WEIRD TALES January 1949. Editor: Dorothy McIlwraith. Cover artist: Lee Brown Coye. Overall rating: *½.

ALLISON V. HARDING “Four from Jehlam.” Novelette. An ancient Indian woman’s curse follows four Englishmen back home and to their not unexpected deaths. Not very well written. (1)

EVERETT EVANS “Food for Demons.” A demon inside one professor’s head feeds on the minds of others. (2)

FRANK GRUBER “The Thirteenth Floor.” Standard tale of non-existent floor in a large department store. (2)

SNOWDEN T. HERRICK “Open Season on the –bottoms.” People whose last names end in “bottom” start disappearing. (0)

JOHN D. MacDONALD “The Great Stone Death.” The great stone lizard attacks two outdoorsmen; one escapes. (1)

HAROLD LAWLER “Lover in Scarlet.” A skeleton in a scarlet cloak. (0)

ROBERT BLOCH “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” A magician’s assistant tries to saw a girl in half, and succeeds! (2)

ERIC FRANK RUSSELL “The Big Shot.” At his time of reckoning, Rafferty finds that his final judge is himself. (4)

STEPHEN GRENDON “Balu.” A boy’s strange Egyptian cat knows the secret of transformation to human form. (1)

MARY ELIZABETH COUNSELMAN “The Bonan of Baladewa.” An old Javanese musician calls of the spirit world to avenge his daughter’s death. (1)

ROBERT HEINLEIN “Our Fair City.” Novelette. A reporter uses the talents of a friendly whirlwind to expose the corruption of City Hall. Farce. (2)

E. X. FERRARS – Alive and Dead. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1975. Bantam, paperback, 1982.

   The novels of E. X. Ferrars (a pseudonym of Moma Brown, who also writes under the name of Elizabeth Ferrars) are best described as quiet and polite. The characters are usually normal middle-class British people — which is not to say they are dull: many are writers or artists or engaged in otherwise unusual professions; the women are independent and strong. But they are people to whom violence seldom happens: and when it does, they are shocked, but willingly take charge and get to the bottom of these unexpected happenings.

   Martha Crayle is a typical Ferrars heroine. Middle-aged and twice divorced, she has struggled to raise two sons while caring for an invalid aunt and running a rooming house. When the aunt dies and leaves her an unexpected legacy, she moves out all her boarders except the reserved and stem Mr. Syme (who has become her confidant and, when crime strikes, a sort of Watson) and takes up volunteer work for the National Guild for the Welfare of Unmarried Mothers.

   It is at their offices that she meets Amanda Hassall, a young pregnant woman who claims she has been deserted by her husband and impregnated by the man she is living with. Amanda does not wish to marry the baby’s father, nor does she want to put the child up for adoption as her parents have suggested. Martha takes the girl home, and a day later takes in another pregnant woman, Sandra Aspinall.

   As Mr. Syme has darkly hinted, Martha should not have given refuge to these total strangers. Before Amanda has spent two nights in the house, a murdered man turns up in a local hotel, and she is reported to have been on the scene.

   Amanda insists the victim is her estranged husband, but her parents –who appeared shortly before the body was discovered — claim the husband died in an airplane crash the year before. In addition to the parents, the boyfriends of both young women arrive, and by the Lime murder is done twice, Martha thoroughly regrets her involvement and wishes she had listened to Mr. Syme.

   The plot twists and turns (with plenty of surprises) all the way to the very end. Ferrars writes well and creates characters that are sure to enlist her readers’ sympathies. This novel is one of her best.

     ———
   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.

GYPSY WILDCAT. Universal Pictures, 1944. Maria Montez, Jon Hall, Peter Coe, Nigel Bruce, Leo Carrillo, Gale Sondergaard, Douglass Dumbrille. Screenplay: James Hogan, Gene Lewis, and James M. Cain. Director: Roy William Neill.

   Filmed in lush Technicolor, Roy William Neill’s Gypsy Wildcat stars Maria Montez and Jon Hall in a fun escapist adventure movie. Montez, as the Gypsy girl Carla, captivates the audience with her beauty and charm. Jon Hall, as Michael, provides the story with a male love interest for our exotic leading lady.

   In terms of plot, Gypsy Wildcat may ultimately not add up to all that much. Falsely accused of murdering Count Orso, Michael (Hall) shacks up with a Gypsy caravan. On his trail is the mischievous Baron Tovar (Douglass Dumbrille) who seeks to not only capture Michael, but to marry Carla and steal her royal birthright. It’s Robin Hood, Errol Flynn type of fare and nothing that requires too much thought.

   What struck me the most was how absolutely saturated in color the movie turned out to be. Whether it is a Gypsy festival at the beginning of the film or a choreographed fight sequence, color schemes play a vital role in bringing this film to life. It makes for a highly enjoyable viewing experience. Which, of course, was the whole point of this production.

   While the ending is both way too abrupt and predictable, most of the storyline is seamless and works quite well. Of note, hardboiled writer James M. Cain is one of three writers credited with the screenplay. But don’t let that fool you. The material here is lighthearted and not even remotely noir.

   A final word. It’s long been my contention that Roy William Neill remains one of the most underappreciated directors of his era. Much like The Black Room, which I reviewed here a decade ago, Gypsy Wildcat punches well above its weight, thanks to a director who took the subject matter seriously.

BART SPICER – The Dark Light. Carney Wilde #1. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1949. Bestseller Mystery, digest-sized paperback, date?

   Carney Wilde gets hired to find a missing preacher, a Reverand Kimball of the Church of Shining Light. A church of Kimball’s own founding.

   Kimball’s gone awol, and no one seems to know where he could have gone.

   As soon as Wilde thinks he gets a lead, a church member is killed, and then another. It begins to look like anyone with any information about Kimball’s whereabouts gets erased.

   Wilde does some good, methodical detective work, has a bit of luck, and he’s able to crack the case. Of course.

   There’s nothing too special about the story. It’s a fine mystery, solved fairly. But what really makes the book good is how good a writer Bart Spicer is. His writing is sparkling clean, his metaphors innovative, and his voice is his own. There’s no tired, rote turn of phrase. All the sentences are written beautifully, and each phrase is fresh and new, in the hardboiled way we like ’em. I’m a fan.

   My son Jonathan’s first novel, from Stark House Press:

   Here’s the descriptive blurb, taken from the back cover:

   Private investigator Mike Levinas’s life has stalled. All that changes when a desperate Southern woman enters his office, asking him to find her dissolute older husband. What begins as a standard missing persons case reveals itself to something far more nefarious. Mike soon finds himself embroiled in intrigue and the target of a dangerous international conspiracy. As Mike traverses the seedy streets of 1980s Manhattan on the hunt for a Nazi war criminal, he encounters an array of shady characters and lonely souls. When the cops prove to be less than helpful and the violence rises to a fever pitch, Mike toughens up and takes matters into his own hands.

   Speaking of The Old Days (wasn’t I?), back when I first got interested in Movies there were maybe a dozen books on the subject, mostly very shallow or abstrusely academic. A recent visit to the Library, though, reminded me how much times have changed. On fifty full shelves filled with books on movies I found detailed reference books, books devoted to single films, and a variety of carefully researched works on highly-specialized topics like science fiction serials, the “Road to” movies, Abbott Costello’s horror spoofs, and The Films of the Bowery Boys (Citadel, 1984) by David Hayes & Brent Walker.

   Now I don’t recommend the Bowery Boys to anyone; the humor is crude and forced at the best of times, and at their worst, the films are so shoddy as to defy their own existence. But I find them possessed of a raw energy and persistent vision that cannot be denied, and I confess I watch them every chance I get.

   The Boys started out in the New York production of Sidney Kingsley’s classic play Dead End, and when the property went to Hollywood in 1937 they went with it, where they were billed as the “Dead End Kids” in films like Angels with Dirty Faces until Warners lost interest, whereupon they took a step down to Universal as “the Little Tough Guys” for a series of “B”s and hung around for a couple of serials. In 1940 they osmosed into “the East Side Kids” at Monogram, and coalesced into the Bowery Boys in 1946, the form they remained in until the series demise ten years later.

   By this time, there were only two real members of the group: Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall, plus a changing roster of hangers-on, frequently abetted by Leo’s dad Bernard, as Louie Dumbrowski, owner of the minimalist soda shop where the boys hung out. In this universe the “Boys” – now quite middle-aged and looking every misspent minute of it – went through a series of situations frankly quite beyond their B-movie budgets, but impressive nonetheless, with romps through London, Paris, the Orient, Olde Englande, Africa ….

   They were also visited by every character actor with a few free days and some bills to pay. The roster will mean little to non-addicts, but those of us who once worshipped the grainy black-and-white images think fondly of Noah Beery, Erle Blore, Hillary Brooke, Iron Eyes Cody, Lloyd Corrigan, John Dehner, Douglas Dumbrille, Douglas Fowley, Steven Geray, Billy Gilbert, Mary Gordon (from the Sherlock Holmes movies) Raymond Hatton, Percy Helton, Warren Hymer, Ian Keith (once considered for Dracula) Bela Lugosi (who got the part and ended up here anyway), Fuzzy Knight, Martin Kosleck, Sheldon Leonard, Keye Luke from the Chan films, J. Farrell McDonald, Mike (Murder My Sweet) Mazurki, Alan Napier, Sig Rumann, Dan Seymour, Lionel Stander Craig Stevens, Glen Strange, Woody Strode, Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer, Minerva Urecal, Lee Van Cleef and Clint Walker True, we remember them from much better films, but here they are nonetheless, plugging along in cinematic obscurity.

   The authors somehow manage to document all this, watch the films and do research on a series to which respectable critics wouldn’t give the time of day. And, as with the Boys themselves, one must admire their perseverance.

   Incidentally, one of the Bowery Boys movies actually received an Academy Award nomination, which it turns out is not exactly the same as being nominated for an Oscar, which is the basis of an amusing story which unfortunately cannot be related here.

RUTH FENISONG – The Butler Died in Brooklyn.Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover 1943. Mystery Novel Classic #97, digest-sized paperback, 1946/47. Stark House Press, 2-in-1 edition with Murder Runs a Fever, softcover, 2024.

   Fenisong wrote thirteen books about New York Police Sergeant (later Inspector) Gridley Nelson from 1942 to 1960. They enjoyed considerable popularity and many were reprinted in paperback. In an era of uneducated but street wise fictional cops, Nelson has just about everything going for him. He is a Princeton graduate with a substantial private income that allows him to hire a full-time housekeeper who lives in Harlem and serves as an information pipeline through her friendships with other servants. This is of enormous value to Nelson since he is frequently assigned to investigate upper-class murders.

   In The Butler Died in Brooklyn, tangled upper-class family relationships arc involved when Beulah Fitch Casey Danille Roberts’s longtime butler, Shepard (who had just been fired without cause), is found murdered. “Booming Beulah” has just moved her entire household — including giddy granddaughter Marianne and her twin brothers — from Gramercy Park to a recently converted apartment house to be near her current husband’s antique shop/warehouse.

   After another family murder, Nelson’s housekeeper, Sammy, takes it upon herself to answer an ad for a maid in the household. Proper police procedure is followed, with long interrogation of suspects and extensive background checks, while Marianne complicates matters by trying to protect her brothers and getting herself kidnapped. It is the dogged, step-by-step investigation by Nelson, and Sammy behind the scenes, that finally solves the case just in time to prevent another murder.

   Fenisong’s books, even the non-series ones like Jenny Kissed Me ( l944), are a mixture of romance and suspense, and provide glimpses of how the other half lives. Her formula of the wealthy young police officer who “speaks the language” has been used by others, but never more successfully. Among Gridley Nelson’s other successful cases are Murder Needs a Face (1942), Deadlock (1952), and Dead Weight (1962).

     ———
   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.

HARRY HARRISON – Deathworld 3. Dell #1849, paperback original; 1st printing, May 1968. Cover art: John Berkey. Ace, paperback, 1987. Serialized earlier in Analog SF, Feb-Mar-Apr 1968, as The Horse Barbarians.

   Jason dinAlt convinces some of the inhabitants of the planet Pyrrus (Deathworld 27) to attempt resettling on Felicity. Rich mineral deposits await them, but the native barbarians make the new planet only slightly less unfriendly to new off-world settlers. Their culture is that of warring tribesmen, cities are [restricted] by traditional laws, and death by following the law is [definitely an] obstacle.

   The Pyrrans attempt infiltration of the most powerful clan, led by Temuchin, but they discover that cultural change can come only from within, and that defeat can lead to final victory.

   Too much of the story is spent on the wrong approach, which would be acceptable if bloodshed were an approved form of entertainment. [Worse], Jason has on page 21 a computer capable of providing the necessary conclusions, and it is not until page 167 that it even appears in the story again. The emphasis on fighting and violence is not justified, […] with the latter breaking out over and over again.

Rating: ***

CHARLES PERRY – Portrait of a Young Man Drowning. Simon and Schuster, hardcover, 1962. Signet, paperback, February 1963. W. W. Norton & Company, softcover, 1996. Film adaptation: 1997 as Six Ways to Sunday, starring Norman Reedus and Deborah Harry

   A bildungsroman of Harry Odum, from a child with an Oedipus complex, to mob hitman. And everything in between.

   I guess it’s really two different story arcs, one literal, one figurative: the rise and fall of a mother-fucker.

   So it all starts relatively innocent enough. Mama loves her baby. And she doesn’t want him to love anybody else more than her. And she doesn’t ever want him to leave her. And he must always care for her. As she did for him.

   And as a kid it doesn’t look that weird. But as mama starts driving off all eligible bachelorettes, chastising her full grown son for his divided attentions—things start to get weird.

   And at the same time, we see Harry growing from small-time hoodlum to big time enforcer. And with the money he’s bringing in, he can bring Ma to the top o’ the world Ma, top o’ the world.

   And he does.

   Of course when you get to the top, you got much further to fall.

         —

   Beautifully orchestrated Oedipal mob story, where a child’s development into a psycho-killer is inextricably intertwined with his twisted sexuality, to the point that he can only be aroused by murdering someone. And only then and immediately must he find a mate, a mate denied by his mother, til she’s the only one left.

   Pretty hard core stuff. But well done.-

WILLIAM LINDSAY GRESHAM – Limbo Tower. Rinehart & Co., hardcover, 1949. Paperback reprints listed below.

   Crime fiction fans know Gresham for his 1946 classic noir novel Nightmare Alley and nonfiction classics on carnival/magician culture (Houdini: The Man Who Walked Through Walls and Monster Midway: An Uninhibited Look at the Glittering World of the Carny). In 2010, Bret Wood released Grindshow: The Selected Writings of William Lindsay Gresham (see Walker Martin’s Mystery*File review here for more details).

   Few people today know about Gresham’s second novel, Limbo Tower, although it had some commercial success. My copy (William Heinemann, 1950) is the second hardcover edition, and Signet/New American Library published at least three paperback editions (Signet 839 in 1951, Signet D2046 in 1962, then a reprint of D2046 in 1973).

   It’s a curious mix of crime thriller and melodrama. The limbo tower in question is an urban tuberculosis clinic—TB is a harsh disease, so the quarantined patients are in limbo between life and death. For the main character, Jewish atheist Communist poet Benjamin Rosenbaum, the rest-and-nothing-else routine is torture. He’s got words to write and systems to smash.

   Catholic nurse Anne Gallagher struggles to care for him well because she can’t admit she’s in love with an atheist. Other patients—most notably Muslim cab driver Abdullah, con man Jasper Stone, and fundamentalist preacher Joe Kincaid—orbit around Rosenbaum, amusing or irritating each other. Meanwhile, Dr. Rathbone struggles with being a skilled surgeon in a job where his options to cure patients are limited. His colleague, Dr. Crane, strives to hide an affair with a woman whose boss is on the hospital board.

   Many interesting things could be said about how the novel connects with Gresham’s real life. Gresham spent about six months in tuberculosis wards (leaving against doctors’ advice) in 1939-1940. He dedicates the book to Alexander F. Bergman, a poet who died of tuberculosis and was “a genius, a revolutionary, and an expert at handling small boats. God rest him, he’s dead now.”

   Readers familiar with Gresham’s wife, Joy Davidman (she later married C.S. Lewis, a romance depicted in the movie Shadowlands) will know she edited They Look Like Men, a collection of Bergman’s poetry. All interesting things that biographers and researchers are still unpacking today.

   The more interesting topic for crime fans is how much Limbo Tower feels like it wants, and doesn’t want, to be a crime novel. Wood (and Alan Prendergast in a Writer’s Chronicle piece) observe that the tuberculosis setting and ensemble cast make Limbo Tower resemble Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. I found it felt more like a mix between Jim Thompson’s The Alcoholics and Elmore Leonard’s Touch.

   Like The Alcoholics, it’s an ensemble clinic story with noir elements, yet its subject matter announces that it’s meant to be “serious literature.” In Gresham’s case, the crime comes via hints that preacher Kincaid has sinful secrets and Dr. Crane’s affair with a femme fatale who talks like the brunette in Detour.

   In Thompson’s case, the crime comes via his usual tropes (women with odd sexual interests, heroes with unmentionable dark pasts), just in a clinic instead of his usual small Texas town. Yet Thompson makes his goal fairly clear: he highlights the fact the clinic is a “California gothic” style building, his ensemble cast resembles a gothic novel’s quirky mansion residents, and the essential dilemma is over accepting much-needed money from a crooked source (“how will we maintain the mansion?”).

   This is noir returning to its gothic roots. Gresham’s much longer, rambling story doesn’t have such clarity: there’s a lot of talk about religion, allusions to people’s criminal pasts, and some vague hints of supernatural phenomena, but it never coheres into a clear vision. In both cases, attempting to write a self-consciously serious novel feels like overreaching. Thompson and Gresham seemed at their best when they took a pulp novel setup (con jobs, bank heists, etc.), then quietly made it more radical.

   Like Leonard in Touch, Gresham offers a curious mix of piety and grit. Leonard isn’t strictly a noir writer, although his trademark messy urban characters and snarky humor seem to build on noir’s legacy of fast-talking crooks—hence why Tarantino liked Leonard so much.

   In Touch, a novel about hucksters exploiting a Franciscan priest whose stigmata can heal people, Leonard wants to be simultaneously snarky and reverent. The religious elements aren’t scorned, as we’d expect from someone who wrote Rum Punch. Similarly, Gresham (writing during the tail end of his 1946-1950 churchgoing Christian phase, contributing testimonies to Presbyterian Life about how much C.S. Lewis’ apologetics informed his faith journey) takes faith seriously here. Readers familiar with Nightmare Alley, where the con artist hero poses as a spiritualist minister, keep waiting for a reveal where the faithful turn out to be fools. Instead, even Rosenbaum’s angry Communist tirades against religion are treated as misguided faith. Leonard and Gresham both try to combine writing styles known for irony and cynicism with pious treatments of religion. Neither quite pulls it off.

   So, Limbo Tower is a messy book. That being said, Gresham provides some memorable scenes—including a wicked twist in Dr. Crane’s love life. The descriptions of the hospital—particularly the biblical allusions to Babel/Babylon as its furnace burns contaminated sheets—are also fun. The characters could use a stronger plot to orbit around, but they are all intriguing. As readers saw in Nightmare Alley, Gresham had a knack for making a community of characters feel like the universe in microcosm.

   Maybe now that Guillermo del Toro has made Nightmare Alley into a movie and some lesser-known Gresham works have crept back into print (Dunce Books re-released Monster Midway in 2021), we’ll see new interest in Limbo Tower. I’m unsure how well a reissue would sell, but I can see a smart adaptor playing with the structure to make a compelling audiobook or graphic novel.

         ____

About the Reviewer: G. Connor Salter is a writer and editor living in Colorado. He has contributed over 1,400 articles to various publications, including Mythlore, The Tolkienist, and Fellowship & Fairydust. His interview with mystery author Clayton Rawson’s son was published here earlier in Mystery*File.