Iris Meredith has been a favorite of mine for nearly 40 years now. She’s not the greatest actress in the world — although she wasn’t exactly given challenging roles or directorial guidance in Westerns and serials — but her beautiful face and distinctive voice still exert a vaguely hypnotic influence on male viewers, as Steve is now learning.

   Unfortunately, like so many who toiled in “B” movies, she didn’t get the breaks she deserved. As a Columbia contract player, she worked long hours on cheap pictures and was forever being promised better opportunities that never seemed to materialize.

   Iris lost both parents before she started working in Hollywood (while still a teenager) and supported a younger brother. She retired from the screen in 1943 after getting married; I think that Buster Crabbe Western was her last film.

   In the late 60s or early 70s she developed a particularly virulent form of cancer that necessitated the removal of half her jaw and part of her tongue, disfiguring that once-beautiful face. She showed unusual grace and courage, in my view, by accepting an invitation to appear at a 1975 convention of Western movie fans in Nashville. Fortunately, her old fans — by now middle-aged men and women — showered her with affection during the convention, and she was moved to tears when an audience of several hundred gave her a standing ovation at the closing-night banquet.

   Although she found speaking difficult — the loss of part of her tongue made it hard for her to articulate many words — Iris graciously granted me an interview. She recalled with fondness her stint as Charles Starrett’s regular leading lady (they made 20 Westerns together) and her appearance as Nita Van Sloan in The Spider’s Web.

   Curiously, when I mentioned her third and final serial, 1940’s The Green Archer, Iris said, “I don’t like to discuss that film. Please don’t ask me about it.” I hastily changed the subject, but I’ve always wondered what happened on that set to make the shooting of Green Archer such an unpleasant memory for her.

RICHARD & FRANCES LOCKRIDGE – Murder Within Murder.

Pocket Books, reprint paperback; 1st printing, July 1982. Hardcover edition: J. B. Lippincott, 1946. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club [3-in-1 edition], February 1946. Other paperback reprints: Dell 229 [mapback], 1948; Pyramid, October 1965. Trade paperback: Perennial, July 1994.

   Based on information obtained from Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction III, this is the 10th of the multi-entertaining series of Mr. & Mrs. North detective novels. There were 26 in all, appearing between 1940 and 1963. When his wife Frances died, Richard Lockridge continued writing for quite a while, but that’s when the curtain fell for the Norths, whose last appearance was Murder by the Book in 1963.

   I’m only guessing, but it always seemed to me that the character of Pamela North, the lady with the charmingly and disconcertingly chaotic thought processes, died when Frances did. She was either Pam’s creator or inspiration, or more than likely both, and when she left us, Mr. and Mrs. North went with her.

   And while I’m digressing, one thing more. Here’s something’s that always puzzled me. The North books were immensely popular, or so it’s my impression, but they never seemed to be very successful in paperback. Compared with the way the Perry Mason books sold, for example, the adventures of the Norths were left in the dust.

   Even though there was a long-running radio series chronicling their adventures, and later a TV series, many of the books were never published in softcover. If it weren’t for the Dollar Mystery Guild, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to read each and every one when they came out, and I doubt that I was the only one.

   Pressed to describe Pamela North to someone who’s never read one of her excursion in murder and detection, I’d have to say Gracie Allen without the brashness. Assuming that that someone knows who Gracie Allen is. The books themselves are light-hearted without being out-and-out funny. Here’s a quote, from page 143. Lt. Bill Weigand is speaking to Sgt. Mullins, who always thinks the cases in which the Norths get involved become screwy:

   The first victim is a middle-aged lady, very righteous in manner, who is doing research on a book of several notorious true crimes for North Books, Inc., and the list of suspects is a long one. She controls the purse strings of her late brother’s estate, and she does not approve of either the behavior of her niece and nephew or their habitual need for money.

   While a member of the faculty of a small college in Indiana, she disapproved of a fellow teacher’s conduct with a female student, and she said so, loudly. And as she was doing the research on the book on unsolved murders, it’s also possible that she uncovered some facts from the past that greatly displeased someone she perhaps shouldn’t have confronted. Hence the title.

   This is my kind of detective novel. All kinds of theories, possibilities, and configurations of other possibilities. The good stuff.

   Delicious coincidences also abound, which may turn some people off, but I didn’t mind them at all. Wiegand is a very good policeman, even if he lets the Norths hang around a little too much, and his interview with several suspects in Chapter 8 is a small masterpiece.

   Money — or safety — is the root of all murder. I’m paraphrasing from page 68, but it’s true. In retrospect, the solution to the murders is rather obvious. What the Lockridges were able to do more often than not, and they did it again here, is a magician’s trick, to keep what the eyes of the readers are seeing from actually reaching their brains. It’s either that, or I’m awfully thick-headed.

[COMMENT] 01-07-09. When I suggested Gracie Allen as being the ideal person to play Pam North, I think I had completely forgotten the movie in which she actually did
play Pam North. Either that, or I thought my comment “without the brashness” would cover whatever deficiencies in that regard that she might have.

   I might have to watch the movie again, but right now, unh-unh, no I don’t think so. After recently watching some of the early 50s TV shows with Barbara Britton, I’m now not so high on Gracie in the part now when I first wrote this review.

   Regarding the Norths in paperback, I was struck by the fact that this particular book came out quite a few times in paperback, and maybe you caught that, too. I’ll stick to my assertion that overall the North books did comparatively poorly in paperback, and one of these days I’ll do the research I need to back my statement up.

MR. AND MRS. NORTH. MGM, 1942. Gracie Allen, William Post Jr., Paul Kelly, Virginia Grey, Tom Conway, Millard Mitchell, Keye Luke, Jerone Cowan. Based on the stories by Frances & Richard Lockridge. Director: Robert B. Sinclair.

   For starters, you could refer back to my review of The Patient in Room 18 – you know, my comments about Hollywood and detective mysteries. Gracie Allen gets a solo lead billing in Mr. and Mrs. North, and you know what that means. Disaster, in a word.

   As Pamela North, unlike the stories, she is a chattering nitwit, charming but still a nitwit. George Burns at least had the strength of personality that made it seem reasonable that he could survive living with her for more than a week. William Post, Jr., whom I don’t know — I can’t think of another movie that he was in — is, in contrast, rather bland and ineffectual in the role of Jerry, her greatly put-upon husband.

   What the movie’s about is a good question, and it may even be relevant. After both Pam and Jerry have been out of their apartment for a day — he on a business trip, she to visit her mother (or so she says) — they return home to find a corpse in their closet. (They open the door, and out he falls, on his face.)

   They don’t know the man, at least at first, but then it seems that the paths of the dead man and several of the Norths’ closest friends seem to have been intricately tangled. It takes a while to untangle all of the relationships, none of which (unfortunately) are very interesting.

   That Jerry North is, at several points of time, the number one suspect, means that his close relationship with Lt. Weigand has not yet developed, but by movie’s end, you can see that it’s in the works. This is mostly a comedy picture, though, and if you’re not a fan of Gracie’s, you can easily pass it by.

[UPDATE] 01-07-09.  A few comments, in no particular order. First of all, nothing that I’ve ever read suggests that this movie was based on any one of the Lockridges’ books, only that it was based on their characters.

   Looking back over this review, I see that I made a big assumption. That the people reading it actually knew who George Burns and Gracie Allen were.

   Maybe it was true in 1991, but even if it was, it has to be even less true now. If you’re more than 10 years younger than I am, follow this link for more information.

   As for William Post, Jr., the all-but-known chap who played Jerry North in this movie, thanks to IMDB, I can now tell you more, but not a lot, since there isn’t a lot to tell.

   Of interest to mystery fans, he appeared in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1943), Experiment Perilous (1944), The House on 92nd Street (1945), and Call Northside 777 (1948), but I can’t say that I remember putting a name to his face in any of them.

   It wasn’t until TV came along that there was any other attempt to bring the Mr. and Mrs. North to the screen again. Richard Denning and Barbara Britton played the couple for two seasons, starting in 1952, and they were quite good at it.

TUCKER COE – Don’t Lie to Me.   Random House, hardcover, 1972. Paperback reprint: Charter. Hardcover reprint: Five Star, 2001. UK edition: Victor Gollancz, hc, 1974.

    “Tucker Coe” is one of several pseudonyms used by Donald E. Westlake. And Mitchell Tobin, the narrator of Don’t Lie to Me and of four other novels published under the Coe name, is in many ways Westlake’s most fascinating creation.

   Tobin is an ex-New York City cop who was thrown off the force in disgrace when his partner was shot down while covering for him: Tobin at the time was in bed with a woman named Linda Campbell, another man’s wife.

   Unable to reconcile his guilt, Tobin has withdrawn to the point where little matters in his life except the high wall he is building in the back yard of his Queens home — a continuing project that symbolizes his self-imposed prison and isolation.

   His forgiving wife Kate and his teen-age son are unable to penetrate those internal walls; no one can, it seems. Occasionally, however, someone from his past or his present manages to persuade him to do this or that “simple” job, thus creating circumstances which force Tobin to utilize his detective’s training.

   The combined result of these cases, as critic Francis M. Nevins has noted, is that Tobin “builds up a store of therapeutic experiences from which he slowly comes to realize that he is not unique in his isolation and guilt, and slowly begins to accept himself and return to the real world.”

   Don’t Lie to Me is the last of the five Tobin novels, the final stage of his mental rehabilitation. He has been given a private investigator’s license and is working as a night watchman in Manhattan’s Museum of American Graphic Art, and before long Linda Campbell, his former lover, about whom he has ambivalent feelings, reappears in his life.

   Tobin then discovers the naked body of an unidentified murder victim in one of the museum rooms. Further complications include pressure from hostile cops and from a group of small-time hoodlums with a grudge against Tobin.

   Against his will, he is forced to pursue his own investigation into the murder, and eventually to reconcile his feelings toward Linda Campbell — and toward himself. The ending is violent, powerful, ironic, and appropriate.

   The other four Tobin novels are Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death (1966), Murder Among Children (1968), Wax Apple (1970), and A Jade in Aries (1971).

   It is tempting to say that more Tobin novels would have been welcome, but this is not really the case. Westlake said everything there is to say about Mitch Tobin in these five books, what amounts to a perfect quintology; any additional novels would have seem contrived to capitalize on an established series character.

         ———
   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.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – 13 to the Gallows.

 Crippen & Landru, hardcover & softcover, September 2008.

   Another splendid volume of discoveries from Crippen & Landru, this time the scripts of four stage plays written by the US-born detective writer John Dickson Carr (1906-1977), two of them written in collaboration with Val Gielgud. It’s the Carr name that’s the attraction here, though for me in equal parts the name of my hero, the British researcher and editor Tony Medawar, on the book’s dust jacket made me put my money down.

   I know next to nothing about Val Gielgud, and I found myself frequently throughout the book wondering what parts of the two full-length pieces Gielgud wrote, and which were Carr’s alone. As with his collaboration with Adrian Conan Doyle, Carr’s presence is so strong it seems the other fellow only occasionally got his hand in, but I may be wrong about that.

   You’d think Gielgud’s background with the BBC must account for the detailed trials and tribulations of a radio program producer during the Second World War, but Car worked there too, and he seemed to do pretty well all by himself in the much later novel The Nine Wrong Answers.

   But anyone will feel a difference between the tone of the longer plays and the two longish one-acts which make up the rest of the volume: the shorter plays are more serious, they’ve got real feeling behind them, and they’re genuinely spooky and atmospheric.

   The two Carr-Gielgud plays cover much of the same ground, almost as if the second were a reworking of the first. Both take place far from the main BBC studios in London, one in the basement of a confiscated country house estate miles from anywhere, the other in the basement of a converted high school in Barchester, the imaginary cathedral town that Anthony Trollope created and which, at the time Carr and Gielgud were working together, was the setting for a few dozen romance novels by their contemporary Angela Thirkell. I wonder if Carr and Gielgud were sending up Thirkell in some of their situations!

    “Inspector Silence Takes the Air” involves a true crime radio script of a romantic triangle (older man, young woman, young lout) being rehearsed by a crew of actors who eerily replicate their on-air parts with their own backstage drama, much to their discomfort. During the rehearsal, in front of everyone’s eyes, an actor is shot dead, but none of the guns found later during an intensive search match the bullet that killed.

   As Medawar notes, Carr had used a similar problem in his short novel The Third Bullet a few years before, and bringing in Inspector Silence (a character invented by Val Gielgud in a previous play he’d written without Carr) isn’t all that much fun. OK, I take that back, it’s funny when the retired policeman gets nervous as a schoolgirl and dries up his lines when confronted with a microphone.

   I liked the second play much more. Instead of a lover’s misunderstanding, “13 to the Gallows” takes an unsolved crime of the past as its central feature, as years later the survivors of that crime examine must reestablish their own alibis.

   The protagonist was, years before, acquitted of the crime of pushing his wife from a belltower, and yet popular opinion in Barchester has remained solidly against him, leaving him a social pariah — until one young BBC employee takes a personal interest in him, pleading with her boss to give Wallace Hatfield a new hearing — live, on the radio — during a variety hour that also features a troupe of trained sea lions. The play is suspenseful and fairly clued, though its ending is puzzlingly abrupt, as though Carr and Gielgud just left the room and abandoned their script.

   Two shorter plays, written by Carr alone, are very beautifully done, without the tiresome comedy elements that one hates so much in his work. “Intruding Shadow” reminded me of some of the later stage plays of Agatha Christie, with its cat and mouse playing and its concentration on a tiny cast, and most of all, the sense of menace and doom so palpable in “The Unexpected Guest” or “Verdict.”

   As I had previously never linked Carr and Christie together before, I was curious to see how Carr manages to achieve his effects here. Some of it is in the very shiftiness of the crime itself, because we are never sure what has happened or what is being made to seem happen by some outside, unseen perpetrator (U.N. Owen anyone?)

   The hero is a detective novelist who attempts to use some of his own patented writing tricks to scare off a threat to his own reallife happiness. Unexpected results ensue, including a Grand Guignol sequence in which a corpse seems to speak after death — like the surprising ending of Russ Meyer’s Beneath the Valley of the Dolls.

    “She Slept Lightly” (I know — none of these titles is much good, is it?) is a grand old style melodrama set during the Napoleonic end-game of Waterloo, featuring a great part for an elderly actress…

   I would love to see this one staged. As Medawar discusses, the part of Lady Stanhope was taken by an actual acting legend, Irene Vanbrugh, who sounds like she wiped the floor with everyone else.

    Those who are familiar with Carr’s eight-part radio serial, Speak of the Devil, also brilliantly edited for C&L by Tony Medawar, will know the story basically, but here I think Carr has improved on it significantly. (Largely by getting rid of the comedy fops and the comedy country bumpkins and in fact, all the comedy.) What’s left is lean and grand and gorgeous.

   In the limited edition, you get a bonus: a radio play about Inspector Silence solving a crime in the New York subway system. It’s brief, it’s pretty forgettable, it’s okay. I know you want it!

   For those of you wondering why they call this book “13 to the Gallows” and what it means, I can’t reveal that just yet because, as you’ll see, it is like the end of Fog of Doubt, revealed literally in the final words of the piece.

LEONARD R. GRIBBLE – The Grand Modena Murder.

Doubleday Doran/Crime Club, hardcover, [1931]. Prior UK edition: George G. Harrap, hc, 1930. Paperback reprint: Cherry Tree, UK, ca.1944.

   The earliest books that were published under Doubleday’s Crime Club imprint showed decidedly English overtones. Like this one, a great many of their selections between 1929 and 1933 first appeared on the other side of the Atlantic.

   This one was written by Leonard Gribble when he was still very young, only 23, and perhaps as a result it nicely shows a grand youthful passion for melodrama and determined, awkward telling. Over a long career, Gribble wrote well over 50 other mysteries, both under his own name and others. Crime Club published only two or three of them, however, and most of his work has never appeared in this country.

   The Grand Modena that gives the book its name is a hotel, one of London’s finest. The opening scene is a confrontation that takes place in the ballroom, between a young man and the father of the girl he loves.

   Apparently the older man is something less than a completely trustworthy business associate as well. Not altogether to our surprise, he’s found the next morning murdered in his room upstairs. Detective Inspector Anthony Slade is immediately called in as the representative of Scotland Yard’s famed Criminal Investigation Department.

   Slade lives and breathes the entire investigation that follows. He eats it, he sleeps it, and over and over again he reasons his way through the treacherously tangled skein that the past has made of numerous intertwined secrets.

   If the internal workings of a detective’s mind is what you find yourself yearning for in a story, without the noisome clutter of a troubled domestic home life, this is a story built for you.

   But even so, if details like watching Slade look through a lens for fingerprints upon a dagger already cleaned by the doctor bother you, and if you believe that detectives, even policemen, are only human too, you may begin to have doubts.

[UPDATE] 01-06-09.   In spite of my rather lukewarm comments, Inspector Slade went on to have one the longer careers in the annals of Scotland Yard. I’ll add a complete listing of all his full-length novel appearances below. Gribble wrote a few other works of crime fiction in which Slade did not appear, and these are not included in this list.

   I also mentioned that Gribble used other pen names. There’s a fellow named John Creasey who used more, but Gribble is right up there as a leader in this particular category. The following information comes from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

GRIBBLE, LEONARD R(eginald). 1908-1985. Pseudonyms: Sterry Browning, James Gannett, Leo Grex, Louis Grey, Piers Marlowe, Dexter Muir & Bruce Sanders.

SLADE, SUPT. ANTHONY

o The Case of the Marsden Rubies (n.) Harrap 1929 [England]
o The Gillespie Suicide Mystery (n.) Harrap 1929 [England]
o The Grand Modena Murder (n.) Harrap 1930 [England]
o Is This Revenge? (n.) Harrap 1931 [England]
o The Stolen Home Secretary (n.) Harrap 1932 [England]
o The Secret of Tangles (n.) Harrap 1933 [England]

o The Yellow Bungalow Mystery (n.) Harrap 1933 [England]
o The Death Chime (n.) Harrap 1934 [England]
o The Riddle of the Ravens (n.) Harrap 1934 [England]

o Mystery at Tudor Arches (n.) Harrap 1935 [England]
o The Case of the Malverne Diamonds (n.) Harrap 1936 [England]
o Riley of the Special Branch (n.) Harrap 1936 [England]
o The Case-Book of Anthony Slade (co) Quality 1937 [England]
o Who Killed Oliver Cromwell? (n.) Harrap 1937 [England]
o Tragedy in E Flat (n.) Harrap 1938 [England]
o The Arsenal Stadium Mystery (n.) Harrap 1939 [England]
o Murder First Class (n.) Burke 1946 [England; Train]
o Atomic Murder (n.) Harrap 1947 [England]
o Hangman’s Moon (n.) Allen 1950 [England]
o They Kidnapped Stanley Matthews (n.) Jenkins 1950 [England]
o The Frightened Chameleon (n.) Jenkins 1951 [England]
o The Glass Alibi (n.) Jenkins 1952 [England]
o Murder Out of Season (n.) Jenkins 1952 [England]
o She Died Laughing (n.) Jenkins 1953 [France]
o The Inverted Crime (n.) Jenkins 1954 [England]

o Death Pays the Piper (n.) Jenkins 1956 [England]
o Superintendent Slade Investigates (co) Jenkins 1956 [England]
o Stand-In for Murder (n.) Jenkins 1957 [England]
o Don’t Argue with Death (n.) Jenkins 1959 [England]

o Wantons Die Hard (n.) Jenkins 1961 [England]
o Heads You Die (n.) Jenkins 1964 [England]
o The Violent Dark (n.) Jenkins 1965 [England]
o Strip-Tease Macabre (n.) Jenkins 1967 [England]
o A Diplomat Dies (n.) Jenkins 1969 [England]
o Alias the Victim (n.) Hale 1971 [England]
o Programmed for Death (n.) Hale 1973 [England]
o You Can’t Die Tomorrow (n.) Hale 1975 [England]
o Midsummer Slay Ride (n.) Hale 1976 [England]
o Crime on Her Hands (n.) Hale 1977 [England]
o Death Needs No Alibi (n.) Hale 1979 [England]
o Dead End in Mayfair (n.) Hale 1981 [England]
o The Dead Don’t Scream (n.) Hale 1983 [England]
o Violent Midnight (n.) Hale 1986 [England]

DONALD E. WESTLAKE – The Hook.

Mysterious Press, hardcover, March 2000. Paperback reprint: Warner, April 2001.

   Of course, the writer’s lot has never been a particularly happy nor profitable one. Few fields reward so meagerly in comparison for the effort and time put into a work, or so serendipitously in success, acceptance and recognition. Trite as it may sound, it’s a rough way to make a living.

   And perhaps never more so than now, when corporate mergers, marketplace pressures and swift, omnipresent technological change are altering not just the business of publishing but the reason and form for the art of fiction as well. Talented writers, gifted entertainers with loyal audiences and good stories to tell, vanish or, if they have a clever and supportive agent, reinvent themselves through pseudonyms.

   It’s against this unforgiving background that Donald E. Westlake has set The Hook, which begins with a chance meeting in the New York Public Library between Bryce Proctor, a successful thriller writer of Ludlumesque proportions, and Wayne Prentice, a talented journeyman who has been zeroed out, not once but twice, by that infernal computer.

   Each writer is suffering in his own way: Wayne, unable to secure a contract for his latest book, is looking for teaching jobs, a move that will undoubtedly cost him his self-respect and then his marriage, while Bryce, enduring a protracted, nasty and expensive divorce, is months behind on his next book and completely devoid of ideas.

   Except one.

   As if pitching a book proposal to his editor, Bryce unreels the narrative hook: Wayne can’t sell a book and Bryce can’t write one. And neither one can conceive of himself as anything other than a writer. What if they were to merge their strengths, have Bryce submit Wayne’s manuscript as his own and then split Bryce’s million dollar advance fifty/fifty? Oh, there’s one other thing. Bryce’s wife has to die.

   A hook, indeed. And one that buries itself deep into each man. It gives nothing away to say that the bargain is sealed, the fatal deed soon done with the inevitable and unexpected repercussions lining up to knock at each man’s door.

   Far from being consumed by guilt, Wayne is instead reinvigorated creatively, establishing a new career and enjoying a new persona as a writer of high-paying magazine articles, rising to a level of success previously unimagined.

   Meantime, Bryce remains stuck in neutral, leaving New York and resettling in his rural Connecticut estate, obsessing over the murder he feels he should have seen but didn’t, still unable to break his creative block except for the germ of one idea that can’t quite develop itself.

   Like Burke Devore in Westlake’s 1997 classic, The Ax, Bryce and Wayne are men who have defined their identities by their work and who now find that work, and by extension their reason for being, under siege from technological, business and social change. Bryce and Wayne will take any and all steps to preserve their jobs, their identities and their lives.

   Switching his narrative back and forth between them, Westlake gradually charts the shift in the balance between the two men, contrasting Wayne’s ascendancy with Bryce’s isolation, until Wayne must take steps to ensure that Bryce – and the partnership – continues to function. But, naturally, things don’t end there.

   An experienced reader may correctly guess how things will turn out on the last page, but that prescience should not detract from the many pleasures contained in The Hook. As a novel of psychological suspense it is subtle and austere, disturbing in its subdued matter of fact descriptions of moral dexterity and clandestine guilt, confident in its narrative voice, agile in its accumulation of complications and plot twists.

   The book gives wry glimpses into the writer’s mind, particularly the peculiar duality of the person who creates make-believe worlds as a means of living in what passes for the real world.

   The Hook is also, in a quiet, dark-humored way, a grimly funny book. Westlake casts a cold eye on the current state of the publishing world, in particular the reliance on product over quality writing, the all-consuming hunt for the Next Big Thing, and the replacement of the individual craftsman with a brand name – and often does so in scenes that are simultaneously sardonic, funny and disturbing. It’s an informed view from someone who’s been in the writing business a long time.

   Deceptively complex and ambitious, The Hook never loses its way as a story. And that’s to be expected. Westlake’s crafted many types of work under several different names over four decades, always entertaining his audience, always telling a good story. And one suspects that’s all he’s ever wanted to do.

   If anyone can beat that damn computer…

JACK WEBB – One for My Dame.

Holt Rinehart & Winston, hardcover, 1961. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club [3-in-1 edition], October 1961. Paperback reprint: Avon G1218. UK edition: T. V. Boardman [American Bloodhound #378], hardcover, 1962.

   Jack Webb the mystery writer is not Jack Webb the actor. Jack Webb the mystery writer never played Sergeant Joe Friday, and he never wore badge 714. Instead, Jack Webb the mystery writer produced a number of entertaining books featuring a priest, Father Joseph Shanley, and a detective, Sammy Golden, as well as two exceptional thrillers.

   One for My Dame is a thriller that Hitchcock should have filmed. It has all the elements: an innocent man, for over two years a prisoner of war in Korea and now the owner of a pet shop, who has information that Mafia killers want; a beautiful girl on the run; a great supporting cast, including a character actor who lives in model homes, a Great Dane, a hill monkey, and a myna bird who shouts things like “Watson, the needle!”; and even a lovely blonde.

   The pace is brisk, the style is literate, and there’s enough action to satisfy nearly anyone. This is the kind of book that one reads in a single sitting, looking up surprised to discover how fast the time has gone by. The resolution seems a bit drawn out, but the rest of the book more than compensates.

   Webb’s other thoroughly entertaining thriller is Make My Bed Soon (1963), a little bit tougher but every bit as much fun. The best of the Shanley and Golden mysteries are probably The Big Sin (1952), The Brass Halo (1957), and The Deadly Sex (1959).

   Webb also wrote several novels under the pseudonym John Farr; two of these — Don’ t Feed the Animals (1955) and The Lady and the Snake (1957) — feature well-realized zoo backgrounds. Another good Farr novel is The Deadly Combo (1958), whose chief appeal is an expert depiction of jazz music.

         ———
   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.

YOUNG BUFFALO BILL. Republic, 1940. Roy Rogers, George ‘Gabby’ Hayes, Pauline Moore, Hugh Sothern, Trevor Bardette, Steve Pendleton, Wade Boteler. Director: Joseph Kane.

THE KID RIDES AGAIN. PRC, 1943. Buster Crabbe, Al “Fuzzy” St. John, Iris Meredith, I. Stanford Jolley, Glenn Strange, Charles King.

   Here are a couple of B-westerns that play fast and loose with history, and if you can’t trust B-westerns, who can you trust? In the first of these two films, Roy Rogers plays Buffalo Bill Cody as a young scout who comes to the aid of an aged Spanish don with a ranch outside of Sante Fe. A crooked surveyor is trying to cheat him out of his land.

   In the second, Buster Crabbe adds another entry to a long list of movies in which he played Billy the Kid. In this particular alternative universe, Billy is a misunderstood gunfighter who’s really good if people would only leave him alone. This time around he helps a bank owner withstand a run on his bank after thieves have robbed it.

   In both cases there are young girls involved who catch both heroes’ eyes. Pauline Moore plays the Don Regas’s granddaughter to whom Roy is immediately attracted; and Iris Meredith is Joan Ainsley, the daughter of the banker in The Kid Rides Again.

   Another point of similarity between the two movies is that both Bill Cody and William Bonney have goofy sidekicks. Roy has Gabby Hayes, who resents (often) being called an old goat and is called Gabby for good reason; and Buster Crabbe has Fuzzy St. John, the skinny old galoot prone to scratching his addled head and sidesplitting pratfalls. (Well, I thought they were funny.)

   Neither plot line needs an in-depth analysis. The production values in Roy�s movie are the greater ones, but if you’re not a fan of singing cowboys, you already know to avoid his films. Roy’s probably also a better actor (earnest and young) than Buster Crabbe, but the Billy the Kid movie has something that Bill Cody doesn’t, and that’s Iris Meredith.

   What a beautiful woman! I’m comparatively new to the world of the serials of the 1930s and 40s, so I’ve not seen her in her most famous roles, those being The Spider’s Web (1938), Overland with Kit Carson (1939) and The Green Archer (1940), not to mention dozens of westerns like this one, which as it turns out, was also her last.

   Looking down the list of movies she was in (on IMDB), she deserved better roles than she ever received. If she had a major part in an “A” film, I don’t see it.

   I’ve found two photos to show you, but neither one comes from The Kid Rides Again. The first one (above) shows how she looked as Nita Van Sloan in the pulp hero serial, The Spider’s Web. In the second one (seen to the right), she’s standing between Charles Starrett and Bob Nolan in Spoilers of the Range, Columbia, 1939.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE – The Ax.

Mysterious Press, hardcover, June 1997; paperback: May 1998.

   The national din on downsizing, corporate America’s wholesale decimation of jobs and workers in pursuit of higher profits and bigger returns to investors, rang loud during the early months of the 1996 Presidential campaign then receded to the level of white noise, in the background, acknowledged but barely noticed. But it didn’t recede as a day-to-day issue for the many American workers who lost their livelihoods and their assumptions about work and identity. And it certainly didn’t recede for Burke Devore, the narrator on Donald Westlake’s new novel, The Ax.

   You’ve seen someone like Burke somewhere, bagging your groceries or working the floor at Macy’s. He’s the middle-aged middle manager who bought fully into the fiction that corporate loyalty entitled one to a lifetime job. A good soldier, Burke. Not necessarily the best or brightest, but steady; a good organizer and a facile problem solver, a liberal arts grad who worked his way up from sales to production for a Connecticut paper manufacturer. A man secure in his career and his life until his employer merged with a Canadian conglomerate and sent all the high-paying jobs over the border and all the high-paid workers to the breadline.

   The Ax opens two years into Burke’s enforced vacation. His exile, if you will. Though he’s kept quiet and to himself, Burke has not accepted the situation with grace; he wants his job back, his job and nothing else will do. An article in a trade journal points him to a job that’s a carbon copy of his old one at another paper mill within a reasonable commuting distance.

   The only problem is the man who’s already in the job. In his mind, Burke toys with the idea of doing away with the interloper until a deflating reality comes to the fore: Even if the current occupant met a sudden demise, someone else would get the job; someone younger, someone with more education; someone who interviews better. Despair evolves into inspiration and Burke’s problem-solving skills come into play as he devises a plan to learn who his most likely competition would be and to them do away with them…

   It’s clear that Donald Westlake doesn’t want The Ax to be taken as a comic novel. What he does here is to take reality, stretch it the least little bit and add the slightest of kinks. He taps into the fear of poverty and the career man’s unspoken terror that his professional life’s been for naught, that the wrong choice was made a long time ago and can never be rectified.

   In real life, a Burke Devore would be gunned down by police after staging a bloodbath at corporate headquarters, or more likely, would slaughter his family then add himself to the package. But in Westlake’s ghostly, disquieting suburbia, murder becomes an exercise in resume writing, a self-described “learning curve” which Burke Devore masters with each killing. And the killings become a rite of passage through which Burke realizes the strengths and skills he possesses even though he lacks the job through which he’s defined his entire adult existence.

   Westlake’s great accomplishment is to get inside Burke’s clever, troubled and bland mind, to make both his madness and his justification credible and yet also show his complete isolation from the world around him. He eschews stylistic flourishes, making Burke’s narrative voice simple, clear and disturbing.

   There’s an element of Hitchcock, the mischievous Hitchcock, at work here as well. The subtle humor of unexpected complications and the absurdity of a man blandly talking about taking human life. And the reader being taken in by it all. How will Burke explain and pay for that fender damaged when he ran over a victim and will it be fixed in time to go after victim number four? What’s that cop doing knocking on the door? Will anyone observe the murder in the parking lot?

   The primary question for the reader nearing the end of the book, though, is what trick or twist will the author pull out to end things? Will there be a fillip, a catharsis, a mordant twist of fate? Will Burke Devore’s quest end in madness, blood or success?

   The last chapter is ironic and troubling. But the book’s chief irony is what Burke Devore becomes by its finish. His claim of sympathy and sorrow for his victims doesn’t stop him from slaughtering them and profiting from their demises. His passionate survival rationale echoes the corporate downsizers who have ended thousands of careers and not a few lives in pursuit of their goals.

   The Burke Devore who once blandly assumed lifetime loyalty from corporate America has bought into a new creed: Me first. Win at any cost. The end justifies the means. The one loud laugh in this sorrowful book comes at the bottom line: Burke Devore, corporate downsizing’s ultimate victim, becomes its star-spangled poster boy.