CHARLES O. LOCKE – The Hell Bent Kid. W. W. Norton, hardcover, 1958. Popular Library, paperback, 1958; reprinted. 1963. Ace, paperback, date unknown. Named at one time as one of the top 25 Western novels of all time by the Western Writers of America. Film: Released as From Hell to Texas (20th Century Fox, 1958) Don Murray, Diane Varsi, Chill Wills, R. G. Armstrong, Dennis Hopper. Directed by Henry Hathaway.

   Tot Lohman is only about eighteen, a fair hand with cattle, but gifted with his two loves, horses and guns. He’s a decent kid, hard luck, but hard luck isn’t unusual on the Staked Plains of West Texas, the Llano Estacado.

   But life has just spun out of control for Tot because he killed a Boyd, and the Boyd was related to Hunter Boyd, and his son wild Tom Boyd, and neither will stand for the killing.

   Tot wisely decides getting out of the country will be better than waiting for the Boyds. He heads for New Mexico looking for his father determined to put the Boyds behind him, but the Boyds are determined and want “justice,” and they will do anything to get it, including turning Tot Lohman, a big kid who just happens to be good with a gun into the Hell Bent Kid, a killer with a conscience and a growing list of white crosses in his wake.

   I have a taste for Westerns, and bend to no one in my love of the more common pulp Western from Zane Gray to Louis L’Amour and the men and women who write them, but there is another kind of Western, the more literary model, the Western as novel, and not just story that I admire. It is no attack on the former to admire the latter.

   It’s a sub-genre of the more popular form with a history in itself with familiar names like Owen Wister, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, Walter Van Tilberg Clark, Frederick Manfred, Dorothy Johnson, Wallace Stegner, Conrad Richter, Oakley Hall, Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, and now one I never knew about before, Charles O. Locke. Titles like The Oxbow Incident, The King of Spades, A Man Called Horse, Sea of Grass, Shane, The Last Hunt, Warlock, Blood Meridian, and Lonesome Dove are among its more famous examples.

   As you might imagine, it’s rarer to discover a book in this category than in the more familiar form and a time to celebrate when you do.

    The Hell Bent Kid is a pure example of the form. The plot may be straight out of a hundred pulp Western fantasies, but this is a novel and not just a tale. It is about the destruction of a young man forced to run and fight through brutal country against hard men who learn too late his almost mystical skill with a gun. It is about a good kid forced to become a killer, a decent young man who doesn’t want to be what his hunters make him into, who meets a girl, has a brief moment of normalcy, and is forced to take up the gun one last time.

      It’s the inevitability of Tot Lohman’s fate that makes this a novel and not just a well written pulp tale. The same story appeared in a thousand Western pulps and original paperbacks and still does today, but seldom written with the simplicity and human understanding of this version.

   It’s no coincidence this one ends in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, though Tot Lohman is no Billy the Kid, and his fate isn’t met at the hands of a Pat Garrett.

   There is no shortage of standard Western thrills here, but there hangs over the book a hint of Greek tragedy, of hard country written on men’s souls, and burned in women’s broken hearts and too short lives. As I said at the beginning I had never heard of this book or of Locke, but now I will look for his name and treasure this book.

   Told in epistolary form, a long section in the middle by Tot himself, the book is as easy to read as any Western, it just has a little more to say than most, the difference between a great B Western film and John Ford, between blazing guns and the smell of gunsmoke and the exposed souls of the people involved.

   The Hell Bent Kid was made into a decent film in 1958, From Hell To Texas, directed by Henry Hathaway. It’s a pretty good little film aimed at focusing on younger stars, but it is a pale adaptation of the novel, much more a standard Western than the well-written novel this book is.

STEVE SHERMAN -The White Mountain Murders. Hugh Quint #2. Walker, hardcover, 1989. No paperback edition. (See also comment #2.)

   Hugh Quint, ex-Boston cop, now a PI, heads for New Hampshire to help find the half-sister of a friend and ends up preventing the theft of a $100,000 antique chest. Several murders occur as well, he most obvious suspect being a back-to-nature Abenaki Indian.

   The same Indian who’s gone off with the half-sister who started it all. The detective work is slight, and most of the book’s charm comes from the rustic setting and the bucolic nature of its inhabitants. Unfortunately it begins to wear off about halfway through.

       The Hugh Quint series —

The Maple Sugar Murders. Walker 1987
The White Mountain Murders. Walker 1989
Primary Crime. Appledore 2000

THE QUIET GUN. Regal Films / 20th Century Fox, 1957. Forrest Tucker, Mara Corday, Jim Davis, Kathleen Crowley, Lee Van Cleef, Tim Brown. Based on the novel Law Man, by Lauren Paine. Director: William F. Claxton

   Sheriff Carl Brandon (Forrest Tucker) is a man with a code. The quiet but strong type, he is the lawman of a Western frontier town. With a live and let live attitude, he does not seem to have all that much to do, other than keep things calm. All that changes when the city attorney comes to his office and tells him that he and the town are about to file an immorality complaint against rancher Ralph Carpenter (Jim Davis).

   Carpenter’s alleged crime? Relations with a teenage Indian girl named Irene (Mara Corday). After all, his beautiful wife has temporarily left him due to marital troubles and it can’t simply be that the Indian girl is his servant? Can it?

   Brandon warns the city attorney to let it be. First of all, Carpenter is an old friend of his. But more importantly, the good sheriff knows that provoking Carpenter will be like provoking a bear and will likely result in bloodshed. The city attorney is determined, however, to have his say and ends up getting himself killed by Carpenter.

   What follows is a compelling hour or so of action and drama in which Brandon investigates what happened at the ranch and attempts to uncover the conspiracy that ends up getting Carpenter and Irene murdered before it all ends. This leads him into a direct conflict with saloon owner John Reilly (Tim Brown) and cattle rustler Doug Sadler (Lee Van Cleef).

   In many ways The Quiet Gun could just have easily been a pilot for a late 1950s TV Western with Forrest Tucker cast as the lead, but the movie transcends the limitations of the small screen with some stark visuals, a hardy cynicism, and a rather dismal view of the human propensity to gossip. It would seem as if nearly every man in the town except Brandon and his deputy, the kind, but mentally slow Sampson (portrayed by Hank Worden, known for his association with John Ford).

   There’s not much in this Regal Films production that you haven’t seen before – a man quietly in love with his friend’s wife; a lynch mob exacting brutal frontier justice; and a sheriff holed up in his office determined to make sure that his prisoners face a judge rather than a street mob – but one thing I noticed in The Quiet Gun is that nary a minute is wasted. This is a taut, well-edited film and one that deserves more attention.

DIAL RED O. Allied Artists, 1955. Bill Elliott, Helene Stanley, Keith Larsen, Paul Picerni, Jack Kruschen, Elaine Riley. Written and directed by Daniel B. Ullman.

   Getting too old for the B-westerns he’d been making, and with B-westerns on their way out anyway, “Wild” Bill Elliott ended his movie-making career with five low budget police dramas from Allied Artists. This is the first of the five, all of them recently released in a box set from Warner Archives.

   Strangely enough, Elliott never appeared once on television, so when the five crime films didn’t pan out, he seems to have disappeared quietly into retirement. I’ve had the five movies on a want list for quite a while, but while Dial Red O is perfectly acceptable for what it is, I was also disappointed. Except for possibly some of the lighting effects and a jazzy score by Shorty Rogers and his group, there are no noir aspects to the film at all.

   Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But Dial Red O could easily almost have been an extended version of Dragnet on TV, without the monotone deliveries and the distinctive “Dum – – – de – DUM – DUM.”

   Not that Elliott doesn’t speak in terse, clipped tones himself. In this film he’s a Hollywood police lieutenant named Andy Flynn, and the fugitive he’s after is an escapee from an army psychiatric hospital whose wife had just divorced him.

   The wife, played by Helene Stanley, has been playing around. After she’s killed by her married lover, the fugitive Flynn os looking for is the obvious suspect.

   From here on, or even before, there are no frills, only straight-forward police work. Nothing less, but nothing more, either.

DALE L. GILBERT – Murder Begins at Home. Carter Winfield & Matt Doyle #3. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1989. No paperback edition.

   Ever wonder what it would be like if Nero Wolfe and his gang were to move to San Diego, take up new identities and went back into business? Well, dream on. This isn’t it, but it’s close. Slightly whacked ouyand steamed up, but close. Blame it on Californication.

   Matt Doyle is the legman for reclusive/exclusive PI Carter Winfield, and in this case,they go to work (under duress) for a Mafia kingpin who needs a bodyguard for hi family. The writing is vaguely reminiscent of the pulps, but the characters are vividly drawn.

{UPDATE]   I followed this at the time with a footnote that included a detailed description of what I found to be a serious plot flaw. Reading it now, though, I found it boring and uninteresting. Deciding that you would too, in the context of a review that I now consider to be far too short, I’ve omitted it.

   What I really would like to know now is more about the Nero Wolfe-Archie Goodwin connection. I didn’t go into that very well back in 1989, and I guess the only way I’m going to be able to is to find my copy of this book and read it again.

   This was the final book in the series. It was preceded by The Black Star Murders (1988) and The Mother Murders (1989). Dale Gilbert, the author, died in 1988.

BRIAN CLEEVE – Vice Isn’t Private. Sean Ryan #3. Random House, hardcover, 1966. Lancer 73-621, paperback, 1967. First published in the UK as The Judas Goat (Hammond, hardcover, 1966).

   Somewhere between the suave James Bond, the tough minded Quiller, and Len Deighton’s nameless (in the books anyway) Chandler-voiced cynical operative there was Brian Cleeve and his creation, former IRA killer turned reluctant British agent, Sean Ryan.

   Like many of his fellow British spy writers, Cleeve was a former intelligence operative, but unlike most, he chose a darker and less glamorous path. You wonder if Ryan ever owned a dinner jacket; in fact, you wonder if he owned a decent suit most of the time.

   This gritty thriller opens with Ryan recently rescued from prison by a cold-blooded major (is there any other kind in spy fiction) to work for counter-intelligence, “You don’t have to know anything, just do what you are told.”

   Kathy O’Hara’s “friend,” Mike Rafferty, is in Garside prison, and a fixer named Harry Marks has arranged for a meeting with Ryan as the man to get him out, but Harry is under the thumb of brutal gangster Guilio Romano, and he sings like a bird that Ryan is “Big Law”.

   Ryan’s job is to get Rafferty out, disguising the fact he has the government behind him, follow him and retrieve the photographs Rafferty is blackmailing a cabinet minister with. Not just any cabinet minister either, Garrett Cameron-Harvey, the Home Secretary.

   To this point, this entry in the series is pretty clearly based on Sean Bourke’s book about breaking traitor George Blake out of prison and smuggling him out of England to Russia. It was a good story as true spy stories go, demonstrated by the fact it was the basis for Desmond Bagley’s Freedom Trap (John Huston’s The MacIntosh Man) and would have been the basis for a Hitchcock film had he lived.

   It made headlines and Bourke’s book was a bestseller, optioned but not filmed itself.

   Of course nothing is ever that simple in any spy novel, much less suspense novel, and the same is true of this one.

   Complicating things farther is the source of the Home Secretary’s blackmail, Irina Mortimer, a discrete dominatrix who has reasons of her own to keep his secrets from destroying her access to a very elite clientele in Europe and England.

   The escape proves the easiest of Ryan’s tasks, which escalate when Romano kidnaps Rafferty in order to get the papers for himself, leaving Ryan to rescue Rafferty, retrieve the photographs, and get Rafferty and Kathy O’Hara out of England and well away from the Home Secretary, all complicated by Ryan’s growing hate of Rafferty and desire for Kathy, and Cameron-Harvey himself on the thin edge threatening to collapse under the threat.

    Vice Isn’t Private is a tight and lean book, under two hundred pages, far from today’s bloated thrillers. There isn’t an extraneous word or missed beat, the violence shocking and sometimes sadistic, the suspense palpable, and Ryan a fascinating protagonist torn between his violent past and glimpses of a world away from it he can never quite reach, all told in tough and sometimes poetic prose by Cleeve, who later went on to write bestselling historical fiction.

BACKLASH. Universal International, 1956. Richard Widmark, Donna Reed, William Campbell, John McIntire, Barton MacLane, Harry Morgan, Robert J. Wilke, Jack Lambert, Roy Roberts, Edward C. Platt, Robert Foulk. Screenplay: Borden Chase, based on the novel Fort Starvation by Frank Gruber, reviewed here. Director: John Sturges.

   Here’s a gaudy little B-movie which I found enjoyable out of all proportion to its actual merit. Written by Borden (Red River) Chase, directed by John Sturges (Great Escape, Magnificent Seven) and done up in lurid Universal Technicolor, this is in every inch a “B,” never mind the budget, cowboys, Indians, lost treasure and what-all else you need for a Saturday afternoon.

   The plot hangs loosely on the peg of Richard Widmark looking for the man who killed his Pa — or more precisely, the an who let Dad and four others get butchered by Indians instead of going for help, then took the gold they were carrying out of Indian country.

   To this end, Widmark does some exemplary sleuthing, poring over old testimony, double-checking witnesses, exploring the crime scene and wisecracking in the best PI tradition (“There’s something I’ve wanted to tell you since we first met — Goodbye!”) with “tough gal” Donna Reed, who plays the possibly treacherous female lead like Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo or The Killers.

   There are suggestions here that this could have been a better movie, though perhaps less fun: as the story progresses we find that Widmark is not so much pursuing his dad’s killer as he is trying to live up to a father whose love he never knew. Anthony Mann or Delmar Daves would have pursued the oedipal complexities of this, but Sturges just shrugs it off and brings on the Indians.

   And the gunfights, fistfights, and chases with the lean technical skill typical of him, and even a certain amount of humor. I particularly enjoyed the spirited thesping of third-billed William Campbell: he’s only in the movie for a few minutes, but he plays a black-clad giggling gunfighter just like Richard Widmark’s Tommy Udo of a decade earlier.

   Tuba Skinny is a traditional jazz band based in New Orleans. The female singer in this video is Erika Lewis (no relation).

BOSTON LEGAL “Head Cases.” ABC, 60 min. Season 1, Episode 1. 03 October 2004. James Spader (Alan Shore), William Shatner (Denny Crane), Rhona Mitra, Lake Bell, Mark Valley, Rene Auberjonois, Monica Potter. Created by David E. Kelley. Director: Bill D’Elia.

   William Shatner will be known for now and forever as Captain James Kirk of the starship Enterprise, but I think that totally irreverent hotshot Boston lawyer Denny Crane is the role he was always meant to play. His view of things is that he’s still at the top of his game, but in this first episode of Boston Legal, his underlings and associates are beginning to wonder if he’s still up to the job.

   This series had a large ensemble cast, and since some of the players came over from a preceding series called The Practice, which I never saw (and in fact this is the first time I’ve seen an episode of this series), it took me a while to put together who was who and what connection they may have to each other.

   There are a quite a few cases the firm is working on as well, beginning with the head of the local office coming to a staff meeting sans pants (nor undershorts) and being carried away strapped down in a stretcher. The two major ones are (1) a major client of the firm demanding that a PI be hired to follow his wife. Denny refuses, for good reason. He’s the one who’s sleeping with the wife. And (2) the mother of a young black girl wants to sue a theatrical company for not choosing her to play the part of Annie.

   James Spader is the first name in the cast listing, but it took me until I’d seen the second episode, not otherwise reviewed here, to understand how essential he is to the show’s chemistry. His unflappable refusal to ever be outwitted in a battle of words, in the office as well as in the courtroom, is a wonder to behold.

   By the way, I consider this a comedy, an extremely sophisticated one, but if you were to have been watching me watch this show and listening to me laugh out loud several times, and smile all of the rest of the time, you would know exactly what I mean. I also do not know how true this is in the real world, but not only are all of the women in this series knockout attractive, they’re wonderful actors too.

   It looks like I may be watching this series several nights a week for some time to come.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER -The Case of the Stuttering Bishop. Perry Mason. William Morrow, hardcover, 1936. Pocket #201, paperback, January 1943. Reprinted many more times. Film: First National / Warner Brothers, 1937 (Donald Woods, Ann Dvorak, Joseph Crehan). TV adaptation: Season 2 Episode 20 of Perry Mason ( 14 March 1959.

   This isn’t a review. I never finished the book. I got only so far and I stopped. Thinking I might try again where I let off, I realized that I didn’t really remember what was going on, so I stated skimmed through from the beginning, and taking notes as I went. Herewith, the players, with appropriate page numbers:

1. Perry Mason — the kind of attorney you’d want fighting for your interests if you ever get into a legal jam, except if you’re a rich father with an wastrel son, in which case he’ll turn you down flat, no matter much fee he could charge.

1. Bishop William Mallory — a visitor from Australia who comes to Mason as a client, wishing to know about the statute of limitations in a manslaughter case; the problem is, he stutters — is he a real bishop?

5. Della Street — Mason’s highly trusted personal secretary; they go out together for the occasional meal and dancing, but any closer on a personal basis, they never get.

7. Paul Drake — head of a private detective agency with seemingly unlimited manpower at his beck and call; Mason hires him to check out the bishop as well as any manslaughter cases still open from 22 years before.

10. a cab driver — the one who brought the bishop to Mason’s building; he was asked to wait, but the bishop seems to have gone out a back way without paying the fare.

11. Jackson — Mason’s law clerk, a quite capable individual, but a non-factor in this story.

12. Jim Pauley — house detective at the hotel where the bishop is checked in; he has a sharp eye: he noticed someone following the bishop when he went out, and a redheaded dame who was waiting for him when he returned; when she leaves, he goes up to the bishop’s room and discovers a fight has taken place in the bishop’s room and the bishop concussed (and sent to the hospital).

17. Charlie Downes — one of Drake’s operatives who was following the bishop, then the redhead.

19. Janice Seaton — the aforementioned redhead; she claims she’s a trained nurse who answered an ad placed in a newspaper by the bishop; she found the bishop injured, treated him and left him in bed.

27. Renwold C.Brownley, Oscar Brownley (son), and Julia Branner, who married Oscar 22 years before [as reported by Paul Drake] — but while the latter was driving their car after getting married, she hit and killed a man; hence the (trumped up) manslaughter charges. Oscar is now dead, but the girl thought to be his daughter is living with Renwold; the girl’s mother is still a fugitive from justice.

32. Philip Brownley — [as Perry tells Della] a grandson of Renwold also living with him.

33. Janice Alma Brownley — [as Della tells Perry] Renwold’s granddaughter, who was on the same ship as the bishop as he traveled from Australia to the US; did the bishop suspect she was an imposter?

44. Julia Branner — in person, in Mason’s office; on the advice of the bishop, she is hoping to hire him as her attorney. The bishop has told her that the girl claiming to be her daughter (and Renwold’s granddaughter) is a fraud.

   From here, it gets complicated. When Renwold Brownley is supposedly shot and killed, no body can be found, in spite of eyewitnesses to the shooting. And what’s worse, the story that Mason’s client tells gets sounds fishier and fishier.