WALLENDER. TV4, Sweden. Season 1 (13 episodes), 2005-2006. Krister Henriksson (Kurt Wallander), Fredrik Gunnarsson, Mats Bergman, Stina Ekblad, Marianne Mörck, Douglas Johansson, Johanna Sällström (Linda Wallander). Based on the characters created by Henning Mankell. (Shown with subtitles on BBC4.)

   The most enjoyable programme of the last few months, imho, has been Wallender, not the waffly Kenneth Branagh version but the Swedish version with Krister Henriksson in the title role.

   As I understand it the first in this series was originally made for cinemas, based on Hanning Mankell’s book about Kurt Wallender’s daughter Linda, Before the Frost (Innan frosten), in which the Inspector had only a secondary role. The rest of the 13 part series were made between 2005-2006 and based on plots provided by Mankell but turned into film by other scriptwriters.

   The BBC in their wisdom showed numbers 1 and 6 at the time of the Branagh adaptations and only later started to show the rest of the series. They are a refreshing change with excellent actors who manage to portray their characters as colleagues who go about their work in a natural way.

   The stories are strong and the programmes have been excellent. There has been much praise for the series in the press here, but for some reason the BBC temporarily stopped at number 10, with the final three shown later on.

Editorial Comment: Reports are that Season Two of the Swedish version will be broadcast on BBC4 sometime this coming spring, but without the late Johanna Sällström as Wallender’s daughter Linda.

JAMES MELVILLE – The Wages of Zen. Martin Secker & Warburg, Ltd., UK. hardcover, 1979. Methuen, US, hc, 1981. Reprint paperback: Ballantine/Fawcett Crest, paperback, 1985.

   In this first novel, Melville gives us a very human and very Japanese superintendent of police, Tetsuo Otani, in a case involving foreign students at a small Zen temple. Its priest, Okamoto, is a mysterious person who leads his students in za-zen by day and entertains prostitutes by night.

   The students are a mixed bag: male, female, old, young, Irish, English, American, Danish, hippie, conservative. Otani is called in first when it seems that drugs are being used or sold; next there is a murder.

   In the course of the investigation we are introduced to Otani’s wife, Hanae, and their happy home life, and to his associates in the police and even an Ambassador. The depiction of everyday Japanese life is interesting, and Otani’s thought processes as he attempts to deal with these foreigners and their strange ways are enlightening. Seeing our Western ways through Eastern eyes is quite an experience.

   An enjoyable book.

The Superintendent Tetsuo Otani series  [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin] —

       The Wages of Zen (n.) Secker 1979
       The Chrysanthemum Chain (n.) Secker 1980
       A Sort of Samurai (n.) Secker 1981

       The Ninth Netsuke (n.) Secker 1982

       Sayonara, Sweet Amaryllis (n.) Secker 1983
       Death of a Daimyo (n.) Secker 1984
       The Death Ceremony (n.) Secker 1985
       Go Gently, Gaijin (n.) Secker 1986
       Kimono for a Corpse (n.) Secker 1987
       The Reluctant Ronin (n.) Headline 1988
       A Haiku for Hanae (n.) Headline 1989

       The Bogus Buddha (n.) Headline 1990
       The Body Wore Brocade (n.) Little Brown 1992

A. A. FAIR [Erle Stanley Gardner] – Crows Can’t Count.

William Morrow, hardcover, 1946. Paperback reprints include: Dell 472, mapback edition, 1950; Dell D373, McGinnis cover art, September 1960 (shown); Dell 1625, September 1972.

   Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, two of the best-named characters in American crime fiction, are hired by the trustee of an estate to find out why an emerald necklace belonging to the estate has gone missing. Complications ensue when the other trustee is murdered, leaving behind a pet crow whose behavior is the key to the title.

   This is as irritating a well-crafted book as one might encounter. The plot is convoluted, with the motives and behavior of several completely offstage characters playing important roles. A portion of the book takes place in Colombia, and south-of-the-border stereotypes are pervasive. Bertha Cool comes across as completely useless.

   As an example of craft, here’s how Lam describes a meal:

   Gardner is worth reading, but this one is for completists.

Previously reviewed on this blog:

      Crows Can’t Count (by Steve Lewis)
      Owls Don’t Blink (by Marcia Muller)
      Kept Women Can’t Quit (by Steve Lewis)

REGINALD HILL – Midnight Fugue. HarperCollins, US, hardcover, October 2009. British edition: HarperCollins, hc, 2009.

   Supt. Andy Dalziel has just spent his first week on the job since recovering from injuries he received in Death Comes for the Fat Man. He heads out one Sunday morning, thinking it was Monday, as his telephone was ringing, and winds up in Church where he is approached by Gina Wolfe, who was following him. Unbeknownst to them both, she was being followed by the sister and brother team of Fleur and Vince Delay.

   Gina has come to Yorkshire to ask Andy about her husband Alex, an Inspector at the Met who disappeared almost seven years ago. This was shortly after their daughter had died from leukemia and while he was under suspicion of having relayed information to a black man under investigation named Goldie Gidman. Gidman’s son Dean is now a Tory Member of Parliament and a rising young star of the party (a British Obama since his mother is white) expecting to one day be Prime Minister.

   Now Gina is about to have her husband declared legally dead when she receives a photo in the mail showing Alex in a crowd of onlookers during a visit to Yorkshire by a minor Royal. Gina wants Andy’s unofficial help in finding out if Alex is still alive, while the Delays, in the employ of Goldie Gidman, are also after Alex to silence him permanently.

   It’s always a pleasure to read another Dalziel and Pascoe novel by Mr. Hill, my favorite living crime novelist. Outstanding characterization and clever plotting are in abundance here, and he out-does 24 in that all the action takes place in 18 hours of the same day. Here is also a wonderful ending with Andy restored, in the eyes of his subordinates, back at the top of the Yorkshire Police, and a surprising coda that supplies the justice the law can’t provide.

Previously reviewed on this blog:

   Ruling Passion (by Steve Lewis)

“Crimson Witness.” An episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (Season 3, Episode 12). First air date: 4 January 1965. Peter Lawford, Martha Hyer, Roger C. Carmel, Julie London, Joanna Moore, Alan Baxter, Paul Comi, Larry Thor. Teleplay: Morton S. Fine and David Friedkin. Story: Nigel Elliston. Director: David Friedkin.

   If anybody ever had a strong motivation to commit murder, it’s Ernie Mullett (Peter Lawford), the plant manager of a large firm.

   Ernie’s brother Farnum (Roger C. Carmel) has practically replaced him in everyone’s estimation. His boss (Alan Baxter) has demoted Ernie from manager, putting Farnum in his stead. Ernie’s wife Judith (or Judy — note that name, it’ll prove to be important — played by Martha Hyer) has fallen for Farnum. Even Ernie’s gorgeous secretary and mistress Barbara (Julie London) finds Farnum irresistible. It’s enough to drive a body mad with jealousy, and that’s just what it does.

   Exactly how Ernie deals with this intolerable situation constitutes the remaining three fourths of the play — but I would urge you to pay close attention to the flowers that thread in and out of the story because ultimately they will prove fateful ….

   And you can see Ernie exact revenge on Hulu.

   Even more so than “See the Monkey Dance” (reviewed here ) this episode features a script that sparkles with wit, and all the performers seem to work to achieve it. Morton Fine wrote many episodes for I Spy, The Most Deadly Game, Kojak, The Streets of San Francisco, and one for Banacek (“The Vanishing Chalice”). He often teamed with David Friedkin on their TV projects.

   Peter Lawford has the distinction of playing Ellery Queen in the ’70s pilot for a new series (Ellery Queen: Don’t Look Behind You); he also featured in the original Ocean’s Eleven (1960), as well as playing Nick Charles in 72 episodes of The Thin Man TV series (1957-59).

   Roger C. Carmel was good at playing scoundrels; he was “that insufferable, unprincipled kulak” Harry Mudd in three Star Trek episodes. Beautiful Julie London was in The Fat Man (1951) and Crime Against Joe (1956, and reviewed here ), as well as enjoying a long run on the Emergency TV series.

   And we previously talked about Joanna Moore’s appearance in The Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode “Who Needs an Enemy?”

HELEN WEST. British TV mini-series: 3 x 90m, ITV1. Episode One: “Deep Sleep” 6 May 2002. Amanda Burton (Helen West), Conor Mullen (Chief Supt. Bailey); with Annabelle Apsion, Dermot Crowley, Harry Eden, Ian Puleston-Davies. Based on the novel by Frances Fyfield.

   In Frances Fyfields’s mystery novels — there are six of them in which Superintendent Bailey teams up with prosecuting attorney Helen West as a top notch crime solving team — his first name is Geoffrey, but I’m not sure whether came up in the TV show or not.

   The three episodes are available in the US as a boxed set entitled The Helen West Casebook. The other two in the set are also based on Ms. Fyfield’s novels:

       1. 06 May 2002. Deep Sleep
       2. 13 May 2002. Shadow Play.
       3. 20 May 2003. A Clear Conscience

   An earlier book was also adapted for television: Trial by Fire (1999); in this one Juliet Stevenson and Jim Carter played the two leading roles. This unaccountably leaves the first book in the series (A Question of Guilt) and the last (Without Consent) as never having been filmed.

   What all this means is that in “Deep Sleep,” based on the third of the novels, we (the viewers) are plunged straight into the series without much introduction, with Helen West undergoing and recovering from surgery and straight into the arms of her lover, Superintendent Bailey. (As a side comment, I cannot see any conflict of interest there, but their public smooching sometimes borders on the unprofessional.)

   I was going to say that maybe they do things differently in England, but I can’t, since maybe they do in this country also, and I just haven’t been paying attention. Dead in this one, though, is the wife of a well-loved pharmacist. Her passing is all but considered to be of natural causes, but a noticeable amount of chloroform in her blood keeps Helen from closing the case.

   Making the story a little more complicated is the fact that the pharmacist’s assistant, whom he seems to have eyes for, is the former wife of one of the officers under Bailey’s command == and the officer in question is not reconciled with the separation, not at all.

   There is also the matter of a kidnapped child, the suspicious death of a neighborhood junkie, and an unexploded bomb discovered while tearing down a row of worn-out tenement buildings.

   It all adds up to a lot of story, as perhaps you can tell. While Helen West takes a rather small role, surprisingly enough, when all is said and done, all of the activity in it certainly revolves about her. Even though this particular episode is far more a crime thriller than it is a work of detective fiction, I enjoyed it anyway. I’ve not watched the other two films in this set, but I shall, and quickly too.

RICHARD SALE – Not Too Narrow, Not Too Deep.   Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1936. Paperback reprints: Armed Services Edition #S-7, 1940s. Popular Library 247, 1950.

Strange Cargo. MGM, 1940.   Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Ian Hunter, Peter Lorre, Paul Lukas, Albert Dekker, J. Edward Bromberg, Eduardo Ciannelli. Screenplay: Lawrence Hazard, based on the novel Not Too Narrow, Not Too Deep, by Richard Sale. Director: Frank Borzage.

   I’m a deeply spiritual person, in my own shallow, materialistic way, so as the Holidays drew near, I elected to read/ watch something morally uplifting and settled on Richard Sale’s Not Too Narrow, Not Too Deep and the movie made from it, Strange Cargo.

   Sale’s book is a taut, gritty, down-and-dirty parable of redemption, dealing Fate to ten convicts trying to escape from a tropical prison hell, written in spare, evocative prose, and filled with action and suspense that somehow doesn’t cheapen the story. It’s also populated with a colorful cast of well-wrought characters, some of whom surprised me from time to time.

   Unlike most parables, Narrow doesn’t shirk from things that were considered shocking in its time, like homosexuality, and pedophilia (still pretty shocking today, but no longer taboo in literature). In short, this is a one-of-a-kind thing, and I recommend it to anyone looking for a good read a little off the beaten path.

   A few years after it was published, Narrow got the MGM treatment, released as Strange Cargo, and should have been an unmitigated disaster, what with Joan Crawford written into the story (by Anita Loos, no less) to redo her Sadie Thompson bit, Clark Gable as an unrepentant and very virile heel, plus a cast of familiar character actors including Albert Dekker, Peter Lorre, Eduardo Cianelli, J. Edward Bromberg and Ian Hunter as the mysterious figure who somehow dominates the action despite Gable and Crawford.

   In fact, this is surprisingly a very effective film, thanks mostly to director Frank Borzage, who steers it deftly between schmaltz and pretentiousness, getting powerful performances from the stars but never letting them run away with the story. And there’s a fine bit from Paul Lukas as a satanic convict not in the book. The scene where he parts company with Hunter and the rest of the group, like an angel cast out of heaven, is one of those creepy, unforgettable movie moments that carry real dramatic weight.

   As a footnote, I might add that despite some cheap sops to the censors, this film was condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency, I think because it depicts God as a nice guy who tries to help out when he can.

   I agree wholeheartedly with the review Steve Lewis recently did of Goldsmith’s Detour. It’s every bit as fine as the much-lauded film version (which follows the novel’s progression fairly closely), and unputdownable once begun.

   It so happens I have a copy of Double Jeopardy, which I’ve read and which is excellent if not quite as good as Detour. I thought everyone might like to see a scan of the jacket of the earlier book; it’s included here, as is one of the first edition of Detour. Both books were published by Macaulay.

   Here’s the dust jacket blurb for Double Jeopardy, in its entirety:

   Amen to that last line.

   Goldsmith’s third and final novel, Shadows at Noon (Ziff-Davis, 1943), is a dark wartime fantasy that examines what might have happened to a disparate group of ordinary citizens if Nazi bombers had actually penetrated U.S. air space and dumped their payloads on a large American city. Interesting, but not nearly as good as his two crime novels.

   Goldsmith spent some twenty years in Hollywood, beginning in the mid 40s, where one of his first film scripts was for the film version of Detour. He later scripted several other B films and wrote for episodic TV. Another of his films was The Narrow Margin, the well-regarded 1952 version; he also wrote an episode of The Twilight Zone. His other claim to fame is that he was married to Anthony Quinn’s sister.

MARTIN M. GOLDSMITH – Detour: An Extraordinary Tale.

O’Bryan House, Publishers; trade paperback, 2005. Hardcover edition: Macauley Co., 1939.

   The people behind O’Bryan House, and that includes Richard Doody who wrote the introduction, have done the fans of noir fiction a tremendous favor in reprinting this book. If you are thinking, “What book?” and I imagine many of you are, you are in exactly the same position I was when I first heard about it.

   Now of course there is the Movie Version, which perhaps you have heard of. If there ever were a poll of noir film fans, the film that is based on this book would have to rank in the top two or three of all time. Forgive me, though, if I don’t review the movie, although I will have to admit that scenes from it were continually in my head when I was reading the book. I’ll review the book, though, if you so allow, and whatever movie you’re thinking of, I never heard of it.

   Let me get back to the “favor” that I mentioned in the first paragraph. There are [at the time of this writing] two copies of the First Edition on ABE, neither of which has a dust jacket. The asking price for the first is $2500, and no, I did not lose the decimal point, so you can get up off your hands and knees and stop looking for it. The second copy is a mere $3500, but that one is signed by Mr. Goldsmith, who died in 1994, with a long inscription, so it is probably worth the money.

   There may be other ways to obtain the paperback edition, but one good way may be to order it from Amazon, and at an even more reasonable $14.95. There should be other outlets where it’s available, and it’s a bargain price, no matter the venue.

   To get started on the review, though, I hope that you don’t mind if I simply start off by quoting to you the first four paragraphs or so.

   Once again, if you are a fan of noir fiction, and if you were to tell me that you could put the book down after reading this, most of the first page, frankly, I wouldn’t believe you.

   One way or another, you’d be lying to me. Either you’re no fan of noir fiction, or you’re picking the book back up again when I’m not looking.

   Telling this first part of the story is a down-on-his-luck jazz musician named Alex Roth. He is heading for California, and Hollywood in particular, since that is where his former live-in girl friend, Sue Harvey, has headed before him, only a week or ten days before they were to have gotten married. (She is the impulsive type, Alex tells the reader.)

   Picking him up in the grey roadster is Charles Haskell, who has a wad of money in his billfold and who is not long for this world. His untimely death is an accident, but Alex knows that no one will believe him, given that small incident (thirty days) in Dallas, and given that he and Haskell do look alike… Well, you get the picture.

   Backing up just a little, from page 32:

   In the meantime, Sue herself is not doing so well. From pages 47-48, she expresses to the reader her distinctly discouraged view of Hollywood, where she is getting by (barely) as a waitress, and not as the star she had thought she was destined to be.

   Or if so, not yet:

   Goldsmith is less convincing as the voice of Sue Harvey than he is speaking as Alex Roth, but his portrayal of her is solidly etched in weariness and desire, and if one of the two of his two leading characters were to be considered hard-boiled, you have to know that it is not Alex.

   And returning to that half of the story, the reader’s brain will yell out in warning (but to no avail) when Alex, in turn, picks up a hitch-hiker, female, a woman named Vera, and man, does the story explode from there, eventually taking a leap with one staggering coincidence that exceeds even the often crazy incoherence of a Cornell Woolrich short story or novel, but in this kind of story, the stops are usually pulled all of the way out, and if they weren’t, you’d complain.

   Backing up one more time, from page 84, after Vera has agreed to the lift, saying as she gets in, “Los Angeles is good enough for me, mister.”

   These are the players. What you have just read includes considerably more quoting than I usually do, but there is little here, I guarantee you, that you will not glean from reading the few sentences of descriptive material on the back cover. There is plenty of story left, and on very nearly every one of the 158 pages in this book, there is another passage as quotable as any one of these.

   To my mind, this is the great undiscovered American novel, told from the underside, and somehow in its understated raciness, marvelously reminiscent of those rather notorious pre-Code days at the movies. Which brings us back around to one of my opening comments. They did make a movie out of this book, did you know?

   Although Martin M. Goldsmith was a successful novelist, screenwriter and playwright, the details of his private life are not well known. By all accounts Goldsmith preferred it that way. When his publisher asked him what they should tell their readers about his life, the author replied that it was enough to say that he was there yesterday, here today and “… God knows where I’ll be tomorrow.”

   What is known is that Martin Goldsmith was born in New York City in 1913. Over the course of his life he rarely lived in one place for long and in 1928, while still in his mid-teens, he left New York “via the thumb route” to see the rest of America. His writing career began a few years later with the publication of several short stories. By the late 1930’s Goldsmith was in Mexico, where he wrote his first book, Double Jeopardy, a crime novel published by the Macaulay Company of New York.

   In 1938, the author moved to Hollywood, hoping to write for films. To break into the film industry he took a job as a stage hand and used the opportunity to see how films were made. During his first year in Hollywood, Goldsmith completed work on the manuscript that would become Detour. Unlike the film version of Detour, the novel features two characters who live on the fringes of the Hollywood dream – Sue Harvey, a would-be actress working as a waitress at a local drive-in and Raoul Kildare, a bit-player who plans to leave Hollywood to try his luck on Broadway.

   In its final form the book has a tough and hard-boiled writing style, one often identified with the likes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. When Detour was published by Macaulay in January of 1939, the New York Times called it “… a red hot, fast-stepping little number…” and favorably compared it to the works of James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity.

   In 1944 Goldsmith sold the film rights to Detour to the Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), with the understanding that he would be hired to write the screenplay. The author finished writing the screenplay before the hiring of director Edgar G. Ulmer, the person most often credited with the film’s success. Operating under a tight budget and with little known actors, Ulmer shot the fIlm in less than a week, relying heavily on Goldsmith’s detailed script. Released in 1945, the film version of Detour is recognized as a masterpiece of film noir. In 1992 the film was selected by the Library of Congress for entry into the National Film Registry.

   In all, Goldsmith received screen credit for work on twelve films including Dangerous Intruder, Blind Spot, Shakedown, and Hell’s Island. He wrote two other novels, Shadows at Noon, a fictional account of an enemy attack on Manhattan, published in 1943, and a comic novel, The Miraculous Fish of Domingo Gonzalez, published in 1950.

   In 1952 he received an Academy Award nomination for contributing the story for the crime film, The Narrow Margin. During these years he also wrote for television, turning out episodes of The Twilight Zone, Gunsmoke and Playhouse 90.

   Despite his success as a screenwriter, Goldsmith eventually tired of writing for films and television and in the mid 1960’s he gave it up to spend more time traveling with his wife and writing books. His last works included an unpublished autobiography and a play entitled Night Shift, which ran for 24 performances at the Labor Theater in New York in the fall of 1977. After a long period of declining health, Martin M. Goldsmith died on May 24, 1994.

NOTE: This short biography of Mr. Goldsmith is also the foreword to the current reissue of Detour by O’Bryan House, Publishers LLC, the first American paperback edition of this classic crime novel. It is reprinted here with the permission of Mr. Doody.