PETER CHEYNEY – This Man Is Dangerous. Lemmy Caution #1. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1936. Coward McCann, US, hardcover, 1938. Reprinted many times. Film: Sonofilm, France, 1954, as Cet Homme Est Dangeureux.

   Peter Cheyney (1896-1951) never visited the United States in his life and knew next to nothing about Americans, but in the late 1930s he became an instant success in his native England and in Europe, especially France, a writer or fake-American hard-boiled novels. In This Man Is Dangerous and ten subsequent titles, he chronicled the adventures of rootin’-tootin’-two-gun-shootin’ Lemmy Caution, an indestructible FBI agent who downs liquor by the quart, laughs at bullets flying his way, romances every dame in sight, and blasts away at greasy ethnic-named racketeers and (in thelater novels) Nazi spies.

   Americans, of course, saw these ridiculous exercises for what they were, and only the first few were ever published here.

   Certainly no one would read Lemmy Cautions for their plots, which are uniform from book to book — all 1hc nasties double-crossing each other over the McGuffin — nor for their characterizations, which are pure comic strip. But mystery fans with a taste for lunacy may be attracted by Cheyney’s self-created idiom. Lemmy narrates his cases in first person and present tense, a wild-and-crazy stylistic smorgasbord concocted from Grade Z western films, the stories of Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon, eyeball-poppers apparently of Cheyney’s own inventor (like “He blew the bczuzu” for “He spilled the beans”), and a steady stream of British spellings and locutions.

   Nothing but quotation can convey the Cheyney flavor. From This Man ls Dangerous:

   I says good night, and I nods lo the boys. I take my hat from the hall and walk down the stairs to the street. I’m .feeling pretty good because I reckon that muscling in on this racket of Siegella’s is going to be a good thing for me, and maybe if I use my brains and keep my eyes skinned, I can still find some means of double-crossing this wop.

   From Don’t Get Me Wrong (1939):

   Me — l am prejudiced. I would rather stick around with a bad-tempered tiger than get on the wrong bias of one of these knife-thrown’ palookas. I would rather four-flush a team of wild alligators outa their lunch pail than try an’ tell a Mexican momma that I was tired of her geography an’ did not wish to play any more.

   From Your Deal, My Lovely (1941):

   Some mug by the name. of Confucius – who was a guy who was supposed to know his vegetables – once issued an edict that any time he saw a sap sittin’ around bein’ impervious to the weather an’ anything else that was goin’, an’ lookin’ like he had been hit in the kisser with a flat-iron, the said sap was suffering from woman trouble.

   Lemmy Caution became. so popular on the Continent that Eddie Constantine, an American. actor, portrayed him in a series of French films. These films were so successful that Jean Luc Godard used Constantine as Caution in his New Wave film Alphaville.

   Eventually Cheyney launched a second wave of novels, written in a spare ersatz-Hammett style and featuring Slim Callaghan, London’s toughest PI. But for those who love pure absurdity, and appreciate the wild stylistic flights of Robert Leslie Bellem and Henry Kane and Richard S. Prather, a treat of compatible dimensions is in store when they tackle the adventures of Lemmy Caution.

———
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.

ONE BODY TOO MANY. Paramount Pictures, 1944. Jack Haley, Jean Parker, Bela Lugosi, Blanche Yurka, Lyle Talbot, Douglas Fowley. Director: Frank McDonald.

   There’s no way of getting around it. One Body Too Many owes more than a lot to The Cat and the Canary, the movie with Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard that came along five years earlier. Not that that’s a bad thing, but any movie reviewer worth his salt has to point out things like this.

   In this one leading actor Jack Haley plays an insurance salesman who finally has an appointment with a wealthy recluse to sell him a $200,00 life insurance policy. Little does he know that by the time he gets there, the man is dead and his relatives, almost all of whom he had despised in his lifetime, have gathered around to hear the reading of his will.

   All they get, however, is a preliminary statement from the lawyer, which in essence says that if he is buried above ground, the estate is divided one way, but if he is buried under ground, the bequests will be distributed in the reverse order. (Don’t ask.) More, all the relatives are required to stay in the house together until such time as the burial occurs.

   When he arrives, Haley is mistaken for the PI the attorney has hired the watch the body, the PI having been met and disposed of just as he arrived. This causes a lot of happy confusion, as you might expect, before that particular matter is all straightened out. In the meantime, Haley and Jean Parker, the dead man’s favorite niece, have become attracted to each other, and he decides to stick around to give her what assistance he can.

   There are lots of hidden passages, sliding panels, trap doors, and eyes that watch rooms through the eyes of paintings on the wall, not to mention a sudden thunderstorm and lights that go on and off. The body itself seems to come and go at will, and the butler, superbly played by Bela Lugosi, acts even more suspicious than the other relatives, a greedy lot all.

   Jack Haley, I think, was underrated as a comedian, probably because he never goes as over the top as a Bob Hope, say, or heaven forbid, at least as far as this film is concerned, a Red Skelton. Haley is far more subtle here than either of those gentlemen, and he’s a huge factor in making the movie as much of a success as it is, if this is the kind of movie you like as much as I do. That said, at 75 minutes, it runs maybe 15 minutes too long. If it had been up to me, although I was only two at the time, I’d have trimmed the scene in which the coffin, with Haley inside, was tossed in the pool. Your opinion may vary.

EDWARD D. HOCH “The Problem of the Tin Goose.” Dr. Sam Hawthorne #24. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1982. Collected in More Things Impossible: The Second Casebook of Dr Sam Hawthorne (Crippen & Landru, 2006). Previously reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunits, edited by Mike Ashley (Running Press, US, 2004).

   In the 1920s troupes of barnstorming pilots were all the rage, doing al sorts of fancy flying maneuvers and such daredevil stunts such as wing-walking, including stepping from the wing of one plane onto that of another. And even though Dr. Sam Hawthorne was but a young man then and new to his practice, he was around to watch – and to solve a murder that on the face of it had no possible explanation.

   To wit: When one of the planes involved in such activities comes back down to the ground, the pilot is found stabbed to death in the cockpit, which was locked from the inside, nor was there any feasible way for the knife to be thrown through the open window from the other plane.

   Hoch’s stories were almost always perfect models of pure puzzle stories, with only occasional attempts at in depth characterizations. If that is what you’re looking for in the crime stories you read, Hoch is probably not the author for you. And even so, I thought the crucial part of the clue to howdunit could have been amped up a little without letting any of the cat out of the bag.

   A mere quibble. “Tin Goose” is not only a really neat puzzle yarn, but it’s fun to read simply for the brief incursion into the past it provides, showing us what kinds of local events got small town America excited between the wars.

77 SUNSET STRIP “Girl on the Run” ABC, 10 October 1958 (Season 1, Episode 1). Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (Stuart Bailey). Guest Cast: Erin O’Brien, Shepperd Strudwick, Edward Byrnes, Barton MacLane, Ray Teal. Screenplay by Marion Hargrove, based on a story by Roy Huggins. Director: Richard L. Bare.

   There none of the trappings you usually think about whenever you think of 77 Sunset Strip, the series, in this the very first episode, the flashy sights of Hollywood, the joint practice of two or more PI’s working out of the same office, the car jockey who was always combing his hair and giving with the jive. It is generally accepted as fact that this, the pilot, was filmed and shown theatrically (somewhere in the Caribbean) before the series started with one nefarious purpose in mind. To swindle credit from writer Roy Huggins by claiming that the series was based on the film, not on any of his books or stories.

   As a ploy, it worked. Roy Huggins lost his suit and left the series, and never worked for Warners again. (I’m not absolutely certain about that last statement; Hollywood in many ways is much like politics, or so I’m told.)

   In any case, PI Stu Bailey is on his own in this one, with no connection with Hollywood, and Sunset Strip in particular. He’s hired by a client to find his missing fiancée, but what he doesn’t know, but we the viewer do, is that the girl in question is a witness to a shooting who went on the run when she quickly learns that as a police witness, her life is in immediate danger.

   It doesn’t take Bailey long to learn that he’s been taken, but not before the killer (well, of course that’s who Bailey’s client is) has hired a gun man (Edd Byrnes) to follow him and kill the girl. It is up to Bailey to foil the plot, along with the help of both a friendly cop and and an equally helpful union leader.

   Edd Byrnes proved so popular as the killer for hire that the producers wiped the first episode completely out of continuity and wrote Byrnes in as teen favorite “Kookie” Kookson, parking attendant and wannabe PI working next door to the office on the Strip that Bailey quickly found himself sharing with Jeff Spencer (Roger Smith) for most of the rest of the series.

   Looking back today, based on this first episode, it is not easy to see what the fuss was all about, except for Byrnes’ eye catching performance. As PI stories go, there is nothing especially new about “Girl on the Run.” With Stu Bailey as a lone wolf PI who finds himself falling in love with the girl he is helping, he’s just one of hundreds just like him.

   I can also only wish that as an established PI (note how impeccably dressed he always is), he’d have done his job right and checked a little more into the background of the guy who hired him. But of course if he had, there’d not have been much of a story at all, would there?

H. PAUL JEFFERS – Rubout at the Onyx. Harry McNeil #1. Ticknor & Fields, hardcover, 1981. Ballantine, paperback, 1987.

   Here is a private eye story, but by no means is it your common, everyday sort of private eye story. Instead, it’s a swinging trip into the past, an excursion by make-believe time machine into the history book of yesterday, back to the post-Prohibition jazz-era days of the Big Apple’s “Cradle of Jazz” — Fifty-Second Street, that is, between Fifth and Sixth. The year, 1935.

   The private eye is Harry MacNeil. His office is located upstairs over the Onyx Club, the heart of the jazz district. His client is a lately bereaved widow. Her husband was a two-bit gambler who was rubbed out downstairs on New Year’s Eve. She brings Harry a message in code that may lead them to a three million dollar fortune in stolen diamonds. She is also a little lonely.

   Balancing the two rather nicely, Jeffers never really seems to commit himself all the way to whether he’s writing a history first, or a mystery. Whatever it is, in the end, there’s no doubt whatsoever that it’s a lot more fun to puzzle through than any classroom textbook anyone’s ever been assigned to read. Strictly as a mystery, though … well, sad to say, there’s no great revelation that comes at the end. MacNeil uncovers the truth by just plain diligence, and the culprit is fairly obvious from a long way off.

Rating: B minus.

   
   The Harry MacNeil series –

The Rubout at the Onyx. Ticknor 1981 [New York City, NY; 1935]

Murder on Mike. St. Martin’s 1984 [New York City, NY; 1939]
The Rag Doll Murder, Ballantine 1987 [New York City, NY; 1935]

REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

COTTAGE TO LET, aka BOMBSIGHT STOLEN. Gainsborough, UK. 1941. Leslie Banks, Alastair Sim, John Mills, George Cole, Michael Wilding, and a host of solid British supporting players. Screenplay by Anatole de Grunwald, from a play by John Kerr. Directed by Anthony Asquith.

   A surprisingly jaunty film to come out of England during the Blitz, and a solidly entertaining one.

   The plot circles around a cottage in Scotland that has been designated as a recovery hospital for wounded airmen. It has never had a patient, but:

   It houses the laboratory of an eccentric inventor (Leslie Banks) and:

   The grande dame who owns it decides it would be a perfect place to accommodate children evacuated from London during the Blitz. She gets only one, a scruffy street urchin (George Cole, in his film debut age 15) not knowing that:

   The agents who manage the Grande Dame’s property (he sign is an in-joke) have rented it out to Alastair Sim. and then:

   They get their first patient, a likeable downed flier (John Mills.)

   Add a comely nurse for romance, an officious butler for comic relief and it looks like a set-up for light comedy. But then:

   It develops that Banks’ inventions are really helping Britain in the War Effort, but information on them is leaking out to the Germans. So British Intelligence has sent someone there to ferret out the spy, and we’re supposed to guess Who is What while they all act suspiciously — except for the cockney kid from London, who is a fan of Sherlock Holmes (“The greatest bloke what ever lived!”) and uses his powers of deduction….

   From this point on, Cottage spins between deft comedy, suspense, and heart-stopping action in the early Hitchcock-Gilliatt vein, with cunning traps, narrow escapes, and characters with a bit more depth than one expects. Leslie Bank chafes so convincingly at official red tape that one suspects he may be selling his own secrets to the Nazis. John Mills is really quite moving as the flier who is not what he seems to be, and Alastair Sim, funny as ever, is surprisingly sinister in his best moments.

   This film began a life-long friendship between George Cole and Alastair Sim, who put him in many of his movies. It’s also a lot of fun, with a showy shoot-out in a tawdry hall of mirrors. Don’t be put off by the soporific title — this is the Goods!

SNEAKY PETE. “Pilot.” Amazon Prime Video. 07 August 2015. Giovanni Ribisi (Pete Murphy / Marius Josipovic), Marin Ireland, Shane McRae, Libe Barer, Michael Drayer, Peter Gerety, Peter Gerety, Margo Martindale. Series created by David Shore and Bryan Cranston. Director: Seth Gordon.

   When small time con man and sneak thief Marius Josipovic is released from prison, he quickly learns that he owes a big time gangster is on his trail for a large amount of money he thought he’d paid off. So what does he do? He heads for the home town of his former cell mate and passes himself as the other, a prodigal son finally returned home.

   How does he manage this? They have not seen him in a long time and his cell mate had bored him to tears with stories of his youth. What the newly minted Pete Murphy does not know is that his new family runs a well-oiled bail bond business, and he’s expected to move right in and an active employee. This leads, at least in this first episode, into an unexpected confrontation with someone he knows from his past. Also in the abeyance he has his own past that will, I am sure, continue to catch up with him.

   In terms of the basic plot lines, there are – and you may not noted this too — some similarities to the set up to the recently reviewed Cinemax series Banshee, which debuted in 2013, two years earlier. In that one the hero, also just out of prison and on the run, assumes the identity of the new sheriff, newly hired unseen. Similar, yes. but with enough differences to make each of them watchable without an excessive amount of déjà vu in switching from one to the other.

   Of the two, I enjoyed this one a little more than the other. There’s enough comic potential in this series – I’ve only seen this, the first episode – to make the same implausible set-up go down more easily, with perhaps less violence. Those of you who have seen more are welcome to tell me otherwise, but I know others enjoyed this one too. It was on for three seasons, and apparently left quite a few viewers wanting more.

DARK MOUNTAIN. Paramount Pictures, 1944. Robert Lowery, Ellen Drew, Regis Toomey, Eddie Quillan, Elisha Cook Jr. Director: William Berke.

   Robert Lowery may have been the nominal star of this film, but it’s the villain of the piece, played exceedingly well by Regis Toomey, who takes home the acting honors, and by a landslide. Lowery plays a stalwart but not exceedingly bright park ranger, or shall we say not terribly swift on the uptake, who when he gets a promotion, finally asks his girl (Ellen Drew) to marry him.

   He, of course, has waited to long to make his affection in this regard known, and she has already married another. Regis Toomey, that is, and you know immediately, once he walks into the room, that he’s an out-and-out no-good-nik. Lowery bows out gracefully, or at least his character does. But when Toomey’s character shows his true colors, kills two people, and takes Drew with him on the lam, Lowrey is there to aid and assist and eventually pick up the pieces.

   It does take a while, but even so, to fill out the running time, the film still needs some comedy mixed in with the suspense, which is minor to begin with. Comedy provided courtesy of Eddie Quillan, Lowery’s fellow ranger who in one scene plays checkers with himself for well over five minutes, or what seems like it, his moves on either side of the board assisted by the knowing nods or disapproving shakes of his dog’s head.

   Reading back what I’ve written so far, I should caution you that the movie isn’t as bad as I’ve probably made it sound. Regis Toomey, in particular, is just as fine as the kind of smooth-talker operator who could have someone like Ellen Drew fall in love with him as he is the kind of villain who can wipe out anyone who crosses his path without thinking at all about it. Most of his career, I suspect, was spent in secondary roles such as this one and doing them well.

CAPT. W. E. JOHNS – Biggles in the Blue. Biggles #45. Brockhampton Press, UK, hardcover, 1953. Knight, UK, paperback, 1968. Reprinted several times. No US edition. Readable online at www.archive.org.

   The year is 1953, and Bigglesworth of the RAF and the Special Air Police is in Jamaica confronting Erich von Stalhein his old adversary going back to WW I in peacetime. A German war criminal named Wolff has died in Jamaica posing as a man named Hagen and in his home there is the clue to the secret that von Stalhein and Biggles are both after, plans of experimental weapons including the dreaded V series rockets that fell on London late in the war.

   Von Stalhien has connections in Eastern Europe and a new master, the Russian Zorotov.

   The papers are on an island, but which of the many small cays in the area? The clue is somewhere in Wolff/Hagen’s Kingston home

   As Air Commodore Raymond of the Special Air Police explained when he sent Detective Inspector Bigglesworh on the case: “…get things clear. We want these plans, not so much for our own use but to prevent them falling into the hands of a potential enemy.”

   Which finds Biggles, as his friends call him, ace of two wars, and hero of dozens of adventures in war and out, in Jamaica at Wolff/Hagen’s home Rumkeg Haven, with his usual team of Air Constables Algy, Bert, and Ginger.

   W. E. Johns, the author of the popular Biggles series that eventually would include books, radio (Monty Python alumni Michael Palin read Biggles Flies North on radio), comics, a flying teddy bear also named Biggles, and even a big budget movie, Biggles, Adventures in Time, was himself a pilot in the Great War whose greatest success came with the adventures of his young First War ace. Johns also wrote some adult thrillers and even cracked the British pulp Thriller, but none of his other work inspired the long term success as the adventures of Biggles and his friends. Many of the books are still in print or at least easily available.

   Johns’ affections for the character and investment in his adventures make the Biggles series a good deal more personal than many such works.

   The Biggles books run in the fifty to sixty thousand word range and include illustrations by frequent illustrator Peter Archer. The writing is a bit better generally than the equivalent Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew in this country, with somewhat more action and more dangerous villains. The level of action isn’t far off the standard thriller of the twenties and thirties or the hero pulps here though there is a good deal of good old chums business — though that isn’t far off the kind of schoolboy thing Bulldog Drummond got up to with his pals.

   Surprisingly the book is less politically incorrect than you might expect. There is a minor black villain (Morgan, who is at least a would be Napoleon and not merely a thug), but also a strong smart black woman who saves the boys lives and helps them get the best of von Stalhein and the Russian submarine he stalks them in. That hasn’t been true of all the Biggles books I’ve read, but they are generally at least less tiresome than most books of that era about such things.

   As juvenile fiction of the time period — roughly the early thirties through the sixties — the Biggles series reads well enough, contains some genuine thrills, and considering it began as the adventures of a World War One ace has certainly got around over the years, taking Biggles to every corner of the globe. His adventures may not be well known on these shores, but in much of the world his name is one to conjure with.

J. J. des ORMEAUX “The Poisoned Bowl.” Novelette. First published in Clues Detective Stories, April 1939. Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries, edited by Mike Ashley (Running Press, softcover, 2006), as by Forrest Rosaire.

   I used the term “Locked Room Mystery” up there in the heading, but that’s only in the loosest of terms. “Impossible Mystery” is far better: in “The Poisoned Bowl” a man falls dead of an instantly fatal poison with several people standing around him and no one giving him anything to eat or drink, including himself. How could it be done?

   It’s an interesting question, and J. J. des Ormeaux, a modestly prolific pulp writer whose real name was Forrest Rosaire, does his best to confuse the issue by a lot of hand-waving and other such means of distraction. Lots of coincidences, in other words, not to mention keeping relevant information from the reader. The final result is a veritable hodge-podge of a story, but … it all does make sense in the end, sort of.

   A question is, could a better writer (or editor) have taken this story, cleaned it up and made something more presentable out of it? Answer: There’s a germ of a good story at the base of it, so I’d like to think so, but in all honesty, without the hand-waving and the holding back of vital information from the reader, it would be awfully tough. Fun to read, especially if you love pulps, but all in all, no cigars for this one.