MIGNON G. EBERHART – Woman on the Roof.

Paperback reprint: Popular Library; several printings, including 1968, 1973. Hardcover editions: Random House, US, 1967; Collins Crime Club, UK, 1968. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, January 1968.

   Mignon Eberhart’s started out by writing detective stories, more or less. Her first five books, starting with The Patient in Room 18 in 1929, featured the mystery-solving duo of nurse Sarah Keate and private eye Lance O’Leary, and they were highly regarded enough that all five were made into movies.

   Allow me to digress, if you will. I did some investigation, and here’s a complete list of all the films that have been based on Eberhart novels. I’ve underlined the ones mentioned above as being the first five Keate and O’Leary books.

   There was one book in which only Sarah Keate appeared and which did not become a movie, and that was Wolf in Man’s Clothing, which was published in 1942.

   Over the years I may have seen one or two others in this list, but the only one I remember watching is The Patient in Room 18. And you can, in fact, read my review of this it here, posted earlier on this blog. I enjoyed it, but it was in spite of all of the movie’s flaws, including being played primarily for laughs.

   Eberhart’s final mystery was Three Days for Emeralds, which came out in 1988, when the author was in her late 80’s. She died in 1996, with well over 50 novels to her credit.

   From the book at hand, however, try the following first line on for size: “There were times when the shadow on the terrace seemed to take on the shape of a woman’s body flung down, left in its blood and beauty.”

   It’s a pretty good indication, I think, of the kind of book you’re going to get when you read it. As it happens, the first wife of Susan Desart’s new husband had been murdered on that very same penthouse terrace five winters and four summers earlier. Ssusan had married Marcus when the Jim, the man she really loved — and still mourns for — died in Viet Nam.

   And other than that one single reference, this is a book that could have just as easily have been written in the 1940s. It’s an old-fashioned mystery story in which the staging creaks once in a while, but when Jim turns up not dead after all, and Marcus refuses any discussion of a divorce, revealing his true nature in surprisingly violent fashion, old-fashioned chills started to creep up and down this still rather modern spine of mine.

   In her later years Eberhart wrote what’s probably best described as romantic suspense, perhaps, but this is no cozy. There’s some real emotion involved in this book. I’d cast Edward G. Robinson and Barbara Stanwyck in two of the parts, and maybe John Payne as the other.

   But why it was never made into a movie, nor any other of Mignon Eberhart’s books after 1945, I can’t tell you. Woman on the Roof came along too late, but if her 1940s and 50s books are as good as this one is — and I think they are — then I’d have thought that they’d have fit right in with the Film Noir era.

   At the least, based on what Hollywood did to The Patient in Room 18, they would turned out better than the movies based on her early detective fiction. If ever an opportunity was missed, this was it.

WHO WAS THAT LADY? Columbia, 1960. Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Dean Martin, James Whitmore, John McIntire, Barbara Nichols, Joi Lansing, Simon Oakland, Larry Storch. Screenplay: Norman Krasna, based on his play. Director: George Sidney.

   Some days nothing goes right.

   It’s one of those days for Tony Curtis, who teaches chemistry at Columbia in New York. A beautiful student waltzes in to thank him for a make-up test, and gets a little over enthusiastic just as his wife, Janet Leigh comes in. Janet stomps out, and Tony is in hot water. All over a make-up test.

   All this is shown in the opening titles without a word of dialogue. It doesn’t really need dialogue. We get the point immediately, and the title song, catchily sung by Dean Martin fills us in on anything else we don’t know.

   This is a sex farce, American screwball style.

   So what would you do? Well, you probably wouldn’t call your overly imaginative bachelor buddy Dean Martin who writes for television and has a wonderfully twisted imagination.

   How does Curtis explain his innocent kiss? Why of course, tell your wife you are a an FBI agent and the student was a foreign exchange student and a spy. You even go to CBS where Dean works and have FBI badges made and guns from the prop department.

   Just what any sensible husband would do.

   Of course, whenever the prop department at CBS makes a phony FBI badge, they notify the Bureau so it lands on local agent-in-charge John McIntire’s desk, and he passes it on to weary James Whitmore.

   Meanwhile Dean and Tony have sprung the story on Janet, who is one of her less bright moments buys the story. (In fairness almost no one in this film is an intellectual giant.) Dean, though, has plans. He has a date with a sister act of exotic dancers — Barbara Nichols and Joi Lansing — and he needs a wingman. Tony is elected. And Janet even pushes him to go — it’s his duty.

   Whitmore shows up at Tony and Janet’s apartment just as a panicked Janet discovers Tony had gone on his mission without his gun. Whitmore sees his daughter in her and decides to throw a scare in the boys without arresting them or revealing the truth to her.

   That’s going to cost him.

   Before the evening is over, Whitmore has taken a bullet and Leigh has blabbed to the press how her husband was hunting spies.

   It’s been one of those days. And it’s about to get worse.

   Because the CIA, more than a little miffed that the FBI is running a spy op without them, shows up. Seems the boys have drawn out an actual KGB cell. Now the FBI has to keep quiet and use the boys to draw out the real spies.

   They should have known better.

   Which is how the boys end up kidnapped by Russian spies Simon Oakland and Larry Storch, drugged, and locked in the sub basement of the Empire State Building — which they mistake for a Russian sub and proceed to sink while singing patriotic songs.

   Which explains why it is snowing on some floors of the building and sweltering on others, not to mention the geyser spouting from the roof. And they thought the cleanup after King Kong was rough.

   In the wrong hands, this kind of froth can go horribly wrong, but when everyone involved is a seasoned pro, and sheer charm and skill compete with fast quips and sheer nonsense, the result is a souffle of a movie, smart, silly, and great fun.

   Don’t tune this one in looking for great art, but if belly laughs are the mood you are in, this is the perfect film. When you watch today’s latest comedy fall flat on its face at the mall and see ham-handed performances and obvious direction, you can appreciate how hard this is to do, and wonder that in this period it was done so well so often.

   At the time this must have seemed just another playful comedy from a team of pros. Today it seems like art.

   Dying is easy, comedy is hard. But if you do it right, it looks easy. And isn’t that the trick in farce, not to let the audience see how hard the actors are working to make it all seamless and easy?

   On that level, this one is the highest of art.

TCM Alert:    Monday, July 6.   6:00 PM.    Who Was That Lady? (1960)
   A cheating husband convinces his wife his flirtations are actually spy missions. Cast: Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Dean Martin. Dir: George Sidney. BW-114 mins, TV-G, Letterbox Format.

THE SYSTEM. Bryanston Films, UK, 1964. Released in the US as The Girl-Getters, American International Pictures, 1966. Oliver Reed, Jane Merrow, Barbara Ferris, Julia Foster, David Hemmings. Director: Michael Winner.

   There’s not a crime to be seen in this British-made movie, unless it’s the breaches of trust committed by a group of local lads who prey on the girls (birds, or thrushes) who come down from London and elsewhere to their small bailiwick on the sea every summer. Seduce and abandon, is their modus operandi, and their system is simple.

   The leader of their lot, a chap named Tinker (Oliver Reed) has a job as a roving beach photographer.

   He takes pictures of likely victims, obtains their local addresses, and distributes the same to the others of the group. When the summer’s over, they’ve left their ladies with lots of memories, perhaps, and – also perhaps – many of the memories are good ones. But lasting ones? Hardly ever.

   No big crimes involved here, right? There are lots of swinging sixties beach party scenes, and the film is certainly not without lightness and humor, but no Annette Funicello beach blanket movie is this. If ever a film might be called Noir without even the hint of a murder being committed, it might be The Girl-Getters.

   The question is, as it slowly dawns on Tinker, is who are the Takers and who are the Taken?

   His pursuit of the wealthy Nicola (Jane Merrow) only shows how strong the “caste system” in England really was, and how futile it may have been to fight it. The one-set tennis match he plays with one of Nicola’s gentlemen friends, or tries to, and then tries to laugh it off, is a turning point that comes, one supposes, in everybody’s life – at which time they learn their limitations, and at the same time learn they cannot do anything about it.

   The glowing embers behind Oliver Reed’s fiery, dark-shadowed eyes, and his memorable performance in this film, show that when the occasion presented itself, he was one of the finest actors of his day. Up until this movie, most of his work was done for Hammer Films, but I’d like to think that a lot of doors were opened to him afterward.

   Not that The Girl-Getters was recognized as anything close to a work of art at the time, but it was among the vanguard of British films dealing with modern (if not mod) themes such as class differences and sexual awareness like Alfie and Georgy Girl (both 1966) that turned the world of film-making upside down.

   I didn’t see The Girl-Getters back then, but that’s the era when I started to really enjoy what film-making was all about, rather than simply film-watching. Blow-Up (1966 as well, and starring David Hemmings, who also had a small role in this earlier movie) was a revelation to me, nor was I the only one who felt that way.

JACK S. SCOTT – The Poor Old Lady’s Dead.

Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1976. Reprint paperback: Popular Library, 1980. First published in the UK: Robert Hale, hc. 1976.

   The Chief Inspector had come down with a bug and the Superintendent was not aware of it until Detective Inspector Rosher had taken over the investigation. So the tumble down the stairs by a little old lady at the Haven, an old folks’ home, remains in the ham-fisted hands of Old Blubbergut, as he is unaffectionately known to his colleagues and his underlings.

   Rosher has to deal with an alderman who is the dead lady’s nephew and quite influential in the town, and finesse and subtlety are not Rosher’s strong points, if they are points of his at all.

   A subplot involves Rosher’s unhappy and hapless assistant, who has to suffer not only from his superior’s taunts but from the demands of a pregnant mistress who, quite reasonably, wants him to leave his wife and marry her.

   Rosher can be compared with [Joyce Porter’s] Chief Inspector Wilfrid Dover in some ways, only Dover is a caricature, a grotesque, and funny. Rosher is unfunny and very close to real.

   He toadies to his superiors. As for his underlings, “Strangely, he was not unpopular with the rank and file, provided they were on a lowly rung and unlikely to rise far above it.” Like Dover, he cadges meals and drinks from the unfortunate juniors who have to work with him. His personal habits aren’t very pleasant, either.

   As some other authors before him have discovered when they made their main character unpleasant, a continuing character must receive some empathy from the reader or be a burlesque like Dover. Otherwise, the normal reader will not buy further books in the series.

   Scott made Rosher more appealing and more human, though still not particularly pleasant, as the series advanced. Read this first recorded case of Rosher for a good investigation, some rather bitter humor, and to discover what he was like in the beginning.

   Then read the rest of Scott’s novels featuring Rosher. They become even more enjoyable as Rosher mellows somewhat.

      Bibliographic Data:     [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

ROSHER, INSP. (Sgt.) ALFRED STANLEY “ALF”.   Series character created by Jack S. Scott.

      The Poor Old Lady’s Dead (n.) Hale 1976; Harper, 1976.
      The Shallow Grave (n.) Hale 1977; Harper, 1978.

      A Clutch of Vipers (n.) Collins 1979; Harper, 1979.

      The Gospel Lamb (n.) Collins 1980; Harper, 1980.

      A Distant View of Death (n.) Collins 1981; Ticknor, 1981, as The View from Deacon Hill.
      The Local Lads (n.) Collins 1982; Dutton, 1983.
      An Uprush of Mayhem (n.) Collins 1982; Ticknor, 1982.
      All the Pretty People (n.) Collins 1983; St. Martin’s, 1984.

      A Death in Irish Town (n.) Collins 1984; St. Martin’s, 1985.
      A Knife Between the Ribs (n.) Collins 1986; St. Martin’s, 1987.

Editorial Comment:

   I may be wrong, but I don’t have any strong feeling that either Inspector Rosher or his creator Jack S. Scott are remembered by more than a handful of mystery readers today, some 20 or 30 years later. Back in the 1970s and early 80s, I’m fairly sure that Joyce Porter’s Inspector Dover’s books were more popular than Rosher’s, and I’m sure that even the obnoxious Dover is now little more than a fading memory, alas.

SON OF SINBAD. RKO, 1955. Dale Robertson, Sally Forrest, Lili St. Cyr, Vincent Price, Mari Blanchard, Nejla Ates. Director: Ted Tetzlaff.

   There’s silliness and to spare in Son of Sinbad, with Dale Robertson and a cast of strip-tease artists cavorting around in skimpy outfits and Technicolor so bright you need sunglasses.

   Director Ted Tetzlaff was an accomplished cinematographer (Notorious and The Enchanted Cottage come to mind) and a director who had his moments (The Window, from a Woolrich story), and while Son of Sinbad will never make the pantheon of great movies, he gives it a certain gaudy panache, throwing bright colors across the screen every chance he gets and trying to impart a sense of motion to a story that is mostly inert.

   Also thrown across the screen are girls. And more girls. And still more girls, all wearing not very much at all, and showing it off with surprising stylishness.

   Mention must also be made of Vincent Price dressed in a circus tent, playing Omar Khayyam (!) with tongue in cheek, having a good time with dialogue that shows surprising glimmers of intelligence. The best-known line comes when he settles down to sleep and mutters, “To sleep… perchance to dream… An interesting thought, but I’m too tired right now; I’ll leave it to some future poet.”

   Just a flash of wit in what is essentially a good dumb movie.

EDITORIAL COMMENT.   I’ve not seen the movie, yet, but I have watched two clips from it on YouTube. The first features the exotic dancing of Nejla Ates; in the second, Sally Forrest dances up an equal storm while dressed, as Dan so eloquently states, wearing not very much at all.

   I have more pictures I could show you, but the one below will have to suffice, then it’s back to regular programming:

EDGAR WALLACE – The Four Just Men. The Tallis Press, UK, hardcover 1905; Tallis, UK, 1906, with the solution to the mystery. Small Maynard, US, hc, 1920. Reprinted many times.

   The Four Just Men is the book that put Edgar Wallace name on the front page, and kept it there, thanks to an ingenious news paper promotion in the Daily Mail in which he challenged the readers to solve the mystery for a big reward.

   Wikipedia has a good account of the mess this led to. Unfortunately for Wallace, too many came up with the solution, and he had to swiftly change his ending and even then he ended up losing money, but by then his name was made. Money always went through his fingers like that — often at the racetrack. But whatever the circumstance, The Four Just Men was a sensation, and Edgar Wallace was off to his own literary races.

   The plot involves what I call ‘the great vote,’ a particularly British invention wherein for some reason a Minister, MP, or member of the House of Lords must be stopped from introducing a bill (usually involving defense funds) or making a key vote.

   As far as I know, it first showed up in a story by Lord Dunsany, and its most famous incarnation before Wallace may have been in American Richard Harding Davis’s novel In the Fog (really a collection of related novellas in the mode of Stevenson’s Arabian Nights or Andrew Lang’s The Disentanglers), both well known and popular. (The Davis is worth finding just for the beautiful color illustrations by American Sherlock Holmes illustrator Frederic Dorr Steele). The Four Just Men stands as the best known version of the plot today.

   In Wallace’s case his heroes, who call themselves the Just Men, announce that if Cabinet Minister Sir Philip Ramon doesn’t withdraw his upcoming bill that will send many honest revolutionaries to certain death at the hands of their homelands dictator, they will be forced to kill him. A brief summary of their career is compiled by the police:

   Scotland Yard draws in its forces, the Minister refuses to budge on his bill, and in due course the Just Men strike. The Just Men, Leon Gonzallez, George Manfred, Raymond Poiccart, and Thiery plan their move and the nations holds its breath, the question being how will they managed the feat.

   The Just Men win out, but at the cost of one of their lives. Notably Wallace doesn’t make the case clean cut. Ramon is a good man who will not be the victim of extortion, and the Just Men swear to kill him for the greater cause of justice, not because he is evil.

   Few thrillers today deal with such moral quandaries, much less any in the Wallace class of popular fiction. Though Wallace spends precious little time on the moral question (it’s a fairly short book), the fact that it comes up at all in a newspaper serial designed as a thriller is a tribute to Wallace’s instincts as a writer. It doesn’t hurt that the solution to how they kill Ramon is clever in itself and well handled by Wallace.

   The Just Men are what Robert Sampson called Justice Figures in his survey of the pulps, Yesterday’s Faces (published in six volumes by Bowling Green Press), avengers who operate outside the law for the public good. Their name derives from the Jewish tradition that to each generation forty just Gentiles are born who treat the Jewish people fairly and with justice.

   The Just Men have led dangerous lives before the book begins, and will continue for several volumes, one dying, one retiring, the two survivors eventually opening a sort of detective agency after receiving pardons for their past crimes.

   It has probably already dawned on you that by modern standards the Just Men are political terrorists — at least in this first book — but by the standards of the day such a passionate love of country and justice could be justified, and Wallace goes out of his way to portray his gentlemen as good men of high moral and political fiber who believe theirs is the only way to prevent a dangerous threat to moral good.

   This was the heyday of anarchists, nihilists, and the Fenians, and it was still possible to romanticize figures of social justice such as the Just Men. The mass killing of WWI and the Russian Revolution would change the milieu which they operated in, however.

   Still, in today’s world it is hard not to think of modern terrorism and the ‘excuses’ given for its atrocities when reading the book. If you can park that modern sensibility, The Four Just Men is a classic that deserves to be read, and the sequels among Wallace’s best works. But you may find it makes you think more than Wallace ever intended when he wrote it.

   Whatever its politics, The Four Just Men is a compelling and entertaining Edwardian tale (it was published the year Queen Victoria died), with a quartet of interesting heroes and enough invention and suspense for a much longer book. Though it does reveal its origin somewhat as a newspaper serial, it is still highly enjoyable today.

   Wallace was never one to miss out on a money maker, and the Just Men would return throughout his career in books like The Three Just Men, The Just Men of Cordova, The Council of Justice, and The Law of the Three Just Men.

   It’s only speculation, but they may have been inspired in part by Eugene Sue’s Prince Rodolfe in The Mysteries of Paris, and E.W. Hornung’s Mr. Justice Raffles, which both deal with heroes who set up their own underworld court systems to hand down justice to those the law can’t touch. (No doubt a little of the thieves court from Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame and Balzac’s Thirteen Men also contributed.)

   Whatever their origin the book became an instant classic, still in print, and at one point even issued by Oxford University Press. Pretty good company for a newspaper serial.

   The Four Just Men came to the big screen in 1939. Known as The Secret Four in the US, the plot was moved up to a contemporary setting but was otherwise faithful. Francis L. Sullivan, Hugh Sinclair, Griffith Jones, and Frank Lawton were the Just men. Walter Forde directed from an Angus McPhail script.

   In 1959 thirty-nine episodes of a syndicated television show starred Dan Dailey, Richard Conte, Vittorio de Sica, Jack Hawkins, and a semi-regular Honor Blackman as modern variations on the characters ran and was seen worldwide.

   Paul Gallico later penned a novel about a group of aging Resistance fighters who behaved much the same way as the Just Men, The Zoo Gang (Coward, 1971). A summer replacement series that was based upon it starred Brian Keith, John Mills, Barry Morse, and Lili Palmer, running for six episodes in 1975.

   The Four Just Men isn’t great literature by any means, but it is one of the high points of Edgar Wallace’s career, and one of the most important books in the genre.

   It’s a quick and easy read, and one that has entertained for over a century. As far as I know it is still in print, and in any case it is fairly easy to find and available as a free e-book as well.

   The film, The Secret Four can be found on the gray market, and may be available from a legitimate source as well. Wallace fans who don’t know it, genre historians, lovers of Victorian and Edwardian detective fiction, and readers who like to be entertained should all give it a chance. All the Saints, Shadows, Spiders, and the like who came afterward are in the shadow of Wallace and the Just Men.

   I suspect that detectives like Henry Tibbett [whose mystery case Falling Star, by Patricia Moyes, was reviewed here several days ago] were a reaction to the eccentric sleuths of an earlier era, e.g., Holmes, Wolfe, and Poirot.

   Mystery writer John Creasey fathered a small army of detectives, all of whom had “smarts” and physical prowess, though none were especially colorful. Understandably, but perhaps unfairly, Creasey’s name has often made mystery readers smile. The most prolific mystery writer, he started by writing some dreadful books in his early days.

   Nor were all of them mysteries, since he wrote in all genres. (One of his early “Tex Reilly” westerns is reputed to contain the deathless line about coyotes flying in the sky.)

   Creasey was best known for his Commander George Gideon books, written under the J.J. Marric pseudonym, but G.G.’s roots were clearly in his older literary brother, Inspector Roger “Handsome” West, who appeared in forty-three novels and at least one short story.

   West started off rather inconspicuously in 1942, depending on a socialite friend for much of his detection and legwork. However, as the series progressed, Creasey’s writing and West, as a hero, improved.

   Happily, Harper’s Perennial Library has recently reprinted eight of the Roger West series, and their selection is excellent, as witnessed by the following examples.

   Serial killers are everywhere today. (I’m sure I pass them on the streets as I walk from the train to work.) The Beauty Queen Killer (1954) is a good early example, with some exciting scenes, marred only by difficult to accept motivation.

   The Gelignite Gang (1955) dates from the same year as the first Marric novel, and it also gives a good picture of London from a policeman’s viewpoint.

   Here, the police are faced with a series of jewelry robberies, with the titular form of dynamite the common factor. When murder occurs during robbery in the city’s largest department store, West is called in to solve a mystery that has more surprises than most.

   In Death of a Postman (1956) Creasey accomplishes what relatively few mystery writers do: he makes us care about the victim. A postal worker, who leaves behind a wife and five children, has been murdered during the Christmas rush. As we rapidly turn the pages of one of Creasey’s best narratives, we become involved and want West to track down a particularly heinous killer.

Bibliographic details:

   The Beauty Queen Killer.   Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1956. First published in the UK as A Beauty for Inspector West, Hodder & Stoughton, hc, 1954. US paperback editions include: Dell 985, 1957, as So Young, So Cold, So Fair. Berkley F1095, 1965; Lancer 74757, 1971; and Perennial, 1987.

   The Gelignite Gang.   Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1956. First published in the UK as Inspector West Makes Haste, Hodder & Stoughton, 1955. US paperback editions include: Bantam 1884, 1959; Berkley F1176, 1966, as Night of the Watchman; Lancer, 1971, as Murder Makes Haste; and Perennial, 1987.

   Death of a Postman.   Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1957. First published in the UK as Parcels for Inspector West, Hodder & Stoughton, 1956. US paperback editions include: Bantam 1883, 1956; Berkley F1167, 1965; and Perennial, 1987.

RINGS ON HER FINGERS. 20th Century-Fox, 1942. Gene Tierney, Henry Fonda, Laird Cregar, Spring Byington, John Shepperd (Shepperd Strudwick), Frank Orth, Henry Stephenson. Director: Rouben Mamoulian.

   Gene Tierney was as beautiful an actress as Hollywood ever produced, wasn’t she?

   In the scene in this mostly light-hearted movie in which she’s trying to attract Henry Fonda’s attention, dressed in a single piece bathing suit and stretched out on a blanket along the shore, he’s so distracted he can hardly talk, and who can blame him?

   Over the span of her career, Gene Tierney didn’t do too many romantic comedies – most of her films seems to be straight dramas (Dragonwyck, The Razor’s Edge) or crime films with a strong noirish flavor (Laura, of course, and Night and the City) – but she acquits herself well in Rings on Her Fingers, making me wish she’d done more movies in the same vein.

   Looking through her list of films, I see only That Wonderful Urge (1948), a remake of Love Is News (1937), with Tyrone Power in both, as a movie that’s in any sense comparable to Rings on Her Fingers.

   In a way, you might call this film a “re-imagining” of The Lady Eve (1941), in which Henry Fonda played against Barbara Stanwyck. The gimmick here is that Henry Fonda’s character is poor, not rich, and when Gene Tierney’s character is part of a flim-flam which fleeces him of $15,000 hard-earned dollars, it’s easy to see that the two of them will get together, but how will she keep her part of the swindle a secret from him?

   Not that she’s a bad girl, only a shop girl easily tempted by glamor and easy riches, and taken in by the real pair of crooks, Laird Cregar and (believe it or not) Spring Byington. And what a mis-matched pair they are: Cregar was a giant of a man in size (but nimble enough on his feet), and Byington was tiny and nearly swallowed up on the screen in comparison.

   Is this a screwball comedy? I’ve asked myself that, and when I did, I didn’t get an immediate response, mostly because, like “noir film,” I don’t know that I have an exact definition of screwball comedy in mind.

   But I guess I know one when I see one, and at the moment I’m inclined to say No as far as Rings on Her Fingers is concerned. The romantic problems are a little too real, with too much of an edge to them (how does she keep him finding out that she was part of the con game that took him in?), and there doesn’t seem to be the kind of goofy wackiness that I associate with other screwball comedies of the 1940s.

   As for Henry Fonda, he’s perfect for the part, naive but noble, and what a way to make a living: kissing Gene Tierney.

JUDSON PHILIPS – A Murder Arranged. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1978. Reprint hardcover: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, November 1978. No US paperback edition. (Shown is the cover of an Italian softcover edition.)

   Journalist Peter Styles’ crusade against senseless violence leads him to an out-of-the-way New England village where he becomes the champion of a young man accused and convicted of murder. All the evidence seems to point directly to Tim Ryan, but the feeling of at least half the townspeople is that the state police wrapped up their case far too quickly.

   Obviously there’s more than a little resemblance here to a story that recently made Connecticut headlines, and the reader is swallowed up at once into the affairs of a small town. In spite of some fast deductions and the long arm of coincidence in the final chapters, Philips demonstrates once again that few authors are so non-stop reliable as he.

[UPDATE] 06-29-09.  For an author as popular as Judson Philips (1903-1989) was, it never made sense to me that a good percentage of his books never came out in paperback. Including the books he wrote as Hugh Pentecost, his hardcover mystery fiction would have filled at least two long shelves at your local library.

   Philips began his career writing an even longer list of stories for the pulp magazines in the 1930s, and books continued to come from his typewriter very nearly up to the day he died. A list of his book-length fiction can be found online here.

   If it weren’t for readers and collectors of pulp magazines, I imagine that Philips would have fallen long ago into that ever-growing limbo of mystery writers who sold tons of books in their day, but who are fast fading from memory today. (A list of his “Part Avenue Hunt Club” stories from Detective Fiction Weekly that have recently been reprinted in a two-volume set from Battered Silicon Dispatch Box can be found online here.)

          

SINBAD THE SAILOR. RKO, 1947. Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Maureen O’Hara, Walter Slezak, Anthony Quinn. George Tobias, Jane Greer, Mike Mazurki, Sheldon Leonard. Co-storywriters: John Twist & George Worthing Yates; director: Richard Wallace.

   Moving on to swashbuckler movies from westerns, a while ago TCM did a series of “Sinbad” flicks which finally floated to the top of my to-be-watched pile.

   Sinbad the Sailor is a lush 40s Technicolor extravaganza with odd touches of noir as an equivocating Douglas Fairbanks Jr. moves into uneasy alliance with an enigmatic Maureen O’Hara, and they both play cat-and-mouse with hard-boiled icons like Anthony Quinn, Walter Slezak, Jane Greer and even Mike Mazurki and Sheldon Leonard, all looking a bit out of place in Arabian Nights country, but giving it a shot anyway.

   The stunt work is nothing to write books about (disappointing from a swashbuckler of Fairbanks’ pedigree) but the sheer, ebullient silliness of the thing carries it off.

Coming soon:

   Dan’s reviews of Son of Sinbad (1955) and Captain Sinbad (1963). In the meantime, I wish I’d found a copy of this photo in color: