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.

   

   Just as Holmes had his Moriarty, and the 87th Precinct had its Deaf Man, so Nero Wolfe had… Arnold Zeck, who figured in three consecutive Rex Stout novels: And Be a Villain (1948), The Second Confession (1949), and In the Best Families (1950). Beginning with Full House (1955), Viking Press — his publisher for the last three decades of his life, and my future employer — assembled three books apiece into eight omnibus editions, five of which contained two novels and one of his collections (themselves generally comprising three novellas, occasionally two or four). All but one had poker-themed titles, the books seemingly selected at random, but the last bore the delicious moniker Triple Zeck (1974).

   A little history: my high-school geometry teacher, whom I will forbear to name, did not excel at her job, but I owe her an incalculable debt, for it was she who — knowing I loved mysteries — lent me her Triple Zeck (I now have my own copy). So entranced was I with Wolfe and Archie that I proceeded to devour all 46 books, plus the spin-off Red Threads (1939), that year. Mind you, in 1981, I was also amidst other series: Lord Peter Wimsey (7 books), Tarzan (4), Barsoom (1), George Smiley (4), Horatio Hornblower (1), Mike Hammer (the only one not to stick; 1), and Len Deighton’s anonymous spy (1); hard to believe that at 18, I had so much time for reading …  while falling in love with my wife!

   Backtracking a bit, the trilogy follows Too Many Women (1947), in which a disharmonic convergence of two virtually unthinkable events occurs the night the second victim, Kerr Naylor, is killed. First, Naylor loses Saul when he abruptly ducks into a taxi, and second, after Naylor takes it to Wolfe’s brownstone and, without leaving a name, asks for Archie, who is out for the evening, Fritz forgets to tell Archie upon his return.

   â€œThat Saul Panzer is the best tailer in New York. I don’t for a minute believe he lost Naylor! He don’t lose ’em! Even if he did, when Naylor came here, wouldn’t you have had him tailed when he left, since you were interested in him?,” bellows the understandably incredulous Cramer.

   The curtain goes up on And Be a Villain (Hamlet, Act I, Scene V) as Wolfe — goaded into action by IRS payments — suggests that radio star Madeline Fraser hire him to investigate the poisoning of horse-race tipster Cyril Orchard on her show, in a sponsor’s product, yet.

   Lina would pay only expenses, plus a deductible $20,000 if he nails the killer, to stop the bad publicity, although Tully Strong, secretary of the Sponsors’ Council, says the makers of Hi-Spot, the doctored beverage, might wish to do the hiring. It is decided that said fee will be split unequally among Hi-Spot; the network, the Federal Broadcasting Co. (FBC); Fraser; and other sponsors White Birch Soap and Sweeties: cue assembling the suspects.

   Refusing to work for Sweeties, Wolfe reassigns their 2% to the FBC and hosts Lina; her “stooge and feeder,” Bill Meadows, and manager, Deborah Koppel; script writer Elinor Vance; Nathan Traub, ad exec for the agency handling three sponsors; and Strong. Gate-crashing are Hi-Spot’s president and p.r. man, respectively Walter B. Anderson and Fred Owen, and FBC veep Beech.

   Absent are Columbia mathematician F.O. Savarese, the ill-fated broadcast’s surviving guest, otherwise engaged, and Nancylee Shepherd, the “nosy little chatterbox” and “pain in the neck” who organized the country’s largest Fraser Girls’ Club, kept at arm’s length as much as possible, while being tolerated by Lina to a degree.

   All deny remembering who’d uncapped the bottles, one containing cyanide — with which Fraser’s husband, Debby’s brother, allegedly killed himself six years earlier — and placed it in front of Orchard; it is unclear if he was a deliberate target. With Nan and her mother shipped off to the Ambassador in Atlantic City, impervious to Saul’s charms, Wolfe grills Savarese, an expert on probability who knew Orchard, and asked to join him on the show, to no end. Archie’s faked telegram from Al Shepherd lures his family to the brownstone, where Wolfe catches Nan lying, forcing her to admit that nearly a year ago, clear glasses were switched to opaque blue … and Lina’s bottles were always marked with Scotch tape.

   The inference is clear: Lina hasn’t been drinking Hi-Top, which gave her indigestion, a ruinous fact if revealed, and Bill says that Traub — naturally unaware of the substitution — unwittingly gave Orchard Lina’s poisoned coffee. Wolfe tells Cramer enough to have his army of men investigate who might have it in for Lina, and if his fact is deemed essential to catching the killer, he will collect that fee.

   Even this seems fruitless until Beula Poole is shot dead in her office; she and Orchard published, for the unheard-of weekly price of $10, sheets giving, respectively, “inside advance information on political and economic affairs” and race-track tips, and Cramer reveals that both their offices were cleaned out.

   Then, it happens: answering Wolfe’s ad seeking subscribers to What to Expect or Track Almanac is a voice “hard, slow, precise, and cold as last week’s corpse”; he has heard it before, with advice on a job for General Carpenter, and to advise him to limit his “efforts in behalf of a Mrs. Tremont,” which he did, but only “because no extension of them was required to finish the job I was hired for.”

   Zeck, who has a place in Westchester, is not pleased to learn that Wolfe knows his name — ascertained by Del Bascom’s agency with no word to Archie, whom he did not want to involve — and warns him to drop the matter. Cautioning Archie to forget his name and stay away from him, Wolfe drops a bombshell.

   â€œI’ll tell you this. If ever, in the course of my business, I find that I am committed against him and must destroy him, I shall leave this house, find a place where I can work — and sleep and eat if there is time for it — and stay there until I have finished. I don’t want to do that, and therefore I hope I’ll never have to.”

   Then it’s back to the matter at hand, and he learns that said sheets were an ingenious blackmail racket. A disobedient Archie calls Lon Cohen at the Gazette — introduced in The Silent Speaker (1946) — to ask about Zeck, whom Lon has heard “owns twenty Assemblymen and six district leaders … if you print something about him that he resents your body is washed ashore at Montauk Point…”

   Comparing notes with Cramer, Wolfe posits that the éminence grise behind the sheets has “units” nationwide, ensuring success both with modest payments and by rigidly adhering to one-year “subscriptions” sans renewals. He suggests focusing on subscriber Vance — whose namesake is “Eleanor” in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) — and says one of Zeck’s cutouts may know the murderer’s identity.

      He refuses a unilateral attempted firing by Anderson, who is enraged at associations with blackmail after Archie gives Lon the story (naming no names, natch) and withdraws his sponsorship; Wolfe also stirs the pot by faking an “anonymous” letter that implicates Elinor in a suspicious death.

   At least that’s the plan, but as Archie waits for the interested parties to wind up a summit meeting to select the replacement for Hi-Top, Debby eats a sample of Meltettes candy, to disprove Nan’s assertion that “It’s dangerous!,” and promptly drops dead.

   Unfortunately, when Archie refuses to be frisked like the others, Deputy Commissioner O’Hara (invoked yet unseen in Too Many Women) has him hauled downtown, where the forgery is found. He is sprung to forestall the release of an announcement sent to Fraser’s station, WPIT, that Wolfe “has solved the murder cases, all three of them, with no assistance from the police,” and can soon tell the D.A., so Cramer and Stebbins start rounding up suspects…

   The blackmailers cleverly implied knowledge of fabricated dirty laundry but, by the law of averages, inevitably put the bite on someone who really had a deadly secret they would kill to protect. Lina faked Lawrence’s suicide and made herself seem to be the target, not Orchard; Anderson was scared off by Strong, who showed her the accusatory letters and deduced her guilt.

   When Zeck calls to “congratulate you on keeping your investigation within the limits I prescribed,” and Wolfe responds, “I permit prescription of limits only by the requirements of the job. If that job had taken me across your path you would have found me there,” he says, “Then that is either my good fortune — or yours,” and hangs up.

   Act II, The Second Confession, opens as James U. Sperling, chairman of the board of the Continental Mines Corp., tries to hire Wolfe to do what Bascom has not: prove there is, and if possible get, evidence that layer Louis Rony is a Communist. He wants to prevent Rony, a “champion of the weak and downtrodden,” from marrying his younger daughter, Gwenn; Wolfe and Archie agree with her that communism is “intellectually contemptible and morally unsound.”

   Wolfe says, “Why not hire me to reach your objective, no matter how — of course within the bounds permitted to civilized man?,” but Del’s reports reveal that Rony was seen at Bischoff’s Pet Shop, “a branch of Zeck’s far-flung shenanigans…”

   â€œAndrew” Goodwin infiltrates to photograph Stony Acres, Sperling’s country home near Chappaqua, for a corporation portfolio and steal shots of Rony, at whom Connie Emerson is making a pass, while Archie fears that war widow Madeline may do so at him, tangling a possible diversionary run at sis Gwenn.

   Also present are James, Jr., economist Webster Kane, and Connie’s husband, Continental-sponsored WPIT newscaster Paul, despised by Wolfe as a veritable fascist. Fiercely protective of Gwenn, Madeline recognizes “Andy” from a news photo and intuits that his object is Rony; offering him a ride back to the city, Archie plots for him to be knocked out in an ambush, simulated by Ruth Brady and Saul.

   Rony carries an American Communist Party membership card for a “William Reynolds,” which Archie photographs, and eight keys, of which he takes impressions, giving Saul his cash to maintain the fiction. On his return, Wolfe is reporting a warning from Zeck to let Rony alone when the plant rooms are blasted with gunfire, leaving Theodore traumatized but unhurt.

   Enlisting Andy Krasicki, Lewis Hewitt, and G.M. Hoag to salvage what they can, Wolfe is driven — literally and figuratively — to Westchester, where he enlightens the Sperlings regarding “X,” leaving Gwenn to decide if she insists on proof regarding Rony, whatever the cost; stalling for time, she makes a rendezvous to tell Rony they’re through.

   The victim of an apparent hit and run, he’s found behind a bush by Archie, and Wolfe has Sperling, who rehires him to solve it, report the death, bringing local law Dykes, Noonan, and Archer — introduced, like Andy, in “Door to Death” (1949).

   Archie deflects Archer’s interested in the faux holdup as best he can, while the antagonistic Noonan is thrilled that Wolfe’s car is found to have killed Rony, which Kane confesses he did by accident while borrowing it to mail some letters in Mount Kisco. Archer is satisfied, but not Wolfe, who refuses to consider Sperling’s $50,000 pay-off (including orchid-damage) final and, back home, receives the same amount in an anonymous package, obviously on behalf of Zeck.

   He calls wishing luck to Wolfe, who asks Doc Vollmer to seek any sign on Rony of being knocked out before he was run over, with inconclusive results. He sends Archie and Saul with duplicate keys to his apartment, fruitlessly searched just when Jimmy and his mother turn up, looking ostensibly for letters from Gwenn, but presumably for a threat Rony held over them.

   Telling the ’teers that any information will be used — or not used — at his sole discretion, he asks Saul and Orrie Cather to learn the hold, and Fred Durkin to probe their servants in an effort to glean who doped a drink meant for Rony yet consumed by Archie, who had done the very same thing, and switched them in the hope of searching his room.

   Connie suspiciously materializes just as Archie locates a stone that — per Weinbach of the Fisher Laboratories, introduced in “Cordially Invited to Meet Death” (1942) — hit a man’s head. Saul learns that Jimmy contributed to the Committee of Progressive Business Men, a “funny front” for former Vice President, 1948 Progressive Party candidate, and alleged Communist “fellow traveler” Henry A. Wallace, his check one of several photostatted by a possible spy.

   Wolfe is visited by Gwenn, who reports hearing an argument between the Emersons that implicated the jealous Paul, and “Mr. Jones,” a mysterious contact within the Communist party whom Archie has never met, and then has Archie call off the boys.

   Deducing that Reynolds is not Rony’s alias but the killer’s, Wolfe ghost-writes articles on the party’s inner workings (leaked by Jones) for Lon, now second in command at the city desk; his anonymous letter fingering Reynolds as their source leads high-ranking Harvey and Stevens — one of whom may be Jones — to sign a document identifying his photo.

   At the climactic confab, Wolfe forces Web to retract his first confession, only to reveal he is Reynolds, his stunned look the titular admission. In what Archie calls “the tail,” Sperling repays Wolfe by pulling Paul off the air, where he’d insulted Wolfe, and a satisfied Zeck sends him $15,000, replacing what he’d paid Jones, all set aside by Wolfe as a war chest.

   Wolfe finally makes good on his vow in Act III, In the Best Families, which begins when wealthy Sarah Rackham visits with cousin Calvin Leeds and hires him to learn the source of second husband Barry’s new income. As cover, Archie is to be called in on a valuable dog’s poisoning at Calvin’s Hillside Kennels, and invited with him to dine at her adjacent Westchester estate, Birchvale.

   That morning, Wolfe is expecting a sausage delivery from Bill Darst that he and Fritz plan to share with Marko Vukcic, but the box instead contains a cylinder of tear gas, a warning from Zeck to lay off Barry, suggesting an answer to Mrs. Rackham’s question; Wolfe hangs up when Zeck offers to replace her $10,000 with cash.

   â€œThis episode will be repeated. [The telephone] will ring, and that confounded voice will presume to dictate to us. If we obey the dictate we will be maintaining this office and our means of livelihood only by his sufferance. If we defy it we shall be constantly in a state of trepidant vigilance, and one or both us us will probably get killed.”

   Wolfe refuses to ignore the third threat, as does Archie, who advises that the household begin the “trepidant vigilance” and heads off to Westchester, casing Eastcrest, Zeck’s mansion. At dinner are Sarah’s widowed daughter-in-law, Annabel Frey; banker, Dana Hammond, her admirer; and secretary, Lina Darrow, as well as her admirer, state assemblyman Oliver A. Pierce.

   That night, Nobby, a Doberman pinscher given to Sarah by Calvin, crawls to Hillside and dies with a steak knife stuck in him; his mother, Hebe, gets the scent, leading Calvin and Archie toward Birchvale, but on the path is Sarah, stabbed with the same knife. Archie is candid with Archer, if omitting Zeck, and Leeds says, “It happens in the best of families” before he races home, where Wolfe has bolted, leaving three notes. Two offer Theodore and Fritz employment with Hewitt (who takes the plants) and Marko, respectively, while one reads, “A.G.: Do not look for me. My very best regards and wishes,” and a Gazette ad announces his retirement, referring only clients having “unfinished matters” to Archie.

   Marko reveals that Wolfe has given him a power of attorney, told him “to offer the house and its contents for sale [with] confidential instructions,” and bidden Archie “to act in the light of experience as guided by intelligence.” New millionaire Barry contradicts Archie, claiming that Sarah was going to consult Wolfe about possible mishandling by Hammond of her affairs, and disbelieving Archie’s ignorance of Wolfe’s whereabouts, Archer locks him up.

   Before Wolfe’s lawyer, Nathaniel Parker (mentioned, by surname, in The Silent Speaker), springs him, Archie is offered a job in the “organization” by his cellmate, Max Christy, who per Lon sets up “little weekend roundups … Anything men risk money for.”

   Bequests also go to distant relatives, servants, Lina ($200,000), Annabel (Birchvale plus $1 million), and Leeds ($500,000), whose corroboration of Archie is disbelieved as well; like him and everyone else, Cramer thinks Archie knows how to reach Wolfe but, having deduced the truth, he says Wolfe should return Sarah’s fee and Zeck “is out of his reach.”

   Archie decides to open his own office at 1019 Madison Avenue, with Annabel as his first client, who asks him to a gathering of the suspects … none of whom will cooperate. Max invites Archie to meet a man he thinks might be Zeck, but it is bearded Pete Roeder from L.A., who wants Archie to tail Barry and has his driver, Bill, take them up to 1019 to talk.

   There, he is revealed as Wolfe, who’d spent “the most painful month of my life — except one, long ago,” in Texas, and has lost 117 pounds. Like Charles Forbin in D.F. Jones’s Colossus (1966), he knows his only guarantee of privacy is to feign the need for female companionship, so Lily Rowan hosts a five-hour confab in her E. 63rd Street penthouse, necking with “Pete” en route to sell it.

   Having planted a seed of suspicion in Zeck, Pete has Archie hire the ’teers for the job, deliberately letting themselves be spotted, and when confronted by Barry, Archie accepts $6,000 to reveal that they are working — indirectly — for Zeck, whom he conjectures “is getting set to frame you for the murder of your wife.”

   Archie claims to have told Barry he was working for Annabel in his daily reports to Max, who takes him to an audience where Zeck denies seeking Wolfe, but tries to recruit him; with the threat of a murder rap, he wants to force Barry to help them duplicate Roeder’s successful L.A. operation locally.

   Summoned to Archer’s office, Archie encounters Lina (a name Stout, typically casual, used for two characters in the trilogy), jilted by Barry and peddling the tale of a fictitious whistle-blowing call from Wolfe to Sarah that gave him a motive. “About all that [his] ticket to the electric chair needed was my endorsement,” yet however deserved, it would end the anti-Zeck scheme, so he shoots the story full of holes.

   Persuaded that his only out is an accommodation, Barry is taken to Zeck by Archie — now nominally on the payroll — and Pete, with a gun beneath his briefcase’s false bottom, used to cover Barry when they abruptly bind and gag Zeck. He agrees to trade evidence Wolfe has assembled against him for evidence that will convict Barry, who grabs the gun Archie “carelessly” put down to free Zeck, kills him, and in turn is killed by henchmen.

   Back in the brownstone at last, Wolfe earns Sarah’s fee by revealing that Calvin tipped off Zeck, and only he would be trusted by Nobby enough to stab him after killing his new mistress; vacationing with Lily in Norway, Archie learns that Leeds has hanged himself in his cell.

   The only book in the trilogy to be adapted, “In the Best Families” (3/6/81) was directed for the William Conrad series — which, oddly enough, I was not watching while reading the books during its original January 16-June 2 run — by the prolific George McCowan and, like “Before I Die” (1/30/81), scripted by Alfred Hayes.

   I hope you’ll agree that to summarize the first two in detail gave the third an essential context! Guest stars Linden Chiles (Leeds), Burr DeBenning (Max), and Diana Douglas (Sarah) each made multiple appearances with Conrad on Cannon; DeBenning, the ill-fated scientist in The Incredible Melting Man (1977), was also later seen on Matt Houston opposite Lee Horsley (Archie).

   Even before Sarah and Leeds arrive, a messenger (Chuck Tamburro) delivers the fateful package from Arnold Dorso (Robert Loggia), “king of the spiders,” who knows Wolfe is out to change his untouchability. Defying this third warning, Wolf takes the job; Hayes excises several characters, but otherwise follows Stout closely with the Westchester trip, the introduction of Annabel (Juanin Clay) and Barry (Lawrence Casey), and the murder.

   Once again, Archie returns home to find the door wide open as Fritz (George Voskovec) and Theodore (Robert Coote) wait with the notes, yet no sooner has he been summoned to Rusterman’s than Marko (Alex Rodine) takes him to Wolfe, hiding in the meat locker.

   The spectacle of a chipper Wolfe in chef’s garb, singing opera, is a far cry from the folds of skin bespeaking “Pete’s” crash diet, and if he truly sought to disappear, hiding out with his oldest friend seems less than secure. It’s as if Hayes said, “Let’s adapt Gone with the Wind, but leave out all that nonsense about the Civil War”; why, with 46 to choose from, select and then vitiate the book whose distinguishing characteristic is Wolfe’s imposture?

   Archie rejects an offer from Annabel, who believes Barry is guilty, but accepts one from Max (now a Christy/Roeder amalgam), ostensibly bitter over his abandonment by Wolfe, whose dispute with Marko’s chef over seasoning is interpolated as supposed comic relief.

   The rest of the plot, and even the dialogue, remain faithful, with Archie flying solo in the climactic confrontation, and Annabel assuming some of Lina’s functions, just as Max did Pete’s. When the normally unsentimental Wolfe hands Leeds over to D.A. Emory (Arnie Moore) and his assistant (David M. Zellitti), his outrage over Nobby’s betrayal is true to Stout; in a lame tag, Archie refuses a delivery from another messenger (Bennett Roberts). Loggia’s toymaker in Big (1988) was a change of pace from crime stories, e.g., Scarface (1983), Prizzi’s Honor, Jagged Edge (both 1985)  — earning Loggia an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor — Innocent Blood (1992), Lost Highway (1997), The Sopranos.

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: “Disguise for Murder”
   

Editions cited:

   Too Many Women: Bantam (1955)

   And Be a Villain, The Second Confession, In the Best Families in Triple Zeck: Viking (1974)
   

Online source:

   

SILVER BULLET. Paramount Pictures, 1985. Gary Busey, Everett McGill, Corey Haim, Megan Follows, Terry O’Quinn, Lawrence Tierney, Bill Smitrovich. Narrator: Tovah Feldshuh. Screenplay by by Stephen King, based on his novel. Directed by Dan Attias.

   This is a quintessentially Stephen King movie. What do I mean by that, exactly? Well, for starters, the official title of the movie is Stephen King’s Silver Bullet. Or so that’s what it says on the VHS box cover. Also, the screenplay is by King, adapted from his novelette, “Cycle of the Werewolf” (1983). The movie is well-entrenched in the horror genre, set in a small town where evil lurks just under the surface, and where kids can be insightful, cruel, and far wiser than adults. Sounds like King to me.

   The plot. Evil comes to Tarkers Mills, a small town with the usual coterie of King characters. Here the darkness comes in the form of a judgmental local religious leader, Reverend Lowe (Everett McGill) who – it just so happens – also is a werewolf.

   Ultimately, it’s up to wheelchair bound teenager Marty Coslaw (Corey Haim) to both discover Lowe’s dark secret and to convince his skeptical Uncle Red (Gary Busey) that the local minister is a lycanthrope. There’s also a subplot about Marty’s strained relationship with his older sister Jane, who is weary of having to play second fiddle to her paralyzed younger brother.

   Look for Lawrence Tierney as a bar owner who joins a vigilante mob that tries to hunt down the serial killer responsible for a number of local gruesome slayings. (Hint: it wasn’t a serial killer). Tierney has an oversized presence in any movie that he’s in, so much so that even though he probably doesn’t have more than forty or fifty words of dialogue, he’s very much a primary character.

   Watching on VHS was an experience. It gave the movie that subdued analog feel that seems fitting for a 1980’s King movie. This wasn’t the first time I watched Silver Bullet. I remember watching it when I must have been eleven or twelve. It must have been on HBO. And I was absolutely terrified. Well, I can say I was less scared this time. Time and age has a way of doing that to people. But it’s still a hair-raising experience. Pun intended.

   Silver Bullet isn’t really a good movie, per se. But it’s a highly nostalgic one. Both in terms of my own childhood memories and in terms of its content.

   

SURFSIDE 6. “Country Gentleman.” ABC / Warner Brothers. 03 October 1960 (Season One, Episode One). Lee Patterson (Dave Thorne), Troy Donahue (Sandy Winfield II), Van Williams (Ken Madison), Diane McBain, Margarita Sierra. Guest Cast: Ray Danton, Frank DeKova, Robert Burton, Janet Lake. Director: Irving J. Moore. Many shows available for streaming on the Internet Archive.

   As far as least a secondary function of the first show of the season is o introduce the characters, this particular one is (was) a gigantic flop. It might be me, but I felt as though I could have been watching an episode in the middle of the season rather than the first one.

   Not that that was much of a problem. The picture filled itself in easily enough, if all you want is to watch is a show with three good-looking guys running a PI agency in Florida (Miami) with the usual light-hearted effort to put on an otherwise ordinary PI TV show.

   But to put in the effort that a blogger who likes to watch old PI TV shows should be doing, let me crib from IMDb:

   â€œKen, Dave, and Sandy are three hip private detectives living on, and working out of, a houseboat in Miami, Florida. A yacht, belonging to socialite Daphne [Diane McBain], is anchored next to their houseboat. While not pursuing criminals, they spend time at the Fontainebleau Hotel chasing Cha Cha [Margarita Sierra], who works as an entertainer in the Boom Boom Room.”

   It is interesting to note that Van Williams’ character (Ken) was a fellow who previously was one the lead players on Bourbon Street Beat, another Warner Brothers/ABC production which had just closed down for good the previous spring.

   In this one, a cool suave but still somewhat crude gangster (played by totally cool suave but still somewhat crude Ray Danton) is trying to use his money and charisma to join whatever high society that Miami has to offer, and hitting a brick wall in doing so. When one of the gents who blackballed him is found dead, guess who is the obvious suspect? Not to mention that he and the Commodore’s daughter have become very close.

   This is a somewhat mediocre episode and yet perhaps as enjoyable a one as viewers were able to see in 1960. The stories may very well have improved, as the series was on for two years. But when the “villain” of the piece has more screen appeal than its nominal three stars, something’s just not right.
   

   

AUSTIN REED – The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict. Random House, hardcover, 2016. Modern Library, softcover, 2017. Edited by Caleb Smith. David W. Blight (Foreword), Robert B. Stepto (Foreword).

   â€˜Cut off from all virtue a man will in time,

   Sit brooding on vice and preparing for crime.’

   Written in 1858, but privately held for 150 years until discovered at a Rochester estate sale in 2009, this is apparently the first prison memoir by a Black American.

   It is the picaresque bildungsroman (don’t I sound smart) of a man first imprisoned at aged nine at the House of Refuge in the Bowery in 1833 (for burning down the house of a farmer that horsewhipped him for stealing fruit and refusing to work off his debt), his multiple escapes and further crimes, and his placement at Auburn State Prison in 1840.

   By ‘picaresque’ what I mean is this: I went to a screening of the Italian movie Il Sorpasso. It’s a road movie about a drunken womanizing hooligan who convinces an uptight law student to forsake his exams for an intoxicated spree across the countryside. It inspired Alexander Payne to make Sideways. Payne was at the screening and said that the ‘road movie’ is just a picaresque novel in film form. And he claimed the picaresque novel is at least as old as Don Quixote.

   And that what’s fun and easy about the picaresque novel/road movie (at least from a creative standpoint) is that all you have to do is tell a series of chapters going from points a to b to c on a map. Each stop on the map is a different chapter. And that’s it.

   So while ‘picaresque’ sounds all hoity toity, all I mean to say is that this book is just a series of events in the life of a juvenile delinquent. A real-life Huckleberry Finn with horrific periods of imprisonment for his shenanigans.

   Each time he is caught and imprisoned: “awaiting my arrival… was Mr. Hard Heart, Mr. No Feelings. Mr. Cruel Heart, Mr. Demon, Mr. Fiend, Mr. Love Torture, Mr. Tyrant, and Mr. Cat Bearer” (‘cats’ being the cat gutted barbs slashed upon a prisoner’s back).

   And by ‘bildungsroman’ all I mean is that the book shows how the dastardly, bastardly treatment of a juvenile delinquent turns a mischievous boy into a hardened criminal. “Horrors, horrors, horrors, eternal horror of horrors came beating and pealting upon my mind.”

   I can’t say the book was that fun to read. It was okay. The goal, I guess, of the book was to convince other juvenile delinquents to stick to the straight and narrow — scaring ’em straight from a life of crime.

   The best thing about the book is how surprisingly modern the language is. I had read something somewhere from Raymond Williams, I think (what a great scholar I turned out to be!), saying that the hardboiled/proletarian novel emerged from the prison confessionals of the 19th century. And I guess I can see it to some extent. There is definitely a rough-hewn unvarnished quality to the prose. And it’s the heavy varnish and embroidery that I find so annoying about most literature prior to Hammett, Hemingway and Tully. Get to the freaking point! (My wife has an Onion T-Shirt that reads: “Let the Fucking Begin”).

   So, yeah. I’ve been reading 19th century slave narratives and prison confessionals on Raymond Williams’s recommendation. And so far I guess I agree. Not that I’ve gotten a great deal of joy from these reading experiences so far (although the Confessions of Nat Turner was surprisingly wacko — that dude was a total, astounding wack-job).

   But yeah. I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that plain-talking, hard-boiled prose was happening in America much earlier than we’ve been led to believe. It’s generally criminous and confessional. And it may not be the most enjoyable thing in the world to read. But it’s there. It’s real. It’s hard as rocks and it’ll make your head bleed.

   Just take it from Rochester’s own Austin ‘Rob’ Reed. Stay free of crime, me lads, lest the blade’s scabbard broach its breach: “Show him to me, and ere the sun sets in the west the bowknife of my father shall be stained with his blood.” I beseech ye: don’t let it be so! Stay free of crime, me lads. Let the Lord’s path be your guide, lest your soul swelter in hell, yelping helplessly, forevermore.

   

DANGEROUS TO KNOW.  Paramount Pictures, 1938. Akim Tamiroff, Anna May Wong, Gail Patrick, Lloyd Nolan, Anthony Quinn, Roscoe Karns, Harvey Stephens, Hedda Hopper, Porter Hall. Screenplay: Harold Lipman & Horace McCoy, based on the novel and play On the Spot by Edgar Wallace. Song “Thanks for the Memory.” Directed by Robert Florey.

KING OF CHINATOWN.  Paramount Pictures, 1939. Akim Tamiroff, Anna May Wong, J. Carroll Naish, Philip Ahn, Anthony Quinn, Sydney Toler, Roscoe Karns. Screenplay: Irving Reis & Leland Hayward. Directed by Nick Grinde.

   Two films teaming Akim Tamiroff as a gangster with Anna Mae Wong, both giving strong performances in above average B-films, both co-starring a young Anthony Quinn. Of the two Dangerous to Know is the better film, though Wong has a bigger role, though not as showy, in King of Chinatown.

   In the former,Tamiroff is Stephen Recka, who runs the town, but would rather be accepted by society and appreciate his music with his “hostess” Lan Ling (Wong) who loves him despite his neglect. As the film opens, Recka has been double-crossed by an associate and arranges with his right handed man (Quinn) to cause an “accident.”

   But Recka has met beautiful society woman Margaret Van Case (Gail Patrick) and decides he wants her. She’s in love with young Philip Easton (Harvey Stephens) though, and Recka has to get rid of him first, which he does by getting Easton a job with a bank and then setting him up for the theft of bonds and kidnapping him.

   Meanwhile things quickly complicate when Tamiroff discovers the two thugs he hired to set Easton up have taken off with the bonds and been picked up by the police putting his old rival Inspector Brandon (Lloyd Nolan, making the most of a fairly small role in one of several films he did with Tamiroff) on his trail.

   Margaret comes to Recka to get help for Easton who has been arrested on a tip from Recka who left him drunk in a hotel room. Brandon further messes up Recka’s plans by not charging Easton, but Margaret agrees to marry Recka if he saves Easton.

   Coincidence runs rampant toward the end, but Wong gets to shine in a scene when she says her goodbye to Recka, which, while high melodrama is effective, and the thing gets wrapped up neatly in just under an hour, replete with the debut of Bob Hope’s theme song “Thanks for the Memory.”

   No one can say you didn’t get your quarter’s worth with a B and a feature plus newsreels, shorts, and cartoons.

   With an Edgar Wallace novel and play (Wong played the lead on Broadway with Glenda Farrell), a screenplay by Lipman and McCoy and always interesting direction by Florey, it is all much more than you have the right to expect from a B-movie.

   Wong has a much bigger role in King of Chinatown, where she is a brilliant surgeon, Dr. Ling, whose father, also Dr. Ling (Sydney Toler, in a debut of his Charlie Chan persona after he was cast, but before his first film was released) is resisting efforts of nightclub owner and self styled king of Chinatown, Baturin (Tamiroff).

   Ling and her boyfriend reporter Bob Lee (Philip Ahn in a rare leading man role) are witnesses when Baturin is wounded in a plot by his ex-murderer business manager the Professor (J. Carroll Naish) and an ambitious hood (Anthony Quinn) and thinking her father shot him try to keep him from talking.

   Ling operates on Baturin and keeps him isolated. and later takes a job caring for him in his home, where Baturin starts to fall for her. In the meantime, the police are starting to move in on the Professor and Quinn as the Professor decides to silence Baturin before he can come back and see what they have done in Chinatown.

   In the end with the money from Baturin, Wong and Ahn fly off to China with money to help with medical aid for the on going war with Japan.

   There is no big scene for Wong in this, though she is on screen much more of the time, and despite her strong presence, both films are much more showcases for Tamiroff, who starred in a number of strong B films in the period. The notable thing about both films is they are far better and more ambitious than they had to be and have fairly notable screen credits (Lipman, McCoy, Hayward, Reis).

   It’s also notable how many familiar faces wander in and out of these, with actors like Porter Hall and Roscoe Karns on hand for little more than walk-ons.

   

   

THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. Hammer Films, UK, 1957. Peter Cushing (Victor Frankenstein), Hazel Court, Robert Urquhart. Christopher Lee (The Creature), Melvyn Hayes, Valerie Gaunt. Screenplay: Jimmy Sangster, based on the novel by Mary Shelley. Director: Terence Fisher.

   The previous time I had seen Hammer’s Gothic classic, The Curse of Frankenstein, it was at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles. Screened in glorious 35mm as part of a Halloween lineup, the movie’s aesthetic definitely made an impression on me.

   Much like the Universal Monsters films from the 1930s, the Hammer Films have the capacity to transport the viewer into a self-enclosed universe of ghouls and monsters. Everything from the costumes to the lighting works in tandem to create a celluloid dreamworld that is – in my humble opinion – simply unmatched in contemporary horror film-making.

   So when I came across a VHS copy, I jumped at the chance. It wasn’t that expensive ($10), and the box is in relatively good condition. Plus, it’s got somewhat atypical cover art that admittedly captures Peter Cushing’s eyes quite well!

   Now there’s nothing new under the sun here in terms of storytelling. If you know the Frankenstein story (legend?), then you’re not going to be surprised by all that much. Young Baron Frankenstein (Cushing) hires Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart), a tutor to help him with his studies. As years go by, Frankenstein emerges as a scientific genius with a penchant for danger.

   It doesn’t take long for the tutor to disavow his former student’s desire to create life from death. Complicating matters even further is the entrance of the beautiful Elizabeth (Hazel Court), Frankenstein’s cousin who threatens to pull the mad doctor not only away from his work, but also from the chambermaid he’s been having an affair with!

   Christopher Lee doesn’t speak a word, but he’s quite convincing as the scarred, deformed, and ultimately tragic Frankenstein monster – or, as the film credits state, “The Creature.” There’s a great scene in which Baron Frankenstein lords over a chained and terrified Creature, reminding us just who the monster in this movie really is.

   I appreciated watching this one on VHS as it allowed me to focus a bit more on the characters than I did when I saw it at the New Beverly. Altogether, well worth the ten bucks.
   

   

ROBERT C. DENNIS – Conversations with a Corpse. Paul Reeder #2. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1974. Ballantine, paperback, 1976.

   Robert C. Dennis wrote dozens of short stories for the pulps in the 1940s and hundreds of teleplays for such popular TV
series as Dragnet, Cannon, and Perry Mason from the 1950s to the early 1980s. But his output of novels, regrettably, was limited to just two — both published in the early Seventies; both narrated by architect Paul Reeder, “a psychic, a man with a freak brain capable of recovering mind pictures of past events”; and both literate and expertly constructed whodunits that even ESP skeptics can enjoy.

   On a business trip to the small California wine-country town of Orofino, the “Wine Capital of the West,” Reeder rents a car at the local airport and, as soon as he touches the steering wheel, has a psychometric vision telling him the man who last drove the car is now dead. Directed by his “inner mind,” he embarks on a search that leads him into conflict with Sergeant Dryden of the Orofino police and with members of the Chicano community; into an abandoned winery filled with bloated rats and an equally bloated corpse; and finally to a confrontation with a homicidal madman at the Mission Santa Teresa Dolorosa.

   Library Journal called the novel “a suspenseful and menacing puzzle”; the Los Angeles Times praised it as “tough and furiously fast-paced … [with] bone-chilling situations.” Both assessments are on target. The scene in which Reeder is trapped in the bankrupt winery is a minor masterpiece of its kind, guaranteed to give the most jaded reader a case of the shudders.

   The first Reeder novel, The Sweat of Fear (1973), is also a fine piece of criminous storytelling and highly recommended.

———
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.

   

   Rex Stout’s third Nero Wolfe collection, Trouble in Triplicate (1949), contains a trio of novellas first published in The American Magazine: “Before I Die” (April 1947), “Help Wanted, Male” (August 1945), and “Instead of Evidence” (May 1946); the latter debuted as “Murder on Tuesday,” yet was curiously advertised a month before as “Too Stubborn to Live.”

   That’s how Martha Poor describes husband Eugene, convinced that his partner, Conroy Blaney, plans to kill him for his half of their novelty business. All agree that it is impossible to prevent this, but Gene wants Wolfe to ensure that Blaney gets caught, while she would prefer that he be bought out for a ridiculously low $20,000 — yet remain alive.

   When a real exploding cigar kills Poor, obliterating his face, longtime genre readers are perhaps unsurprised as “Gene” is revealed to have been her accomplice, eliminated after helping Martha implicate Blaney, and in fact, all three stories have imposture in common. In “Before I Die,” Wolfe surprises Archie by having him admit Dazy Perrit, King of the Black Market, who provides a phone number to offset the “Great Meat Shortage.”

   He is being blackmailed by Angelina Murphy, set up in his penthouse off Fifth Avenue as his faux daughter, Violet; he took this precaution because his enemy Thumbs Meeker learned that he had one somewhere: Beulah Page, now “among the top of her class at Columbia.”

   She turned two the week he went to prison, and believes that Perrit merely represents her mysterious, wealthy father; Dazy, whose minion is Archie’s namesake, also fears that her appearance and mannerisms, strongly resembling her dead mother’s, will be a give-away. Himself posing as Harold Stevens of the Dayton, Ohio Community Health Center, Archie invites Beulah and her fiancé, law student Morton Schane, to dine with Wolfe, who later threatens to turn “Violet” (aka Sally Smith) in on a Salt Lake City charge if she does not give him 90% of what she gets from Perrit. Archie assumes he plans to kick it back, but as he escorts her home she is gunned down, her last words, “It’s — uh…shame. Shame!”

   Archie is released after telling Lt. Rowcliff that the killer fired from a (stolen) car with a handkerchief over his face; no sooner has he reached the brownstone to be confronted by Perrit and Archie 2 than they, too, are shot dead from a taxicab. L.A. Schwartz, Dazy’s lawyer, tells Wolfe he will get $50,000 if he assents to be the executor “and in effect the guardian of his daughter,” then turns over a sealed envelope containing background data on Beulah, and a request that Wolfe make sure she receives his sizable estate. They are interrupted by calls from Fabian, an “associate” who may blame them for Perrit’s death, and Beulah, who has seen Archie’s photo in the paper, and shows up with Schane in tow.

   With Beulah — to whom he has revealed her patrimony — up in the plant rooms, Wolfe has just convened Fabian, Schwartz, Schane, and Saul Panzer when Meeker breezes by Fritz; per Archie, “Before I die I get to hear Wolfe bawling hell out of Thumbs … for dashing in to where Fabian is ready with his gun out.”

   Wolfe denies telling the cops that Archie had fingered Dazy and Violet for him, explaining that she had learned Beulah’s identity, and Schane, with whom she had a history, secretly cultivated Beulah. Violet’s final word was not “Shame!,” but “Schane!,” and when confronted with the truth he fires on Wolfe yet is shot down by Fabian, Meeker, and Saul, leaving Archie to dine with Beulah at Ribeiro’s.

   Like the stories in Not Quite Dead Enough (1944), “Help Wanted, Male” occurs during Archie’s World War II service as Major Goodwin of Military Intelligence (who notes in “Instead of Evidence” that “I had been a civilian again for only a week”). Publisher and politician Ben Jensen, whistle-blower in the (unrecorded) case of court-martialed Captain Peter Root, brings Wolfe the warning he’s received in the mail: “YOU ARE ABOUT TO DIE—AND I WILL WATCH YOU DIE!” Archie recognizes it from an ad for the movie Meeting at Dawn, published in The American Magazine, ha ha ha, but Ben is not amused, especially when Wolfe refuses to provide protection … and 12 hours later, Jensen is killed.

   Shot along with him, Cramer reports, was Doyle, the best man at the Cornwall and Mayer agency (hired by Jensen on Archie’s suggestion), but while “not interested, not involved, and not curious,” Wolfe receives an identical clipping. Presuming a connection, he asks Archie to fetch Root’s fiancée, Jane Geer, delaying his trip to Washington to ask General Carpenter to send him overseas; the head of G-2, introduced in “Booby Trap” (1944), he was revealed as Mrs. Boone’s cousin in The Silent Speaker (1946), where Ribeiro’s was first mentioned. Arriving simultaneously is Ben’s son, the handsome Major Emil Jensen, who leaves with Jane when Wolfe suddenly shifts gears and refuses to see either of them.

   His request refused, Archie confers with Colonel Dickey on various cases, and then spots an ad in the New York Star: “WANTED A MAN” of Wolfe’s description, “Temporary. Hazardous.” Fleeing Pentagon red tape, he returns home, where a retired architect, H.H. Hackett, “an unsurpassed nincompoop with the manners of a wart hog,” is impersonating Wolfe, who believes Cramer is wasting his time trying to nail Emil, due to a quarrel upon learning that Ben sued his mother for divorce while he was serving in Europe. No sooner have Jane and the gate-crashing Emil arrived to see “Wolfe” than a shot — fired inside the house — nicks Hackett’s ear, and a revolver wrapped in a handkerchief is found in a vase.

   Giving the gun and a bullet Archie digs out of the wall to Cramer, Wolfe persuades the guests to stay during a ballistics test to see if it killed Ben and Doyle, yet when Cramer shows up with confirmation, Purley Stebbins, and a search warrant, he angrily demands that the latter be torn up before playing ball.

   He suspects Jane and Emil, as the killer had intended, until the absence of a sofa cushion points him in the right direction: Hackett is in fact Thomas Root. Peter’s vengeful father took a job as a doorman at Ben’s apartment house in order to kill him, then fired a separate shot from one of Wolfe’s pistols into the cushion as part of an elaborate ruse to implicate them, nicking his ear with a pocket knife.

   Among a handful of works adapted for the Wolfe TV series starring both William Conrad and Maury Chaykin, “Before I Die” (1/30/81) was directed for the former by Edward Abroms, second only to George McCowan with his contributions.

   Along with The Red Box (1937), “Black Orchids” (1941), The Silent Speaker, and five of Stout’s later works, “Before I Die” was also dramatized on a Russian series that ran for two seasons (2001-2002 and 2005), featuring Donatas Banionis as Wolfe, with Sergey Zhigunov as Archie. The Conrad version was scripted by Alfred Hayes, who had shared Oscar nominations for Teresa (1951) and — with Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini—Paisà (Paisan, 1946).

   Dazy is now Leo Crown, played by Darren McGavin’s fellow Night Stalker alum Ramon Bieri, also seen in The Andromeda Strain (1971) and Sorcerer (1977); surprisingly, Russ Tamblyn turns up as an unidentified police detective. Kidnapped by Eddie Meeker (H.M. Wynant) to end a war between them, Violet (Char Fontane) is released to Leo and Harry Fabian (Eddie Fontaine), then admits her masquerade to Wolfe and Archie (Lee Horsley), fearing for her safety. Angelina is followed there by Leo, who agrees to let her “retire,” and the two shootings — separated by Cramer (Allan Miller) questioning Archie — follow, with no last words for Violet, and Leo survived by his useless bodyguard (Robert Sutton).

   Saul (George Wyner) learns that in Utah, hooker Angelina had a boyfriend, local hustler Harvey Pine, and Cramer tells Eddie — who denies hitting Leo — he’d grabbed the wrong girl; Schwartz, now Arthur Poor (John Ericson), provides the envelope identifying Elaine Page (Tarah Nutter), warning that Harry will dislike the will.

   Archie flies his true colors when inviting Elaine, about to head for Maryland to wed Paul Shane (Kale Browne), chez Wolfe, suggesting that she will learn the truth at last. The dialogue and Nutter’s delivery convey how badly she wants it (“I’ve lived in houses that weren’t mine, with families that weren’t mine”), and how devastated she is at the news that her father was killed that day.

   As in the novella, Wolfe confirms his suspicions of Paul by tripping him up on an arcane legal point at dinner, and having Fritz (George Voskovec) save his “cracked” wine glass, complete with Pine’s fingerprints. A shot through the window of the brownstone later on suggests an attempt on the life of Elaine, kept there for safety, but was only an attempt at misdirection by Paul, who wished to marry into her fortune.

   We are deprived a climactic hail of bullets (with Saul proven to have fired the fatal shot) as a tipped-off Cramer takes Paul away, but Hayes is largely faithful, eliminating the blackmail angle, and ending on a grace note as Theodore Horstmann (Robert Coote) presents Wolfe’s ward with an orchid.

   Both “Before I Die” (6/16/02) and “Help Wanted, Male” (6/23/02) were directed for the Chaykin series by its own runner-up (after star Timothy Hutton), John L’Ecuyer, airing on consecutive weeks in the second season. They were adapted by, respectively, Sharon Elizabeth Doyle (by far the most frequent scenarist, a contributing producer that season) and, in his only contribution, Mark Stein.

   Interestingly, although each episode features a half-dozen of the show’s repertory players, they have none in common, while Dazy Perrit is played by Seymour Cassel, whose collaborations with John Cassavetes include his film debut, Shadows (1958), and a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for Faces (1968).

   The double-length international version of “Before I Die” is augmented with comedic and Corleonesque scenes created by Doyle in which Archie 2 (Joe Pingue) earns the grudging admiration of Fritz (Colin Fox) by teaching him how to make “gravy” (spaghetti sauce, to us non-Sicilians).

   Michael Small provides a jazzy score befitting this underworld motif, while the opening narration by Archie (Hutton) preserves Rex Stout’s immortal line, “To Nero Wolfe a meal without meat was an insult.” Ostensibly fresh out of St. Louis, Violet (Christine Brubaker) makes her N.Y.C. debut when Dazy introduces her to Fabian (Doug Lennox), Archie 2, and their respective girlfriends (Nicky Guadagni, Angela Maiorano).

   An in-joke has Violet show her friends a designer dress from Saks in a box conspicuously labeled “L’Ecuyer,” while a sexual relationship with Dazy either wasn’t in the novella, or went right over my head (admittedly plausible). Beulah (Lindy Booth) is a social activist focused on health work, who insists she is not a communist, and brings Schane (Matthew Edison) to dinner, where she impresses Wolfe with more dialogue original to Doyle.

   Bill MacDonald returns as Rowcliffe (sic), his role in “Prisoner’s Base” (5/13 & 20/01), while the shooting spree by Fabian, Meeker (Beau Starr), and Saul (Conrad Dunn) is retained as Schwartz (Ken Kramer) witnesses that they fired in self-defense — since Schane shot first.

   In “Help Wanted, Male,” guest star Larry Drake, who won consecutive Supporting Actor Emmy Awards as mentally impaired office worker Benny Stulwicz on L.A. Law, is well cast as “Hackett.” Convinced that Wolfe turned down the job because he thought it was too hot, Cramer (Bill Smitrovich) invades Wolfe’s bedroom during breakfast to detail the deaths of Ben (James Tolkan) and Doyle (Randy Butcher). Jane (Kari Matchett) did have a grudge against Wolfe when she believed Peter (Steve Cumyn) a scapegoat, but revised her opinion of Root; she now fears that the adverse publicity from being a murder suspect will hamper her aspirations to be the first female vice president of her advertising agency.

   Noting the immediate attraction between Jane and Emil (Richard Waugh), Archie makes his abortive trip to Washington, where Carpenter (George Plimpton) states, “Your role as Mr. Wolfe’s assistant is absolutely vital.” Stein interpolates bizarre byplay between him and eyepatched Dickey (Robert Bockstael), and dramatizes Wolfe’s questioning of Root, brought to him from prison, which he merely related to Archie in the novella.

   Trying to maintain the façade, Archie has Fritz hold Jane and Emil at gunpoint so that he can coach Hackett, but Wolfe shortly reveals himself; as Cramer and Purley (R.D. Reid) investigate the shot’s trajectory, Archie and Fritz launch the separate search for the missing cushion.

            — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: “Door to Death” [See comment #1.]

    Edition cited:

      Trouble in Triplicate: Bantam (1955)

    Online sources:

[link mislabeled as “Wolfe at the Door”]

   

THOMAS M. DISCH “Voices of the Kill.” First published in Full Spectrum, edited by Lou Aronica & Shawna McCarthy (Bantam Spectra, paperback original, September 1988). Reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy: Second Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling (St. Martin’s Press, trade paperback, 1989). Collected in The Wall of America (Tachyon, softcover, 2008).

   Thomas M. Disch was an author almost as well-known for his poetry as he was for his unique blend of science fiction and fantasy. While “Voices of the Kill” is a fantasy tale through and through, it is poetry as well, and in a way as opaque to me as most poetry is.

   It is the story of a man who, living alone in a cabin along a stream, falls in love (of sorts) with the flowing water, or (perhaps better said) is seduced by the stream, lying at night as he does in its waters and soothing embrace, listening to it talk to him.

   I do not know why Nixie asks him to place a twenty dollar bill under a stone in its (her?) depths. When William’s cousin Barry comes to visit, the overnight stays in the stream must end. When the two travel down it to its outlet into the sea, Nixie is annoyed.

   And what is the significance of the black woman in a pea-green swimsuit who is playing there with her son on the beach? (She does return.)

   In spite of these and other questions I cannot answer, the effect of this story is one I cannot get out of my head. Good poetry (and fantasy) can have an amazing effect on one’s mind. It is no wonder this was the lead story in the Full Spectrum anthology where it first appeared.