HELENE TURSTEN – Detective Inspector Russ. Soho Press, hardcover, US, January 2003; trade paperback, May 2004. Translated by Steven T. Murray.

   Irene Huss is a police inspector in Goteborg, Sweden, and her story is a character-driven semi-procedural flavored with a strong dose of domestic life, reminiscent of Peter Robinson’s and Donna Leon’s police series.

   Private life is less idealized in Tursten’s book, although Irene’s chef-husband Krister is a little too good to be true. As she investigates the mysterious death of wealthy Richard von Knecht, the reader is also shown her household’s twice-monthly cleaning routine and a crisis with one of the daughters slipping into skinhead culture.

   There’s just enough of this sort of thing to provide a strongly realistic atmosphere, heightened by vivid descriptions of nasty weather and long hours of darkness during the weeks before Christmas. Despite the domestic detail, including a lovable dog, this is rather hardboiled, including, for example, a nasty run-in with a group of Hell’s Angels.

   Originally published in Sweden in 1998, this came out in English from Soho Press in 2003. Recommended, but not to those of you who have already tried and disliked Scandinavian crime fiction. This book won’t change your mind.

       The Inspector Huss series:

Translated into English:

   1. Detective Inspector Huss (2003)
   2. The Torso (2006)

   3. The Glass Devil (2007)

Published in Sweden:

   * 1998 – Den krossade tanghästen, English title: Detective Inspector Huss (2003)
   * 1999 – Nattrond
   * 1999 – Tatuerad torso. English title: The Torso (2006)
   * 2002 – Kallt mord
   * 2002 – Glasdjävulen. English title: The Glass Devil (2007)

   * 2004 – Guldkalven
   * 2005 – Eldsdansen
   * 2007 – En man med litet ansikte
   * 2008 – Det lömska nätet

   Six films based on the series has appeared in Sweden and are available on the Internet as a six-DVD boxed set. Playing Inspector Huss is Angela Kovàcs. Contained in the set are:

   1. The Torso
   2. The Horse Figurine
   3. The Fire Dance
   4. The Night Round
   5. The Glass Devil
   6. The Gold Digger

   Swedish titles: Glasdjävulen / Guldkalven / Eldsdansen / Nattrond / Den Krossade tanghästen / Tatuerad torso.

   A trailer for The Torso can be seen here on YouTube.

W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM – The Magician. William Heinemann, UK, hardcover, 1908. George H. Doran Co., US, hardcover, 1908. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and soft. Silent film: MGM, 1926 (with Alice Terry, Paul Wegener; director: Rex Ingram).

   The villain of Somerset Maugham’s 1908 novel The Magician was loosely — very loosely — based on Aleister Crowley, and the novel is as close as Maugham ever came to writing pulp, an all-out mellerdrama with sinister sorcerer, helpless heroine, ho-hum hero… there’s even a Van Helsing character written in to help move the plot along.

   Said plot involves the corpulently wicked Oliver Haddo being publicly (and justifiably) humiliated by the Good Guy and taking his vengeance by magically seducing his Innocent Fiancee to be used as a pawn in the Dark Arts. And so on.

   Parallels with Dracula (1897) are not far to seek. Interestingly, though the major get-the-plot-across passages seem a bit hurried and obvious, with purple vapours, lurid visions and such, the less relevant chapters, sketching out the emotional effects of all this on the characters, are really quite effective. Maugham may not have been a great author, but he was a damgood novelist and it shows here.

   I may have indicated that the horror novel parts of The Magician fall a bit flat, and they do mostly — up to the end. The climax of this book in Haddo’s hellish castle is as frightening as anything you’re apt to read in this genre, and it stays in the memory.

      Etext: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/14257

Editorial Comments:   Dan wrote this review in November 2005. I felt that it was appropriate to post it now, considering the way the comments following Walter Albert’s review of the 1931 film version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde happened to flow.

   As they went along, they (the comments) seem to have morphed themselves into a discussion first of the filmed version of The Magician then onto Mr. Maugham’s contribution to literature in general.

      Adapted from an email from David Vineyard:

   Don’t know how many of you care for this sort of thing, but if you check out the BBC7 site this week they are airing an eight part adaptation of the Paul Temple mystery Paul Temple and the Gilbert Case. Currently there are also adaptations of two of Agatha Christie’s Poirot’s, a new Biggles (starting Thursday), John Creasey’s The Toff and the Runaway Bride, and The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes.

   Previously they’ve done Ashenden, Bulldog Drummond, The Scarecrow, and many more. They also have original crime programs and adaptations of more recent writers’ works.

   The episodes run about thirty minutes and are full cast productions. Thought I’d give everyone a heads up.

   The Gilbert Case finds Paul and wife Steve’s holiday plans interrupted when the father of a murdered girl asks him to try and clear the young man, Howard Gilbert, convicted of murdering her and facing the death sentence. “I know you, you enjoy sticking your neck out.”

   Honestly there’s too much to listen to, but you can pick and choose the ones you really like, and they can be downloaded to an MP3 player or IPod as well.

“Captive Audience.” An episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (Season 1, Episode 5). First air date: 18 October 1962. James Mason, Angie Dickinson, Arnold Moss, Ed Nelson, Roland Winters, Sara Shane, Bart Burns. Teleplay: Richard Levinson & William Link, based on the novel Murder off the Record (1957) by John Bingham. Director: Alf Kjellin.

   Victor Hartman (Arnold Moss) publishes mystery novels, but even so he’s unprepared for what’s been developing for the past few days. Victor has been receiving tape recordings from a prospective author named Warren Barrow (James Mason) in which Barrow may be revealing his plans to exact revenge on Janet West (Angie Dickinson) for trying to frame him for murder —   OR what he’s saying on the tapes might just be notes for a novel he hopes to place with Victor.

   Victor is unsure and calls in Tom Keller (Ed Nelson), one of his best mystery authors. Is Barrow really planning murder, or is he just floating ideas for a novel? Because, if Barrow IS serious, something has to be done — and fast ….

   Altogether, the now legendary but then struggling to get established Richard Levinson and William Link were responsible for five Alfred Hitchcock Hour episodes, and not a bad one in the bunch: “Captive Audience”; “Day of Reckoning”; “Dear Uncle George”; “Nothing Ever Happens in Linvale”; and “Murder Case.”

   Another Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode, “The Tender Poisoner,” was also derived from a John Bingham novel.

Hulu: http://www.imdb.com/video/hulu/vi1490550809/

THE MOONRAKER. Associated British Picture Corporation, 1958. George Baker, Sylvia Syms, Marius Goring, Peter Arne, Clive Morton, Gary Raymond, Paul Whitsun-Jones, John Le Mesurier (Oliver Cromwell). Based on a play by Arthur Watkyn. Director: David MacDonald.

   A “moonraker” is a smuggler who drops his contraband goods into coastal waters then rakes them up again in the moonlight.

   I hope I have that right. If not, those of you who live in England, please do correct me on this — or anything else in this review I might happen to get wrong in the rest of what follows. British history is not necessarily my strongest suit.

   The movie begins with the Moonraker (Anthony Earl of Dawlish, played quite handsomely by actor George Baker) riding by horseback in a purple tunic though open meadow land, green wooded areas, down the cobbled streets of a small town at night, then into open land again till we see in the near distance the outline of the circle of standing stones that make up the national monument called Stonehenge.

   The next scene purports to take place within those same stones, but I’m not so sure. I suppose the film crew may have been allowed to do so? In any case, it is there that Dawlish meets Charles Stuart, whose father Charles I had recently been overthrown (and executed) by Oliver Cromwell.

   It is the Moonraker’s task to ensure the safe passage of the would-be king to France, an event which of course actually happened, though the Moonraker’s role is, as I understand it, quite fictitious.

   However, this dates the time that this movie takes place exactly: 03 September 1651. Robin Hood, another British folk hero that even those here in the US have heard of, came along much earlier, the 12th century A. D. and the time of Richard the Lionheart. Just to put events in perspective.

   Here in the US as kids (probably not so much any more) we played a lot of Cowboys and Indians, and Good Guys and Bad Guys. Did boys in the UK play Robin Hood and His Merry Men very often? I’m guessing, but probably more than they did Cavaliers (Royalists) and Roundheads (Cromwell’s men).

   In any case, it is the strife between the latter that this movie is about. Being based on a play, much of it takes place not in the open (other than the aforementioned opening credits) but in the confines of a small inn along the coast, where Charles Stuart is to begin his voyage by sea to France and his temporary exile.

   Complicating matters, for the sake of a story, a girl (Sylvia Syms) who is betrothed to one of Cromwell’s high ranking officers is forced to confront both Dawlish and her own beliefs face-to-face. Romance wins out, but will there be the time and the place for it to bloom further?

   There is, of course, much swordplay and other acts of derring-do that also take place, all very well done, in beautiful Technicolor. But while the movie is entertaining from beginning to end, the story itself just isn’t solid or meaty enough to stay in one’s memory for very long. Perhaps it’s more significant and means more in England than it does here?

CARROLL JOHN DALY – The Snarl of the Beast. Edward J. Clode, 1927. Previously serialized in Black Mask, June-July-Aug-Sept, 1927. Hardcover reprint: Gregg Press, 1981. Trade paperback reprint: Harper Perennial, 1992.

   Carroll John Daly was one of the fathers of the modem hard-boiled private eye, a primary influence on such later writers as Mickey Spillane. His style and plots seem dated today, but the presence of his name on the cover of Black Mask in the Twenties and Thirties could be counted on to raise sales of the magazine by fifteen percent.

   Daly’s major contribution was Race Williams, the narrator of The Snarl of the Beast and the first fully realized tough-guy detective (his first appearance, in the June 1, 1923, issue of Black Mask, preceded the debut of Hammett’s Continental Op by four months).

   Williams was a thoroughly hard-boiled individual. As he says of one criminal he dispatches, “He got what was coming to him. If ever a lad needed one good killing, he was the boy.” Williams doesn’t hesitate to dole out two-gun, vigilante justice.

   The Snarl of the Beast has an uncomplicated plot: Williams is asked by the police to help track down a master criminal known as “the Beast” and reputed to be “the most feared, the cunningest and cruelest creature that stalks the city streets at night.”

   Williams is willing to take on the job and to give the police credit for ridding the city of this menace, just as long as he gets the reward. Along the way he meets a masked woman prowler, a “girl of the night,” and of course the Beast himself.

   Daly is not known for literary niceties — his style can best be described as crude but effective — yet there is a certain fascination in his novels and his vigilante/detective.

   Characterization is minimal and action is everything. “Race Williams — Private Investigator — tells the whole story. Right! Let’s go.”

   Race Williams also appears in The Hidden Hand (1929) and Murder from the East (1935), among others. Daly created two other series characters, both of them rough-and-tumble types, although not in the same class with Williams: Vee Brown, hero of Murder Won’t Wait (1933) and Emperor of Evil (1937); and Satan Hall, who stars in The Mystery of the Smoking Gun (1936) and Ready to Burn (1951), the latter title having been published only in England.

         ———
   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.

Editorial Comment:   For a long expository commentary of the book as well as the author, see Mike Grost’s Classic Mystery and Detection website. Included is a breakdown of the novel into its singular parts as they appeared in Black Mask magazine.

CARROLL JOHN DALY – Murder From the East. Frederick A. Stokes, hardcover, 1935. Previously serialized (as individual stories) in Black Mask, May-June, August 1934. Paperback reprint: International Polygonics, 1978.

   Some books have everything — or nearly everything. Murder From the East is one of those. It has a bit of everything — the yellow peril, beautiful adventuresses, and tough guy private eyes.

   And as the latter goes, there was never anyone tougher than Race Williams. And if you don’t believe it, just ask him.

   So are we. But we shouldn’t be. Race Williams is the first private eye. True, Daly’s own Three Gun Terry Mack beat Race to the game, but Terry wasn’t a private eye, or a least never identified himself as one. He was an adventurer like Gordon Young’s tough gambler Don Everhard.

   Race is the first of his breed (not the first private detective, but the first in the hard-boiled mode) making his debut in the Ku Klux Klan issue of The Black Mask in “Knights of the Open Palm.” Some of the stories were pro Klan — Daly’s was anti.

   In Murder From the East Gregory Ford, who runs the biggest private detective agency in the city, is working for the government, and wants to hire Race to knock off a gunman who is gunning for Race anyway. But Race isn’t having any.

   But before the day is over the gunman has run down Race and met his just end. Then the man who hired the gunman shows up in Race’s office.

   His name is Count Jehdo, and he turns out to be from Astran, a country that is making trouble in Europe and Asia. He’s also involved in the “Torture Murders” the papers are screaming about.

   Pretty soon Race is in the pay of the General, the man behind Gregory Ford, and the trail leads Mark Yarrow, the man behind the torture murders and Astran’s crimes but even he doesn’t know about the Number 7 man, the General’s man inside the organization, and Race’s job is to destroy Yarrow while the Number 7 man brings down Jehdo.

   Then, who should show up but —

   The Flame and Race have been at this game for a while. She’s up to her neck in this new game and wants Race out of her way.

   But she has taken on more than a lover. She is now the Countess Jedho.

   The rest of the book precedes in a hail of gun smoke as Race thins the numbers of the organization and generally makes a nuisance of himself. He’s captured and tortured, but escapes thanks to the Flame and eventually smashes Yarrow and Jehdo and reveals the Number 7 man.

   Much has been written about Daly’s shortcomings as a writer, and most of it is true, but what is also true is that he wrote at a sort of white hot level straight from the hip, like the hot lead pouring from is blazing .45’s, and for all the melodrama, cliches and corn, there is a conviction to his best work that few writers ever managed.

   In terms of style and literary considerations he is a pale shadow of Hammett and Chandler, and he could never plot or even created characters as well as Erle Stanley Gardner, but he was the most popular writer at the famed Black Mask, and his name on the cover drove sales up every month.

   Time passed Daly and Race by. For a time his tales of Satan Hall, a Dirty Harry style cop, surpassed Race, and Race eventually fell from the Mask to lesser pulps as Daly’s career sagged. By his death in the 1950’s his books couldn’t find an American publisher.

   For a time Race Williams and Carroll John Daly were kings of the hard-boiled private eyes. If they lacked the graces of the better writers they still offered their own brand of thrills and action, and in their wake marched the Dan Turner’s, Mike Hammer’s, and Shell Scott’s that followed. If nothing else Daly influenced Mickey Spillane, and in Spillane had a lasting impact on the genre.

   Race and his creator are fairly insubstantial figures now, but once they were giants, and traces of their footprints still leave a trail. Park a few of your critical judgments and you can still find a good deal of enjoyment in Race’s adventures.

   You may not applaud the writing, but you are likely to stay for the sheer entertainment. Perhaps more than many of the better writers from Black Mask, the true voice of the pulps thunders in the exploits of the one of a kind Race Williams.

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE. Paramount Pictures, 1931. Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins, Rose Hobart, Holmes Herbert, Halliwell Hobbes, Edgar Norton, Tempe Pigott. Screenplay: Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath, based on the story by Robert Louis Stevenson. Director: Rouben Mamoulian.

   In 1931, two films were released that are still being shown in theaters and on television: James Whale’s Frankenstein and Tod Browning’s Dracula. Their great popularity initiated the horror cycle of the thirties.

   A third film was released that year whose subject was, like Frankenstein, the creation by a brilliant, eccentric scientist of a creature who threatens his creator’s life and sanity, but Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is director Rouben Mamoulian’s only horror film, and it has languished in relative obscurity,

   The film’s fluid, imaginative camera work, for which Mamoulian was noted, allies it to the best horror/fantasy films of the period as well as to the innovative musicals that were Mamoulian’s chief subjects in his long Hollywood career. It may be of some interest to note, in this respect, Whale’s direction of the 1936 Showboat, and to suggest that in their free use of non-realistic elements, the musical and horror films of the thirties are not unrelated.

   Mamoulian’s adaptation, like the other film versions of Robert L. Stevenson’s novella, places great emphasis on the laboratory and transformation scenes and, unlike the source, doesn’t attempt to conceal the nature of Hyde’s identity from the audience.

   (In Stevenson’ s story, Hyde is the evasive criminal whose secret Mr. Utterworth, the lawyer-investigator wryly calling himself Mr. Seek, sets out to uncover, making of the adventure at once a morality and a detection tale.)

   The laboratory is the conventional workshop of the thirties’ horror film, a classical locus that is at its most poetic and imaginative in Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein. It is also a dramatic stage which gives some slight plausibility to the drug-induced emergence of the Hyde personality.

   Mamoulian’ s principal interest is probably not in the horrific or suspenseful elements of the story, although his film is lacking in neither of these. His Hyde — a curious Simian-Negroid creation that may strike some viewers as a rather blatant ethnic stereotype — is certainly repulsive enough, but I think the director’s real subject is the consequences of the release of all inhibitions, his Hyde brooking no interference with any of his immediate needs and desires.

   This is most evident in the careful portrayal of the apparent distinction between Jekyll, the staid Victorian lover (even if unconventional scientist), and Hyde, the sensual, brutal lover whose pleasure is in a sadistic inflicting of pain on his mistress. And it is in the tactful but powerful depiction of Hyde’s relationship with his mistress (marvelously played by Miriam Hopkins) that the originality of this film in its relation to the horror film lies.

   The male/female relationships in the Hollywood horror films of the period tended to be chaste, unlike the franker treatment in other genre films: the rampant visual/sexual puns in the Busby Berkeley musicals, the poetic physicality of the Tarzan/Jane relationship in the first two MGM Weismuller/O’Sullivan films and Kong’s famous — and later edited — undressing of Fay Wray in King Kong.

   If one of the cherished memories — and cliches — of the monster chasing and sometimes carrying the heroine to a possible but never realized fate worse than death, the sexual play in these films is relatively tame.

   Not so in Mamoulian’s Jekyll. One of the best sequences — still memorable and unsettling is of Hyde’s unexpected return to his mistress’s chambers and his subsequent vicious teasing before he strangles her in a grim and deadly parody of the sexual embrace.

   It has often been said that the Horror of Dracula (Hammer Films, 1957) made explicit the eroticism of the vampire myth; what should also be pointed out — and perhaps for its irony — is that in the year that Browning’ s Dracula presented the classic version of the gentleman vampire, Mamoulian’s night-creature (like Dracula, freest and most powerful in his mistress’ s bedroom) tortured and teased and sexually abused his lover a way that the “mainstream” horror film would only dare to follow a quarter of a century later.

   The classic horror film has its narrative source in Victorian taboos and the way in which they are circumvented by the monster created in the laboratory or the grave. The vampire is the dark lover, the sensual bringer of pleasure and death, so unlike the correct, cardboard hero.

   In Mamoulian’s film, the hero and the villain inhabit the same body. His Jekyll (Fredric March) has been criticized for his wooden playing, but what has not to my knowledge been pointed out is the way in which, as Hyde increases in strength, Jekyll comes to resemble him.

   There is a striking scene when Jekyll returns home, free he thinks of Hyde but dressed in the cape and top-hat affected by his other self and in his extravagant gestures more like the exuberant Hyde than the controlled scientist.

   But, then, Hyde was never far from Jekyll as the scientist pursued his obsession with the separation of the dual self, an obsession whose consequences are finally as destructive as Hyde’s natural genius for evil.

   Early in the film, before Jekyll effects his first transformation, the good doctor treats a patient in her room. This patient is Ivy, the prostitute Hyde will pursue and kill, and as Jekyll takes his leave of her after they are surprised by his friend Lanyon in a passionate embrace, Ivy whispers seductively, “Come back,” and languorously, voluptuously moves her bare leg enticingly back and forth.

   Mamoulian superimposes the shot of her leg and the echo of her invitation over the following scene as the supposedly blameless Jekyll and his friend walk away from the apartment. Sex and science are both seductive siren calls, and the breaching of limits is fatal for both scientist and lover.

   Call Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a morality play, a scientific romance, a monster film with many of the genre’s conventions, a psychological flirtation with the mysteries of the self, this superbly crafted and haunting film is an artful extension of the possibilities of the horror film, and it has a power to disturb that still sets it apart from most other genre films of its time.

HOWARD BROWNE – Halo in Brass. Dennis McMillan, trade paperback, 1988. Originally published as by John Evans: Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1949; paperback reprint: Pocket #709, July 1950.

   Another Eastern writer besides Steve Fisher who hit it big in the movie and television industry of Hollywood was Howard Browne, whose movie credits included The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and who wrote television shows like Mission Impossible and The Rockford Files.

   Dennis McMillan Publications has recently reprinted one of Browne’s best books, Halo in Brass, which he originally published in 1949 as by John Evans.

   As Evans, Browne wrote a small series of books about Chicago private eye Paul Pine, and each is memorable. Brass concerns Pine’s efforts to find a young woman who disappeared after she left Nebraska to live in Chicago.

   It explores themes not generally written of in the mysteries of its era, but don’t read Browne-Evans just because he was ahead of his time. Read him because he was a remarkable story teller, one who was imaginative and who created one of the best first-person narrators in the long history of the private detective novel.

  THE MAN ON THE EIFFEL TOWER. RKO, 1949. Charles Laughton (Inspector Jules Maigret), Franchot Tone, Burgess Meredith, Robert Hutton, Jean Wallace, Patricia Roc, Belita.

 Screenplay: Harry Brown, based on the novel A Battle of Nerves (La Tete d’un Homme, Paris, 1931) by Georges Simenon. Director: Burgess Meredith.

   The Man on the Eiffel Tower can be picked up on DVD for about a buck at bargain stores, and it’s well worth the effort. Burgess Meredith took a one-time shot at directing this and stars as a myopic scissors-grinder set up to be the patsy when Franchot Tone commits murder-for-hire.

   Tone’s scheme works with creepy efficiency (A scene of Meredith stumbling about the murder scene looking for his smashed glasses prefigures the well-known Twilight Zone episode.) and Burgess seems headed for the Gallic equivalent of Slice-o-Matic till Inspector Maigret intuits the solution and sets about putting things right

   The plot moves swiftly and with some intelligence, but this is basically an actor’s movie — watch it to see Burgess Meredith’s hammy underplaying, or Franchot Tone’s manic-depressive killer, a brilliant Raskolnikov flinging himself up against Charles Laughton’s relaxed, authoritative Maigret/Porfiry, who realizes the only way to resolve the problem is to gently coax a confession from a psychotic.

   This felicitous mix of writing (courtesy of Harry Brown) directing and acting doesn’t come along all that often, and it provides here a deal of genuine pleasure for mystery fans and movie lovers like me.