RICHARD NEELY – The Walter Syndrome.   McCall Publishing Co., hardcover, 1970. Paperback reprint: Signet, 1971.

   Lambert Post is a mild-mannered classified-advertising phone solicitor for the New York Journal. His association with the silver-tongued Charles Walter begins quite innocently, as he listens to Walter flatter landladies into placing “rooms to let” ads in the paper.

   Walter, whose upper-class background and ease with people impresses Post, finds a “most fascinated and sympathetic audience” in him, and soon he progresses from boasting of his exploits to enlisting Post’s participation in a little game: Walter gets the names of recent widows and divorcées from the paper, then calls them up and makes a date; but Post is the man who shows up, explaining Walter has been called out of town.

   Quickly the encounters turn ugly. One woman humiliates him in front of a roomful of guests; another has her boyfriend beat him up. Angry at the women’s treatment of Post, Walter embarks on a plan of revenge.

   The first woman, Jennifer Hartwick, is knocked unconscious, raped, and left in a room at a hotel; because of an anonymous call, the police think she is a prostitute. The second woman, Diane Summers, and her boyfriend, Edward Cranston, are found shot to death.

   At first the police suspect a murder/suicide, but then they find that a third party purchased the gun; and Walter — ever protective of Post — realizes that Lambert can be identified not only as the man who bought the weapon but also as someone with a grudge against Jennifer Hartwick. Thus, he reasons, Jennifer must die, too.

   Soon the papers are carrying stories about the Executioner, a man who punishes women for their wickedness. And as investigative reporter Maury Ryan of the Journal delves into the case, the Executioner begins to contact him by phone, throwing out teasers and taunting him.

   Told from the viewpoints of Post, Walter, and Ryan, this is a truly frightening tale. By the time a fourth woman is murdered and we realize the Executioner’s plans for fifth, it is impossible to put the book down.

   While the astute reader may pick up on what is going on fairly early, the outcome is nonetheless chilling — and the ultimate revelation is a total surprise.

   Neely has written other tales of psychological suspense among them Death to My Beloved (1969), The Japanese Mistress (1972), Lies (1978), The Obligation (1979), and Shadows from the Past (1983).

         ———
   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.

RICHARD NEELY – A Madness of the Heart. Crowell-Collier, hardcover, 1976; Signet, pb, 1977.

   Richard Neely specializes in the novel in which nothing is what it seems. This book is no exception. It tells of Harry Falcon, who saves a girl from rape only to return to his home and find his own wife (just released from a sanitarium) raped and beaten.

   As a rapist begins to terrorize the city, Harry becomes obsessed with finding him and extracting vengeance. In the course of things he meets his childhood sweetheart, and their romance is rekindled; but as he recalls their past love, we learn some strange things about Harry Falcon.

   Everything falls into place in the end, and the reader begins to see how cleverly Neely has planted little hints all along. Events and phrases take on new meanings as the truth is revealed.

   This is a suspense story which carries you right along. The shocking ending might not be as great a surprise to readers of certain detective novelists as it will be to others, but it’s a strong one nevertheless.

[EDITORIAL COMMENT.]   In my opinion, Richard Neely’s books were like no one else’s. Noirish and dark and nothing in them is ever exactly what it seems to be. I’ve found a short piece about him on one of Ed Gorman’s former blogs. You can go here to read the whole article, but I don’t think he’ll mind if I include a short excerpt here, one in which he’s discussing The Plastic Nightmare, another of Neely’s works:

REGINALD HILL – Ruling Passion.   Dell, paperback reprint; Scene of the Crime #51; first printing, August 1982. Hardcover editions: Collins/Crime Club, UK, 1973; Harper & Row, US, 1977. Reprinted many times, both hardcover and soft.

   Chronologically the third of the Superintendent Dalziel–Sergeant Pascoe novels, of at least 20 and still counting, and only the second that I’ve managed to sit down and read. The first one is lost to memory — to mine, at least. I could hazard a guess as to which one it was, but that’s all it would be, a guess.

   But even so, I could tell that the uneasy rapport (of sorts) between Pascoe and Dalziel was still going through some growing pains in Ruling Passion, the overweight (fat) Dalziel thinking of himself as a mentor, and Pascoe, if indeed a student, often wishing that he had a different master.

   If you’re a long-time reader of the series, feel free to chip in. How has their relationship grown and changed over the years?

   The two cases in Ruling Passion are really both Pascoe’s. The one in which he’s more deeply involved is the more interesting of the pair, and he’s not even the investigating officer. He and Ellie Soper, a friend from college days with whom he’s been recently reunited, getting together with four other friends from that time of their life, shockingly find three of them dead — murdered. Missing, and presumably the killer (although not to Pascoe’s way of thinking) is the husband of one of the three.

   The other case, the one to which he’s officially been assigned, is that of a series of house break-in’s that have recently taken place while the owners have been away. A fairly innocuous case, but there are signs that — as opposed to the usual burglar — this one will put up a fight if he’s cornered.

   This was a long book in 1973, unusually so, with over 300 pages of small print in the paperback edition I read; while it may run closer to today’s norms, I still found it long. The big question (to mystery readers) is whether or not the two cases are connected. Hill’s books can be difficult to get a good read on, or so I’ve been told, so it’s not so clear cut that the two cases are really one — and I won’t tell you.

   But as possibly an experiment in story-telling technique, what these means is that there are two distinct circles of major characters for the reader to keep track of, and for me in particular, it meant that the case I found less interesting — the one involving the break-in’s — got the short end of the stick, as far as paying the attention I should have to it. (Looking back, though, having finished the book, I think that case number two as well as the characters really WERE less interesting.)

   Hill also has a way of starting scenes somewhat after they’ve begun, hiding what happened at the end of one scene, only to come back to it later and off the beat. While Pascoe does a lot of detective work (Dalziel, while a central figure, stays rather in the background, if that makes sense) I don’t think he (Pascoe) did any detecting: just thinking and putting a lot of jumbled facts together, in a common sense sort of way, sometimes to good advantage and sometimes not.

   Nor does Pascoe have all the facts, as it turns out. This is a detective novel in which the characters and the relationships between them are as interesting to watch and follow as the unraveling of the case(s) itself/themselves — if not more so.

   Ellie, in particular, not sure in the beginning that she really likes having a policeman as a boy friend, and detesting Dalziel in particular, finds herself warming to him, gradually and very much to her surprise.

   As for Pascoe, he is pleased to learn along the way that he’s been promoted to Inspector. Does that mean that there’s life, he wonders, after Dalziel?

[POSTSCRIPT]   I haven’t mention the long-running BBC TV show based on the series, but obviously, since it did run so long (60 episodes in all, between 1996-2007), it must have had quite a bit going for it. Comments and/or comparisons, anyone?

DEBORAH MORGAN – Four on the Floor. Berkley, paperback original; 1st printing, October 2004.

   Jeff Talbot, former FBI agent and now an antiques “picker,” continues to be one of the more personable protagonists in the flourishing antiques mystery sub-genre, although my lack of interest in antique cars (or, indeed, of cars of any kind except as a way of getting from one bookstore to another) kept me from enjoying this as much as earlier entries.

   Well, I didn’t really care about the subjects in a couple of the other entries either, but I figure that Morgan will hit one of my very limited interests one of these years.

   When Jeff goes to pick up his restored vintage automobile, he finds four dead bodies that at first appear to be the result of an industrial accident. Of course, you won’t be surprised to hear that murder is the explanation and Jeff becomes a somewhat unwilling participant in the investigation.

   A second, apparently unrelated case, is a mystery involving his parents, who were killed in an automobile accident when he was quite young, an enigma that suggests they were involved in a crime.

   I must say that the conclusion Jeff leapt to initially here seemed off-the-wall to me, as indeed he is to learn that it was. The truth is more mundane, but a bit more interesting and changes the way he views his family and himself.

   Smooth and entertaining. If you’re into antique cars, you may think this is the cat’s meow.

      The JEFF TALBOT Antique-Lover’s Mystery Series —

1. Death Is a Cabaret. Berkley, pbo, November 2001.

2. The Weedless Widow. Berkley, pbo, October 2002.

3. The Marriage Casket. Berkley, pbo, October 2003.

4. Four on the Floor. Berkley, pbo, October 2004.

5. The Majolica Murders. Berkley, pbo, April 2006.

ELIZABETH LOWELL – Blue Smoke and Murder.

Avon, paperback reprint; 1st printing, April 2009. Hardcover edition: William Morrow, June 2008.

   This is one of those long (over 400 pages) novels of romantic suspense that I often buy because they look interesting and end up never reading because they simply look too long and maybe not so interesting after all when I get them home and out of the Barnes & Noble bag.

   This one’s an exception – by which I do not mean exceptional, but it’s in many ways quite acceptable – because I did start reading it late one evening and didn’t put it down until I’d read about a quarter of the way through. Quite acceptable, that is, until … and I’ll get to that soon.

   The background is what intrigued me at first – that being an inside look at the puffery and other hi-jinks (mostly illegal) that go on in the art business, or at least the auction end of it — which is maybe the most of it, at least as far as the where the money is.

   Hence the “blue smoke” of the title, and there is quite a bit of it, since over 400 pages is quite a large number of pages to fill – but not in an uninteresting fashion, mind you.

   The story: when Jill Breck, who is one of those highly efficient and independent young women who may appear more often in fiction than they do in the real world – she has a degree in art but spends her days as a rapid-river travel guide on the Colorado River – but when she finds herself in a jam, she calls on the highly expensive St. Kilda Consulting agency, whose operatives have figured in several other of Ms Lowell’s earlier books.

   Jill’s great-aunt has died, under semi-suspicious circumstances, as it happens, although the authorities do not think so, but when Jill tries to investigate the value of a painting her great-aunt had had for a long time, she is both poopoohed badly and threatened, also badly.

   It is the latter, the threat, this is, that has her concerned. St. Kilda sends Zach Balfour to act as her bodyguard and to otherwise give her all-around assistance. Bodyguards in novels like these often end up getting closer to the bodies they are guarding than would be professionally correct, and this novel is no exception — but without the abundance of graphic details that may inhabit other books of this same genre.

   From a masculine perspective, I thought Jill would be a good person to learn to known, but that the two leading males were far too shallow: too much macho, not enough finesse. (Truth in Lending: I have neither.)

   Nonetheless, the story is OK, if not more than adequate, until the action begins, which is when it goes off the track entirely. Why let the leading lady go off by herself into such an obvious trap? And what really happened anyway, other than the villain simply going nutso?

   I’d have thought that a much more subtle ending was in order — there should have been a way to get some actual auction action involved. That’s what I was waiting for — not the usual TV stuff with cars, planes, police cars, guns and a dumpy sex ranch with a convenient ravine behind it. I can watch that sort of stuff on the boob tube almost every night in the week.

   When I read a book I want something a tad more clever than this. More than a tad, in fact.

      St. Kilda Consulting

1. Always Time to Die. Morrow, 2005; Avon, 2006.
2. The Wrong Hostage. Morrow, 2006; Avon, 2007.
3. Innocent as Sin. Morrow, 2007; Avon, 2008.

4. Blue Smoke and Murder. Morrow, 2008; Avon, 2009.

E. C. BENTLEY – Trent’s Last Case.

Thomas Nelson, UK, hardcover, 1913. First published in the US as The Woman in Black, Century, 1913. (Later US editions have the British title.) Reprinted many times in both hardcover and paperback. Also available as an online etext.
   Silent film: Broadwest, 1920 (Gregory Scott as Philip Trent; Richard Garrick, director). Also (with partial sound): Fox, 1929 (Raymond Griffith as Philip Trent; Howard Hawks, director). Sound film: British Lion, 1952 (Michael Wilding as Philip Trent; Herbert Wilcox, director).

   One of the true cornerstones in the development of the modern detective novel, Trent’s Last Case has received high praise for more than seventy years. G.K. Chesterton (to whom the book was dedicated) called it “the finest detective story of modem times,” while Ellery Queen praised it as “the first great modern detective novel.”

   Later critics have tempered their praise somewhat, and Dilys Winn’s Murder Ink even lists the book in its Hall of Infamy among the ten worst mysteries of all time.

   But there can be no doubt as to the book’s importance, especially in the character of detective Philip Trent. Before Bentley’s creation of Trent, fictional detectives had always been of the infallible, virtually superhuman type exemplified by C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes.

   English artist Philip Trent, investigating the murder of a wealthy American financier for a London newspaper, represents the birth of naturalism in the detective story. He falls in love with the victim’s widow (the woman in black of the original American title), who is the chief suspect in the case, and he is far from infallible as a detective.

   Bentley wrote the book as something of an exposure of detective stories, a reaction against the artificial plots and sterile characters of his predecessors. But despite Trent’s fallibility, his detective work is skillful. The ending, with its surprise twists, is eminently satisfying.

   Though slow-paced by modem standards, the book has a graceful prose and quiet humor that have stood up well with the passage of time. Mystery readers were not to see anything remotely like Trent’s Last Case until Agatha Christie’s initial appearance with The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920.

   Happily, Philip Trent’s last case wasn’t really his last, though E. C. Bentley waited twenty-three years before producing a sequel, Trent’s Own Case, written in collaboration with H. Warner Allen.

   This time Trent himself is the chief suspect in a murder case, and if the book falls short of its predecessor, it is still a skillful and attractive novel.

   Bentley followed it with thirteen short stories about Trent, written mainly for the Strand magazine, twelve of which were collected in Trent Intervenes (1938), a classic volume of anthology favorites. A final thriller, Elephant’s Work (1950), is more in the style of John Buchan and is less successful.

         ———
   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.

E. C. BENTLEY – Elephant’s Work: An Enigma.   Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1950. Alfred A. Knopf, US, hardcover. 1950. Also published as The Chill. Dell 704, paperback, 1953.

   E(dmund) C(lerihew) Bentley is one of the magical names in the mystery genre. His book Trent’s Last Case (1912) is usually cited as the birth of the Golden Age of the British detective novel, and certainly the book that carried the genre from the short form practiced by Doyle, Chesterton, and Morrison, to the novels championed by Christie, Sayers, Berkley and others.

   In addition to the classic Trent’s Last Case Bentley also wrote a collection of short stories featuring journalist and amateur sleuth Philip Trent, Trent Intervenes (1938), and a second novel, Trent’s Own Case (1936) with H. Warner Allen, but then was silent in the field until 1950 when he penned Elephant’s Work: An Enigma.

   And enigma is exactly what Elephant’s Work is. Bentley dedicated the work to John Buchan, and it is certainly in the form of a “shocker,” inspired when Bentley expressed his admiration for Buchan’s The Thirty Nine Steps and Buchan suggested Bentley pen his own. The result forty years later was this book. In retrospect he should have ignored the advice and stuck to detective stories.

   The novel begins promisingly. The hero Severn boards a train where he encounters a formidable American and learns there is a dangerous fugitive abroad. As they wait, there is a ruckus coming from a nearby circus train. An elephant has escaped and gone on a rampage. When the elephant goes wild again on the train and causes a wreck, Severn is knocked unconscious.

   When he awakens, he is suffering from amnesia and finds he is the guest of one General da Costa who informs him the name on his passport is Taylor, and while the General, the doctor, and everyone else are all perfectly kind, it soon dawns on Severn he is a virtual prisoner, and his fate is involved with someone known as Nick the Chill who works for a gangster called Farewell Billy.

   In fact it is more than implied by the General and others that Severn is none other than Nick the Chill, a gunman in the employ of Farewell Billy.

   So far so good. The writing is clean and clear and the suspense well calculated. The sense of mystery and Severn/Taylor’s confusion and growing paranoia well drawn. Is he the deadly Chill, or an innocent man being set up to take the fall in some elaborate scheme? Buchan himself could hardly have done it better, especially when Severn/Taylor eludes his protectors and tries to piece the mystery together pursued by mysterious sinister men and unable to go to the police who may believe he is a dangerous killer.

   And then Elephant’s Work takes the most absurd twist you can imagine. I almost hesitate to reveal it, save unwary readers might think Elephant’s Work was a lost classic of the thriller genre only to run aground on the most unlikely reef in the history of the chase and pursuit novel.

   Severn isn’t Taylor, and he isn’t Nick the Chill, he’s the Bishop of Glanister, on a little holiday before taking up his new duties — as the just appointed Archbishop of Canterbury — and the entire conspiracy has been the hastily contrived work of his friends attempting to protect him from any potential bad publicity while he was recovering his memory.

   If at this point you feel the need to throw the book across the room, it is at least a small volume. Of course there is a bit more to it than that. The General himself was a fugitive of sorts who didn’t want Severn’s presence to reveal where he was until his situation was settled, but even that is hardly a satisfying explanation why everyone behaves in the most absurd manner possible and for the most absurd of reasons.

   Ultimately Elephant’s Work is one of those annoying books where if anyone behaved halfway reasonably or made some effort to actually think, the entire facade would come crashing down like the house of cards the author has constructed. You should on general principle avoid any book which the author subtitles an “Enigma.” Chances are he means it.

   This shouldn’t put anyone off reading Bentley’s classic detective novels. While it’s a bit dated, Trent’s Last Case is a genuine classic, and both Trent Intervenes and Trent’s Own Case are exceptional works in the genre.

   Philip Trent is the model for many of the amateur sleuths to come later and especially an early influence on Dorothy L. Sayers and Lord Peter Wimsey. Bentley was a clever and charming man who gave his own name to the playful four line stanzas known as Clerihews he wrote in school and which were published with illustrations by G.K. Chesterton as Biography For Beginners. Bentley himself was a respected journalist and editorial writer for the Daily Telegraph.

   But be forewarned, Elephant’s Work is one of the single most annoying thrillers ever written, light as a souffle only because it really is filled with hot air. And be careful where you throw it. You might upset an elephant and start the whole absurd business all over again.

   The victim of Trent’s Last Case is the millionaire Sigsbe Manderson, that name being a motive for murder if nothing else, as some wag once pointed out. Trent’s Last Case was filmed twice, the second time as The Woman in Black with Michael Wilding as Trent and Orson Welles as Manderson.

   Despite, or because of that, it’s a dull affair all around. Luckily we were spared the film version of Elephant’s Work — one of those small mercies we should be grateful for.

P. G. WODEHOUSE – Wodehouse on Crime: A Dozen Tales of Fiendish Cunning.

Ticknor & Fields, 1981. International Polygonics Library, hardcover/trade paperback: 1991. Editor: D. R. Bensen, with a foreword by Isaac Asimov.

    P(elham) G(renville) Wodehouse–“English literature’s performing flea” (Sean O’Casey) and “the funniest guy I ever read” (H & R Block)–was a master of comedy. Now, tastes vary as to what constitutes humor — the eruption of Krakatoa still provokes a laugh in some circles — but P.G. Wodehouse (“Plum”, or just “You, there”) is generally acknowledged as the best-of-the-best.

    Wodehouse on Crime collects twelve stories from Wodehouse’s massive output of over six decades of writing. At first blush, you wouldn’t associate innocuous P.G.W. with criminal intent, would you (and why are you blushing)? As the late Isaac Asimov asks in his foreword: “Can there be crime in the never-never-land of P.G.W. idyllatry? Certainly! The tales are saturated with it, and even that does not weaken our love … when one stops to think of it, there is rarely a story in the entire Wodehouse opera which doesn’t feature crime.”

    Editor D. R. Bensen adds that “… it would be impossible to present a full collection of those of P. G. Wodehouse’s stories which are concerned with crime. It would be a book of thousands of pages, with a spine about two and a half feet wide, which would make for awkward reading.” He also notes, tongue in cheek, the “baleful” influence that reading the Sherlock Holmes stories in the Strand had on the young and impressionable Plum.

    However, be aware that if you’re seeking blood and gore and pick up Wodehouse on Crime, you’re in the wrong venue.

    The first story in the collection, “Strychnine in the Soup,” is typically criminous Wodehouse. Plum’s Underwood portable here dispenses a lively story — a gentle spoof of Golden Age Mystery conventions — centering on Mr. Mulliner’s nephew Cyril, a diffident chap who encounters Miss Amelia Bassett at a play. After an awkward introduction — she grabs his leg — Cyril speaks first:

       “You are evidently fond of mystery plays.”

       “I love them.”

       “So do I. And mystery novels?”

       “Oh, yes!”

       “Have you read Blood on the Bannisters?”

       “Oh, YES! I thought it was much better than Severed Throats.”

       “So did I,” said Cyril. “Much better. Brighter murders, subtler detectives, crisper clues … better in every way.”

    Then, says the author, “The twin souls gazed into each other’s eyes. There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.”

    A little later, Amelia asks apropos of nothing: “Tell me … if you were a millionaire, would you rather be stabbed in the back with a paper-knife or found dead without a mark on you, staring with blank eyes at some appalling sight?” — a question we’ve all asked ourselves, I’m sure; but before Cyril can answer, in walks Amelia’s formidable mother …. but read “Strychnine in the Soup” for yourself, and the eleven other stories, too.

    As with H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction, take P.G.W. in small doses for best results — you wouldn’t want to overdo it — in between, say, the disappearance of Mr. Davenheim’s moustache and the murder of Mrs. Twisby-Axleby’s trained albatross in that blood-drenched Golden Age mystery you’re currently reading. (Oh, and by the way, Mr. Mulliner’s solution to The Murglow Manor Mystery, mentioned in passing, is intricate … and completely loopy.)

    To die an embittered misanthrope was the sad fate of too many of our great humorists — Mark Twain, S. J. Perelman, Soren Kierkegaard — but not so with P. G. Wodehouse: He reportedly kept a stiff upper lipper to the end, remaining at his post as the fort was being overrun by mutinous Sepoys and seditious Polyglots, a feather duster in one hand and his Underwood portable in the other.

    That Plum: What a guy!

      Contents:

“Strychnine in the Soup” (1932)
“The Crime Wave at Blandings” (1937)
“Ukridge Starts a Bank Account” (1967; reprinted in EQMM in 1982)
“The Purity of the Turf” (1923)
“The Smile That Wins” (1931)
“The Purification of Rodney Spelvin” (1927)
“Without the Option” (1927)
“The Romance of a Bulb-Squeezer” (1928)
“Aunt Agatha Takes the Count” (1923)
“The Fiery Wooing of Mordred” (1936)
“Ukridge’s Accident Syndicate” (1926)
“Indiscretions of Archie” (1921)

          Addendum:

    “I seem to keep finding, or I keep seeming to find, trace elements of Doyle in the Wodehouse formulations. I sense a distinct similarity, in patterns and rhythms, between the adventures of Jeeves as recorded by Bertie Wooster and the adventures of Sherlock Holmes as recorded by Dr. Watson ….”

    So states Richard Usborne in his Plum Sauce: A P. G. Wodehouse Companion (2002). He goes on: “The high incidence of crime in the Wodehouse farces, especially the Bertie/Jeeves ones, may be an echo of the Sherlock Holmes stories, too — blackmail, theft, revolver shots in the night (Something Fresh), airgun shots by day (‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’), butlers in dressing-gowns, people climbing in at bedroom windows, people dropping out of bedroom windows, people hiding in bedroom cupboards, the searching of bedrooms for missing manuscripts, cow-creamers and pigs. I am not accusing Wodehouse of having concocted his stories deliberately on Doyle’s lines; I am saying that, of all the authors to whom Wodehouse’s debt shows itself, Doyle is second only to W. S. Gilbert. And Wodehouse would gladly have acknowledged both debts.”

    That bears repeating: “… Doyle is second only to W. S. Gilbert” as an influence on the foremost humorist of the twentieth century.

    Wodehouse admitted as much to a biographer: he “recalled the excitement of waiting for new issues of The Strand Magazine on Dulwich station” containing the latest Holmes adventures.

    Another of Wodehouse’s characters was Psmith (pronounced “smith”). Usborne writes that one of the “strongest influences in the rhythms and locutions of the Psmith language was Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories … Wodehouse’s first major conversational parodist, Psmith, is constantly echoing Sherlock Holmes (indeed, the Holmes Valley of Fear influence probably to some extent suggested the plot of Psmith Journalist). Psmith has verbal ‘lifts’ from Sherlock Holmes, with direct quotations of words and copying of manner”; and Usborne produces several examples from the Psmiths and the Jeeves and Woosters.

SIREN OF BAGDAD. Columbia Pictures, 1953. Paul Henreid, Patricia Medina, Hans Conried, Charlie Lung. Director: Robert Quine.

    Turner Classic Movies had a salute to Hans Conreid the other day, which was kind of a surprise, as I don’t think anyone would consider him one of the great movie stars of the day, to put it frankly.

    He began his career in radio — think Professor Kropotkin on My Friend Irma (1949), for example, a role he carried over to the film version, as did Marie Wilson in the title role, but most people remember the movie as the debut of a comedy team named Martin and Lewis — and he also did a lot of work on TV on up through the early 1980s.

    But movies? Not really, that wasn’t his metier, but I taped the ones that TCM showed, and my reviews of them will show up here eventually. (Assuming that you don’t mind, I’ll exclude The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T from 1953, which I’ve seen before and I decided I’d pass on watching again.) Conreid was perfect for radio and TV sitcoms, though — he was also Uncle Tonoose on Danny Thomas’s Make Room for Daddy — loud, sneeringly brash and willing to do anything for a gag.

    A role not unlike the one he plays in Siren of Bagdad, too. There’s a small amount of adventurous derring-do in the movie, but very little. The movie’s played for laughs all the way, and on the level of a mediocre radio show, much less TV, although the sets could have come from the same warehouse.

    Samples:

    Trying to distract a palace guard: “I beg your pardon. I realize they haven’t been invented yet, but have you got a match?”

    Making his way with his boss, the magician Kazah the Great (Paul Henreid), to Bagdad: “The sands of the desert have barbecued my bunions.”

    At a time when things are looking dark for the pair: “Where can I catch the next camel to Basra?”

    Story line: When the dancing girls in his entourage are kidnapped by desert bandits and taken to Bagdad to be sold as slaves, Kazah the Great and Ben Ali (Conried) follow and fall in with some revolutionaries. The Great Kazah also falls in love with the leader’s daughter (Patricia Medina), and you can take it from there.

    There is also a large magic trunk into which people are put, only to disappear, among other uses, including changing Ben Ali into a beautiful dancing girl (with Ben Ali’s voice, both unfortunately and amusingly), the better to infiltrate the Sultan’s harem. (Along this line of thinking, there is much to see in this movie.)

    One would think that’s a long way down for Paul Henreid, from Now, Voyager and Casablanca to Siren of Bagdad, but to his credit, and this is the honest truth, he seems to be having a great time.

    As for the director, Robert Quine, you may not be able to tell from this film, but he was on his way up — to films like My Sister Eileen (1955), The Solid Gold Cadillac (1955) and The World of Suzie Wong (1960), among a number of others.

   I realized, when I saw that Hard Case Crime was reissuing Donald Westlake’s The Mercenaries as The Cutie and that Ramble House was reissuing Ed Gorman’s The Night Remembers, that I’d reviewed both for Drood Review back in the early 1990s.

   Here they are. I enjoyed them a lot, but I am curious as to what I’d have to say about them today, after 18 years of life…

      From The Drood Review of Mystery, April 1991:

DONALD E. WESTLAKE – The Mercenaries. Carroll & Graf, reprint paperback, 1991. Random House, hardcover, 1960. Also published as: The Smashers, Dell, paperback, 1962; and as The Cutie, Hard Case Crime, 2009.

   Thirty years lends a curious and bloodless innocence to Westlake’s debut novel. In The Mercenaries, the criminal organization is just that: a business enterprise run by suited, thin-lipped executives.

   The protagonist is Clay, a dutiful middle manager who takes care of the details and shuts off his emotions when employees must be (literally) terminated. Those emotions get a workout, however, when he’s forced to play private eye to find the “cutie” whose murder of a connected man’s mistress may be the opening salvo in a power play aimed at Clay’s boss.

   Written in steady, unobtrusive style, The Mercenaries speeds along, going almost too fast to allow us to figure out what Westlake’s trying to accomplish. Is this an early spin on blue-jawed gangster stereotypes, or a dry spoof of the then-popular Organization Man?

    References and details and Clay’s early ’60s New York “sophistication” date marvelously. If all of the plot details don’t jell at the story’s conclusion, it’s because we see things through Clay’s eyes. And in the disorienting and ambiguous ending, Westlake foreshadows the genesis of one of his most famous characters, Parker.

      From The Drood Review of Mystery, March 1991:

ED GORMAN – The Night Remembers. St. Martins, hardcover, 1991. No mass market paperback edition. Ramble House reprint: hardcover/trade paperback, 2008.

   Sixtyish Jack Walsh, retired Cedar Rapids deputy turned private investigator, is presented with a classic predicament: the wife of a man he sent to prison wants him to prove her husband’s innocence. It takes one corpse (that of a would-be blackmailer) and one intimation of mortality (a cancer scare for Walsh’s lover) to put him on the job.

   Gorman dedicates the book to Bill Pronzini “and somebody else who shall remain Nameless.” While there’s a superficial resemblance to Pronzini’s well-seasoned sleuth, the two characters’ real common ground is their maturity. Each brings his life experience to his cases, neither needs to be a tough guy and both are able to be empathetic and judgmental at the appropriate times.

   Characterization is Gorman’s strong suit and he presents Walsh’s sensitivity without dropping into easy sentimentality. The sometimes awkward, sometimes silent relationship between Walsh and his mildly restless lover is uncomfortably true to life in the ’90s.