CLIFFORD IRVING – Tom Mix and Pancho Villa: A Romance of the Mexican Revolution. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1982; paperback, 1984.

   So begins the rip-snorting adventure tale told in the first person by Tom Mix about his early days and his adventures riding side by side with Mexican Revolutionary Pancho Villa in the days of the Mexican Revolution at the beginning of the 20th Centruy. And it should come as no surprise that this tall tale of a “memoir” should sound authentic since it is penned by the infamous Clifford Irving whose Howard Hughes memoir was one of the great literary hoaxes of all time.

   It hardly needs to be said this “memoir” is no more authentic than most of its subjects popular Westerns, but must be added it is every bit as entertaining as the best of them, as Tom Mix, at trails end, shortly before the tragic accident that ended his legendary (in more senses than one) life sits down to recall the best and happiest time of his checkered career.

   Seeking an old friend in Juarez young Tom falls in with Villa, and soon is hypnotized by the revolutionary:

   And young Tom is swept up, and who wouldn’t be, in dreams of revolution and adventure.

   Adventure being the key word. Adventure in the grand and picaresque sense of the word, adventure full of character building, painful realizations, fast horses, flying bullets, dead enemies, lost friends, beautiful senoritas Rosa, Eliza, and one of his own race. Hannah, treachery, Hemingwayesque discussions of passion, revolution, death, and manhood (“If your obligations are the same as your desires, you’re a lucky man. You can be whole.”), all kept moving by colorful and rich portraits of Mexico and the border in those wild days.

   The ending, as our hero rides into a different kind of sunset has a beauty all its own:

    Tom Mix and Pancho Villa is a big technicolor historical fantasy, all vistas and gun battles, beautiful women, heroic men, and hard riding against a rich backdrop of a time not so very far away. I confess it is one of my favorite books, rich in imagination and vivid action and characters, not, perhaps, as flawed as their real life counterparts, or at least in the same ways, but beautifully painted images as glorious in their own ways as their cinematic adventures.

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN. Universal Pictures, 1940. Virginia Bruce, John Barrymore, John Howard, Charlie Ruggles, Oscar Homolka, Donald MacBride, Margaret Hamilton, Shemp Howard, Anne Nagel. Director: A. Edward Sutherland.

   This may be the only movie made by a major studio in the 1940s in which the leading lady spends most of her time on the screen totally nude. She even kisses the leading man in the same condition. We can’t see her, of course, but we’ve got imaginations, don’t we?

   This movie is also (slightly less) famous for that noteworthy line, “You know, if women were invisible, life would be much less complicated.” It’s also the funniest movie I’ve seen in ages. If ever this shows up again on your favorite cable station, don’t miss it.

DANA CHAMBERS – She’ll Be Dead by Morning. Jim Steele #3. The Dial Press, hardcover, 1940. Popular Library #238, paperback, no date stated [1950]. Popular Library Eagle EB-5, paperback, 1953.

   The gimmick in this tough guy detective series is that Jim Steele is not a private eye, even though all of his cases, which he seems take on only as favors to friends of friends, are precisely the kinds of cases that PI’s take on.

   In this one he’s “hired” to help a wealthy old man to help his daughter get though the trouble she’s obviously in. He’s recently lost two of his other children to accidents, so Steele has no problem in saying yes at the same time he’s tearing up the blank check he’s offered.

   In other books in the series Steele’s day job is said to be hat of writing radio thrillers, but in this one, he calls himself only a businessman, but no ordinary businessman gets into the kind of scrape that he does in this one.

   Which starts out with a bang. Whatever trouble that Suzy is involved with, there is someone who wants him off the case, and badly. After being shot through the arm Steele is told to get out of town — to take a train to Chicago — and only if he does, will his wife be released. She has been kidnapped and in the hands of the bad guys.

   Steele gets on the train, followed closely by someone obviously assigned to keep an eye on him, but he dumps the guy off the train, follows suit and finds the man dead. He has until the train’s arrival in Chicago, which he will not be on, to find whoever has his wife and rescue her.

   An action-packed adventure story, in other words. It starts well but gets talky and sags in the middle, before ending up on a higher note, but as a full-fledged detective novel, which in my opinion was not one of the author’s stronger points. This is a case of simply going off in too many directions, in other words, but all in all it’s good enough to tell me I ought to find time to read more of the series, most of which I already own. Unaccountably I have allowed them to sit idle for far too long.

       The Jim Steele series —

Some Day I’ll Kill You (n.) Dial 1939
Too Like the Lightning (n.) Dial 1939
She’ll Be Dead by Morning (n.) Dial 1940
The Blonde Died First (n.) Dial 1941
The Frightened Man (n.) Dial 1942
The Last Secret (n.) Dial 1943
The Case of Caroline Animus (n.) Dial 1946

THE 7th DAWN. United Artists, US/UK, 1964. William Holden, Susannah York, Capucine, Tetsurô Tanba, Michael Goodliffe, Allan Cuthbertson. Director: Lewis Gilbert.

   There’s a scene in the latter part of The 7th Dawn in which William Holden, along with two traveling companions, slog their way through the humid Malay jungle in a near futile attempt to reach the city before a prisoner they hope to save is hanged. As they swing their machetes to and fro, hoping to take down trees and brush that obstruct their path, you just sense how trapped these characters feel. Most of all, you feel the slowness of it all, the overpowering sense of how little time seems to be elapsing despite their valiant effort.

   Call me overly critical, but that’s essentially how I felt watching this turgid cinematic adaptation of Australian novelist Michael Keon’s The Durian Tree (1960). Although filmed on location in Malaysia, which admittedly does provide the viewer with some captivating scenery, the film never really makes a solid case for itself. William Holden is the star. He portrays Ferris, an American rubber plantation owner caught up in the power machinations of both sides during the Malay Emergency. He is a one-note character, a committed bachelor and political maverick, loyal to no side but compelled, like so many other characters in novels and movies before and since, to live in exotic non-Western locales.

   When the British detain his long time mistress Dhana (Capucine) for terrorist activities, he’s forced to make decisions that will impact not just his own life and fortune, but also the future of Malaysia and its people as they seek independence from British rule. He soon is forced to reckon his own desire to stay aloof from politics with the knowledge that Ng (Tetsurô Tanb), a comrade in arms from from the Second World War and the fight against the Japanese occupation, is leading the violent, pro-Soviet insurgency against the British. Added to the mix is an unlikely – and frankly unconvincing – platonic May-December romance between Ferris (Holden) and Candace Trumpey (Susannah York), the daughter of the newly appointed British Resident in Malaysia.

   For a movie that appears to have been promoted as both an adventure film and as a romance, The 7th Dawn is a shockingly dull motion picture. While there are a few somewhat exciting moments scattered throughout the film, none of them, save an overwrought scene in which British soldiers torch an insurgent village, are particularly memorable. And that one was cheap, clearly designed to pull the heartstrings of theater audiences and to build a moral equivalency between the British and the Malay communists.

   Perhaps that’s part of what made watching this movie such a slog. When all is said and done, you just don’t feel particularly keen on either the British or the Malay insurgents. Why make a movie with a plot that continually raises the stakes and gives the audience no one to truly root for?

HANK JANSON – Becky. Hank Janson #58(?) Gold Star IL7-70, US, paperback, 1965. Revised from its first publication in the UK as Sinister Rapture (Moring, paperback, 1957).

   Based on its cover, this is a book far different that I’m sure you’d be expecting. It’s #17 in its US Gold Star series, but its one of a much longer line of Hank Janson books published in the UK. [The numbering is questionable since it is one of five published in 1957, but listed alphabetically in Hubin for that year.] Janson is a crime writer for the Chicago Chronicle, a guy with a perpetual leer for the ladies and a lousy nose for a story right under his eyes.

   Among his many other adventures are such titles as A Nympho Named Sylvia, so what you expect in this one (I did) is a glorified sex farce a la Carter Brown, but what you really get is an even greater dose of that old paranoid TV series The Prisoner. The Chicago of this book is unlike any Chicago that ever existed, and the story will absolutely knock you off your feet.

   Let me back up a little, and then maybe I can do something about substantiating this claim. If you don’t have a copy of this book already, you’ll probably have a hard time coming up with one, so if I cover the plot a but more thoroughly than usual, I don’t think it could possibly hurt.

   Hank Janson the author, according to Al Hubin, was a house name used by a number of writers of a whole slew of cheap British thrillers, a scattering of which were published in this country by Gold Star Books, a small and insignificant company [that published 60 to 70 books between that years 1963 to 1965. Also known since this review was first published is that Stephen D. Frances was the author of this one, as now so stated in the current edition of Crime Fiction IV.]

   I haven’t read any of the other ones, but there’s certainly little that happens any where in the first half of the book that’s in any way out of the ordinary. An obvious crackpot comes to Janson’s newspaper office and tries to convince him that he’s come up with a mathematical formula that will nullify the radioactive effects of nuclear fission, but he can’t get anyone in authority to listen to him. In no mood for japery, Janson quickly shoos the old man away.

   Soon after, though, Janson gets a visit from a good-looking girl, one wearing transparent leggings as protection against the never-ending rain in Chicago. (Neither the rain nor the leggings are ever explained, by the way, but no matter.) She is Professor Morgan’s niece, on a visit from Florida, and he has disappeared. The police are not particularly interested.

   When Janson investigates, he gets the same kind of brushoff. He suspects bribery. He also stays overnight with Becky — she’s the niece, and she has this cute sort of pony tail, and with a little prodding, nature just seems to take it course.

   But then he discovers he’s been poking his nose in a bit too far. An organization calls Security shows up. Two quiet-spoken guys who think Janson is becoming a nuisance. Two guys who see Communist agents everywhere, Two guys who would work well with the American Investigation Committee (page 84). Two guys who think Christianity is the state religion (page 86). “Do you love your country,” they ask.

   Janson is fired. Insubordination. No other paper will give him a tumble. He’s booted out of his apartment. The tenancy law is quoted, and he’s given a week’s notice. Someone with more power than Security gives him a visit, someone named Mr. Brown. “There are inner workings of inner workings, matters of utter public importance that are too delicate to be handled by woolly-minded senators… Do you know, Mr. Janson, that the penalty for being a traitor is death?”

   Janson ends up naked in a sealed room with only a bed, toilet facilities and a small door through which meals can be provided. For how long, he doesn’t know. When released, he discovers he still has no story, because — you guessed it — no one will believe him anyway.

   There obviously is a huge parallel here between the dismal days of McCarthyism here in this country in the 1950s, given a quick little twist in the form of an overseas perspective. I’m not sure if it still has a form of social significance any more, or if it was worth all of this space to describe it, but please note that I haven’t even mentioned yet the girl Janson meets on page 90 — an utter misanthrope who is harder than any nails you can imagine and who just about steals him out of the story before it’s even half begun. She’s a stunner, and — this is the truth — I’ve not read a character quite like her is anything I’ve ever read before.

SLEEP, MY LOVE. United Artists, 1948. Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche, Robert Cummings, George Coulouris and Hazel Brooks. Written by Leo Rosten, St Clair McKelway, Decla Dunning and Cy Endfield. Directed by Douglas Sirk.

   A stylish variation on Gaslight, with Claudette Colbert waking on a train to Boston with no idea how she got there, aided by a too-helpful and rather snoopy stranger (Queenie Smith) and bundled back home in the charming company of Bob Cummings.

   Cut to her New York mansion where we see her presumably distraught husband (Don Ameche) reporting her missing to a somewhat sinister police detective (Raymond Burr), and it’s easy to see she’s “the victim of some diabolical mind control” as they say in the Movies.

   What could have been a simple copycat film emerges as a gripping, humorous, real and very elegant movie, thanks to witty writing, clever acting, and the emotive direction of Douglas Sirk. Sirk always had a feel for décor, but here he evokes Colbert’s mansion-prison into a landscape that seems to determine the fate of the characters in it; people are constantly struggling up and down staircases, perching on furniture, darting from bedroom to bedroom… and there’s a frosted glass door that hides a meaning all its own.

   Ms Colbert in her 40s radiates a mature sensuality, perfectly matched by Don Ameche’s slippery solicitude. Both of them come up against George Coulouris’ obsessive would-be mastermind, and whoever wrote Cummings’ dialogue had a perfect feel for Bob’s bemused charm. His encounters with the bad guys show off a vivid contrast of acting styles that translates into real conflict on the screen.

   But the most arresting screen presence in Sleep, My Love belongs to an actress whose career went nowhere: Hazel Brooks as Daphne, a femme fatale whose merest glance could freeze molten lava. Next to her, the bad girls of Detour and Double Indemnity look like the Flying Nun — even more effective because she never does anything very criminal here, but always looks like she’d rather be pulling the wings off flies.

   In all, this is a superb film, one that should be better-celebrated in the realms of Noir and Romantic Suspense. And one you should seek out for a fine, fun evening.

GARLAND LORD – Murder Plain and Fancy. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1943.

   Garland Lord was the joint pen name of husband and wife Isabel Garland (1903-1988) and Mindret Lord (1903-1955). They wrote four books together under this name, none with series characters, the first three for Doubleday’s Crime Club imprint. Isabel also wrote one book under her own name, apparently before they decided to team up together.

   This one starts out with the hugest of coincidences. When a young man and woman, both members of a traveling actors troupe, decide to visit the latter’s long estranged aunt, against her protests that she does not want to see her, they hardly expect to find her dead in her house at the bottom of the stairs, apparently the victim of a very untimely accident.

   Well, of course, if you are reading this, you would know as soon as I did that it was no accident. What’s more, since Sheila was the woman’s only heir, it is natural for the small town local authorities to suspect that either she or her male friend Ken had something to do with it.

   You might also suspect that this is a romance as well as a detective novel, but it is not Ken who Sheila finds herself more and more attracted to, but someone local, someone who’s had a taste of big city life and has decided it is not for him. Ever so slowly he has Sheila thinking that way too. Ken, of course, is green-eyed with jealousy, and begins to act more and more suspiciously.

   The two authors do an excellent job is disguising a fairly obvious reason for the dead aunt’s strange behavior, which as it turns out is also strongly involved with the motive for her death. In that regard, this is a minor affair, but it is the characters who make the story. Even the minor ones are extremely well drawn, each in their own way. The end result is very readable.

NOTE:   According to IMDb, Mindret Lord had some success writing for movies and TV, as well as radio.

K. C. CONSTANTINE – Cranks and Shadows. Mario Balzic #11. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1995; paperback, 1996.

   I was less than impressed with Constantine’s previous book, Bottom Liner Blues, but there’s no doubt that this gas been one of major series in American crime fictionm bd in American regional fiction as well.

   Rocksburg, Pennsylvania Police Chief Mario Balzic is 65, and he’s just becoming aware that his world is crumbling around him. His city is broke, and he’s going to be forced to lay off men from his already understaffed department. Not only that, he’s suddenly become aware that a para-military law enforcement team has been formed under county aegis, and is operating in his town.

   The old-time politicians are remaking the town, and his wife Ruth is increasing her pressure on him to retire. All of the things he’s been ignoring and avoiding are pressing on him at once, and he doesn’t know what he’s going to do about them. Or what he can.

   Okay. The first thing to understand is that this is a Novel, not a crime novel, not a detective story — a Novel, It really shouldn’t be published by a genre imprint, though maybe the series is well enough known by now that it makes no difference.

   As always, you have Constantine’s unmatched ear for the voices and characters of small-town, ethnic Pennsylvania. The book is filled with people’s talk. Good people. Bad people. Indifferent people. You have an evocative, thoughtful, sad, and angry picture off what Constantine thinks is wrong with a good bit of America, and of course you have the final touches put to the continuing portrait of Constantine’s Pennsylvania.

   This is Balzic’s swan song, and probably Constantine’s; I think he’s said what he had to say. On its own terms, it’s an excellent book.

STELLA DALLAS. United Artists, 1925. Ronald Colman, Belle Bennett, Alice Joyce, Jean Hersholt, Beatrix Pryor, Lois Moran, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Vera Lewis. Based on the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty. Director: Henry King. Shown at Cinevent 22, Columbus OH, May 1990.

   One of the great all-time tear-jerkers, and I don’t imagine there was a dry eye in the room at the end. Colman was a major star before the talkies, and I’ve never seen him give a bad performance, but this Belle Bennett’s film, and she carries you with her all the way.

   Is her performance better than Barbara Stanwyck’s in the sound remake? Maybe not, but I think it’s just as good, and I am a great admirer of Stanwyck in almost everything she did in the thirties and forties.

BRUNO FISCHER – Murder in the Raw. Gold Medal #694, paperback original; 1st printing, August 1957. Cover art: James Meese. Reprinted as #1011, 1960.

   I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that Bruno Fischer wrote hundreds of pulp mystery stories, or if it is, it isn’t by much. (I’m counting stories under his own name as well as Russell Gray and Harrison Storm.) The first of these was “The Cat Woman” which appeared in the November 1936 issue of Dime Mystery Magazine under the Russell Gray byline.

   He wrote one hardcover mystery novel in 1939 (So Much Blood, for the obscure Greystone Press) but it wasn’t until the mid-1940s that he made the transition to novel length work for good. He was one of the early authors to sign up with Gold Medal when they began publishing, circa 1950, writing 11 novels for them throughout the first year they were in business.

   Obviously the most provocative thing about Murder in the Raw — well, make it two — are the title and the cover art, both designed to catch the eye of a would-be buyer (male, of course). I don’t know if the title was Fischer’s choice, but the scene shown is in the book.

   But even so, both the title and the cover art disguise the fact that this is a pretty good detective story and an even better character study. When newspaper reporter Clem Prosper tries to take a short vacation in a lodge along a lake, he finds his host missing and himself falling in love with a young woman living nearby who has been badly scarred by having been acquitted of killing her husband, a man she loved but did not know his secret life was that of a notorious gangster.

   Fischer does a good job of hiding the identity of the true killer, suggesting at one time it is one person, then another, and convincing the reader each time that it could have been him or her. I think that’s the sign of a good author, to flesh out and define his (or her) characters well enough to make what’s essentially a puzzle plot actually work.