REVIEWED BY RAY O’LEARY:

DEAN R. KOONTZ – Midnight. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1989. Berkley. paperback, 1989.

   Thomas Shadduck, owner of New Wave Microtechnology, dreams of turning Mankind into a race of emotionless logicians — Vulcans, to you Trekkies out there. Toward this end, he has administered most of the leading citizens of Moonlight Cove, California, with a fluid which will make them stronger, smarter, and virtually invulnerable. Unfortunately, as they say in Sci-Fi, there are Side Effects: some of the converts have chosen to make frequent regressions turning themselves into animals and killing anything in their way.

   Now, as Shadduck plans to convert the rest of Moonlight Cove, four people struggle to survive and get help: Sam Booker, an FBI agent sent to investigate the sudden rash of violent crime; Henry Talbot, a crippled Vietnam Vet; Tessa Lockland, whose sister supposedly committed suicide a few weeks earlier; and Chrissie Foster, who caught her parents regressing and escaped when they tried to inject her with the fluid.

   Koontz throws in elements from various sources, which he freely Acknowledges: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Island of Doctor Moreau, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and even Aliens. Chrissie seems inspired by the Space Orphan in that film, and Koontz throws in a scene where her Parish Priest transforms into the Alien monster.

   Though hardly a master craftsman, Koontz makes you care about bis characters and he writes a story that propels the reader helplessly, gladly along with it.

RAOUL WHITFIELD “Mistral.” Short story. Anonymous (“Benn”). First published in Adventure, 15 December 1931. Reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, 22 April 1981, and in Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini & Jack Adrian (Oxford University Press, 1995).

   The unnamed narrator of this short but very tough, hard-boiled tale is an European operative for an international detective agency based in Paris. After finishing one job in Genoa, he heads west along the Riviera coastline to Monte Carlo, Nice and Cannes. Along the way his path keeps crossing that of another man, one with a red and very visible scar on his neck. The man is almost certainly an American. He is unfamiliar with European customs, but he seems to have money, spending one night in a casino playing with thousand-franc chips.

   The narrator is intrigued, but is nonetheless surprised when a bulletin from his home office informs him that a client is on the lookout for him. Reporting in, he is told to back off, and that the client will handle things from that point on. Telling the man, whom he has taken something of a liking to, that his name is Benn, most probably not his real one, and what the score is, he then lets events take their own course from there.

   Telling the story tersely against a backdrop of a continually rising wing (a mistral), Whitfield keeps the tension rising right along with it, to an absolute knockout of an ending. Other than the Pronzini-Adrian anthology, this story may be hard to find, but it’s well worth the effort.

McMILLAN & WIFE “Murder by the Barrel.” NBC, 29 September 1971 (Season 1, Episode 2). Rock Hudson (Police Commissioner Stewart McMillan), Susan Saint James (Sally McMillan), John Schuck (Sgt. Charles Enright), Nancy Walker (Mildred). Guest Cast: Kenneth Mars, David Huddleston, Vito Scotti. Director: John Astin.

   According to Wikipedia, this second episode of the series was preceded by the pilot “Once Upon a Dead Man” on 17 September 1971, while IMDb calls this the first episode. (The pilot they call episode 0.) The pilot was two hours long; the episodes of the series itself varied between 90 minutes or two hours long; this one runs 90 minutes, including commercials. I’m not sure how long it lasted as part of NBC’s Mystery Movie wheel series, but at least at the beginning, it ran in rotation with Columbo and McCloud.

   â€œMurder by the Barrel” begins with the McMillans moving into their new home, but with Mac having left for the office, Sally finds a body in one of the barrels, one that her grandmother’s best china is supposed to be in. Of course, when Mac and Sgt. Enright get there, the body is gone. What follows is a hearty mixture of laugh-out-loud comedy and detective work that’s at least adequate, split about fifty-fifty.

   There are a lot of suspects – everyone that the three leads comes across is somehow connected with the case, which of course begins with the moving company as the focus of all their attention. Even though Rock Hudson had the bigger name at the time, I think that the more than outgoing Susan Saint James is the real star of the show – a throwback to days of Nora Charles and Pam North and lots of other female halves of many many other detective duos, each in their own distinctive way, of course.

   Wordplay is a strong key to the comedy. A full minute is spent, for example, with the three of them in a police car riffing on the difference between shipping barrels and storage barrels: You can ship in a shipping barrel and store in a storage barrel, and you can store in a shipping barrel, but you can’t ship in a storage barrel.

   Well, I thought it was funny.

   It is no wonder that the series was on for six years. The last season was a dud, though. Because of a salary dispute with Susan Saint James, Sally McMillan was killed off, and the show tried to go on without her, emphasis on the word “tried.”

      —

   For as long as it stays up on YouTube, here’s a video of this particular episode:

OUT OF SIGHT. Universal Pictures, 1998. George Clooney (Jack Foley). Jennifer Lopez (Karen Sisco), Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle, Steve Zahn, Albert Brooks, Dennis Farina, with cameos by Michael Keaton & Samuel L. Jackson. Based on the novel by Elmore Leonard. Director: Steven Soderbergh.

   I can easily image that everyone reading this already knows the story, even if you haven’t actually seen the film. I’ll recap, though, just in case, but as briefly as I can. When a career bank robber by the name of Jack Foley (George Clooney) breaks out of a Floridan prison, he’s forced to share the trunk of the getaway car with a federal marshal by the name Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez). And as it so happens, as they talk about movies and other things, propinquity prevails and romantic sparks fly, as unlikely a thing as that might be.

   Except in the movies, of course.

   It was a huge hit, rightfully so, and the beginning of very successful movie-making careers for both of the two lead stars. But the secondary players may even be better in this one, thanks to dialogue that if it didn’t come straight from Elmore Leonard’s novel, it could have.

   It’s a wonderful romantic film, with a lot of shooting toward the end. I have only one kind of sour note to add to this short commentary, and I feel like a churl for bringing it up, but it did bother me somewhat. How did they get two adults in the same trunk at the same time? I don’t think I could fit curled up in a trunk all by myself, much less along with a fine young lady such as J.Lo.

   I’d be willing to try, though.

GEORGE HARMON COXE – Woman at Bay. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1945. No paperback edition. Kindle edition available.

   When one thinks of Coxe, one usually thiks first of Flashgun Casey or Kent Murdock, ubiquitous photographers for Boston newspapers, but Coxe often did switch his non-series mysteries to scenes of the Caribbean, If this book were the only evidence, however, I’d say it’s awfully difficult to distinguish a round of nightlife in the Boston area from night clubs, cafes and liquor spots in Havana.

   This adventure occurs just before the end of the war, when Cuba was useful for European refugees as a stopping-off place before entry into the States. Paul MacKinnon is sent by a secret government agency on a hunt for the diary of a top-rank Vichy official whose window once was Mrs. MacKinnon. His job is the diary and not to fall in love again – he keeps telling himself.

   The key to the resulting murder is an obvious one, but Coxe has always been capable of a pleasant shuffle surrounding the charade. This one’s no exception. by far.

REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

SAN ANTONIO. Warner Brothers, 1945.Errol Flynn, Alexis Smith, “Cuddles” Sakall, Victor Franken, John Litel, Paul Kelly and Tom Tyler. Written by Alan Le May and W. R. Burnett. Music by Max Steiner. Directed by David Butler, Robert Florey (uncredited) and Raoul Walsh (uncredited).

   This generally gets compared unfavorably to Dodge City (1939) and dismissed as inferior, but I find a lot in San Antonio to enjoy. With three directors and two talented writers, it’s hard to say who might be the real auteur of the film, but my bet is Max Steiner.

   Flynn plays Clay Hardin, a South Texas rancher shot to pieces sometime before the movie started (Tom Tyler quips “They must be picking lead out of him yet!”) recovering from his wounds in Mexico and gathering evidence against Paul Kelly, who heads up a combine of organized rustlers preying on honest cattlemen. As the film opens, Flynn’s got hold of the vital Macguffin that will convict Kelly, and means to make his way to San Antonio (hence the title of the piece) through outlaw-infested territory to get his man — with a few time-outs to romance itinerant chanteuse Alexis Smith.

   It’s a plot that wouldn’t be out of place in a film noir. Kelly owns the nightclub saloon where Ms Smith performs and he has a suave and treacherous partner in Victor Franken. Unfortunately, somebody lets the pace slacken, throws in too much witless time-wasting bits with Cuddles Sakall, and generally prolongs things when they need speeded up. BUT we also get a death scene from Tom Tyler to match his memorable exit in Stagecoach and a dandy saloon-wrecking shoot-out where everyone who gets hit smashes into something, falls off of something, or just flies into the air — or as we kids used to say “He died neat!”

   There are also as couple of quieter moments that surprised me: Like Errol Flynn looking visibly shaken after killing Tom Tyler in the street. I’ve never seen such a haunted look from Flynn or any other movie cowboy coming out of a fight. And satanic Victor Franken, double-crossed and dying, smiling up at his killer and saying “I’ll be waiting for you!”

   Small things, but together with the bigger scenes, thy make San Antonio a fun movie, and one worth seeing.

REVIEWED BY RAY O’LEARY:

GEORGES SIMENON – Maigret and the Gangsters. Inspector Maigret #39. Harcourt, US, hardcover, 1986. First published in the UK by H. Hamilton, hardcover, 1952. Reprinted in the US by Harcourt, hardcover, 1954, as Inspector Maigret and the Killers. Translation of Maigret, Lognon et le Gangsters (Paris, 1952). Film: Comacico, France, 1963, as Maigret Veit Rouge (“Maigret Sees Red”).

   Madame Longon, the semi-invalid wife of a policeman nicknamed “the Old Grouch” asks Maigret to help when her home is visited twice in three days by American gangsters. She’s been in phone contact with her husband, but hasn’t actually seen him since the Bad Guys came calling.

   Maigret finally talks to Longan and learns that a few nights earlier, the Old Grouch saw a body dumped from a car. But as he was calling in to report it, the body was spirited away. With nothing to back up his story, Longon has been investigating on his own and learned the identity of the killers — who have, in turn, learned his.

   When Maigret takes over the investigation, he is warned off by a restauranteur, who knows the Americans, and even a friend in the FBI cautions he may be in over his head. Maigret takes the warnings as an insult to the French Police and determines not only to catch the killers, but also to learn who it was that retrieved the body.

   One of the many novels written during Simenon’s American sojourn, this is up to his usual standard, with believable characters and perhaps a little more detective work than usual.

RETURN OF THE BAD MEN. RKO Radio Pictures, 1948. Randolph Scott, Robert Ryan, Anne Jeffreys, George ‘Gabby’ Hayes, Jacqueline White, Robert Armstrong. Director: Ray Enright.

   It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Bring together all of the famous bad men of the west, or a good passel of them, whether or not they ever met each other in real life, or were active at the same time, and create a gang of outlaws even a figure as solid and stalwart as Randolph Scott could handle them. Audiences would simply flock in, or I’m sure that’s what was the expectation was.

   I haven’t researched the historical facts well enough to tell you whether anything in this movie is true, but I doubt it. In any case, the result is surprisingly sub-par. Not even the evil presence of Robert Ryan as the Sundance Kid, nor the alluring beauty of Anne Jeffreys as Cheyenne, the niece of Wild Bill Doolin, help a lot to make Return of the Bad Men more than a barely passable way to spend 90 minutes f your time.

   For the record, here’s a list of the outlaws that gangleader Bill Doolin (Robert Armstrong) puts together: The Youngers (Cole, Jim and John), the Daltons (Emmett, Bob and Grat), Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Yeager, and the Arkansas Kid. I hope I didn’t leave anyone out. I didn’t list any of their names as part of the cast because other than Robert Ryan, who’s as mean as they come, all of them are very minor roles.

   It turns out that Randolph Scott has a sweetheart that he plans to marry, but what Anne Jeffreys’ character, once reformed (or is she), thinks about that is that she will have something to say about it. Scott is quite oblivious. Unfortunately, the writers not knowing how to write themselves out of this romantic triangle they’ve written themselves into, take the weakest, lamest way out.

   George ‘Gabby’ Hayes, as a bank president, no less, adds comedy relief, but the story is overwhelmed by characters who are simply not very interesting. Not even the sight of the masses of men on horseback and in flimsy wagons at the beginning of the Oklahoma Land Rush adds any excitement to the proceedings.

   Passable entertainment, but barely. Only the sharp, clear black and white photography is worth a mention (J. Roy Hunt , cinematographer). Credit where credit is due.

MARGARET LAWRENCE “Winston and the Millennium Man.” Winston Marlowe Sherman. Short story. Published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 2006. Probably never collected or reprinted.

   This is a strange one. Winston Marlowe Sherman, English teacher and secretly the author of a long list of mystery novels, was the leading character in five mystery novels himself. Appearing in rapid succession between 1990 and 1993. (Since three of them appeared in 1990, the exact order of the three as given below is quite possibly not accurate.) The author of record of those novels was M. K. Lorens, but this sixth and final tale is under the byline of Margaret Lawrence, another of true author Margaret Keilstrup’s pen names.

   As Margaret Lawrence, she also wrote three well-regarded mysteries about Hannah Trevor, an 18th century midwife in Maine, the first of these being nominated for several awards. What I found strange, besides the change in bylines for this story, is that the introduction to it does not mention the five previous mysteries that the leading character was in.

   And this is important, or it should have been, for in this story Sherman has come to the end of both his careers: his book publisher has declines to extend his writing contract, and the story begins as he leaves campus for the last time, having been forced out at age 70 for having grading standards too high for modern student bodies. What’s more, it is Christmas time, 1999, just before the disaster that wasn’t, but no one was sure at the time.

   And whatever the equivalent to cyberbullying was before computers came along, Sherman being harassed by someone unknown, both by verbal heckling and crank telephone calls. All of the other characters in the books are in this story, too, including Sarah, his longtime living companion of some forty years. In this tale, two things are accomplished: the “Millennium Man” is caught, and Sarah finally says yes to Sherman’s proposal of marriage. It’s a comfortable and oddly satisfying story, a final coda of sorts, except for the fact that Sherman’s life is not ending, only marking a milestone and a change of direction.

   For fans of the five previous Sherman adventures, wouldn’t it have been nice to have let them know about this?  And wouldn’t the readers of this story have liked to have known about the previous five books, and not have read it in a vacuum?
   

   The Winston Marlowe Sherman series —

Deception Island. Bantam 1990.
Ropedancer’s Fall. Bantam 1990.
Sweet Narcissus. Bantam 1990.
Dreamland. Doubleday 1992.
Sorrowheart. Doubleday 1993.

NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT. Rank Film Distributors / Charlemagne Productions, UK, 1973. Christopher Lee (Colonel Bingham), Peter Cushing (Sir Mark Ashley), Diana Dors, Georgia Brown, Keith Barron, Gwyneth Strong. Based on the novel by John Blackburn. Director: Peter Sasdy.

   When Martin Edwards recently reviewed this movie on his blog, he praised it in part (“It’s fair to say that the whole is less than the sum of its considerable parts.”) but in part only. What caught my attention was how he did his best to talk around the actual plot of the movie without ever talking about exactly what kind of movie it is. Obviously he didn’t quite succeed because I tend to notice little things like that, and I wondered why.

   Well, now I know, and in my review in turn, I’m going to do the same exact thing. But if you know who John Blackburn, the author of the book the film was based on, and the kind of books he wrote, then you will know what it is that I’m going to do my best not to say.

   The story begins with a series of murders to various trustees of an orphanage located on a small island of the shore of Scotland. They all appear to be accidents or suicides, but we the viewer know better. But when a young girl who is also one of the orphans is involved in a bus accident later on begins to have unexplained nightmares and hallucinations, her doctor becomes suspicious. He calls upon his superior (Peter Cushing) for help, who in turn is abetted by a retired police officer (Christopher Lee) who has taken an interest in the case.

   Complicating matters is that the girl’s mother (a most floozy Diana Dors) wants back the custody of her child, and to that end, calls upon a lady journalist (Georgia Brown) for help. At which point a rather conventional murder story turns into … whatever it turns into, and in the most traditional way of telling such a story, and in the way the British seem to do it best.

   It’s a great cast, and the photography is excellent. The ending is suitably chilling, and it would be even more so if there were not so many holes in the plot. They can be ignored, but a tighter (and more realistic) hold on the story on the part of the screenwriter would have improved things immensely.

   It’s still a fun movie to watch, and I have Martin Edwards’ review of it to thank for having brought it to my attentions.