BILLIE HOLIDAY – Lady Sings the Blues [with William Dufty]. Doubleday, hardcover, 1956. Reprint editions include: Popular Library, paperback, 1958. Lancer, paperback, 1969. Avon, paperback, 1976. Harlem Moon, softcover, as Lady Sings the Blues: 50th Anniversary Edition, 2006.

   An ‘as told to’ autobiography. Legitimacy in question, but if you ask me, based on nothing but instinct, it’s pretty legit.

   Why? Because it makes her look bad. And it’s not very well written. And it makes you depressed just reading it. It’s not ups and downs. It’s mostly just downs.

   And certain tidbits, no one is making this shit up. For example: one of her earliest memories is of her great grandmother, who she loved. Who would regale her with stories from the days of slavery. Where she had 16 kids by the Irish master, and was set up in a little shack behind his home. Great grandma was never supposed to lie down, so she slept in a chair. She’d die if she ever lay down. And little Eleanora (she picked up the name ‘Billie’ later, for her screen girl crush, silent starlet Billie Dove), would wash her great grandma down with washcloths, and was the only one who paid any attention to her.

   So the little four year old bathes grandma one time and grandma begs: oh dear child, please lay down some blankets, I’m so tired, and snuggle up with me and I’ll tell you a story. So she does and wakes a few hours later, middle of the night, and great grandma is ice cold, rigor mortis has set in, and she’s holding the child with a death grip. The child screams and they have to call the fire department to break great grandmas arm to set her free. And she’s beaten for having let great grandma lie down, and was told she killed her.

   Yeah. And it doesn’t get much brighter. Hounded for addiction to opioids, imprisoned, raped aged 10; sent up for seducing the 40 year old man who raped her. Her life sucked.

   There were some good times, sure. And she has nice stories of Orson Welles and Bob Hope and Clark Gable and Artie Shaw standing up for her, standing up against racism.

   But overall it’s just a depressing pit of despair. And she’s frankly not that likable as she sinks. She takes no responsibility for her addiction, the black hole of her constant poverty, no matter how much she makes, her relationships with one abusive scoundrel after the next. And you can see she’s drowning. And it’s too late. But she still can’t see it in this book completed three years before her death. She still has a bit of hope that you know is doomed. And that voice, that fading beauty, the tremor in her reaching vibrato. She sings straight from her breaking heart. And you can feel it. But to no avail. You’d like to help but it’s just too late.

   It’s easy to remember. But so hard to forget.

   Forget it. It’ll just make you sad.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink. Perry Mason #39. William Morrow, hardcover, 1952. Pocket #1107, paperback, 1956. Reprinted several times since. TV adaptation: Perry Mason, CBS, 14 December 1957. (Season 1, episode 13; starring Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale.)

   The moth-eaten mink belongs to waitress Dixie Dayton — or at least it does until the night Perry Mason and Della Street stop in for dinner at Morris Alburg’ s restaurant. While they are there, something-or someone frightens Dixie and she runs out, without either her paycheck or the once-expensive coat.

   The restaurateur, Mason, and Street speculate about the woman’s hasty disappearance, but soon find out from the police that Dayton was struck down — not fatally — outside by a passing car while fleeing a man with a gun. Mason takes charge of the mink, and in its lining finds a ticket from a Seattle pawnshop. But before Paul Drake can investigate it, the police find a second ticket in Dayton’s possession; they inquire and find out it is for a diamond ring, and the pawnbroker remembers the other object left in his shop-a gun used in a cop killing one year before.

   The case becomes a tangle of falsehoods, assumed identities, cryptic clues, missing witnesses, missing clients. and murder. Mason and Drake work around the clock in the interests of their clients — Morris Alburg and Dixie Dayton, both now accused of homicide. And Lieutenant Tragg hands Mason a surprise in the last sentence.

   All the Mason books are talky, relying upon dialogue rather than description, action, or deep characterization, but this one is particularly so. Tragg, in fact, holds center stage with his long-winded speeches. The plot, however, is characteristically complex, and a true Perry Mason fan will relish its twists and turns.

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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.

ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE. November 1967. Overall rating: ***

HARRY KEMELMAN “Man on a Ladder.” Novelette. Professor Nicky Welt solves the murder of a scholar [committed to academic work.] I may be in the minority, but I found this story wordy and flat, and if I may, stagey, The chess analogy is good, but isn’t it clear? (2)

JACOB HAY “The Belkamp Apparatus.” A sales representative for a Grand Rapids firm is mistaken for a master spy. It is humorous. (4)

COLIN WATSON “The Infallible Clock.” If a wife disappears and a large clock stops working, what would you suspect? (2)

WILLIAM BRITTAIN “Mr. Strang Finds the Answers,” The key to Mr. Strang’s chemistry exam is stolen, but the mystery is outweighed by the human factors involved. (4)

RICHARD CURTIS “Odds Bodkins and the £1000 Wager.” The odds on breaking out of prison? Only in England. (3)

G. R. SPENCER “The Polite Mrs. Payne.” First story. A holdup man’s politeness is his downfall. (3)

JOYCE CARY “The Sheep.” Published earlier in Texas Quarterly Winter 1958. Tomlin is a sheep, helpless to speak out for himself; excellent characterization that collapses into nothingness. (3)

RON GOULART “Rink.” Parody. 1001st Precinct mystery. Funny. (3)

ELLERY QUEEN “Uncle from Australia.” First appeared in The Diners Club Magazine, June 1965. The Cockney aitch strikes again. Easy puzzle. (2)

THOMAS WALSH “Poor Little Rich Kid.” First appeared in Collier’s, 18 April 1936, as “The Boy on the Train.” A boy with an inheritance, and a weak father, befriends a couple of rodeo cowboys. Good story, but over-plotted. (3)

JAMES CROSS “The Man Who Called Himself James Cross.” Sebastian Nonesuch. A sequel to “The hkzmp gsv bzmp Case,” published in the November 1966 issue of EQMM (reviewed here). The revealed details of the exploits of  US agent Sebastian Nonesuch must be stopped. Often hilarious. (4)

MICHAEL HARRISON “The Fires in the Rue St. Honore.” Another “unpublished” story of C. Auguste Dupin. It seems to be better than the rest, but it turns out to be hopeless for the attentive reader. (2)

ARTHUR PORGES “The Nose of a Beagle.”That the detective is Charles Darwin is obvious from the title. (2)

CHRISTIANNA BRAND “Here Lies…” How to drown a wife who is a swimming champion, and how to build an atmosphere of suspense most effectively. (5)

DEAN R. KOONTZ – Star Quest. Ace Double H-70; paperback original; 1st printing, 1968. Cover art by Gray Morrow. Published back-to-back with Doom of the Green Planet by Emil Petaja. Apparently never reprinted.

   The universe has been the scene of a centuries-long war between the Romaghians and the Setessins. On a restricted primitive planet Tohm is forcibly separated from his love Tarnilee by invading Romaghians. His search for her leads him to the slave planet Basa II, where he joins a group of hunted Muties, mutants caused by the effects of nuclear warfare,

   The latter have learned the power of shifting between divided universes, and have successfully rid their universe of warring worlds.

   Shallow on first reading, but Dean says there are allegorical points. The warring enemies are descendants of the radical right and the radical left; the mutants are “soulbrothers” – the victims of the attempted cleansing of guilt – who have succeeded in ending war, But who are the mutants with white eyes, tangible lust creatures, who periodically appear and disappear?

   This will probably not rate well with others, sorry to say. Dean does have a good picturesque style.

Rating: ***

JULIAN MacLAREN-ROSS – Of Love and Hunger. Allan Wingate, UK. 1947. Reprinted a number of times.

   Fanshawe’s about 30, jaded, in 30’s London between the wars. And broke. Trying to sell vacuum cleaners door to door. Unsuccessfully.

   “The new bloke’s name was Roper. Soon as I set eyes on him I knew he’d never make a salesman. He was about twenty-four and not very tall, and he’d a pink face with a long pointed nose and blond hair slicked straight back with the pink puckered skin of a scar running up into the roots of it. The scar looked odd on him somehow: he didn’t seem the kind of chap who’d have a scar like that. You’d never think he’d been to sea. That’s how he got the scar: a lascar with a bottle in Marseille.

         …

   “Sukie was his wife. She’d a job in the cash-desk at Morecombe’s, dress shop down by the Arcade. Sultry-looking piece. Spanish type. Black hair, dark eyes, lot of lipstick on. Hell of a temper, you could see. We’d never actually met, but I didn’t like the look of her at all.”

   Roper decides to quit and go back to sea. Look after my wife for me while I’m away, he says. See that she doesn’t get lonely.

   Fanshawe does. And so it begins. A torrid affair, but not for long. And Roper returns.

   And without further ado, Hitler invades Poland, and Fanshawe goes to war.

   The end.

   A tightly written, slangy slice of hardscrabble life in 30’s London. I dug it.

WILLIAM L. SHIRER – The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 17 October 1960. TV adaptation: ABC, 1968, consisting of a one-hour episode aired each night over three nights.

   I’m anticipating here.

   See August is the end of Summer, and that got me to thinking of September. Which is the month before October. (Check your calendars.) Which is the month I spend reading scary books and watching old monster movies.

   And that got me thinking about an Autumn a few years back, when I led into it….

         (Cue harp.)

   …by reading William L. Shirer’s classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich ,  a real mega-book when it first came out – I remember it was serialized in Life, there were TV shows, bubble-gum cards, tie-in comics, etc. – and it’s easy to see why: More’n fifteen hundred pages and scarcely a clunker in the bunch. Well, I admit to skimming over some of the background on Hitler’s grandparents, but by and mostly this is a compulsive page-turner, even if the title gives away the ending.

   What’s Halloween-scariest, though, is the first third, describing Hitler’s rise to power: how he subtly smeared his rivals with racist tactics, arranged to have opposing parties disenfranchised, convinced Parliament to give up its oversight powers, and the people to abridge their civil liberties in the name of National Security; filled the media with scare stories about threats from Poland and Czechoslovakia… one either sees the parallels or never will, but what impressed me is that you and I read about these antics and say, “I don’t wanna do that stuff if Hitler did it,” but apparently some people read this and say, “Hot dang! That’s slicker’n a toad in a out-house! I gotta try that….

   I guess Real Life gets scary too.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Fan Dancer’s Horse. William Morrow, hardcover, 1947. Pocket 886, paperback, 1952. Several later reprint editions.

   In 1933, when Erle Stanley Gardner took his publisher’s advice that the hero of his first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, might make a good series character, he did not know what lay in store for him-or for Perry Mason. Since then, the Los Angeles lawyer; his secretary, Della Street; and private investigator Paul Drake have become household names. And with the first airing of the immensely popular Perry Mason television series in  1957 they became household images as well, in the form of Raymond Burr. Barbara Hale, and William Hopper.

   While not particularly well written or characterized, the Mason books have convoluted plots and punchy dialogue, which in the courtroom takes on the form of verbal sparring. The books are also very much alike, and perhaps this is the basis for their wide appeal. Readers know that in each one an innocent (in the legal sense) will become involved in a murder; odious Lieutenant Tragg will investigate and arrest; snide District Attorney Hamilton Burger will prosecute; and Perry Mason will vindicate his client in a dramatic courtroom revelation of the true killer.

   It is these courtroom scenes that make the novels stand out from other mystery fiction. Gardner, a lawyer himself, was able to simplify courtroom procedure so even the least astute reader could understand it, while at the same time packing the scene with dramatic impact. Even those who are normally bored with legal matters can enjoy watching Perry Mason devil the D.A. in the interests of justice, and many a lawyer practicing today will admit he got his first taste of the profession through Mason’s legal pyrotechnics.

   The Case of the Fan Dancer’s Horse begins with a hit-and-run automobile accident in California’s Imperial Valley. Two cars glance off one another; Perry Mason and Della Street rush to aid the one that overturns in the ditch, and find an old Mexican woman whose car trunk contains the plumed wardrobe of a fan dancer. The woman is presumably taken away to the hospital by a passing motorist, but the accident is never reported. Mason, who has taken the fans and dancing shoes into custody, places an ad in the paper offering their return. The reply is not what he expected: The fan dancer docs indeed want her property returned, but it is a horse, not a wardrobe, that she is missing.

   Dancer Lois Fenton — alias Cherie Chi-Chi — is appearing in an old western town called Palomino, and Mason and Street travel there to meet with her. They return the fan-dancing paraphernalia and receive a description of the missing horse, but soon it becomes apparent that the woman they spoke with is not the real Lois Fenton. The real fan dancer — who has a complicated history — is as missing as her horse.

   Approached by a young man who is in love with Miss Fenton, Mason accepts a retainer to act in her behalf, and earns it when a wealthy rancher is found murdered in an L.A. hotel room, a bloody imprint that could have been made by an ostrich feather on the wall. Lois Fenton was seen leaving the scene and quickly becomes the chief suspect.

   In spite of obvious holes in logic — why, for instance, would Mason take on a client when he has seen no more of her than her ostrich plumes? — the story moves ahead at a breakneck pace. And when the real Lois Fenton finally turns up and the legal battle lines are drawn, Mason is in fine form.

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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.

WALTER TEVIS – The Man Who Fell to Earth. Gold Medal k1276, paperback original, February 1963. Cover art by Diane Dillon and Leo Dillon. Reprinted several times, including: Avon, paperback, 1976 (slightly updated); Bantam, paperback, 1981. Film: British Lion Film Corporation, UK, 1976; Cinema 5, US, 1976 (starring David Bowie). TV Movie: ABC, 1987. Plus two TV Mini-series.

   An alien, an Anthean, comes to Earth. They’ve run out of resources on Anthea.

   The Antheans had just enough fuel to send one of them to Earth.

   He’s long, tall and gangly, with bird like bones, but with prosthetics looks human enough to pass. He’s learned English from intercepted television broadcasts.

   He has a bagful of diamonds which he pawns til he raises a decent stake.

   He buys a suit of clothes, passage to nyc, rooms at a luxury hotel, and visits the best patent lawyer money can buy. He shows the lawyer formulas for more efficient oil processing, digital photography, digital recording technology, and offers 10% of the profits if the lawyer will take care of the patents and hire the infrastructure to start World Enterprises Corporation. The lawyer salivates.

   Before you know it, the Anthean is a multimillionaire. An Elon Musk-like titan of technology.

   His next project is a huge spacecraft whose secret purpose is to travel to Anthea to bring the rest of his race to Earth. To take over. To rule the earth in a wise dictatorship. To save Earth from the destructiveness of man.

   But the CIA discovers him and his plans. He’s arrested. Officially, the change is being a suspected non-us citizen without proper immigration papers. But he’s forged perfect proof of citizenship and has all the right papers. He’s too famous to kill, and the administration doesn’t dare tell the public he’s an actual alien. It’s an election year, and they’d be laughed out of office. Other big business moguls and the press are hounding the government on this warrantless arrest of a titan of industry. So he’s released.

   But his plans are ruined. There is no way the US government will allow the incomplete spaceship to be finished. And if the Antheans arrived they’d be arrested or killed.

   The Anthean realizes he’ll never see his people again, his wife and family. They’ll be unable to forestall man’s foretold fate of self destruction.

   He discovers the pleasures of gin. He soaks his loneliness. And decides, what the hell is all this for? Who cares? Better to drink my way to oblivion.

   An affecting and strangely believable meditation on loneliness.

BANK ALARM. Grand National Pictures, 1937. Conrad Nagel, Eleanor Hunt, Vince Barnett, Wheeler Oakman, Nat Carr. Directed by Louis J. Gasnier.

   Bank Alarm is a perfectly average crime film. Although considerably dated, it nevertheless tells a somewhat compelling story about a federal agent’s quest to uproot a bank robbing outfit in 1930s Los Angeles. G-Man Alan O’Connor (Conrad Nagel), with his girlfriend/assistant Bobbie Reynolds (Eleanor Hunt), begins his investigation when a lower ranking member of the criminal outfit is killed in prison.

   Little does O’Connor know that his sleuthing will eventually lead to his sister’s new boyfriend, screenwriter Jerry Turner (Frank Milan). Turner has been working in cahoots with local crime boss, nightclub owner Joe Karlotti (Wheeler Oakman).

   There’s nothing particularly special about this film. With a running time of around an hour, it doesn’t waste the viewer’s time with extraneous material. That said, there’s not much here to overly recommend. If you watch it, you probably won’t love it and you probably won’t hate it. It is what it is. Just a largely forgotten B-movie that most people, I suspect, have never heard of, let along seen.

LOOK WHO’S LAUGHING. RKO Radio Pictures, 1941. Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy, Fibber McGee & Molly, Lucille Ball, Harold Peary. Director: Allan Dwan.

   Edgar and Charlie make an unscheduled landing in Wistful Vista, the home of Fibber McGee and Molly. Lucille Ball is Edgar’s secretary, and to make things complicated, she is secretly in love with him.

   The rest of the story has to do with land for a proposed airplane factory in Wistful Vista, but the main attraction of the story is seeing so many famous radio characters in the flesh – including Fibber’s long-time nemesis, Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve.