FERGUSON FINDLEY – Counterfeit Corpse.

Ace Double D-187, paperback original; 1st printing, 1956.

   Findley wrote a small handful of crime novels back in the 1950s, and I’ll add a list of them at the end of my comments on this one, which I enjoyed, but which I’d be hard pressed to recommend to anyone else without waving a lot of warning flags first. (Read on.)

   A fellow named Don Ivy is the featured player in Counterfeit Corpse, and he tells the story himself. After being bounced out of England, after years of knocking around Europe and northern Africa during and after the war, and now that his mother’s dead, he’s settled down in the small town in New England and living in the very same house he grew up in.

   It’s not clear whether the town of Tombury is supposed to be in Vermont or New Hampshire, but since later on in the story he and his niece Judy have to cross the Massachusetts line while making a quick trip to Boston, my vote’s for the latter.

   Which of course doesn’t matter to you. What does matter, I think, is that the reason he was quietly kicked out of England was his expertise in making counterfeit plates (for ten pound notes) so well that the bills they were capable of printing could not be distinguished from real ones, save for one small deliberate flaw that only Ivy knows.

   He has no record in England, though — it’s been erased, thanks to services to the Crown. Which is all prelude to the story, though, which begins with Ivy finding a body in his yard while doing a spring cleanup. Then another – a roadside accident — then his niece Judy, whom he hasn’t seen in maybe 15 years, shows up; and then another body is found face down in a pond behind his house.

   Coincidence? Not on your life. It certainly gets the local authorities into an uproar, though. First the local cop, then a state policeman, then a guy from the FBI. It’s up to Ivy and the surprisingly capable assistance of his niece Judy to get him out of trouble before he’s up to and over his neck in it.

   Breezily told, in good old-fashioned pulp magazine style, the tale has some flaws I ought to tell you about, too. The pile up of bodies is no coincidence, but heading to Boston to look for clues, it strikes me as next to impossible that he find the correct cheap night spot where all of the players in the plot struck out from, in only one try — and how did they all come to be there in one spot to begin with? That’s neatly not mentioned or alluded to either.

   There is not a lot of detective work going on in this book, not the real deductive kind, that is, until the end, in which (unless I’ve read it wrong) Ivy doesn’t recognize a certain telephone number, one that he should know, until several hours later, when it is almost too late.

   What is amusing, I think, is how Ivy manages to steal the local cop’s girl friend away from him, after the local cop, trying to be friendly, uses the girl friend as part of his cover in the aforesaid enterprise.

   And if you’ve read this far, you might as well read the book and see how he does it, whether it ‘s a good move or not; or on the other hand, you might decide that I’ve told you enough of the story already, and that anything more would be superfluous.

Bibliographic data:   [Expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin; US editions only.]

FINDLEY, FERGUSON. Pseudonym of Charles Weiser Frey, 1910-1963.

       My Old Man’s Badge. Duell, 1950 [Johnny Malone]. Popular Library #324, pb, 1951. Also reprinted as Killer Cop (Monarch #114, pb, 1959).

      

      Waterfront. Duell, 1951 [Johnny Malone]. Serialized in Collier’s Magazine, August 1950. Popular Library #408, pb, 1952.

      The Man in the Middle. Duell, 1952. Reprinted as Dead Ringer (Bestseller B160, 1953).

      Counterfeit Corpse. Ace Double D-197, 1956.
      Murder Makes Me Mad. Popular Library #780, 1956.

GARDEN OF EVIL. 20th Century-Fox, 1954. Gary Cooper, Susan Hayward, Richard Widmark, Cameron Mitchell, Hugh Marlowe, Rita Moreno. Screenplay: Frank Fenton; director: Henry Hathaway.

    “If the earth was made of gold, men would still die for a handful of dirt.”

   When is a western not a western?

   When it’s an adventure film, like The Treasure of Sierra Madre and this, Henry Hathaway’s Garden of Evil, even though it is set in the classical western period after the Civil War and features gunmen and Apaches.

   Gary Cooper, a soldier; Richard Widmark, a gambler; and Cameron Mitchell a gunfighter too fast with a gun and his temper are aboard a ship headed south when they arrive too late in a small Mexican fishing town to make their ship and have weeks to wait until the next ship is due.

   We never learn exactly what they are fleeing, but it is clear from the subtext of the film that what they are seeking — each in their own way — is a new beginning, redemption. None of them expect to find it in this sleepy little fishing village where the most excitement would seem to come from a flirtatious girl (Moreno) in the cantina, and a jealous vaquero.

   But today is the day Susan Hayward shows up, a desperate American who says her prospector husband has been trapped in a mine and she needs help to save him — help she will pay for. But there are no takers. Hayward and her husband have been prospecting an old Spanish conquistador mine, one in the interior in a remote valley guarded by an almost stone age band of Apaches. No local will follow her for any amount of money. The valley is haunted, and damned.

   But Cooper, Widmark, and Mitchell will, and the vaquero. They can be bought for money, the lure of gold, and the beauty of a woman. They are men who hold those things more dearly than life.

The tension rises as they set out toward the valley. The vaquero is trying to mark the trail (not knowing Hayward has destroyed his markers), and Cooper has to beat Mitchell half to death and humiliate him after a near rape.

   Nor is Cooper fooled by Hayward’s desperation to save her husband. He has seen through her as clearly as he has Mitchell or the vaquero. She is guilty because she doesn’t love her husband, afraid he will die having gotten himself killed trying to prove he was worthy of her. Like the others, she is seeking redemption for herself as much as rescue for her husband.

   Cooper can read them all because he knows himself. All but Widmark, the enigmatic gambler who talks too much too easily and says so little. Widmark’s ability to play both hero and villain plays a major role here, because neither Cooper or the viewer knows exactly where the cards will fall with him.

   There is also a fairly subtle sense in the film that Widmark’s character is seduced almost as much by Cooper’s honor and sense of himself as he is by Hayward or the gold. Widmark will use the same almost homoerotic subtext in his role opposite Robert Taylor in The Law and Jake Wade.

   It’s a mark of his qualities as an actor that the manages it without seeming the least weak or effeminate, He simply conveys that his character finds something missing in himself — or something he fears is missing in himself — in the strong silent and competent Cooper.

   Finally they reach the valley and enter along a narrow cliff trail. The Apaches let them in with no trouble, though they watch them from every shadow. They will not let them out as easily.

   They find the husband, Hugh Marlowe, alive, half mad, tormented by the Apaches who have made a game of watching him die, in pain, and bitter at Hayward who he blames for his own weakness and whom he half feared would abandon him, half feared would return and make him face again that he is a weakling, a failure, and unworthy of her..

   Meanwhile Mitchell and the vaquero have gold fever. Only Cooper and Widmark know their problems have just begun.

   Once they rescue Marlowe from the mine they set out to leave the valley.

   One by one the Apaches pick them off. The vaquero, Mitchell, and finally Marlowe who sacrifices himself to save Hayward, earning in death what he could never find in life.

   But Cooper, Hayward, and Widmark make it to the narrow cliffs in a running battle. There is one spot where a single man with a rifle could hold off the Apache while the others escape. They cut cards. Widmark stays behind.

   Cooper gets Hayward out, but has to go back. He says it is because Widmark cheated at the card draw, then admits: “I was wrong about him, I have to tell him.” He returns in time to find Widmark wounded and dying with a quip and laugh on his lips. As the setting sun turns the valley to gold, Cooper says bitterly: “If the earth was made of gold, men would still die for a handful of dirt.”

   He rejoins Hayward and they ride away.

   Veteran director Henry Hathaway directed Garden of Evil from a literate script by Frank Fenton. The score is by Bernard Herrmann and does much to lift the film above its western origins; it is one of his best works.

   The location cinematography by Milton Krasner is stunning, and few films of the era use technicolor as effectively. The location shooting looks like no other western of the period.

   Like many simple adventure films Garden of Evil has things to say. At the time it must have seemed like just another good adult western, but through the looking glass of time we can see that the rare skills of the cast, director, script, score, and cinematography came together in ways that surpassed its origins.

   It may seem a simple adventure story about men and a woman and their desires, dreams, hopes, and fears, but there is more here.

   This is the type of film they mean when they say they don’t make ’em like that anymore. It has the thrills of a Saturday matinee or a serial, but it also has things to say about all of us, about why men and women risk their lives for dreams and for love.

   Within the confines of a western it has something to say about loss, dreams, loyalty, and what those things can cost and are ultimately worth. Cooper is a man who has lost his dreams and regains them. Widmark, a man who never let himself dream, finds a woman worth desiring and a man worth dying for. Hayward’s obsession costs four men their lives, but she saves her soul and redeems herself as a woman.

   Like Adam and Eve, she and Cooper are reborn, but in innocence this time, emerging from what an old padre called the garden of evil.

    “If the earth was made of gold, men would still die for a handful of dirt.” Or for a woman’s love, honor, and a chance at redemption.

ERICA QUEST – The Silver Castle. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1978. Reprint hardcover: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, Sept-Oct 1978.

   The discovery that Gail Sherbrooke’s father, who she’d thought dead for over twenty years, had just committed suicide in Switzerland sends the aspiring young artist off on a search to learn the truth about a man she had never known.

   Lying just beyond her reach she finds both mystery and romance — the type of story most readers surely find done far too often, and rather badly, too.

   That’s not at all the case here. With much of the charm and intricacy of a hand-made Swiss clock, this is indeed an uncluttered detective story that’s both haunting and wholly enchanting.

Bibliographic data:    [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin]

QUEST, ERICA. Pseudonym of John Sawyer & Nancy Buckingham Sawyer; other pseudonym: Nancy Buckingham

      The Silver Castle (n.) Doubleday 1978
      The October Cabaret (n.) Doubleday 1979
      Design for Murder (n.) Doubleday 1981
      Death Walk (n.) Doubleday 1988 [Kate Maddox]

      Cold Coffin (n.) Doubleday 1990 [Kate Maddox]
      Model Murder (n.) Doubleday 1991 [Kate Maddox]
      Deadly Deceit (n.) Piatkus 1992 [Kate Maddox]

   I believe the Sawyers were British, but their books as Erica Quest were published only in the US. I seem to have avoided the issue somewhat in my review, but if The Silver Dagger were to be assigned to a genre, I don’t believe it could be called a Gothic. “Romantic suspense,” perhaps, but with a solid core of detection involved, if I can rely on the statement made above by my younger self.

   (Bolstering the detective content of the Quest books is a discovery, made only this evening, that the series character who appeared in their last four books is actually Detective Chief Inspector Kate Maddox.)

   Many of the books the Sawyers wrote as Nancy Buckingham were published only in England; most of the ones that appeared in the US were published in paperback as Gothics by either Ace or Lancer. A typical title might be The Legend of Baverstock Manor (Ace, 1968), which was originally published in the UK as the noticeably less striking Romantic Journey (Hale, 1968).

   The Sawyers also wrote many straight romances, using the additional pen names Christina Abbey, Nancy John, and Hillary London for many of these. A list of these, along with some covers, can be found on the Fantastic Fiction website.

ELLERY QUEEN – The Scarlet Letters. Little Brown, US, hardcover ,1953; Gollancz, UK, hc, 1953. Included in the omnibus volume The New York Murders, Little Brown, US, no date [1958]. Paperback reprints include Pocket Books #1049, 1955; Signet Q5362, 1973, with many later printings from each publisher.

   Dirk Lawrence, not too successful mystery writer and even less successful “serious” writer, and his rich wife, Martha, have a perfect marriage. Perfect, that is, until Dirk begins to suspect that his wife is cuckolding him and becomes drunken and violent.

   Nikki Porter, Ellery Queen’s secretary, is a friend of Martha’s. Despite his quite correct protests that he is no good at such things, she gets Queen involved in the domestic discord.

   Queen does a lot of running around and very little deducing. As a private-eye type, he’s futile, and he admits it. Private eyes “tail” people; Queen “trails” them.

   It is evident to anyone with the meanest intelligence — which this reader possesses on a good day — what the outcome of this case will be. So with vast anticipation the reader waits for Ellery Queen the author’s twist, the final surprise, the revelation that nothing is what it seems. Most surprisingly, the shock is that everything is indeed exactly what it seems.

   Those who have knowledge of the Queen saga may recall an earlier novel in which Biff Barnes or Barnes Biff or Beau Rummell or someone with a name like that, a partner with Queen in an investigative agency, pretended he was Ellery Queen.

   That, I believe, is what happened here, without Ellery Queen the author bothering to reveal it. Good lord, even Sergeant Velie could have figured out the dying message the moment it was written, yet this Ellery Queen dithers about it for days.

   Nonetheless, despite the obviousness of the plot and Queen the detective’s dimwittedness, there’s an engrossing novel here.

PATRICIA MOYES – A Six-Letter Word for Death.

Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1983. Holt Rinehart and Winston, US, hc, 1983. US paperback reprint: Holt/Owl, 1985.

   In the late Fifties, as many of the Golden Age masters of the British mystery were retiring or expiring, new blood (so to speak) entered the field. Many of the younger generation turned their hands to more realistic mystery forms, but a few novices stayed with the old ways and true.

   Such a writer is Patricia Moyes, whose dedication to the classic British puzzle has been a comfort to cozy fans since Dead Men Don’t Ski (1959).

   A Six-Letter Word for Death is but the latest in a long-running series featuring Chief Superintendent Henry Tibbett of Scotland Yard and his wife, Emmy. It is a classic country-house mystery set on the Isle of Wight. A publisher invites a group of pseudonymous mystery authors called the Guess Who for a weekend house party.

   Meanwhile, Henry (invited as guest expert and lecturer) has received a series of clues by mail crossword-puzzle sections indicating that the party guests may an have skeletons in their closets. When murder follows, Tibbett’s investigation intensifies to a classic, if overly melodramatic, confrontation with suspects and murderer.

   Moyes manages to poke a bit of affectionate fun at mystery fiction and its creators. She also creates a traditional tale much more satisfying than some of her recent work set in the West Indies. Moyes takes a touch of the police procedural, a dash of the husband-and-wife mystery/adventure, and creates a very pleasing product in the style of the Golden Age.

   A Six-Letter Word for Death is one of Moyes’s best mysteries of the last ten years. Other notable Tibbett cases are Murder a La Mode (1963), Johnny Under Ground (1965), and Seasons of Snows and Sins (1971).

         ———
   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.

ANY GUN CAN PLAY. 1967, a/k/a Vado… l’ammazzo e torno. Made in Italy; dubbed into English. Edd Byrnes, George Hilton, Gilbert Roland, Kareen O’Hara (Stefania Careddu), Gerard Herter. Director: Enzo G. Castellari.

   The opening scene is quite spectacular, and while the rest of the movie doesn’t quite match up, parts of it do, and it does let the moviegoer a pretty good hint of what they’re in for — a genial spoofing of a western movie genre, 1960s style, with more twists and turns in the plot line than a dozen Roy Rogers movies, and more unusual (and often spectacular) camera angles than a gross of Gene Autry films.

   By 1960s style, and given the fact that the film was produced in Italy, I assume you realize that the particular type of movie that Any Gun Can Play is playing off against is that of the so-called “spaghetti western.”

   I’d stopped watching westerns in the 1960s, and I’m no expert in the field, but I know enough to know that the three riders plodding their horses into town, as frightened onlookers peer out from behind curtained upper story windows, are takeoffs of Clint Eastwood in his trademark poncho, Lee Van Cleef in his ever-present black suit, and someone strongly resembling the steely blue-eyed Franco Nero as Django in the movie of the same name.

   Credit where credit is due. I knew two of the three. The third one I needed a helping hand with, and it’s Steve M of Western Fiction Review whose suggestion in the comments I’ve just used. But here’s what’s important. What happens next will blow you away. It did me, and I know I wasn’t the only one.

   The story itself begins only after this opening scene ends, as the notorious bandit Monetero (Gilbert Roland) makes plans with his gang to hold up the train that the job of Clayton, a tenderfoot banker (Edd Byrnes), depends on. The train is carrying a fortune ($300,000) in gold coins, and if the shipment doesn’t arrive safely, he’s likely to be given his walking papers.

   On Montero’s trail, however, is “The Stranger” (George Hilton), a bounty hunter with a thirst for ready cash, whether for the reward money or the stolen gold… Oops. I missed telling you about that. The holdup goes off with nary a hitch (except for leaving a humongous body count behind), and a double cross on the part on one of the bandits means that the gold’s hidden somewhere not too far away, but exactly where? Dead men cannot say.

   There is more than one double cross in what follows next, triple crosses — why not? — and even perhaps a quadruple cross or two. A fortune in gold coins does that to people’s minds.

   There is a point, about two-thirds of the way through, where the subtly of the spoof so far — and for a long time the film is played so straight that you begin to believe that the opening scene was only an homage and not a hint of things to come — turns and becomes what is almost all out comedy, thus tending to spoil the effect.

   A hint at the right place and at the right time may be all that’s needed — a wink from one of the players, perhaps, not much more — and although extremely well choreographed, the fight scenes tend to go on too long.

   It’s all a matter of perspective, of course. What jiggles one person’s sense of humor immensely may need a much bigger poke to make another person smile or laugh. All in all, while I didn’t laugh out loud all that much, I certainly smiled a lot.

   And, oh. One last thing. While the two young guys displayed their talents well, I think Gilbert Roland, at the age of 62, stole the show. Suave and utterly unflappable as the bandit Monetero, I think he showed Mr. Byrnes and Mr. Hilton a thing or two.

   With a lifetime of filmmaking behind him, including a short stint as the movie’s Cisco Kid, he was at ease in his role as if he’d been a notorious Mexican bandit all his life.

PATRICIA MOYES – Falling Star. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1964. Holt Rinehart & Winston, US., hc, 1964. US paperback reprints: Ballantine U2244, 1966; Owl, 1982.

   The publisher Holt, Rinehart, and Winston has been reprinting most of the mysteries of Patricia Moyes in its Owl series, and Falling Star has been one of them. While it is not one of her stronger books, most other authors would be glad to claim it.

      The motive and murder methods are not convincing, however, and the number of suspects too limited for a really strong puzzle. Nonetheless, the author’s experiment of eschewing third-person narration in favor of a story teller who is a movie executive and also a bit of a prig (and not too bright) works well.

   Also, Moyes’s series detective, Henry Tibbett, continues to be likable and efficient, if somewhat bland.

    “Patricia Pakenham-Walsh, aka Patricia Moyes, was an Irish-born British mystery writer. [She] was born in Dublin on January 19, 1923 and was educated at Overstone girls’ school in Northampton. She joined the WAAF in 1939. In 1946 Peter Ustinov hired her as technical assistant on his film School for Secrets. She became his personal assistant for the next eight years.

    “Her mystery novels [beginning with Dead Men Don’t Ski in 1959] feature C.I.D. Inspector Henry Tibbett. One of them, Who Saw Her Die (Many Deadly Returns in the US) was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1971.

    “She married photographer John Moyes in 1951; they divorced in 1959. She later married James Haszard, a linguist at the International Monetary Fund. She died at her home in the British Virgin Islands on August 2, 2000.”

LOUIS TRACY – The Postmaster’s Daughter.   Cassell, UK, hardcover 1917. Edward J. Clode, US, hc, 1916.

   John Menzies Grant is taking an after-breakfast stroll in the garden of The Hollies, a charming house just outside the hamlet of Steynholme, Sussex. An ex-officer and now writer, he’s another of the typical Golden Age “healthy, clean-minded young Englishman” so sadly lacking in detective fiction these days.

   But what is not lacking is a body — in this case a bound woman dragged from the river at the end of a line tied to Grant’s side of the river.

   Grant recognises the woman as actress Adelaide Melhuish, to whom he had proposed marriage three years before. He then discovered she was married, and her suggestion he pay her husband to facilitate a divorce so disgusted Grant it precipitated their parting.

   He had not seen her since, except for her face in the window, he thought he had glimpsed fairly late the evening before, but which he had dismissed as his imagination running riot.

   The other woman in the case is a mere slip of a girl, Doris Martin, the postmaster’s daughter of the title. She lives across the river and she and Grant signal back and forth from home and garden. There is an as yet unacknowledged attraction between them, and the pair were in Grant’s garden the evening of the murder stargazing at Sirius at a time deduced to be not long before the murder took place.

   It transpires Miss Melhuish had been in Steynholme for a couple of days asking questions about Grant and his friends and doings, and so suspicion naturally falls on him. Feelings start to run high in the village, fanned by the arrival of Isidor G. Ingerman, Miss Melhuish’s husband, who hints at a suit for alienation of affection against Grant and is otherwise quite beastly.

   Grant has some moral support from Miss Martin as well as the owner of another pair of boots which take up residence under his dinner table, this particular set belonging to Grant’s close friend and global adventurer Walter Hart, whose conversational turns of phrase would make a number of present day humorists envious.

   Tracy’s delightful pair of dueling Scotland Yard detectives solve the mystery, although the eccentric Charles Furneaux initially turns up without his more stolid investigative partner James Winter, who does not get onstage until about half way through the book.

My verdict:   This is the sort of novel where the reader is drawn along at a rattling pace. There are few clews and much obfuscation, with comic interest added by badinage between the Scotland Yard men and Hart.

   Readers may quibble with how some of the evidence is obtained, but the shifting moods of the local residents are well portrayed and the mystery ends with a strong denouement in the hamlet’s main street, followed by a brief “what happened next” chapter tying up the loose ends. It’s fair to say cozy fans as well as those enamored of the Golden Age of Detection will enjoy this novel.

Etext: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/0/1/1/10110/10110.txt

      Biblio-biographical data:

   From Wikapedia:  “Louis Tracy (1863-1928) was a British journalist, and prolific writer of fiction. He used the pseudonyms Gordon Holmes and Robert Fraser, which were at times shared with M. P. Shiel, a collaborator from the start of the twentieth century.”

   For information on Tracy’s collaborations with M. P. Shiel, this website may tell you all you need. For a complete bibliography of Louis Tracy’s own work, a chronological checklist complied by John D. Squires can be found online here.

Previously reviewed by Mary Reed:

      The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley, 1915.

      Number Seventeen, 1916.

SO LONG AT THE FAIR. Gainsborough (UK), 1950; Eagle-Lion/United Artists (US). Jean Simmons, Dirk Bogarde, David Tomlinson, Austin Trevor, Honor Blackman, Andre Morell, Felix Alymer, Cathleen Nesbitt Screenwriters: Hugh Mills & Anthony Thorne, based on the latter’s novel (Heinemann, 1947). Directors: Terence Fisher & Anthony Darnborough.

   Ah, this one is a charmer, and all the more fascinating because it is based on what well may be a true story. Simmons is Vicky Barton a young Englishwoman traveling with her brother Johnny (David Tomlinson) to the famous Paris Exposition of 1896. Her head is filled with romance and wonder and dreams of adventure — that are about to turn into nightmare.

   The brother and sister arrive in Paris and check into their nice upper middle class hotel, they have a night on the town in which they meet British artist George Hathaway (Dirk Borgarde) who is living and working in Paris, and a balloonist who is making an ascent for the Exposition before returning home for an early night so they can take in the Exposition the next day.

   The day dawns bright and beautiful and Simmons goes to awaken her brother who apparently has slept in.

   Only to find his room is no longer there.

   Confused and more than a little panicked she calls on a maid. Who informs her there has never been a room there and no such room number as the one she insists her brother was staying in. She goes downstairs to the manager — and is told that she arrived alone, checked in alone, and they have never seen nor heard of her brother. Her name alone is on the reservation and her name alone is in the registration book.

   Of course we’ve seen the brother so we know something is up, but from here on the film becomes a mix of thriller, detective story, and even a touch or two of the Grand Guignol as Simmons makes increasingly desperate attempts to convince the authorities in the form of a French Police Commissaire (Austin Trevor) and those around her she is sane and really has a brother before they lock her away, as no one seems to believe her, not even the British consul.

   She remembers the balloonist and rushes to see him eluding those who want to lock her up, but arrives too late, he has made his ascent. And as she watches in horror his balloon bursts into flames and he falls to his death.

   Finally she remembers the young artist who was so kind. And to her relief finds him. Of course he recalls her brother. But it proves no help. The police simply assume he is trying to seduce her by claiming to believe her preposterous story. After all, there is no evidence save the word of two foreigners, and why would the hotel lie, and risk a scandal during the most important event for tourism in French history?

   It all seems lost until Bogarde’s artist eye takes in one telling detail.

   The hotel has one more balcony on the brother’s floor than it has rooms …

   I won’t give away the secret, save to say it is both shocking and offers a touch of almost gothic horror to the proceedings — something both horrible and yet not only believable, but in this case possibly true.

   A film like this lives on the qualities of cast, script, direction, and almost as importantly the costumes and sets, and this one is a beauty to look at. Terence Fisher, who would helm many of the best of the famed Hammer horror films, directs with a sure hand, and Simmons’ fine balance between hysteria and spunk keeps the viewer pulling for her even we start to doubt what we have seen. The Paris of the Belle Epocque is evoked with real skill, and you may not even notice that all the French have British accents. At least you may not mind.

   This is a small gem of a film, and should be appreciated in that spirit. It’s what might be called a “curious tale,” and taken in that spirit, it is both mystifying and intriguing with a payoff as good as any murder, spy, or horror film. Plus there is the bonus that this one may have actually happened, if not exactly like this.

   It’s a perfect little film that achieves everyone of its modest goals and does so with such charm and ease it puts many bigger and more ambitious films to shame. Approach it in the right mood, and the right frame of mind, knowing it is as much a cautionary fable as a suspense film and you’ll find it succeeds at what it sets out to do.

   There is some question as to whether this tale ever really happened, and if it did during which French Exposition, but it’s a great story true or not, and handled here with the maximum of style and skill. Let the historians argue about the facts and enjoy the fiction, and next time you travel, carry a camera — and maybe a few witnesses. You never know when your hotel room is going to disappear.

      Note:

   Austin Trevor, who plays the Police Commissaire, was well suited to play detectives. He had previously played Hercule Poirot and Philip MacDonald’s Anthony Gethryn. It was a photo of Trevor as Poirot that accompanied the obituary for the character that ran in the New York Times upon the publication of Curtain.

THE GUN HAWK. Allied Artists, 1963. Rory Calhoun, Rod Cameron. Ruta Lee, Rod Lauren, Morgan Woodward, Robert J. Wilke, John Litel , Lane Bradford. Director: Edward Ludwig.

   Over the years, Monogram, the 1930s and 40s Poverty Row motion picture company, morphed into Allied Artists, and by the time of The Gun Hawk they were making B-westerns in color, but they were still very much B-westerns.

   This has the usual stigmata of the genre: bad script, bad acting, low budget … but it’s lifted out of the ordinary by Rory Calhoun’s ghoulish portrayal of a dying gunman determined to go out on his own terms.

   He’s counseled by veteran good-guy Rod Cameron and hounded by veteran bad-guy Robert Wilke, but this is basically Calhoun’s show, and he makes for fascinating viewing as he prowls about the screen, obviously dead from the moment he walked on; such a finely honed performance, one really wishes there were a decent movie somewhere around.

   The Gun Hawk also offers a small part from an actor who specialized in them, Lane Bradford. Bradford came on in the waning days of Republic serials and series westerns, and he never did anything especially noteworthy. (Well, he did try to blow up the planet while dressed in purple sequins for Zombies of the Stratophere, which was something of an anomaly.)

   But in the days when the once mighty outlaw gang had dwindled down to two or three henchmen for reasons of economy, he could always be seen somewhere in the background, looking formidably evil with his lantern jaw and broken nose, and getting punched out by Rocky Lane or Whip Wilson.

   Here he has a good time bullying the town drunk till Calhoun steps up, and it’s nice to see Bradford, after all these years, still dealing out his brand of special nothingness.