BIG BROWN EYES. Paramount, 1936. Cary Grant, Joan Bennett, Walter Pidgeon, Lloyd Nolan, Alan Baxter. Screenplay: Bert Hanlon. Story: James Edward Grant. Director: Raoul Walsh

   This relatively short comedy mystery is as close to a B-programmer as Cary Grant ever made, and despite being a disposable example of the fast-paced fast-talking comedy mystery of the era, is well worth seeing.

   Mildly screwball and played much in the vein of the “Thin Man” films, this is a minor film, and until recently hard to find, but there are several points of interest.

   Grant is Danny Barr a detective sergeant whose girl friend Eve (Bennett) is a manicurist with a nose for news. As the movie opens Danny is in pursuit of gangster Russ Cortig (Nolan) who heads a gang of jewel thieves and who fired a stray shot in a police chase that killed an infant. A bit grim for one of these ‘light’ romantic crime comedies, but fortunately played for as little pathos as possible.

   Eve gets her dream job on a newspaper, Cortig gets off thanks to a slick lawyer, and Danny quits the force and turns private eye to get Cortig on his own.

   Meanwhile the wise cracks spark like fireworks and the pace and patter never falter long enough to ask any serious questions.

   Eve leaves her dream job when her paper turns on Danny and goes back to her manicurist job, and it’s there she stumbles on the clue that turns the whole thing upside down. We cut to the chase and Grant closes in on Cortig and his gang for the big finale and the final clench.

   This sort of thing lives or dies on the capability of the cast, and Grant and Bennett are more than capable of the kind of sparks needed to keep this going.

   This is a slight film, and Bert Hanlon’s script could be better, but the cast and director push through, and the result is worth 77 minutes of your time.

   It’s far from Walsh’s best work, but it’s interesting to see Grant more or less playing a private eye, especially considering Raymond Chandler once suggested he would have been the ideal screen Philip Marlowe. If nothing else it’s interesting to see an early version of Cary in the kind of role he played in films like Notorious and Charade.

   Bennett, Pidgeon, and Nolan are all old pros and a cast of familiar faces rounds out the rest.

   I suppose you could complain that with that cast it should be better, but instead just enjoy it for what it is, a painless little preview of better things everyone involved would do.

   Nolan in particular is an interesting case, as his career had an unusual arc, playing a mix of villains. heroes, sidekicks, and good cops, fathers, and doctors well into the television age, with hardly a break in his screen appearances.

   If you watch this or any Nolan performance a second time, you might take note of the fact he was profoundly deaf, and as a result pays particular attention to his fellow actors looking for the visual clues to when his character is to act or speak.

   His Michael Shayne series offers an early look at the classic private eye persona on the screen well before the noir era.

   Pidgeon’s notable career was just starting, having come from a major hit on Broadway in the production of Ayn Rand’s tricky Night of January 16th.

   At this point the studios didn’t quite know what to make of him and he was often cast as slick lawyers, reporters, or even gangsters (the role he played in the Rand play). His stalwart leading man stereotype was still a few years ahead of him.

   Bennett had been around since 1929’s Bulldog Drummond with Ronald Colman and would be one of the actresses considered to play Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With The Wind, but her best work would come in film noir, notably in Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street opposite Edward G. Robinson, as one of the screens most ruthless femme fatales. Later, of course, she ended her career with a continuing role on the cult soap opera Dark Shadows.

Note: The big brown eyes of the title are Grant’s, but it’s still an odd title for a mystery, even a comedy mystery.

MARK BURNELL – Chameleon. Avon; reprint paperback, March 2003. HarperCollins hardcover, 2002.

   A spy thriller about a female assassin, the best in the business that there is. She’s Stephanie Patrick a/k/a Stephanie Schneider a/k/a Petra Reuter and quite a few others as the book goes on, and at the beginning of this 400-plus page novel, she’s burned out, in hiding from her British overseers, and (more significantly) from herself.

   This retreat may be caused in large part, by events, in an earlier novel, The Rhythm Section, but since I seem to have missed the book completely, that’s only a strong conjecture.

   But adding to a theory I’m still in the process of developing, there’s something I’ve decided to call the Heinz test. The precise numerical value is still subject to empirical study, and hence revision, but at the present time it goes something like this. If after reading 57 pages, and nothing in the book has happened that makes you really want to keep reading, why should you?

   On page 57 Stephanie is the midst of being involuntarily rehabilitated, being fitted up for service again. And even though the problem she’s being groomed to tackle, something to do with plutonium being smuggled out of somewhere into somewhere, was moderately non-interesting, the reclamation project she’s being forced to undergo was engaging and challenging enough for me to give the book a tentative and conditional go-ahead.

   There’s a re-evaluation stage that comes next, and I’ll call this one the Dalmatian test. When I got to this point, I stopped, and I stalled out again. If I may, I’ll quote for you a paragraph from page 101:

   There’s more immediately following, three or more paragaphs in a similar vein. Information dumps like these occur far too often. Every minor character seems to have his or her own long history, and in turgid detail. Also making the book unappealing is that it’s also difficult to root for an assassin, whether she’s on “our side” or not. A writer like Donald Westlake can pull it off, a lesser author can not.

   (Note to self: It’s obviously time to put Westlake on the to-be-read list, and maybe Eric Ambler too. See below.)

   Ambler’s early heroes were ordinary people, as I recall, caught up in events beyond their control, and managing somehow to still survive. Stephanie has too many contacts, too much money, and even with all the psychological baggage she carries with her, and the love affair that’s all-too-apparently going nowhere, she’s far too competent at what she does for the reader to care.

   Not this reader, at least. Not this time.

          Bibliographic Data:

      The Stephanie Patrick series:

The Rhythm Section. HarperCollins, UK, hc, 1999. HarperCollins, US, hc, 2000; Avon, pb, 2000.

Chameleon. HarperCollins, UK, hc, 2002. HarperCollins, US, hc, 2002; Avon, pb, 2003.

Gemini. HarperCollins, UK, pb, 2003.

The Third Woman. HarperCollins, UK, hc, 2005.

DEAD HEAT ON A MERRY-GO-ROUND. Columbia, 1966. James Coburn, Camilla Sparv, Robert Webber, Aldo Ray, Nina Wayne, Rose Marie, with Harrison Ford (uncredited). Screenwriter-director: Bernard Girard.

   After watching several movies recently in black-and-white, it was quite a pleasure to see one in color, especially one in which the choice of colors used was so expertly done, along with a wide variety of clever camera shots and angles.

   I’ll go out on a limb here, and say that a sizable chunk of the credit goes to cinematographer Lionel Lindon, who received an Oscar for Around the World in Eighty Days and was nominated two other times. Not a shabby resume.

   Other than the camera work, though, I really have to apologize that I can find little else in this movie that’s worthy of a recommendation to you. It’s a bank caper story, one that takes place at the same time a Russian bigwig is landing at the L.A. airport, using up all of the LAPD’s manpower, but the story makes very use of that, nor any of the other plot devices I kept making up in my head as I was watching along.

   The story’s disjointed, there’s no characterization — save (in a way) for the criminal mastermind himself, Eli Kotch, played by James Coburn, and I’ll return to him in a minute — and believe it or not, there’s no suspense, not a single iota of excitement. Not once, not ever.

   Personally, I find James Coburn as an actor to be brashly if not insufferably smug and self-centered. Perhaps not in all of his films, but in Dead Heat, he turns up the arrogance a notch or two. Don’t get me wrong, I can deal with it if the story’s got my attention, but in this movie, it’s James Coburn you get, or nothing at all.

   Maybe I’m just jealous? In this movie, at least, all he has to do is smile, and women simply fall in love (and into bed) with him. Good-looking, most of them — you needn’t ask. Poor Camilla Sparv, as one of his victims, who goes so far as to marry him and unwittingly aid his cause — that of robbing a bank, in case it’s slipped your mind.

   When she’s of no further use to him, she’s gone, all but out of mind and forgotten. And there’s where he makes his first (and only) mistake. Perhaps not in the way you might expect — nor me, either, since as a payoff, when it finally came, I threw up my hands and said, that’s it??

   As for Harrison Ford, and his first film appearance. Blink, and you’ll miss him. I did.

STUART PALMER – Cold Poison. M. S. Mill Co./William Morrow, hardcover, 1954. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club [3-in-1 edition], June 1954. Pyramid R-1040, paperback, 1964.

   Miss Hildegarde Withers is the definitive little-old-lady sleuth upon whom many future spinster, schoolmarm, and librarian sleuths were based.

   Her prominence on the mystery scene was ensured by a 1932 film based on her first adventure, The Penguin Pool Murder, starring Edna May Oliver; and the ensuing fourteen novels and short-story collections in which she is featured brought her even greater recognition.

   Five other films, with a variety of female stars, reinforced the much-loved image of a snoopy, highly intelligent, eccentric woman who helps the police in their investigations.

   In Cold Poison, Miss Withers has semi-retired (from her teaching position) to California, but old habits die hard — especially when the production manager of Miracle-Paradox Studios asks her to investigate the four un-comic, Penguin-decorated valentines promising death that have been received in the cartoon department where Peter Penguin’s Barn Dance is being animated.

   Using the subterfuge of chaperoning Tallyrand, her French poodle who is modeling for the artists, Hildegarde starts by going to see the one practical joker among the suspects. She finds him dead of what turns out to be poison-ivy poison.

   When she calls her old policeman friend, Inspector Oscar Piper, in New York, Oscar realizes that this case could very well tie in with one he couldn’t solve in New York four years before, so he flies to the Coast to assist.

   He and Hildegarde become familiar with the world of cartooning and the various characters and their jobs — which takes up a good part of the book. When all clues are assembled, Hildegarde sets up a final confrontation in the screening room at the studio, even though she lacks the final clue necessary to confirm her suspicions.

   During this showing of the valentines and Hildegarde’s attempt to compare them to sketches by members of the cartooning staff, an attempt is made to poison her coffee — and a little-known fact arises that helps her solve the case.

   This entertaining case was Hildegarde’s next to last; her final appearance was in Miss Withers Makes the Scene (1969), which was begun by Palmer and completed by Fletcher Flora after Palmer’s death.

         ———
   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.

STUART PALMER – The Penguin Pool Murder. Brentano’s, hardcover, 1931. John Long, UK, hc, 1932. US softcover reprints: Bantam, 1986; International Polygonics, 1991; Rue Morgue Press, 2007. Film: RKO, 1932, with Edna May Oliver as Miss Hildegarde Withers and James Gleason as Police Inspector Oscar Piper.

   In this novel, which introduced Hildegarde Withers to the mystery-reading public, Miss Withers takes her grade school class to the New York Aquarium, where one of her students sees a body floating in the penguin pool.

   As soon as the police arrive, Hildegarde begins making suggestions; and after having another teacher take the students back to school, she insists on helping Inspector Oscar Piper by taking notes in shorthand (which she has studied as part of her hoped-for avocation as police assistant). Hildegarde takes time off from teaching to run around New York with Oscar until, with her guidance, the baffling case is solved.

   This is a low-key introduction to one of the genre’s more likable investigative pairs. Hildegarde is typical old-maid schoolteacher: austere, sensible, and entirely out of patience with what she considers the police’s inefficient and bumbling ways.

   Oscar, on the other hand, is your typical cigar-smoking cop: tough on the outside but thoroughly cowed by what he would never admit is a formidable woman. The friendship and affection that develops while they are investigating the strange death among the penguins — with Oscar doing the legwork and Hildegarde supplying insight — is one that continues throughout the thirteen-book series and numerous short stories.

   (Hildegarde acts on the theory that years of dealing with children in the classroom make her an expert on devious behavior patterns in adults, too — and Oscar is eventually forced to admit she is right.)

   At the end of this first adventure, Hildegarde and Oscar go off hand in hand to the marriage-license bureau; however, they must have changed their minds on the way, because they remain platonic — albeit fond — friends throughout the rest of the series.

   Outstanding among the other Hildegarde Withers novels are The Puzzle of the Red Stallion (1936), Miss Withers Regrets (1947), and The Green Ace (1950).

   Hildegarde’s shorter cases can be found in such collections as The Riddles of Hildegarde Withers (1947) and The Monkey Murder, and Other Hildegarde Withers Stories (1950), both of which are digest-size paperback originals published by Mercury Press.

   A later series character, Howie Rock, is an obese, middle-aged former newspaperman who appears in Unhappy Hooligan (1956) and Rook Takes Knight (1968). The first of these novels makes use of Palmer’s unusual background as a circus clown for Ringling Brothers.

         ———
   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.

Bibliographic Update:  Another collection of Miss Withers stories has been published since 1001 Midnights first appeared, and it’s one well worth your attention: Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles, Crippen & Landru, 2002.

STUART PALMER – The Puzzle of the Red Stallion. Bantam, paperback reprint; 1st printing, February 1987. Hardcover edition: Doubleday Crime Club, 1936; hc reprint: Sun Dial Press, date unknown (cover shown). British title: The Puzzle of the Briar Pipe. Collins, 1936. Film: RKO, 1936, as Murder on a Bridle Path (with Helen Broderick as Hildegarde Withers & James Gleason as Police Inspector Oscar Piper).

   I’ve not seen the movie recently, which means not within the past 40 years or more, but the synopsis and the various comments on IMDB makes it sound as though the book was translated into film, amazingly enough, about as closely as it could be done.

   When a young woman riding her horse through New York City’s Central Park is found dead on the ground, it is presumed at first that her horse threw her, but when schoolteacher Miss Withers finds a spot of blood on the horse’s upper leg, even Inspector Piper has to agree that something suspicious has happened.

   And when more clues prove conclusively that the woman was murdered, there no shortage of suspects, including an ex-husband whom she had jailed for non-payment of alimony; her ex’s father; the stablehand whom advances she spurned; another fast-living type named Eddie for which the same goes; the obnoxious stable owner who’d love to get her hands on the titular horse; that lady’s meekish sort of husband; and more.

   This is a good but far from great example of the 1930s concept of the comic crime novel, and no, you should not expect anything resembling good professional procedure on the part of the police and medical experts who are called in. In fact, quite oppositely, both are fairly inept at what they are supposed to do.

   But what can you expect when the police allow an old maid, a spinster, if you will, to follow the head of homicide around on his cases, picking up and stashing away clues at her own discretion, running interference for him when he?s about to go off in wrong directions, and generally being in charge of the case, albeit of course strictly unofficially?

   Comedy is a matter of taste, and in this case, it worked only intermittently for me. The was the sixth novel Hildegarde Withers was in, and by this time I think Stuart Palmer simply fired up the plot and let things cruise along on automatic.

   There is some good detective involving pipes and the people who smoke them, and there is also the reddest of red herrings. You get the good with all of the pleasure of watching an author work up a fine case of deductive reasoning, and you take the bad with a small grimace of my goodness, did he really do that?

   He does, and he did.

DANTE’S INFERNO. Fox Film Corporation Production, 1924. Lawson Butt, Howard Gaye, Ralph Lewis, Pauline Starke, Josef Swickard, Gloria Grey. Written by Edmund Goulding and Cyrus Wood; cinematography by Joseph August. Director: Henry Otto. Shown at Cinevent 41, Columbus OH, May 2009.

   This is one of those moral dramas that were so popular in the silent film era, which seemed to take special delight in appealing to audiences’ interest in the artistically tasteful depiction of sexual excess, this time portrayed in a tour through Dante’s Inferno with the poet guided by his Roman predecessor, Virgil.

   The really interesting part of the film, the guided tour that shows the horrified Dante the sufferings of the damned (with a great deal of what appears to be actual or very well simulated nudity), is embedded in a modern morality play, whose simple treatment of good and evil needn’t detain us here.

   As for the programmers at Cinevent, I suspect they scheduled the film rather less for its artistic merit than as a lead-in to Josef van Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture, a modern take on the eternal question of good and evil that may be less classically graphic but is a much more powerful treatment of the subject.

Editorial Comments: Be watching for Walter’s review of The Shanghai Gesture. It’ll show up here soon.

   And while it isn’t certain that the photo below is from the 1924 silent version of Dante’s Inferno, there is a long sequence in the 1935 film with Spencer Tracy and Claire Trevor which used stock footage from the earlier one. Since that may be where this rather horrific scene came from, I’ll include it on a provisional basis, and delete it later if it shouldn’t be here at all:

            

GEORGE GENTLY. BBC1, 2008. Martin Shaw [Inspector Gently], Lee Ingleby [DS John Bacchus], Simon Hubbard [PC Taylor]. Based on the novels and characters created by Alan Hunter. Screenwriter: Peter Flannery.

   Following the pilot episode “Gently Go Man” (8 April 2007), we recently have had two more stories (each 90 minutes, no adverts) both based on the Gently series by Alan Hunter:

    “The Burning Man” (13 July 2008) based on Gently Where the Roads Go (1962) and “Bomber’s Moon” (20 July 2008) based on the book of the same title (1994).

   The Gently books (of which I’ve only read one, Gently With Love (1974), which didn’t do much for me) ran from 1955 to 1999 and were mainly set in East Anglia, which is where I was brought up. (Indeed I keep meaning to read the second in the series, Gently by The Shore (1956), since it is set in the fictitious “Starmouth” which I believe is the actual Great Yarmouth where I was living in 1956, aged eleven.)

   Hunter himself ran a second hand bookshop in Norwich (some 20 miles away) and may well have been the man who found me a copy of Sax Fohmer’s second Fu Manchu book, The Devil Doctor around that time.

   Anyway back to the series, which is set in the sixties (so we have the strange situation of a 1994 book being set back some 30 years) and in the North East of England (far away from East Anglia in both distance and character).

   I have to say that I didn’t find these stories particularly interesting and the characters of Gently (played by Martin Shaw) and ambitious young sidekick DS John Bacchus (Lee Ingleby) were rather marred for me as they both came over as unlikeable, though I’m not sure that was the intention.

   Overall a disappointing outcome for a series that I was hoping would be better.

A TOUCH OF LARCENY. Paramount-UK, 1959. James Mason, Vera Miles, George Sanders, Harry Andrews, Robert Flemyng, Screenplay: Roger MacDougall with Guy Hamilton, Paul Winterton (aka Andrew Garve), and Ivan Foxwell, based on the novel The Megstone Plot by Andrew Garve. Director: Guy Hamilton.

   Money, is the root of all evil — and not a little comedy. It’s also the root of suave Commander Max Easton’s problems. Rammer Easton (James Mason), hero of the British submarine fleet, doesn’t have any — money, that is.

   At least not enough to impress the beautiful American widow he’s just met, Virginia Kilane (Vera Miles).

   Even worse she is engaged to Charles Holland (George Sanders), a supercilious snob and prig from the Foreign Office who does have money.

   Up to now Max has been quite happy with his status as a playboy and his job at the Admiralty where he commands a desk. But now he is falling hard for Virginia, and she is quite frank she doesn’t intend to live on his Royal Navy salary or pension.

   True love has its limits.

   Which is the spur of a bright idea.

   At this point the casual viewer should know two historical facts. The British have some of the strictest slander laws and the most irresponsible tabloid newspapers in the Western World, and all through the 1950’s those papers were filled with one story of treason and defection after another, culminating in the Kim Philby affair.

   It might also help to know that in the mid-fifties Commander Lionel Crabb, a decorated Royal Naval expert in underwater demolitions, went missing while on a mission to photograph a Russian trawler underwater in a British port. (Crabb was played by Laurence Harvey in Silent Enemy, which is the story of his exploits battling German saboteurs planting mines on British ships in Malta, winning the Victoria Cross.)

   The Crabb affair was never settled, but created headlines and speculation, and was treated fictionally in Noel Hynd’s The Khrushchev Objective (1987) a sequel of sorts to Brian Garfield’s best-selling novel The Paladin. (Both credit the pseudonymous Christopher Creighton as co-author.)

   Now, having completed our little historical aside, back to our story.

   The only valuable thing Max has access to is the Starfish project, a new nuclear submarine, but he’d rather not sell out to the Russians. (Neither prison nor exile on the Black Sea are appealing and Max is no traitor, just broke.)

   Still it occurs to him as he is bantering with Virginia that if he were to somehow be accused of treason and then cleared he could sue the press for a fortune. Silly idea, and yet…

   So Max manages to be seen with too much to drink at an embassy party with a Russian (who doesn’t speak a word of English), and then take his holidays, even selling his sports car before he leaves, and managing to lose the Starfish file behind an office cabinet before he goes.

   He pointedly stops at a northern port and makes an ass of himself asking a policeman about a Russian trawler in port, and then he takes his sail boat, the Shelldrake, and goes sailing off of Scotland where he sinks himself marooning himself comfortably on a barren rock in the lonely Skerries, and waits for nature and the press to take their course.

   And they do just that, with Max becoming the latest cause celebre. Too bad Virginia has let it slip to Charles about that clever little plan of Max’s. Now Charles wants to go to the police, but she persuades him it would cause a scandal. And anyway surely Max hasn’t gone through with it.

   Back on the island Max decides the bait is well and truly set, and rids himself of his survival gear and goes to set the bonfire that will bring rescue. Which is the point where fate intervenes in the form of a seagull. Max takes a swim, his matches are wet, his fuel is sunk, and now he really is marooned and without supplies. Meanwhile his story has cooled and everyone has forgotten who Rammer Easton was.

   Which is why Max is both relieved and a little unnerved when his rescuers turn out to be two men from Scotland Yard’s Special Branch. Seems they got his message. The one he put in a bottle…

   But he didn’t send one.

   However Virginia did, when she realized Max was in trouble.

   And then that old stick Charles in the mud goes to the police, just as everything is falling into place.

   I won’t give away anymore, save to tell you Max gets the girl and the money and without breaking a single law — though he’s bent a few along the way.

   A Touch of Larceny is based on the novel The Megstone Plot by bestselling British thriller writer Andrew Garve (Paul Winterton) who also wrote as Roger Bax and Paul Somers.

   Garve’s best known books are The Ashes of Loda, The Cuckoo Line Affair, Ascent of D-13, A Hero for Leanda and A Hole in the Ground.

   His best known book in the States was Two if by Sea (1949), filmed in 1953 as Never Let Me Go, directed by by Delmer Daves and starring Clark Gable, Gene Tierney, and Richard Haydn.

   It’s about a pair of journalists trying to smuggle their Russian brides out of the Soviet Union in the post-war expulsion of the foreign press. (Garve himself was a former correspondent in Moscow and frequently used a Russian setting.) His novels are a mix of suspense, intrigue, and often humor like this one.

   A Touch of Larceny is one of those films the Brits do effortlessly with expert casts and flawless scripts. Mason is at his most charming as the roguish Max, and Sanders even manages to bring a touch of humor to the otherwise annoying Holland. Miles has seldom been more attractive in the kind of role usually reserved for Deborah Kerr, Margaret Leighton, or Jean Simmons.

   The laughs are of the quiet variety, and much of the films charm depends on Mason proving he should have done more comic roles. Watching this you can’t help but wonder if this is how he might have played James Bond (especially since director Hamilton would helm Goldfinger, the film that set the Bond phenomena in overdrive) if they had been able to convince Mason to do three films instead of two. (Cary Grant was offered the role first, but would only sign on for one.)

   Smart sophisticated and with just enough kick to keep the plot moving A Touch of Larceny is like a good champagne cocktail — light and amusing, but you’ll remember it in the morning.

   Following my recent re-reading of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and moving on to things more criminous, I found two books recently with the same cockamamie plot. (That’s funny: the spell check just now objected to “criminous” but let “cockamamie” slip by! Oh well.)

   Start with the premise that two people who resemble each other are caught in a fire from which only one emerges, alive but scarred beyond recognition and also suffering from amnesia, so that no one, for purposes of the plot, knows which it is.

   Then add that at least one of them was plotting to kill the other. Throw in a cast of venal supporting characters on each side who stand to profit, depending on who the survivor turns out to be, and you have the makings of an improbable but entertaining mystery.

   Body and Passion (with one of my favorite paperback covers) by Whit Harrison — aka Harry Whittington — takes the tale along fairly conventional lines, with one character a notorious gangster and the other a crusading D.A., but he throws in some cute wrinkles as it turns out the crook may have been trying to quit the rackets and go straight, while the D.A. was possibly a crooked politician trying to frame him.

   Both men were married to greedy wives who didn’t love them, and both were surrounded by dubious “friends” looking to jostle them out of the picture, by means unctuous and/or violent.

   Whittington/Harrison deals this out with his usual serviceable prose, right up to a rather unsatisfying ending. Whittington was a competent and readable hack, but no more, and he delivers a competent and readable story — but no more.

   In 1962, the astute French mystery writer Sebastien Japrisot re-did the premise with his own uniquely Gallic approach: instead of a Mystery, Trap for Cinderella becomes a study on the nature of love, guilt and existence.

   The central character this time is a spoiled heiress, who supposedly survived a fire in which her paid companion, who may also have been her lover, was supposedly killed — both were burned beyond recognition, but the survivor was identified as the heiress by her long-time mentor, who may also have been her ex-lover.

   Set in a milieu of the very very rich and the parasites who feed off them, Trap generates a sardonic paranoia as a face-less, past-less heroine keeps finding hints that whoever she is, she may have been a target of murder … or possibly plotting one of her own.

   Japrisot tacks a richly ironic ending onto this. Not a surprising one, but a conclusion that seems to lift the story and its characters out of the pulp they inhabit for an instant and ask something about what they mean.

      Bibliographic data:

WHIT HARRISON – Body and Passion. Original Novels #714; digest-sized paperback original; 1st printing, 1952. Reprinted as by Harry Whittington (Stark House Press, Spring 2009) as: To Find Cora / Like Mink Like Murder / Body & Passion.

SEBASTIEN JAPRISOT – Trap for Cinderella. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1964. Souvenir Press, UK, hc, 1965. US paperback reprints: Pocket, 1965; Penguin, 1979. Translation of Piege pour Cendrillon. Paris, 1962. Film: Gaumont, 1965, as Piege pour Cendrillon (Trap for Cinderella) (scw: Sebastien Japrisot, J. B. Rossi, Jean Anouilh, Andre Cayatte; dir: Cayatte).