LEN DEIGHTON – The Billion Dollar Brain. “Harry Palmer” #4. Jonathan Cape, UK, hardcover, 1966. Putnam’s, US, hardcover, 1966. Dell, US, paperback, 1967. Film: Lowndes, 1967 (with Michael Caine as Harry Palmer and Karl Malden as Leo Newbigen).

   Len Deighton’s first novel, The Ipcress File (1962; later filmed with Michael Caine), marked the debut of one of the major stars of espionage fiction. Since then this former photographer, illustrator, teacher, and occasional cookbook author has written a string of stylish and tightly plotted espionage novels that are thoughtful commentaries and reasoned examinations of society as well as first-rate thrillers.

   One of Deighton’s chief concerns is the morality of the world of espionage, but his treatment of this theme is never ponderous or heavy-handed. Instead he chooses to examine the ethics of the characters about whom he writes with an ironic wit; his prose has a lightness that further leavens this rather weighty subject. The books are also full of vivid description — of places, people, meals, natural wonders — that give the stories an air of authority; his use of documents and appendixes further convinces the reader that the espionage world is really as described. Along with John LeCarré, Deighton is one of our foremost contemporary writers of espionage novels.

   The billion-dollar brain of this novel’s title is a remarkable computer owned by a Texas mogul who has assembled his own private espionage network. This wild-card covert agency poses a grave threat to just about every government on earth, and what makes it tick is the incredibly complex computer, the quintessential technical-wonder successor to man’s own reason and self-asserted destiny.

   Deighton’s insubordinate, deceptively tough, unnamed first-person spy is given the task of neutralizing this menace, and along the way meets some fascinating characters. There is sensuous, champagne-swilling Signe Laine, a Finnish beauty who favors expensive underwear and has a knack and passion for besting males; Dawlish, the fumbling Intelligence chief who runs the show; Colonel Stok, of Red Anny Intelligence; Harvey Newbegin, the neurotic American agent who is in on the chase; and the maniacal General Midwinter. The action is on an international scale, swinging from Helsinki to London, Texas, Leningrad, and New York.

   This is a tightly constructed, imaginative, high-tech sort of thriller. Space Age espionage, in which Colonel Stok makes the disturbingly relevant observation “Two not very clever men will have to decide whether to extend a hand or pull a trigger.”

———
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.

KATE WILHELM – Malice Prepense. Barbara Holloway #3. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1996. Reprinted in paperback as For the Defense (Fawcett, 1997).

   Kate Wilhelm is the· author of over 30 books, and is well known in the fields of both mysteries and science fiction. She’s married to one of the leading science fiction critics, anthologists, and writers, Damon Knight.

   Teddy Wendover is a grown man in body, but because of an accident 20 years ago an eight-year old in mind. Everyone agrees that he’s a lovable man-child, but the police suspect that he’s a killer. The Oregon senator who led the field trip where Teddy’s accident occurred has been murdered-with a rock very similar to the ones that Teddy plays with and collects.

   Lawyer Barbara Holloway is uneasy with mentally challenged people, and wants no part of the case, but her father and partner takes it. It is, of course, more complex than it seems, and before it’s over, Barbara is in the courtroom fight of her life and struggling with an unwanted romance.

   Wilhelm is one of the few writers doing lawyer books that are also courtroom dramas, and are not Big Lawyer silliness à la Grisham. I liked the first two in the series, Death Qualified and Best Defense, and I liked this one. Holloway and her father are both likable and realistic characters, drawn in enough depth to engage the reader without the plethora of detail that sometimes overwhelms today’s crime fiction.

   The courtroom scenes are realistic and pertinent, and Holloway’s opponent is for once not portrayed as an evil and ambitious villain. This isn’t a sensational book and hence won’t garner the sales of inferior but more lurid brethren, but it is a very readable and enjoyable one.

   Try Wilhelm — you’ll like her.

ON THE NICKEL. Rose’s Park Productions, 1980. Donald Moffat, Ralph Waite, Hal Williams, and Penelope Allen. Written and directed by Ralph Waite.

   I hate to review, much less rave about, a movie this hard to see, but I just watched it again last night, and enjoyed it so much I had to share it.

   Or perhaps “enjoyed” isn’t quite the right word….

   Writer/producer/director/star Ralph Waite gets top billing, but Donald Moffatt carries the film (and most of the cast at one time or another) as Sam, a recovering alcoholic who helps an old drinking buddy (Hal Williams) get into a mission shelter on LA’s skid row (5th Street, called “the nickel” by its habitues.) and goes in search of another former crony, the elusive “CG” (Ralph Waite.)

   Sam’s search slowly morphs into a bizarre odyssey, by turns nostalgic, monotonous, and horrifying, as he revisits the people and places of his old life and rediscovers the appeal of a nomadic, bombed-out life, and the oppression, freedom, friendship, and dependency that come with it.

   As you may have gathered, this is a complex film. It’s also a very moving one, played to perfection by actors who look and speak like genuine derelicts. Penelope Allen in particular gives a truly moving performance as a mentally impaired street-dweller with a smile that embraces all of humanity – and two shopping carts that contain her worldly goods.

   Amid all this, Ralph Waite’s showy performance as the flamboyant “CG” fits in very well indeed, with quiet moments of reflection followed by fits of the DTs and a powerfully done moment as he sees his approaching death (called “the Pillow Man” for reasons shown later) and reacts with a totally bizarre and convincing air of startled detachment — or maybe just numbed surprise.

   I was disappointed by a comic interlude toward the end, but that may be just a personal thing. There are those who find the whole film funny. The ending as it stands is curiously upbeat — or at least it tries to be, but it’s hard to dispel the poignant ninety minutes that preceded it.

   So what we’ve got here is a remarkable film in many ways. It’s also practically impossible to see. On the Nickel doesn’t show up on any of the streaming services, and the DVD is rather pricey if you can find it at all. For me, it was a lavish birthday present, and one I’ll revisit.

A. A. FAIR – The Knife Slipped. Donald Lam & Bertha Cool. Hard Case Crime, paperback, December 2016.

   Written in 1939, this was supposed to be the 2nd Cool and Lam book, following The Bigger They Come.

   Unfortunately, the publisher nixed it due to Bertha Cool’s tendency to “talk tough, swear, smoke cigarettes, and try to gyp people.” The afterward wonders how different the series would have looked had the publisher allowed Bertha to be as cool as she is here.

   Bertha is really quite wonderful in the book. And probably would have been considered a more historically important figure in mystery fiction had the publisher green lighted it.

   Donald Lam, Bertha’s operative at B. Cool Detective Agency, is a runt of a disbarred lawyer. He is a complete wimp. Not by inclination but by physique. He’s a 90 pound weakling. And unarmed.

   Bertha, on the other hand, is both the brains AND the brawn of the organization. Donald Lam is Bertha’s miniature Archie Goodwin. Anytime Donald finds himself outmatched mentally OR physically, Bertha is there to bail him out. She’s tough. And she punches people. And because she’s a woman, she’s able to gut punch deserving vamps with impunity — and without the PTSD triggering machismo of a Mike Hammer.

   In this adventure B. Cool Detectives get hired to track a cheating husband by his flabby wife and her overbearing mother. But after tracking him down, Donald Lam discovers that the cheating hubbie is not only cheating his wife! He’s also the point person in a massive New York State Civil Service Exam fraud scheme. Cheatin’ Hubbie is the point person for cops and firefighters to go to if they want to buy the answers to the civil service exam.

   When Donald finds out, he immediately wants to go to the authorities. When Bertha finds out, she wants to ‘cut herself a slice of the cake. She has no interest in turning anybody in. She feels that corruption is as American as apple cake. And that it will always be here. So the only question is: Who gets a slice of the cake. And the answer is: Bertha!

   Unfortunately, while trying to cut herself a slice of the cake, “The Knife Slipped”. Sadly I don’t recall any knives used as murder weapons — so no double entendre. The metaphorical slipping of the knife while trying to grab a piece of the graft is simply that: a metaphor.

   As a result of Bertha’s knife slipping, complications ensue. Naïve, wimpy Donald gets beaten up a bunch, fooled and tricked and beaten up some more, and Bertha comes to save the day.

   It’s an entertaining book, if slight. It’s main importance is perhaps in reminding us that the absence of hardboiled female detectives of the 30’s and 40’s may have less to do with writers than with publishers.

   Under the byline Evan Hunter, legally adopted in 1953, Salvatore Albert Lombino (1926-2005) was the original author and/or screenwriter of such films as The Blackboard Jungle (1955), adapted by director Richard Brooks; John Frankenheimer’s The Young Savages (1961); and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). His scripts and stories were seen on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Kaiser Aluminum Hour, and Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre.

   As Ed McBain, he was the acknowledged master of the police procedural, his 87th Precinct mysteries comprising 55 books over half a century, possibly inspiring Hill Street Blues. Cop Hater, The Mugger, and The Pusher (all 1956) were filmed between 1958 and 1960; the following year, NBC’s 87th Precinct debuted. Robert Lansing, carried over from The Pusher (1960), played Det. Steve Carella, and later Gary Seven in the Star Trek spin-off manqué “Assignment: Earth” (3/29/68).

   In a 1989 introduction to Cop Hater and afterword to The Pusher, McBain discussed his innovation of a “conglomerate hero in a mythical city…[that] was like New York but not quite New York,” with analogs for each borough. “[O]ne cop can step into the spotlight in one novel, another in the next novel [as when Carella is honeymooning in The Mugger], cops can get killed and disappear from the series, other cops can come in, all of them visible to varying extents…” The show standardized the duty roster to Carella and three colleagues, replacing “Isola” with its model, Manhattan.

   Ron Harper — later astronaut Alan Virdon on Planet of the Apes  —  co-starred as Bert Kling, promoted from patrolman after cracking a murder in The Mugger. The landlord on Three’s Company, Norman Fell played sardonic family man Meyer Meyer, per McBain “a Jew whose father had a hilarious sense of humor.” Immortalized in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), Gregory Walcott was the sanitized Roger Havilland, whose prose original tried to break up a street fight; broken in four places by a lead pipe, his arm had to be rebroken and reset, said ordeal rendering him a violent cynic.

   â— Of the 30 episodes, 11 were based on McBain’s works, including all nine novels following The Pusher; “The Floater” (9/25/61) was adapted from The Con Man (1957), previously dramatized on Climax! as “The Deadly Tattoo” (5/1/58). The 87th Precinct premiere was written by Winston Miller, who went on to co-produce the series with Boris D. Kaplan, while Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Thriller workhorse Herschel Daugherty directed the first and last episodes. This introduced Carella’s deaf-mute spouse, Teddy (Gena Rowlands), and medical examiner Dr. Tom Blaney (Paul in the novels; Dal McKennon).

   Robert Culp guest-stars as serial killer Curt Donaldson, who selects prospective wives with personals ads, gains control of their money, and dispatches them with arsenic after “signing his work” with distinctive tattoos. Teddy plays a prominent role, following Curt and his latest victim from a tattoo parlor to Pier 7, where she is almost killed before the squad arrives to save both women. Havilland provides a vastly toned-down account of McBain’s transformative trauma, while the lethally affable Culp was followed by such up-and-comers as Dennis Hopper, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Vaughn, and Peter Falk.

   â— McBain personally scripted “Lady in Waiting” (10/2/61) and “King’s Ransom” (2/19/62); adapted from Killer’s Wedge (1959), the former marked Rusty Lane’s debut as Desk Sergeant Dave Murchison. Virginia Colt (Constance Ford) holds the disarmed Meyer, Kling, and Havilland hostage at the station house — located, per McBain, on Grover Avenue, facing Grover Park — with a bottle of alleged nitroglycerine, vowing to kill Carella on arrival for sending her safecracker husband to prison, where he has died.

   Stumbling in, clerk Alf Miscolo (Miguel Landa) is shot, concealed, and denied a doctor as Roger turns off the fan, closes the windows, and cranks up the thermostat, prompting Virginia to remove the coat in which she pocketed his gun. Teddy arrives as Roger goes for his weapon, and Meyer pretends she is a complainant, but Virginia recalls reading of Mrs. Carella’s disability, and threatens her before being subdued in a scuffle by Roger and Bert. Delayed by a flat, Carella is baffled by the Bomb Squad’s call to say, “it was.”

   Dropping Teddy’s pregnancy and the B story of Steve’s locked-room “suicide,” McBain nicely depicts the squad’s ingenious efforts at extrication, defeated by stupidity. Bert slyly tries to summon help while answering a call from the precinct commander, who is oblivious to his hints; assuring a clueless Dave that the shot he heard was accidental, Meyer says he’ll see the sarge “forthwith,” police jargon for “report immediately”; Meyer is pistol-whipped by Virginia when she listens in on an imprudent call from Headquarters after two boys find a note he slipped out the window. McBain also retains his sympathetic portrayal of a Puerto Rican immigrant arrested for slitting the throat of a man who “got funny” with her.

   â— “King’s Ransom” was based on McBain’s 1959 novel, filmed by Akira Kurosawa as Tengoku to jigoku (Heaven and Hell, aka High and Low; 1963). Businessman Douglas King (Charles McGraw) faces an ethical dilemma when his chauffeur’s son, Jeff (Buzz Martin), is mistakenly kidnapped instead of his own, and Sy Barnard (Tony Carbone) demands that he pay regardless. Needing the money he has raised for a boardroom power struggle, King shocks his wife, Diane (Nancy Davis), by refusing to pay, but is advised to play for time by saying he will.

   With Carella on the floor in the back, King is given the runaround by Sy’s accomplice, Eddie Folsom (Charles Aidman), transmitting by radio to his car phone to direct him to a drop-off for Sy. But Eddie’s wife, who wants nothing more than a fresh start in Mexico, fears that Sy plans to kill Jeff either way, so she blurts both their location and his into the open mike, and when the hideout is raided, Jeff repays her kindness by insisting he’s been alone since Sy left. This exceptionally well-cast episode makes the boys 18, rather than 8, and when the Kings tell Carella that Doug’s power grab succeeded, we learn the Folsoms were caught, unlike in the book.

   â— Faithfully adapted by John Hawkins from the 1958 novel, “Lady Killer” (10/9/61) introduces department psychiatrist Ben Daniels (Harlan Warde); Sam Grossman (Michael Fox), who runs the police laboratory; and his technician, Joe Richards (Dennis McCarthy). Taking a complaint, Kling barely notices when Frankie Annuci (Billy Hughes) — paid $2 by an unknown man — delivers a pasted-up note reading, “I will kill The Lady tonight at 8. What can you do about it?” Carella sees binoculars glinting from a roof across the street, so Bert slips out back to investigate, but is clouted before getting a good look at the perp.

   Meyer learns that the purchaser of the dropped glasses may have lost them at the 708 Club, yet Frankie says he isn’t the man, and works with a sketch artist. Checking tenements, Meyer learns that the sketch may match tenant “Mr. Smith,” who fires on him and flees; he finds cards from the Jo-George diner, where George Ladonna (Peter Leeds) says partner Jo Cort (Lee Krieger) took a few days off. With George headed for drinks at 8:00 at the nearby 708, Carella remembers “la donna” is Italian for “the lady,” and they arrive just in time to save George, who loyally denied recognizing the sketch, thinking that Jo — jealous because his ex-girlfriend prefers George — was in routine trouble.

   â— The first of Norman Katkov’s two adaptations, “Killer’s Payoff” (11/6/61) was based on McBain’s 1958 novel and directed by John Brahm, like Daugherty a mainstay of the Hitchcock series and Thriller. Slain blackmailer Hank Richards paid for an apartment for dancer Nancy Johnson (Beverly Garland), from whom Havilland gets his “client list.” Kling overhears ex-model Lucy Mencken (Jeanne Cooper), shielding her husband from racy photos, make a rendezvous with Hank’s would-be successor, but following her, Roger is pistol-whipped.

   Havilland’s questioning provokes an angry visit in which Hank’s friend Marty Torr (Paul Richards) slaps Nancy around, admitting that he killed Hank and then followed the cops to identify his marks. He’s about to shoot Nancy when Roger calls to invite her to dinner, and her cleverly off-kilter reply cues him to go in with gun blazing. McBain’s far more convoluted solution involved a “conglomerate perp,” three hunters whom the blackmailer saw accidentally kill, and bury, a fourth; they joined forces to shoot him, and almost claim the life of the detective trying to trap them.

   â— Adapting “’Til Death” (12/11/61) from McBain’s 1959 novel, Katkov turns Steve from an expectant father (of twins born on the last page) and the brother of bride Angela (Judi Meredith) into a family friend. Tommy Palmer (Darryl Hickman) and Angela receive deliveries containing, respectively, a black widow and condolence card. Marty Kellogg (Johnny Seven), who blamed Tommy for a buddy’s death in Korea, was just released from a veterans’ hospital, so Kling agrees to attend with his fiancée, Claire Townsend (Margie Regan), in tow.

   Dancing with Angela at the reception, best man/long-ago beau Ben Darcy (Corey Allen) says it should have been theirs, and he’ll be there if anything happens to Tommy; overhearing, Steve confirms Ben’s handwriting on the delivery cards, which he says were jokes. Marty arrives, professing no hard feelings, but clocks Kling, who was searching for him, and attacks Tommy with a switchblade, stopped by Steve in the nick of time. Katkov streamlines McBain’s bizarre plot, putting commendable focus on emotions and relationships.

   â— Richard Collins wrote three adptations, starting with “Empty Hours” (11/20/61), which was shorn of the initial article from a novella published in Ed McBain’s Mystery Book #1 (1960) and the titular 1962 collection. Claudia Davis drowns when Eric Blau (William Schallert) fires at her canoe on Triangle Lake, while onshore companion Josie Thompson (Patricia Crowley) — oblivious to the silenced shots  — tries to save her. Penniless Josie, reported drowned, has her hair cut and dyed, telling fiancé George (Henry Brandt) that their uncanny resemblance will enable her to claim her best friend’s inheritance.

   Blau’s employer says “Claudia” is writing checks that lead Steve and Bert to a witness, recompensed for workdays the inquest cost him, and a passport photographer; records also reveal a traffic violation. The embezzling executor asks “Claudia,” unseen since childhood, to refrain from drawing interest, citing an investment tip, and has Blau try again, but questioning a cabbie hired to drive “Claudia” — who didn’t know how — back to town tips off Carella and Kling in time to stop him. Inventing Blau, George, and the executor, Collins here takes the greatest liberties with McBain’s source, which opens with “Claudia” found strangled by a panicked burglar.

   â— In “The Heckler” (12/18/61), Collins masterfully distills the 1960 novel introducing the precinct’s Moriarty, the Deaf Man, aka Sordo; with the iciness he later showed in Bullitt (1968), Robert Vaughn is perfect as the ruthless, methodical villain. His complex scheme involves death threats to a man whose loft is above the soon-to-relocate Mercantile State Bank, and to others located near lucrative businesses. Distracting the police with those and bombs made by night watchman “Pop” Smith (Frank Albertson), he hopes to heist more than $1 million from the the vault in the new location, under which he has tunneled during construction.

   Learning that Pop concealed a fiancée, Sordo coldly shoots him, but a hotel matchbook found in his burned uniform leads to Lotte Constantine (Mary La Roche); Kling catches her retrieving love letters from his apartment and finds a bank floor plan before Sordo — who learned Pop copied it — bursts in to wound Bert. Sordo follows with the kidnapped Lotte while his henchmen take the loot to the ferry in an ice-cream truck. Disembarking after a family vacation, Meyer accosts the driver over a license-plate discrepancy, but timely warnings from his wife, Sarah (Ruth Storey), and Lotte allow him to disarm the thieves.

   â— Scripted by Luther Davis and Collins, “Killer’s Choice” (3/5/62) was based on McBain’s 1957 novel, previously an episode of Kraft [Mystery] Theatre (6/11/58). That and another live Kraft entry — Larry Cohen’s original teleplay “87th Precinct” (6/25/58) — were the first attempt at a series, with several cast members in common; Cohen later wrote the telefilms Ice (1996), based on McBain’s 1983 novel, and Heatwave (1997), another original. Amy Boone (Gloria Talbott) is found shot dead in the liquor store where she worked for Franklin Phelps (R.G. Armstrong), with whom she was having an affair.

   â€œIt sounds like we’re talking about three different people,” Kling says when the squad compares accounts by her mother, ex-husband, and other “friend”; Mrs. Phelps is tricked into admitting she killed Amy, having slipped away from a Miami party and taken a round-trip flight to New York. In the novel, McBain introduced Det. Cotton Hawes and killed Havilland with the shards of a plate-glass window through which a perp pushed him, a B story incorporated into “New Man in the Precinct” (4/16/62), supplanting Havilland. (McBain’s Pusher afterword reveals he wanted Carella to succumb to gunshots there, but was dissuaded by his agent and editor.)

   â— Written by Robert O’Brien and James Gunn, “New Man” finds Cotton (Fred Beir) filling in from the ritzier 30th for vacation-bound Det. Frank Kanin (Ray Montgomery), who meets the literary Havilland’s fate. He stops to help stricken Matt Murdock (Robert Colbert), winged by Dave Evans (Max Slaten) after breaking his jaw with a left hook in a liquor-store robbery; noticing the blood, Frank gets the same, hurled to his death. Carella checks out ex-pugs in trouble with the law, and Evans identifies Murdock, who persuades a doctor to remove the bullet, although daughter/nurse Linda Walters (Elizabeth Perry) warns it’s illegal not to report it.

   Social Security leads Carella and Hawes to Murdock’s hotel, but Cotton naively knocks on the door, eliciting a hail of bullets that nearly kills Steve. His wound reopened, Murdock blackmails Linda into coming to his new digs to patch it up, with a penicillin chaser, yet when the clerk spots his newspaper photo and drops a dime, the syringe is found. Bluffed to believe her father’s prints are on it, Linda recalls Murdock’s unusual phraseology regarding his getaway, a trucking company’s marketing slogan; the squad apprehends him at the depot, and Hawes learns that Steve is not one to hold a grudge.

   â— In “Give the Boys a Great Big Hand” (1/15/62), adapted by Shimon Wincelberg from McBain’s 1960 novel, a severed hand in a flight bag from Las Vegas sends Bert to Missing Persons, where he’s offered the file on stripper Barbara “Bubbles” Caesar as a diversion. Kling and Carella investigate merchant seaman Karl Andrade (Michael Forest), who stormed out on learning of Milly’s (Suzi Carnell) pregnancy. He got drunk, and a previous flame — whose photo Bert recognizes as Bubbles — called to say he was there, asleep, but Karl claims it’s all over between them.

   Choreographer Warren Tudor (Barry Atwater) brought his “soul mate” from Vegas and hated the baser attentions she received at the club where drummer Mike is also missing; Karl wants her to convince Milly nothing happened, and sets up a meeting at Tudor’s, but it’s a trap. Carella and Kling arrive just in time to prevent Tudor from chopping off the hands that “defiled my love” with a sword, finding Barbara and a mutilated Mike, both killed when caught in flagrante delicto by Tudor, who deludes himself that she is still alive. Wincelberg ends on a more positive note with the Andrades reconciling, whereas McBain’s unsympathetic seaman, obsessed with Bubbles, planned to abscond with her.

            — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

         END OF PART ONE: TO BE CONTINUED …

THOMAS B. DEWEY – Death and Taxes. Mac #14. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1967. Berkley, paperback, May 1968.

   This one starts out the way a good old-fashioned PI story should – no, I’ll take that back. Any good PI story should start with a good-looking blonde entering the PI’s office as a would-be client. But consider this as the next best thing:

   
   Given that Marco Paul having been an old-fashioned Chicago gangster for most of his life, and this is an old-fashioned hit straight out of Black Mask Magazine, you might even decide that this is a better first sentence than the worn-out Gorgeous Blonde Client Gambit.

   And as it turns out, Marco Paul is/was on the verge of becoming Mac’s client. What Paul wanted Mac to do is make sure that his daughter gets the million dollars in cash he has stashed away for her, tax-free.

   So far, Mac has said he’d think about it. Does he know where the million dollars is? No. They hadn’t gotten around to that. Do other parties (both friends — some closer than others — and family) think he knows where the million dollars is? Yes, and they become actively involved in finding out where it is.

   At one point along the way Mac is severely tortured and beaten. Does he recover in the very next scene and carry on as usual, as a certain detective named Joe Mannix always did after being conked on the head? No. Definitely not. This is real life that Mac is living through, and real life often hurts.

   I mentioned Black Mask a short distance upstairs. This reads – or at least the first half does – like a finely tuned Black Mask story, a little more literate and a little more polished, perhaps,  and it is a lot of fun to read. Unfortunately when it comes time to pull all of the plot threads together, Death and Taxes becomes a lot more standard type of PI tale, with lots of guns blazing away and a lengthy explanation of who did what to whom and when.

   I going to call it a mixed bag, then, and let you decide, once you take me up on this proposition, to read this for yourself and tell me which half you preferred.

SIMON JAY – Death of Skin Diver. Collins, hardcover, 1964. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1964.

   The author’s first book and he only wrote one more. Set in New Zealand, it opens with the accidental drowning of a skin diver – or at least it appears to be accidental until absent-minded detective, Dr/ Peter Much, a practicing pathologist, notices one or two inconsistencies and follows them up.

   More violence and death follow, and Much is nearly killed himself. There is mysterious sea chase (and endpaper map to illustrate it), and the unusual crime of gin running (yes, that’s right, gin not gun) is at the bottom of it all.

   By no means a classic, but nonetheless well worth searching out for Dr. Much and his haphazard detection.

Bibliographic Update: Simon Jay’s second and only other mystery novel was Sleepers Can Kill (Collins, 1968). Unfortunately, there is no indication in Hubin that Dr. Much made a second appearance in it.

J. D. KIRK – A Litter of Bones. DCI Jack Logan #1. Zertex Crime, hardcover, October 2020. Setting: Scotland.

First Sentence: The total collapse of Duncan Reid’s life began with a gate in the arse-end of nowhere.

   The past comes back to haunt DCI Jack Logan. A boy has disappeared, and the case has all the characteristics of “Mister Whisper,” a serial child-killer Logan put away ten years ago. When another child goes missing, Jack is sent to lead the investigation. Did Jack have the wrong man all those years ago? Is this a copycat. Either way, Jack needs to do everything possible to rescue the boy.

   It takes very little time to recognize the quality of Kirk’s writing and his skill for dialogue. He provides a well-done introduction to Logan’s team and their personalities. Sinead and DC Hamza Khaled are particularly well utilized in their roles.

   One appreciates the hints of humour with their very Scottish flair— “But in a minute, I’m going to hear a cry for help from within this house, giving me no choice but to break this door down and investigate.” …Sinead hesitated, then nodded. …He watched as Sinead leaned past him, turned the handle, and pushed the door open. “It’s the Highlands,” she told him. “We don’t always lock our doors.” What a good example of Logan being out of his element while showing his fallibility.

   Kirk establishes an excellent sense of place, whether it be a small, mid-terrace house, or the open area. Yet it is the excellence of conveying the fear and frustration of the family which are particularly compelling. His ability to escalate suspense is palpable, cementing the plot as being a ripping page turner filled with wicked twists. Be aware that there are scenes related to animal torture, and others not for the faint of stomach.

   A Litter of Bones is a straight-through, non-stop read filled with great characters, action, suspense, emotional impact, twists and just enough humor for balance. There are no portents, just a wicked good story that keeps on turning the pages. It is dark, and there are scenes unpleasant to read, yet the positive qualities outweigh the negative and compel one to read the next book.

Rating: Excellent.

RAYMOND CHANDLER – Farewell, My Lovely. Philip Marlowe #2, Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1940. Reprinted many times.

MURDER, MY SWEET. RKO, 1944.  Dick Powell, Claire Trevor, Anne Shirley, Otto Kruger, Mike Mazurki and Miles Mander. Screenplay by John Paxton, from the novel Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler. Directed by Edward Dmytryk.

   I like to get back to Raymond Chandler once a year or so, and late last year it was Farewell, My Lovely (1940) a fun read enlivened by Chandler’s polished prose and feel for violence. This is the one with Marlowe getting knocked around by Moose Malloy — a character who seems to have inspired the Incredible Hulk — then waking up in a sanitarium for more sadistic fun. Add some engagingly corrupt cops, stolen whoosis and the inevitable near-fatale femme and you get a book that set the standard for a whole generation of tough mysteries.

   I have to say there’s about twenty-five wasted pages — something about Marlowe trying to get on a gambling ship that takes an awfully long time to reach a plot point he could have covered by a phone call, but by and mainly, Lovely still seems fresh and surprisingly un-clichéd nearly seventy years on.

   This was filmed in 1942 as The Falcon Takes Over, with George Sanders’ debonair sleuth replacing Marlowe, and under its original title in 1975, with Chandler’s archetypal detective played by Robert Mitchum, himself something of an archetype by then. But the definitive version came out in 1944 under the title Murder, My Sweet.

   Murder, My Sweet ushered in film noir, and no wonder; it’s a dazzling visual thing, brightly scripted and intelligently played, the kind of movie that sets a style and inspires imitation. Director Edward Dmytryk fills the screen with monster-movie imagery — hard shadows, cobwebs, lurking things coming out of the night — and plays it off beautifully against a hard-edged, take-no-sh*t attitude. Dick Powell’s Marlowe sometimes seems petulant when he ought to look tough, but for a trend-setting film, there are remarkably few false notes played here.

   Speaking of notes though, the ending of Murder, My Sweet echoes another horror-influenced film released months earlier, The Pearl of Death (Universal, 1944) one of Roy William Neill’s superior “B” Sherlock Holmes series with Basil Rathbone. Both movies end with an unarmed detective cornered in a room with Miles Mander and a hulking brute enraged by… well, you get the idea.

   I only wonder what actor Miles Mander must have thought, finding himself playing out the same scene at different studios just months, or maybe weeks, apart.

WILLIAM D. BLANKENSHIP – The Programmed Man. Walker, hardcover, 1973. Manor Books, paperback, 1975.

Credit where it is due, that opening draws a clear picture I’m betting every one who reads this review can instantly see. Who hasn’t been in one of those bright clean and relentlessly dingy type offices at some point? Kudos to Blankenship for nailing the experience.

I’ll let the hardboiled sleuth introduce himself, “My name is Michael Saxon. Saxon Security Systems. I’m in the business of industrial security, Franklin, and I’ve been hired by the InterComp Corporation to look into the use you’re making of that computer terminal back there.”

There, that saves some time. Nothing like jumping in with both feet. The Franklin is one Adam Franklin, six foot five of trouble who hisses ‘like a German Gestapo officer’ and in short order cleans the floor with our hero and takes off.

Michael Saxon is an ex cop, and while far from the first industrial detective may be the first to specialize in computer crime in this 1973 novel published by Walker in hardcover and Manor books in 1975 (nice cover on the Manor paperback edition). Of course computers had been around for a while, and were common in Fifties science fiction movies and police procedurals and by the end of the decade even showing up in comedy (Desk Set and The Man From the Diner’s Club), but unless an abacus features in one of Robert Van Gulik’s Judge Dee translations, I’m not sure when the first computer shows up in written mystery fiction, much less the first computer sleuth.

A sort of computer/robot features in John Dickson Carr’s The Crooked Hinge, but turns out to be something else, and by the mid to late sixties computers were pretty common in SF and James Bond era spy novels. I have seen it claimed the first computer bug appears in one of James Mayo’s Charles Hood novels, Let Sleeping Girls Lie (and it’s an actual bug, a cockroach that screws up the works for the bad guys thanks to Hood), and features in Len Deighton’s The Billion Dollar Brain. I’m just not sure where the first one showed up in straight mystery fiction, or if this has some minor historical significance as the first book to deal with hacking and computer sleuthing.

I don’t want to oversell this on that point. It is pretty much a standard, relatively hardboiled private eye novel right down to the sexist tropes. Saxon is not programmer (for that he calls on a Japanese/American friend, another computer clich’ that may be new here), but a fairly well connected private eye type with an eye for attractive women, a penchant for violence, and more gun play than most real private eyes see unless they served in combat.

Here we have him considering the women in the case in the typical voice of the times:

Structurally and in terms of action there is nothing unique here you wouldn’t find in a standard Johnny Liddell adventure or any private eye episode on episodic television (the first season of Mannix certainly beats this guy to the boat on the computer tie-in, though not the hacking thing or how ubiquitous computer terminals became in small businesses allowing for hacking. I want to say computers figure in episodes of The Rogues and Checkmate too, but I’m not certain).

Of course nothing is as simple as it starts out in any private eye novel and it turns out something more important than a few stray files belonging to InterComp are missing, a revolutionary business model system has been stolen and must be recovered. It’s a fairly good mystery plot really.

This is a quick enough read, well written, just not terribly original save in the subject matter, but it and Saxon pass the likability threshold despite his sexism. I know most of what is in this regarding computers was old hat to us who read SF, but my question was how new was it to mystery fiction in 1973, a good decade before the ubiquitous home PC would sit on desks in dorms and home offices.

Blankenship wrote several novels including Yukon Gold, and Brotherly Love, which was a 1985 made for television movie with Judd Hirsch. Among his other works are Tiger Ten, The Levenworth Irregulars, The Time of the Wolf, Mark Twain and the Hanging Judge, and The Helix File (which sounds as if it might be another Saxon novel, and with its 1970 date maybe the first). I confess I recognize the name, but never read anything else by him, something rectified with this one.

Hopefully someone will know if this one has a bit of historical import or was just hooking onto an already moving train. It would be interesting if it proved to be the first novel about computer hacking. If not, it’s not a bad read, though a bit dated in some of its attitudes for more modern readers.