From the L.A. Times comes word of the death of Tige Andrews:

   Mr. Andrews was born Tiger Androwaous on March 19, 1920 in Brooklyn, N.Y. His parents, immigrants from Syria, reportedly named him after a strong animal to guarantee good health.

   From VARIETY, some more about his career:

   Of the most interest to crime fiction fans, other series on which Mr. Andrews appeared are the ones below, beginning with his earliest. These are all guest appearances, although some may also have been short recurring roles:

   Kraft Mystery Theater, Inner Sanctum, U. S. Marshal, Playhouse 90 (as Frank Nitti), The Grand Jury, The Lawless Years, The Fugitive, The FBI, Police Story, Police Woman, Kojak, Vega$, CHiPs, Quincy M.E., Hawaiian Heat, Street Hawk, and Sledge Hammer!

               “One white…one black…one blonde.”

   Aimed at the youth market, The Mod Squad, in which three troubled youngsters fight crime as undercover agents for the police, was one of the those TV programs that was on the air at exactly the right time and struck precisely the right chord for its viewers. As a precursor to several such series that followed, such as 21 Jump Street, The Mod Squad was on for five seasons between 1968 and 1973.

    From the Mod Squad “unofficial” home page:

   More from the same source. I should apologize for quoting as much as I am here, perhaps, but why not, when someone else has said it this well:

   It was Tige Andrews as the straighter and narrower Captain Greer that pulled the show together, however. As the man in charge, he acted as both a mentor and father figure to the threesome. Gruff but caring, he added the essential balance which helped make the series a success.

   Mr. Andrews’ last appearance on television was on Murder, She Wrote, January 6, 1991, in an episode entitled “Family Doctor.” IMDB states that he played the role of Carmine Abruzzi, but that seems to be in error.

   From the online All Movie Guide comes both a synopsis and a revisionist approach to the credits:

   Personally, I like the All Movie Guide’s version better. I’d greatly prefer that the last time Mr. Andrews’ appeared in a movie or on television, it was as a cop, rather than as a villain. Not that he didn’t play villains during his career, I understand that, but it’s as a policeman that he’ll always be remembered.

          —

      MOD SQUAD – The Books

* Richard Deming:
      o The Greek God Affair (n.) Pyramid 1968
      o A Groovy Way to Die (n.) Pyramid 1968
      o The Sock-It-to-Em Murders (n.) Pyramid 1968
      o Assignment: The Arranger (n.) Whitman 1969
      o Spy-In (n.) Pyramid 1969
      o Assignment: The Hideout (n.) Whitman 1970
      o The Hit (n.) Pyramid 1970

* William Johnston:
      o Home Is Where the Quick Is (n.) Pinnacle 1971

                  Data from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.

   As a followup to my blog entry on Columbo a while back, here’s an email I received today from John Apostolou. On the original M*F website, John is the author of an excellent article on MacKinlay Kantor, which includes a long and complete crime fiction bibliography for him, we believe.

>> Thanks, John. What’s reported is not always what’s true, as anyone who’s done any research has quickly found out.

ROMILLY & KATHERINE JOHN – Death by Request. Hogarth Crime; trade paperback. 1984. Also published as a Hogarth hardcover. Offset from the original [hardcover] Faber & Faber edition, 1933. Vintage/Ebury, US, hardcover and paperback, 1984.

   Quite surprisingly, given the fact that it’s been reprinted several times, this is the only mystery that the married couple of Romilly and Katherine John wrote. Who were they, is one question, and how did it happen that Hogarth reprinted it some 50 years later?

   For at least a partial answer, one must read the new introduction to the Hogarth edition, written by Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan, as part a series of Hogarth Crime reprints of classic detective fiction. Romilly, born in 1906, was in the RAF, was briefly a civil servant, then a poet and an amateur physicist before dying in 1986. Katherine was a reviewer as well as a translator of Scandinavian books. She died two years before her husband, in 1984.

   The gap between 1933 and 1984 between editions may be one of the longest on record for any mystery novel. The fact remains that Hogarth Press considered it significant enough to reprint in a series of classic crime fiction. In that regard, the book is a locked-room mystery; and in its own inimitable way, a minor tour de force of one form or another, the details of which I most sincerely will do my best to avoid telling or revealing to you.

   The dead man is found in his bedroom at one of those old English manor residences so commonly found in works of mystery fiction, especially the English ones. He is found gassed to death in a heap on the floor, still dressed as he was the evening before, the window shut tightly, and (of course) the door was locked. It had to be broken down in order to enter in the morning. Could it have been suicide? No, Lord Malvern seems to have been well enough off, and he was off to visit his fiancée in London on the very same day as his death.

   Telling the story is the local vicar, an elderly man by the name of John Colchester, a long-time friend of Matthew Barry, the master of the house. Also staying over are various friends and relatives, including a comic-relief colonel who harrumphs all over the place; a weepy young girl; a recent widow only slightly older; the slightly deaf sister of Matthew; assorted staff, mostly female, save for a slightly villainous butler named Frampton.

   And to tell the truth Frampton is more than only slightly villainous. He’s a socialist, a seducer of young maids in the area, and — as the truth comes out — a blackmailer. Many letters which threaten to reveal secrets which others might wish kept unrevealed are found, some sent by Frampton, others perhaps not. Obviously, as these have a great deal to do with the plot, the letters — their contents, who received them, who sent them, and who may have intercepted them — must be given, as the book goes on, a exhaustive and thorough going over.

   And to tell you another truth, the going-over of the letters is probably too thorough and exhaustive. One is tempted, I must admit, to throw up one’s hands whenever another letter appears and must be discussed and put into the context of the previous ones.

   I see that I have neglected to mention the detective on the case. Nominally that would be Inspector Lockitt, but that particular gentleman seems content to do his work off-camera, as it were. Almost all of his activity is related to the vicar second-hand, and then of course the vicar must relay his impressions of the good Inspector Lockitt on to us, the reader. It seems a strange way to tell a mystery, but one must always get accustomed, eventually, to things we expect to occur in the usual way, but which do not, do we not?

   The bulk of the detective work is rather more accomplished, in fact, by an unusual twosome: (a) Mr. Nicholas Hatton, a friend of the dead man’s fiancée, one of those amateur detectives who are as common in British mystery fiction in the 1930s as damp old manor houses with murders committed within them, and (b) the aforementioned widow, Mrs. Fairfax, who proves to be a most tenacious (and efficacious) individual when it comes to solving mysteries.

   There are secrets galore that must come out before the solving is done, including at least two that should correctly be considered “bombshells” when they are revealed. There is, of course another secret at the end, which I promised not to tell or reveal to you, and looking back at what I have written, I do not believe that I have.

   So, is the book a classic? You may well ask, and you should. No, I say, but with a small hedge in the back of my mind. For today’s audiences, large portions of this exercise in murder-solving will be dreary and dull to the extreme. For those of you who like puzzles, well, the puzzle is there, and without a doubt, a double delight it is. The problem is that it’s, well, unskillfully told, when measured by more modern standards, say of five or so years later.

   That the door was locked on the inside, for example, is not revealed until page 50, whereas the body itself was found on page 24. Nor, surprisingly enough, is the locked room aspect very much — if at all — the focus of the tale. This may in part be due to the telling (see above) or the fact that (as is often the case) the solution (to the locked room aspect) is rather simple when explained, and therefore not very worthy of much dwelling upon.

   If you were to read this book — and if you are still with me, I would at least suggest that you should, for this must be the kind of mystery you prefer to read, not so? — you will also need to know what a geyser is, at least a geyser that one would find in the bathroom of a country house in England in the early 1930s. Readers of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Unnatural Death, for example, will have already come across one, I believe, if they were to think back upon it.

MARI ULMER – Cart of Death

Worldwide; paperback reprint, September 2006. Hardcover edition, as Carreta de la Muerte (Cart of Death): Poisoned Pen Press, April 2001.

    Subtitled “A Taos Festival Mystery,” this second adventure in which Christina Garcia y Grant finds herself involved takes place shortly before and during the celebration of the local Las Fiestas holiday. The first book in which Christy appeared was Midnight at the Camposanto (April 2000), which took place on a previous Good Friday through the following Easter Sunday.

    According to the Poisoned Pen website, the latter was to have been “the first novel in a series planned to follow the sacred and secular calendar through its annual cycle,” but thus far, only the two books have been published. (Also on the PP website is an announcement that “Mari is now working on More than Mischief at San Geronimo,” but since on that same page is a link to her 2002 author’s tour, along with the fact Ms. Ulmer is now 74 years old, I have a feeling that the chances that it will appear are diminishing quickly.)

    Which is shame, for I rather enjoyed this book, in spite of some rather uncomplimentary comments some readers have left on Amazon. Christy is a former lawyer who now runs a bed-and-breakfast in a small town south of Taos while she attempts to begin a writing career. This means that there are numerous tenants whose humorous antics keep her hopping while she is trying to keep them happy. Her mother lives by, and when the festival begins, the guests are displaced by all of her relatives who come swarming in.

    One particular tenant is a permanent resident, a retired surgeon from Florida named McCloud, or Mac for short, and an attraction between Mac and Christy seems to be growing. At least enough so that when other men look at Christy longer than he thinks they should, Mac feels the pangs of jealousy.

    Especially gnawing at Mac is that the suave Evelyn Bottoms (male) would make such an ideal candidate for the murder of a young worker at a local art gallery. Missing is Bobby’s female assistant, Cindy, a close friend of Christy’s mournful friend Iggy (short for Ignacio), a young lawyer she has been mentoring.

    The mystery is strangely gruesome, with at point (page 140-141) three more deaths occurring within the span of two pages. The detective work? Well, it’s as satisfying as it is in most present-day cozies. The star attraction for this book, though, overshadowing everything else, is the locale, its history, its inhabitants, and the overall spirit of enthusiasm and joy that’s on continuous display for all of the above.

    Not quite so satisfying, given the lack of another tale to continue the series, is that the semi-romance between Christy and Mac, which is left badly hanging. All readers are would-be authors, though, are we not? Anyone who reads this rather charming look at contemporary New Mexico culture (plus mystery) will know exactly how that will come out, or already has.

UPDATE: This review was written in November of 2006. A representative of Poisoned Pen Press promised to pass on to Ms. Ulmer an email of inquiry I’d sent them, suggesting that perhaps she would respond to me directly. That was several weeks ago, and she has not. More, the information I quoted from the PP website is no longer there, or at least I am unable to find it again. I wish I had better news than this.

   As you will have read in every newspaper in the country today, author, screenwriter and playwright Sidney Sheldon died yesterday at the age of 89.

   In all likelihood, the average person (not you), having glanced at the headlines and the first few paragraphs without reading further, will think of Mr. Sheldon as an author of powerful blockbuster bestsellers a lot more than they’ll remember him as a writer of crime fiction.

      If that is the case — and who knows, I may be wrong — I suspect it’s because that same hypothetical average person, when confronted with the phrase “crime fiction,” thinks primarily of “detective fiction,” and of Agatha Christie, Perry Mason and Spenser: For Hire, for example, but none of which (or whom) were Mr. Sheldon’s model, style or forte.

    No matter. Sidney Sheldon was a crime fiction writer. Most of his novels were strongly based on criminous activities of all sorts, including (and especially) murder and its aftermath, often dealing with the rich and famous, beginning with his very first novel, The Naked Face, which earned him the Edgar for that year’s Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America.

   From the wikipedia website is a synopsis of the story line:

   From Allen J. Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV is a list of Mr. Sheldon’s work that correctly belongs to our field, ignoring all of the work he did as a screenwriter. (The hyphen before two titles indicates marginal crime content.)

   To which I can add the following books published after the year 2000:

   Two books, Catoplus Terror (a novel about a former spy attempting to apprehend Carlos the Jackal) and The Pavid Pavillion, are not written by Sidney Sheldon but are said to have been done by someone else who published them under his name. (Someone will have to enlighten me on these two books, as I cannot find copies of either of them offered for sale on the Internet.)

   From today’s obituary for Mr. Sheldon in the New York Times, I offer this excerpt about his writing:

   For Mr. Sheldon’s credits in the world of TV and movie entertainment, I will send you to IMDB. Of the various series and films he worked on, the one for which I’d remember him most is Hart to Hart (1979-1984)the TV series he created starring Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers, with made-for-TV movies continuing on through 1996. Fluff, perhaps, but high-powered (and highly enjoyable) fluff, and they did solve crimes.

   For even more on Mr. Sheldon’s long career, you could not do better than to start with his own website, then head to a February 2006 interview with him by Kacey Kowars from which the following excerpts are taken:

   but later:

UPDATE [02-01-07] On his blog, which you should visit every day, Ed Gorman gives a blunt but hugely accurate assessment of Mr. Sheldon’s career, then compares the comments he’s received on his death with those given Harold Robbins. Two writers whose fictional work took place in the same strata of society, two wholly different reactions to their passing.

From a notice in the New York Times —

   With all of these years in the world of publishing, Mr. Barnard could very easily have had many connections to the world of crime fiction, but the only one that appeared under his own name is –

   Data taken from a listing on ABE and Index to Crime and Mystery Anthologies, Contento & Greenberg.

   A earlier anthology, Cleopatra’s Nights (Dell #414, pb original, 1950) contains 13 stories and articles about the famous Egyptian queen. None seem to be crime-related, except possibly “A Toast to Murder” (from Queen Cleopatra) by Talbot Mundy.

   Regarding my previous posts on Frederic Goldsmith and his mystery novel Murder in Mayfair, primarily this one, Jamie Sturgeon sent me the following email:

   In the pair of emails that follow, Jamie added:

and

    Comparing the pair of titles for Caspary’s book with the story line given in the blurb, it certainly looks like a match to me. I’m convinced. Thanks, Jamie! With this to go on, I also found the Good Housekeeping citation, from a Gutenberg list of copyright renewals:

   Case closed?

   As far as the individual entries in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV are concerned, it’s easy to forget that there a life behind each and every one of them. There’s always much more than the listing can ever say, taken in isolation by itself. Here’s an example. The entry for Muriel Davidson looks like this:

   Two books which fall into the category of crime fiction, plus a third that’s only marginally so. The year of her birth, and the year of her death. You’d read this, glance at it for up to, say, several seconds, and then you’d go on to the next one, whichever the next one might be.

   Unless you were looking for her entry with a specific reason in mind, and until you happened to want more and decided to Google her name. There is another Muriel Davidson who has something to do with the Canadian census, and you’ll going to have to screen her out. Then you come to an entry that looks promising, you click on it, and that’s when you discover, quoting the following news item in the New York Times:

    A followup story appeared the next day:

   To say that this was unexpected would be an understatement of some magnitude, and that’s putting it mildly.

   Now the reason I was looking up Mrs. Davidson was that I was doing some research on a made-for-TV movie entitled The Wednesday Woman, which was supposedly based on her novel The Thursday Woman, included in CFIV and mentioned in the first Times article above. I kept looking, hardly expecting to discover anything else of significance. That a mystery writer was murdered herself was unusual enough. That there was a second chorus coming would never have occurred to me. (You may remember the incident yourself, though, especially if you were living on the West Coast at the time.)

   It turns out that the made-for-TV movie, The Wednesday Woman, (CBS; Wed., May 24, 2000, 9 p.m.) if I am understanding the course of events correctly, was not exactly based on Mrs. Davidson’s book, but on her life, which in turn imitated the book that she had written earlier, The Thursday Woman. The movie was fiction based on a real-life sequence of events, which tragically mirrored the earlier work of fiction.

    I don’t suppose I’m making myself as clear as I should be. I realize this because it took me a while myself to put the chain of events into some sort of order. The website that seems to tell the story best is this one, but allow me to quote the essential passages, and then if you’re so inclined, you should certainly go read the rest of the story for yourself.

   First, however, a quote from the book itself:

   And now the chain of events that I mentioned:

(1A) In addition to TV scripts, celebrity profiles and other magazine articles and books, the real Davidson wrote a novel titled The Thursday Woman, about an addictive woman who has an affair with a dangerous fruitcake.

(1B) Besides writing for a magazine, the movie Muriel (played by Meredith Baxter) writes a novel with a similar plot titled The Wednesday Woman.

(2A) The real Muriel was murdered by Robert Thom, an alcoholic whom she met at a hospital where she counseled alcoholics once a week. A police report called the two “quite close.” A county probation officer said that just prior to her murder she had tried to sever her sporadic sexual relationship with Thom, who pleaded no contest to second-degree murder and was given a sentence of 17 years to life.

(2B) In the movie, Muriel is a recovering alcoholic, as is her psychotic lover (Peter Coyote) who tries to kill her after she wants to end their relationship.

(3A) and (3B) The kicker that comes next, is that the real life Muriel is murdered. In the movie, she is not, to widespread critical disapproval. If you are portraying real events as closely as this movie does, they said, how can you get away with changing the ending, even if it’s one that leaves the viewer pleased and satisfied that everything in the end, um, ended well?

   You’ll have to answer that one yourself. I can’t give you any advice. I’m still marveling over the sheer audacity of real life to imitate fiction so closely in the first place, in this one single secluded entry in CFIV.

      —

UPDATE [01-30-07] From a brief email sent by Victor Berch:

   The California Death Index gives MD’s birth date as March 21, 1923; born in St. Paul, Minnesota. This seems to be verified in the 1930 US Census taken on April 8, 1930, where her age is given as 7 years old. Her maiden name was Friedland, so her entry should read:

      DAVIDSON, MURIEL (FRIEDLAND) 1923-1983.

   This post began as an UPDATE to be found at the end of the previous one, but as I kept writing, it became long enough, I thought, and substantiative enough, to survive on its own. And so, on its own two feet, here it is:

   Taken from an email message from Al Hubin this morning: “Looks good. The only connection you haven’t made is that Murder in Mayfair was reportedly the basis for the movie “Hour of Decision” (Tempean, 1957).”

   >> No, I didn’t catch that, and I’m certainly happy to know about it. When I checked how many copies of Murder in Mayfair were offered for sale yesterday on the Internet, the answer was none. Zippo. If someone were interested in knowing what the book’s story line was, all I could offer right now in reply are the comments of a single viewer on IMDB, which I’ll add below. And, yes, I know that the movie may be NOTHING like the book, but here goes something better than nothing, at least:

    To which I add, ah yes, Hazel Court. I remember her from a short-lived TV series called Dick and the Duchess (CBS, 1957-58). It was an American series filmed in England and was mostly a comedy, but with criminous overtones.

   Hazel Court’s co-star was Patrick O’Neal, who played Dick Starrett, an American insurance claims investigator based in London and married to an Englishwoman, the “duchess” of the title. That is to say, his wife Jane, whose efforts to help her husband invariably ended in disaster.

   I may be the only person I know who remembers this series, but even though I was only 15 or 16 years old at the time, I think that I was slightly in love with Hazel Court. Yes, she was too old for me, but at that age what possible difference could a few years make, and a distance of only a few thousand miles away … ?

    Thus began a lifelong love of British crime fiction. And yes, I do digress.

   Even though Allen J. Hubin’s work on Crime Fiction IV is nominally closed, he is still accumulating Addenda for his massive bibliography, as I’ve mentioned before, and actively so at that. The Internet is a massive tool to have at your disposal, especially Google, as everyone reading this must surely know — an enormously valuable implement for scooping up data and facts that simply wasn’t available when most of the work on the book was being done.

   In Al’s case (and mine as well, if truth be told) he can now type in the name of an author whose vital statistics are scanty or non-existent (birth date, year of death, some biographical details) and/or the title of one of their books, and see what shows up.

   Sometimes you get nothing at all, and sometimes – if the name is too common – you get too much. It’s impossible, for example, to sort through all of the Bill Joneses of the world.

   Sometimes, however, you hit upon a nugget or two, or even more. Case in point. At the present time, or not until a couple of days ago, nothing was known about:

   On the web now, though, is a site belonging to Paul K. Lyons which includes, among other things, pages of information for over 500 diarists. Besides writing a small amount of fiction, Paul has been a diarist himself since 1974, and he is in the process of making the entries available online.

   In January 1981 he happened to be reading a book called Murder in Mayfair (see above) and wrote about it in his diary. One line, and Google picked it up: “In the British Library I’ve been reading Murder in Mayfair written by my father, Frederic Goldsmith.”

   Al spotted this, immediately emailed Paul and received this reply:

      [UPDATE: In a later email to me, Paul added the following:

   And there’s the connection with Vera Caspary. Here’s one of that lady’s entries in CFIV:

   Emphasis mine. And here’s Isadore Goldsmith’s full entry in www.imdb.com:

   One of the movies that caught my eye was The Scarf, which Isadore Goldsmith both produced and wrote the story it was based on. Was there some connection also to the book of the same title written by Robert Bloch (of Psycho fame)? No, not so. The co-author of the story, according to IMDB, was Edwin Rolfe, who has a single entry in CFIV himself:

   And The Scarf, by Robert Bloch (Dial, 1947) seems to have never been made into a movie at all.

   As for Vera Caspary, she has many entries in CFIV (which I won’t repeat here), even more as a screenwriter in IMDB, and there is a full biography for her here.

   She’ll certainly best be known as the author of Laura, however, and (more than likely) for the movie more than for the book.

   But which of her stories did Frederick Goldsmith use to construct his novel Murder in Mayfair? At the moment I do not know, but if and when I do, you can be sure you will read about it here.