GRANTCHESTER “Episode 1.” ITV, UK, 06 October 2014. Shown in the US as part of Masterpiece Theater (PBS, 2015). James Norton (Sidney Chambers), Robson Green (Inspector Geordie Keating), Morven Christie, Tessa Peake-Jones. Based on the short story collection Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death, written by James Runcie. Developed for television by Daisy Coulam. Director: Harry Bradbeer. Currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

   Sidney Chambers is the Anglican vicar in the small English village of Cambridgeshire. Set in the early 1950s, you might say that the small town is as dangerous place to live as Cabot Cove, since the series is now in its sixth season. Blessed with a honest smile and a sense of who people are, he makes a good partner with local policeman Inspector Keating in tracking down murderers; the latter is a by-the-books detective who resents Chambers’ intrusion on this, their first case, but they quickly become good friends.

   The reason for the initial resentment is that Keating thinks the case is all wrapped up, as an obvious suicide. But after Chambers is persuaded to intercede by the dead man’s mistress (and the wife of his business partner), Keating reluctantly has to agree that Chambers – and his keen eye for items found at the murder scene – is right. It’s a good mystery, but I claim it’s unfair to the viewer to not be able to read what the two detectives do in the dead man’s diary. Well, we do, but you can measure the length of time it’s on the screen in nanoseconds.

   Both stars have engaging personalities, however, and that goes a long way in paving over small little complaints such as this. There is, or will be, an ongoing sub-plot that may prove interesting, that of a platonic girl friend that Chambers has known since they were both were young. But when she announces her engagement to someone else, it appears that both of them are beginning to wonder if their friendship was so platonic after all.

H. P. LOVECRAFT’s “Beyond the Wall of Sleep.” Short story. Adapted in graphic format Lovecraft in Full Color #2. Adventure Comics [an imprint of Malibu Comics], March 1992. Writer: Steven Philip Jones. Pencils & inks: Octavio Cariello. Reprinted in H.P. Lovecraft’s Worlds – Volume One (Caliber Comics, paperback, June 2019).

   â€œBeyond the Wall of Sleep” is one of H. P. Lovecraft’s earliest stories, written in Spring 1919 and first published in the amateur publication Pine Cones in October 1919. It has been reprinted many times since and is probably still in print today, over a hundred years later.

   In this particular comic, it’s been updated to what was present day at the time (1992), and while it’s told in a somewhat disjointed form, the story is still very much recognizable from the one Lovecraft first created. A university researcher is trying to find ways to read the minds of others, and in what may be a breakthrough, connects with a being somewhere in the cosmos through the mind of crazed killer named Joe Slaader, a denizen of the deep Catskill hills, a man suffering from dementia who likely never been more than five miles from where he was born.

   Slaader is dying, but has a history of visions and delusions, and somehow the researcher has tapped into that. And at least for the short time before Slaader dies, the researcher finds himself “not a stranger in this Elysian realm,” but looking out upon Earth from somewhere near the star Algol. Slaader is dead, but his life of torment on this world is over.

   The story is short, the adaptation is clunky and difficult to follow, but there’s a magic to it that somehow neither the telling nor the sketchy artwork can hide. It may, paradoxically, add to it.

   Other Lovecraft stories adapted in this series:

1. “The Lurking Fear.”
2. “Beyond the Wall of Sleep.”
3. “The Tomb.”
4. “The Alchemist.”

BAT MASTERSON “Double Showdown.” NBC, 08 October 1958 (Season 1, Episode 1.) Gene Barry (Bat Masterson). Guest Cast: Robert Middleton, Jean Willes, Elisha Cook, Adele Mara, King Donovan. Teleplay: Gene Levitt. Director: Walter Doniger. Currently streaming on Amzazon Prime Video.

   In this first episode of a new western series on NBC, Bat Masterson comes to the aid of a old friend who owns a casino saloon: he’s being threatened by a competitor (Robert Middleton) who does not think the town is big enough for them both, but if it is, he wants to own them both.

   Using his guns and his trademark cane as well as his wits, Masterson manages to persuade the unctuous villain to a game of chance, winner take all. Dealing the cards is an old girl friend (Jean Willes), now reduced to working for Middleton’s character.

   Unfortunately there’s not a lot of suspense that can build in an episode that’s only 30 minutes long, and that includes commercials and a bit of flirtatious byplay involving Adele Mara’s characters, who comes in the stage one day and leaves the next. Not only that, the episode has two different endings. Anticipating that critics would be complaining how badly the show plays loose and easy with the facts, the point the producers decided to make in advance is that there is often more than one way history gets relayed down to us over the years.

   It’s an approach that I don’t remember ever seeing before, and I wasn’t expecting it. It was rather neat to see it done here.

RICHARD HOYT – Decoys. John Denson #1. M. Evans, hardcover, 1980. Penguin, paperback, 1984.

   John Denson is a Seattle-based private eye. While his first case is no out-and-out classic, it is refreshingly different, and Denson’s a character I’d love to see again.

   Nor would I mind if his competition in this book for an unknown treasure – unknown to Denson, that is – were to show up along with him. She is Pamela Yew, also a private investigator, and she knows what the objective is. They make a bet. She will win the $50,000 piece of artwork adorning Denson’s office. He will win, um, her.

   A lot of male/female stuff comes into play. Denson does not think PI work is a woman’s line. She refuses to stay on the pedestal he offers her. Who wins? You’ll have to read this one for yourself to find out.

   There are also a large number of “decoys” in this book. It all depends on how deep allegorically you want to dig. And even so, if you like your detective fiction fast-paced with a lot of twists, and populated by characters who know what they are all about, I can’t imagine your failing to enjoy this one.

Rating: A minus.

   
     The John Denson series –

Decoys (1980)
30 for a Harry (1981)
Siskiyou (1983; aka “The Siskiyou Two-Step”)
Fish Story (1985; aka “Contract Killer”)
Whoo? (1991; aka “Flight of Death”)
Bigfoot (1993)
Snake Eyes (1995)
The Weatherman’s Daughters (2003)
Pony Girls (2004)

      Short Stories –

“Private Investigations” (1984, The Eyes Have It)

LOUISE PENNY – All the Devils Are Here. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #16. St. Martin’s/Minotaur, hardcover, September 2020; softcover, June 2021. Setting: Contemporary Paris.

First Sentence: “Hell is empty, Armand,” said Stephen Horowitz.

   Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his wife Raine-Marie have come from Canada to Paris for the birth of a new grandchild. After a celebratory dinner with their two children, spouses, and Armand’s billionaire godfather, Stephen Horowitz, Stephen is deliberately struck by a vehicle and now lies in a coma. A grim discovery at his apartment prompts an investigation and the uncovering of family secrets leaving Armand to determine just who can be trusted.

   Paris is not a city about which one can be objective. It is a city that enthralls from the moment one arrives and, even if one never has the chance to return, it lives within one forever. Penny has captured perfectly that sense of having found the city of one’s soul and portrays it perfectly. Even the hardcover book’s glorious endsheets, designed by MaryAnna Coleman, draw one into the beauty of Paris. Opening with lines from Shakespeare’s “Tempest” is the perfect balance to the City of Light with a history of darkness.

   Although not an issue for new readers, series readers may have a sense of being a stranger in a strange land having the story set outside the usual environs of Canada and Three Pines. This was an effective decision as it is echoed by Gamache having the same sense of not knowing who to believe, who to trust. It illustrates the duplicity of people and is effective in heightening the suspense and tension. The connections made back to Three Pines and the Sûreté du Québec are nicely done.

   The mystery is well-plotted as it grows upon itself and is delightfully complex taking one down unexpected roads. Yet, more than a mystery, this is a story of relationships, and with that comes wisdom.

   Penny employs her characters wisely. Involving family members as part of an investigation can be risky. However, in this case, no one is superfluous; neither are any of their roles forced or out of character. Each has skills that contribute, and each is humanly imperfect with weaknesses and foibles. In other words, they are real. Even the use of an unseen, yet critical, character is wonderfully done. The theme of abandonment, which appears in various ways through Penny’s books, is heartfelt and recognizable to so many.

   Penny’s ability to place the reader within the story is second to none. Sitting in the hospital, awaiting news of a loved one, you feel, hear, and smell the starkness and desperation of those who are there, and the unwillingness to give up hope. Her use of dialogue is evocative. The banter between Jean-Guy and Armand is always something one anticipates and enjoys, but this was lovely as well– “Please, Dad,” Daniel now said. “Tell me you were a commando.” “Better.” His father leaned closer and dropping his voice further. “I taught commandos.”

   When reading Penny, there are always lines that make one stop and consider, small lessons to be learned– “It had taken Beauvoir years to see the power of pausing. And of patience. Of taking a breath to consider all options, all angles, and not simply acting on the most obvious.” She teaches one the value of seeing not only what is there, but what is not; what is real, and what is facade, and that– “People believe what they want to believe. Beginning with their own lies.” “Hell is the truth seen too late,” said Reine-Marie.”

   strong>All the Devils are Here is Penny’s best book to date. It is complex, suspenseful, and emotional with a small touch of the paranormal. It has a cracking good, twisty plot — you don’t see where it is going — and an excellent ending. Most of all, it demonstrates Penny’s continuing growth as an author and, I suspect, as a person. And isn’t that the goal of us all?

Rating: Excellent.

THE DIPLOMATIC CORPSE. Rank, UK, 1958. Robin Bailey, Susan Shaw, Liam Redmond, Harry Fowler, André Mikhelson. Director: Montgomery Tully.

   Robin Bailey, known best to me for playing Charters in the British TV series Charters & Caldicott, is a newspaper reporter in this one, along with Susan Shaw, who works the paper’s woman’s news desk. To tell you the truth, though, she seems to have more a nose for news than he does. Shaw is a pretty blonde who ought to have had a greater movie career than she seems to have had (even looking at her IMDb list of credits, they all seem to be minor – I don’t recognize any of them).

   Dead is an attaché for a foreign embassy in London. While the viewer knows who the villains are as soon as they appear on the screen, it takes our stalwart detective pair a little longer, even with the reluctant assistance of a Scotland Yard detective, whose hands are tied because, as everyone knows, embassies are not legally on British soil.

   Which as it so happens, without really giving anything away, I hope, is the key to the case, as a purely legal matter, although I do think the bad guys give up way too easily.

   The Diplomatic Corpse is a minor film from any perspective, but its mere 60 minutes running time makes it seem that it’s moving faster than it really is. It’s stagy and severely handicapped by a lack of more than the three or four sets than are actively used, all indoor. Even when Susan Shaw’s character is caught impersonating the switchboard operator in the embassy and locked in an upstairs bedroom, it doesn’t move the needle on the suspense meter more than one small notch, if that.

   And yet, and yet, after all this carping, as minor as this movie is, I enjoyed watching it. Whatever the story and production may be lacking, the actors were pros at the job and they seemed to having a good time. That counts for a lot.

KATHERINE HALL PAGE – The Body in the Vestibule. Faith Fairchild #4. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1992. Avon, paperback, 1993.

   Faith Fairchild, her husband Tom and their three-year-old son are in Lyon, France, while Tom researches his dissertation on the Albigensian heresy. A friend of his has secured them lodging across from the St. Nizier’s Church, where a clochard (homeless man) begs. Two weeks into their stay, Faith discovers the clochard’s body in a dustbin at the foot of the stairs (they live five flights up), but when she gets her husband and returns with the Police, the body is gone.

   The next day, the clochard has apparently returned to his spot, but Faith realizes he is not the same man. Then a young prostitute whom Faith has befriended “commits suicide.” After being warned not to meddle in the clochard’s disappearance, naturally Faith does meddle and ends up getting abducted herself.

   Early on, mention is made of a burglary ring , and one expects this will tie in with the killings. Some surprises at the end and a few likeable characters make this a tolerable effort.

   For the titles, see below. Cast: James “Shamrock” Ellison, Russell “Lucky” Hayden, Raymond Hatton, “Fuzzy” Knight, Julie (later Julia) Adams, Tom Tyler, George J Lewis, John Cason, Stanley Price, Dennis Moore, George Chesebro, Bud Osborne, and Stanford Jolley. Written by Ron Ormond and Maurice Tombragel . Directed by Thomas Carr.

1. HOSTILE COUNTRY. 1950.

2. MARSHAL OF HELDORADO. 1950.

3. CROOKED RIVER. 1950.

4. COLORADO RANGER. 1950.

5. FAST ON THE DRAW. 1950.

6. WEST OF THE BRAZOS. 1950.

   Six movies with the same set of credits. There’s a story here.

   About the time William Boyd achieved TV stardom with his old Hopalong Cassidy movies, producer Robert Lippert hit upon the notion of making a little cash with the erstwhile sidekicks of Hoppy’s salad days, James Ellison and Russell Hayden. (For background on Lippert, see my review of MAN BAIT.)

   Lippert announced his new series with all due fan-fare: Press releases about multi-year contracts and big-budget Western epics… then proceeded to make all six films in a month(!) using the same actors in the same costumes on the same sets and locations, playing the same roles, or analogous ones, in all six entries.

   Actually, the first three aren’t bad, as B-westerns go. The action is plentiful, the actors show a certain chemistry playing off each other, and there’s a sly, subtle humor flirting about the edges of the scripts. HELDORADO offers James Ellison a chance to masquerade as an Eastern Dude, just as William Boyd did from time to time in the Hoppy series, and the result is pleasingly humorous.

   With COLORADO RANGER, a sort of carelessness began to creep in, betrayed at first by a bit of mis-matched footage from a Bob Steele Western in COLORADO RANGER. FAST ON THE DRAW opens with about ten minutes of “Prologue” made up of unrelated stock footage (a favorite ploy of writer Ormond’s) that meanders into a tired story of Shamrock Ellison seeking out the criminal mastermind behind the murder of his parents — the guilty one turns out to be not only the least likely suspect but also the least convincing. WEST OF THE BRAZOS, which opens with the same footage as FAST ON THE DRAW, brought the series slouching to a close.

   Which is kind of a shame, actually. There was an abundance of talent here, some beloved faces, and an indefinable sense of sheer Fun in the early entries. Just a shame Lippert – who never wasted a penny foolishly, or ever spent one wisely—couldn’t see what he had and do better by it.

PETER O’DONNELL – I, Lucifer. Modesty Blaise #3. Souvenir Press, UK, hardcover, 1967. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1967. Fawcett Crest T1234, US, paperback, 1969. Mysterious Press, US, paperback, 1984.

   Enter Lucifer, the strange young man whose belief that he is Satan incarnate is matched only by his ability to predict the death of those soon to die of natural causes.

   In the hands of the sinister Seff, killer Jack Wish, and nervous Dr. Bowker, Lucifer is the key to a murderous extortion racket with Seff extracting ransom from the wealthy whose death Lucifer predicts — helped along when needed by Wish, Seff’s executioner.

   But Lucifer has a wild talent and Seff needs more control in order to insure their continued profit.

   A young man named Stephen Collier, who just happens to be a close friend of Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin, whose unexpected presence will put them both in deadly danger at Lucifer’s rocky island fortress in the North Sea Hau Lobrigo.

   Exotic Modesty Blaise and her Cockney partner Willie Garvin first appeared in a hit comic strip written by veteran comic strip writer Peter O’Donnell and artist James Holdway. With the popularity of the James Bond craze, O’Donnell decided to branch out to books as well, with Modesty soon appearing in the a bestselling hit bearing her name, which also produced a film with Monica Vitti and Terence Stamp as Modesty and Willie (the less said about that, the better). Sabre Tooth, the second Modesty Blaise novel followed, and in 1967, I, Lucifer.

   Of the twelve novels and two collections of short stories that followed (not including the collections of the long running comic strip), I, Lucifer is my favorite.

   Collier is involved with Modesty, whom he finds as mysterious as her history (one time head of the criminal organization the Network turned very wealthy and well connected sometime helper to Sir Gerald Tarrant and the British government). Nor does he quite understand the non-sexual but close relationship with Willie Garvin, a former kick boxer she rescued and made into her second in command and most trusted friend. Willie purchased a pub with his profits and lives near Modesty.

   Readers of the long running series know the Platonic but close friendship of the two is the most intriguing mystery the series offers, and O’Donnell keeps that puzzle and that relationship at the heart of the series front and center, even as others move in and out of their lives. It’s a question O’Donnell cleverly doesn’t answer even in Cobra Trap when he writes the final story in the series.

   Somehow Modesty never did successfully transfer to the screen despite a television pilot with Ann Turkel, and a Quentin Tarantino produced movie My Name Is Modesty, made to keep the rights to a bigger production that never came.

   But the books are more than enough compensation, along with the internationally syndicated comic strip.

   Modesty and Willie are put onto Seff and Jack Wish by their friend Sir Gerald, but their plan to infiltrate Hau Lobrigo is thrown a loop when Modesty gets in only for Willie, observing from binoculars, to find Stephen Collier there as well ready to blow Modesty’s cover.

   As complications arise it becomes clear to Modesty she not only has to get Collier free, but also the innocent Lucifer, victim of his own delusion and Seff’s deadly plans despite Collier’s objections of how dangerous her plan is.

   Through battle, near death, serious injury, and scrapes so close there are tooth marks in them Modesty and Willie will triumph and the bad guys will meet the kind of fate they deserve in the most satisfying of ways. It is indeed, their “kind of business.”

   And as always Modesty remains Modesty, she and Willie enigmatic as her American millionaire friend John Dall (Sabre Tooth) explains to Collier.

   Which pretty much sums up my long relationship with Modesty.

   I’m never so busy I won’t answer her call.

SLEEPERS WEST. Twentieth Century Fox, 1941. Mike Shayne #2. Lloyd Nolan (Michael Shayne), Lynn Bari, Mary Beth Hughes, Louis Jean Heydt. Based on the novel Sleepers East by Frederick Nebel and the character created by Brett Halliday. Director: Eugene Forde.

   To answer your first question first, yes, they changed the title of the film from that of the book, but there’s an easy explanation. In the book the train all of the characters are on are going to New York City from someplace in the Midwest, Ohio perhaps, and in this second filming of the book, they’re going from Denver to San Francisco.

   And, yes, they changed that, too. Instead of PI Mike Shayne home base being either Miami or New Orleans, as the books he was in would have it, they made it San Francisco. And, truthfully, I see no resemblance between Brett Halliday’s character and the one Lloyd Nolan plays in this movie. (I am somewhat reluctant to point this out, since he does such a good job playing a PI trying to escort a young blonde witness across country without anyone knowing about it that I am willing to forgive and forget and just go along for the ride.)

   And if you enjoy detective mysteries taking place in the movies on trains, then this is the movie you have you see, if you haven’t already. Well over two-thirds of the movie takes place on a train, and until a crazed engineer trying to make his last run come in on time causes a huge accident, I think the whole movie could have taken place on it.

   Jamming up the works for Shayne is Lynn Bari’s character, a former friend of Shayne who’s now a reporter for a Denver newspaper. Playing the young blonde witness-to-be is Mary Beth Hughes, who really couldn’t care less about being a star witness in an upcoming trial.

   There are more complications in this movie than there are in most other detective movies of the same era, including the friendship the young blonde witness surreptitiously makes with a man who is also looking to escape from a life he longer wants to live.

   The only flaw in this film, to my way of thinking is how quickly it wraps up and ends. I could have watched another 15 to 20 minutes of this one, easily.