711 OCEAN DRIVE. Columbia Pictures, 1950. Edmond O’Brien Edmond O’Brien, Joanne Dru, Otto Kruger, Barry Kelly. Director: Joseph M. Newman

   Edmond O’Brien stars in this remarkably average crime drama about the bookmaking racket. He portrays Mal Granger, a telephone company technician who works his way up in the criminal world, eventually becoming a top Syndicate figure on the West Coast. Along the way, he has a rival murdered, steals the rival’s girl (Joanne Dru), and then proceeds to knock off the hitman who he hired in the first place. All the while trying to outwit the Syndicate’s Cleveland-based boss (Otto Kruger).

   Tough stuff, with O’Brien giving a solid performance as a man whose heart is increasingly hardened by his chosen line of work. Unfortunately, it takes a long time for the movie to get going. The first half hour or so, especially, is a drag. Too much time is spent on Granger’s ability to rig a telephone system for a low-level bookie, one that would allow said bookie to get near instantaneous results from the track.

   This might have been interesting in 1950 – and I say might – but it is a drag now. The movie does perk up in the second and third acts, with the film culminating in a well executed and photographed chase and fight sequence set in and around the Hoover Dam in Nevada.

   Overall, 711 Ocean Drive is, as I said previously, average. I just don’t know what the title refers to! It’s never mentioned in the film (as far as I could tell) and it doesn’t seem to indicate anything special, other than possibly Granger’s fictional Malibu address once he becomes a big shot.

WILLIAM FULLER – Back Country. Dell First Edition #8, paperback, 1954. Stark House Press, 2022 (Black Gat #36).

   William Fuller, according to his publishers, was a merchant seaman, a hobo, a veteran of World War II, and a bit player in western movies. He also wrote seven novels about Brad Dolan, a big, tough drifter who travels around the south getting in and out of trouble.

   In Back Country, the first book in the series, Dolan’s car breaks down in Cartersville, a small town in central Florida. Many similar small towns turned up in the paperback originals of the 1950s, and Cartersville is filled with all the characters we love to hate — the Boss who runs the county and believes that “nigras” are all right if they slay in their place; the cruel, corrupt, pot-gutted lawmen; the redneck town bigots.

   Dolan enters this environment and makes all the wrong moves: He wins at gambling, insults the sheriff, makes time with the big Boss’s wife. Naturally, he gets beaten and thrown in jail, but that doesn’t stop him. He not only sleeps with the Boss’s wife, he sleeps with the Boss’s daughter. Then the wife is found in Dolan’s room with her throat cut, just as the town’s racial tension reaches a crisis.

   These ingredients may sound familiar, but Fuller mixes them expertly, keeping the pace fast and the characters believable. Dolan’s toughness (and his realization that he’s not quite as hard-boiled as he thinks) is convincingly handled. There’s a spectacularly vivid cockfighting sequence, and the setting is at times drawn with telling realism.

   Also recommended in the Brad Dolan series: Goat Island (1954) and The Girl in the Frame (1957).

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   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.

   Well,almost. I’m hoping to be able to post something a lot more substantial later this evening, but in case I’m not, I thought a short message such as this might allay any concerns on the part of any of you who have been wondering where the hell I’ve wandered off to.

   Or maybe you’ve never noticed. So be it. But you can blame it on a weird confluence of medical appointments and a balky boiler in the basement of this house which uses it for hot water, including most especially for heat in the overnight. (Spring is still only in its wistful wishful days here in CT.)

   In any case, all is as well here as it can be, and even if slowly, I shall be back in business soon. Those awaiting replies to emails, I will work on those accordingly as well. I promise!

IVAN T. ROSS – Old Students Never Die. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1962. Detective Book Club, hardcover, 3-in-1 edition.

   School teacher Ben Gordon accepts a weekend vacation at a former student’s country hideaway. The student is Jackie Meadows, now a successful comedian, and one who is now negotiating for his own TV show, which explains the additional presence of the many typical show business types on hand.

   The unexpected return of one of Jackie’s old girl friends upsets things, and leads top her death. The change in Jackie since high school days leads Ben to accuse him of the murder. Admission, attempted suicide, death.

   So far, so good, but the story still has 20 pages to go. Obviously a twist in the tale is yet to come, but for some reason, it is not as satisfactory as it should have been.

   Analogies drawn to high school days are uniformly fine. And they would naturally lead one to conclude that Ivan T. Ross has done a considerable amount pf high school teaching.

   But Jackie Meadow’s jokes are really not very funny.

Rating: ***½

THE WINDOW. RKO Radio Pictures, 1949. Barbara Hale, Arthur Kennedy, Paul Stewart, Ruth Roman, Bobby Driscoll. Based on the story “The Boy Cried Murder” by Cornell Woolrich. Director: Ted Tetzlaff.

   Adapted from a short story penned by Cornell Woolrich, The Window is an above average thriller and a suspenseful yarn that holds your attention from beginning to end. With child actor Bobby Driscoll as the glue that holds everything together, the film is never dull or lifeless.

   Driscoll, whose adult life was marked by tragedy, portrays Tommy Woodry, an excitable, imaginative young boy living with his working class parents in a modest apartment building in Manhattan. He’s known by both his peers and his parents for telling tall tales, stories about gangsters, Indians, and whatnot. So when he actually does witness a murder, no one believes him. He’s the boy who cried wolf.

   Aside from Driscoll, the film benefits from some talented actors. Arthur Kennedy portrays Tommy’s father, a man who is torn between the love he has for his son and his embarrassment at how the boy is seemingly turning into a compulsive liar. The upstairs neighbors, the ones who actually do commit a murder, are portrayed by radio star Paul Stewart and the prolific Ruth Roman. They make a great villainous couple.

   There’s a lot to admire in The Window, from the acting to the cinematography and lighting. There’s a shadowy menace to the stairwell in the Woodrys’ apartment building, one that is used to heighten the dangerous situation in which Tommy has found himself. There is also a white knuckle ending that takes place in a nearby condemned building.

   This was the second time I’ve had the occasion to watch this movie,and I enjoyed it even more this time. I realized how very much it’s both a Woolrich movie and a New York City one. As much as anything else, this film is about the struggles of postwar life (and death) in the Big Apple.
   

HARRIGAN AND SON “Hello Goodbye.” ABC/Desilu. 12 May 1961 (Season 1, Episode 30). Pat O’Brien (James Harrigan Sr.), Roger Perry (James Harrigan Jr.), Georgine Darcy, Helen Kleeb. Director: Sherman Marks.

   While nominally a lawyer series, one watching the video of this episode below soon comes to the quick and savvy conclusion that it was in reality a comedy show instead. Maybe the thirty minute running time should have been the tipoff. Most of the series featuring courtroom cases and the like were an hour long. A half hour simply isn’t enough time to get into the nitty gritty details of a full-fledged murder case, for example.

   Harrigan and Son was a – well, you guessed it – a small father and son legal firm, with the ever smooth Pat O’Brien as the father, and three relative unknowns filling out the rest of the cast. (You may, however remember Georgina Darcy playing “Miss Torso” in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.)

   The series was on for one season, long enough to be able to blink a couple of times before missing it. After James Harrigan the senior has a rough day in court, he decides to retire and let his son take over the firm on his own. After some not really very funny incidents in which he finds he’s not having any fun either, he decides that he’s not really ready to retire just yet.

   Amusing, perhaps, but certainly not laugh out loud funny. I’d never heard of this one before stumbling across it on YouTube, and I’m willing to wager none of you have either.
   

MICHAEL COLLINS “Black in the Snow.” PI Dan Fortune. Published in An Eye for Justice: The Third PWA Anthology, edited by Robert J. Randisi (Mysterious Press, 1988). Collected in Crime, Punishment and Resurrection (Donald Fine, 1992).

   Of the several pen names used by author Dennis Lynds, I believe (but am not absolutely certain) that Michael Collins is the one he  used most often. And of the books and shorter fiction he published under that name, most of them were about PI Dan Fortune.

   The most distinguishing physical aspect of Dan Fortune as a man is that he has only one arm. This fact sometimes comes up as a crucial part of story; sometimes, as in “Black in the Snow,” it’s mentioned only in passing. Which is interesting, and maybe someone could write a master’s thesis about it someday, but in all honesty, I don’t think it’s likely to be all that interesting to anyone else but me.

   Fortune is hired by a lawyer in this one to look into the death of the female half of a married couple, middle-aged or perhaps later. The husband claims he came home to find her dead, stabbed to death by persons unknown. The man suggests a burglar, which is certainly a possibility. The “black in the snow” is that of the wife’s dog, thrown there by the killer. Quite possibly, but why? Fortune has a job to do.

   His investigation is limited. He scours the house for clues and has long conversation with the husband’s sister. I may have made the case sound lengthy and boring, but a writer as good as Lynds can make reading the phone book sound palatable, and Fortune gets to the bottom of things very quickly. (I’d sound like a grouch if I said coming up with all the details he does makes the ending a little sketchy, so maybe I won’t. Or maybe I will.)

LEE THAYER – And One Cried Murder. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1961. Detective Book Club, hardcover, 3-in-1 edition.

   The stiff manners of Peter Clancy’s English butler Wiggar carry over to the stilted language and dialogue of nearly everybody else. For example, how does “So that’s where the unfortunate fellow got it!” (page 128) really sound? For my first introduction to San Francisco detective Clancy, this story is really a failure.

   The death of a rich aunt by carbon monoxide poisoning leads to suspicion of two brothers and a sister, with a mysterious suitor sneaking around in the background. It suddenly turns out that he works for the FBI, and it is [REDACTED], who is the killer. Strictly from nowhere, for the most part. and slow, but interesting in spots.

Rating: **½

LAWRENCE BLOCK “By the Dawn’s Early Light.” Matt Scudder. First published in Playboy Magazine, August 1984, Collected and reprinted many times. Winner of the Shamus Award for Best Short Story.

   Matt Scudder, of course, does not legally have a license to work as a private eye, or at least he doesn’t at the time this story takes place. That doesn’t stop him from taking cases such as the one in this story that PI’s always take on, with or without the proper credentials. This time around he agrees to help out a casual drinking buddy who’s being accused of hiring a couple of guys to kill his wife.

   As it turns out – and this is important – Scudder knows the fellow’s girl friend even more than he does the drinking buddy. What he’s hired to do — not having all of the resources the police do – is to ask around and see what people on the street know about, first of all, his client, but more importantly, the two guys who got caught and are now implicating the client. They never did the killing.

   Or so they say.

   This may sound way too complicated for a simple short story, and maybe it is, but Lawrence Block could write a story with a lot more going on, ten times as much, and he’s such a smooth talker (well, writer) you’d go along with it all in a heartbeat.

   And yet, I said complicated, and I meant it. Even while reading it and the 21 pages of the story are vanishing more and more quickly, and I’m thinking, he could have made a novel out of this. The structure? Exactly the same.

   There’s a hint of darkness in the ending, too. Maybe Playboy didn’t get too excited about it, but the story’s a lot tougher than what Alfred Hitchcock’s Magazine was publishing at the time. Face it, though. Lawrence Block is a writer’s writer, and he always has been. This one’s a winner.

TIMOTHY FULLER – Three Thirds of a Ghost. Jupiter Jones #2. Little, Brown, hardcover, 1941. Popular Library #81, paperback, 1946.

   When his first novel, Harvard Has a Homicide, was published in 1936, Timothy Fuller — just twenty-two and a Harvard undergraduate — was hailed as an important mystery-story prodigy. He never quite lived up to the promise of that first book, however, either in his productivity or in the quality of his later work.

   It was five years before he published his second and third mysteries, another two years until his fourth, and seven more until his fifth and final book. And only Reunion with Murder (1941) and This Is Murder, Mr. Jones (1943) can be said to equal or surpass Harvard Has a Homicide in plotting and technique.

   Despite its inherent flaws, however, Three Thirds of a Ghost may well be Fuller’s most appealing work. One of the reasons-perhaps the main reason-is that it is set primarily in a Boston bookshop, Bromfield’s, where writer Charles Newbury (who specializes in roman a clef novels about important Boston families, not to mention mysteries featuring an Oriental detective known as the Parrot) is shot to death while addressing 200 guests at Bromfield’s 150th birthday celebration.

   In Catalogue of Crime, Barzun and Taylor call Three Thirds of a Ghost “disappointing.” And so it is, in terms of its rather thin plot and dubious gimmick to explain how Newbury could be killed without any of the 200 witnesses seeing who fired the shot.

   But Harvard Fine Arts instructor Jupiter Jones, the amateur sleuth who also stars in Fuller’s other four novels, is an engaging bumbler; the cast of characters — especially Jupiter’s girlfriend (later wife), Helen, Newbury’s non-stereotypical. Chinese secretary, Lin, and some refreshingly intelligent cops — is diverse and well drawn; and there are amusing bits of business interspersed with plenty of barbed commentary on the writing and selling of books and on pre-World War II Boston society.

   If your taste runs to the humorous, sophisticated, slightly screwball type of storytelling popular in the 1930s, this bibliomystery (and any of the other Jupiter Jones romps) is definitely your sort of Boston tea party.

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   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.