THE FATAL HOUR. Monogram Pictures, 1940. Mr. Wong #4. Boris Karloff (James Lee Wong), Marjorie Reynolds, Grant Withers, Charles Trowbridge, Frank Puglia, Craig Reynolds, Lita Chevret. Based on the “James Lee Wong” series in Collier’s Magazine written by Hugh Wiley. Director: William Nigh.

   When an undercover policeman and a good friend of Captain Bill Street of San Francisco Homicide is found murdered, it is his friend Mr. Wong who steps in and gives him all the help he needs to catch the killer. Spunky female reporter Bobbie Logan is also on hand, but she’s there mostly for eye appeal and doesn’t do much in the way of actual detective work.

   But since I’ve mentioned “detective work,” this is, I think, is one of the better B-movies in that regard that I’ve watched in a while. There are a lot of suspects crammed into a movie that is only about an hour long, and all of the plot points click off like clockwork. There is even a brand new invention involving a common home [Redacted] that’s part of the solution.

   To tell you the truth, Boris Karloff doesn’t look Chinese to me, but any movie that he appeared in was far better off than if he wasn’t, and The Fatal Hour is no exception. I haven’t seen one of these Mr. Wong movies since I was 15 or 16, and it’s only me who’s the worse for wear.

THIEVES. “Pilot.” ABC, 28 September 2001. John Stamos (as Johnny), Melissa George (as Rita), Robert Knepper, Tone Lōc. Written by Jim Leonard. Director: James Frawley.

  It’s so tempting to start this review by saying, “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before,” and guess what? I just did. Two young cat burglars, male and female, each successful on their own, are caught trying to steal the same set of diamonds, and given an ultimatum” Work for us (the government) or go to jail. By story’s end, they have (guess what) decided to work for the government.

  They of course bicker between each other a lot, but one can imagine that if the series had been allowed to continue (only eight of the ten films were aired before the plug was pulled), the sparks would have been romantic ones as well as those generated by their competitive natures. Both lead actors are extremely attractive (and the female partner of the two seems to dress in clothes that show as much bare skin as much as possible).

  There is an old adage in the television business (or if there isn’t, there should be), that you need a story, too, not bits of pieces of one that need as much padding as to make each episode fit comfortably in a 60 minute time slot, less commercials.

  Each of the two leads ha gone on to have had successful careers. This series wasn’t much of a step up along the way, however. It remains a relic only, of interest only to those of us who love digging up old relics such as this.

CLYDE B. CLASON – Blind Drifts. Theocritus Lucius Westborough #3 or 4 (two book appearances in 1937). Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1937. Rue Morgue Press, trade paperback, 2012.

   Mild-mannered Professor Theocritus Lucius Westborough, an expert on the Roman emperor Heliogabalus, is an amateur sleuth in the classic mold of the Twenties and Thirties: He solves convoluted puzzles through the time-tested Sherlockian methods of keen observation, a storehouse of esoteric knowledge, and deductive reasoning. Westborough – and his creator specializes in locked-room “miracle problems.” Even the best of these offers no challenge to John Dickson Carr, but for the most pan they are cleverly constructed and well clued. The one in Blind Drifts offers a particularly neat and satisfying variation on the theme.

   Westborough’s home base is Chicago, but here he travels to Colorado to visit a gold mine in which he has inherited 70,000 shares. Not long after his arrival, he finds himself investigating, first, the disappearance or one of the mine’s directors, and then the murder of its owner, Mrs. Coranlue Edmonds, known far and wide as a “bearcat on wheels” – a murder by shooting that takes place in front of seven witnesses, in a “blind drift” deep inside the Virgin Queen mine. by a seemingly nonexistent gun.

   The plot is twisty and complex, the clues numerous and fairly presented, the motive for Mrs. Edrnonds’ murder plausible, and the method likewise. The Colorado setting is well depicted, as are the details of the operation and physical makeup of a large gold mine. It is Clason’s attention to such detail, more than anything else, that lifts his work above the average puzzle story or the period; you can’t read a Westborough novel without learning something, and something interesting at that.

   The one drawback to this and the eight other entries in the series is Clason’s sometimes florid, often prolix style. Blind Drifts is the only book of his that would not benefit greatly from the excision of ten or fifteen thousand words, and at that it could stand to lose five or six thousand here and there.

   The most appealing of Wcstborough ‘s other cases are The Death Angel ( 1936), set on a Wisconsin country estate called Rumpelstiltskin, where a murder happens in spite of 1542-to-l odds against it. and a murderer is twice guilty of killing the same man; The Man from Tibet (1939), which features a locked-room murder and contains some fascinating background material on the strange customs and rites of Tibet; and Green Shiver (1941), which has a Los Angeles setting and another “impossible” plot, the solution to which depends on Westborough’s knowledge of Chinese jade.

———
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

OZARK  “Sugarwood,” Netflix, 21 July 2017. Jason Bateman, Laura Linney, Sofia Hublitz, Skylar Gaertner, Esai Morales. Director: Jason Bateman.

   As a pilot for this series that’s now in its third season on Netflix, it does its job exceedingly well. Due to some serious lapses on the part of his fellow members in a plan to skim off a potion of the profits in a money-laundering scheme they are working on for a Mexican drug cartel, Marty Byrde, his wife and two children must pack up their bags overnight and leave Chicago behind so he can start anew in the area around the Lake of the Ozarks.

   I did not know that the shoreline of the lake is longer than hat of the entire state of California, did you? With tourists and other visitors from all over the world, it seems as though the area wold be a great spot to start business up again, or so Byrde manages to convince Camino “Del” Del Rio (Esai Morales) in a desperate attempt to save his life.

   It takes the full hour to set up the premise. It is assumed that things are Not Going to Go Well. Other than that, though, there is, however, no indication of where the story line will go from here. In fact I should not even pretend that I am reviewing the series at all, based on this first episode, which is well enough done that watching the second one is a must before passing judgment, so I won’t.

   I will say this, however. I found nothing interesting to say so far about the newly exiled father, who as a crook and not a very good one at that, is very nearly a cipher, even at episode’s end; nor his wife, who has been cheating on him; nor his daughter, a whiny teen-aged girl; nor his nebbish younger son.

   No, the standout at this point is Esai Morales, a loyal lieutenant in the drug cartel and a man who knows his job and does it well. He also knows the answer to the question he poses to Byrde and his associates when he first finds them out: If a loyal female clerk in a family business for many years is found taking the cash from the till, should she be fired, or should she be forgiven?

   I knew the answer, the crime boss knows, and by the end of this first episode, Marty Byrde has figured it out as well.

JOSH PACHTER “Sam Buried Caesar.” Nero Wolfe Griffen & Artie Goodman #1. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, August 1971. Reprinted in The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe, edited by Josh Pachter (Mysterious Press, trade paperback, April 2020).

   Nero Wolfe Griffen and Artie Goodman may be the youngest private eyes on record. The former is ten when this story takes place; the latter is a year younger. And some background, I think, before I talk about the story itself. Artie has recently moved next door to the Griffen family. The father, a widower and an inspector for the Tyson County Police Force, has eleven children. Their first and middle names are Peter Wimsey, Albert Campion, John Jericho, Parker Pyne, Gideon Fell, Augustus Van Dusen, Sherlock Holmes, Perry Mason, Ellery Queen, Nero Wolfe, and one girl, Jane Marple Griffen.

   Two earlier stories by Josh Pachter in EQMM featured cases solved by E. Q. Griffen. “Sam Buried Caesar” appears to to be the third and final case solved by members of the Griffen family, which is a shame, as I’m sure you will agree, the tales could have gone on indefinitely. In this one the two friends are hired to solve a case of the missing body of a dog (named Caesar) who a neighboring boy (named Sam) buried after his pet was hit by a car. When dug up, the makeshift grave is discovered to be empty.

   Artie, of course, is the one who does all of the legwork, while Nero sits home and does all of the detective work without moving an inch. As I’ll also sure you’ll agree, this is an amusing tale that’s a lot of fun to read, and as I understand it, was the impetus behind the recent collection of pastiches recently published in honor of one the most famous detectives of all time.
   

BRUNO FISCHER – Quoth the Raven. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1944. Bestseller Mystery #B82, digest-sized paperback, 1950. Reprinted as The Fingered Man, Ace Double D-27, paperback, 1953; published back to back with Double Take by Mel Colton.

   Grocer Sam Tree’s wife had two previous husbands. The first was killed escaping from the police; the second is a drunk, a gambler, and not averse to a little blackmail. Where is his wife getting the money to pay him? And is her first husband really dead?

   In this book Fischer deftly balances the clever with the cheap cliché. Except for Sam’s wife, who has neatly mastered the technique of cuddly double talk to answer her way around any question, the dialogue is trite and corny. But I will tell you this: the ending surprised me.

Rating: C plus.

THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE. Universal Pictures, 2002. Thandie Newton, Mark Wahlberg, Tim Robbins, Christine Boisson, Simon Abkarian, Charles Aznavour. Based on the film Charade (1963). Director and co-screenwriter: Jonathan Demme.

   There was a lot of talent involved in making this movie, but the end result certainly doesn’t show it. I came across this film by researching the credits of the leading female star, Thandie Newton, whom I most recently saw in the mini-series Rogue, which I recently reviewed here.

   She has the second-most undesirable task of playing the part that Audrey Hepburn played in the movie this one is a remake of, and I’m happy to saw that she does a creditable job of imitating the pixieish charm of Miss Hepburn. On a scale from one to a hundred, I’d give her a 60. Mark Wahlberg, however, displays — well, let’s put it this way. Cary Grant had more charm in the pinkie of his left hand than Mark Wahlberg shows in trying to follow in his predecessor’s most considerable footsteps.

   I know Wahlberg has gone on to bigger and better things, but at this stage of his career, he was out of his league. And Tim Robbins in Walter Matthau’s shoes? Not on your life, not ever.

   The story’s almost the same. A young woman who’s not been married long but is already thinking divorce comes home from a brief vacation to find the apartment they share all but empty and what furniture there still is destroyed. Turns out the man is dead, he had many many secrets, and many people want something — a fortune in diamonds that he had in his possession.

   All of the fancy camera doesn’t help a muddled and badly told story, and it often served to make me dizzy. This was a mess, through and through — there’s no better word to describe it — a film best avoided if possible, and I don’t say that lightly. The only reason I watched until the bitter end was to see Thandie Newton, whose name and fame does not match that of any of the others involved in this production, but it should.

PS. There is still the same fatal flaw in the plot that the first movie had, and if anyone wants to know, I’ll bring it up in the comments. That’s the one thing they could have improved upon in putting this remake together, and why they didn’t, I can’t possibly imagine.

REVIEWED BY RAY O’LEARY:

BRETT HALLIDAY – Blood on the Black Market. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1943. Dell #64, paperback, 1944. Many other paperback edition exist. Revised edition: Heads You Lose. Torquil/Dodd, hardcover, 1958.

   As I mentioned in my review of Death from a Top Hat, having watched the Mike Shayne movies, I decided to re-read one of the Shayne books in my vast, well-organized files. This one is the earliest of the five Shayne map-backs in my collection.

   Mike Shayne, still grieving over the death of his wife, is woken from a sound sleep by a telephone call from Clem Wilson, a friend of his who owns a gas station. Before Clem can really tell him anything, Shayne hears a shot and the sound of a falling body. Telling the desk clerk of his hotel to call the police, Shayne rushes to Wilson’s filling station where his friend Chief Will Gentry is on the scene.

   Shayne intimates to Gentry and a few others that Wilson has told him enough about a ring trying to get him to sell black market gas (during World War II) to make Shayne dangerous to them. Soon he finds himself a target for would-be assassins as well as being courted by the newly-fanned Motorists Protective Association and its pretty female lawyer Edna Taylor.

   It’s a passable effort, with Shayne breaking the law at will and treating women in the time-honored way of the American tough-guy. I pretty much remembered who the killer was, or it was relatively easy to figure out. In a rather egregious implausibility, two different characters shoot someone down in cold blood in front of Shayne on the pretext that they thought those unarmed someones were dangerous. Once I could swallow with difficulty but twice is getting preposterous.

CALEB CARR – The Alienist. Random House, hardcover, 1994. Bantam, paperback, 1995. TV adaptation: A ten-episode limited series on TNT, January 22 to March 26, 2018.

   Carr is a young native of NYC with a degree in history who writes frequently on political and military affairs. His first novel was one of the bigger ones of ’94, and I missed it. Why is it that I get review copies by the basket that I wouldn’t read on a bet, but not the ones I want to? I actually had to buy a second-hand copy. It’s not fair.

   It’s 1896, and Theodore Roosevelt is Police Commissioner of New York City. Dr. Lazlo Kreizler is a controversial psychologist, or “alienist.” John Schuyler Moore is a crime reporter for the New York Times. The three men met in their youth at Harvard, and now they must form an unlikely and secret alliance. Someone is killing the city’s children, and viciously mutilating their bodies.

   Dr. Kreizler believes it is the same someone, and that he will kill at increasingly shorter intervals. His theories about insanity are so unpopular that Roosevelt cannot be publicly associated with him, so they must work covertly to catch the murderer, a serial killer before that was a phrase for it, or public that would or could believe in it.

   I’m enough of a literary snob that it goes against the grain for me to admit I like a bestseller, but I’ve got to ’fess up — this was a damned good book. A serial killer book, too, and I don’t like those at all. I’m always amazed when a young writer and first time novelist writes so well.

   It’s a fascinating detective story, as well as being an equally fascinating picture of New York City at the end of the 19th century. Carr’s slowly painted portrait of the killer is chilling, and his characterizations of the team following him solid. I would have liked to have seen Moore, the narrator, a little better developed. But it’s hard to quarrel with the foci Carr chose.

   It’s a thick book, and at times I thought the very picture of the city that I found so interesting slowed the story a bit too much. All told, though, it was an excellent book and would surely made my 1994 awards list.

REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF DON JUAN. United Artists, 1934. Douglas Fairbanks, Merle Oberon, Bruce Winston, Benita Hume, Gina Malo, Binnie Barnes. Director: Alexander Korda.

   The Private Life of Don Juan lacks wit or pace of action, but it offers an elegant coda to the career of its star, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., here in his fifties and looking tired of the whole thing. When an imposter masquerading as Don Juan is killed by a jealous husband, the legendary lothario takes advantage of the situation and retires to the country, with tepid results. Doug doesn’t do any stunts, there’s no swordplay, little plot, and yet …

   … Halfway through the film, Don Juan attends his own funeral, and director Alexander Korda deals it out with his usual splendour, all billowing cloaks and wailing women, as America’s cavalier strolls through the palazzo contemplating his own mortality. Fairbanks never made another movie, lending an odd elegiac tone to a film that doesn’t really deserve it.