffles), so in 1932 Montague Haydon, editor of the British magazine Thriller had the bright idea of continuing the character. He approached Leslie Charteris, creator of the Saint, who turned him down, and next the turned to Philip Atkey, Australian nephew of writer Bertram Atkey, who had already continued his uncle’s popular tales of cracksman Smiler Bunn.

   Writing as Barry Perowne, Atkey updated Raffles to the 1930’s and involved him in adventures along the lines of the Saint and other durable desperadoes from Thriller. The writing was good, and the tales enjoyable, but the war and the paper shortage ended both Thriller and Raffles.

   In 1950 Perowne had the bright idea of bringing Raffles back yet again, but this time in his original form, in short stories set in the original period and milieu. Raffles, the gentleman cricketer of the M.C.C. (Marlebone Cricket Club) and the Albany and his pal Bunny Manders were back and in the opinion of many if some of Hornung’s atmosphere and decadence are gone the writing and the plots have improved no end.

   The new stories appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, The Saint Mystery Magazine, and John Bull. They were an immediate critical and popular hit. In addition Perowne gave the perpetually dumb Bunny half a brain, a device that helped the stories no end, and added Raffles sister Dinah to the mix.

   The stories in Raffles Revisited are:

      The Grace and Favor Crime

   Raffles and Bunny foil a German spy ring, thanks to a dog that doesn’t know its master and a master who doesn’t know his dog, and Raffles is offended by a bribe.

      Princess Amen

   Raffles employs a mummy case to crack a safety deposit box in a bank and comes close to suffocating, save for fast thinking by the fence Ivor Kern and Bunny’s ability to read hieroglyphics.

      Kismet and the Dancing Boy

   Raffles plays cupid while coveting a rare chess set.

      The Birthday Diamonds

   In Paris Raffles finds himself cracking a safe for a Parisian policeman in front of a room full of witnesses — and still gets the swag.

      The Dartmoor Hostage

   A cricket game at the prison uncovers an attempt to break in to Dartmoor, and a secret that turns a profit for Raffles.

      The Doctor’s Defense

   On a cruise Raffles and Bunny have to aid an old classmate set up as the fall guy in an international con game involving phony diamonds.

      The Gentle Wrecker

   Raffles breaks his oath to never rob a house he is a guest in to steal a ship’s figurehead and unite a pair of lovers by framing an innocent man.

      Six Golden Nymphs

   Raffles eludes the police by setting them to solve a murder that never happened.

      Man’s Meanest Crime

   Raffles foils the Anniversary Thief.

      The Coffee Queen Affair

   Raffles meets his American compliment and aids the Knickerbocker Kid in reform and romance, all to win a wager on who will be chosen the Coffee Queen.

      An Error in Curfew

   Raffles postpones lifting a fortune in jade to help a houseful of young ladies named after the days of the week.

      Bo Peep in the Suburbs

   Raffles has to rob a safe that is only out of sight for a few minutes every day.

      The Governor of Gibraltar

   Raffles becomes the envoy for his old school chum the Royal Governor of Gibraltar in order to help the husband of a charming and innocent con woman escape from a heavily guarded ship carrying gold bullion.

      The Riddle of Dinah Raffles

   While Raffles is in Australia Bunny discovers his sister is more than blood ken to the master cracksman.

   Later books in the series, Raffles of the Albany, and Raffles of the M.C.C. add a new twist to the stories with Raffles meeting historical personages like Winston Churchill (“The Baffling of Oom Paul”), Conan Doyle (“The Victory Match”), Oscar Wilde (“Dinah Raffles and Oscar Wilde”), and P.G. Wodehouse (“The Graves of Acadame”) among others.

   With the possible exception of August Dereleth’s Solar Pons stories, the Raffles pastiche are unique in that they established their own fan base beyond the original stories. I’ll confess I find them superior to Hornung in terms of plot and writing, and believe they stand alone as some of the most entertaining stories of their kind ever penned.

   Perowne is not the only author to continue Raffles adventures. John Kendrick Bangs wrote a series featuring Mrs. Raffles and another with the son of Sherlock Holmes and Raffles daughter, Raffles Holmes. Graham Greene penned a play, The Return of A.J. Raffles, and Alan Moore recently included Raffles as one of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman graphic novels. David Fletcher, creator of the British television series Raffles with Anthony Valentine wrote a novelization of the eleven stories in the series.

   The Perowne stories are well worth discovering even if you don’t care for the originals by Hornung. Perowne’s version of Raffles and Bunny are a charming pair of rogues who manage the balancing act of a career in crime while never endangering their standing as English Gentlemen or Raffle’s standing as England’s finest cricketer. How they manage that feat is a constant source of entertainment in probably the finest series of pastiche ever written.

PHILIP MacDONALD – Something to Hide. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1952. No paperback edition. Published in the UK as Fingers of Fear: Collins, hardcover, 1953. A “Queen’s Quorum” title.

    This collection comprises two novellas and four short stories, all exceptionally well done. Two of the stories display the abilities of Doctor Alcazar, MacDonald’s “clairvoyant” detective.

    In “The Green-and-Gold String,” Alacazar is at his tent at the carnival and reads the future — “General Reading–50 cents. Special Delineation–$1.00” — of a lady’s maid, who is murdered several days later. Her employer offers a reward of $5000, and Alcazar can’t resist the “easy” money. Alcazar is a character, of course, but a superb psychologist and bluffer, and he traps the murderer into a confession.

    In the second story about Alcazar, “Something to Hide,” he and companion, the carnival’s former Weight-Guesser, are down on their luck. Their former client knows a rich woman with a problem, but how is Alcazar to know what the problem is? No one needs to tell a clairvoyant anything; he should already know it. As Avvie says:

    “The Wood-for-the-Trees” has Anthony Gethryn returning to England from the US in the summer of ’36. He is delivering a letter from a Personage of Extreme Importance in the US to another P.O.E.I. in England. The area to which he is delivering the letter has recently had two murders by, ostensibly, an obvious maniac.

    A third occurs while Gethryn is there, and he quite frankly admits that a motiveless crime is best handled by “routine politico-military methods.” Something his son says on his return home and wifely suspicions, however, put him on to the murderer.

    “Malice Domestic” deals with a husband who is being given poison, most probably by his wife, and the “happy” ending, or at least happy if you’re the murderer.

    “Love Lies Bleeding” is something of a horror story. How does Cyprian Morse, having killed a young lady in hot blood after she tries to seduce him — Cyprian is CD all of the way, you see — manage to be freed after telling a quite implausible tale of how the murder happened? A fairly evident ending, but nonetheless a powerful story.

    Finally, “The Fingers of Fear” deals with a child molester and murderer. After he has presumably been apprehended, Lieutenant (acting Captain) J. Connor, the man who arrested him, begins to have doubts, doubts that are reinforced by his wife. Connor and his wife begin their own investigation.

THE MARKET OF VAIN DESIRE. Triangle, 1916. H. B. Warner, Clara Williams, Charles Miller, Gertrude Claire, Hutton. Story: C. Gardner Sullivan. Director: Reginald Barker. Shown at Cinefest 26, Syracuse NY, March 2006.

   Mrs. Badgely (Gertrude Claire) has engineered a marriage between her reluctant daughter Helen (Clara Williams) and the too smooth and obviously villainous Count Bernard d’Montaigne (Charles Miller). (You have to suspect that he’s not all he seems to be since no true French aristocrat would drop the “e” in d(e) Montaigne.)

   Pastor John Armstrong (H. B. Warner, warming up for his role as the Christ in DeMille’s King of Kings), upset by the blatant insincerity of the arranged marriage, preaches a sermon in which he compares the “selling” of a daughter to a woman selling her body on the street, bringing home this message with the introduction of a streetwalker (Leona Hutton) into the service.

   The congregation is horrified and when Helen’s father calls off the engagement, the “Count” confronts and assaults the minister. When the fake aristocrat is exposed, the members of the congregation are reconciled with their pastor, and he and Helen, realizing that they love one another, pledge their troth.

   I like a meaty melodrama, and this heady mix of religion, prostitution and social climbing was to my taste. I wasn’t raised a Southern Baptist for nothing. The moral lessons I absorbed in countless sermons and bible classes still resonate in the proper setting and with the right material.

   I noted with some surprise that C. Gardner Sullivan was both the author of the scenario for Hairpins [reviewed here ] and of the story for the very dissimilar Market.

   Health issues, tax chores, snow — I have more excuses for the lateness of my latest column than a toad has warts. This month we cross the Atlantic and resurrect my impressions of some British whodunits I read back in the late Sixties and Seventies. I didn’t read them in chronological order but I’ll arrange them that way for the column.

   Leslie Charteris’s Meet—the Tiger! (Ward Lock 1928, Doubleday Crime Club 1929) is just as cornily melodramatic as the title suggests, featuring a pure heroine whom the mustachioed leering villain tries to force into marriage and a hidden mastermind captaining a clutch of super-crooks.

   What saves this book from the graveyard of worthless imitations of Edgar Wallace is that its hero, appearing for the first time, is a daring young swashbuckler christened Simon Templar but better known as The Saint.

   Simon’s two-front war against Scotland Yard and the super-crooks for the prize of a fortune in gold hidden somewhere around a Devonshire village lacks the gleeful outrageousness in plotting, prose and people-drawing that was soon to become the hallmark of the Saint Saga, but its historic interest is hard to deny.

   H.C. Bailey’s Garstons (Methuen, 1930; U.S. title The Garston Murder Case, Doubleday Crime Club 1930) is set on the palatial estate of the munitions-manufacturing Garston family and in the surrounding towns and villages.

   The 20-year-old disappearance of an obscure chemist whose formulas the Garstons may have stolen, the theft of some cheap jewelry from the fiancée of a long-dead Garston scion, and the strangulation of the ailing matriarch in a dark archway of the family castle, blend into a neat problem for psalm-spouting criminal lawyer Joshua Clunk.

   Bailey here uses the multi-viewpoint approach, putting us inside the heads of Clunk, his Scotland Yard antagonist Superintendent Bell (who will be familiar to readers of the author’s Reggie Fortune stories), a local inspector, a Jane Eyre-like nurse, and the young student who falls for her in the chaste old-fashioned way.

   The interplay of each one’s knowledge with the others’, some fine scenes of interrogation and recapitulation, and a wealth of details of time and place and history and geography combine to make this long, slow, carefully constructed work a model British detective novel of the Golden Age.

   George Bellairs’ Death of a Busybody (John Gifford 1942, Macmillan 1943) finds genial Inspector Littlejohn paying a wartime visit to the town of Hilary Magna to find out who drowned the village voyeur in the vicar’s cesspool.

   He encounters some amusing bucolic suspects and his investigation moves more briskly than is customary in English whodunits, but the climax is clumsily structured, the solution is reached purely by legwork, and the culprit is obvious to readers (though not to the supposedly seasoned officials) as soon as he offers his alibi.

   A sharp incidental picture of a country hamlet in wartime is the highlight of this all too average specimen.

   In Harry Carmichael’s Put Out That Star (Collins, 1957; U.S. title Into Thin Air, Doubleday Crime Club 1958) we follow insurance investigator John Piper as he looks into the disappearance of a glamorous British movie queen from a fashionable London hotel.

   Eventually he discovers how, who and why, but the only readers who won’t have tumbled to the truth a hundred pages ahead of Piper are those who are completely innocent of the hoariest cliche denouement in English mystery fiction.

   Carmichael also manages to slip in the most hackneyed American climax in the genre and to leave several huge holes in the plot. Quite an achievement, yes?

   A Murder of Quality (Gollancz 1962, Walker 1962) casts John LeCarre’s ex-spy George Smiley in the unusual role of private sleuth, invading Dorsetshire’s posh and snobby Carne School in order to look into the fatal bludgeoning of an instructor’s wife shortly after she stated that she was afraid her husband was trying to kill her.

   Smiley pokes into the animosities between townies and gownies and between the Anglicans and the Baptists without neglecting physical clues like the piece of bloody coaxial cable and the altered examination paper, but LeCarre never clarifies how Smiley reached his solution nor what the murderer’s plan was.

   However, the confused plot is balanced by fine evocations of scene and character, including two of the bitchiest females I’ve ever encountered in a whodunit.

   John Creasey’s The Depths (Hodder & Stoughton 1963, Walker 1967) isn’t really a mystery but a blend of philosophy, SF and suspense that’s typical of his postwar novels about Dr. Palfrey and the international organization Z5.

   This account of Palfrey’s war against the mad-scientist ruler of an undersea kingdom who’s discovered the secret of prolonging life indefinitely and can also create tidal waves powerful enough to destroy any ship or seacoast in the world crawls at snail speed and bulges with plot holes.

   But it’s worth reading for a few fine character sketches — notably that of another doctor who slowly discovers a humanistic conscience — and especially for the climax where Creasey evokes the moral nightmare of politico-military decision-making in today’s world. The implied value judgments may rouse readers to fury but very few of the tough questions are evaded in this early specimen of the techno-thriller.

   Douglas Clark’s Deadly Pattern (Cassell 1970, Stein & Day 1970) is a plodding and drearily written quasi-procedural in which snobbish Detective Chief Inspector George Masters and his three Scotland Yard subordinates are dispatched to a tiny coastal town to investigate the almost simultaneous disappearances of five drab middle-class women.

   When four of them are found buried by the seashore, Masters and company crawl into action, taking 169 pages to uncover a psychotic killer whose identity should be apparent to every reader by page 30.