BILL PRONZINI – Games. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1976. Crest, paperback, 1977. Stark House Press, trade paperback, 2007, published in tandem with Snowbound.

   A Senator from Maine, burdened by a marriage in name only, takes his mistress to his isolated island retreat for a quiet Memorial Day weekend. He intends that they should be alone, but on the first night, they discover that the house has been broken into. Guns have been stolen. A squirrel is found bloody and disemboweled near what looks like an altar. The crash of a broken window, a jagged piece of bone.

   A senator’s games are of politics, as well as he games everyone plays, games of love, of life itself. Senator Jackman finds himself in a chilling, then mind-exploding game of cat-and-mouse – the most dangerous game. The horror of something unpleasant of something happening to someone else is compounded when you’re forced to realize how each of us is to becoming the object of the crazed torment of persons unknown. You won’t escape this book without being shocked at least once.

   This is a suspense story with a kick, some twists, and an impact that’s as real as anyone’s worse nightmares. Yet what’s also remarkable is seeing a person’s philosophy change before your eyes. Jackman is forced to understand himself for the first time, as few of us do.

Rating: A

DELLAVENTURA “Above Reproach.” CBS. 23 September 1997 (Season One, Episode One). Danny Aiello (Anthony Dellaventura), Ricky Aiello, Byron Keith Minns, Anne Ramsay. Guest Cast: Meg Gibson, Anthony Franciosa. Cameo: Rudolph Guiliani. Created by Richard Di Lello, Julian Neil and Bernard L. Nussbaumer. Director: Peter Levin.

   Anthony Dellaventura is a Manhattan-based PI who once worked for the police department but quit when he became fed up with internal politics and crooks getting off too easily. One of the D.A. he approves of, though, is Sarah Macalusso (Meg Gibson), who is scheduled to soon be sworn in as a municipal judge. A small problem has arisen, however. She was kidnapped overnight, drugged, and videotaped in shall we shall we say compromising positions.

   Even though Dellventura talks quietly, he’s also the kind of street guy who also talks tough, or that’s the premise of the show. I think he’s also the kind of guy who doesn’t think before making promises too quickly. There’s also no sense of real danger or suspense when he charges in without a plan other than confrontation and hoping for the best. He’s all brave braggadocio, but little more than that, and without a small gang of loyal assistants, I don’t think he’d get very far in the real world.

   The show is still mildly enjoyable, in a homespun sort of way, but overall, viewers seem to have agreed with me. Thirteen episodes and that was it for this short-lived PI series, now probably forgotten by everyone other than those involved. Incidentally, and for the record, Episode Two is titled “Pilot,” This wasn’t it.

ROBERT CARSON “Aloha Means Goodbye.” Serialized in five parts in the Saturday Evening Post (*), June 28 to July 26, 1941. No book publication known. Filmed as: Across the Pacific (1942), with Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sidney Greenstreet. Screenplay and Directed by John Huston.

   Richard (Ricky) Leland is sailing from Vancouver on the Japanese freighter the Genoa Maru, with fellow passengers Alberta Marlow (a very calm dame), whose eccentric Uncle Dan owns a plantation on his own island in Hawaii, and the mysterious Dr. Barca, a mysterious Filipino (…he looked genial and unimposing, except for his eyes which were cold and black). No one is quite what they seem including Ricky who appears to be a disgraced American Artillery Officer, but we soon learn is in reality an American agent.

   Even the Genoa Maru isn’t quite what it seems.

   If you have seen the John Huston film Across the Pacific, his first after The Maltese Falcon, and his last before going off to the war, you know the basic story. Barca and the Japanese are part of a dastardly plot to invade and lead a sneak attack on the States involving Alberta Marlow’s Uncle Dan and his plantation, and Ricky Leland is not who or what he seems to be.

   In the film Barca becomes the German, Sidney Greenstreet, and the plot, thanks to Pearl Harbor, turns to Panama instead of Hawaii (coming once the title had been released and making no sense in the film since they never cross the Pacific), but just how close the movie is to the serial (I’m not sure the serial ever appeared in book form) is surprising (right down to the shootout in the Japanese movie theater — that makes more sense in Hawaii than Panama), because the real joy of the film is the by play and double entendre between Bogart and Mary Astor and the war of wits with Greenstreet, and much of that is lifted directly from the dialogue in the serial.

   Carson was a successful author who frequently contributed stories to the Post, and this serial that ran there between late June and early August of 1941 is a lively tale, accompanied by handsome full color illustrations by Ben Stahl.

   Just as Huston virtually transcribed Hammett’s novel the same seems to be true of this serial, though obviously Carson is no Hammett, as Pacific is no Falcon.

   There are minor differences, of course, but Huston was always the most literary of directors and famously honed close to his source material.

   â€œAloha” is a product of the slicks as magazines like the Post, American, Liberty, and Collier’s were then known, and much has been written belittling the slick style in comparison to the pulps, but some of the best writers of the time, from Fitzgerald and Faulkner to Philip Wylie and John P. Marquand worked there, and pulp favorites like Erle Stanley Gardner, Fred Nebel, Robert Carse, Edison Marshall, Sax Rohmer, and Rex Stout crossed over into the slicks, and were often paid more. They might get up to $5,000 for a serial at a time a novel might bring as little as $500.

   The Post was always well associated with the mystery genre as the home of Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto, Perry Mason, Albert Campion, Roderick Alleyn, and Hercule Poirot.

   â€œAloha Means Good-bye” is a fast moving tale in the best sense, with something of the same pace and style of the tongue in cheek movie. I’m not sure if you can really call a book prescient for predicting a Japanese attack on the US in the summer of 1941 (Van Wyck Mason predicted one in 1932 in The Branded Spy Murders; it was something that had been inevitable for much of the century), but it was great timing, however you look at it, and even now an entertaining tale thanks to its lighthearted style.

       —

(*) For anyone interested you can go to Internet Archive and find over 6,000 issues of the Saturday Evening Post from the twenties to the mid-sixties with full serials by Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, Rex Stout, Earl Derr Biggers, P. G. Wodehouse, Dornford Yates, Hammond Innes, Alistair MacLean, Alan LeMay, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, John P, Marquand, Luke Short, Jack Finney, C. S. Forester, Paul Gallico, James Warner Bellah, and many more, as well as short fiction by Philip Wylie, Robert A. Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Fred Nebel, Lester Dent, and others, illustrated by the likes of Matt Clark, Harold Von Schmidt, and Mitchell Hooks.

HUSTLE “The Game Is On.” BBC One, UK. 24 February 2004 (Series One, Episode One). Adrian Lester, Marc Warren, Robert Glenister, Jaime Murray, Robert Vaughn. Creator-screenwriter: Tony Jordan. Director: Bharat Nalluri.

   Of the eight seasons this British TV series was on, only four have been released on DVD in the US. I recently caught up with the first episode when I saw that it was streaming online. Well worth the wait, I’d say, on one hand, but on the other, I have to ask myself, why did I wait so long?

   I have known what the basic premise was all along, of course. Every week it was on a gang of very experienced con artists pull off a long complicated scam on some unsuspecting victim. One crucial ingredient, or so I’m told, is that very often in each episode when it looks as though their plan is going to collapse, that’s when the real con takes over. It is difficult to imagine how many times the writers of this show can fool the viewer for eight seasons like this, but spread out over as many years, well, why not? Obviously they did it.

   In “The Game Is On,” not only do the basic members of the gang get together for “one last con,” but a new member of the team invites himself in, all the while playing on the greed of a victim who thinks he’s about to make a no-risk fortune on the stock market.

   The story is told in very obvious tongue in cheek, and it’s pleasure to see Robert Vaughn (the senior member of the group and the only member of the cast I recognized) play a role obviously meant for him. It is also very obvious that this is a series that I will be watching more of.

PETER RABE – Agreement to Kill. Gold Medal #670, paperback original; 1st printing, May 1957. Stark House Press, trade paperback, 2006 (published in tandem with My Lovely Executioner).

   I have in my collection nearly 300 original mystery/suspense/crime novels published by Gold Medal during the 1950s. Very few of them deal with detection in the classical sense, but in quality they often far outclass the pulp stories they are descended from. The types of stories are indeed the same pulpish stuff,with many of the same writers, their apprenticeship already served. Private eyes and tough hoodlums dominate.

   This is the first of Peter Rabe’s books that I’ve read. As far as I know, he came along after the pulps had gone. My impression is that he was popular (14 books in 5 years, for Gold Medal), writing largely from the criminal point of view, giving readers a realistic inside look into the hard and tough world of organized crime.

   Agreement to Kill is unusually strange. Jake Spinner, just released from prison, finds himself on the run for the shooting of the man who put him there. Running with him is Loma, the professional who really did the killing, on a contract from bosses in St. Louis. Loma is a cripple, an enigmatic clubfoot who never does anything for no good reason, no matter how temporarily. And Spinner? He thinks it may be time to change sides, and he wants a job and connections to the people in St. Louis.

   The ending reminds me of Cornell Woolrich. A guy and a girl are walking hand-in-hand into their future when fate intervenes. All in all, the book is very much off the beaten track, and the result is a puzzling piece of action that may either repel or wholly fascinate.

Rating: A minus.

TAKEN. “Pilot.” NBC, 27 February 2017. Clive Standen as Bryan Mills and Jennifer Beals as Christina Hart. Large ensemble cast, including guest stars, some of whom may return; others who won’t. Showrunner/screenwriter: Alexander Cary. Director: Alex Graves.

   Now as most of you already know, those of you who are well ahead of me on this, Liam Neeson played Bryan Mills, a former CIA operative whose life takes three separate and serious turns of events, each turned into a  fast action film and huge box office successes. Rather than a fourth film, what to do with the character? Go back to his beginnings and build a TV series around them.

   It lasted for two years, and believe it or not, this is the first I’ve known about it. I was scouting around on Amazon Video looking for something else to watch with Jennifer Beals in it, and there I found it.  I haven’t watched the movies either. Always meant to. Haven’t yet.

   Of course you realize that the TV series is totally generic. Take the name of the character and the title (Taken), and voila. There you have it. Name recognition from day one.

   The pilot has, unfortunately, no plot in and of itself. It’s an “origin” story all the way, nothing more. But nothing less, either. When terrorists kill Mills’ younger sister in retaliation for killing a drug lord’s son, Mills takes matters into his own hands – but not quite. He’s tracked all the way and given help (rescued) by Christina Hart’s team of operatives. She’s a Deputy Director with Special Portfolio at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. (Confession time. I had to look this up online.)

   The story ends with Mills being recruited by her. I hope I’m not giving too much away. The pilot is well enough done, but what kind of stories will follow next is not entirely clear. We are left with only our imaginations at work. I might watch the movies next, but on the other hand, since Jennifer Beals is in the series, I can’t tell you that I’m all that sure about that.

REVIEWED BY RAY O’LEARY:

CLAYTON RAWSON – Death from a Top Hat. The Great Merlini #1. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1938. Dell #169, mapback edition, 1947. Mercury Mystery #125, digest paperback, circa 1950. Gregg Press, hardcover, 1979. IPL, paperback, 1986. Penzler Publishers, hardcover, 2018; trade paperback, 2019.

   I recently bought the DVD set of Mike Shayne movies, and after watching them, I decided to re-read one of the novels. I had some Shayne mysteries among my mapbacks, but as I was looking for them, I came across this Rawson book and decided to re-read it first. Hollywood, in its wisdom, bought the rights to Mike Shayne from “Brett Halliday” and then used the character in films based on other writers’ fiction. The second film in the set, The Man Who Wouldn’t Die, is based on one of Rawson’s Great Merlini novels (not this one). The Merlini character even makes a cameo appearance in that film, giving Shayne info on magicians who do a certain kind of act.

   As Top Hat opens, Ross Harte, Mer1ini’s “Watson,” has just started working on a magazine article on the sorry state of detective fiction when he hears people pounding on the door of the apartment across the hall from his. The apartment belongs to Dr. Cesare Sabbat, a man who spends has time delving into the occult, and the three people in the hall are Eugene Tarot, a sleight-of-hand magician and radio show host, Colonel Watrous, a psychic investigator, and Madame Rappourt, a Medium. Both doors to Sabbat’s apartment are locked and bolted f om the inside and have cloth stuffed in the keyholes.

   When they finally break in they find Sabbat lying on the floor in the middle of a pentagram. He’s been strangled, and the windows are likewise locked and bolted from the inside. Harte calls the police, and when Inspector Gavigan from Homicide arrives, suggests they call on their friend, “The Great Merlini” for help.

   Well, I’m always in the mood for a locked room murder mystery, and this is a pretty good one; one I really enjoyed because I’d forgotten it completely. It’s cleverly plotted and homage is paid to the master of the sub-genre, with references to John Dickson Carr and Dr. Fell’s famous locked-room lecture. As with magic, misdirection is the key here, and Rawson really piles it on as he bamboozles the reader.

I’LL NAME THE MURDERER. Puritan Pictures, 1936. Ralph Forbes, Marion Shilling, Malcolm MacGregor, James Guilfoyle, John W. Cowell, Wm. Norton Bailey, Agnes Anderson, Charlotte Barr-Smith, Mildred Claire. Director: Raymond K. Johnson.

   I certainly can’t stop you, but I’m going to tell you up front that I’m probably not going to say anything in this review that will encourage you one iota to see this movie. On the other hand, don’t get me wrong. Just because it’s another run-of-the-mill mystery movie made in the 30s by a film company you never heard of doesn’t mean that it’s a bad movie. Unless you’re like me, that is, and you can’t get enough of these slapdash mystery movies and only watch them for the sheer fun of doing so.

   Dead is a nightclub singer who, as it turns out, she has made a lot of enemies, and what’s worse, from the point of view of those trying to name the killer, there plenty of them in and around her dressing room where she was stabbed to death.

   Assisting them in their duty, whether they want his help or not, are a well-known gossip columnist (Ralph Forbes) and a lady photographer for the same paper (a cheerfully chipper Marion Shilling). Assisting them in turn is a PI named Joe Baron (James Guilfoyle), but in only an auxiliary role.

   At the basis of the victim’s death, or so it seems, is a batch of old love letters she’s using for a bit of blackmail, but this is more than a one-note samba. There is, as expected, more to it than that. The title of this film, by the way, comes from the fact that toward the end of it Tommy Tilton advertises in one of his daily columns that he’s far ahead of the police and will announce who the murderer is in the following day’s paper.

   All of the players were new to me. Some had long careers, however, and some not so long. For one of them, this was the only movie she was ever in. Among the others with short career was the very plain if not unattractive (shall we say) young woman who played Joe Baron’s secretary. She’s quick with a quip, hwever, and a sharp retort, and she caught my attention right away. She’s not in the credits, so I had to look her up on IMDb after the movie was over. Her name was Louise Keaton, and that may be enough to tell you whose younger sister she was.

   Little bits like this always makes movies like this one, worth watching.

OUT OF LINE. Curb Entertainment, 2001. Jennifer Beals, Holt McCallany, Michael Moriarty, Christopher Judge, Rick Ravanello, William B. Davis, Alonso Oyarzun. Screenwriter-director: Johanna Demetrakas.

   While there is more than enough criminous activity in this film to warrant my categorizing it as a Crime Film, what it really is, when it down to it, is a romance. A Pretty Woman in reverse, you might say, and I’d be even more convinced of the comparison if I’d ever seen that other film. I’ve always meant to, but it’s still on my Must See list.

   But try this on for size. When Henri Brulé aka Henry Burns (Holt McCallany) is released from prison early, his parole officer is a young but very dedicated Jenny Capitanas (Jennifer Beals). She’s the kind of supervisor who finds the hard-nosed approach her fellow officers (all male) use not her style at all, and she finds herself taking him to the opera and teaching him tai chi, or if that’s not correct it’s close enough.

   The attraction between them is obviously not in the rule book, and as in all good noir films, you know that things are not going to work out well for them, nor do they. Th crime element comes in when Henri has to work on a deal he made to another inmate while still in prison: to mess with both a smooth crime boss’s business – and his wife.

   That’s all I’ll say about that, except that it does lead to the very much expected (and explosive) fireworks at the end. To me, the value of this film lies in the (probably) doomed romance, which produces fireworks of a different kind. If it works, and I think it does, a good share of the credit goes to Jennifer Beals, who I haven’t seen in a film she she started, way back with Flashdance, way back in 1983. As an actor, she’s not only beautiful, but intelligent too. Her body language and what you see in her face are fluid and natural. You can’t ask for more. At least I can’t.

   The overall film you can call only a qualified success, at best. I saw this online one of streaming channels, and I’d like to have a DVD as a permanent copy, but it seems to have gone out of print very quickly, and used copies have become pricey.

PostScript: I’ve just watched the trailer. It’s excellent.

REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

WILLIAM P. McGIVERN – Heaven Ran Last. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1949. Dell #599, paperback, date?

   How many books are there where lovers kill for money and/a freedom? Dozens? Scores? Hundreds maybe? Did the sub-genre start with The Postman Always Rings Twice, or does it go back to Macbeth? Probably good topics for discussion on somebody’s website, but I came across a cute variation on the theme in Heaven Ran Last, by William P McGivern.

   In books like this, the killers usually come up with a clever can’t-fail plan, but here Johnny Ford, a Chicago bookie who’s been having it at home with the wife of an overseas war hero, comes up with a scheme to get rid of the inconvenient husband that’s completely half-assed. And as Johnny develops his plan, even the most naive reader will spot holes, maybe-nots and needless complications.

   Oddly, this doesn’t weaken the story; it only makes it more compelling, like watching an accident happen. It’s hard to look away from (or put down) Last as the half-smart protagonist gets one bone-head “inspiration” after another, and McGivern gives the whole thing a final, nasty twist. I found the whole thing unexpectedly enjoyable, in a sweet, sick way. Look this one up if you like this sort of thing.