Part I was posted about a week ago. Here’s the same introduction I used as a prologue and an explanation back then:

   Note that the movies listed below, each based on an Agatha Christie novel or short story, are only those which are not included in the original Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. (They are included in the Revised CFIV, but not in this expanded version, as well as the online Addenda, where they also are.)

   For more information on each of the movies or TV series episodes mentioned, follow the links provided to their corresponding IMDB entries.

CHRISTIE, AGATHA
   ● The Man in the Brown Suit. TV movie: Warner, 1989 (scw: Carla Jean Wagner; dir: Alan Grint). SC: Colonel Race (Ken Howard)

   ● The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. TV movie: BBC/A&E, 1992, as The Mirror Crack’d (scw: T. R. Bown; dir: Norman Stone). SC: Miss Marple (Joan Hickson)

   ● The Moving Finger. TV movie: BBC/PBS/A&E, 1985 (scw: Julia Jones; dir: Roy Boulting) . SC: Miss Marple (Joan Hickson). Also: Granada, 2006 (scw: Kevin Elyot; dir: Tom Shankland). SC: Miss Jane Marple (Geraldine McEwan)

   ● The Mystery of the Blue Train. TV movie: Granada, 2005 (scw: Guy Andrews; dir: Hettie MacDonald). SC: Hercule Poirot (David Suchet)

   ● The Murder at the Vicarage. TV movie: BBC/A&E, 1986 (scw: T. R. Bowen; dir: Julian Amyes). Also: ITV, 2004 (scw: Stephen Churchett; dir: Charles Palmer). SC: Miss Marple (Joan Hickson)

   ● Murder in Mesopotamia. TV movie [series episode]: A&E, 2001 (scw: Clive Exton; dir: Tom Clegg). SC: Hercule Poirot (David Suchet)

   ● A Murder Is Announced. TV movie: BBC/PBS, 1985 (scw: Alan Plater; dir: David Giles). SC: Miss Marple (Joan Hickson) Also: ITV, 2005 (scw: Stewart Harcourt; dir: John Stickland). SC: Miss Marple (Geraldine McEwan)

   ● Murder Is Easy. TV movie: CBS, 1982 (scw: Carmen Culver; dir: Claude Whatham)

   ● The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. TV movie [series episode]: BBC, 2000 (scw: Clive Exton; dir: Andrew Grieve). SC: Hercule Poirot (David Suchet).   [The movie is reviewed here on the M*F blog.]

   ● Murder on the Links. TV movie [series episode]: London Weekend Television,1995 (scw: Anthony Horowitz; dir: Andrew Grieve). SC: Hercule Poirot (David Suchet)

   ● Murder on the Orient Express. TV movie: MediaVest, 2001 (scw: Stephen Harrigan; dir: Carl Schenkel). SC: Hercule Poirot (Alfred Molina)

   ● The Mysterious Affair at Styles. TV movie [series episode]: London Weekend/A&E/PBS, 1990 (scw: Clive Exton; dir: Ross Devenish). SC: Hercule Poirot (David Suchet)

   ● Nemesis. TV movie: BBC/PBS, 1987 (scw: T. R. Bowen; dir: David Tucker). SC: Miss Marple (Joan Hickson)

   ● The Pale Horse. TV movie: A&E, 1997 (scw: Alma Cullen; dir: Charles Beeson)

   ● Peril at End House. TV movie [series episode]: London Weekend Television,1990 (scw: Clive Exton; dir: Renny Rye). SC: Hercule Poirot (David Suchet)

   ● A Pocket Full of Rye. TV movie: BBC/PBS, 1985 (scw: T. R. Bowen; dir: Guy Slater). SC: Miss Marple (Joan Hickson)

   ● Sad Cypress. TV movie [series episode]: London Weekend Television, 2003 (scw & dir: Dave Moore). SC: Hercule Poirot (David Suchet)

   ● The Secret Adversary. TV movie: London Weekend/PBS, 1982 (scw: Pat Sandys; dir: Tony Wharmby). SC: Tuppence & Tommy (Francesca Annis & James Warwick)

   ● The Seven Dials Mystery. TV movie: London Weekend Television, 1982 (scw: Pat Sandys; dir: Tony Wharmby). SC: Supt. Battle (Harry Andrews)

   ● The Sittaford Mystery. [Published in the US as Murder at Hazelmoor.] TV movie: Granada, 2006 (scw: Stephen Churchett; dir: Paul Unwin). SC: Miss Jane Marple (Geraldine McEwan). [Miss Marple did not appear in the book version. The film version seems to have been universally panned.]

   ● Sleeping Murder. TV movie: BBC/PBS, 1987 (scw: Kenneth Taylor; dir: John Davies) SC: Miss Jane Marple (Joan Hickson). Also: Granada, 2005 (scw: Stephen Churchett; dir: Ed Hall). SC: Miss Jane Marple (Geraldine McEwan)

   ● Sparkling Cyanide. TV movie: CBS, 1983 (scw: Sue Grafton, Steve Humphrey, Robert Malcolm Young; dir: Robert Lewis). Also: ITV, 2003 (scw: Laura Lamson; dir: Tristam Powell). SC: Colonel Race (Oliver Ford Davies, as “Col. Geoffrey Reece”).

   ● Taken at the Flood. TV movie: Granada, 2006 (scw: Guy Andrews; dir: Andy Wilson). SC: Hercule Poirot (David Suchet)

   ● They Do It with Mirrors. TV movie: CBS, 1985, as Murder with Mirrors (scw: George Eckstein; dir: Dick Lowry). SC: Miss Marple (Helen Hayes). Also: BBC/A&E, 1991, as They Do It with Mirrors (scw: T. R. Bowen; dir: Norman Stone). SC: Miss Marple (Joan Hickson)

   ● Three-Act Tragedy. TV movie: CBS, 1986, as Murder in Three Acts (scw: Scott Swanton; dir: Gary Nelson). SC: Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov)

   ● Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? TV movie: London Weekend, 1980 (scw: Pat Sandys; dir: John Davies, Tony Wharmby)

   ● The Witness for the Prosecution. TV movie: CBS, 1982 (scw: Billy Wilder, Harry Kurnitz, Lawrence B. Marcus; dir: Alan Gibson)

   All of the books I reviewed in Mystery.File 1 are now online (and the reviews are all that Mystery.File 1 consisted of). I printed out two copies of this particular version of Mystery*File in January 1987. One went to my good friend and fellow mystery enthusiast, the late and greatly missed Ellen Nehr, in a letter dated January 16th, and I found the other here in a file folder not too long ago.

   It’s possible I used the reviews in a DAPA-Em zine after that, but if I didn’t, they’ve seen the light of day for general consumption for the first time here on the M*F blog.

   I didn’t add a letter grade to the books I reviewed in that issue, but to close out the issue, I ranked the books in order, according to how I enjoyed them at the time. “Keep in mind,” I said, “that this is very subjective — and subject to change from moment to moment ….”

   The reviews in full can be found by using the search box in the column to the right of the text, if you so wish. (Rankings can tell you something, but not as much as you might think.) I enjoyed reading what I had to say back then, some 22 years ago, and I hope you have, too.

   But there is nothing unusual in pointing out reviews that I’ve written that may have been seen by only two people. I have many reviews in my “archives” that have been seen by only one person (me), while others have been seen by up to a 100 or so, and when I was reviewing for the Hartford Courant (back in the 1970s), a hefty multiple of that, one hopes.

   The very first issue of Mystery*File was dated only by the year, 1974. The second gave the month also: July 1974. The first version of M*F ran only 8 issues, including one numbered 5A, for what reason I no longer recall. Number 7 was dated May 1975.

   There have been many start-ups and shutdowns along the way since then, including several changes of title, with Fatal Kiss being the most common. While of course there were articles and checklists in each that were contributed by other people, a good chunk of them had reviews in them that I’d written, usually a dozen or more at a time.

   When I wasn’t publishing my own zine, my reviews appeared in Guy Townsend’s The MYSTERY FANcier and other zines, hundreds of them. (One full issue of TMF has been cannibalized, so to speak, with a big chunk of it having appeared here on the blog over the past year or so — not only my stuff, but by others who I’ve been able to track down and persuade that their past activities need not be hidden forever.)

   And when I was between zines willing to print my reviews, I wrote them anyway, of movies as well as books, and they’re all in my files, never seen by anyone by me.

   So with all of these old reviews of mine on tap and available, I’d never have to read another book or watch another movie to keep this blog going in the direction it’s been heading over the past few months.

   I’ve never had a clear focus or goal in mind since I started the blog version of Mystery*File, and I think it’s about time I established one. I seem to be running out of steam in writing reviews of books I’ve recently read, but (as you may have noticed) I’ve found a whole new world of interest in collecting and watching movies on VHS or DVD, both old and new. And if not all of them have crime-related components, so be it.

   (I suppose I could start another blog to review movies which aren’t criminous, but a number that aren’t have already been covered here, so it’s too late. A precedent has been set.)

   Mixing them in with any new ones that I write, I’ll continue postng older, “archived” reviews and short articles (like George Kelley’s recent one about the Joe Gall series). Taken from old fanzines (of which I have a great supply on hand), most of this material has never been read by more than a couple of hundred people at the most, and with permission of the various authors, it’s time to make it available to the whole world via the Internet.

   I’d love to do longer articles and author profiles, but I have too many interests and other obligations, and I no longer have the time. I’d gladly publish them here, but they’re going to have to be done by someone else.

   So that’s the plan. It’s subject to change, but what in this world isn’t?

JAYNE CASTLE – The Chilling Deception.

Dell, paperback original. First printing, August 1986.

   Speaking of numbers of books sold, as I was in my preceding review of Richard S. Prather’s Over My Dear Body, Jayne Castle is no slouch in racking up sales, which were up to seven million in print at the time The Chilling Deception came out. (Ms. Castle is also known as Stephanie James and Jayne Ann Krentz, which also happens to be her real name.)

   That many of her books are romances without a hint of mystery to them makes no difference at all, especially to the IRS and other more mortal bean-counters.   [Jayne Krentz is also Amanda Quick, under which name many of her more mystery-oriented books have appeared, but she didn’t use that name until several years after this review first appeared.]

   Prompted, I assume, by the success of such TV series as Remington Steele and Moonlighting, in which the pseudo-romance between the leading characters is featured as prominently as the detective story itself, book publishers (never ones not to sense a dollar when a dollar is there) have decided to get in on the action. Hence, the second of the adventures of Guinevere Jones, exclusive secretarial assistant, and Zachariah Justis, sophisticated security specialist.

   They have a romance going — or more properly, perhaps, an affair — and in between trying to help their combined client in this book out from whatever trouble he is in — he won’t tell them — Guinevere is trying to pin Zach down as to what exactly their relationship is, and Zach, he’s simply trying to pin Guinevere down. In bed, that is.

   There is more explicit sex in this book than in Richard Prather’s, say, and nothing else could be more indicative as to how times have changed. Swooning is hardly enough for today’s readers — and I imagine I’m talking about the female half of the population, for I don’t believe many males will read this book.

   And if they do, they are likely to find the other scenes, those in which Guinevere and Zach talk (or, when they’re alone, think) about their relationship, something less than totally compelling. (I hope I’m not maligning men too much.)

   I have little idea how the aforementioned female half of the population will go for this book and this series, except to say that a track record of seven million books is quite a record to build on.

[UPDATE] 12-12-08. There were in all four books in the series. They all came out in 1986. Expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here’s a complete list:

JONES, GUINEVERE
      o The Desperate Game (n.) Dell, pbo, June 1986.

      o The Chilling Deception (n.) Dell, pbo, Aug 1986.
      o The Sinister Touch (n.) Dell, pbo, Oct 1986.
      o The Fatal Fortune (n.) Dell, pbo, Dec 1986.

   She has her own page on the Thrilling Detective website, devoted to private eyes of all kinds, but other than that, I don’t know how successful the series was.

   Except for this. If you were to search for any of these four books on Amazon, which is where you will find the most accurate prices books are really going for, you will find only one for which the asking price is less than $22.50, and I’m willing to wager that that one book won’t last long at that price.

   Apparently none have been reprinted. If that’s so, one wonders why, as the market for Jayne Ann Krentz’s fiction seems to know no bounds. If her total was seven million books in print in 1986, one can only imagine what it is now.

THE MIGHTY BARNUM. 20th Century, 1934. Wallace Beery, Adolphe Menjou, Virginia Bruce, Rochelle Hudson, Janet Beecher, George Brasno, Olive Brasno. Screenwriter, based on his play: Gene Fowler; director: Walter Lang.

   I ordered some Edgar Wallace movies on DVD from an online dealer, and he sent me a packet of Wallace Beery instead. Not good, as I have never been a Wallace Beery fan, but the dealer said to keep them and said he’d send me the Wallace movies anyway.

   To make a long story short, I never did get the Edgar Wallace movies. He sent another set of DVDs entirely, but these were ones I didn’t have and didn’t mind having, so I let things be. I won’t order from this fellow again, though.

   I’ve looked up Wallace Beery on the Internet to learn, as I knew in general but not in specific, that he was a very bankable star in the silent film era — and into the 1930s as well, having only a small difficulty in the transition. He spoke in a slow, drawling voice and had a mild propensity for mugging while on camera. (Keep in mind I’m using only The Mighty Barnum to gauge from, but many of the sources I found online say much the same thing.)

   In any case, he’s likeable enough, and unless you require accuracy in your biographical movie watching, The Mighty Barnum is entirely acceptable as light entertainment. If there ever was a man whose life could be played for laughs, without being a comedian himself, it would have been P. T. Barnum.

   Mentioned (and seen) in the film, among others, are Madame Zorro, the Bearded Lady; Jumbo the Elephant; Col. Tom Thumb and his wife Livinia (played by George Brasno, a midget himself, and his sister Olive); and Jenny Lind (the lovely Virginia Bruce), the source of Barnum’s greatest triumph, and (according to the movie, at least) his greatest disaster. (I wonder if Virginia Bruce did her own singing. I’ve yet to find a source that says whether or not, definitively.)

   Everything is all scrambled around chronologically, from all accounts, and not even the name of Barnum’s partner in the Barnum & Bailey Circus, which came along later than the events in the movie, is given correctly.

RICHARD S. PRATHER – Over Her Dear Body.

Gold Medal s887; paperback original. First printing, June 1959. Reprinted many times.

   [As a brief preface, this is the book I read immediately following Hyde and Seek, by Benjamin Wolff, and reviewed here by me earlier on the blog.]

   Two books in a row, and in both a private eye (or someone playing at being a private eye) is hired by a girl (a knockout, of course) to help her brother, who has been working at some secret deals, making a lot of money, then either (1) disappearing, or (2) starting to worry for his life.

   Coincidences happen, but it’s still a little scary.

   Actually all it really says is that there is a shortage of private eye plots to go around. So, I thought, we’ll let the veteran Mr. Prather show the new guy how it’s done. After all, hadn’t he already sold over 21,000,000 Shell Scott books by the time this was published? (Information taken at face value from the front cover.)

   Isn’t he the guy with the built-in leer in his typewriter? Books full of tomatoes, bikinis, nudist camps and other highly unlikely spots for one of the toughest private eyes in the business to find business in? (Information from reading but a small fraction of the above-mentioned 21,000,000 books — which is all it takes. Really.)

   Unfortunately and in all honesty, this wasn’t one of Mr. Prather’s better efforts. There are no drug smugglers, no South American generals, no semi-benevolent order of Christian missionaries — only a single gang of crooks whose only task is to wipe out Shell Scott before he wanders onto the truth. And of course they don’t. End of story.

   If the plot of Hyde and Seek ended up far too complicated — and with too many loose ends — to be believable, not to mention sour-tasting (or maybe I did — say something along those lines, I mean), the trail Shell Scott follows in this book is as straight as a string.

   The tomatoes are delicious, though.

[UPDATE] 12-12-08.   The following paragraph, again only slightly revised, was actually the first paragraph of the next review to appear in that issue of Mystery.File 1. As you can see, reviewer’s remorse was already setting in:

    “Lest you misunderstood, let me hasten to add that I found the Prather book easier — more fun — to read than the one by Wolff. In spite of a simplistic plot and some rather obvious padding, Prather knows how not to take himself too seriously, and how to entice the reader into keeping the pages turning. After all, 21 million books cannot be wrong.”

   And keep in mind that the cover blurb where I found that figure was from a book published in 1959. Prather’s career continued with Gold Medal up to 1964 when he switched to Pocket, where he stayed until 1975. Two further books came out from Tor in 1985-86, both Shell Scott books, but by that time interest in wacky PI novels had diminished greatly, and neither of them seemed to attract much notice.

   I’ll refer you to the Thrilling Detective website for more on both Shell Scott and his creator, Richard S. Prather, along with a complete bibliography and a small selection of covers. And if you want even more, here it is: http://user.dtcc.edu/~dean/.

THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE. Paramount, 1973. Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Steven Keats, Alex Rocco, Joe Santos. Based on the novel by George V. Higgins. Screenwriter/director: Peter Yates.

   My wife and I upgraded our cable boxes last month, two of them, and part of the package (at an additional ten dollars a month) were all of the Cinemax channels, while the HBO ones came free, if you don’t include the cost of the high-definition box we converted to downstairs.

   You don’t need to know all of this, but as far as I am concerned the extra $10 Cimemax surcharge was paid for in one swoop, when I taped this movie late one night last week. For some reason — no one seems to know why — The Friends of Eddie Coyle has never been released commercially, on either video or DVD, but right now it’s strong in the running as the best Robert Mitchum movie I’ve ever seen.

   And that’s saying some, as Robert Mitchum has always been one of my favorite movie actors, bar almost none. His sleepy-eyed facade belies some of the most complex and interesting characters ever portrayed on film. I don’t know if he and I would get along in person, but on the screen, he’s a giant, as far as I’m concerned.

   Until yesterday, I’d have said that Farewell My Lovely, which came a couple of years later and was the first time around that he played Philip Marlowe, was my favorite Mitchum role, but no more. (Of course, if I were see Farewell, My Lovely again right now, I might change my mind.)

   As usual, I’ve not read the book that The Friends of Eddie Coyle is based on, so I’m not reviewing that, only the movie. It takes place in and around Boston, where Eddie Coyle (that’s Mitchum) is doing the best he can to stay out of jail for a job he did, got caught for, didn’t rat out on the guy who hired him, but is thinking of making a deal with the Feds (à la Richard Jordan) on some of the other criminal activities going on that he knows about, including a gang of professional robbers hitting suburban banks.

   Obviously — isn’t it? — the title of the movie is a misnomer. Eddie Coyle has no friends. The life of a criminal is hard. You get old, and even if you don’t, you never know whom to trust, not even the guys you’ve always though were your best pals. Eddie Coyle is tough but wearing out.

   If you thought that noir movies were never made after 1960 or that noir movies could never be made in color, you’d be wrong on both counts. The bright brisk color of Boston and environs in the late autumn are in a not-so-subtle contrast with the quiet desperate of Eddie and his acquaintances as they try to scrap up a buck here and there, and the dingy bars, diners, bowling alleys and shopping malls where they transact most of their business.

   I’ve looked but I’ve not come up with scenes from the movie that are in color. Black and white will have to do. It’s appropriate enough, but if you see the film, you have to see it in color. The movie exists, but you’ll have to do some scrambling around to get it.

   And when you do, don’t be distracted and put off by the lack of straightforward storytelling. You’ll see for a while what seems to be two movies going on at the same time and in the same place, switching back and forth from one to the other, small snippets of Eddie’s life here, the gang of bank robbers pulling off their jobs there, and in between Stephen Keats as Jackie Brown, plying his trade as a young but experienced dealer in illegal guns (or so he thinks).

   I didn’t mention any women in the credits I listed up above. There are none. None that have more than three minutes on the screen. This is a man’s movie, and while women are in the film, they have no say in what happens. Not that the men in it have much say, either.

   Have I gotten you interested but not convinced? Here’s a link to a three-minute trailer for the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WtR-mi6VtU. That ought to do it …

   … but if not, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR-_m4CLzM8&feature=related.

   Perfect!

BENJAMIN WOLFF – Hyde and Seek.

Avon, paperback original; 1st printing, October 1984.

   A blurb from Tony Hillerman is on the back cover, and he makes the book sound promising, if not more so: “A great story, a skillful storyteller … action-suspense fans are going to love this one.”

   I hate to disagreed with Mr. Hillerman, but I do. I thought the story was murkily plotted, that Wolff is an unpolished story-teller, and that while I personally didn’t go wild over it, maybe the book did sell well in army post bookstores. Not that it’s in Donald Pendleton’s league, but when it comes down to it, whose are?

   From the publicity blurb on the front cover, I was also led to believe that this was a private eye yarn. As it turns out, though, the only real connection the protagonist of the story, John Byron Hyde, has with that profession is through a part-time job he has doing an insurance investigator’s books.

   He is also a part-time karate instructor, however, and a disillusioned post-traumatized Vietnam vet, and (after some thought) nobody I’d really rather care to know. (There goes the rooting interest.) When he’s asked by a girl (a knockout, of course) to help her find her brother, who’s mysteriously disappeared, he ends up in a sour-tasting melange of drug smuggling, South American politics, and the semi-benevolent order of The Good Helpers of our Lady The Mother of God.

   After something of a conclusion has taken place (at least everybody’s motivations are laid out in the open), the story is clearly continued into the next volume of Mr. Hyde’s adventures. I have a copy — it’s here somewhere– but if/when I find it, the question is, will I read it? You have two guesses, the same as I, and the second doesn’t count.

[UPDATE] 12-11-08.   An uneasiness I have whenever I pull a review out of my archives that’s as negative as this one is that it turns out to have been written by someone I know, but writing under a pen name at the time. Not that I fear writing negative reviews (not all books can be as wonderful as the publicity guys make them sound), but generally speaking, I tend not to write reviews of books by authors I know.

   It turns out that Wolff was a pen name, and that there were only two of John Hyde’s adventures. My review had nothing to do with the latter. No more than 40 people may have seen this review when it first appeared; more than likely it was only a tenth of that.

   From the Revised Crime Fiction IV by Allen J. Hubin:

WOLFF, BENJAMIN. Pseudonym of Louis Chunovic; see also Charles Heath.
      Hyde and Seek (Avon, 1984, pb) [John Byron Hyde; Los Angeles, CA]
      Hyde in Deep Cover (Avon, 1985, pb) [John Byron Hyde; Bolivia]
      Nasty Boys (Berkley, 1991, pb) [Las Vegas, NV]

HEATH, CHARLES. Generally a pseudonym of Ron Renauld, but also note the book below:
      Operation Desert Sun: The Untold Story [by Louis Chunovic] (Dell, 1984, pb) [A-Team; Middle East]. Novelization of the “A-Team” TV series.

NORA ROBERTS – Midnight Bayou.

Jove; paperback reprint; first printing, December 2002. Hardcover edition: Putnam, October 2001.

   I may or may not have mentioned this recently, but among other things, I collect gothic paperback romances. In the decade from roughly 1965 to 1975, they were immensely popular, with a thousand or more different titles published. Every publisher did several a month, or so it seemed, and readers must have gobbled them down like candy.

   Eventually historical romances took over, “bodice-rippers” as they were called for a long time, and the gothics died away, never quite completely, but never again to make a sustained comeback. (Novels of romantic suspense — heroines in jeopardy — are still with us, and seem to be rising in popularity, but without the overtones of the weird and occult, most of them cannot be properly called gothics.)

   Some books hover right on the borderline, and this latest romantic novel from Nora Roberts is one of them. The prologue certainly has all of the right elements, beginning with the rape and murder of a young woman by her husband’s twin brother in Louisiana’s turn-of-last century’s bayou country. Her young daughter is left alive, but abandoned to her mother’s backwoods family, she’s forcibly separated from her father’s heritage, rightfully hers.

   It’s a strong, intense start, and the ghosts of the past that still haunt Manet Hall in the year 2002 are what keeps the book loosely in the gothic genre. But it’s largely the story of two modern-day lovers, Boston raised-and-born Declan Fitzgerald, Manet Hall’s new owner, determined to refurbish it, and Angelina Simone, Cajun descendant of the young murdered woman and her infant daughter.

   Nora Roberts writes romance (if not sublimated lust) that simply oozes with electric tension on the printed page, with dialogue that continually crackles with chemistry and wit. It’s hard to imagine more perfect people than Declan and Angelina; even their flaws are perfect. This is the stuff of fantasy.

   As for the ghost story, it’s chilling at first, but it fades in significance in comparison with Declan’s efforts to persuade Angelina that he’s the man for her, then it collapses altogether with no logic behind which spirit is doing what and for what reason.

   Well, most of the old-fashioned gothics ended in much the same way, the hints of mysticism waved away, and wedding bells in the offing. Nora Roberts just may have you believing it all, however, especially during the telling. It’s no wonder she’s one of the most popular authors writing today.

[UPDATE] 12-11-08.  And of course she still is today, and if possible, even more so. Quoting from her Wikipedia entry:

    “Nora Roberts was the first author to be inducted into the Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame. As of 2006, her novels had spent a combined 660 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List, including 100 weeks in the number-one spot. Over 280 million copies of her books are in print, including 12 million copies sold in 2005 alone. Her novels have been published in 35 countries.”

   The best bibliography, with the most covers, is as usual at the UK FantasticFiction website. Go and prepare to be amazed. (But not if the numbers in the previous paragraph have sunk in.)

   Also, from HollywoodReporter.com: “October 27, 2008. Lifetime has lined up big-name talent for the first two of its four upcoming movie adaptations of Nora Roberts novels. […] Jerry O’Connell, Lauren Stamile and Faye Dunaway lead the cast of Midnight Bayou.”

   It looks like perfect casting to me.

TALMAGE POWELL – Man-Killer.

Ace Double D-469; paperback original. First printing, 1960.

   Speaking of “workmanlike prose,” as I was a little while ago — in the review of the other half of this Ace Double, as a matter of fact — I know Talmage Powell wrote a good deal for the pulps, so I’m not surprised to find anything he wrote totally readable — even, to coin a phrase, “hillbilly mystery fiction,” of which this might be a prime example (complete with moonshiners, deputy sheriffs and other dumb hicks).

   [The other half was Bob McKnight’s Running Scared, and you can find my comments here.]

   If a lack of tightly knit plotting may have been McKnight’s Achilles heel in the other half of the double volume, then a tendency toward melodramatic dialogue is Powell’s in his portion. Or maybe I’m not the one to judge. Perhaps old aristocratic ladies now on hard times actually speak the way they do in this book while contemplating their future — and the future of wayward sons who (in this book) insist on helping a poor hill girl accused of killing her husband days before her divorce becomes final.

   Or maybe the subject matter just naturally leads toward melodrama. More solidly plotted than McKnight’s book, Man-Killer nonetheless lacks the compulsive (not to say screwy) readability of Running Scared, which, on the whole, if you were to ask, I’ve decided is the better of the two.

[UPDATE] Later the same day.   I didn’t do it ahead of time, and maybe I should have, but in the first comment to this post, August West happened to mention Talmage Powell’s private eye character Ed Rivers. Having a few minutes on my hands, I followed up with a list of all five detective novels that he was in. Check it out.

THE PERILS OF NYOKA. Aka Nyoka and the Tigermen. Republic Pictures, 1942. 15-part serial. Kay Aldridge, Clayton Moore, Lorna Gray, Charles Middleton, William Benedict, Forbes Murray, George Pembroke, Tristram Coffin, Robert Strange. Director: William Witney.

   The plot is simple enough. In exchange for helping a small group of scientists and archaeologists find the long lost Tablets of Hippocrates, rumored to provide the location of a hidden treasure of gold and jewels, Nyoka Gordon requests their help in finding her father, equally long lost in the same area of northern Africa as the Tablets.

   Some observations follow, pretty much as they come to me.

    ? Kay Aldridge plays Nyoka as a fresh-faced debutante straight out of finishing school with a formal accent that is hard to describe, but in essence it sounds something like this: “I need your help in finding my fah-tha.”

    ● But no ordinary debutante is she. Living in Africa as her home, she has probably never even gone to a ball, or dressed formally. Shirt and shorts are her everyday attire. It is she, of course, who gets into a serious scrape at the end of every chapter.

    ● By “serious” I mean deadly. Going over a cliff in a chariot, lying on a sacrificial altar while a swinging blade gets closer and closer, being blown out of a wind tunnel built into the side of a cliff, and picking herself up and dusting herself off for the next step of the adventure.

    ● The cliffhanger endings — and resolutions — are very well done. I thought the wind tunnel gag was questionable, but I never went back to check it out. The rest? Very smooth indeed.

    ● Playing Vultura, the ruler of the natives who also would like her hands on the treasure, is Lorna Gray. Mostly she wear long slit skirts, but whenever the slit widens we see more of her legs, long and beautiful, than we do of Nyoka’s.

    ● It was my friend Jim Goodrich who suggested that I watch this serial. The primary reason was to see Lorna Gray. He remembers that as a 15-year-old (or so) all of his fellow buddies came out of the theater with their tongues hanging out after seeing Lorna Gray as Vultura.

    ● I am paraphrasing Jim’s actual words. His description was much more vivid. And accurate. And more couth, too.

    ● Both Nyoka and Vultura are more than willing to mix it up personally with the members of the other side, and with each other, providing for many highlights on ESPN later, if ESPN had been around in 1942.

    ● Nyoka in particular has no compunction against slugging away with her fists at the men with flowing robes who are in her way. Nor leaping nor climbing nor jumping. A real heroine.

    ● Mentioning flowing (Arab) robes reminds me that there is little other way to grasp the fact that the story is taking place in Africa. Otherwise the hills where all the action takes place look very much like the hills where many a B-western was shot. (As far as actual locations, IMDB says they included the Corrigan Ranch in Simi Valley and the Iverson Ranch in Los Angeles.)

    ● Guys in long flowing robes have a big handicap fighting hand-to-hand against guys who don’t.

    ● In the early going I thought the star of the movie was the guy in the ape suit. He disappeared for a while, then had a big role again at the end.

    ● I watched an episode a night for 12 chapters, missed a night, then made up for it by watching the last three in on big gulp. Couldn’t resist.

    ● When Nyoka’s father is found, he has been the chief of the Tuaregs for some time with no memory of a previous life. To bring his memory back, Dr. Larry Grayson (Clayton Moore) has to take 10 minutes off from helping Nyoka get in and out of her perils to operate on him, in order to relieve the pressure of his skull against his brain. While a huge fight is going on in the next cave.

    ● Professor Gordon has what might be called an instant recovery from this rather makeshift bout of brain surgery. He is up and about immediately, with no bandages around his head to indicate anything was ever amiss. And he almost goes out the wind tunnel with Nyoka for all his resilient strength and recuperative ability.

    ● I saw Jay Silverheels in the list of miscellaneous cast members. This was before he joined up with Clayton Moore as that other pair of characters that you may remember them as.

    ● I may have seen this serial myself, not in 1942, but in 1952, when it was re-released. I would have been ten. I’m not sure, but the guy in the ape suit certainly looked familiar. And by the way, that alternate title? Not a single tiger in this movie. It has almost everything else, but no tigers.