BUDD SCHULBERG – The Harder They Fall. Random House, hardcover, 1947. Paperback reprints include Bantam 707, October 1949, and Signet, 1968.

THE HARDER THEY FALL. Columbia Pictures, 1956. Humphrey Bogart, Rod Steiger, Jan Sterling, Mike Lane, Max Baer, Jersey Joe Walcott, Edward Andrews, Harold J. Stone, Carlos Montalban, Nehemiah Persof. Screenplay by Philip Yordan, based on the novel by Budd Schulberg. Directed by Mark Robson.

   Eddie Lewis is press agent for the boxing interests of mob boss Nick Latka. Eddie still has some fantasies about being a ‘real’ writer someday. But for now, he’s getting paid a lot of dough and a percentage to hype up whatever fighter the mob tells him to.

   His newest assignment, however, promises to be harder that all of the others: hyping Man Mountain Toro Molina, Giant of the Andes (based on real life ‘boxer’ Primo Carnera). Molina (as well as Carnera) is 6’7”, 275 pounds. Slow as sludge, with a glass jaw and punches that couldn’t puncture a balloon.

   Molina is a pituitary case, with a body enlarged by glands and muscle bound by a life of lifting wine barrels in Argentina.

   Eddie expresses his concerns about hyping this oafish goon. But Nick, the Boss, reassures him (reminiscent of William Randolph Hearst’s “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war”) you hype the fighter, I’ll make sure he wins the fights.

   From there it’s one fixed fight after another, building up the hype machine, praying on the gullibility of the average fan and the salability of the average reporter.

   And then, when he finally meets a legit fighter that can’t be bought (Max Baer — both in reality in the Max Baer/Primo Carnera fight as well as in the film where Max Baer reprises his role as destroyer of fake fighters), the mob is happy enough to take the 9-5 odds and lay their money on Baer for the win. Carnera/Molina is decimated in the Max Baer fight (in the book he’s named Buddy Stein — in the film Buddy Brannen).

   The book qualifies as noir. There’s nothing redemptive. The whole thing stinks to high heaven. Even the pummeling of Molina is such an absolute decimation and destruction of a basically decent, stupid ox that there’s no schadenfreude to enjoy. Everyone is bought and sold. And after the fight, when ‘El Toro’ decides he’s ready to quit and go home, he’s told that after subtracting all expenses that his total take (for his entire boxing career) amounts to $49.70.

   In the film, when Bogart finds out about this affront to human decency, he gives his entire take to Molina ($16,000). In the book, Eddie Lewis only offers Molina $5,000 — which makes a lot more sense as Eddie does everything in half-measures. In the book, Molina rejects the filthy lucre. In the film, Molina gratefully accepts: At least the world has one true friend!

   In the book, Eddie’s girlfriend dumps him: sick of his hypocrisy and his pretense of being better than the trash he traffics. In the film, Eddie is married and his wife stands by his side, nudging him lovingly towards truth, justice and the America Way.

   The book ends with Eddie in bed with a whore. The movie, with Bogart standing up to corruption: The Harder They Fall in the film is a double entendre referring both to the collapse in the ring of Man Mountain and to Eddie’s outing of mafia corruption in the Free Press! Eddie’s gonna singlehandedly bring down mafia fight fixing! Bogart reprises his role of Rick in Casablanca. Bogart’s corruption is only a pose. Deep down he’s clean and pure and strong. The final image has his devoted wife placing a tea cup and saucer lovingly beside his Remington as he types his expose.

   It’s Bogart’s final role. He looks much older than his 56 years, weak and tired and full of cancer. He tries to convince us that good will prevail, and the swelling orchestra backs him up. But he looks resigned and deathly, like the truth.

         —————–

   What did I think of them? Well — like I said: the book is noir and the movie isn’t. But just because something is noir or not doesn’t mean it’s good. For me, they both hit me kind of flat. If you’re interested in the basic story it’s pretty much covered in the movie (until the truth is betrayed in the end to allow the audience to leave with a smile and comfort in the fact that all is well and justice will out).

   The movie also leaves out a tremendous amount of sex. More sex than I knew was possible in print in 1947. (Eddie says trying to remember one girl over another is like trying to remember one particular cigarette after you just chain smoked a pack.) El Toro has an affair with the mafia boss’s wife — until he catches her giving a blow job to the chauffeur’s 17-year old nephew (were only the chauffeur the beneficiary I’d make my annual Rosh Hashanah joke about blowing the shofar): ‘La puta! La puta!’ he screams at her.

   The movie also pretty much leaves out the mob element. Although Rod Steiger is a tough guy, it’s not really clear that the repercussions of not going along with his orders are ending belly up in the East River. You’ll merely be fired. (As an aside, if you close your eyes, Steiger’s voice and words sound like a dead ringer for Donald Trump — I’d be shocked if Trump didn’t watch the film when he was a 10 year old boy).

   Anyway. I guess I’d say you can safely skip both the film and the book. They’re okay. But, as good old Robert Louis Stevenson jauntily jotted: ‘the world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.’

My daughter and her husband are visiting me from Illinois this weekend, starting tomorrow and leaving Tuesday. I will probably not have as much time for posting as I usually do, so if this blog goes blank for a while, all is well. Will be back soon!

RICHARD S. PRATHER – Over Her Dear Body. Shell Scott #10. Gold Medal #s887, June 1959. Cover art by Barye Phillips. Many later printings.

   I grew up reading the Shell Scott books, all the way through high school, but if I read this one, it was a long time ago, and no memories of it this past week came back at all. The Shell Scott books, as I remember them, were wacky adventures of a Hollywood-based PI, filled with the three B’s: babes, booze and bullets, but I’ll tell you this up front. I found this one sorely disappointing.

   In reverse order, lots of bullets, a moderate amount of booze, and barely any babes. Pun intended. On a yacht filled with party-goers where he is to meet a client, female, Shell does cross paths another lady, one with no clothes on and swimming off the stern and without a ladder to come up off the water. He is more than happy to provide one, but while whimsically amusing, in essence that’s as far as that goes.

   But while looking for the ladder for the lady, he butts into a stateroom in which a secretive conference is going on, with one of the several guys in attendance ending up dead the next day. Not too surprisingly, the dead man is Shell’s client’s brother. From there the story’s as straight as a string. No surprises, no twists, no fun.

   I think Prather, whether he realized or not, was coasting with this one. He’s fine, even better than fine, in descriptive passages, but the dialogue he puts into Shell Scott’s mouth completely belies the latter’s reputation as being a tough hardboiled detective. He’s whiny, and he’s always trying to come up with excuses for his actions. He’s 180 degrees the opposite of Sam Spade, for one big example, whose thoughts you are never even close to being sure of, ever.

   Once again, I’ll rate this one D for Disappointing, and on my trademarked H/B (hardboiled) scale, a 3.3 maybe, tops. Out of ten.

SANDRA WEST PROWELL – Where Wallflowers Die. Phoebe Siegel #3. Walker, hardcover, 1996. Bantam, paperback, 1997.

   I wasn’t as taken with Phoebe’s first two adventures as a lot of people were. I liked them and liked the character, but thought there were some definite rough edges. Prowell has a strong, individual voice, though.

   A Montana politician who’s running for Governor wants Billings PI Phoebe Siegel to investigate the murder of his wife; the catch is, it occurred 27 years ago, and is still an open case. It’s one her dead father had worked on, one that disturbed him a lot.

   Phoebe doesn’t much like politicians, but takes the case anyway. When she starts opening long-closed doors, bad things come out, past death leads to present, and she comes in harm’s way herself.

   I still think Prowell has a way to go before moving up to the Muller /Grafton/Paretsky /Barnes class, but she’s sure better than some female PI writers who are with bigger publishers for probably bigger bucks. My main problem is just that, mine — I don’t find Phoebe Siegel all that likable a protagonist. Too mindlessly antagonistic and wiseass when it’s not called for. Got a mouth on her like a stevedore, too, which may offend some.

   I do think that Prowell tells a pretty good story, and I liked the fact that the ending was at least semi-realistic and didn’t culminate in an orgy of needless violence. Really, if you take to ol’ Phoebe you’ll probably think these are pretty damned good.

      The Phoebe Siegel series —

1. By Evil Means (1993)
2. The Killing of Monday Brown (1994)
3. When Wallflowers Die (1996)

      Awards —

Dilys Awards Best Book nominee (1994) : By Evil Means
Shamus Awards Best Novel nominee (1995) : The Killing of Monday Brown
Shamus Awards Best Novel nominee (1997) : When Wallflowers Die

PETER GUNN “The Kill.” NBC, 22 September 1958 (Season One, Episode One). Craig Stevens (Peter Gunn), Lola Albright (Edie Hart), Hope Emerson (Mother), Herschel Bernardi (Lieutenant Jacoby). Guest Cast: Gavin MacLeod, Jack Weston. Music by Henry Mancini. Written and directed by Blake Edwards.

   As opposed to my recent encounter with the first episode of Surfside 6, this is, wow, the way to start off a brand new private eye TV series. Introduce the characters: a tough but suave PI; his girl friend, singer in the night club where he spends a lot of his time; the tough lady owner of said night club; and the cop who’s actually a good friend of the aforementioned PI.

   Then explain who they are naturally, and show the relationships between them by seeing them in their usual haunts and as they interact with each other in the every day (or night) course of business.

   And have a story that’s wrapped up in 30 minutes (although certainly rushed a little at the end), and still have time for the PI and the girl take a break outside the club between sets talking about life, love and maybe, the future. All in the realm of totally cool, but when Mother is seriously injured in an explosion in the club, Mr. Peter Gunn (the PI) gets to show how tough he is too, and the thugs responsible for the explosion will back me up on that statement, you can count on that.

   Although several others of the same overall genre came before it, Peter Gunn the TV show was a breath of fresh air in the business, what with the noirish atmosphere throughout the show, and the music – by Henry Mancini – that took the genre to new heights. This is a TV show that all private eye aficionados can’t afford not to know about, nor miss. (Unfortunately if you don’t have it on DVD (all three seasons, two on NBC, one on ABC), right now the bad news is that you’ll have settle for watching it on FreeVee, with dreadfully awful commercials.)

WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS. 20th Century Fox, 1950. Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, Gary Merrill, Bert Freed, Tom Tully, Karl Malden, Ruth Donnelly, Craig Stevens. Screenplay: Ben Hecht, based on the novel Night Cry by William L. Stuart.. Directed by Otto Preminger.

   A tough police detective, repeatedly in trouble for beating up suspects in cases he’s investigating, accidentally kills one of them, a guy being framed for knifing another guy after a dice game. After dumping the body, he finds someone else accused of the crime.

   That someone being the father of the girl he’s falling in love with, the estranged wife of the guy he killed. Whew. I hope I didn’t give too much away with all this plot summary. The fun in a movie like this is just to sit back and let events flow naturally.

SAMUEL R. DELANY – The Einstein Intersection. Ace F-427, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1967. Many reprint editions exist, but the Bantam paperback of April 1981 is the first US edition that includes a chapter missing from the Ace paperback original. Cover art by Jack Gaughan.

   In a new Earth, peopled with new inhabitants, Lo Lobey leaves his village and travels to find Friza, to return her to life. He meets various characters: Kid Death, Spider, Green-eye, and the Dove.

   Symbolic garbage, trailing off to meaninglessness. Some people might be impressed by this; not I. Read the back cover and forget the rest.

Rating: **½

[UPDATE.] The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula voting for 1968, and came in second for the Hugo award.

THE MIGHTY QUINN. MGM, 1989. Denzel Washington (Xavier Quinn), James Fox, Mimi Rogers, M. Emmet Walsh, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Esther Rolle, Robert Townsend (Maubee). Based on the book Finding Maubee by A. H. Z. Carr. The title of the film is derived from the song “Quinn the Eskimo” by Bob Dylan. Director: Carl Schenkel.

   I’d seen The Mighty Quinn before (reviewed here by my father a couple of years ago) and thoroughly enjoyed it. It must have been on DVD. This time, however, I decided to watch it on VHS on my 9” Sylvania TV/VCR combo.

   And while the small screen did inevitably detract from the very scenic aspect of the film, watching it as I did allowed me to appreciate the plot even more than during my first watch. Plot, or should I say, anti-plot? Because at the end of the day, The Mighty Quinn is, in many ways, a plotless movie.

   True, you have Denzel Washington portraying Xavier Quinn, a Carribean police chief, tasked with tracking down his childhood friend Maubee, who is now the prime suspect in a murder. But really, when you take the whole movie in, you come to realize that it’s a journey movie; not a plot one. That the movie’s force – and what makes it a personal favorite to a small group of people – is the myriad characters that Quinn meets along the way.

   In that sense, The Mighty Quinn is far more like 1950s noirs like Kiss Me Deadly (1955) than it is other Denzel Washington action/crime vehicles such as the ones he did with directors Tony Scott and Antoine Fuqua. Still, the movie isn’t noir. It’s not remotely hardboiled. If anything, it’s a little light and comedic at times. Which all works to its benefit.

LESTER DENT – Dead at the Take-Off. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1946. Bestseller Mystery, digest-sized paperback, date? Reprinted as High Stakes (Ace Double D-21, paperback, 1953).

   Lester Dent is best known as the creator of Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze, who ranks with the Shadow as the most popular cull hero to come out of the pulp magazines of the 1930s. As “Kenneth Robeson,” Dent wrote close to 200 full-length Doc Savage novels for Doc’s own monthly magazine from 1933 to 1949.

   Dozens of these have been reprinted in paperback since 1964, under their original titles — Brand of the Werewolf, The Squeaking Goblins, The Living Fire Menace, etc. Despite hokey plots, stereotypical villains, and hurried writing, they contain some ingenious ideas and extrapolations. Dent was much more than a pulp hack; he had genuine talent and a convincing prose style that, when he took the time to polish it, matches up well with the best crime writers past and present.

   Dent’s best work is a pair of novelettes featuring detective Oscar Sail, which he wrote for Black Mask in the mid-Thirties, and Dead at the Take-Off, his first novel to appear under his own name. Take-Off is an evocative work, with postwar commercial aviation as its background.

   The protagonist is Chance Molloy, the owner of a small airline, AEA, who is facing financial ruin because a conspiracy headed by corrupt Senator Lord has prevented him from buying surplus military transport planes. Molloy, with the aid of two of his staff, has been trying lo obtain proof of the senator’s duplicity, and now believes he has found it.

   Lord’s nephew has agreed to turn over damning evidence against his uncle at the senator’s New Mexico ranch. Along with several other principal characters, including the senator’s daughter, Janet, Molloy boards Flight 14 for New Mexico. En route, there is considerable intrigue, capped off when the nephew turns up dead and Janet is drugged. Later, in New Mexico, an attempt is made on Molloy’s life, and the suspense continues to heighten. The violent climax takes place back on board the airliner.

   There is plenty of action, but Dead at the Take-Off has much more than that to recommend it. The characterization is sharp, with strong psychological overtones; effective use of flashback is made; and the writing is among Dent’s best. The book is jam-packed with such imagery as:

   The book has its flaws — Dent was never able to totally overcome his. pulp origins and there is a good deal of melodrama here — but it is still a very good example of the mid-Forties hard-boiled crime novel.

   Dent’s other books are somewhat less successful, although Lady to Kill (1946), which also features Chance Molloy, and the paperback original Cry at Dusk (1952) have many of the same positive qualities as Dead at the Take-Off .

———
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.

CORNELL WOOLRICH – Hotel Room. Random House, hardcover, 1958. No paperback edition.

   The novel’s protagonist is Room 923 of the St. Anselm Hotel in New York City.

   A nice, fresh, new and sparking hotel, the room was christened June 20, 1896, by newlyweds.

   Crossing the threshold, the bride tells the groom, on the inevitability of aging, ‘I can’t imagine it ever happening to me. But when it does, it won’t be me any more. It’ll be somebody else….. An old lady looking out of my eyes…  A stranger inside of me. She won’t know me, and I won’t know her.’

   â€˜Then I’ll be a stranger too,’ responds the groom. ‘Two strangers, in a marriage that was begun by two somebody-elses.’ He closed the door. But for a minute or two his face seemed to glow there where it had been. Then it slowly wore thin, and the light it had made went away. Like the illusion of love itself does.

   Down the bride’s face, “a thin shining line down each cheek like silver threads unraveling from her eyes. ‘Don’t let the day come. Don’t let it come yet. Wait till he’s back first’… mercilessly the night thinned away, as if there were a giant unseen blackboard eraser at work, rubbing it out. ‘But now tomorrow’s yesterday…. Oh, what happened to tomorrow? Who took it away?’

   Next we are catapulted in time to the day Wilson declares war against Germany, April 6th, 1917. A young enlisted man comes, seeking a room on his last night. Everything’s booked. But an elderly German couple are in 923. Screw the krauts, screw the Kaiser, says the desk-man. And kicks them out. It’s the patriotic thing to do. Everyone “broke out in a rash of patriotism, like hives.”

   The young enlisted man calls a pretty girl he knows just vaguely and needles her into a date. He pressures her into giving herself to him. It’s the patriotic thing to do. And she does. Fervently. Oh what passion. What patriotic passion. And they immediately afterwards run out and wed. Promising not to speak to each other again until the war is over. And that day meeting again. At Room 923.

   Now it is Armistice Day, November 11, 1918. And the clandestine couple meets again. And they don’t recognize each other. The patriotic passion is spent. They don’t really care for each other at all. And they agree to an annulment. To let it go.

   And now it’s February 17, 1924. The last night in the life of a Mafioso who has lost his grip. Who has lost his hold on his territory. He’s done but doesn’t know it.

   His mother comes to see him. “’D’you remember when I was a kid, and you used to make lasagne for Vito and me, and bring ’em hot to the table—?”

    ‘Quella non ero io . . .That was not I, that was another woman, long gone now. A woman whose prayers were not answered. Io non sono piu tua madre . . .’ she whispered smolderingly. ‘Mother, no. Just a woman who bore a devil. The woman who once bore you says good-bye to you.’

   And then there was death, the great know-nothing part of life. Or had life perhaps been only the brief knowsomething part of an endless all-encompassing death?”

   The next time we come to Room 923, it is the evening of the stock market crash, October 24, 1929. And the man checking in, a powerful Wall Street man. At least he was so that morning. And now he’s squat.

   The hotel’s become second rate, with time. “’[N]ever been in a hotel like this before…. Oh, not for a long time, anyway, And that was another me… My life slipped out of its room and beat its bill, and there are no tracers anywhere that can find it and bring it back.’

   The bellboy performed all the little flourishes, turning the light behind it on, then off again, shed a spark for an instant, and then remain out as it had been before.

   He looks at a photo of his daughter, inscribed: “’To Daddy from his loving Ruth’. And there was something so polite….. greetings from a distance, from a thousand heartbeats away, from which all the warmth has escaped en route, they had so far to go.”

   Opening the window to jump out, “Like an extra dimension, that had been lurking about him all the while, but whose existence he had never suspected until just now….. glass behind which all life is supposed to be lived, to be allowed to run its course, unknowing — he knew now — of the strangeness on the other side. The glass that, without that, shatters easily enough”.

   Next is the night before Pearl Harbor, December 6, 1941. A mixed couple, a Caucasian girl and a Japanese boy, have run away together to NYC—to escape the anti-miscegenation racism of their parents. To start on their own. To elope. And begin their lives……

   And last, we are left on September 30, 1957. The evening before the demolition. The hotel to be razed for an office tower.

   The blushing bride we met back in 1896 has come back. To bookend her life, and the life of the room.

   She thanks her departed husband “for not slowly aging before my eyes, as I would have slowly aged before yours, until finally neither of us was what the other had married, but somebody else entirely. Some unknown old man. Some unknown old woman. Thank you for staying young. And for letting me stay young along with you. A lifetime of youth. Eternal spring.”

’[H]otel rooms,’ amended the maid, ‘are a lot like people.’”

   I liked it. A bit wistful and sad, with dominant sense of geography and loss. It’s an interesting idea for a novel: having the location as the main character, letting the setting stay still, slowly aging, and having the times and people change, in accelerated action at momentous times. It would make a good play.

   I’ve often felt the strange gap where you visit a familiar place, a house you grew up in, or a town, a restaurant, great memories, so intensely real, but gone and gone forever. And the place remains, seemingly unscathed.

   But is it? Is the place unscathed? Or are all of the memories and events somehow contained therein? Redeemable in time?

   I don’t have any of the answers. And neither does the novel. But there are evocations and suggestions of meaning. Which is the only honest response anyway.

   Woolrich dedicated the novel to his dear mother, his roommate until the end:

         To Claire Attalie Woolrich

            1874-1957

         In Memoriam

            This Book: Our Book

   Woolrich also wrote at least a couple of other stories taking place at the St. Anselm Hotel. One of the stories, “The Penny-A-Worder,” also takes place in room 923, and is about a pulp mystery writer assigned a rush order to write a cover story to match a cover that has already been produced — set to go to the printers tomorrow morning. This story was intended to be included in Hotel Room — but the publishers decided that it didn’t fit in with the rest of the stories.

   “Mystery in Room 913,” written twenty years earlier, occurs right down the hall. It’s a pretty typical, but well-told story about a mysterious ‘suicide room’. Every single man who checks in seems compelled to throw himself thru the window. The cops buy it. Why complicate things? It’s the depression! But the hotel dick doesn’t believe it at all. And he uses himself as bait!

               —–

   Barry Malzberg , Woolrich’s last agent, set me onto Hotel Room with his recommendation of ‘The Penny-A-Worder’. But I’d suggest to readers to save that story until after reading Hotel Room. It has just the right dream within a dream quality that gives the rest of the book its intended phantasmic effect. And it should have, to my mind, have been included as an epilogue to the book.

   Malzberg, in a reminiscence contained in The Big Book of Noir, edited by Ed Gorman, Lee Server, and Martin H. Greenberg, recalls complimenting Woolrich on Phantom Lady. Woolrich’s response was that the man who wrote that novel has been dead for years.

   It’s an interesting take on life. That the person that you are and the person that you were are strangers to one another. It’s a dissociation shared by all of the characters in Hotel Room. You could retitle the title: ‘In Memoriam to Identity’ (to steal from Kathy Acker), or, to coin a phrase: ‘The Dissociation Association’. But perhaps Hotel Room is right. It’s anonymous. And it fits you. At affordable rates. It may even be a vacant now. Make your reservation. Room 923 awaits.