THE ROOKIE COP. RKO Radio Pictures, 1939. Tim Holt, Virginia Weidler, Janet Shaw, Frank M. Thomas, Ralf Harolde, Muriel Evans, Ace the Wonder Dog. Director: David Howard.

   Tim Holt, who came up for discussion as a B-western movie star following my review of Sagebrush Law a while back, was only 20 years old when he made this film, and as a rookie cop Clem Maitland, he’s really perfect for the part, since he’s young and eager and as wet behind the ears as they come.

   Although he’s billed first, this film is really built as a showcase for all the clever things Maitland’s dog Ace can do, which I didn’t find all that interesting, but back in 1939, audiences may have enjoyed his tricks a whole lot more. As for me, I was more impressed with the performance of even younger Virginia Weidler, 12 at the time playing a 9-year-old tomboy named Nicey who wants to become a cop herself, when she grows up — and she can hardly wait.

   It’s too bad that with all the screen time Nicey gets, they really didn’t have a lot for her to do. Part of the story has to do with Clem convincing the police chief that dogs can be of great help to a police force, but even though the police chief is the father of his girl friend, he stubbornly can’t see it Clem’s way.

   The other half of the story is nabbing a gang of crooks, which is a whole lot easier than convincing a stubborn police chief to see the light. The end result is competently done, but it’s certainly nothing special.

  DONALD WOLLHEIM, Editor, with Arthur W. Saha – The 1989 Annual World’s Best SF. Daw #783, paperback original; 1st printing, June 1989. Cover art by Jim Burns.

#2. STEVEN GOULD “Peaches for Mad Molly.” Novelette. First published in Analog SF, February 1988. Nominated for both the Hugo (2nd) and Nebula Awards.

   Another author whose work this is the first time I’ve read. Looking ahead at the rest of the Wollheim anthology, that is going to be a very common thread connecting these stories. Gould is best known for his popular series of “Jumper” novels, books for Young Adults about a teenager who is able to teleport from one place to another.

   As for this story, some time in the Earth’s future, it is presumed, many (if not most) of the planet’s inhabitants live in apartment buildings two kilometers tall. Some who do not, and there are a few, live on the outside of the buildings, much like the homeless people of today live on sidewalks under bridges.

   Some do so by choice, however, either for a sense of independence or the thrill of adventure. Such a one is the unnamed narrator of this story, a man who climbs up and down the outside of the building using ropes and grapples and with a whole lot of flair. On the occasion of Mad Molly’s birthday, he decides to surprise her by going down and fetching her some fresh peaches. It means, however, crossing the floor 520 to 530, claimed by the Howlers as their territory.

   This is a very picturesque tale, and it has a huge amount of visual appeal, but when it comes down to it, our hero is the same person at the end as he was the beginning. One new friend, perhaps, and a lot of dead enemies, both of which I concede are all to the good.

   But what, if I dare ask, is the difference between this story and a western in which the hero must cross a territory claimed by the Comanches to find a store on the other side that carries and sells peaches. Peaches wanted by a dear old lady who would like to be surprised by some?

          —-

Previously from the Wollheim anthology:   DAVID BRIN “The Giving Plague.”

A live performance of “It Must Have Been Years” by Gary Numan in 2008. The song was first recorded on the album Replicas released in 1979, with Numan as the lead singer for the English new wave band Tubeway Army.

   Two weeks or so after this column is posted I’ll be traveling by Amtrak to the east coast, where on the evening of March 29 I’m giving a talk in New York City at Columbia University’s second annual Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival. Anyone who wants to learn more about this festival should visit its website. (Follow the link.)

   Why was I asked to take part in the program? Because this year the theme is Cornell Woolrich, and in certain quarters I’m rumored to know a bit about that haunted recluse. Just before my talk there will be a screening of BLACK ANGEL (Universal, 1946), which was based on Woolrich’s novel of the same name, and I expect to be concentrating on the relation between the novel and the movie. For the benefit of readers who won’t be able to attend the festival, I’ll cover the same subject here.

   THE BLACK ANGEL (1943) is one of the strongest, strangest and most wrenching of all Woolrich’s novels and the only one narrated throughout in first person by a woman. Superficially it’s a conventional Woman Menaced suspenser but once we crack its thin surface we’re in the jolting nightworld that is Woolrich’s private domain, and locked inside the mind and heart of one of his most twisted people.

   Like most Woolrich novels, it reminds us of other novels of his. It shares with PHANTOM LADY (1942) the race against the clock to save an innocent man convicted of murder, but this time it’s the man’s girlfriend not his wife who’s been killed, and it’s his wife who risks everything to save him from the chair.

   Like THE BRIDE WORE BLACK (1940) it consists of a series of disconnected episodes with a tormented psychotic woman entering the lives of various men and devastating each in a different way. The angel of the title is Alberta French Murray, whose husband Kirk has taken up with nightclub entertainer Mia Mercer. Finding Kirk’s packed suitcase hidden in a closet, and knowing what until now she had only feared, she forces herself to go to Mia’s lavish Sutton Place apartment and beg for her man back.

   She finds the entrance door unlocked and Mia on the bedroom floor, smothered to death with a pillow. At that moment Mia’s phone rings. Alberta in a panic lifts the receiver to shut off the sound, hears Kirk’s voice on the other end, and hangs up without a word. Convinced that Kirk is innocent and frantic to protect him, Alberta steals Mia’s address book from the apartment. On the way out she notices and also takes with her a match folder, monogrammed with the letter M, which she finds wedged in the seam of the entrance door, apparently by the real murderer, who visited Mia openly once and then sneaked back to kill her.

   Alberta doesn’t report the murder to the police and doesn’t even think to call Kirk at his office and tell him Mia’s dead until it’s too late and he’s on his way to her place. The next time she sees her husband he’s handcuffed to a cynical cop named Flood and under arrest for Mia’s murder.

   A few pages later, thanks to the legally challenged Woolrich having wisely spared us a trial scene, he’s awaiting execution. While he’s sitting in the death house, she goes through his belongings, which the police have returned to her, and discovers that the monogrammed match folder she took from Mia’s apartment doesn’t belong to Mia herself. Therefore she concludes at once — and the intensity of Woolrich’s prose makes it easy for us to forget that her reasoning is ridiculous — that the real murderer must be one of the four names on the M page of Mia’s address book.

   She goes to Flood, who doesn’t send out underlings to check whether any of the four M’s uses monogrammed match folders but agrees to backstop Alberta’s crazy and time-intensive plan: to enter the life of each M in turn and try to pin the murder on him.

   For the rest of the novel we are with her and inside her as she carries out her mission. The first M is Martin Blair, a hopeless alcoholic into whose wretched life she insinuates herself until he commits suicide. Does she blame herself? “No, I was kind to him. I gave him something to die for…. It is better to die for something than to live for nothing.”

   The second M is Mordaunt, a foul-smelling doctor with a sideline of pushing narcotics, who soon takes her into his operation as a delivery person. This episode is full of suspense and anguish but Mordaunt never rises above the pulp monster level.

   Alberta emerges from the nightmare intact and with proof that the doctor isn’t the man she’s after. M3 is wealthy bon vivant Ladd Mason, whom Alberta entices into a relationship, then has Flood set up a hidden dictaphone device in her apartment to preserve any damning admission Mason might let slip. Eventually he admits that he’d visited Mia on the day of her death and found her body on the floor.

   She leaves him asleep in her apartment and goes on to her fourth quest, a man named McKee, a gambler-gangster-nightclub owner of a sort familiar from many pulp stories by Woolrich and countless others.

   Auditioning for and landing a spot in his club’s chorus line, she is soon installed in his Central Park West penthouse. She induces him to give her the combination to his safe and, at the earliest opportunity, opens it to hunt for evidence of his connection with Mia Mercer, but is caught by his goons and taken out to be executed.

   There’s no need to describe the rest of the novel, which ends with our black angel torn by love for one who is dead, shattered inside as she had shattered others, executioner and victim in one flesh.

   Fred Dannay once said of Woolrich that his “driving narrative power…carries readers on the crest of a tidal wave, and they are equally oblivious of the long arm of coincidence and the long arm of incredibility” when immersed in his fiction even though there “might be a hole in the plot structure that would destroy an ordinary story.”

   That is an inspired description of the raw material that the makers of the movie BLACK ANGEL (Universal, 1946) had to contend with: a wrenching, bizarre episodic novel whose protagonist’s obsessions grow to madness as she ruins others and herself to save her man from Mister Death.

   The film was directed and co-produced by British-born Roy William Neill (1886-1946), an industry old-timer fondly remembered for his Sherlock Holmes series with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. He and screenwriter Roy Chanslor took on the jobs of tightening the novel’s structure, reducing the number of male characters, making the female lead more sympathetic, and at the same time preserving the Woolrich qualities of suspense and emotional anguish. A tall order!

   June Vincent starred as Catherine Bennett and Dan Duryea as the alcoholic pianist Martin Blair, who is an amalgam of Woolrich’s Martin Blair and his haunted socialite Ladd Mason. The Dr. Mordaunt episode was scrapped, and in the movie the M-monogrammed matchbook leads the black angel not to several men as in the book but only one, nightclub owner Marko (Peter Lorre), who more or less corresponds to Woolrich’s love-struck gambler McKee.

   Vincent’s Catherine Bennett doesn’t carry out her quest alone as Woolrich’s black angel did but is joined by Duryea’s Marty Blair character. Although Woolrich’s Marty kills himself after his brief encounter with the angel, Duryea not only lives through the movie but is recovering from his alcoholism by the fadeout. Duryea falls in love with Vincent somewhat as Ladd Mason had with Woolrich’s protagonist but in the movie she doesn’t return his love but stays loyal to her convicted and unfaithful husband.

   Yet despite these changes and many more, every frame of this fine film noir is permeated with the Woolrich spirit, Neill and his cinematographer Paul Ivano investing every shot with a visual style that translates the novel into film with total fidelity to its soul and precious little to its literal text. It was Roy William Neill’s finest film, and his last.

   In November 1965, less than two years before his own death, Basil Rathbone in a talk before a group of Sherlock Holmes fans described how the director of so many Holmes movies and of BLACK ANGEL had died. Late in 1946, Rathbone said, he was appearing on Broadway in a production of THE HEIRESS.

   â€œOne night to the theatre came dear little Roy Neill. We loved him. We called him Mousie. He was a little guy and as sweet as they come, though a damn good disciplinarian….[W]e didn’t disobey orders and we were always on time and we always knew our lines….There came to my dressing room, in a gray flannel suit and a white carnation, little Roy Neill. And he was going home, which was Maidenhead on the Thames, in England, for the first time in…something like fifteen-odd years….[He] took the keys out of his pocket, and he showed me one and said to me: ‘….That opens the door to my home at Maidenhead on the Thames.’ And he had had a housekeeper stay there for all this time, waiting for this wonderful moment when, after making substantial money, he was able now to go home and enjoy his life on the river Thames. And he boarded the ship, and—I only learned this later—and he arrived, and he went to Maidenhead, and he put the key into the front door, he turned it, and walked into the hall of his home, and dropped dead.”

   According to the brief New York Times obituary on Neill, the 59-year-old director had died of a heart attack in the London home of a nephew. But if Rathbone wasn’t embellishing the facts for the sake of a good anecdote, what a Woolrich-like death for the man who had just made what up to that time was the finest Woolrich-based film!

   Woolrich himself thought the picture a disaster. Early in 1947 he received a letter in which the poet and scholar Mark Van Doren, who had been one of his professors when he was an undergraduate at Columbia, mentioned having recently seen the movie.

   Woolrich then went to see the picture at a neighborhood theater. “I was so ashamed when I came out of there,” he wrote Van Doren on February 2. “All I could keep thinking of in the dark was: Is that what I wasted my whole life at?”

   Keeping in mind how radically the movie altered his novel, one can understand Woolrich’s point of view. Perhaps those who are there for the screening and my comments later this month will understand too.

   But that doesn’t mean he was right. For my money, if a single theatrical feature based on a Woolrich novel (as opposed to the features based on shorter work like Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW) could be preserved for future generations and all the rest had to be destroyed, BLACK ANGEL is the one I would opt to keep.

Written and first performed by Ian & Sylvia, but I like this version too:

GEORGE HARMON COXE “Murder Picture.” Novelette. “Flash” Casey #8. First appeared in Black Mask, January 1935. Reprinted in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, edited by Otto Penzler (Vintage Crime, softcover, November 2007).

   The count above is of Casey’s story appearances in Black Mask. The first novel he appeared in didn’t come out until 1942 when Silent Are the Dead was published by Knopf in hardcover.

   I imagine quite a few of you already know that Casey was a news photographer and that he was sometimes also known as “Flashgun.” He was a rough-edged kind of guy, though. He may have been the only news photographer who carried a gun — not all the time, mind you. Only when the occasion called for it, and that it definitely does in this story when his assistant named Wade is kidnapped by a gang of thugs as a means of getting their hands on a photograph Casey has taken.

   There are too many people in the story, both good and bad, and not many who are in-between. We don’t get to meet the girl Wade is soft on, however, one who Casey thinks is up to her neck in the criminal activities the people she works for are involved with, and that’s too bad, as she’s the only whiff of a feminine presence anywhere in the story.

   I confess that I didn’t (couldn’t) follow the plot all that well, but I didn’t have to in order to enjoy all of Casey’s fast-thinking maneuvers he uses to learn where Wade is being held, and from there on, it’s fast-paced action all the way.

CHARLES WILLEFORD – The Way We Die Now. Hoke Moseley #4. Random House, hardcover, 1988. Ballantine, paperback, 1989.

   The last of the Hoke Moseley series unless a manuscript turns up among Willwoford’s papers. (*) This is not the most glorious of exits for wither Moseley or Willeford. The detective work is minimal since Moseley spends most of his time moping around the house after Donald Hutton, whom Hoke thought he had put away for a while, moves into the house across the street.

   Moseley closes the books on an unsolved case, and goes undercover on another case, but nothing really gets in the way of his general dissatisfaction with the way things are going in his personal life.

   Willeford is, I think, incapable of writing a novel that does not capture the reader’s interest, and his characterizations are as sharp as ever, but I found this meandering and somewhat shapeless. So is life, but I like to see more point to the fiction I read than to the life I see people living.

(*) Editorial Note: Taken from Wikipedia: “Grimhaven is the manuscript for an unpublished book by hard-boiled crime writer Charles Willeford. Originally intended as Willeford’s sequel to Miami Blues, the novel was deemed too dark for publication, and his agent refused to send it on to the publisher. The novel New Hope for the Dead was later written and published as the second book in the Hoke Moseley series.”

  DEBORAH CROMBIE – Leave the Grave Green. Duncan Kincaid & Gemma James #3, Scribner, hardcover, 1995. Berkley, paperback, 1996. Avon, paperback, 2005.

   I like Crombie’s books. They strike me as crosses between village mysteries and British cozies, and I think they’re well done.

   [Detective Superintendent Duncan] Kincaid and [Sergeant Gemma] James are dispatched from Scotland Yard to handle a politically sensitive case a little way down the Thames. The so-in-law of two titles personages who are major figures in British opera has been found washed up in a lock, and it appear that murder is a possibility.

   The family is an odd one; the daughter lived with her parents rather than her deceased husband, while he continued to occupy their flat. No one seems terribly cut up about it all, and clues are scarce. Nothing to do but get out the spades and start digging, so they do.

   I commented about a previous book in the series that I thought Crombie overdid having Kincaid lust after every woman in the story, and that hasn’t changed. WARNING: PLOT ELEMENTS REVEALED. Some readers seem to prefer their fictional heroes with large warts. but I don’t. Crombie puts a couple of dandies on Kincaid here, and it lessens his appeal to me as a protagonist. Simply if inelegantly put, he screws both a suspect and his comely Sergeant, and that doesn’t make him more human, it just makes him stupid. Well, maybe that’s the same thing. END WARNING.

   Aside from all that, this was a piece with the two previous books: well written, nicely characterized, decently plotted, and an enjoyable read.

EDGE OF DOOM. Samuel Goldwyn, 1950. Released in Britain as Stronger Than Fear. Dana Andrews, Farley Granger, Joan Evans, Robert Keith, Paul Stewart, Mala Powers, Adele Jergens, Harold Vermilyea, Douglas Fowley and Ray Teal. Screenplay by Charles Brackett, Ben Hecht and Philip Yordan, from the novel by Leo Brady. Directed by Mark Robson.

   A powerful and moving film noir despite some pasted-in tampering.

   Farley Granger stars as Martin Lynn, a hard-working young man up against it: low-pay, a sick mother, and in love with a woman he can’t afford to marry. He has also carried a grudge against the Catholic Church ever since his father’s death by suicide years earlier.

   Brackett, Hecht and Yordan sketch out his dilemma in a few pungent scenes as Martin frets over his mom, all but begs for a raise to move her to a healthier climate — and gets warmly refused. Director Robson handles it quickly, in a prosaic, sunlit style, contrasted with Granger’s politely controlled desperation, then moves to moodiness when Mom dies, leaving Martin shadowed in guilt—and determined to give her a fine funeral.

   Things progress with a fine scene, written and played perfectly as Martin argues with the parish priest over what is clearly going to be a charity job. He’s up against Harold Verrmilyea, who had a good line in bent lawyers and venal medicos in those days. Here he’s cast as a burned-out priest who has lost the warmth and care Martin so badly needs. His dour refusal clashes with Martin’s growing angst and the young man’s well-bred manners visibly disintegrate when Vermilyea tosses him a buck for cab fare; more frustrated than angry, he clubs the priest to death with a heavy metal cross.

   From here on, Edge of Doom moves solidly into noir territory, following Martin through a nightmare of suspicion, dread and guilt like a tortured Raskolnikov, harassed by hard cops (Robert Keith, Douglas Fowley and Ray Teal at their nastiest) befriended by Dana Andrews as Vermilyea’s compassionate successor, and tempted by sardonic Paul Stewart as a petty crook.

   Edge is well played and poignantly written, but what struck me most was the steep visual style imparted by director Robson and photographer Harry Stradling. Together they fill the frame with vertical lines: tall buildings, high windows and elongated door frames, imparting a unique and evocative look to visually reinforce Edge’s themes of alienation and redemption.

   Vertical lines serve to isolate Farley Granger’s character on the screen, and suggest oppression. But they also convey salvation. The great cathedrals and many other religious structures are traditionally designed with strong vertical lines, lifting the eye upward to the heavens. And so it is here, as the viewer sees on a subconscious level that Martin has a chance to rise from the mess of his life… and wonders if he’ll take it.

   I’ll just add here that after some negative preview feedback — and, I suspect (but have no evidence for) pressure from the Church — producer Sam Goldwyn ordered Dana Andrews back for some additional scenes, showing him as a knowing but compassionate priest to further counterbalance Harold Vermilyea’s unsympathetic portrayal. They also added a prologue and epilogue to show us everything’s just fine, go home folks, and don’t worry, your Priest knows best.

   And I won’t comment on that except to say it doesn’t spoil a gripping and eloquent film.