MAD HOLIDAY. MGM, 1936. Edmund Lowe, Elissa Landi, Zasu Pitts, Ted Healy, Edmund Gwenn, Edgar Kennedy, Raymond Hatton. Suggested by the story “Murder in a Chinese Theatre” by Joseph Santley. Director: George B. Seitz.

   I’ve looked, and I can’t find a record of the story just mentioned, nor even a mention anywhere of the author, Joseph Santley. If anybody knows anything more, let me know. [See the UPDATE below.]

   Another curiosity is that the name of the “detective” in this film is Philip Trent, but the character has nothing to do with the detective of the same name in the works of E. C. Bentley. This Philip Trent is a movie actor who plays a detective by the name of Selby James in a series of films based on the books written by Peter Dean. (Still with me?)

   Tired immensely of the role, claiming that the situations he’s been put into over the years to have been unrealistic and utterly unbelievable, Trent declares himself finished with the role and takes off on a sea-going vacation.

   And what does he run into? Murder and a stolen diamond. (How did you know?)

   He also discovers that “Peter Dean” (played by Elissa Landi) is someone he wouldn’t mind being handcuffed to, once he meets her and is accused along with her of doing away with the owner of the diamond.

   As you can guess, any film with Zasu Pitts in it, or any movie featuring Ted Healy (mentor and leading instigator of The Three Stooges) is not bound to be taken very seriously. Nonetheless, there is some body to the plot (besides the body, I mean). And while it’s not exactly a high-class production, this strictly B-version of a detective mystery story still provides a full 70 or 75 minutes of entertainment.

[UPDATE] 01-23-09.  This review was written well before the Internet was in full swing, and in particular before the online IMDB was readily available. Joseph Santley was the director of 89 films, starting in 1928; in the 1940s he seems to have worked primarily for Republic, putting out small trifles like Rosie the Riveter (1944, with Jane Frazee) and Hitchhike to Happiness (1945, with Dale Evans).

   Santley was either the screenwriter or wrote the story for 15 other films in the 1930s, but where the story that Mad Love was based on was published, if ever, has still never been determined.

   Elissa Landi was only 32 when she made Mad Holiday, but she appeared in only three movies afterward, including After the Thin Man, also in 1936. (The photo you see of her to the left was taken from that film.)

   As for Mad Holiday itself, I have absolutely no recollection of ever seeing it. My only hope is that someday I’ll come across the video tape that I saved it on.

LILLIAN O’DONNELL – The Goddess Affair.

Fawcett Crest, paperback reprint; 1st printing, January 1998. Hardcover edition: Putnam, December 1996.

   Born in 1926, Lillian O’Donnell wrote 34 mystery novels between 1960 and 1998. Three different series detectives appeared in these books, all female: Norah Mulcahaney, a detective for the NYPD, beginning as a rookie cop (15 books); Gwenn Ramadge, a Manhattan-based PI (4 books, of which this is one); and Mici Anhalt, who works as an investigator for the New York City Crime Victim’s Compensation Board (3 books). The other 12 books all appear to be stand-alones.

   In The Goddess Affair Ms. Ramadge is hired by the owner of a cruise liner to find who’s been stealing jewelry from the passengers as the ship makes its way through the Caribbean, the Panama Canal and up the Central American coast.

   What she doesn’t count on is being asked to solve a murder mystery too, that of Minerva Aldrich, the only one of three half-sisters who has any wealth remaining several years after the unfortunate death of their mother, who was the head of Goddess Designs, and the creative force behind it.

   Are the two cases connected? It’s up to the intrepid heroine to find out – although as she admits on page 185, “She didn’t consider getting beat up or shot at as part of the job. She wasn’t that kind of private eye.”

   What she does do is ask a lot of questions, most of them quite personal, but being on ship is like being trapped in a mansion surrounded by banks of snow. There is no place the possible killers and/or thieves to go. The telling is readable enough but rather flat in tone, without a lot of excitement – even though exciting things are going on.

   If being realistic can be considered a fault in a detective story, that’s the underlying problem here. Gwenn Ramadge is no superheroine. It takes several calls to her backup assistant in New York City to come up with the facts that clinch the case, all offstage – that plus luck, and the timely intervention of Ray Dixon, her close friend on the NYPD, who flies down and helps wrap things up in the last three or four pages.

   Some personal matters between Ray and Gwenn are also quickly settled, and on the last page they exit stage left — and off into the sunset — this being their last recorded case together.

       ___

   From the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here’s a list of all four:

               RAMADGE, GWEN     [Lillian O’Donnell]

       A Wreath for the Bride (n.) Putnam 1990

       Used to Kill (n.) Putnam 1993
       The Raggedy Man (n.) Putnam 1995

       The Goddess Affair (n.) Putnam 1997

JOHN HARVEY – Darkness & Light. Harcourt, hardcover, July 2006; trade paperback: Harvest, July 2007. UK editions: William Heinemann, hc, 2006; Arrow, ppbk, 2007.

    — Gone to Ground. Harcourt, hardcover, February 2008; trade paperback: Mariner Books, October 2008. UK editions: William Heinemann, hc, 2007; Arrow, ppbk, 2008.

   I was a long-time fan of John Harvey’s Charlie Resnick series and had high hopes when he began a new series featuring retired detective Frank Elder.

   In the third in the series, Elders is asked by his ex-wife to look into the disappearance of a friend’s older sister. The inquiry eventually links up with a cold case that brings in D.I. Maureen Prior for an investigation that takes some surprising turns.

   This was a pleasurable, if evanescent read, with much of the detail disappearing as soon as I’d put down the book.

   I then read Gone To Ground, a stand-alone novel, with the investigation conducted by detective Will Grayson and his partner, Helen Walker.

   This should have been a natural for me since the case involves an academic who’s writing a book on “the mysterious life and death of fifties movie star Stella Leonard.”

   However, this went down easily and, like Darkness & Light, all too forgettably. Evanescent reads I can do without. Can this be my farewell to John Harvey’s work?

   The opening of Isabel Ostrander’s The Clue in the Air (1917) is a full intuitionist detective novel. There is a Dying Message. There is a description of a whole apartment building, and the suspects living on various floors and corners — a description that could have served as a blueprint for the many Golden Age novels which have elaborate floor plans in their stories.

   The detectives also investigate alibis and time tables. Unfortunately, this does not lead to a classic puzzle plot. Ostrander unravels all the threads of her story, but does not show any great ingenuity in the Christie tradition.

   Still, the whole tone of the novel anticipates the storytelling of Christie, Queen and other intuitionists of the Golden Age. Ostrander, like other American women writers such as Lee Thayer and Carolyn Wells, was writing intuitionist detective novels at an early date: in the 1910’s, and long before the famous British writers like Christie and Crofts, who allegedly started the Golden Age in 1920.

   Thayer and Wells dealt with the domestic realm in their tales: a house full of suspects, whose motives sprung from their personal relationships with each other and the deceased. This was in marked contrast to the public realm writers of the American Scientific school, where motives spring from business relationships, theft, politics and civic corruption.

   Ostrander has plenty of domestic motives. But she also has a young inventor and his plane. A typical scientific school, business type issue. Similarly, in At One-Thirty (1915) we have domestic motives for some characters (a tangle of jealousy and adulterous relationships) and business issues motivatingothers (a detailed look at a Wall Street swindle).

   Business issues in Christie et al tend to be somewhat perfunctory. Someone will threaten to kill someone because they are double crossing them in a business deal. The motive is not developed into a major story, the way the American Scientific School would do it.

   For example, everything about the missing cashier and the embezzlement in The Circular Staircase is elaborately plotted. Ostrander straddles both traditions in her books.

   Another difference between the two schools. The intuitionists play attention to the crime scene, and the movements of the suspects around it during the crime. This is not generally true of the American Scientific School. A possible exception: Cohen’s Six Seconds of Darkness.

   This motion around the crime scene probably is a consequence of impossible crimes: one cannot have a Zangwill-Chesterton rearrangement in space and time, without tracking the characters’ movements.

   But it spreads to writers that are not always impossible crime oriented, such as SS Van Dine, Anthony Abbot, and Ellery Queen. It was also found in Doyle, in stories like “The Naval Treaty.” This was before the main impossible crime movement.

   The central mystery plot of Ostrander’s At One-Thirty (1915) is a straightforward imitation of Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case (1913). This shows that Ostrander was reading British mystery novels.

   Ostrander’s book is very similar to Golden Age mystery fiction to come, with murder among a closed circle of suspects in a wealthy home. Here as elsewhere, Ostrander introduces a whole slew of suspects, each with a different subplot.

   Servants tend to be prominent characters in Ostrander, just as they are in Bentley. They do not tend to be the anonymous functionaries of Christie, who fade into the background. Instead they play major roles in the stories.

   Ostrander’s The Tattooed Arm (1921) has her police detective hero Sergeant Miles go undercover into a wealthy Long Island home as a servant, and much of the story is narrated from the servants’ hall and point of view.

   Scientific School writers sometimes paid close attention to issues of spousal abuse. These stories are fully feminist, and remind one of the attention that the women’s movement focused on this issue in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Ostrander also continues this tradition. At One-Thirty has a very detailed look at the problems of an abused wife.

   At One-Thirty centers on blind detective Damon Gaunt. Ostrander does a vivid job of evoking his world of sound, touch and smell. Gaunt makes many brilliant deductions from these senses, in a way that evokes Sherlock Holmes’ numerous deductions about his clients.

   Gaunt’s main detective work centers around flashes of insight into the situations in front of him. Ostrander makes it clear that he solves mysteries by pure thinking. This is definitely in the intuitionist tradition, and recalls both Sherlock Holmes before him, and such Golden Age intuitionist writers to come as Christie, Milne and Queen.

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

OSTRANDER, ISABEL (Egenton). 1883-1924. Pseudonyms: Robert Orr Chipperfield, David Fox & Douglas Grant. (Books published under the latter three pen names are not included here.)

      At One-Thirty (n.) Watt 1915
      The Crevice [with William J. Burns] (n.) Watt 1915
      The Heritage of Cain (n.) Watt 1916

      The Clue in the Air (n.) Watt 1917 [Timothy McCarty]
      Island of Intrigue (n.) McBride 1918
      Suspense (n.) McBride 1918
      Ashes to Ashes (n.) McBride 1919
      The Twenty-Six Clues (n.) Watt 1919 [Timothy McCarty]

      How Many Cards? (n.) McBride 1920 [Timothy McCarty]

      The Crimson Blotter (n.) McBride 1921
      McCarty, Incog (n.) McBride 1922 [Timothy McCarty]
      The Tattooed Arm (n.) McBride 1922
      Annihilation (n.) McBride 1924 [Timothy McCarty]
      Dust to Dust (n.) McBride 1924

      Liberation (n.) McBride 1924
      The Black Joker (n.) McBride 1925
      The Neglected Clue (n.) McBride 1925
      The Mathematics of Guilt (n.) McBride 1926

      The Sleeping Cat (n.) McBride 1926
      The Sleeping Cop [with Christopher B. Booth] (n.) Chelsea House 1927

[Editorial Comments.]

   Please see Mike Grost’s website A GUIDE TO CLASSIC MYSTERY AND DETECTION for more essays such as this on the history of Detective Fiction. If it’s your first visit, you’re bound to stay quite a while — and to come back often.

   For further discussion of Carolyn Wells and Mary Roberts Rinehart, among other contemporaneous authors, see the comments that follow Bill Pronzini’s review of Carolyn Wells’ novel, The Wooden Indian.

My computer either has a virus or some sort of corrupted hard drive. I’ll be back as soon as things are fixed. I’m hoping for the best, but it comes to computers, you gotta suspect the worse.

NIGHTFLYERS. 1987. Catherine Mary Stewart, Michael Praed, John Standing, Lisa Blount, Michael Des Barres. Based on the novella by George R. R. Martin; director: Robert Collector.

   Nightflyers is a science-fiction movie that starts out well, but then before you know it, it’s turned to sci-fi (pronounced skiffy). Where have you heard that before? Read on.

   It begins sometime in the next century, with a crew of scientists and adventurers with less than creditable credentials on an organized hunt through space for a race of aliens said to be far more advanced and intelligent than mankind.

   One problem. The trail they’re following may be created by only random radio noise. The creatures may be nothing more than figments of mythological fiction; the stuff legends are made of. The lure of the unknown may lead nowhere.

   The crux of the story is the ship they’ve chartered, though. It holds far more in store for them than any mysterious race of never-before-seen aliens. There is no crew, and the captain appears to them only in the form of a three-dimensional hologram. More, it soon becomes clear that the ship itself is intelligent, nor is it — or should that be he? or, perhaps, she? — is particularly interested in having them aboard.

   The captain himself is strongly attracted to Miranda (Catherine Mary Stewart), the project’s good-looking co-ordinator who narrates the tale, and he may wish to leave as well, but if so, it would hardly be with the ship’s good wishes.

   Except for perhaps the movie Blade Runner, the settings in Nightflyers are more authentically 21st century in appearance than any other movie I’ve ever seen.

   Unfortunately, the story doesn’t come close to matching it. It ends up, as I’m sure you may have guessed, in a bloody battle with the malevolent computer that is running the starship — complete with decapitations, stabbings and noisy explosions in space. The usual stuff.

   And none of it means. anything, even to the survivors. (And I suppose you can count me among them.)

   The science fiction that I’ve read by George R. R. Martin — I haven’t read this particular one — has been adventure fiction in part, but it’s always had some intelligent thought behind it. The second half of this movie hasn’t any at all. (Or what there is, if I’m not giving too much away, is of the artificial variety only.)

[UPDATE] 01-18-09. After reading this review, I think I’d like to see the movie again. That line I wrote about the settings intrigues me. Could the staging of a small-budget movie like this have impressed me that much?

   I could do without the horror film this movie turns into, though, and so … what are the chances I’ll start tracking down a copy? Realistically? I haven’t seen this movie in over 17 years, but unless someone comes up with a good reason that will tell me why I should, I probably won’t, not for a while longer yet.

STUART TOWNE [CLAYTON RAWSON] – Death Out of Thin Air.

Coward McCann, hardcover, 1941. UK edition: Cassell & Co., hardcover, 1947. Both novelettes are included in The Magical Mysteries of Don Diavolo, by Clayton Rawson, aka Stuart Towne, Battered Silicon Dispatch Box Press, hc, 2005.

   Death out of Thin Air is, I believe, a scarce book. It actually contains two pulp novelettes, “Death from the Past” and “Death from the Unseen,” featuring Don Diavolo, a red-garbed version of the Great Merlini.

   Considering the stories’ source, it is not amazing that Diavolo’s entourage includes such elements as an oriental valet, a custom red automobile, beautiful blond twin assistants, and a townhouse next to his residence owned solely for the purpose of spying on and escaping from visitors.

   The first of the stories begins with a locked-room murder in Diavolo’s dressing room; the second gives us a variety of crimes carried out in such a way that the criminal must have been invisible. Similar crimes and further adventures and mysteries intervene before Diavolo exposes the perpetrators.

   These are not the best of Rawson’s works but contain full measure of the puzzlements fairly explained, though arising from unlikely and extravagant causes, which make all of his books so popular with a small group. What element is lacking in his books to account for their original small sales — it is hard to find a copy of any that was bought by an individual, not a library — and Rawson’s giving up writing them?

      Contents:

   Death from the Past, published as “Ghost of the Undead,” Red Star Mystery, June 1940.

   Death from the Unseen, published as “Death Out of Thin Air,” Red Star Mystery, August 1940.

MURDER 101: NEW AGE. Hallmark, 2008; aka MURDER 101: LOCKED ROOM. Dick Van Dyke, Barry Van Dyke, Carey Van Dyke, Shane Van Dyke, Susan Blakely, Wendy Glenn. Director: David S. Cass Sr.

   On August 2, 2008, Hallmark Channel premeiered a two-hour film in its Murder 101 series, which stars Dick Van Dyke as Prof. Jonathan Maxwell, a university criminology instructor.

   In this one, a New Age guru is found shot dead in a locked meditation room along with four other people. Trouble is, they’re all in deep meditative trances when the crime is discovered. Even when the sheriff fires off a blank, they still remain in the trance state.

   Of course, when they do come ’round none of them remembers seeing the crime occur. A further complication is that no one heard the fatal shot, yet a test later proves that a firearms discharge would be heard outside.

   The gun itself, found next to the victim, had no silencer attached, and since there is no GSR [Gun Shot Residue] on the dead man, it is very unlikely he committed suicide. But a note, which many construe as indicating the victim contemplated killing himself, is found in his room.

   GSR is soon discovered on one of the four who were in the room at the time, but shortly after this person is arrested he lapses into a near-death state: “Suicide by coma; that’s a new one.”

   Meanwhile, someone tries to run over an associate of the dead guru in the hospital parking lot and later tries to tidy up the loose ends of the crime by cremating Jonathan — while he’s still alive ….

   This one reminded me of a first- or second-season Murder, She Wrote episode in which a group of people are in a hypnotic trance when a murder takes place right before them, but the similarity ends there.

   The violence content is quite low, with the script concentrating more on WHO, WHY, and HOW, a refreshing change of pace from the usual “crime drama.”

   I didn’t think this was the best possible treatment of the locked room theme — the impossible crime motif is by far my favorite — but it wasn’t all that gosh-awful either.

      Filmography:

Murder 101. 01-07-06. A successful executive is murdered in an explosion at his mansion, and an attractive female investigative reporter is suspected; she had been working undercover on a story about corporate scandal.

Murder 101: College Can Be Murder. 01-06-07. When Dr. Maxwell does not believe that Professor Archer Coe died of a heart attack, he hires his friend, PI Mike Bryant (Barry Van Dyke), to investigate.

Murder 101: If Wishes Were Horses. 08-18-07. A horse is stolen, and the owners receive a $100 million ransom demand; the trainer is later found dead.

Murder 101: New Age. 08-02-08.

TODD DOWNING – The Case of the Unconquered Sisters.

Doubleday Doran/Crime Club, hardcover, 1936. UK edition: Methuen, hc, 1937.

   The skeleton of a professor doing sabbatical research down in Mexico is accidentally brought to light by the derailment of a train carrying a museum’s collection of archaeological relics back across the border.

    Customs official Hugh Rennert is first upon the scene, and this connection to the case, as slight as it is, seems enough to lead the American embassy in Mexico City to request his services in conducting the ensuing murder investigation.

   This is his fifth case, by the way. Customs work apparently means that you’re naturally snoopy — or is it the other way around?

   This is a curious sort of mystery, filled with wild and crazy clues, and populated by a pair of mildly eccentric expatriate ladies and their niece (beautiful), assorted servants and embassy officials, plus the remaining team of university scholars. It’s artificial, scatter-minded, and clouded by clumsy obfuscation.

   Nobody would publish such stuff today, and in a way, it’s a shame.

[UPDATE] 01-18-09. As a matter of fact, the folks who run the Rue Morgue Press are doing well reprinting books like this, and more success to them! In spite of my critical remarks, books like these are fun to read, and that’s a statement you should not take lightly.

   I’ve been omitting the letter grades I added to my reviews back then, but this one received a “C.” Obviously it’s not one of the classics — or you would have heard of it before now — but it’s equally not a stinkeroo from the bottom of the barrel. You can never go far wrong with a Crime Club mystery.

   As for the author, he was born in Oklahoma (Indian Territory) in 1902 of Native American (Choctaw) descent. He was the state’s “first successful writer of detective novels,” according to this website, which has a considerable amount of other information about him.

   All of the books below, in a list taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, take place in either Texas or Mexico — quite often both:

DOWNING, (George) TODD. 1902-1974.

      Murder on Tour (n.) Putnam 1933 [Hugh Rennert]
      The Cat Screams (n.) Doubleday 1934 [Hugh Rennert]
      Murder on the Tropic (n.) Doubleday 1935 [Hugh Rennert]
      Vultures in the Sky (n.) Doubleday 1935 [Hugh Rennert]

      The Case of the Unconquered Sisters (n.) Doubleday 1936 [Hugh Rennert]
      The Last Trumpet (n.) Doubleday 1937 [Hugh Rennert]
      Night Over Mexico (n.) Doubleday 1937 [Hugh Rennert]
      Death Under the Moonflower (n.) Doubleday 1938 [Peter Bounty]
      The Lazy Lawrence Murders (n.) Doubleday 1941 [Peter Bounty]

   I don’t know very much about Downing’s second series character. An online review from Time Magazine of this last book describes him as a Texas sheriff, with the mystery taking place on a train en route to Mexico.

SARA WOODS – Murder’s Out of Tune.

Avon, reprint paperback; 1st Avon printing, March 1988. Hardcover editions: Macmillan, UK, 1984 (shown); St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

   Here’s something I never noticed before. Sara Woods wrote almost 50 detective novels between 1962 and 1987, all but one of them featuring London barrister Antony Maitland. That averages out to something close to two a year, but wait. There’s more Between 1980 and 1986, there were 18 Maitland mysteries, and that’s nearly three a year. That’s a lot of wordage, and every time I have one for sale, I sell it almost immediately. Woods’ books are extremely popular.

   I’ve not read many of them, but I think the pattern that evolves in Murder’s Out of Tune is much the same that’s in most of them. There isn’t a lot of action until perhaps a brief flurry toward the end, but what there is this: lots of talk with family and friends, and lots of pointed discussion about the case with everybody who’s involved: the defendant, the victim’s family, and (in this case) even the inspector’s mother, Grandma Duckett.

   Lots of speculation, lots of back-and-forth about motives, and opportunities, all the Good Stuff that a good old-fashioned detective story should have.

   But if you’re a hard-boiled fan, you’re going to have a tough time with some of the dialogue. Here’s a brief quote from page 18. I think you’ll see what I mean. Maitland’s uncle, Sir Nicholas is talking to his wife Vera:

   There’s a certain stiff formality (if not clumsiness) in those two sentences, but it becomes less noticeable as the tale goes on. This is a way of speaking that the characters are comfortable with, it suits them, and in the same way as when you’re watching a British film, you’re disoriented at first, but then the ear and the mind get in sync, and the feeling that you’re lost in a foreign land begins to disappear.

   In Murder’s Out of Tune Maitland is brought in to defend an actor who’s been accused of hiring a hit man to dispose of his wife, who was about to divorce him and contest his rights to visit his son. But if his client is innocent, he was framed and who else even had a motive? The murdered woman otherwise had a complete unmurderability (page 103), and that’s the difficulty that has to be overcome.

   It’s a neat puzzle, and even with no action, the mystery is designed to keep your mind in gear overtime. The problem is a good one, and the solution nearly matches it (as quite often it doesn’t).

   What’s disappointing is how Woods structures the plot so that Maitland finds the key. Having one character, not the guilty one, know something, and for no reason decide not to say something — that’s where the story’s the weakest, and it collapses just a little on this small link between the riddle and its unraveling.

   Again, I wouldn’t recommend Sara Woods as an author to anyone who’s solely a fan of action thrillers or private eye capers, and she’s not quite in Agatha Christie’s league as a puzzle-maker — maybe she was a little too prolific — but if you love Christie, you will find a lot to like in Sara Woods.

PostScript: I believe that the titles of all of the Maitland mysteries came from Shakespeare. This one’s from Othello.