UNSANE. Bleecker Street Media, 2018. Joshua Leonard, Claire Foy, Sarah Stiles, Marc Kudisch, Amy Irving. Director: Steven Soderbergh.

   Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane is everything you want a solid psychological thriller to be – and more. Captivating and filled with tension, the movie stars Clare Foy as Sawyer Valentini, a white collar professional who relocates to Pennsylvania to start a new life.

   Her old one in Boston was tainted by the fact that she had been stalked for well over a year by the obsessive David Strine (Joshua Leonard). Life in Pennsylvania, however, isn’t exactly going as planned. Sawyer decides to seek out mental health counseling at a place called Highland Creek. She is told to fill out a series of forms, not realizing that the facility is going to use her “consent” to institutionalize her against her will and then charge her insurance for her stay.

   As you might expect, Sawyer fights back against the staff, leading them to view her as dangerous. Despite warnings from Nate (Jay Pharoah), a friendly fellow “inmate,” she increasingly pushes back against her confinement. At that point, the staff really does think she belongs there. As tension mounts, things come to a head when she thinks she sees her stalker, David, at the facility. He’s working there and giving out meds to the patients.

   But is he? Or is it all in her head? As the movie progresses, secrets are revealed and Sawyer must fend for her life against a man who has developed a bizarre fascination with her. Problem is: she’s stuck in an asylum and doesn’t know who she can trust. Even her ally Nate isn’t who he pretends to be.

   Filmed on an Apple iPhone 7 Plus, Unsane looks and feels like something different from what moviegoers are used to. Although I was skeptical about what an entire film captured on a phone would look like, I have to say that I was very impressed. The aspect ratio works well, especially for a movie which is meant to be claustrophobic.

   Overall, I found Unsane to be an effective thriller, one that evokes those made in the 1980s and 1990s. It is bolstered by Foy’s solid performance as a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The movie has a lot to say about the corrupt health care industry as well, something that, to the filmmakers’ credit, never comes across as preachy or didactic.

   As you can tell, I liked this one quite a bit. Even if, or better yet despite, how the whole thing may come across as far fetched.

JOHN LUTZ – Dancer’s Debt. Alo Nudger #5. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1988.

   Alo Nudger is hired by a woman who is worried about the man she is living with, a Vietnam veteran with the soul of a poet and in debt to everyone in town (St. Louis). Recently he has been living in fear, of what he will not say.

   Nudger’s client is someone he could fall in love with, and he very nearly does. There is also more to the case than the above. Lutz is a good writer, but not a great one. What builds to a climax then sadly fades to a neatly-wrapped anticlimax, and epilogue.

THE BURGLAR. Columbia Pictures, 1957. Dan Duryea, Jayne Mansfield, Martha Vickers, Peter Capell, Mickey Shaughnessy. Screenplay by David Goodis, based on his novel of the same name. Director: Paul Wendkos.

   Watching it recently. this was the second time that I’ve seen The Burglar, a criminally underappreciated film noir starring Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield. Adapted for the screen by David Goodis, the author of the book upon which the film is based, The Burglar has the always impressive Duryea front and center the majority of the time. He portrays Nat Harbin, the ringleader of a gang of thieves.

   After stealing a priceless jewelry necklace from a rich spiritualist, the group must contend with the police, their decision as to where to fence the goods, and their own internal squabbles. Along for the ride with the men is blonde bombshell Gladden (Mansfield), the daughter of a man who took Nat   in when he was a young runaway.

   Directed by Paul Wendkos, this crime movie reminded me very much of Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956). Much like Kubrick, Wendkos had an eye for faces. Indeed, the movie isn’t so much filmed as it is photographed in beautiful, crisp black and white. Filmed largely on location in Philadelphia and Atlantic City, the movie immerses the viewer into the action. This includes a final sequence in an Atlantic City fun house which is as creepy as it is well executed.

   I recommend this sweaty, rough around-the-edges noir highly for those who haven’t yet had the occasion to see it.
   

W. R. BURNETT – The Loop. Stark House, July 2025.

   Burnett is deservedly considered one of the original hardboiled masters, having authored Little Caesar, The Asphalt Jungle, and High Sierra. It turns out he left some unpublished manuscripts upon his death. This should be news of the magnitude of discovering a new James M Cain trove. Maybe not Hammett or Chandler — but close.

   This one is about a proto-Parker thief, in Chicago for a job: Dooley. 1928. In the Loop.

   One of Dooley’s buddies, Hamm, has cased out a caper, and Hamm’s capers are always well oiled and rich.

   Dooley needs a score. But when he comes to visit Hamm at his slummy apartment to go over the plans, he has ceased to be, of iron poisoning. A professional job.

   Too coincidental. On the night of the plan reveal. It’s gotta be an insider. But who.

   Dooley never knew the identity of the other players. But he knows there was a guy to front the costs. Maybe it was that guy. Got the plans and figured to pull it himself. Cut out Hamm’s share. Cut out the brains. Stupid.

   Then he sees he’s being tailed by a guy named Shamus, a former cop, kicked off the force for graft. He’s good. But not that good.

   He gets Shamus to spill on who hired him for the tail. Promises Shamus a full share of the job in exchange. And Shamus spills.

   Revenge for killing his buddy? Not Dooley. There ain’t a percentage in that. Hijacking the job? Now you’re talking.

   So Dooley assembles a crew to hijack the thieves after they pull the job. Dooley doesn’t know the heist plans. But he knows who’s planning on pulling it. So he watches ’em, the double crossers. He lurks and awaits his chance to spring on them right after the take.

   It’s a springy little number, a nice fast caper novel. Imagine if WR Burnett wrote a Parker novel set in the Loop in 1928. It’s exactly like that. And you know what? He did!

   I have enjoyed the work of Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) on page and screen for as long as I can recall, his filmography encompassing such notable names as Bert I. Gordon, Ray Harryhausen, Byron Haskin, Nathan Juran, Nigel Kneale, George Pal, James Whale, and Philip Wylie. I graduated from the oversized trade paperbacks of The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898) bought at grade-school book fairs—which I am unable to identify—to the uniform, mass-market Berkley Highland editions (1964-1967), most with striking covers by Paul Lehr. I have not read them in decades, so in this series, I will revisit six major H.G. Wells novels, comparing each with my favorite film version.

   Along with editor Hugo Gernsback, Wells and Jules Verne (1828-1905) are often called “the father of science fiction,” their respective first and last writing decades overlapping. An immediate success that decisively ended an upbringing in poverty, The Time Machine (1895) was Wells’s first novel, one of four seminal works that, incredibly, he produced in as many years, followed by The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). And, for you bibliophiles, it’s the only one of the seven volumes in the Berkley boxed set (of whose existence I only recently learned)—containing all of the novels I’ll be discussing, as well as the unfilmed In the Days of the Comet (1906)—with cover art credited to the legendary Richard Powers.

   “The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him)” explains his theory to his friends Filby, a Psychologist, Provincial Mayor, Medical Man, Very Young Man, and the unnamed narrator. As “experimental verification,” he produces “a glittering metallic framework, scarcely larger than a small clock,” a model time machine that took two years to create, and—using the Psychologist’s own finger to preclude trickery—presses a lever that makes it vanish into the future, or perhaps the past. In his laboratory, he shows them an unfinished larger edition of nickel, ivory, rock crystal, and “twisted crystalline bars” of apparent quartz; on this, “I intend to explore time….I was never more serious in my life.”

   He is late to their next Thursday dinner in Richmond, the returning Psychologist, Doctor, and narrator joined by a Journalist, a Silent Man, and Blank, “the Editor of a well-known daily paper.” The Time Traveller arrives—dirty, disheveled, shoeless, pale, and haggard, with a limp and a half-healed cut on his chin—and, after cleaning himself up and wolfing down some mutton, agrees to tell his story, if uninterrupted. He relates that the machine, finished that morning, “began its career” at 10:00, and as the lab goes dark, servant Mrs. Watchett enters without seeing him, but “seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket,” and after a dizzying trip through time, he stops, the impact throwing him from the saddle.

   Beside the overturned machine, the Time Traveller finds himself amidst a hailstorm in a garden, with a White Sphinx of marble on a bronze pedestal looming beyond, and as the sun breaks out, he is approached by a beautiful and graceful but frail four-foot-high man. Unafraid, humankind’s distant descendants speak in “a strange and very sweet and liquid tongue,” and as they examine the machine, whose dials record a date of 802,701 A.D., he prudently unscrews and pockets its control levers. Childlike, indolent, frugivorous, and oddly lacking in interest, they bring him into a huge, dilapidated hall, where he is fed and begins learning the language of “humanity upon the wane,” however Edenic their setting.

   “Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness,” the success of “the social effort in which we are at present engaged” having removed our salutary challenges. After a walk, our hero finds his machine gone, apparently taken into the pedestal, but unable to effect ingress, he must be patient; befriending Weena, whom he saves from drowning, he learns that the Eloi fear the dark. Ventilating shafts and deep wells dot the land, and watching a small white, ape-like figure descending into one, he discovers metal foot and hand rests that form a ladder, deducing that humanity “had differentiated into two distinct animals”—one subterranean.

   The Eloi and Morlocks, whom the Time Traveller believes took his machine, seem to be the ultimate separation of the Capitalist and Labourer, the Haves and Have-nots, an idea familiar to viewers of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)…which Wells, ironically, trashed in a New York Times review (April 17, 1927) as “the silliest film.” Overcoming the Eloi’s contagious disgust, he enters the well, whence emanates a hum of machinery, noting that the Morlocks, who flee his dwindling matches, are carnivorous. Barely escaping, he goes back to the surface, seeking nighttime safety for himself and Weena in the far-off Palace of Green Porcelain from the Morlocks, for whom he believes the Eloi are “fatted cattle.”

   In the Palace, an ancient museum, the Time Traveller finds a weapon (a lever snapped off a corroded machine), more matches, and camphor to serve as makeshift candles. Hoping to penetrate the Sphinx the next day, he plans to traverse and sleep beside a nearby forest, protected by fire, but a blaze he starts to cover their retreat turns into a forest fire, routing the photophobic Morlocks and leaving Weena—who faints amid the chaos—missing and presumed dead. Returning, he unexpectedly finds the pedestal open, yet as he enters and approaches the Time Machine, the panels clang shut, and surrounded by the Morlocks in the dark, he is barely able to fit the control levers over their studs by touch and activate it.

   Escaping further into the future, the Time Traveller finds a huge, red sun, “the salt Dead Sea…poisonous-looking…lichenous plants…thin air that hurts one’s lungs [and] monster crab[s]…” (This follows a deleted section Wells reluctantly added at the behest of editor William Ernest Henley, in which he encounters kangaroo-like creatures, possibly human descendants, and a giant centipede.) Finally, more than 30 million years hence, he spots “a round thing, the size of a football perhaps [with] tentacles…hopping fitfully about” in the snowy and silent desolation and decides to return home, with the machine reappearing in his lab “the exact distance from my little lawn to the pedestal of the White Sphinx…”

   Despite his audience’s skepticism, the Doctor admits, “I certainly don’t know the natural order of these flowers,” produced from the pocket into which Weena had placed them, à la Zuzu’s petals. The next day, carrying a camera and a knapsack, our hero vows that if given half an hour, he’ll “prove you this time travelling up to the hilt, specimen and all”; suddenly remembering an appointment, the waiting narrator enters the laboratory just as the machine vanishes with its inventor, like a phantasm. “I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveller vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned,” he writes, speculating about his fate in an epilogue…

   Displaying a rare commitment to SF and fantasy, George Pal (1908-1980) produced, and often directed, a dozen features that had a profound impact on the genre; many had their origins in literature, notably his Wells adaptations The War of the Worlds (1953)—more on that one later—and The Time Machine (1960). Born Marincsák György to Hungarian stage parents, the unemployed architect was employed by Budapest’s Hunnia studio as an apprentice animator. Marrying and moving to Berlin, Pal next rose to the top of the UFA studio’s cartoon department until the Nazis’ rise to power drove him out of Germany, and then resided and worked in various European countries before he immigrated to the U.S.

   Pal earned an honorary Academy Award in 1944 for developing the “novel methods and techniques” in his Puppetoons animated shorts. His debut feature, The Great Rupert (aka A Christmas Wish, 1950), was among the first that combined stop-motion and live-action footage, but following this transitional effort, directed by actor Irving Pichel, Pal focused solely on live-action efforts, although animation still featured in many of his productions. Also directed by Pichel, Destination Moon (1950) was adapted by genre giant Robert A. Heinlein from his own young adult novel Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), and set a cinematic standard rarely equaled, dramatizing the lunar flight with scrupulous scientific accuracy.

   Based on Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer’s 1933 novel, Rudolph Maté’s When Worlds Collide (1951) was the first of five films Pal made for Paramount, including the biopic Houdini (1953) and collaborations with director Byron Haskin on The War of the Worlds, The Naked Jungle (1954), and Conquest of Space (1955). With the fantasy tom thumb (1958), Pal moved to MGM, where he would remain for the next decade, and assumed the directorial duties he retained on his next four efforts. As with those of Destination Moon, When Worlds Collide, The War of the Worlds, and tom thumb, the special effects of The Time Machine, by Gene Warren and Tim Baar, also received an Academy Award.

   The largely undistinguished screenwriting career of David Duncan ranged from Monster on the Campus (1958), a low point for director Jack Arnold, to being one of four credited on Fantastic Voyage (1966), which earned Hugo and Academy Awards. In an interview with Tom Weaver, he said, “Like most of Wells’ science fiction novels, [it] was as much a social document as a tale of science adventure….[By then] this forecast of the future no longer carried any plausibility—if it ever did. Labor unions were strong [and high wages and] fringe benefits had moved most blue-collar workers into the middle class.” Instead, air-raid sirens drive the Pavlovian Eloi into the shelters built by the Morlocks’ ancestors.

   Duncan clearly had his work cut out for him, since the brief novel’s characterization and dialogue are minimal, and the film’s visuals are unsurprisingly its greatest strength. Cast as the Time Traveller, known as George (a plate on his machine reads, “Manufactured by H. George Wells”), was Rod Taylor, co-star of World Without End (1956), a time-travel film sufficiently similar to inspire legal action by the Wells estate. The film opens at the second dinner as Mrs. Watchett (Doris Lloyd) admits David Filby (Alan Young) with Dr. Philip Hillyer (Sebastian Cabot), Anthony Bridewell (Tom Helmore), and Walter Kemp (Whit Bissell); on George’s arrival, we then flash back five days, to December 31, 1899.

   Urged to offer his inventive skills to the government for the Boer War, George laments to David (named by Pal in Duncan’s honor), people “call upon science to invent new, more efficient weapons to depopulate the Earth.” Composer Russell Garcia’s dramatic flourish accompanies our first look at the iconic full-sized machine designed by MGM art director Bill Ferrari, a wondrous creation resembling a sled with a rotating clockwork disc behind the saddle. George’s voiceover clarifies the action, while numerous devices visualize the transitions (e.g., a time-lapse candle and flowers; a window mannequin wearing changing fashions), hindsight enabling Pal to depict two World Wars before an atomic one in 1966.

   Stopping in 1917, he encounters uniformed James Philby (Young), whose father, killed in the war, refused while serving as George’s executor to allow the sale of his house, certain he would return someday. This poignant encounter considerably humanizes the story, but the elderly James’s return as an air-raid warden, just before London is destroyed, evoking nature’s volcanic retaliation, is less successful. The film is almost half over when George arrives in 802,701; the limited skills of inexperienced Yvette Mimieux (which reportedly improved enough for some of her earlier scenes to be reshot) made eminently suitable her casting—at Pal’s insistence—as Weena, who with rampant implausibility speaks English.

   Weena shows George the Talking Rings (voiced by Paul Frees), which supply exposition about a 326-year “war between the East and West” that filled the atmosphere with germs, and the Eloi/Morlock division. Duncan conflates the encounters with the latter (executed by William Tuttle, MGM’s makeup wizard for more than twenty years and, like Frees, a frequent Pal collaborator) into a climactic descent as George seeks both his machine and the somnambulic Weena. Brawny, blue-skinned, long-haired, and more imposing than in the novel, they are a better match for Taylor’s two-fisted hero as he seeks to reawaken the spirit of self-sacrifice among the Eloi, whom he leads into a fiery, subterranean rebellion.

   Separated when the panels close, George is unable to bring Weena back to his own time, and while attempting to rejoin her on his next trip, from which he never returns, he takes three unidentified books, with which he hopes to help the Eloi rebuild their world. Pal’s biggest box-office success, the film was remade for television with John Beck (and, in a different role, Bissell) in 1978 and as a feature with Guy Pearce in 2002, as well as being ripped off on countless occasions. Pal long hoped to direct a sequel and, in 1981, shared a posthumous byline with Joe Morhaim on Time Machine II, novelizing an unproduced script featuring a second-generation Time Traveller, the offspring of George and Weena.

   After Atlantis, the Lost Continent (1961), a letdown on every count, Pal collaborated with Charles Beaumont on The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), co-directed with Henry Levin, and 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964). Even a reunion with Haskin could not save The Power (1968) from friction with MGM’s régime du jour, which dumped it with minimal promotion; his final film, Doc Savage—The Man of Bronze (1975), showed how sadly out of step he had fallen with current tastes. Abortive projects included an effort to adapt William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s novel Logan’s Run (1967) and, in his last years, two with Robert Bloch, The Day of the Comet and The Voyage of the Berg.

      Up next: The Island of Dr. Moreau

      Sources/works consulted:

Batchelor, John Calvin, introduction to The Time Machine and The Invisible Man (New York: Signet Classic, 1984), pp. v-xxiii.
Baxter, John, Science Fiction in the Cinema: 1895-1970 (The International Film Guide Series; New York: A.S. Barnes, 1970).
Brosnan, John, Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s, 1978).
Gunn, James, editor, The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: Viking, 1988).
Hardy, Phil, editor, The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1995).
Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb)
Warren, Bill, Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties (2 volumes; Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1982-6).
Wells, H.G., review of Metropolis (The New York Times, April 17, 1927), reproduced by Don Brockway on his (then) Time Machine Home Site (December 25, 2002),
https://erkelzaar.tsudao.com/reviews/H.G.Wells_on_Metropolis%201927.htm.
—-, The Time Machine, in The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, pp. 1-103.
Weaver, Tom, Interviews with B Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers: Writers, Producers, Directors, Actors, Moguls and Makeup (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1988).
Wikipedia

      Online source:

https://archive.org/details/the-time-machine-1960_202203.

   Portions of this article originally appeared on Bradley on Film.

JOHNNY RENO. Lyles/Paramount, 1966) with Dana Andrews, Jane Russell, Lon Chaney Jr., John Agar, Lyle Bettger, Tom Drake, Richard Arlen, Robert Lowery, and Dale Van Sickel. Produced by A.C. Lyles. Screenplay by Steve Fisher. Directed by R.G. Springsteen.

   In the mid-1960s the Western was on its way out. Oh, there were still a number of them churned out each year, many with big budgets and impressive casts, and the cycle of “Spaghetti Westerns” had just cantered into view, giving the genre a final fillip of stylish excitement, but the genre was basically a dying candle at that point, albeit one that still flickers brightly on occasion. And it didn’t help any that a producer named A. C. Lyles was killing it with kindness.

   From 1962 to ’68, Lyles produced more than a dozen Westerns — unmistakably “B” Westerns — for Paramount, filled to overflowing and beyond with faces familiar from decades past: John Agar, Lon Chaney Jr. William Bendix, Rory Calhoun, Richard Arlen, Joan Caulfield, and the like. Here the leads are played by Dana Andrews and Jane Russell and….

   And I pause here to reflect on what a super-colossal movie this would have been, had it been made twenty years earlier. Certainly in 1946, any movie featuring the star of Laura and “The girl all America has been waiting to see!” would have been launched with splash and prestige. Even in the mid-50s, the star power of two such leads would have sufficed to lift any film firmly into the first-run houses.

   But this, alas, was the mid-60s, and the antique charm of the 1940s was banished to the Late-Late Show by a culture charging toward Youth and Relevance. And besides, Johnny Reno isn’t very good.

   A damn shame, but there you are. Lyles’ string of geriatric productions didn’t keep the B-Western alive; they buried it in mediocrity, with worn-out story lines, weak scripts and weary stuntmen. Action is sparse in these things, and the dialogue provided by Steve Fisher is a long way from his classic I Wake Up Screaming. R.G. Springsteen’s direction may be as quietly efficient as his work at Republic, but without the resources of Republic, it’s noticeably more quiet than effective. And I’d be remiss not to mention that the extras made up to look like native Americans are remarkably unconvincing.

   Yet here they are, Jane Russell and Dana Andrews, trudging bravely through the insignificance of it all, trooping like true troupers. They don’t make Johnny Reno worth watching, but they never quit trying.

(Give Me That) OLD-TIME DETECTION. Spring 2025. Issue #68. Editor: Arthur Vidro. Old-Time Detection Special Interest Group of American Mensa, Ltd. 34 pages (including covers).

THE LATEST issue of OTD could be a nostalgia trip for a lot of readers, especially those who were turned on to detective fiction when they were adolescents. As you’ll see, editor Arthur Vidro will show us the part he has been playing in the nostalgic revival.

THE ISSUE begins with Edward D. Hoch, which is always a great start. There’s an interview Hoch had with EQMM in 1976, followed by an essay Hoch wrote for THE ARMCHAIR DETECTIVE in 1979. In the interview he cites the first influential adult book he ever read to be an EQ novel and explains his affinity for the short story form. (Which book? you ask. Read OTD and see.) In the essay Hoch does a good job of connecting real-life criminality with fiction. Even Theodore Dreiser got into the act!

LIKE MOST fictioneers, Stuart Palmer had his own way of going about writing detective fiction, and we have a short summary of it here.

ONE LONG-RUNNING detective fiction character was Hugh Pentecost’s John Jericho, whose adventures were collected by Crippen & Landru in 2008 and for which S.T. Karnick wrote an introduction. In it Karnick notes Pentecost’s primary interest in social corruption and personal responsibility. And were there prefigurings in Jericho of Jack Reacher?

EQ’s 1949 classic serial killer novel CAT OF MANY TAILS has recently been reissued by Otto Penzler with an introduction by Richard Dannay, Frederic Danny’s son, that provides background information on that book and the two cousins’ involvement in detective fiction in general, but focuses primarily on Frederic Dannay’s individual scholarly contribution, which in itself was prodigious.

THE FICTION PIECE is Agatha Christie’s “A CHESS PROBLEM,” a story guaranteed to make you think twice before you sit down at the board.

NEXT, the reigning expert on theatrical versions of mysteries, Amnon Kabatchnik, gives us the background for J. B. Priestley’s AN INSPECTOR CALLS, which he characterizes as a “mystery parable” with “an unexpected twist ending.”

IF YOU enjoyed THE THREE INVESIGATORS series of juvenile mysteries when you were younger, then you’ll be happy to hear that “THE THREE INVESTIGATORS ARE BACK” in deluxe paperback and electronic editions. Arthur details how he came to be involved with the project, modestly claiming to be “A SMALL PART OF THE ACT.”

WHAT WAS POPULAR in paperbacks for the detective fiction fan fifty years ago? Some of the best stuff to come along, reports Charles Shibuk, classics all: Raymond Chandler, G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, John Collier, Stanley Ellin, Dick Francis, Ellery Queen, and Josephine Tey.

MICHAEL DIRDA offers his personal selection of “MYSTERY NOVELS SO CLEVER YOU’LL READ THEM TWICE,” which includes a couple of books by relatively unknown writers.

THEN WE HAVE perceptive reviews by Jon L. Breen of CLOUD NINE by James M. Cain, a wildly erratic writer, and Arthur Vidro of THE REGATTA MYSTERY AND OTHER STORIES by Agatha Christie, who never suffered from Cain’s affliction.

COLLECTING THINGS, especially detective fiction, is an honorable pursuit and two collectors, Nina Mazzo and Donald Pollock, talk about it.

THE PUZZLE PAGE might present a problem for readers who haven’t been exposed to Hollywood’s B-films from the 1930s.

THE SPRING ISSUE of OTD is well worth your time – and a subscription.

Subscription information:

– Published three times a year: Spring, summer, and autumn. – Sample copy: $6.00 in U.S.; $10.00 anywhere else. – One-year U.S.: $18.00. – One-year overseas: $40.00 (or 30 pounds sterling or 40 euros). – Payment: Checks payable to Arthur Vidro, or cash from any nation, or U.S. postage stamps or PayPal. Mailing address:

Arthur Vidro, editor
Old-Time Detection
2 Ellery Street
Claremont, New Hampshire 03743

Web address: vidro@myfairpoint.net

JOHN D. MacDONALD – Free Fall in Crimson. Travis McGee #19. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1981. Fawcett, paperback, 1982. Reprinted a number of times since.

   I’ve been doing some research. The first Travis McGee story was entitled The Deep Blue Goodbye, and it was published first as a paperback in May of 1964, back when a book sold in softcover would set you back all of forty cents or so.

   It’s now exactly seventeen years, eighteen books, and an equal number of colors later [1981], and real money, the folding kind, is going to be what it takes to get your hands on a copy of the latest in the series. [$10.95] No more loose pocket change!

   This negative sort of progress notwithstanding, what this does is to illustrate one of the most remarkable aspects of John D. MacDonald’s long writing career. Ignored by the critics until just recently, he began in the late 1940’s writing hundreds of stories published in the pulp magazines {and mostly still buried there). In the 1950’s, with the demise of the pulps at hand, he switched to novels, with a list of them fully a page long, but all of them in paperback and in paperback only.

   Only in the last five or ten years has it been that his books have come out first in hardcover, and now when they do, they head straight for the bestseller list. Readers have known all along. They’ve known that MacDonald’s name on a story has meant just what they’ve been looking for.

   Today, of course, MacDonald is best known for his adventures of Travis McGee. Other than myriads of articles for TV Guide and blurbs for the dust jackets for the books of other authors, he seems to be writing nothing else. It seems a little strange for those of us who’ve been with him all the while, but apparently McGee is enough to keep the demands of the vast majority of his legions of fans satisfied.

   The format is restricting, but given the continued storytelling drive of a Free Fall in Crimson, plus the usual amount of free-wheeling MacDonald-ian philosophy thrown in for good measure, it seems unlikely that any change is due in the near future.

   In the opening chapters, McGee is still mourning the loss of Gretel, lost but then avenged when last we met him, in The Green Ripper. He is doing a lot of thinking about “destiny,” and not until this new case comes along does he extricate himself from the deep, self-induced funk he’s dug himself into.

   He is asked to investigate, long after the fact, the strange death of an artist’s estranged father. The man was dying of cancer, but perhaps not fast enough, for before he does, he is beaten to death by persons unknown in an isolated wayside rest area. His heir is his wife, from whom he was legally separated. Her current boyfriend specializes in making R-rated biker movies, but his latest films have not been faring well.

   McGee’s solution, when it comes to it, as it always does, is to give fate a handy shove in the right direction. Fate’s response, as is usual in JDM’s books, is tough and uncaring. Unfortunately, McGee neglects some loose ends this time, and as a result, in the next book it will be his best friend, Meyer, who will need some rehabilitating.

   In the Travis McGee universe, it is not wise to stand too close to the target area.

Rating: A minus.

711 OCEAN DRIVE. Columbia Pictures, 1950. Edmond O’Brien Edmond O’Brien, Joanne Dru, Otto Kruger, Barry Kelly. Director: Joseph M. Newman

   Edmond O’Brien stars in this remarkably average crime drama about the bookmaking racket. He portrays Mal Granger, a telephone company technician who works his way up in the criminal world, eventually becoming a top Syndicate figure on the West Coast. Along the way, he has a rival murdered, steals the rival’s girl (Joanne Dru), and then proceeds to knock off the hitman who he hired in the first place. All the while trying to outwit the Syndicate’s Cleveland-based boss (Otto Kruger).

   Tough stuff, with O’Brien giving a solid performance as a man whose heart is increasingly hardened by his chosen line of work. Unfortunately, it takes a long time for the movie to get going. The first half hour or so, especially, is a drag. Too much time is spent on Granger’s ability to rig a telephone system for a low-level bookie, one that would allow said bookie to get near instantaneous results from the track.

   This might have been interesting in 1950 – and I say might – but it is a drag now. The movie does perk up in the second and third acts, with the film culminating in a well executed and photographed chase and fight sequence set in and around the Hoover Dam in Nevada.

   Overall, 711 Ocean Drive is, as I said previously, average. I just don’t know what the title refers to! It’s never mentioned in the film (as far as I could tell) and it doesn’t seem to indicate anything special, other than possibly Granger’s fictional Malibu address once he becomes a big shot.

WILLIAM FULLER – Back Country. Dell First Edition #8, paperback, 1954. Stark House Press, 2022 (Black Gat #36).

   William Fuller, according to his publishers, was a merchant seaman, a hobo, a veteran of World War II, and a bit player in western movies. He also wrote seven novels about Brad Dolan, a big, tough drifter who travels around the south getting in and out of trouble.

   In Back Country, the first book in the series, Dolan’s car breaks down in Cartersville, a small town in central Florida. Many similar small towns turned up in the paperback originals of the 1950s, and Cartersville is filled with all the characters we love to hate — the Boss who runs the county and believes that “nigras” are all right if they slay in their place; the cruel, corrupt, pot-gutted lawmen; the redneck town bigots.

   Dolan enters this environment and makes all the wrong moves: He wins at gambling, insults the sheriff, makes time with the big Boss’s wife. Naturally, he gets beaten and thrown in jail, but that doesn’t stop him. He not only sleeps with the Boss’s wife, he sleeps with the Boss’s daughter. Then the wife is found in Dolan’s room with her throat cut, just as the town’s racial tension reaches a crisis.

   These ingredients may sound familiar, but Fuller mixes them expertly, keeping the pace fast and the characters believable. Dolan’s toughness (and his realization that he’s not quite as hard-boiled as he thinks) is convincingly handled. There’s a spectacularly vivid cockfighting sequence, and the setting is at times drawn with telling realism.

   Also recommended in the Brad Dolan series: Goat Island (1954) and The Girl in the Frame (1957).

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   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.