ARIZONA RAIDERS. Columbia Pictures, 1965. Audie Murphy, Michael Dante, Ben Cooper, Buster Crabbe, Gloria Talbott. Director: William Witney.

   To enjoy Arizona Raiders, you’ll just make it past the first ten minutes or so. Then you’re free to discover that you’ll find that it’s pretty decent, if formulaic, Western. But first you’ll have to put up with an on-screen narrator breaking the fourth wall, as well as voice-over narration, all designed to provide the viewer with historical background about Quantrell’s Raiders. It’s all highly unnecessary and honestly one of the strangest things I’ve seen in a film of this nature.

   But don’t let me give you the impression it’s not worth watching, because the movie has quite a bit going for it.

   Directed by William Witney and shot in Technicolor and Techniscope, Arizona Raiders features Audie Murphy as Clint, a former member of Quantrell’s Raiders, now working for the Arizona Rangers. He’s tasked with rooting out the remnants of his former gang, which has holed itself up in a Yaqui village in preparation for a raid on a gold shipment.

   Legendary serial film star Buster Crabbe portrays Captain Andrews, Clint’s nominal boss. With Witney at the helm, there’s plenty of action, including some beautifully choreographed fight sequences. Murphy wasn’t the greatest of Western actors, but he more than holds his own here. He certainly does appear tired and world weary, something that only adds to the film’s rather downbeat, pessimistic tone. There are a couple of particularly bloody scenes in Arizona Raiders, further delineating how much Westerns had changed since the time of Roy and Trigger.

  FRANK KANE – Time to Prey. Dell 1st Edition B159, paperback original; 1st printing, November 1960. Cover art by Harry Bennett. Reprinted as Dell 8924, paperback, 1966.

   Back in the day, circa 1958-1963, I polished down books like this at the rate of one a day. It was certainly helpful, then, that publishers put them out at very nearly the same rate, and a lot of them were Johnny Liddell private eye novels, just like this one.

   This isn’t one I remember reading, but don’t count on my lack of memory meaning anything. There isn’t anything in this one that stands out now, and I doubt if it would have back then. It starts out being a little different, with Johnny apparently getting caught up with a gang smuggling Communist Chinese agents into the country, but without a lot of notice, the story gradually converts itself into a run-of-the-mill tale of a longshoremen’s racket along the New York City waterfront.

   The villain makes himself known early on, so this is no detective story. Liddell does a good job using his brain as well as his fist, though, working members of the mob against each other, one at at time. He doesn’t even have a client. It’s personal, with the deaths of two young women having occurred because of him, one incidentally, but the other he’s directly responsible for.

   The story’s pure puffery, all the more so by the ineptitude of his primary adversary, who [spoiler alert] sets up a frame for Johnny for one of the girl’s deaths, but does not bother to be sure that the latter has no alibi for the time of the killing.

   If Kane ever describes Johnny in detail, I missed it, at least in this book. Based on his actions and the way people react to him, I picture him as a Robert Ryan type. Ruggedly good-looking but tough as nails when he needs to be.

DEATH FLIES EAST. Columbia Pictures, 1935. Conrad Nagel, Florence Rice, Raymond Walburn, Geneva Mitchell, Robert Allen, Oscar Apfel, Miki Morita. Based on a story by Philip Wylie (American Magazine, July 1934). Director: Phil Rosen.

   A neat if not overly sophisticated murder mystery that takes place on an airplane heading for New York City from California. Dead is a police detective, found slumped in his seat, poisoned. Most of the passengers appear to be ordinary businessmen, plus one deaf woman who is on board primary for comic relief — she can’t hear a word anyone says.

   But also on board is Evelyn Vail (Florence Rice), a nurse and a recent parolee from prison — convicted of complicity in another poisoning case. But she has a definite reason for being on the plane: a convict on death row at Sing Sing can confess to the killing, if only she can get there in time.

   More. A gentle suave gentleman (Conrad Nagel) who sits across the aisle from her and assist her is taking a secret formula to Washington, and he takes the small briefcase he is carrying it in everywhere he goes.

   Everyone appears innocent enough until the murder occurs. Then everyone begins to look suspicious, thanks to some decent writing and even better camera work. A minor film, but an enjoyable one. I only wish I had a better copy, but who restores old, unknown movies like this one?

  DAVID GOODIS – Nightfall. Messner, hardcover, 1947. Reprinted as The Dark Chase. Lion #133, paperback, 1953. Other reprints include: Lion LB131, paperback, 1956; Black Lizard, paperback, 1986; Centipede Press, softcover (introduction by Bill Pronzini).

  NIGHTFALL. Columbia, 1957. Aldo Ray, Anne Bancroft, Brian Keith, James Gregory, Jocelyn Brando, Rudy Bond. Screenplay by Sterling Silliphant. Directed by Jacques Tourneur.

   The book is really too quirky to make a satisfactory thriller, but if you’re just looking for a fine read, you can’t beat it.

   The story opens with Jim Vanning, a commercial artist eking out a living in New York City while hiding out from the law and a trio of very personable bank robbers who are interested in the loot from a job that Vanning inadvertently disappeared with and then lost.

   Like I say, this is just too quirky to work out as a crime story, and purists may lose interest quickly as the story spins out one unlikely move after another. There’s a cop straight out of Woolrich, with his own way of working and nothing else to do but follow Vanning around for months at a time; a girl who falls for him and even believes his cockamamie story for no apparent reason; and a plot twist that defies all logic. I could go on, but you get the point; if you’re looking for realism or even plausibility, this ain’t for you.

   For those who can relate to Goodis’s own personal universe however, it’s a treat. Not as dark and self-defeatist as the later books, but full of that sense of a small man struggling against a very big and very dark universe.

   Goodis’s unique gift was in seeing heroism in the least of us, He didn’t ennoble his bums, winos and working stiffs; he simply made heroes of them, and somehow this seems more gratifying (and much less condescending) than the efforts of many better-respected and more overtly socially conscious writers. His people come out of the gutters to live on the pulpy page, and I enjoy him all the more for it.

   Nightfall was written just after Goodis’s popular success with Dark Passage, but it wasn’t filmed for another ten years, when Columbia showed the good sense to hire writer Sterling Silliphant, who had already adapted Five Against the House (1958) and would go on to The Lineup (’58), and got Jacques Tourneur — of Cat People (1942) and Out of the Past (’48) — to direct.

   Together Silliphant and Tourneur manage to leech the improbabilities out of the story while keeping big tasty chunks of Goodis’s sharp dialogue and his more-than-pulp characterizations.

   Brian Keith is particularly effective as a thoughtful bank robber, played off perfectly against Rudy Bond’s dumb-but-sensitive killer. In the leads, Aldo Ray and Anne Bancroft carry the less colorful parts nicely, but they pale in comparison to James Gregory and Jocelyn Brando as a patient detective and his loving wife.

   Silliphant also manages to throw in a nifty finale, with a Mexican stand-off in snow-bound Wyoming and a serial style cliff-hanger as Ray and Bond struggle aboard a gargantuan snow plow headed right for the good guys. Maybe it ain’t in the book, but it provides a lively cap to a film that captures something of Goodis’s compelling style.

THUNDERING HOOFS. FBG, 1924. Fred Thomson, Fred Huntley, Charles Manes, Ann May, Carrie Clark Eard, Willie Fung, Silver King. Director: Albert S. Rogell. Shown at Cinefest 18, Liverpool NY, March 1998.

   Fred Thomson films are rare indeed. Thomson was married to noted screenwriter Frances Marion and died before the advent of sound films. Willie Fung is a familiar face from sound films, but the real co-star is Silver King, Thomson’s horse.

   In addition to the superb action sequence in which Thomson stops a runaway stage (and injured himself so severely by falling under the horses that the film was completed by stunt man Yakima Canutt), a sequence shows Thomson’s character’s father slipping from Silver King and dying, with a quick cut to a staged shot of Silver King kneeling by a roadside grave marked by a crude cross.

   A good friend’s unforgettable comment was his curiosity about why the footage showing the horse burying the father was cut. In spite of this irreverent comment that broke me up, the film is a top-notch western. I am convinced that had Thomson made more surviving films, he would have made it to the pantheon that includes Tom Mix, Tim McCoy and Buck Jones.

   The course runs concurrently with the Turner Classic Movies “Summer of Darkness” programming event—airing 24 hours of films noir every Friday in June and July. This is the deepest catalog of film noir every presented by TCM (and perhaps any network), and provides an unprecedented opportunity for those interested in learning more to watch over 100 classic movies as they investigate “The Case of Film Noir.”

   For more information, click here.

   Thanks and a tip of the hat to Michael Shonk for passing the info along.

EILEEN DEWHURST – There Was a Little Girl. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1986. First published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1984.

   Eileen Dewhurst is an author new to me, so I started looking up what I could find out about her and her mystery fiction. First of all, she was born in 1929 and is apparently still living. One source says: “Eileen Dewhurst was born in Liverpool, read English at Oxford, and has earned her living in a variety of ways, including journalism. When she is not writing she enjoys solving cryptic crossword puzzles and drawing and painting cats.”

   I have found 25 mysteries that she has written. A few never appeared in this country, and there is a curious footnote to her book The Innocence of Guilt (Piatkus, 1991). Apparently Doubleday printed up copies in this country, but then they changed their minds and never sent them out for sale. Curious, but considering the whims of publishers, this is not particularly surprising.

   Some but not all of her book belong to various series. The case in hand is solved by Detective Inspector Neil Carter; he appeared in four others, three before this one, and one afterward. Inspector Tim Le Page appears in three books, all coming after this one. Phyllida Moon, an actress who moonlights as a private eye, appears in nine books. Helen Johnson, described in one source as the wife of a high member of British Intelligence, appears in two earlier mysteries, while someone named Humphrey Barnes crosses over into one Neil Carter book plus one of those that Phyllida Moon is in. The Neil Carter books may also overlap some of the Phyllida Moon books. Sorting all this out is beginning to sound lke a chore for another day.

   Enough background, perhaps. There are a couple of interesting aspects to There Was a Little Girl, and the first is the little girl herself, a 15-year-old schoolgirl whom we first see being sent off by train to London by her aunt for the weekend, and next as a murder victim – a prostitute Inspector Carter had previously chatted up in a bar for a short time and whom she telephoned for help just before her death, he arriving too late.

   Somehow, or is it my imagination, do the British do the messy sex-related mysteries better and/or more often than American authors do? Not the US hard-boiled version, but the “malice domestic” variety. If so, here’s another one.

   Another aspect is the marital status of Inspector Carter himself, which changes in Chapter 3 from single to married, and Dewhurst portrays the day, the ceremony, and the reception to perfection. A dreamlike panic.

   More. The wedding night. This has to be a first. Neil is hesitant to ask, but his new wife Cathy eagerly accepts. Instead of their regularly scheduled honeymoon location, off they go instead to Bellfield, the small town in the New Forest where the girl was from, where they do some incognito and continuing investigating on their own (department sanctioned), Neil not convinced that the man they have arrested for the murder is actually guilty.

   Query: Is this the first murder investigation conducted by a newly married couple on their honeymoon? And mind you, Cathy takes an active role in the case, an unofficial colleague as it were, allowing certain doors to open more easily than if Neil were on his own. In the process they find themselves embarrassed in how easily they are accepted by those who are (truthfully) suspects in the case.

   The author is very observant when it comes to human nature, and although this is not at all like one of Miss Marple’s detective puzzles, at least in terms of situation, I was reminded of Christie’s works more than once. Christie often made complex plotting look easy, however, and Dewhurst is just a little awkward at it, about which more I cannot say, but if you were to read this book and then go back and read one of the earlier chapters again, you will know what I mean

A KING WITHOUT DISTRACTION. Gaumont, France, 1963. Original title: Un roi sans divertissement. Claude Girard, Colette Renard, Charles Vanel, Pierre Repp, Albert Remy, Rene Blanchard. Story and screenplay by Jean Giono, based on his novel. Directed by Francois Leterrier.

   I first saw this film at a revival house in Paris on the Champs-Élysées in French with neither dubbing nor subtitles. Luckily I was married to a tall blonde French dictionary with legs that went on forever, so my troublesome French was less a problem than it would have normally been. I have been trying to see this film again since then and only just found it on YouTube, still in French, still without dubbing or subtitles, but my French much improved however much I miss the dictionary.

   The number of Americans who have actually seen this must be infinitesimal. It’s seldom mentioned by critics or historians and never listed with films of this genre. I know it originally was not in Hubin, but that may have been corrected. I don’t know that it ever played in this country or has been available on video — at least in Region 1 format. [FOOTNOTE] It is unlikely most people know it to look for it in the first place.

   Mystery, detective, Film Noir, psychological thriller, and one of the handsomest films you will ever see that you probably never heard of, how it came about that this was never mentioned by genre or film historians I can’t say. I only found it referenced once in a series of paperbacks book on various film genres published by Paperback Library in the sixties.

   This film evokes the fatalistic doomed world of Cornell Woolrich and the desperation of some of David Goodis, James M. Cain, or Jim Thompson’s protagonists as well as any film I have ever seen. There are echoes of Graham Greene. John Dickson Carr, and even the Ellery Queen post The Door Between, the one that had serious moral issues about his work. That’s all the more remarkable because the film takes place in a remote village in France circa 1840.

   It is 1840 and Captain Langlois (Claude Giraud)of the gendarmerie has been dispatched to a small mountainous village buried in snow and white fog in the Aubrac region of France, where the former procurer de roi (king’s prosecutor) played by veteran Charles Vanel has summoned him to help deal with a series of brutal deaths. Enlisting the aid of le maire (Albert Remy) and le cure (Rene Blanchard) the Captain settles in at the Inn owned by attractive Clara (Colette Renard) and begins his investigation.

   The evidence soon suggests a lone wolf is responsible for the deaths, a lobo, so the Captain, (who stumbles into more than he discovers) arranges a massive hunt. The Captain tracks down the wolf, corners it, and kills it, but from somewhere in the crowd when he kills the wolf, he hears someone say: “At least he won’t be bored.”

   That sticks in the Captains head, and soon he becomes convinced the wolf could not have killed the victim. There is a murderer in the area killing because he is bored, the title’s king without diversion.

   The Captain probes into the mind of the killer becoming more unhinged himself until when a child his killed and he tracks down and kills the real murderer (Pierre Repp) he tells no one, and takes a garotte from the killers clothing.

   Now the Captain struggles with the overwhelming need to kill, leading to a powerful confrontation with Clara.

   The film is much simplified from the novel by Jean Giono (Horseman on the Roof, Blue Boy), and that works to its advantage, fitting the unadorned look of the film. Though it is filmed in brilliant color, this is one of the starkest films you will ever see. Scenes of the Captain’s figure in black uniform and cloak against the white dead snow are powerful, and the opening as he rides toward the village through a white snow fog sets the tone for the film, mysterious and unsettling.

   Girard makes a powerful protagonist, believably earnest and naive at the beginning and out of his depth, and by turns becoming darker, more obsessed, and bordering on madness. That he is young and handsome makes his descent into madness all the more shocking. Colette Renard’s Clara is attractive, mature, assured, a woman most men would easily desire, and Charles Vanel, an old pro, is sly and even a bit suspicious as the procurer. Leterrier shows a sure hand as a director of rare ability.

   As in the work of Woolrich, the atmosphere is rich with doom and the forbidding ever-present presence of fate. This is a grim film, though it has moments of comedy. The Captain’s figure in the beginning is almost comically incompetent using the authority suddenly thrust on him.

   Strangely for a film that is clearly out of the Noir school, this film is brightly lit and there are no stark shadows. It is often claustrophobic as life in a village in winter must have been in that era, but rather than light and shadow the film seems in soft focus, only the Captain’s sharp black uniform bringing focus to many scenes. Of particular note is the scene where he tracks the killer and child through the snow. I honestly have never seen anything like it in a film.

   It may be a bit arty for some, and it is not a particularly pleasant film. It eschews any melodrama for a kind of matter of fact horror that is all the more disturbing. How this beautiful and disturbing gem of psychological horror and suspense has eluded critics and historians of the genre and of film I can’t imagine, but maybe now a few will at least see it.

   I’m happy to have seen it again, even if it took me forty-one years to do so.

FOOTNOTE.   Since I do not believe the book has been translated into English, the book is not in Hubin, including the most recent update. The film is available on DVD but only in French and as a region 2 release. See for example: http://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm-4752/dvd-blu-ray/?cproduct=80561.    [Steve]

   T

JAY FLYNN – A Body for McHugh. Avon T-444., paperback original, 1960. MacFadden-Bartell 75-378, paperback, 1966.

   This is one entry in a nifty little five book paperback series that Flynn did in the early 19608. McHugh owns a backstreet San Francisco bar, the Door, that serves as the local watering hole for assorted spy types, ours and theirs.

   McHugh (no first name is supplied) is one of ours, working for one of those secret agencies tucked away in a Pentagon sub-basement; he periodically takes on assignments messing around in Mexican or Caribbean revolutions, recovering Nazi war prizes, and the like.

   Oddly, the books were packaged as if they were typical private-eye novels; consequently they may have failed to find the audience that would best appreciate these neatly crafted action yarns. Matt Helm fans,in particular, will find them right up their street.

   In this one, a man is knifed just outside the Door, and a scared young girl, apparently there to meet him, slips out the back way before McHugh (and the FBI and CIA agents hanging around) can get a line on her.

   The killings that ensue (some engineered by adept assassin McHugh) have to do with a missing suitcase full of money, the loot from a double-cross-infested operation by a group of Cubans trying to get their wealth out before Castro grabbed it.

   The action ranges up and down the California coast, from San Francisco to L.A. to Carmel, with assorted law-enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies, and the Mafia mixed into the caper.

   The other four books in the series are McHugh (1959), It’s Murder, McHugh (1960), Viva McHugh! (1960), and The Five Faces of Murder (1962). Flynn also wrote a number of nonseries suspense novels, among the best of which are Drink with the Dead (1959), about a bootlegging operation in northern California; and The Action Man (1961), about a heist involving a golf tournament modeled on the one at Pebble Beach.

         ———
   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.

Editorial Note:   For a long personal profile of Jay Flynn by Bill Pronzini, along with a complete bibliography of the author put together by myself, check out this page on the primary Mystery*File website.

A. S. BYATT – Possession. Chatto & Windus, UK, 1990. Vintage, US, softcover, October 1991. Film: 2002; with Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart; director: Neil LaBute.

   The cover proclaims this a Romance, but only a very patient Romantic would wade through it in search of a fevered embrace. What it is is a Literary Detective Story, cunningly designed and written with a skill that left me quite envious.

   The story spins out from one Roland Michell, a second-rate assistant to the second-greatest authority on Randolph Ash, a (fictitious) Victorian Poet along the lines of Tennyson or Browning. Doing his slow, patient, best to be of help, Michell peruses Ash’s copy of an old book, searching for notes in the margins, when two drafts of a previously unknown letter fall out, from Ash to an unnamed woman, and written with a not-quite-veiled passion that seems to hint at much more.

   Searching various references, Michell identifies the woman as one Christobel LaMotte, a little-known lesbian author of fairy tales and poetry of the times, recently “found” by feminists but still pretty obscure.

   Michell consults the nearest expert on LaMotte, a Professor Maude Bailey, who is distantly related to her. They visit the old Bailey estate, where LaMotte spent her last years, and, through a combination of luck, intelligence, and Michell’s good nature, discover reams of hitherto unsuspected correspondence between Ash and LaMotte. The sort of thing that will require radical re-evaluation among scholars of both their works.

   But, as with any fine detective story, there are hints of more: more clues, more journals, and something much more sinister. There are also added elements of suspense, such as the efforts of rival scholars to “scoop” them, discredit their findings or just buy their sources, Michell’s unraveling private life, and a great deal else.

   Byatt does an incredible job of balancing the unfolding story of the Victorian authors with the ongoing one of Michell and Bailey discovering it and themselves, fleshing out even the minor characters and wrapping the loose ends. And she truly appreciates both elements of her work. There’s the occasional line like “Literary critics make natural detectives … the classic detective story arose from the classic adultery novel….” and some very intelligent insight into the nature of literary study.

   But this is far, far from an academic exercise. Or a conventional love story. Or any ’tec I ever read before. Good enough that although I didn’t care for the ending — it smacks of bad Dickens or typical Keeler — I still enjoyed it.

   I should also add that Byatt writes like a very talented chameleon. Whether it’s paragraphs from dull Ph.D. theses, pages of old correspondence, academic ramblings on abstruse connections, or ersatz Victorian poems — both dry-as-dust and the really engaging ones — she handles each and all with faultless verisimilitude. This is a book by someone who really knows how to write. And read.