I read Frank Herbert’s original novel when it was serialized in Analog SF, thought it was OK, but I never read any of the sequels — and who knew there were going to be so many of them? I also passed on both David Lynch’s movie adaptation(1984) and the 2000 Sci-Fi Channel mini-series.

   Those of you who may be bigger fans of the book than I am, what do think of the new movie coming out in December, based on the trailer below?

   Coming soon to Netflix, a movie remake for movie fans who don’t watch black and white movies. Beware: I think this trailer tells the whole story in only two and a half minutes:

VEXED “Episode One.” BBC Two, 60m, 15 August 2010, Toby Stephens as D.I. Jack Armstrong, Lucy Punch as D.I. Kate Bishop, Roger Griffiths. Created and written by Howard Overman, Director: Matt Lipsey.  Streaming on Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Acorn TV.

   It is difficult to tell what the creators of this series had in mind that would make it stand out amidst all of the other male-female cop series that have been on the air over the past few years. Perhaps it is its light-hearted approach to crime-solving, such as stepping over the latest murder victim back and forth several times as this episode begins in order to evaluate her apartment as a possible rental.

   He (DI Jack Armstrong and the senior partner) is lazy, unorganized but is in his own inimitable way, charming. She (DI Kate Bishop) is neat, efficient and therefore totally exasperated with her new partner on the force. So of course they mix it up together like cats and dogs. Another aspect of Bishop’s role in the series is that she is worried that her husband is straying from their marriage, while Armstrong shows that he is not quite the ladies’ man he would like to pretend he is.

   This all ties in with what they discover as they tackle their current case. The three women all had loyalty cards with the same store, and someone with access to the accumulated data on their customers could find lonely women to be easily preyed upon. This also gives Armstrong the means to meet by “chance” a woman he saw in a supermarket, while Bishop uses it to spy on her husband.

   In spite of all these threads running concurrently, they don’t really mesh all that well. Both the story and the characters involved are easy enough on the eyes, however, without straining too many brain cells, and the show managed to stay on the air for two seasons, albeit with a a two year separation between them.

   Perhaps, if I give them the opportunity, the characters will grow on me as well.

CRAIG JOHNSON – Next to Last Stand. Walt Longmire #16. Viking, hardcover, 2020. Setting: Contemporary Wyoming/Montana.

First Sentence: Years ago, on one particularly beautiful, high plains afternoon when I was a deputy with the Absaroka County Sheriff’s Department, I propped my young daughter, Cady, on my hip and introduced her to Charlie Lee Stillwater.

   Walt receives a call from Carol Williams, the caretaker and administrator of the Veteran’s Home of Wyoming, once Fort McKinney. Charlie Lee Stillwater, the fifth of the group call the Wavers, old Veterans in souped-up electric wheelchairs, has died. Going through his effects, Carol and Walt find a box containing two items of particular note: one million dollars in cash, and a painted canvas which was clearly part of a larger painting. Walt investigates the source of both, and whether the painting, thought to have been long destroyed, was stolen.

   The best characters are ones who grow and change over the course of a series. So too has Johnson done with Longmire. This book is more the Walt we love; the events of the prior two books have understandably changed him as he questions his future.

   Dog is here! Those who are series readers have come to love Dog. Henry is also here. A joke that runs between him and Walt in this story makes one smile. Vic, Walt’s second and girlfriend, is a character who, for some of us, has become tiring. It is nice to see Lonnie Littlebird, Chief of the Cheyenne Nation and Tribal Elder— “Um humm, yes it is so.” But it’s the “Wavers” who are the stars: four elderly veterans in souped-up wheelchairs who wave to passing traffic in front of the Veterans’ Home of Wyoming.

   Walt in evening dress and chasing bad guys through a museum is new, but so are the bad guys. No cowboy hats and boots here— “Do you ever get the feeling that there are people out there who are living lives that we know absolutely nothing about?”

   The plot is interesting and filled with historical information. Unfortunately, it was almost too much information and it slows down the first half of the book. Fortunately, once past that, the pace picks up noticeably. One does wonder where the series is going. Were some of Walt’s comments foreshadowing or merely a frustrating tease?

   The Epilogue is wonderful and worth the price of the book in itself, except for the last sentence, which is annoying, insulting to his readers, and caused me to reduce my rating.

   Next to Last Stand is something of a return to that which fans most love about Johnson’s books. It is interesting, exciting, and filled with excellent characters. However, this is a book one might want to wait to read until the next book is released.

Rating: Good.

HENRY KUTTNER “Don’t Look Now.” First published in Startling Stories, March 1948. Reprinted many times, including: My Best Science Fiction Story, edited by Oscar J. Friend & Leo Margulies (Merlin Press, hardcover, 1949); The Great Science Fiction Stories: Volume 10, 1948, edited by Isaac Asimov & Martin H. Greenberg (DAW, paperback, 1983); and Tales from the Spaceport Bar, edited by George H. Scithers & Darrell Schweitzer (Avon, paperback, 1987). Collected in Two-Handed Engine by Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore (Centipede Press, hardcover, 2005).

   Mos Eisley and the spaceport bar. What a perfect scene. One that thousands of long time science fiction fans had read about and pictured in their minds for years. And there it was, having come to life right before their eyes.

   Bars where spacefarers come to talk, lie and swap yarns. Not all of them human. All kinds and shapes of aliens used Mos Eisley as a stopover point, a place to restock and refuel and catch up on the news. Or in some cases the bar is on Earth, and the conversation is between two men, and the Martians are the beings secretly ruling the world that one of the men is trying to convince the other he can see. Most of the time they are invisible, lurking just out the corner of your eye, but when you can see them, they are easily identified by their third eye. Right in the middle of their foreheads.

   This is a classic story, first published way back in 1948, and if you go looking, over 70 years later, I’m sure you can find a book in print that it’s in, or if not, then in ebook format. In those years after the war, there was a certain uncertainty, if not outright paranoia, about the possibility we were not alone in the universe, that mankind had lost control of things, and in “Don’t Look Now,” Kuttner, in his most humorous mode, capitalizes on it most excellently.

AWAY. “Go.” Netflix, 60m, 04 September 2020 (Season 1, Episode 1). Hilary Swank as Emma Green, an American astronaut who is the commander of the mission; Josh Charles as Matt Logan, Emma’s husband and a NASA engineer who has washed out of the astronaut program because of a brain disease; Vivian Wu as Lu, a Chinese taikonaut who is also a chemist; Mark Ivanir as Misha, a veteran Russian astronaut who is also the space shuttle’s engineer; Ato Essandoh as Kwesi, a Jewish British-Ghanaian rookie astronaut who is a botanist; Ray Panthaki as Ram, the mission’s second-in-command; Talitha Bateman as Alexis “Lex” Logan, Emma and Matt’s teenage daughter. Creator/screenwriter: Andrew Hinderaker. Director: Edward Zwick.

   This is the kind of Science Fiction that I can still watch on either the big screen or small one. Minimal special effects (floating in low gravity environments) and quite a bit of effort on the producers’ part to get the science and engineering right. The basis of the story is simple: follow a diverse crew of five (the standard list of both sexes and various nationalities) as they begin a long arduous three year journey to Mars.

   In practice, though, it isn’t going to be easy. Due to a mistake Emma Green (a perfectly cast Hilary Swank) as commander makes on the trip from the Earth to the Moon, two of the crew are in near rebellion, even before the main part of the journey begins, and complications back on Earth do not make things any easier for her (Emma’s husband suffers a stroke, but without giving anything away, if he didn’t recover just in time, there’d be no series, or does he?).

   So it’s going to be a mixture of soap opera and space opera from here on out. I can anticipate the problems they’re going to have in both regards. I don’t think media critics are likely to praise this, but who cares. I enjoyed this, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the trip.

GEORGE BAGBY – Murder’s Little Helper. Inspector Schmidt #30. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1963. Pocket Cardinal 35007, paperback, 1964; Paperback Library 65-838, paperback, April 1972.

   If my count is correct, this is the 30th in the series of novels that Aaron Marc Stein wrote about NYPD Inspector Schmidt and his “Watson” George Bagby, all also written as by Bagby. The latter is friends enough with Schmitty, as he calls him, to be allowed to hang around with him on his cases. Mostly he keeps quiet and lets the inspector do all the talking, but every once in a while he pipes in with a question or observation or two.

   In Murder’s Little Helper it all begins with a young pregnant woman’s death by drowning in the river, presumably by suicide, but that’s a presumption that doesn’t last long. It turns out that the young lady was the kind of young lady who had lots of very close gentlemen friends, and she wasn’t averse to doing a bit of blackmailing on the side after they were no longer very close.

   Although the Bagby books were popular in their day, they wouldn’t register more than a two out of ten in how they’d go over with mystery fans today. No action, no mutilated bodies, no psychopathic serial killers, just a lot of on the ground detective work – which means a lot of talking, and more talking. Looking at the case over and over again from all directions, twisting it this way and that, left and right and inside out before coming back to the beginning again.

   And talking at length with anyone involved: next door neighbors, the janitor in the building in which the the victim lived, and most importantly, with the men (and their wives) who were paying her money to live on until her dream man was free to marry her. There is a section of some forty pages devoted to this last group of four in which by the time they are done, even George and Martha would sympathize with them.

   This particular case is one that’s not for everyone, and personally I wouldn’t call this one anywhere above average, but I enjoy Stein’s way with words as the author, and once finished, I’m ready for another.

JOSEPHINE BELL – Death of a Poison-Tongue. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1972. Stein & Day, US, hardcover, 1977; paperback, 1981.

   Althea Swinford, the daughter of an archeologist, is en route to the village of Middlecombe, where she is to stay with the local Vicar and his wife — distant relations — while attending school nearby. On the train down, she meets Mrs. Golden, also from Middlecombe, the leader of a local Pentecostal sect who claims to speak “in tongues.” She is the first to tell Althea about the local “poison-tongue,” someone spreading outrageous stories about just about everyone else in the district. Everyone knows who the “poison-tongue” is, and about halfway through the book she is found strangled.

   There is just one word for this book. Well, there may be others, but the most printable is AWFUL. You could create livelier characters with paste and scissors. Bell gets involved at tedious length in subplots about drugs and smuggled antiquities, and her attempt at writing a Seduction (don’t worry, she keeps her virginity) Scene borders on the Ludicrous. Some of her earlier novels were fairly decent efforts, but this thing is a mishmash of ineptitude.

MICHAEL COLLINS “A Death in Monecito.” Short story. PI Dan Fortune. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, April 1995. Collected in Fortune’s World (Crippen & Landru, 2000).

   Montecito is a small but exclusive community area located east of Santa Barbara, a fact which is important in how one-armed PI Dan Fortune approaches this case of murder he’s asked by the victim’s lawyer to look into. The woman’s death is assumed to have been perpetrated by a burglar caught in the act by her, but the arrangement of the furniture seems to Fortune’s client to have been changed. But why? No ordinary burglar would not have done that.

   Posing as a would-be buyer of the house, even before it goes on the market, Fortune does his initial investigation at the scene of the crime itself and by talking to the dead woman’s two daughters, as different from each other as night and day, one a rising Hollywood star, the other the owner of a local boutique. There are other suspects as well, if indeed a burglar was not responsible, and the solution to the cases is a nicely woven combination of clues (minor) and personalities (major).

   In spite of the bright clear skies of sunny California, or perhaps brought out all the more out in contrast, a melancholy mode persists throughout the story, as is the case in many of Fortune’s adventures, and the ending doubly so.

THE CITY OF THE DEAD. Vulcan Films, UK, 1960. Trans-Lux, US, 1962, as Horror Hotel. Christopher Lee, Patricia Jessel, Betta St. John, Venetia Stevenson, Dennis Lotis, Valentine Dyall. Written by George Baxt and Milton Subotsky. Directed by John Moxey. Easily found on YouTube, among other sources, including Amazon Prime.

   A decade before John Llewellyn Moxey directed The Night Stalker (1972), he, under the name John Moxey, honed his skills in the supernatural genre with The City of the Dead, aka Horror Hotel (reviewed here earlier on this blog by Dan Stumpf).

   Beautifully filmed in crisp black and white with an ongoing visual sense of impending menace, the movie draws upon New England witchcraft lore to tell a tragic tale of what happens when one gets too fascinated by the darkness.

   WARNING: Possible Spoilers Ahead. Eager and intrepid college student Nan Barlow (Venetia Stevenson), intrigued by her professor’s lecture on witch burnings seeks to do further research on the morbid topic. Little does she know that her professor, one Alan Driscoll (Christopher Lee) is himself a purveyor of the dark arts. In a twist that would be repeated with greater effect and recognition that same year in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), the first act of the film follows the would-be protagonist from a relatively secure setting to a hotel where she will meet her doom.

   But unlike in Psycho where the killer is a human, albeit a tremendously disturbed one, in The City of the Dead, the killers are very much empowered by a dark, supernatural force. As it turns out, when the good people of the fictional hamlet of Whitewood, Massachusetts, burned a witch at the stake in 1692, they didn’t actually kill her so much as curse their own descendants for all eternity.

   The witch (Patricia Dressel) that they thought they had put to death is very much alive. And in 1960, she’s the proprietor of the Raven Inn, the “horror hotel.” As in Psycho, it’s up to others to figure out what happened to a beautiful young woman who mysteriously disappeared at a hotel. Here, it is Nan’s brother and her boyfriend team who up to solve the puzzle and defeat the coven of witches responsible for the co-ed’s murder.

   There’s a particular aesthetic to The City of the Dead that makes it a stronger and more compelling film than its rather clumsy sets and relatively short running time would suggest. The witch burning sequence at the beginning is top notch. So is the final sequence set in a graveyard. There’s definitely a letdown of dramatic tension in the second act, but this only makes the tense scenes that much more visceral. For his part, Lee puts in a strong performance, but it’s nowhere near his best nor most memorable.

   Still, this is an overall enjoyable horror film that is worth a look this upcoming Halloween season. One final note. The film contains a seemingly incongruous jazz score. One would think that it would be horribly out of place in such a macabre film. But it works quite effectively in reminding the viewer of the era in which the movie was made. And, for those of us who enjoy early 1960s British horror films, movies that were just a little more innocent than the color horror films of the 1970s, that’s not such a bad thing.