RUSSELL H. GREENAN – It Happened in Boston? Random House, hardcover, 1969. Hardcover reprint: Literary Guild. Paperback reprint: Fawcett Crest, 1970.

   From anyone else that statement might seem a trifle paranoid, but from the hero of Russell Greenan’s novel, Alfred Omega (“That’s Irish isn’t it?”) it’s a bright ray of sanity. You see Alfred is a tad paranoid. Obsessive. Manic depressive. Vaguely psychotic. Alfred sits on a bench in Boston’s Public Garden and travels to other times via his ‘reveries,’ living and experiencing them. He sleeps under the bed. He writes down lists of all the restaurants out of the Boston phone book. He thinks God is out to get him and expects a visit from the Almighty at any moment.

   And the pigeons are spying on him.

   For God.

   Or the Devil.

   Alfred also has a young friend Ralph who visits with him and brings his green frog hand puppet Sebastian with him. Sebastian can talk. Really talk. To Alfred anyway.

   Alfred is reading a biography of a Polish magician named Casimir, or perhaps imagining he is reading it. With Alfred it can be hard to tell, but Alfred is taking notes.

   Did I mention Alfred is also a brilliant artist, the only student of the Maestro who taught him all the techniques of line and brush stroke of the masters? Alfred can recreate any painting so perfectly no one can tell it isn’t original. It is original to Alfred. And those nasty old masters keep stealing credit for his work.

   Greenan himself explains it all near the end of the book. I suppose you could call this a spoiler, so be alerted, but believe me there are still surprises to come. Alfred simply summarizes it all better than I can.

   It’s a little hard to describe this magical, fantastical, mysterious, horrific, macabre, psychological thriller. If Fredric Brown and Cornell Woolrich had collaborated with Kafka on a novel that was then developed as a screenplay by Woody Allen, S. J. Perlman, Buck Henry, and Raymond Chandler for a film collaboration by Alfred Hitchcock and Frank Capra… No, that still wouldn’t do it. Might be a hell of a film, but still not quite this one. Maybe if they remade Here Comes Mr. Jordan as film noir re imagined by James M. Cain and Dorothy Parker …

   Well, you see the problem.

   Greenan’s other novels include Nightmare, A Can of Worms, and The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton, but It Happened in Boston? is his masterpiece.

   I don’t suppose it is for everyone, but I think anyone will be charmed by it and caught in its spell. It is what they mean when they call a book one of a kind. It is a work of genius — and madness. It’s sexy, funny, scary, smart, magical, frightening, and has what well may be the most unexpected ending in the history of the genre — hell, in the history of fiction.

   And it happened in Boston.

   Or did it?

   Believe me, when you’ve finished you won’t know either. And you won’t care. You’ll have read It Happened in Boston? and you’ll never be the same. Even if you want to be.

   But you’ll have to excuse me. The cats tell me the pigeons are spying on me. Not that you can trust the cats…

Editorial Comment: In case anyone is wondering, yes, this book is included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. Trust me. I looked.

CAPTAIN SINDBAD. MGM-Germany, 1963, aka Kapitän Sindbad. Guy Williams, Heidi Brühl, Pedro Armendariz, Abraham Sofaer, Bernie Hamilton, Helmuth Schneider, Henry Brandon, Guy Doleman. Co-screenwriters: Ian McLellan Hunter and Guy Endore; director: Byron Haskin.

   Like Son of Sinbad [reviewed here] Captain Sindbad is in Technicolor too, but it’s a ruddy, comic book color: cheap, gaudy, and enjoyably eye-watering. The sets are lavish but cheesy-looking, costumes likewise, and everything seems pointed at an ostentatious show of threadbare splendor, with swordfights, shipwrecks, riots and magic stuff tumbling out like cut-rate toys from a shabby bag.

   Simply splendid.

   Guy Wiliams, in between Zorro and Lost in Space, stars as Sindbad, pitted against evil poo-bah Pedro Armendariz, an actor who appeared in real movies, like Three Godfathers and From Russia with Love.

   Here though, he just sits around in a chintzy palace with vaulted purple ceilings, blood red carpets and golden dragons all over (just the way you or I would decorate a palace if money and taste were no object) and hatches evil schemes with the kind of hammy relish I hadn’t seen since Tod Slaughter.

   Okay, it’s kind of a catch-penny thing, but as written by Guy Endore, and directed by Byron Haskin, Captain Sindbad has a sleazy charm I just can’t resist. There’s always something happening on screen, and the special effects, though never convincing, are always imaginative and even kind of poetic at times.

   I particularly liked how the bad guy can’t be killed because he keeps his heart locked up in a tower an enchanted forest, guarded by a giant hand — I guess we’ve all known someone like that, haven’t we? It’s storybook stuff presented with childlike gusto by people old enough to know better and a film no eight-year-old should miss.

                  

LOUISE PENNY – Still Life. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, July 2006; paperback reprint, May 2007. First published in Canada & the UK: Headline, hc & pb, 2005.

   A Canadian rural mystery, with Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Quebec Sûreté and his team called in to investigate the suspicious death of Jane Neal, a reclusive resident of Three Pines, felled by an arrow.

   The strength of the novel is in its portrait of the town and its colorful inhabitants, but Gamache and his team are also nicely portrayed, with Gamache’s sharply observant eye seldom missing a significant detail in the convoluted relationships that make the investigation difficult to pursue. A promising debut for the series.

Bibliographic data:   The Chief Inspector Gamache mysteries.

1. Still Life.

2. Dead Cold (UK/Canada), A Fatal Grace (US).

3. The Cruelest Month.

4. The Murder Stone (UK/Canada), A Rule Against Murder (US).

5. The Brutal Telling.

SHERLOCK: CASE OF EVIL. USA Network, made for TV, 2002. UK title: Sherlock. James D’Arcy (Sherlock Holmes), Roger Morlidge (Dr. Watson), Gabrielle Anwar (Rebecca Doyle), Vincent D’Onofrio (Professor Moriarty), Nicholas Gecks (Inspector Lestrade), Richard E. Grant (Mycroft Holmes). Based on the characters created by Arthur Conan Doyle. Director: Graham Theakston.

   I’m not sure whether this was originally a British production or not, but from the names of the people involved, actors and otherwise, I suspect that it was. What I am sure of is that a lot of the people who commented on this film on IMDB really hated it — really really hated it — and for the usual and obvious reasons.

   I’m also not sure if this was meant to be the first of the series — and if it was, it hasn’t turned out that way — but it very easily could have, as the movie takes us back to Holmes’ earliest days as a consulting detective, before he had met Dr. Watson (a police autopsy surgeon in this film) but not before Holmes was aware of Professor Moriarty and his dastardly schemes against polite society.

   I read somewhere that Holmes is supposed to be 28 in this movie. Unfortunately James D’Arcy appears to be closer to 18, hardly old enough to handle the liquor, narcotics and the wild Victorian women who flock to his doorstep when they read about his latest exploit in the daily news. (They call them groupies today, or at least they used to in the 1970s. Maybe I’m dating myself.)

   Holmes is also something of a publicity hound, an aspect of his personality that turns Dr. Watson off when first they meet. And if by now you haven’t realized why the howls of protest went up so quickly after this movie was released, you can hardly consider yourself a true believing Sherlock Holmes fan.

   But if I’m evidence of the fact, I think you can be a lifelong Sherlock Holmes fan and still enjoy this movie. I didn’t mind the alterations to Holmes the character, and besides, who knows what he might have been like in his younger days (though the bedroom scene with the two young ladies removing their chemises or whatever was obviously designed to tweak somebody’s noses).

   And by movie’s end, Holmes is definitely chastened and perhaps has “come of age” a bit.

   I rather didn’t care for all of the guns that were used in the raid by the police on Moriarty’s dope-processing warehouse, and while there were several nicely done attempts to show Holmes’ deductive abilities — the scene with Mycroft is a small gem — there is, sad to say, no great attempt by the end of the movie to be little more than just another action flick.

   The atmosphere and general ambiance is nicely done, though. One twist of the plot that came early on is easily spotted, but I shall restrain myself from even beginning to describe it, so as not to keep you from having the same pleasure, otherwise I surprised myself by warming more and more to the characters as the movie went on. Who knows. You may, too.

PostScript: I seem to have ended this review with leaving myself room to show you one more photo. Miss Doyle is a client that both gets herself into trouble and helps to get Sherlock out of some trouble that he gets himself into. She’s an important part of the story, and I really can’t leave her out:

   There are certain posts for which the comments that follow take on a life of their own. Take for example a short piece called “An Early Example of NERO WOLFE on TV?” There are 15 comments following, which is rather high but not unusually so. But if you take into consideration that this piece was a continuation of one of Mike Nevins’ columns, to which 18 comments were added, you will realize that the subject matter — that of which actor played what well-known mystery character, or should have, struck a nerve of one kind or another.

   All of which means little, in the more practical side of things, except the final (or most recent) comment on the second post was from Mike Doran, who mentioned something I’d never known about before. Which is certainly not news in that regard, but perhaps if you missed it, you’d like to know about it, too.

   Mike said, and I quote:

    And not too long ago, Mike emailed me to say, after I pleaded him unmercifully for some follow-up information:

   All I can say is that I wish I lived in the Chicago area. There’s no station around here that plays anything nearly as interesting as reruns of Kraft Mystery/Suspense Theater.

VAN WYCK MASON – The Singapore Exile Murders. Pocket 129, paperback reprint; 1st printing, December 1941. Hardcover edition: Doubleday Crime Club, 1st printing, June 1939. Hardcover reprint: Sun Dial Press, June 1940.

   Widely respected for his historical fiction, Van Wyck Mason (1901-1978) is equally if not better known for his roughly two dozen book length adventures of Captain Hugh North, a American agent working for a government outfit called G-2. The first of the latter was Seeds of Murder (1930), the last being The Deadly Orbit Mission (1968).

   A complete list of all Mason’s books can be found on his Wikipedia page, along with a photo and a short biography.

   Thirty-eight years is a long time to be writing spy fiction, a run that I suspect few authors can match. The setting of The Singapore Exile Murders is obvious, I should think, and the date of publication (1939) is just as important — the entire city is on edge with news of the seemingly unavoidable oncoming war streaming in non-stop from Europe.

   One of the more important characters in the book is suspected by being an agent for the Japanese, and the local Japanese fleet is decidedly on maneuvers, but Hitler and the events ongoing in France, Hyde Park and Czechoslovakia seem to be causing the most jitters.

   From page 155 of the Pocket edition:

   Here’s another sample of Mason’s writing, this time from page 163. This scene takes place at the home of a wealthy Dutch resident of Singapore, and one of the men and women most interested in the formula for a new lightweight metal alloy that Leonard Melville, the man everyone is looking for, has discovered:

   Of course there beautiful women involved — two of them, in fact — and North has to balance his own search for Melville between them. (There would have been a third, but she dies early on in the book, in what was for me quite an disturbing turn of events, but I think it was Mason’s way of letting the reader know not to take anything for granted.)

   North himself is very much an earlier generation’s James Bond, US style, without the same license to kill, but perhaps it was an authorization that was purely tacit. In a similar sense, he’s an agent who’s pretty much left on his own, a la Edward S. Aarons’s Sam Durell, with lots of exotic locales included in fine detail. (See above.)

   After a fairly tense few opening chapters, as North’s plane is forced down in a horrendous storm somewhere en route to Singapore, the middle portion of the book is a textbook example of how to fill lots of pages with action and twist after twist without anything actually being accomplished.

   The ending is a considerable improvement in comparison, but to me, the grand finale was still rather flat — not pancake style, to make a totally inappropriate simile — but neither did it push the overall effort over the top. About average, then, overall, with parts of this eve of World War II spy adventure novel that are far better than that.

   I was nine years old in 1952 when my parents bought their first TV set. Being a little young at the time, I never watched what was perhaps the leading crime-drama anthology series of the early Fifties, CBS-TV’s Suspense, which had been heard on radio for almost a dozen years and debuted on the small screen early in 1949.

   Just recently, however, I’ve begun to catch up, thanks to the release of three DVD sets containing several dozen episodes, including some of the earliest.

   One of these, “Help Wanted” (June 14, 1949), was based on “The Cat’s-Paw,” the second published short story of the soon to be legendary Stanley Ellin (1916-1986),which had just appeared in the June 1949 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

   A few evenings ago I ran this episode and then re-read the story. Both deal with a middle-aged unemployed loner named Crabtree to whom an anonymous party offers $50 a week (a generous salary in those days) to sit in a tiny office on the top floor of a skyscraper, eight hours a day six days a week, and compile useless financial reports.

   Later Crabtree’s benefactor pays him a visit and offers him life tenure, as it were, if he’ll push his next visitor out the office window. Here is where Ellin and the writers of the TV version (Mary Orr and Reginald Denham) part company. In the story Crabtree follows through, although offstage (because Ellin almost never shows an act of violence), and gets away with it because his employer has made the death look like suicide.

   On the air, whose censors looked askance at unpunished crimes, the visitor falls out of the window accidentally because of his paranoid fear of the office cat, and the intended murder is impliedly brought home to Crabtree’s Iago because the victim was the wrong man, not a blackmailer but a harmless crackpot soliciting money for a campaign to bring back Prohibition.

   Otto Kruger played Crabtree, and Douglas Clark-Smith, who gives the impression of having been drunk on camera, was “Mr. X”.

   This live drama, directed by Robert Stevens, was the first of at least fifteen live or filmed TV adaptations of Ellin stories. The same tale, translated to film with the same title and a script based on this one, later became the basis of an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (April 1, 1956), with John Qualen and Lorne Greene in the roles of Crabtree and his employer and James Neilson directing.

   Also on Disc One of Collection One from Suspense is “The Murderer” (October 25, 1949), based on Joel Townsley Rogers’ often anthologized short story of the same name (Saturday Evening Post, November 23, 1946).

   The story begins just after dawn on a lonely meadow, probably in the same general area where so much of Rogers’ powerful suspense novel The Red Right Hand (1945) was set. Farmer John Bantreagh discovers the dead body of his sluttish wife, knocked unconscious and then deliberately run over by a car.

   Then deputy Roy Clade drives up, and the dialogue between the men heightens our suspicion that Bantreagh himself is the murderer. These two are the only onstage characters in Rogers’ story.

   In the Suspense version, directed by Robert Stevens from a Joseph Hayes teleplay, Jeffrey Lynn and John McQuade played Bantreagh and Clade but there are also several other characters who in Rogers’ story were only referred to in the dialogue.

   This tale was never adapted for Alfred Hitchcock Presents but did become the basis of a later live version on ABC’s Star Tonight (March 17, 1955), with Bantreagh and Clade played by Charles Aidman and Buster Crabbe.

   During my three years at NYU Law School I watched very little TV, but in the fall of 1967, when I was still living in Greenwich Village and waiting for the results of the bar exam (yes, I passed), a new series debuted on ABC which, with its tension and its reflection of the turbulence of the Vietnam and Black Power years and its abundant action scenes shot on the streets of New York, captivated me instantly.

   N.Y.P.D., starring Jack Warden as tough detective lieutenant Mike Haines, Robert Hooks as black plainclothesman Jeff Ward and Frank Converse as newbie Johnny Corso, was directed and scripted for the most part by veterans of the golden age of live teledrama and lasted two full seasons.

   Looking over the cast lists recently, I was amazed at the number of actors then based in New York who appeared in one or more episodes and went on to household-name recognition and in some cases superstardom.

   In alphabetical order and limiting myself to males: John Cazale, James Coco, William Devane, Charles Durning, Robert Forster, Vincent Gardenia, Charles Grodin, Moses Gunn, James Earl Jones, Harvey Keitel, Tony LoBianco, Laurence Luckinbill, Al Pacino, Andy Robinson, Mitchell Ryan, Roy Scheider, Martin Sheen, Jon Voight, Sam Waterston, Fritz Weaver.

   Fewer female cast members made it big, but among those that did were Jill Clayburgh, Blythe Danner and Nancy Marchand.

   None of these names were familiar to me 40-odd years ago except James Earl Jones, whom I’d seen in an off-off-Broadway production of Othello, but today they’re instantly recognizable by millions. Why this superb series hasn’t been revived on DVD is a mystery; the fact that it hasn’t is a shame.

   Speaking of vintage TV cop shows, M Squad, starring Lee Marvin, is now available on DVD, the complete 115-episode series for around $120. That’s pretty steep even if you buy the set with a 40% Borders Rewards discount coupon, but many who were teens during its first run as I was will be sorely tempted.

MILTON K. OZAKI – The Dummy Murder Case. Graphic Books #33; paperback original; 1st printing, 1951.

   As part of Professor Caldwell’s class in psychology, the Professor plans a visual presentation to instruct perceptual responses. Instead of the usual classroom show, a rather comlex presentation is given to the class outdoors:

   Two friends of the Professor’s assistant, Bendy, stage a mock murder, with a young lady being shot at the end of a, pier and falling into the water. A mannequin has already been sunk at on the spot. The police, with prior arrangement, are to come and drag for the body.

   Instead of finding the mannequin, the draggers recover the body of a young woman with her throat slit. The police report to Caldwell that the woman had no visible means of support — and no visible person to support her — and has in her apartment a room equipped like the wrapping department of a store, with paper from several first-class establishments and totally empty boxes already wrapped.

   If there were no other reason for him to investigate, this puzzle would bring Caldwell into the case, despite the objections of Bendy, who knows he will have to do all the work while the Professor does the thinking.

   There are enough coincidences in the novel to keep a reader muttering, “It’s a small world,” or maybe even “It’s an infinitesimal world.” Only an interest in the explanation for the wrapped empty boxes kept me reading to the end.

EDITORIAL COMMENT.   An homage to Milton K. Ozaki’s prose style, along with a complete checklist of all his mystery fiction, can be found here on the primary Mystery*File website.

   A longer profile on Mr. Ozaki himself can be found here, where it is said: “Even though he was the product of a mixed marriage, we believe that Milton K. Ozaki is among the earliest mystery writers of Japanese heritage writing in English as his (or her) primary language.”

RED MOUNTAIN. Paramount, 1951. Alan Ladd, Lizabeth Scott, Arthur Kennedy, John Ireland, Jay Silverheels, Francis McDonald. Director: William Dieterle.

   There’s no doubt in the world that Alan Ladd is the star of this movie. As soon as he first sets foot on screen, you get the feeling that the eyes of everyone in the theater are on him — or they would be if you were in a theater and not watching the film alone with a DVD and the TV set in your bedroom.

   This is so, even with a co-star such as the beautifully sad-eyed Lizabeth Scott as Chris, the woman in the movie who’s torn between Lane Waldron (Arthur Kennedy), wanted for a murder he didn’t commit, and Captain Brett Sherwood (Alan Ladd), an officer of the Confederate Army about to join up with General William Quantrill (John Ireland), the man responsible for wiping out Chris’s parents back in Kansas.

   So Brett Sherwood has a big job ahead of him, but as quiet-spoken as he is, and as conflicted as he is between what he sees as his duty (fighting for South) and what he recognizes as evil (Quantrill’s plans for taking over the entire western United States, with the aid of renegade Native American tribes), he’s up to the task.

   Even Lane Waldron sees that attraction between Brett and the woman he was going to marry is futile, even over Chris’s protestations to the contrary.

   The scenery is wonderful — a mountain standing almost vertically against an achingly blue sky — and in color, even more spectacular. (It’s a shame that the only images I can show you are in black and white.)

   The story neither quite as wonderful or spectacular, even with a fast and furious final battle scene, with a rousing musical overture in the background as the Cavalry as usual comes riding in to the rescue. (Lane and Chris have been held prisoner, he with a broken leg, by Quantrill in a cave in what must be Red Mountain.)

   But it’s the Quantrill end of the story that’s the less interesting. Watching (and listening to) Alan Ladd, as he allows Brett Sherwood grow as a character several ways at once, unable to deny his attraction to Chris while becoming more and more disenchanted with Quantrill, is worth the price of admission, as if — as I said earlier in the first paragraph these comments — there were any doubt.

   The presence of Lizabeth Scott, a queen of noir films, if ever there was one, is only icing on the cake.

ROBERT B. PARKER – The Judas Goat. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1978. Reprinted many times, both in hardcover and soft.

   Another book in the hard-boiled Spenser series is always more than welcome. Promised Land, the one just preceding this one, won a great deal of critical acclaim, including an Edgar award, but in spite of extraordinarily good writing, it was noticeably thin on plot, and in many ways it was largely an introspective character study of the tough Boston private eye named Spenser, and the world around him.

   As if to compensate, this time the pace is fast and bloody, regenerating the series completely by means of extreme violence. A gang of terrorists wipes out most of a wealthy industrialist’s family, and Spenser is hired to track them down. After a cleansing process of this ferocity, digging out those responsible, we can only look forward to what’s in store for the future — and, no, Spenser’s proven that he’s not yet too old for this sort of thing.

   Not a perfect book, but then again, so few are.

[UPDATE] 07-04-09.  More often than not, I’ve been revising these old reviews slightly, not to change my opinion — not ever — but to correct small typos, to change some wording around and — every once in a while — to clarify points that I’ve thought I expressed poorly the first time.

   This one I decided to leave exactly as it first appeared, except for the letter grade I assigned to each book back then, which I haven’t using at all in the reprint appearances of these reviews. I gave this one an “A,” so I obviously I enjoyed it, even though the plot as I described it, I have to admit, I don’t remember very much, if at all.

   Over the past few years, Robert B. Parker and I have been drifting apart. It’s not his doing, and it’s not for a lack of appreciation of my part. I think he’s a terrific writer, and for a long time, he was one of a small grouping of authors, less than only five of them, whose books I bought in hardcover as soon as they came out.

   I mention this because the flaws that many friends of mine keep pointing out to me in his work, I see them too. I guess they (the flaws) bother them (my friends) more than they do me.

   So why haven’t I read any of his Spenser books recently? Why have I never read a Jesse Stone novel? Or one of the Sunny Randall books?

   He just seems to be writing books faster than I can read them, that’s about the only excuse I can think of, and what’s really amazing is that he’s going to be 77 this year. Unbelievable.

   It’s time, I think, to make time in the day to read another Spenser novel or two, and maybe even some of those with his other characters. I think that in the 1970s and 80s, Robert B. Parker almost single-handedly saved the PI novel from extinction. I really do.