● La chute de la maison Usher. [The Fall of the House of Usher.] Films Jean Epstein, 1928. Silent. Jean Debucourt, Marguerite Gance, Charles Lamy, Fournez-Goffard, Luc Dartagnan. Based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe; adaptation by Luis Buñuel. Screenwriter-director: Jean Epstein.

● The Fall of the House of Usher. G.I.B., 1949. Gwen Watford, Kay Tendeter, Irving Steen, Vernon Charles. Based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe. Director: Ivan Barnett.

● The Queen of Spades. Associated British Picture Corp., 1949. Anton Walbrook, Edith Evans, Yvonne Mitchell, Ronald Howard, Mary Jerrold. Based on the short story by Alexander Pushkin. Director: Thorold Dickinson.

   After The Phantom of the Opera [reviewed here ] I followed up with two versions of The Fall of the House of Usher: first, a French silent film from 1928 by Jean Epstein and Luis Buñuel (whom I hold responsible for frequent meaningless cutsaway to shots of frogs enjoying a night of passion) and secondly, the British quota quickie from 1949.

   I recommend both films to viewers who can enjoy a creepy mood for its own sake, and ignore some (well, a lot… make that an awful lot of) narrative deficiencies. The ’49 film in particular suffers from a bad script, dreadful acting and low budget, but it conveys such a sense of absolute horror that I find myself shuddering, even after repeated viewings.

   The Queen of Spades, made the same year, in the same country as the second House, is in fact its polar opposite: lavishly produced and directed, brilliantly written and acted, it’s a film I can recommend to anyone who loves a fine, gothic chiller, with ghosts, obsession and satanic bargains.

   And it also has a used bookstore.

      

BILL CRIDER – Murder in Four Parts. St. Martin’s, hardcover; First edition: February 2009.

    In his sixteenth adventure, Sheriff Dan Rhodes finds himself getting recruited into the Clearview (Texas) Community Barbershop Chorus. The group can’t be called a “quartet” because it has more than four members.

    But they do specialize in traditional “barbershop” music sung in four-part harmonies. And the chorus quickly finds its numbers diminishing when the chorus director is found beaten to death in his floral shop.

    As usual, Sheriff Rhodes is up to his eyebrows in problems: the murder of florist and chorus director Lloyd Berry; controversy over whether citizens should be permitted to keep chickens in their back yards within Clearview city limits; a turf war between two dumpster-divers; trouble at the local legal-gambling establishment; and (in true Crider spirit) an alligator loose in a drainage ditch.

    The dialogue is often laugh-out-loud funny while unpretentiously realistic. The characters are at once slapstick, while at the same time people that we all know. There’s math professor C.P. Benton, a perpetual braggart and a folksinger who claims skills in anything from the martial arts to computer security, and who has his eye on the female deputy.

    There’s music store owner Max Schwartz, who has branched out into the restaurant trade, but can’t decide whether to spell out “barbecue” or write it as “BBQ.” There’s Tom Fulton, owner of a store specializing in GPS receivers (“Tom’s Tomtoms”) who has a GPS joke for every occasion.

    And of course there is Lawton, the Blacklin County jailer, and Hack Jenson, the county police dispatcher, who carry on like Abbott and Costello.

    Murder in Four Parts leads Sheriff Rhodes through more twists and turns than a country lane with a plot that seems to tie together gambling, embezzlement, geocaching, and waste disposal, and ends with a daring chase that takes Rhodes through a dark and muddy mesquite field and atop a moving train.

    As with all of Crider’s books, this is a delight. By the end you’re likely to be humming harmonies to “Shine on Me” and “The Old Mill Stream.” A melodic masterpiece.

   John Herrington, who recently has been researching the careers of the many authors who wrote for the British publisher Robert Hale over the years, recently sent Al Hubin and myself word of the passing last month (on October 18th) of one of the more prolific of them, James Pattinson, 1915-2009.

   A list of the some one hundred or more books he wrote is included below. (This list has been expanded from that in the Revised Crime Fiction IV to include a few that have been published later than the year 2000 and therefore beyond the coverage of CFIV.)

   Only a handful of these books have been published in the US, making him all but unknown in this country.

   Says John about Pattinson’s novels: “I have read a lot of them. Not great or classics, but good readable thrillers, sea and war stories. Apparently, apart from time he served in the war, he lived in the same house in a Norfolk village all his life.”

   The death of a crime fiction writer with as many books as James Pattinson produced should not go unnoted. A list of his life’s output, fictionwise, may be a small tribute in some way, but it is a long list. (Note: The first three are war novels not included in CFIV. Thanks to Jamie Sturgeon for providing these, as well as three of the covers you will see below.)

* Soldier, Sail North (n.) Harrap, 1954 [non-criminous]
* The Wheel of Fortune (n.) Harrap, 1955 [non-criminous]
* Last in Convoy (n.) Harrap, 1957 [non-criminous]

* The Mystery of the Gregory Kotovsky (n.) Harrap 1958 [Ship]
* Contact Mr. Delgado (n.) Harrap 1959 [Harvey Landon; Ship]
* -Across the Narrow Seas (n.) Harrap 1960 [1944]
* Wild Justice (n.) Harrap 1960 [Ship]
* The Liberators (n.) Harrap 1961 [Harvey Landon]
* On Desperate Seas (n.) Harrap 1961 [Ship; WWII]
* The Angry Island (n.) Hale 1968 [West Indies]
* The Last Stronghold (n.) Hale 1968 [Harvey Landon; South America]
* Find the Diamonds (n.) Hale 1969
* The Golden Reef (n.) Hale 1969
* The Plague Makers (n.) Hale 1969
* Whispering Death (n.) Hale 1969
* The Deadly Shore (n.) Hale 1970

* The Rodriguez Affair (n.) Hale 1970

* Three Hundred Grand (n.) Hale 1970 [Caribbean]
* The Murmansk Assignment (n.) Hale 1971 [Russia]
* Sea Fury (n.) Hale 1971
* The Sinister Stars (n.) Hale 1971 [Harvey Landon]
* Watching Brief (n.) Hale 1971
* Away with Murder (n.) Hale 1972 [Amsterdam, Netherlands]
* Ocean Prize (n.) Hale 1972
* Weed (n.) Hale 1972
* A Fortune in the Sky (n.) Hale 1973
* The Marakano Formula (n.) Hale 1973
* Search Warrant (n.) Hale 1973 [Sam Grant; U.S.]
* Cordley’s Castle (n.) Hale 1974
* The Haunted Sea (n.) Hale 1974 [Ship]

* The Petronov Plan (n.) Hale 1974 [Brazil]

* Crusader’s Cross (n.) Hale 1975 [Greece]
* Feast of the Scorpion (n.) Hale 1975
* Freedman (n.) Hale 1975
* The Honeymoon Caper (n.) Hale 1976 [Finland]
* A Real Killing (n.) Hale 1976 [Sam Grant]

* Special Delivery (n.) Hale 1976 [England; France]
* A Walking Shadow (n.) Hale 1976

* Final Run (n.) Hale 1977
* The No-Risk Operation (n.) Hale 1977
* The Spanish Hawk (n.) Hale 1977 [Caribbean]
* Blind Date (n.) Hale 1978

* Something of Value (n.) Hale 1978 [Sam Grant]
* Ten Million Dollar Cinch (n.) Hale 1978 [Caribbean]
* The Courier Job (n.) Hale 1979
* The Rashevski Ikon (n.) Hale 1979
* Red Exit (n.) Hale 1979
* Busman’s Holiday (n.) Hale 1980
* The Levantine Trade (n.) Hale 1980
* The Spayde Conspiracy (n.) Hale 1980
* The Antwerp Appointment (n.) Hale 1981 [Antwerp, Belgium]
* The Seven Sleepers (n.) Hale 1981
* Stride (n.) Hale 1981
* A Fatal Errand (n.) Hale 1982
* Lethal Orders (n.) Hale 1982
* The Stalking Horse (n.) Hale 1982
* A Car for Mr. Bradley (n.) Hale 1983
* Flight to the Sea (n.) Hale 1983
* The Kavulu Lion (n.) Hale 1983
* Dead of Winter (n.) Hale 1984
* Precious Cargo (n.) Hale 1984 [Ship]
* The Saigon Merchant (n.) Hale 1984 [London]
* -Come Home, Toby Brown (n.) Hale 1985
* Homecoming (n.) Hale 1985 [England]
* Life-Preserver (n.) Hale 1985 [England]
* The Syrian Client (n.) Hale 1986 [Sam Grant]
* Where the Money Is (n.) Hale 1986
* Dangerous Enchantment (n.) Hale 1987 [Sam Grant]
* A Dream of Madness (n.) Hale 1987
* Paradise in the Sun (n.) Hale 1987
* The Junk Run (n.) Hale 1988
* Legatee (n.) Hale 1988 [Sam Grant]
* Dishonour Among Thieves (n.) Hale 1989
* Killer (n.) Hale 1989
* Operation Zenith (n.) Hale 1989
* Dead Men Rise Up Never (n.) Hale 1990 [England; 1938]

* Poisoned Chalice (n.) Hale 1990
* The Spoilers (n.) Hale 1990 [Central America]
* Devil Under the Skin (n.) Hale 1991 [England]

* With Menaces (n.) Hale 1991

* The Animal Gang (n.) Hale 1992 [England]

* Steel (n.) Hale 1992
* Bavarian Sunset (n.) Hale 1993 [Germany]
* The Emperor Stone (n.) Hale 1993
* Fat Man from Colombia (n.) Hale 1993
* Lady from Argentina (n.) Hale 1994
* The Telephone Murders (n.) Hale 1994
* The Poison Traders (n.) Hale 1995
* Squeaky Clean (n.) Hale 1995
* Avenger of Blood (n.) Hale 1996
* A Wind on the Heath (n.) Hale 1996 [England; 1930s]
* One-Way Ticket (n.) Hale 1997
* The Time of Your Life (n.) Hale 1997
* Death of a Go-Between (n.) Hale 1998 [Sam Grant; Amsterdam, Netherlands; London]
* Some Job (n.) Hale 1998 [West Indies]
* Skeleton Island (n.) Hale 1999 [Florida]
* The Wild One (n.) Hale 1999 [England]
* A Passage of Arms (n.) Hale 2000 [Far East]
* Old Pal’s Act (n.) Hale 2001
* Crane (n.) Hale 2001
* Obituary for Howard Gray (n.) Hale 2003
* Bullion (n.) Hale 2004
* The Unknown (n.) Hale 2008

[UPDATE] 11-11-09. The photo of Mr Pattinson came from the back cover or dust jacket flap of one of his books and was sent to me by Jamie Sturgeon. Jamie also sent along a host of updated information about settings and additional series character appearances. I haven’t added them here, but Al Hubin has them now, and they appear in the next installment of the online Addenda to the Revised CFIV.

MATTHEW PEARL – The Last Dickens. Random House, hardcover, March 2009; trade paperback, October 2009.

   Matthew Pearl has continued his excursions into nineteenth-century historical fiction begun with The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow with The Last Dickens — a meticulously researched account of events, both real and imagined, that follow upon the sudden death of author Charles Dickens, with only six episodes of his detective novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, completed.

   J. T. Fields, senior partner in the firm of Fields, Osgood & Co., Dickens’ American publishers, on the slender hope that a completed manuscript might exist, dispatches his energetic junior partner, James R. Osgood, accompanied by Rebecca Sands, the company’s bookkeeper, to England, where they pursue their quest with increasing urgency, and danger to themselves.

   The novel spans several years (from 1867, the year of Dickens’ last American visit, to 1870, the year of the writer’s death), and three continents. The novel begins in India, with its harvesting of opium under British supervision for an international market, providing what appears to be a diversion from the main trajectory of the novel.

   Then, as the suspense mounts in the pursuit of the elusive and possibly non-existent manuscript, leading Osgood into the opium dens of London, the implications of the events in far-off India become all too clear.

   Anyone who thinks that modern drug trafficking, with its attendant horrors, is a recent phenomenon, will be astonished at its prevalence in the 19th century. Sherlock Holmes’ “eccentric” drug usage had significant contemporary relevance, and the poppy fields of India are the backdrop against which the events of the novel play out

   There are elements that seem fanciful, such as the stalking of Dickens by a deranged Boston female fan (for which, in fact, there is some historical evidence), but the novel easily sheds the manufactured air that can beset historical novels.

   The often bloody wars between rival publishing houses, in a era when America offered no copyright protection for foreign writers, are vividly presented, with the rivalry between Fields and Harper generating much of the dramatic heat of the novel. But if the plot is intricately (and cleverly) laid out, the characters are never subservient to it.

   Finally, I read Pearl’s notes on his sources for the novel with as much interest as I did the novel itself. They answered many of the questions I might have raised about the authenticity of the narrative, with an imaginary dialogue between Pearl and James Osgood a particular delight.

   For me, the dialogue highlighted Matthew Pearl’s ability to create a sense of immediacy that bridges the temporal gap between the 19th and 21st centuries. This may be historical fiction, but it’s history that’s brought to vivid life by the author.

   
CLEVE F. ADAMS – Shady Lady. Ace Double D-115, paperback original, 1955. [Paired back-to-back with One Got Away, by Harry Whittington.]

   Adams is one of mystery fiction’s shadow figures. Born in 1895, he began selling to pulp mystery magazines in the mid-1930s, broke into hardcover novels at the end of the decade, and wrote most of his novels in a burst of creativity (and of recycling earlier pulp tales) during World War II. In these respects, his career paralleled that of Raymond Chandler.

   But unlike Chandler, Adams is today largely forgotten, even though he forged his own distinctive image of the private detective.

    The Adams eye is a sort of prose incarnation of Humphrey Bogart that predates Bogey’s movie detectives, but with more stress on the brutality and cynicism and less on the sentimental heart. He has a capacity for long, brooding silences, sudden ribald laughter, mad fury, and aloof arrogance. His features are wolfish and satanic and he often slaps women around during his maniacal fits of rage.

   He’s a racist, a fascist, and a hypocrite, but a tender ballad brings tears to his eyes. In one word, he’s an oaf, deliberately drawn by Adams so as to pull the rug out from under Chandler’s romantic image of the PI as a contemporary knight.

   Most of Adams’s novels depend on a stock company of recurring characters, mannerisms, scenes, plot elements, even tag lines of description and dialogue. He was an expert at borrowing story lines from Dashiell Hammett, rewriting Red Harvest three times and The Glass Key twice.

   But even when he coasted on the most familiar gambits in hard-boiled literature, he showed a genius for juggling diverse groups of shady characters, each with his or her own greedy objective.

   Right after Christmas 1949, Adams died of a heart attack. His pulp writer buddies Robert Leslie Bellem and W.T. Ballard helped out his widow by finishing his last novel. One version, entitled “Too Fair to Die,” appeared in the March 1951 issue of Two Complete Detective Books magazine, and four years later Ace Books published a more polished draft as the paperback original Shady Lady.

   It turned out to be the finest work of Adams’s career.

   Like many of his earlier novels, among the best of which are Sabotage (1940), Decoy (1941), and Up Jumped the Devil (1943), Shady Lady stars a shamus named Rex McBride.

   In this adventure he trails a missing embezzler’s girlfriend from Los Angeles to the mining metropolis of Copper Hill, Montana, arriving just in time to become involved in a vicious gubernatorial primary, a love affair with two sisters, and a string of murders.

   The plot is plagued with loose ends like many Adams efforts, but the book is so overflowingly rich in character sketches and powerful understated scenes that one is compelled to believe either that Bellem and Ballard contributed huge amounts to the manuscript or that, had he lived longer, Adams might have developed into a talent of near-Chandleresque dimensions. The electoral contest provides a marvelous setting for Adams’s ghoulish cynicism about American politics.

   In his seminal essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” Chandler argued that the PI novel requires a knightly hero to redeem the corrupt milieu. Adams disagreed violently, and in his world the protagonist is not a hero and no less corrupt than anyone else, just tougher and luckier. Repulsive the Adams eye may be, but he’s frighteningly hard to forget.

         ———
   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.

JAMES ANDERSON – Assault and Matrimony.

Doubleday/Crime Club, hardcover, 1981. UK edition: Frederick Muller Ltd., hc, 1980. TV movie: NBC, 1987 (with Jill Eikenberry & Michael Tucker).

   On the surface, Sylvia and Edgar Chambers have a marriage that is too good to be true. In fact, it isn’t. Unknown to either, each hates the other with a passion, and it takes only a nudge to send them both completely over the edge.

   The comedy of errors that quickly follows is deeply tinged in black. Each of these two basically unlikeable people tries in fierce desperation to kill the other — and any innocent bystanders who happen to be wandering by — and yet neither of them quite manages to succeed.

   There is not an ounce of conscience between them. It would not be at all difficult for the easily disillusioned reader to become completely exasperated with both of them, giving up with disgust at the seemingly endless variety of their elaborately structured plots.

   Fortunately, the ending is even more clever and complex, surpassing anything either of them has come up with before then. It’s a challenge, but it’s also well worth the wait.

[UPDATE] 11-03-09. I still have the book but not the patience to find out which of many, many boxes in the basement it could possibly be in. It’s a shame, too, as the ending (as I’ve described it) intrigues me. Do I remember it? In a word, no, I don’t. (That’s a heck of a thing, isn’t it?)

   James Anderson, a British author, made a specialty in his early career of writing books whose titles begin with the letter “A” (The Alpha List, Angel of Death, Appearance of Evil, Assassin and so on).

   Later on he wrote three well-regarded detective mysteries taking place in the 1930s and solved by Inspector Wilkins (e.g., The Affair of the Blood-Stained Egg-Cosy) and three Murder, She Wrote novelizations (with Jessica Fletcher).

[UPDATE #2.] 11-11-09. Thanks to Jamie Sturgeon for sending me the cover image at the top of this review. It’s from the Muller edition, not the Crime Club edition I own but which remains unseen for anyone for almost 30 years, including me.

DICK BARTON STRIKES BACK. Hammer Films, 1949. Don Stannard, Sebastian Cabot, Jean Lodge, Bruce Walker. Based on the BBC Radio serial Dick Barton Special Agent, created by Geoffrey Webb and Edward J. Mason. Director: Godfrey Grayson.

   In 1947 listeners to the early evening BBC tuned in to hear the voice of the ‘Beeb’ intone, “The time is a quarter past seven. This is the BBC Light Programme …” followed by Charles Williams’s “The Devil’s Gallop” thundering over the airwaves.

   With a gasp of anticipation ten year old boys of all ages in post-Second World War England gathered to hear the daily fifteen minute edition of the adventures of ex-commando Captain Dick Barton M.C., and his pals Snowey and Jock as they made their on air debut.

   Somewhere between Jack Armstrong, All American Boy and Carleton E. Morse’s I Love an Mystery, the Dick Barton series captured the imaginations of young boys (and girls) in the dreary days of post-WWII England with tales of derring-do, adventure, and dastardly villains. Dick was played by Noel Johnson early on and later Gordon Davies and Duncan Carse.

   Dick and his pals found themselves at odd ends in Post War England, so when their ex-commander approached them to act as semi-official agents investigating matters that were too delicate for Special Branch or MI5, it seemed the perfect solution to their post war blues. So Dick Barton Special Agent was born

   Which is why the then fledgling Hammer Studios (yes, that Hammer, of Dracula fame) grabbed up the rights to the series and churned out three quick programmers starring handsome Don Stannard in the lead role. These were Dick Barton Special Agent (1948), Dick Barton Strikes Back (1949), and Dick Barton Bay (1950).

   Dick Barton Strikes Back was filmed third but released as the second in the series. Hammer intended to continue the series, but Don Stannard was killed in a car wreck in 1949. Sebastian Cabot was in the car with him but emerged without fatal injuries. Since the films had improved with each new entry, we may well have missed the definitive screen Dick Barton.

   The opening of Strikes Back could easily come from one of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass serials or an episode of The Avengers (Patrick McNee ironically plays a British agent in the opening scenes of the film Dick Barton at Bay ). A remote English village lies silent, everyone and every thing in it lies dead. And no bird sang.

   Dick Barton and his pal Snowey are called in. Their investigation leads to a group of gypsies and the evil Alfonso Delmonte Fourcada (Sebastian Cabot), second in command of the mad scientist whose deadly sonic ray has wiped out two English villages and now is ready for the attack on London.

   Dick and Snowey battle Fourcada and his goons, escape, evade, hunt, and in general chase around in solid thriller tradition. In one particularly good sequence they are left in a snake house, and all the glass shatters with Dick and Snowey suddenly knee deep in deadly serpents.

   Will the boys escape?

   Tune in tomorrow …

   Same time same place …

   The climax is an exciting chase up the famous BBC radio tower in Blackpool where the madman plans to broadcast his sonic weapon and destroy London. Someone must have found the irony of Dick’s final film adventure ending on the very tower that broadcast his adventures all too delicious.

   While no masterpieces, the Barton films are well done programmers, with some nice noirish photography and good if hammy performances. Stannard may proclaim his lines in all capital letters, but he certainly looks like what we expect of ex-commando Dick Barton.

In 1979 Dick returned to the small screen in Dick Barton Special Agent, a series with Tony Vogel as Dick that ran four seasons. Done tongue in cheek, the series was a good deal of fun and spawned a series of paperback adventures. In recent years a series of Dick Barton plays have been a great success mixing nostalgia, camp, and theatrical thrills.

   The creators of Dick Barton, Geoffrey Webb and Edward J. Mason (creators of the long running soap The Archers) issued a collection of short illustrated never broadcast Dick Barton adventures, Dick Barton Special Agent (Contact Publicaions) for Dick’s fans. In addition the television series was featured in annual albums of comic books stories and photos from the series as well as the paperback adaptations.

   Several sites of Old Time Radio collections have the first Barton radio serial (ten episodes) available to listen to for free on your computer or download to your MP3 player. They hold up pretty well all things considered. A good example of the charms of the form.

   The Barton phenomena was popular enough that Eric Ambler sent it up in his screenplay for Roy Ward Baker’s Highly Dangerous (1951) where his heroine, Margaret Lockwood, believes she is Frances Conway Special Agent, after her nephews favorite radio serial, Francis Conway, when a blow to the head while she is on a dangerous mission behind the Iron Curtain leaves her confused.

   But if you still thrill to the William Tell Overture and the sounds of a great white horse’s hoofbeats on the vast plains of the airwaves, to the mysterious Valle Triste and a voice intoning I Love a Mystery, or ever the catchy tune of Little Orphan Annie, then you will fully understand the appeal of the “Devil’s Gallop” on ten year old boys everywhere.

   And now back to today’s episode of Dick Barton Special Agent. As you know Dick and Snowey had just entered the elevator at Professor X’s secret lair when suddenly …

   Editor, reviewer, anthologist, bibliographer, and crime fiction scholar extraordinaire, Allen Hubin’s extensive contribution to the field began over forty-years ago. In 1967, working out of his basement, he founded the legendary fanzine, The Armchair Detective (TAD).

   Then, with just one review under his belt, Hubin was asked to review for the New York Times Book Review, taking over for Anthony Boucher. In his column, “Criminals at Large,” Hubin reviewed six books a week for almost three years. He hadn’t given anthologies a thought until Dutton called and asked if he’d carry on for Anthony Boucher and edit the Best Detective Stories of the Year.

   Hubin’s involvement in crime fiction bibliography began innocently enough, as well. He was asked to write the introduction to the world’s first crime fiction bibliography compiled by North Dakota librarian Ordean Hagen: Who Done It, (published by Bowker in 1969). During the compilation, Hubin opened his home and extensive library to Hagen and offered to help with the research. Unfortunately, Hagen passed away before the book was released.

   When corrections and additions to Hagen’s published work began to accumulate, Hubin decided to publish them in the pages of TAD, but they were rather extensive and a bit too random, and he had some ideas on how the information could be better organized. So, with the six-book-a-week reviews having wound down, he decided he could manage a “little” bibliographic work.

   That work mushroomed into a massive and seemingly never-ending project laboriously begun during the typewriter era, and in 1979, The Bibliography of Crime Fiction, 1740-1975 was published. Hubin could have left it at that, but he had in mind to add another five years of coverage and a new feature or two. Crime Fiction, 1749-1980: A Comprehensive Bibliography appeared in 1984.

   And that was not the end. Others followed, and by the year 2000, the end of the 20th century seemed to Hubin a more fitting climax to what would be more than thirty years of bibliographic effort, bringing him to the current Crime Fiction IV: A Comprehensive Bibliography 1749-2000! This impressive work contains author and title indexes to over 106,000 books, the contents of more than 6,600 collections, and identification of over 4,500 movies.

   A 2008 revised edition of the bibliography has been published on CDROM (by Locus Press). In addition, given that hundred of pages of new/corrected material has since accumulated, a 2009 edition (still with the 12/31/2000 cutoff date for new publications) is contemplated (again on CDROM by Locus Press). Much of this material for the 2009 edition can be found (with linkages and enhancements that won’t appear in the CDROM) at www.crimefictioniv.com.

[UPDATE / EDITORIAL COMMENT]. 11-02-09. Bouchercon 2009 has come and gone. I’d have loved to have been there, but the closest I got was my annual Columbus Day weekend trip to see my brother and sister back in Michigan something close to the same time.

   I certainly don’t know who deserved the award more. If you look at Al’s resume and all of those numbers, his accomplishments are staggering. (And all the more so when you consider that he began when typewriters were all the rage.)

   The updated version of the Revised Crime Fiction IV is now available on CD-Rom from Locus Press. I don’t have my copy yet, but it was on sale at Bouchercon. It incorporates all of the online Addenda included through Part 34. I uploaded Part 35 this morning, and I have some material to send Al later today that will appear in Part 36.

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. Universal, 1925. Lon Chaney, Mary Philbin. Norman Kerry, Arthur Edmund Carewe, Gibson Gowland, John Sainpolis.

Based on the novel Le Fantôme de l’Opera by Gaston Leroux. Directors: Rupert Julian; Lon Chaney, Ernst Laemmle, Edward Sedgwick (the latter three uncredited).

   October is the month I spend watching Monster Movies and reading scary books. I kicked things off with The Phantom of the Opera, directed by Rupert Julian, Edward Sedgwick and possibly others, and adapted by no fewer than seven writers from Gaston Leroux’s novel.

   Phantom has its moments, but overall it’s something of a mess — the result, no doubt of so many cooks at the broth, fingers in the pie, pigs at the trough or who-ever in the what-have-you.

   Universal did a lot of tinkering with this thing, adding and cutting scenes, restoring deleted parts and cutting added ones, and finally emerged with a rather disjointed film: a slow, mysterious first half capped by a horrific climax in the middle of the movie, followed by a colorful romantic interlude, trailed by some rather tepid serial-type chills, with a wild chase for the finish.

   A few pretty nice things creep out of the cinematic jungle though, mostly due to Lon Chaney and the incredible force of personality he brings to Eric the Phantom (Some reports aver that he directed his own scenes himself.) Chaney moves with a compelling balletic grace, and whoever directed his scenes knew how to play up billowing capes and staring skull-faces for all they might be worth.

   The Bal Masque scene is a riot of two-strip Technicolor dominated by Chaney’s Red Death, and the ensuing love scene among the statues achieves a fine romantic creepiness: the furtive lovers embracing under cool blue estuary in the night air, as a red-cloaked monster broods above them.

   Chaney’s acting is magnetic, and Mary Philbin puts visible enthusiasm — if no discernible subtlety — into heroine Christine’s histrionics.

   But it’s Norman Kerry as the nominal hero of the piece who walks off with the show: Aging, bland, over-groomed, dull and unimaginative, Kerry is everything the nominal hero of a Monster Movie should be.

   He has only to walk on screen to bore you to tears, and his declarations of undying love offer a listlessness that horror films were not to see again until the “living Dead” movies of the 70s.

   But wait, there’s more; where the heroes of most monster movies are merely dull and ineffectual, Kerry actually has to be led by the hand to rescue his beloved and finally faints dead away when things get tough.

   There are subversive tendencies in Monster Movies, where the bad guys we’re supposed to fear are always more interesting than the good guys we’re supposed to cheer, and there’s no better illustration of the concept than Norman Kerry in The Phantom of the Opera.

DOUGLAS RUTHERFORD – Kick Start. Walker, US, hardcover. 1973; Ballantine, pb, 1976. UK editions: Collins Crime Club, hc, 1973; Fontana, pb, 1975.

   The hero of this book is really not a person; it’s a motorcycle, a Norton Commando to be precise. And while reading the story isn’t as much fun as being able to ride as well as the protagonist does, it’s a close second.

   Kroll commits a crime, gets caught, and is recruited to penetrate an area ravaged by earthquake, accessible only to a skilled biker. He narrowly gets to his destination (a particularly good scene has him crossing a cracking dam), and then things get worse (the dam breaks; the race in front of the flood waters is another high point).

   One of the most entertaining things about the book, though, is the large number of flaws in the plot — or what appear to be flaws. The reader keeps thinking that the author is doing a really sloppy job, right up until the end, when suddenly the flaws are shown to be in Kroll’s interpretation of events.

   He’s been wrong all along; the reader has been right. And the bitterly ironic ending somehow seems highly appropriate.

Editorial Comment:  I regret to say that I have not turned up a cover image of the Ballantine paperback, but these two should easily do.

   Rutherford, whose full name was James Douglas Rutherford McConnell, 1915-1988, has a total of 25 titles in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, most of them dealing with motorcycles or motorcar racing (e.g., A Shriek of Tyres (1958), The Gunshot Grand Prix (1972) and Rally to the Death (1974)).

   Of more immediate significance, though, is that under the pen name Paul Temple, he co-authored two novels in that series with Francis Durbridge. See the preceding post.