EDWARD D. HOCH “The Theft from the Onyx Pool.” Nick Velvet #2. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 1967. Collected in The Spy and the Thief (Davis, digest-sized paperback; 1st printing, December 1971 (Ellery Queen Presents #3) and The Thefts of Nick Velvet (Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1978.)

   The charm of the Nick Velvet stories to me is how clever they are, and in fact, they have to be. Not only does Nick have to figure out how to steal the essentially valueless objects he’s hired to obtain, but he also has to work out why he was hired to steal them in the first place. (In this story originally published in 1967, his fee is $20,000.)

   In this case Nick is hired by a young woman of some beauty and obvious social standing to steal the water from a famous writer’s pool. She does not want the pool drained. She wants him to steal the water. That’s the job. Nick, being am inquisitive fellow, once again needs to know why.

   Two detective stories in one, both cleverly worked out to the finest detail. How did Hoch do it, over and over again, and this time in only eleven pages?

PACO IGNACIO TAIBO II – Leonardo’s Bicycle. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1995; paperback, 1996. Translation of La Bicicleta de Leonardo, Mexico City, 1993.

   The literary equivalent of Pulp Fiction or the Mystery equivalent of Thomas Pynchon’s V. Take your pick.

   The non-linear plot bounces back, forth, up and down the various and variegated stories of:

   — Leonardo da Vinci’s possible invention of the Bicycle four hundred years before its manufacture.

   — A blocked writer in modern-day Mexico City who watches Women’s Basketball on Cable TV and makes up erotic fantasies about the players, then is galvanized into action (maybe) when one of them is kidnapped.

   — An International Criminal Mastermind in 1920s Spain, dogged by a dying journalist

   — A few anarchists

   — And an American Embassy bureaucrat at the fall of Saigon who manages to steal a car full of cocaine.

   All of which sounds quite Keeler-esque, but Taibo puts it across with sly humor and a gift for colorful description that makes Leonardo’s Bicycle much fun to read. I found myself flipping back and forth, keeping track of the wildly gyrating loose ends, and propelled by the narrative tension into reading this long after I should have been asleep.

   I shall definitely be seeking more from this guy.

THE MOB DOCTOR “Pilot.” Fox, 60m, 17 September 2012. Season 1, Episode 1. Jordana Spiro (Dr. Grace Devlin), William Forsythe, James Carpinello, Zach Gilford, Zeljko Ivanek, Floriana Lima, Jaime Lee Kirchner. Created by Josh Berman and Rob Wright , based on the book Il Dottore: The Double Life of a Mafia Doctor by Ron Felber. Director: Michael Dinner.

   As the pilot for the series which lasted less than half a season on Fox (13 episode, 17 September 2012 to 7 January 2013), this first episde works exceedingly well. It doesn’t hurt, though, that premise can be explained in one sentence: To keep her brother from being offed by the local Chicago mob, an extremely competent surgeon, Dr. Grace Devlin, has agreed to do their wished anytime the need comes up.

   There are other sub-stories in this first episode, but the major one, the one that will catch the average viewer’s attention right away, is that she is ordered to let a would-be witness in an upcoming trial die in the operation room. Well, I consider myself an average viewer and it certainly caught my attention.

   It is a dilemma, of course, and it has Grace sweating out how she’s going to get out of the spot she’s in all the way through. It comes out more or less OK, but there is also a twist in the tale that I didn’t see coming, one designed to keep all of us average viewers coming back next week.

   It helps that Jordana Spiro is not a knockout model type. In fact she is suitably harried throughout this entire episode. If she had been wearing the latest slinky dresses and high-heeled shoes, no one would believed it for a minute.

   Where the series is going, besides more of the same, I have no idea, but until it begins to repeat itself one time too many, I’ll keep watching.

   Marvel Comics’ Ghost Rider (2007) was a box office success, and it’s not difficult to see why. It’s fun, energetic, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Plus, at that time, Nicholas Cage was still a major box office draw and not doing the types of indies and direct to streaming features he is doing now.

   The trailer pretty much gives away the whole story, although not some of the more convoluted parts of the often confusing plot. A guy makes a deal with the devil, becomes a successful stunt motorcycle rider, then has to face a group of bad demons and save the world. Got it? Good. I can’t say it’s a good film because it isn’t. The dialogue is pretty atrocious and the special effects look more silly than they do frightening. But seeing the recently departed Peter Fonda portray The Devil incarnate in a motorcycle movie was still worth the ride.

   As some of you may know, I have been selling books on Amazon for as long as third party sellers have been allowed to do so there. Sales are decent there for recent books. Unfortunately, older books do not do nearly as well there. I have several thousand older mystery and western hardcovers that I would like to find new homes for, and to that end, I’ve just posted a first list of them online.

   To facilitate moving them out, I hope, I’ve priced them at half of what I believe is are “current market values,” as determined by doing some comparison shopping at abebooks.com.

   Some are extremely scarce and are priced accordingly, but many of them are $5.00 each, which is less than many new paperbacks at Barnes & Noble.

   Here’s the link to my first online list, with many more to come:

      https://mysteryfile.com/Books/VHC

   I hope you’ll take a look!

  EDWARD D. HOCH “The Spy Who Came to the Brink.” Short story. Jeffrey Rand #3. First appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1965. Collected in The Spy and the Thief (Davis, digest-sized paperback; 1st printing, December 1971 (Ellery Queen Presents #3.)

   As you might easily deduce from the title, the 1971 collection of tales reprinted from EQMM is evenly split between those of Jeffrey Rand (7) and those with master thief Nick Velvet (also 7). I’ve always liked the Velvet stories more, but the ones with Rand are also extremely good.

   Rand is head of Britain’s Department of Concealed Communications — a spy agency, that is to say, one dealings primarily, but entirely, with codes and ciphers. It’s a job that keeps him busy, with dozens of his adventures to have been told, many of which have taken him around the world several times over.

   In “The Spy Who Came to the Brink,” Rand must puzzle out why a small time TV actor who has gone to great length to steal a secret diplomatic code is shot to death on orders from Russia before he could do so.

   It isn’t that he knew too much, as Rand finally concludes, but rather that he knew too little. Hoch had a devious mind as a writer, second to none, and how he managed to tell short stories as short as this one (ten pages) and still include a strong amount of actual detective work in them, is a absolute mystery to me.

GRAHAM GREENE – The Third Man. Novella. Viking Press, US, hardcover, 1950. First published in the UK; included in The Third Man and The Fallen Idol (Heinemann 1950). Novelization of the screenplay.

THE THIRD MAN. British Lion Films, 1949. Joseph Cotten, Valli, Orson Welles, (Harry Lime), Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee. Director: Director: Carol Reed.

   Carol Reed’s film of THE THIRD MAN surfaced on my to-be-watched-again pile, so I decided to do a thorough job of it, and re-read Graham Greene’s novel (written at the same time as his screenplay) and Charles Drazin’s study of the film, IN SEARCH OF THE THIRD MAN (Limelight, 2000).

   Drazin’s book recounts the events in 1948-9 surrounding the making and marketing of THE THIRD MAN, and it reads like a novel, with director Carol Reed as the hero, writer Graham Greene as his weak-willed sidekick, producers David O. Selznick and Alexander Korda as comic relief, and Orson Welles as the villain of the piece.

   Reading this, one is surprised at how much of the film was simply a mater of convenience: Selznick, the prestigious producer of GONE WITH THE WIND, had money tied up in England that had to be spent there, so — with appropriate flourishes and ballyhoo — he formed a partnership with England’s Alexander Korda, a filmmaker of approximately equal splendour, who had money tied up in central Europe and needed a hit.

   Korda had known some success with Carol Reed and Graham Greene (FALLEN IDOL, 1948) and prevailed upon Reed to write a screenplay set in contemporary Vienna so he could spend his money there. For his part, Graham Greene had a story idea sitting around — something about a man probing the murder of a friend and getting some nasty surprises — and he saw a trip to Vienna as an excellent opportunity to cheat on his wife, so he was only too happy to accept the assignment.

   While Greene was in Vienna learning about sewers and Ferris wheels, Korda and Selznick spoke often and loudly to the press about their forthcoming masterpiece, hinting at a cast that might include Cary Grant as Harry Lime, Jimmy Stewart as his duped friend, and Ingrid Bergman as the woman they loved. Or Jennifer Jones. Or Ralph Richardson. What Selznick ended up putting out was two contract players he was paying anyway, Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli, while Korda financed the logistics by selling rights to release his old pictures in post-war Europe, found Orson Welles in need of money for OTHELLO, and signed him up — whereupon Welles proceeded to behave as obstreperously as possible (according to Drazin) showing up weeks late in Vienna, then refusing to act in the sewers, or much of anyplace else, really, requiring extensive use of a double on almost all the location shooting.

   So what you had here was a much-heralded mega-film made on hand-shakes, promises and pretense, and the wonder is that it turned out so damgood. Greene’s script is sharp, suspenseful and cleverly turned, the performances are real and moving — particularly Trevor Howard and Bernard Lee as a couple of weary MPs — and there’s a fascinating visual tension between Carol Reed’s carefully-composed images and the riotous look of a city that has been “bombed about a bit.”

   Characters go about dressed in elegant scraps of ill-fitting apparel, walking past palaces and rubble, and the dichotomy extends even to the memorable scene on the Ferris wheel, where Orson Welles speaks of death, taxes and heartburn while Joseph Cotten prepares himself to sell out or get sold.

   As for the book itself, it was planned by Korda and Selznick to be marketed in conjunction with the film for added publicity, and they thought that a rather neat trick in those early days before merchandising and product placement. And again, the wonder is that a book written as a matter of convenience should turn out so readable. Greene’s prose is crisp, witty, and not a bit rushed, and though the crux of the story is in no way original, he handles it well enough to make it seem fresh.

   I should note there’s an important difference between the ending of the book and the movie. Without giving it away, I may say Korda and Selznick thought the heroine’s action unrealistic for a woman who had been through what she had. They were wrong. As I read THE THIRD MAN I was impressed by the recurring theme of characters who have survived a war trying to put their lives back together, and Greene’s ending seemed to me a rather touching tribute to the resilience of the human spirit. And heart.

THIS ISLAND EARTH. Universal International, 1955. Jeff Morrow, Faith Domergue, Rex Reason, Lance Fuller, Robert Nichols. Based on the book by Raymond F. Jones (Shasta, hardcover, 1952), a fixup novel comprised of stories appearing in three separate issues of Thrilling Wonder Stories, 1949-50. Director: Joseph M. Newman.

   There is an old saying that you can’t go home again, and I know it’s true, as this movie proves. When I saw this movie the first time, I was 13 years old, and I thought it was the best science fiction movie I’d ever seen. It was in color, first of all, and all of the gadgets in the movie simply knocked my socks off.

   Forbidden Planet came along the very next year, but while that one was also in color and had Robby the Robot and even better special effects, I still liked This Island Earth better. Why? Two scenes have stood out over all these past 60 years. The two scientists building a communications device called the interlocutor from scratch using blueprints and parts send by mail from an anonymous source.

   I tried doing the same thing in my basement at home, but some of the parts must have gotten lost in the mail.

   The other scene I remember is Jeff Morrow and Faith Domergue standing in clear vertical tubes designed as either compression or decompression devices so as to condition them for either space travel or life on the aliens’ planet on their way to the latter to save their civilization. I’ve always been a little vague about the details, but details don’t matter, when you see the two Earthlings in skeletal form as the tubes do what ever is is they did.

   What I didn’t remember — and how could I forget? — is the weird ugly mutated monster that threatens the pair as they make their way back to Earth having failed their mission. A convenient form of amnesia, I guess.

   Nor do I remember when I was 13 wondering why it was the aliens who had so much power and could do many wondrous things on Earth needed all those scientists from Earth to help them fight their battles with other aliens back home.

   I don’t think that Faith Domergue impersonated a atomic scientist very well, but she certainly wore her tight fitting space uniform quite nicely, long before Racquel Welch did in Fantastic Voyage. This Island Earth was there first in a number of ways, but once the group of four left the planet Earth for Metaluna, the story seems to lose its way. Some nice memories were lost along the way as well. I was disappointed.

PAUL AYRES – Dead Heat. Bell, hardcover, 1950. No paperback edition.

   I am always very hesitant in saying that any book is the first and/or only one in a particular category, but off the top of my head, I don’t know of any other mystery novel that was based on a radio series, that being Casey Crime Photographer, which was of course based on the character created by George Harmon Coxe.

   I don’t know how this book happened to come about. Perhaps Randy Cox, our resident expert on all things Casey, will leave a comment to tell us more. As for the author, one supposedly Paul Ayres, he was in real life writer Edward S. Aarons, of Gold Medal’s “Assignment” series fame. In 1950, however, he’d written only one book under his own name; before then he was always Edward Ronns.

   You have to be of a certain age to have listened to the radio when the program was on the air. It ended in 1955 — after having started in 1943 — but since we did not have a local CBS outlet nearby when I was young, I never heard it until I started collecting OTR shows on tape in the mid-70s. Nonetheless, the book brought back quite a few memories from that later time and era:

   The characters were Casey, of course; his girl friend Ann Williams, who also worked for the Morning Express; and Captain Logan of Homicide. Every so often the action stops and they all find their way to the Blue Note cafe, where Ethelbert was the bartender and Herman played the piano.

   From the title and cover image above you might possibly guess that Dead Heat takes place in the world of horse racing, and it does, but it also takes place i the dead of summer, and the whole city of Boston is sweltering in the heat. Murdered is a jockey who has made a mess of his two currently overlapping love affairs, but who is also known for being scrupulously honest. This makes the timing of his death very suspicious: it’s before a race that if he were riding, he’d be a cinch to win.

   Aarons’ prose is clean and uncluttered, very descriptive, and since the plot is not all that complicated, the book takes no time at all to read. It probably isn’t as rewarding as one of Coxe’s own stories about Casey, but I enjoyed it immensely.