(1)   “New Murders for Old” (1939) by Carter Dickson. First appearance: The Illustrated London News, Christmas 1939. First collected in The Department of Queer Complaints (Morrow, 1940). Reprinted in EQMM, August 1966, as “New Murders for Old.” Found in: Alfred Hitchcock Presents 14 of My Favorites in Suspense, 1976.

COMMENTS:

    Tony Marvell, on the urging of friends and family, decides to go on an eight-month round-the-world cruise: Tony’s workaholic lifestyle has pushed him to the brink of a nervous breakdown, and his fiancee and brother insist on this rest cure.

    “It was the nightmare again. One of the worst features of his nervous breakdown had been the conviction, coming in flashes at night, that he was not real any longer; that his body and his inner self had moved apart, the first walking or talking in everyday life like an articulate dummy, while the brain remained in another place. It was as though he were dead, and seeing his body move. Dead.”

    Tony, however, will experience a real shock to the system when he does something few men ever have: read his own obituary in a newspaper. Someone, it seems, wants very badly to see him dead, and if necessary would willingly kill him twice.

    “One moment he was standing there with the automatic pistol in his hand, the noise of the engines beating in his ears and a horrible impulse joggling his elbow to put the muzzle of the pistol into his mouth and —”

NOTES:

   Dickson/Carr relies on a hoary gimmick to activate the plot, but he still keeps things moving, employing his trademark horror atmospherics but paying it all off with a perfectly rational denouement — although you should be prepared to believe at least two impossible things before breakfast about the character Rupert Hayes.

            ———

(2)   “The Silver Curtain” (1939) by Carter Dickson. First appearance: The Strand, August 1939. First collected in The Department of Queer Complaints (Morrow, 1940); reprinted in Merrivale, March and Murder (IPL, 1991), as by John Dickson Carr. Found in: Tricks and Treats, edited by Joe Gores & Bill Pronzini (Doubleday, 1976).

COMMENTS:

    Young Jerry Winton is having rotten luck at the baccara tables. Seeing his difficulties, Ferdie Davos offers Jerry a sizable sum. All he has to do is pick up some pills from a local doctor and collect ten thousand francs: a piece of cake.

    But on his way to the rendezvous Jerry witnesses a murder that couldn’t have happened — a man is stabbed to death when nobody else was anywhere near him — an impossible crime, certainly, and one for which the local gendarmes have a prime suspect: Jerry!

    “His tan topcoat was now dark with rain. His heels scraped on the pavement, for he had been stabbed through the back of the neck with a heavy knife whose polished-metal handle projected four inches. Then the wallet slipped out of his fingers, and splashed into a puddle, for the man died.”

    For the real killer, Jerry fits perfectly in the frame. For Colonel March of Scotland Yard, there really is no mystery, and elucidating this case is all in a day’s — or night’s — work.

NOTES:

    Be prepared to accept one or two highly unlikely aspects of the crime (the skill and timing of the murderer); if you buy those, the story should be enjoyable.

   Carr adapted this one for radio as “Death Has Four Faces,” but without Colonel March (Appointment with Fear, BBC, October 19, 1944). It was also filmed for the TV series Colonel March of Scotland Yard in 1956 with Boris Karloff as March and a very young Arthur Hill as Jerry. (A video of this episode may be found here.)

BERLIN EXPRESS. RKO Radio Pictures, 1948. Merle Oberon, Robert Ryan, Charles Korvin, Paul Lukas, Robert Coote, Reinhold Schunzel, Roman Toporow. Screenplay: Harold Medford, based on a story by Curt Siodmak. Director: Jacques Tourneur.

   The reason for watching this one, or mine at least, was the promise of a movie with a train ride, always an exciting prospect.

   This one I found disappointing, though, as the people making this film had other goals in mind. The fact that the first third, perhaps, takes place on a train (from Paris to post-war Frankfurt) and then again for about five minutes toward the end (bombed-out Frankfurt to an equally bombed-out Berlin) is almost incidental.

   Filmed on location, the actual aims of this film are, first of all, to show the devastation caused by Allied bombers during the war, as a cautionary measure, perhaps; then secondly but foremost to make a call for peace between the four nation occupiers of both the city of Berlin and the state of Germany. One can only rue the fact that such a wish was not to be, and not even a movie with the best of intentions could sway the day, politically speaking.

   But with World War II so long behind us, this film, when watched today, is a reminder that the occupation of Germany was not so easy as several pages in a history textbook might have you believe. (In my own experience with grade school and high school history classes, we never even made it to World War II, but perhaps students are better served today.) Survivors of the war and the earth-pounding air raids may not all have been Nazis, but neither were they occupied easily.

   Sorry. Didn’t mean to get all preachy on us, but rather than a top notch spy thriller, the essence of this film is rather a post-war cinematic plea for peace. Paul Lukas plays a man (German) heading for such a conference (in Berlin) with precisely such a plan, and he is nearly assassinated (on the train) for his efforts.

   In the middle of the movie, he is kidnapped (in Frankfurt) and must be rescued, successfully so, thanks to a four man effort headed by Robert Ryan’s character, who’s an American, with the assistance of an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Russian, the latter reluctantly but in the end quite capably. (There are some twists in the tale, but those I won’t tell.)

   But perhaps you see what I mean about the moral of the tale. Merle Oberon plays Lukas’s secretary assistant equally capably, but with no particular verve or elan.

   The photography, in black and white, is very ably done, and in fact even better than that, with lots of camera angles and striking set designs, but overall, while I stand the chance of being corrected, today this film is no more than a minor relic of the past.

   The train ride, while not essential to the plot, is nice while it lasts, though!

PostScript.   The movie’s been hard to find, or so I’ve been told, but it’s been recently released by the Warner Brothers Archive and is available through them, Amazon, and all of the usual outlets.

THE SILENCERS. Columbia, 1966. Dean Martin, Stella Stevens, Dahlia Lavi, Victor Buono, Arthur O’Connell, Robert Webber, James Gregory, Cyd Charisse, Roger C. Carmel, Nancy Kovack, Richard Devon, Beverly Adams. Screenplay by Oscar Saul, based on-the novels The Silencers and Death of a Citizen by Donald Hamilton; music by Elmer Bernstein. Director: Phil Karlson. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.

   I didn’t see any of the Dean Martin spy thrillers when they were released, but if this film is typical of the series, I didn’t miss much.

   There’s apparently a segment of the movie-going public that thinks that Dean Martin is a decent actor, but if he was, he wasn’t showing his chops in this gaudy, sexy, very dated entertainment. It’s a good cast, although most of the players are wasted.

   Even so, Victor Buono’s archvillain provides some intermittent pleasure, and Cyd Charisse, still looking smashing, dances for the last time in a feature. And then there’s Stella Stevens, the best reason for watching the film.

   She was this year’s third Cinecon guest, still looking good at 71, and in her screen role she’s incandescent, lighting up the proceedings with her beauty and comedic skill that go a long way toward making the often leaden, overlong proceedings (102 minutes), glide by with some grace.

SHARYN McCRUMB – Lovely in Her Bones. Avon, paperback original, 1985; Ballantine, pb, 1990.

   As Bill Crider said on a panel in Omaha [Mayhem in the Midlands], it is hard nowadays to find an American mystery that is not a “Regional.” However, Sharyn McCrumb, who was on his panel, writes mysteries about Appalachia that seem more authentically regional than most.

   Her second mystery, Lovely in Her Bones, is about a “dig” on the Virginia-Tennessee border, designed to prove tribal status for the Cullowhees, an isolated group who claim they’re Native Americans. Elizabeth MacPherson is along to solve the inevitable murder, though she’s just beginning to get interested in forensic anthropology.

   Right now, she’s more interested In Milo Gordon, one of the group’s leaders. There are also computer sabotage and violent lover’s quarrels. As Elizabeth says, “Exhuming bodies is getting to be the dullest part of the project.”

   I like McCrumb’s sense of humor and some of the characters she creates, e.g., the obnoxious Victor, who “hijacks a conversation,” and the hilariously inept Deputy Coltsfoot. I just wish the balance in her books, and in so many other mysteries, hadn’t tipped so far away from the mystery plot, clues and fair play resolution.

MICHAEL JECKS – The Sticklepath Strangler. Headline, UK, hardcover, December 2001; reprint softcover, 2002. Distributed by Trafalgar Square in the US.

Genre:   Historical mystery. Series character:   Sir Baldwin de Furnshill/Simon Puttock, 12th in series. Setting:   England, Middle Ages: 1322.

First Sentence:   They were out there.

   It started with the death of young girls, and the accusation of cannibalism, the murder of an innocent man and his curse on the village. Now a young girl’s skull has been found and Sir Baldwin de Fernshill, Keeper of the King’s Peace, Bailiff Simon Puttock and Coroner Roger de Gidleigh travel to the village of Sticklepath, a place of death and secrets. The death toll keeps rising.

   Jecks is so good at not only establishing a sense of time and place, but creating an atmosphere. The depth and extent of his research is always evident. He clearly expresses the hardship and cruelty of life from disease, nature, as well as the abuses by those in power and the extent to which the desperate can be driven. In spite of the power of the Catholic Church over people lives, this is still a time of superstition and fear of witches and spirits.

   Jecks’ Author’s Notes at the beginning of the book are informative and interesting. Having a Cast of Characters is such an asset and I’m glad Jecks included it. Even without it, the characters are distinctive and memorable, particularly the two protagonists, Baldwin and Simon.

   They are friends but, due to their backgrounds and experiences, very different in outlook and attitude. Baldwin is an ex-Templar knight and whose experiences have resulted in his being more accepting and open-minded.

   This book is filled with characters, quite a few are very unpleasant, yet I never identified the killer. This brings me to the plot. In some ways, I found it so depressing, it was hard to get through. If anything I felt Jecks was so caught up in bringing the period to life, he lost the tautness of the story.

   The positive side is that there were no portents or obvious clues one could pick up so I certainly never saw the end coming. Justice was served, but I wasn’t completely happy with the way in which it was done — but that may be just me. As an author of historical mysteries, Jecks ranks among the best for accuracy. It will be interesting to see how the series progresses.

Rating: Good.

Editorial Comment: There are now 20 books in the series. Rather than post a list here, I’ll send you instead to the Fantastic Fiction website, where as usual they also include a dazzling display of most if not all the covers.

ALLAN VAUGHAN ELSTON – Deadline at Durango. Dell 643, reprint paperback, 1952. Hardcover edition: J. B. Lippincott, 1950.

   A newcomer to the West bases his fortune in the cattle business on some semi-legal activities he carries out during his first days there, but as time goes on, he finally learns that he has to come to peace with himself.

   There’s lots of action, too, after a slow beginning, but guilt is what’s the underlying motivator here. (The girl from the East has a large part to play as well.) Well above average.

PHILIP KETCHUM – Gun Code. Signet 1686, paperback original, July 1959. Reprinted several times.

   Now that he’s grown up, a young cowboy returns to his home town with fire in his eye, ready to avenge his father’s death. Once there, however, he discovers that maybe, just maybe, all the facts he thinks he has are wrong.

   The author was a long-time pulp writer, and he did a few mysteries too, but file this one under T for Tepid. It’s all been done before, and far better.

MARVIN H. ALBERT – Renegade Posse. Gold Medal 826, paperback original, November 1958. Film: Bullet for a Badman, 1963, with Audie Murphy, Darren McGavin & Ruta Lee.

   What would prevent a posse, hot on the trail of a bank robber, from killing the man, splitting the loot among themselves, and claiming the money was never found? Answer: Not much.

   Mix in a deadly personal rivalry between the bandit and the only decent man in the posse, a band of bloodthirsty Kiowas, and you have an action-packed thriller from start to finish. Not much depth in the characters or the story, but there is sure a lot of shooting going on.

NELSON NYE – The Kid from Lincoln County. Ace Double F-184, paperback original, 1963.

   Westerns told in first person are a rarity, I’ve discovered, and I’m not sure why it should be so. This one’s told by a 17-year-old boy living on his own who comes to the rip-roaring town of Post Oak no longer willing to be pushed around by anyone.

   The result is a confused mish-mash of Western cliches and B-movie characterization, surprisingly so, because Nye has won the Spur Award at least once, and is a co-founder of the Western Writers of America.

NELSON NYE – Death Valley Slim. Ace Double F-184, paperback original, 1963.

   The story of a prospector who (apparently) strikes it rich, then tries to figure out how to keep the crooks in town from getting their hands on it.

   I don’t know. Pieces of the plot line keep seeming to occur out of thin air. The story that Nye tells, the story that he thinks he is telling, and the story I think he’s telling are often three different things. He’s got the lingo, no question about that. Maybe it’s me that doesn’t have the savvy.

[UPDATE] 05-06-10. Of these five, I think it’s clear that I enjoyed Deadline at Durango the most. I’m puzzled by my comments on the Nelson Nye books. I wonder if some of the problems I noted may be due to the editing that was needed to cram the two books into one back-to-back Ace Double.

ALISTAIR REYNOLDS – Century Rain. Ace, hardcover, June 2005; reprint paperback, May 2006. First published in the UK: Victor Gollancz, hardcover/softcover, 2004.

   The world Floyd and Custine live in seems to be Paris in the mid-nineteen fifties, but something is wrong, though they — and no one in their world knows it. They don’t know either that all that is about to change and Floyd, an expatriate American private detective/jazz musician is about to become a key figure in what happens.

   So is Verity Auger, an archeologist who specializes in excavating the ruins of Earth in the wake of the apocalyptic Nanocaust. A wormhole has been discovered, and at the end of it like Alice’s wonderland a surviving Earth preserved as if in amber — Floyd’s world, and somewhere on that alternate Earth is a device capable of destroying both realities — and a madman who plans to do just that.

   Over the last twenty years there has been a revolution is the hoary old science fiction genre of space opera in both the United States and in England.

   While popular, the American version tends to be militaristic and modeled on C. S. Forester’s Hornblower saga or Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey and Maturin books, whereas the British revival is something else, with writers such as mainstream novelist Iain M. Banks, thriller writer Paul McAuley, and astrophysicist Alistair Reynolds taking the form places E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith and his Skylark and Lensman saga never imagined.

   Century Rain is a good example of the new space opera, a sweeping adventure novel dealing with vast ideas and concepts and at the same time a meditation in noir recreating a version of 20th Century Paris out of Simenon out of Raymond Chandler, with a human and moral private eye at the center of the action of both worlds and solving mysteries both personal and profound.

   Eventually Floyd and Auger will meet and team to save both their worlds, and part in a bittersweet moment.

   The ending as Floyd makes a painful decision about his own life and his own world is a Chandleresque moment of perfect pitch on Reynolds’ part.

   A world killer, some nasty monsters, galaxy spanning concepts of space and time, a heroine who is a cross between Indiana Jones and Flash Gordon, a noirish private eye with the soul of a jazz musician, a quest, an alternate Noirish Paris circa the 1950’s that would fit with one of Leo Malet’s Nestor Burma novels, hard science, alien artifacts, augmented humans, real humor, a touching love story, a sacrifice, an adventure, spy thriller, mystery … And yet the book is an homogeneous whole, as simple and perfect as any book you are likely to read, written with the casual elegance of a natural.

   And it all ends on a perfect note embracing both noirish despair and at the same time the hopeful optimism of the most boisterous space opera. This one is what they mean by a tour de force, a perfect blend of several genres that shouldn’t blend at all, but do here with real skill and to great effect.

NGAIO MARSH – Grave Mistake. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1978. Little Brown & Co., US, hc, 1978. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and soft.

   Published by Ngaio Marsh when she was 83, Grave Mistake certainly is a better effort than Agatha Christie’s Postern of Fate (1973), published when Christie was that same age. But it’s still a distinctly minor work by this talented author.

   Grave Mistake is one of those British village mysteries that cozy-loving Americans particularly seem to enjoy reading. Several other Marsh village mysteries, most notably Overture to Death (1938), Scales of Justice (1955) and Death of a Fool (Off with His Head in the UK, 1956), are among her most popular tales. Grave Mistake is a weaker tale than those, but should still offer some enjoyment to cozy fans.

   The village in Grave Mistake is Upper Quintern, one of those rural locales in classical English mystery that always seems about twenty years out of date (for example, Overture to Death feels like it should be taking place in 1918 at best and Scales of Justice and Death of a Fool in the 1930s).

   Though presumably Grave Mistake takes place around 1977, it seems that the village is composed solely of wealthy, mostly jobless, women and the people who serve them. Oh, and that Greek multi-millionaire who bought up one of the local mansions and about whom no one is quite sure whether he’s quite quite. The servants are more independent here than in many of the pre-WW2 tales and competition for their services is fierce. The gardener even expects to be called “Mister” — imagine!

   Marsh novels usually have a pair of winning young lovers, it seems, and we have such a pair here. Marsh provides one short scene of the couple in which she not too convincingly tries to convey the language of people born around 1960 (lamentably, the word “groovy” is uttered), but mostly her focal point is Verity Preston, a fifty-something, unmarried, intelligent, charming, sensitive playwright. If you think this might be Marsh herself, more or less, you may be on to something.

   Eventually one of the local society ladies is smothered to death in the fashionable sanitarium she has checked herself into for a “rest” (shades of P. D. James’ recent novel, The Private Patient, and the doctor who owns this clinic is straight out of Marsh’s own Death and the Dancing Footman, from nearly forty years earlier) and soon enough Superintendent Alleyn shows up with Inspector Fox to restore order in the village.

   Alleyn still calls his subordinate “Br’er Fox” and, even more egregious, “Foxkin”; but I suppose Fox had put up with this for 44 years and was surely nearing retirement, so he was able to restrain himself from finally snapping and throttling “Handsome Alleyn” on the spot. For their part, the posh members of the local gentry still comment on how Alleyn is so much more a gentleman than they would have expected, his being a policeman and all.

   As the above may suggest, there’s plenty in Grave Mistake that would have been guaranteed to have set Raymond Chandler’s remaining teeth on edge, had be survived until 1978 and sat down to read this tale. There’s an Aunty Boo. The lovely young well-born girl is named Prunella. She calls Verity, who is her Godmother, Godma V (as in, “Godma V, it’s a stinker”). The ladies love to use the word “lolly” (“Daddy was a wizard with the lolly” actually gets said here). But, then, Marsh wasn’t writing for Chandler, was she?

   My favorite character by far was the stepson of the murder victim. Nicknamed by all the gentry ladies “Charmless Claude,” he’s a feckless character, a sponging waster and loser in his late thirties (a slacker as we would say today) who is tremendous fun to read about as his ineffectual plotting comes to naught. The charming people, by contrast, I found a bit tiresome.

   The mystery itself is a disappointment. It’s extremely straightforward and lacking in complexity and ingenuity, though it is fairly presented.

   But I suspect many did not mind this when Grave Mistake appeared in 1978, two years after Agatha Christie had been been lost to the mystery-loving world. I imagine, rather, that most enjoyed simply immersing themselves in the cozy comforts of a classical form English mystery.

PETER O’DONNELL – Pieces of Modesty. Pan, UK, paperback, 1972. Mysterious Press, US, hc, 1987; Tor, US, pb, 1990.

   Modesty Blaise first appeared as a comic-strip character in 1962, and the first novelization of her exploits was published in 1965. She is often thought of as a female James Bond, but her wildly entertaining adventures certainly entitle her to stand alone as a fascinating fictional character.

    A good way to make Modesty’s acquaintance is to read the stories collected in Pieces of Modesty, each of which reveals something of her background and philosophy.

    At the age of eighteen, Modesty commanded the Network, the most successful crime organization outside the United States. After dismantling the Network, she occasionally found herself working for the intelligence section of the British Foreign Office, as she does in “The Gigglewrecker,” in which a very reluctant defector is transferred from East to West Berlin.

    A better story is “I Had a Date with Lady Janet,” narrated in the first person by Modesty’s formidable associate Willie Garvin, who comes to Modesty’s rescue when she is held captive by an old enemy ensconced in a Scottish castle.

    “A Better Day to Die” and “Salamander Four” might be read as companion pieces. In the former, Modesty finds herself captured by guerrillas, along with the other passengers on a bus. One of the passengers, a minister who believes strongly in nonviolence, sees the results of brutality and is changed by them.

    In “Salamander Four,” a sculptor given to non-involvement finds himself involved against his will when Modesty helps a wounded man, but the ending is is predictable. “The Soo Girl Charity” features Modesty and Willie in a robbery for charity and has an amusing twist at the end.

    For colorful writing and nonstop action, the books about Modesty Blaise are hard to beat, especially such titles as Modesty Blaise (1965), Sabre-Tooth (1966), I, Lucifer (1967), and two titles published for the first time in the United States in 1984: The Silver Mistress (1973) and The Xanadu Talisman (1981).

         ———
   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.

PETER O’DONNELL, R. I. P. (1920-2010). He was in ill health — he had had Parkinson’s disease for several years — so the reporting of Peter O’Donnell’s death on Monday, May 3rd, at the age of 90, was not surprising news, but it was still difficult to accept.

   It is remarkable (or perhaps not) that the opening paragraph of his obituary in The Times begins with a description of Modesty Blaise’s most famous tactic in distracting the enemy, the so-called “Nailer,” described here on one of the earliest posts on this blog, as well as much more (as they say) about both Modesty and her creator.

   And for even more on Peter O’Donnell and his career, including a complete bibliography, check out Steve Holland’s recent post on his Bear Alley blog.

M. R. HALL – The Coroner. Pan Macmillan, UK, hardcover/softcover, 2009.

Genre:   Licensed investigator. Series character:   Jenny Cooper, 1st in series. Setting:   England/Wales.

First Sentence:   The first dead body Jenny ever saw was her grandfather’s.

   Jenny Cooper spent 15 years practicing child-care law, but a serialized cheating, emotionally abusive husband and subsequent divorce, plus a missing year from her own childhood, has resulted in an emotional breakdown and severe panic attacks.

   She’s beginning to put her life back together and has been appointed local coroner in the Severn Vale District Corner, inheriting the office, and its rather resentful clerk, from recently deceased Harry Marshall.

   Two of the cases she also inherits are those of a young boy and a teen prostitute, both dead of apparent suicide, both of who spent time in a youth penal facility, and who knew each other when younger. Jenny begins to suspect Harry of negligence, at best, and possibly a cover-up for murder.

   I have often read about coroners, but never really understood their role, responsibilities and the extent of their authority. How nice to finally find an author who not only focuses on that role, as pertains to the UK, but makes it really interesting. I was particularly struck by the protagonist’s observation that “After just four days as coroner she was already the earthly representative of fifty traumatically departed souls.”

   The scenes at the inquest were as well done as any trial scene I’ve read. I am so impressed with Hall’s writing. There are three major threads to this story: Jenny’s emotional issues, her dealing with a possible new relationship, and the case on which she is working. Hall weaves these three threads evenly and perfectly, and in such a way that you see the character gain strength and develop as the story progresses.

   I like seeing a male author write realistic female characters, and Jenny is an interesting character. In spite of her issues, you know there is strength there and she will survive. It is also nice to see a male author write a male character who isn’t the knight on a white charger. Jenny’s neighbor, Steve, may be her new relationship, but he has growing of his own to do.

   All the characters were real, whether likable or not, and for some, you felt their angst. I was particularly struck by the father of a dead girl, “We blame the teachers, the police, the politicians, every last God-dammed one of those self-righteous bastards who spend their lives telling other people what’s best for them but can’t tell right from wrong.” How heart-felt and timely a statement is that?

   There were some minor weaknesses. As can happen, because Hall lives in the area in which the book is set, the sense of place was not as strong as I, a “foreign” reader, would have liked. It was necessary for me to resort to the internet in order to find out where the book is set and what the area looks like.

   There were also a couple of rather large coincidences and predictable threads, but it was still a very good, engrossing read that kept me up until 2 a.m. to finish the book. Hall’s next book, The Disappeared is already on my shelf, to be joined by his third book, The Rapture due out Fall 2010.

Rating: Very Good.