DON DeLILLO – White Noise. Wiking Press, hardcover, 1985. Penguin, softcover, 1986. Film: Netflix Studios, et al,,2022, starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy, Sam Nivola, and May Nivola; written and directed by Noah Baumbach.

   The white noise is death. We try to ignore it.

   Our vacuous, repetitive, ambiguous and confused suburban lives.

   At least the poor can concentrate on food, shelter, the business of staying alive. Not enough time or energy left for ennui.

   What if we did have time to contemplate? What would we think about?

   It’s like Woody Allen’s complaint about life being a restaurant with terrible food. And such small portions!

   The interminable absurdity of everyday suburban life: “The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of the older shoppers. They walk in a fragmented trance, stop and go, clusters of well-dressed figures frozen in aisles, trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic, trying to remember where they’d seen the Cream of Wheat….There is a sense of wandering now, an aimless and haunted mood, sweet-tempered people taken to the edge.”

   At least the computers seem to know something. Coming to the checkout, the “terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks.”

   The tabloids. Our escape from the white noise, the confusion, the fear. The nothingness. The tabloids with the “tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.”

   What the tabloids offer us is something to have faith in. Something bigger than us. At least somebody knows something. And if we have faith in them, we can glom onto their confidence and escape our wretched fear.

         ——

   Professor Jack Gladney is head of his own department that he created at a small Midwest liberal arts college: Hitler Studies. Jack is quite well known and well regarded. With a certain gravitas and all knowing aura. He has it all. The wife, the kids, the house. Living the suburban dream.

   But it all turns to shit when a train carrying noxious chemicals derails near Jack’s town. The whole town has to be evacuated. And due to Jack’s know-it-all ironic, laconic confidence, he’s exposed to the amorphous chemical cloud.

   The nebulous cloud creates a nebulous tumor within. Or so the medical scanner technicians inform him. And he will die. No longer an abstract concept. He will die within the calculable future. A future of which he can no longer partake.

   And he starts to freak out. To break down. To quiver with fear.

   His wife has been taking an experimental drug to treat the fear of death. The fear of which is paralyzing her. She got access to the drug by giving her body to the pharma rep. But the drug has stopped working and the side effect erode her memory. The pills are thrown in the garbage.

   Jack scavenges for the pills which he craves inconsolably. Riffling thru the garbage, seeking clues: “I found crayon drawings of a figure with full breasts and male genitals. There was a long piece of twine that contained a series of knots and loops. It seemed at first a random construction. Looking more closely I thought I detected a complex relationship between the size of the loops, the degree of the knots (single or double) and the intervals between knots with loops and freestanding knots. Some kind of occult geometry or symbolic festoon of obsessions. I found a banana skin with a tampon inside. Was this the dark underside of consumer consciousness? I came across a horrible clotted mass of hair, soap, ear swabs, crushed roaches, flip top rings, sterile pads smeared with pus and bacon fat, strands of frayed dental floss, fragments of ballpoint refills, toothpicks still displaying bits of impaled food. There was a pair of shredded undershorts with lipstick markings, perhaps a memento of [a tryst].” This latent fear, now stark and omnipresent, had been subsumed, suppressed and sublimated in Jack’s Hitler Studies:

   â€œHelpless and fearful people are drawn to magical figures, mythic figures, epic men who intimidate and darkly loom….You wanted to be helped and sheltered. The overwhelming horror would leave no room for your own death. ‘Submerge me’ you said. ‘Absorb my fear.’…. The vast and terrible depth…The inexhaustibility….The whole huge nameless thing….The massive darkness…The whole terrible endless hugeness.”

   The only escape of fear of death? If you can’t repress it, become a killer.

   â€œI believe, Jack, there are two kinds of people in the world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers. We don’t have the disposition, the rage or whatever it takes to be a killer. We let death happen. We lie down and die. But think what it’s like to be a killer. Think how exciting it is, in theory, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life-credit. Th more people you kill, the more credit you store up. It explains any number of massacres, wars, executions…..[T]o cure themselves of death by killing others…To plot, to take aim at something, to shape time and space.”

   What Jack must do to cure death (for what is death but its fear?) is become a killer. But how?

   Get back to your primordial roots. “The male animal. Isn’t there a fund, a pool, a reservoir of potential violence in the male psyche?….Isn’t there a sludgy region you’d rather not know about? A remnant of some prehistoric period when dinosaurs roamed the earth and men fought with flint tools? When to kill was to live?….homicidal rage…buried in the most prudent and unassuming soul.”

   So Jack tries to summon a homicidal level of rage for the pharma rep who screwed his wife. He gets a gun. Makes a plan. Finds the guy. And tries to make himself a killer.

         —–

   So that’s it, then. Ambiguity, industrial white noise and ennui. The existential crisis of the agnostic suburbanite. The suburbanite lacking faith in the tabloids, in something big and huge and strong to put your faith in. To subsume your fear.

   But it’s a fear that has no primal root. If you can make of yourself a more hardboiled character. A hunter not the hunted. Who kills instead of dies. You’ll live.

         ——

   The book is good enough. It does what it’s supposed to do. It conveys its message. But its message kinda sucks. And it’s a privileged kind of message. Not that it’s not true. I’m sure there’s a kind of truth here.

   But it kind of reminds me of an interview with the director Sarah Polley recently talking about how she turned down the part of Penny Lane in the movie Almost Famous. Penny Lane was an early 70’s groupie. Polley said she simply could not, for the life of her, understand how a young woman in the early 70’s, at the height of the war protest movement, throw her life away as a groupie. So she turned it down.

   My point is that I can’t understand the abstract fear of death, existential angst and ennui. I could when I was younger, in the suburbs, whatever. But now I can’t.

   Brecht says: “Bread before morality.” And I guess that’s where I stand. It’s why Jean Valjean shouldn’t be prosecuted for stealing a loaf for his starving family.

   How can anyone have the leisure to have poolside panic attacks about their own personal abstract mortality when people are starving, getting murdered, dying every day.

   Like Hemingway quotes Donne:

   The hardboiled fare I favor doesn’t see death as an isolated, random, unlikely, angst worthy or even newsworthy thing. It’s present. All of the freaking time. So get used to it, fight it where you can, and know that in the end, life is a tragedy that ends in death. Stop complaining. Get on with it. Everything else is only so much white noise.

THE VELVET TOUCH. RKO Radio Pictures, 1948. Rosalind Russell, Leo Genn, Claire , Trevor, Sydney Greenstreet, Leon Ames, Frank McHugh, Lex Barker. Screenplay: Leo Rosten. Director: Jack Gage.

   A Broadway star murders her producer and former lover in a fit of rage, then finds out all the evidence points to another actress. Has she committed the perfect murder, or will her conscience not allow her to get away with it?

   A big-name cast, bu there is more drama than mystery here. You could fall asleep in the first half. The second half features some unorthodox police questioning, by an outlandish captain of police, played by Sydney Greenstreet, as only Sydney Greenstreet could.

   Rex Stout’s seventh Nero Wolfe novel, Over My Dead Body (1940), was one of several to be serialized or, as in this case, abridged in The American Magazine (September 1939). Since The League of Frightened Men (1935), Stout had produced the spin-offs The Hand in the Glove (1937), introducing early female P.I. and occasional employee Theodolinda “Dol” Bonner, and Red Threads (1939), which featured Inspector Cramer. In The Rubber Band (1936), he mentioned the painting of Sherlock Holmes hanging over Archie’s desk; brought Purley Stebbins onstage at last; and introduced Police Commissioner Hombert, D.A. Skinner, the hated Lt. George Rowcliff, and London “snoop” Ethelbert Hitchcock.

   The Red Box (1937) offers a murder actually committed, via poisoned aspirin, in Wolfe’s office, and an early example of the climactic gathering of suspects there. Also introduced in, respectively, Too Many Cooks (1938) and Some Buried Caesar (1939) are his lifelong friend, Marko Vukčić, the owner of Rusterman’s Restaurant, with whom Wolfe “hunted dragonflies…in the mountains” and is on a rare first-name basis, and Archie’s sometime romantic interest, heiress and socialite Lily Rowan, who dubs him Escamillo — the torero in Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875) — after a run-in with a bull. All four were adapted in a 1969-71 Italian TV series, featuring Tino Buazzelli as Wolfe and Paolo Ferrari as Archie.

   Well, now that we’re all caught up, Over My Dead Body opens with a visit from Carla Lovchen, who — as Archie tells Wolfe— “seems to be named after a mountain. The Black Mountain. Mount Lovchen. Tsernagora. Montenegro, which is the Venetian variant of Monte Nero…”

   Her friend Neya Tormic, also a pseudonymous immigrant from Zagreb employed at the dancing and fencing studio of Nikola Miltan (whom Wolfe has met at Marko’s table), has been accused of stealing diamonds from a man’s pocket. Unnerved when she says “Hvala Bogu” (Thank God), Wolfe orders her ejected; “I have skedaddled, physically, once in my life, from one person…a Montenegrin woman…many years ago.”

   Barely an hour later, Wolfe is visited and reminded by a G-man, Stahl, about the Federal statute “requiring persons who are agents in this country of foreign principals to register with the Department of State.” He says that he is not, although as a boy he served as an agent of the Austrian government and in the Montenegrin army, noting that he “starved to death in 1916,” then walked 600 miles to join the A.E.F. when the U.S. entered the war.

   Wolfe states that he has neither communicated with nor provided money to Prince Stefan Donevitch of Zagreb (the nephew of Old Peter, dying in Paris, whom he knew long ago), but has contributed to both the Loyalists in Spain and the League of Yugoslavian Youth.

   Wolfe tells Stahl, “I was born in this country,” flatly contradicting a previous statement that “I wasn’t born here” (Too Many Cooks) and a reference to “my boyhood in Europe” (Some Buried Caesar). He is, in fact, a Montenegrin; Rex Stout’s authorized biographer, John McAleer, attributed this retcon to “violent protests from The American Magazine, supported by [publisher] Farrar & Rinehart,” but “that even in 1939 Wolfe was irked by the FBI’s consuming curiosity about the private business of law-abiding citizens [so he thus] felt under no constraint to tell the truth about himself when interrogated by Stahl.” No, there won’t be a quiz later on, but this stuff will be important as the series progresses.

   In the copy of United Yugoslavia Carla perused while awaiting his descent from the plant rooms, Wolfe finds a 1938 document. It empowers Stefan’s wife, Princess Vladanka, to talk and act in his name “in all financial and political matters and claims pertaining to me and to the Donevitch dynasty, with particular reference to Bosnian forest concessions and to the disposal of certain credits at present in the care of Barrett & De Russy, bankers of New York.” Wolfe sums up the “Balkan mess” thus: “The regent who rules Yugoslavia [then including Montenegro] deviously courts the friendship of certain nations….Prince Stefan…is being used by certain other nations, and…using them for his own ambition.”

   Wolfe mails the document to freelance P.I. Saul Panzer when Carla reappears, claiming that Neya is his vanished and adopted daughter (unseen since she was 3) and producing his signed adoption record, which he pockets, then solicits the details. Hired with Carla via an introduction by Donald Barrett, son of banker John P., Neya denies being seen by fencing student Nat Driscoll returning his suit coat to his locker, and was searched to no avail by Mrs. Jeanne Miltan. Belinda Reade and a dancing client, Ted Gill, refute Neya’s claim that she was then giving an épée lesson to Percy Ludlow, who asserts that she was getting cigarettes from his identical coat, mistaken for Driscoll’s, in an adjoining locker.

   Driscoll appears with lawyer Thompson, who retracts the charge — saying he’d forgotten his secretary took the gems to a jeweler to be set in a bracelet — but Archie advises Neya not to sign the quittance he produces. Chaos erupts as Jeanne is refusing him permission to ask the porter, Arthur, about stubs and ashes (“just curious”) in the room where Neya fenced with Ludlow, found with an épée stuck through his body. Its blunt point does not bear a col de mort (collar of death) stolen from Nikola’s office…which Archie discovers, upon returning home, in his coat pocket, rolled in a woman’s canvas gauntlet; at Wolfe’s to ask Archie about fleeing the crime scene, Cramer learns of three Feds descending on it.

   He lists 10 suspects with no apparent motive; one of them, Rudolph Faber, alibied Neya, last to see Ludlow alive, and comes to ask Wolfe’s interest in her, departing after he fails to retrieve the document while alone in the office. Another suspect, couturière Madame Zorka, calls to say that she saw Neya put something in Archie’s coat and plans to tell the police, so Wolfe tries to bring them together with Cramer, who has Purley fetch Neya as Carla tags along, also revealing Ludlow and Faber to be confidential agents of the British and German governments, respectively. Zorka has skipped, but Neya admits finding the gauntlet in her robe’s pocket and transferring it to Archie’s, because he was there to help.

   The roomies leave with Wolfe’s promise to return both papers to Neya that day, when she hopes her “political errand” will be done. Then Donald arrives, forced by Wolfe—under threat of exposing his designs on Yugoslav property—to let Archie collect Zorka, stashed at his love nest with Belinda, tipsy and déshabillé, but she escapes the brownstone during the night, which is reported to Cramer. Wolfe orders Archie to give Carla the document in Neya’s presence, yet in the flat they find Carla gone and Faber dead, so having gotten it back from Saul, Archie has fellow operative Fred Durkin, who was tailing them, return it to Wolfe, mindful of the thorough frisking the police will give him when they’re called.

   Back home, John P. comes and goes after Wolfe refuses an offer to hire him, and Zorka is pulled in by Cramer, admitting when confronted with evidence located by Saul that she is Pansy Bupp of Ottumwa, Iowa, backed by Donald. After further machinations, we learn that Neya, the incognito Vladanka, killed Ludlow, who knew she was in cahoots with the Barretts in dealing with the Nazis, and Faber, who tried to blackmail her. When she goes after Wolfe with a dagger, he kills her with a beer bottle (shades of Fer-de-Lance); Carla, accompanying her due to dependence on the Donevitch family, is really Wolfe’s adopted daughter, and he intends to help when she announces her decision to remain in America.

   Over My Dead Body was the earliest work in the canon to be adapted for the small screen (at least in the U.S.), as the two-part first-season finale of A&E’s A Nero Wolfe Mystery. “Over My Dead Body” (7/8 & 15/01) was directed by star Timothy Hutton, who played Archie opposite Maury Chaykin’s Wolfe, and served as an executive producer; scenarist Janet Roach, in her only series entry, shared an Oscar nomination with Richard Condon when the latter’s novel Prizzi’s Honor (1982) was filmed by John Huston in 1985. The series boasted handsome period settings, exclusively Stout-based material, and a cast of more than twenty repertory players rotating in the roles of killers, victims, and suspects.

   Here, they embody the killer, Neya (Francie Swift); the victims, Ludlow (James Tolkan) and Faber (Richard Waugh); and suspects Carla (Kari Matchett), Zorka (Debra Monk), Jeanne (Nicky Guadagni), Nat Driscoll (Hrant Alianak), Belinda (Dina Barrington), and Donald (now Duncan; Boyd Banks). Other members include George Plimpton (as John Barrett), Robert Bockstael (Stahl), and David Schurmann (Thompson), with a two-time guest star, Ron Rifkin, as Nikola. The remaining regulars are Cramer (Bill Smitrovich), assistant Purley (R.D. Reid), cook/butler/majordomo Fritz Brenner (Colin Fox), and “the ’teers”: Saul (Conrad Dunn), Orrie Cather (Trent McMullen), and Fred (Fulvio Cecere).

   A collaborator with Alan J. Pakula on such films as Klute (1971) and The Parallax View (1974), series composer Michael Small gives his score a suitably Balkan feel, heavy on cimbalom and violin. Roach hews closely to Stout while understandably omitting, for example, Archie’s encounter with Arthur (Peter Mensah) — in the novel a literally eye-rolling caricature, decidedly un-P.C. by today’s standards — as he flees the studio. The comic element is played up as Wolfe conceals the gauntlet and col de mort inside a loaf of hollowed-out Italian bread, disguised as a cake with chocolate icing, and then returns them to Archie’s coat to be “discovered” in Cramer’s presence at the end of the first half.

   Curiously, despite the scripted name change, the younger Barrett is playfully referred to as “Donnybonny,” as he is in the novel; Plimpton, who brings a properly patrician air to his father, was the “participatory journalist” whose book Paper Lion (1966), filmed with Alan Alda in 1968, depicts his tryout with the NFL’s Detroit Lions. In an odd directorial choice, separate encounters in Wolfe’s office with Barrett, Cramer, and Zorka are intercut into a montage that throws continuity to the winds. Over My Dead Body was adapted in 2012 on another Italian series, with Francesco Pannofino as Wolfe and Pietro Sermonti as Archie, as were Fer-de-Lance, The Rubber Band, The Red Box, and other books by Stout.

            — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: “Booby Trap”

      Editions cited:

   The Rubber Band, The Hand in the Glove, Some Buried Caesar, Over My Dead Body: Bantam (1982, 1983)

   The Red Box, Too Many Cooks, Red Threads: Pyramid (1963, 1964)

      Online sources:

DERMOT MORRAH – The Mummy Case Mystery. Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1933. Published first in the UK as The Mummy Case (Faber & Faber, hardcover, 1933). Perennial P884, US, paperback, 1988. Coachwhip Publications, softcover, 2014.

   An inquest convened at Beaumont College, Oxford, quickly decides that the death of Peter Benchley, famous Egyptologist, was due to accidental fire. Two junior fellows have inquiring minds, however, and they begin an unofficial investigation on their own.

   Was the fire deliberately set? Is the body Benchley’s, or his recently acquired mummy? If it’s his, where’s the mummy? On page 136 [of the Perennial edition] they come up with a list of sixteen key questions, then follow it with 40 pages of clever deductions. The good humor is equally fine.

E. C. R. LORAC – Fire in the Thatch. Chief Inspector MacDonald #27. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1946. Mystery House, US, hardcover, 1946. Chief Inspector MacDonald Poisoned Pen Press (British Library Crime Classics), US, softcover, 2018.

   Chief Inspector MacDonald goes to Devon to investigate the apparently accidental death of an ex-Navy man in a fire which his thatched cottage home. The local police and coroner are satisfied as to accident, but the man’s former commanding officer raises questions.

   MacDonald finds good reasons why the fire is not likely to have been accidental, but no motives for murder. The dead man, Nicholas Vaughn, was well-liked by his landlord and neighbors. He was a hard-working man who loved the country and was making a go of farming his small bit of land. He was happy and was looking forward to getting married. Only a Londoner, looking for property to buy in the area, had any grudge against Vaughn, and then only a slight one.

   The careful detective work, a few interesting characters – particularly Ali, the evacuee boy – and the contrast between London and the country make this book worth reading. Lorac has committed a cardinal sin, to my way of thinking, however, in killing off a character just as I was getting to know and like him.

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION. September 1948. Editor: John W. Campbell, Jr. Cover artist: Chesley Bonestell.  Overall rating: ***

GEORGE O. SMITH “The Catspaw.” Novella. Two people are given conflicting information about a possible space-drive in their dreams. Tom Barden is given knowledge of the necessary science; Edith Ward is warned by an opposing faction that the drive is unstable and dangerous. Are they guinea pigs? The plot line is cleverly worked out, but the scientific jargon can be skipped. (4)

PETER PHILLIPS “Dreams Are Sacred.” A sports writer is sent into the dreams of an overworked fantasy writer to bring him back to reality. Excellent except for lack of an effective ending. (4)

RENE LAFAYETTE “The Great Air Monopoly.” Novelette. Ole Doc Methuselah stops over on a planet where one man has control of the only drugs useful against hay fever, and the machinery to keep ragweed circulating. Not much of a story and indifferently told. (1)

MACK CHAPMAN LEA “The Gorgons.” The natives on an uncharted planet were friendly, but their mental screens came down at night. (3)

JOHN D. MacDONALD “Dance of a New World.” A recruiter for a projected colony and a dancer in a tavern on Venus go to that world together. (2)

ARTHUR C. CLARKE “Inheritance.” Realistic story of the first space probes, by a man and his son. Point not clear. (2)

THANK YOU, MR. MOTO. 20th Century Fox, 1937. Peter Lorre (Mr. Moto), Thomas Beck, Pauline Frederic, Jayne Regan, Sidney Blackmer, Sig Ruman, John Carradine. Screenplay by Wyllis Cooper and Norman Foster, based on the novel by John P. Marquand. Director: Norman Foster.

   A set of seven ancient Chinese scrolls is the key to the location of the treasure hidden in the tomb of Genghis Khan, and several murders are committed to obtain possession of them. Mr. Moto, an adventurer and a man of mystery, is forced to take a hand.

   Somehow I’ve never cared for the Mr. Moto films. In terms of stories and production values, I suppose they’re no worse than the Charlie Chan films, but for me, they don’t have the same spark. John Carradine, by the way, must have been born an old man.

BRETT HALLIDAY – The Corpse Came Calling. Mike Shayne #7. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1942. Reprinted many times in paperback, including Dell D401, January 1961. Cover art by Robert McGinnis. (See image to the right.)

   I’m not sure in which novel PI Michael Shayne first met Phyllis, his wife to be, but it shouldn’t difficult to pin it down. It was not the book immediately preceding this one, Tickets for Death (1941), reviewed here but it may have been Bodies Are Where You Find Them, the one before that. (The question may even have already been asked and answered on this blog. A lot of books, authors and characters have been talked about in the years it’s been going, some very thoroughly, especially in the comments.)

   In any case, Mike and Phyllis are quite happily married in this one, and in fact Phyllis is acting as Mike’s secretary as the book opens. The two of them are using the apartment directly under the one where they are living as his office, and one morning, while Phyllis is there alone, a man comes in and immediately dies in the open door, with three bullets in his chest.

   Mike is not that far away, however. As this is happening, he is upstairs with a client, decidedly female, who wants Mike to kill her husband, a convict who has just broken out of prison. Are the two cases connected? Only in the books and movies, and the answer is therefore Yes.The dead man is a PI Mike once knew several years ago, and he is also the PI who had advised Mike’s new would-be client that he is the one who could do the job she wants done.

   I haven’t yet mentioned the scrap of paper found in the dead man’s hand, and which Mike decides to not tell the police about. Nor have I mentioned that to get that scrap of paper back, some Nazi thugs kidnap Phyllis. Even worse, from my point of view, Mike is forced to slug Tim Rourke, newspaper reporter and his best friend, and tie and gag him up so he won’t interfere with getting Phyllis back.

   No wonder so few fictional PI’s have wives to interfere (as victims) in cases their husbands are working on.

   But as it so happens, that’s not exactly why Brett Halliday decided Phyllis had to go, dying as she did during childbirth between Blood on the Black Market (#8) and Murder Wears a Mummer’s Mask (#9).

   This has been covered on this blog, and once again, here’s the link where you’ll find Brett Halliday being quoted as saying:

      â€œI finally inquired as to the reason from Hollywood [about why they didn’t adapt Halliday’s own stories] and was told it was because Shayne and Phyllis were married and it was against their policy to use a married detective.

      â€œFaced with this fact of life, I decided to kill off Phyllis to leave Shayne a free man for succeeding movies.”

   In any case, getting back to the book at hand, I thought the case, which is extremely complicated, was held together by guesswork, duck tape and baling wire. My eyes glazed over shile reading the explanation as to how all the threads in the mystery tied together at the end, which I’m sure the did. But as always, your mileage may vary.
   

THE SPIDER. 20th Century-Fox, 1945 Richard Conte, Faye Marlowe, Martin Kosleck, Kurt Kreuger, Mantan Moreland, John Harvey, Ann Savage . Screenplay by Jo Eisenger & Scott Darling based on the play by Fulton Oursler (Anthony Abbott) and W. Scott Darling. Directed by Robert Webb.

   Well done if minor film noir from fairly early in the game, opening  with an overhead panning shot in the streets of New Orleans where Lila Neilson (Faye Marlowe) walks toward a dark staircase with a white painted sign that reads “Cain and Conlon – Private Investigators” as she tells us that Cain (Ann Savage), the distaff side of Cain and Conlon, has approached her to tell her that her partner Chris Conlon (Richard Conte) has information about the death of Lila’s sister.

   Conlon’s manservant, Mantan Moreland, directs her to a cafe where Conlon is holding forth with his reporter friends on a dull night. Conlon is an ex-cop, a bit too slick for the taste of his ex-cop buddies and about to run afoul of that reputation for running close to the edge.

   There is a nice touch in the scene where Moreland confronts Lila in the dark hallway outside Cain and Conlon’s office door and when he walks away w,e notice a shadowy figure with a hat pulled low step out of the deeper shadows.

   For a fairly short B-film, the plot is fairly complex, involving a phony psychic called the Spider Woman whose scam was involved in Lila’s sisters death and Ernest, The Great Garrone (Kurt Krueger) her partner and his top man Martin Kosleck, and something Cain has uncovered in documents she is trying to get to Conlon.

   When Cain meets Conlon at his apartment she is killed there, and Conlon, knowing the police will tie him up with red tape accusing him, transports her body to her own apartment to be found.

   Of course when the police discover tha,t he is on the run.

   In fairness, however stupid that seems, it is standard private eye behavior in print and on screen.

   The playlike structure shows, and of course there is a bit of the usual shtick with Moreland as comedy relief (which for once isn’t the best thing in the film), but on the whole this is a decent film noir outing that benefits from the attractive cast and particularly Conte as a slick private detective right out of the pulps.

   Conte would later play Sam Spade in a television adaptation of a Hammett story and while Conlon is no Spade, he is still well within the slick but not as bright as he thinks he is tradition of movie eyes.

   If there is a problem, it’s the casting alone is enough to give away who the culprit is, but considering the quiet menace the film manages to create that is a minor complaint. The details getting to the reveal at the end are done well and involving enough you probably won’t mind.

   The private eye tropes had been around on the rough edges of movies since the early Thirties and films like Private Detective 62 and Mister Dynamite (suggested by stories by Raoul Walsh and Dashiell Hammett respectively), not to mention the Ricardo Cortez Maltese Falcon adaptation, though it is later in the Thirties before the more modern take starts to take form (in Private Detective 62 William Powell is a disgraced diplomatic agent who uses his skills to prey on women cheating on their husbands more than investigates crimes), helped along by the Thin Man films and cemented by John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon and the Lloyd Nolan Michael Shayne films. Murder My Sweet and The Big Sleep nailed the final screen image of the private eye for good in terms of the film version of the trope.

   The evolution of the private detective in film from the dumb fat guy with cigar and bowler hat to the slicker version we are familiar with is fairly interesting with some unusual side streets like Nigel Bruce’s Cockney private detective in Murder in the Caribbean. The earliest incarnations were fairly unscrupulous pseudo crooks usually played by the likes of William Powell, Edmond Lowe, or Ricardo Cortez evolving through the Thirties into more acceptable social types like Preston Foster’s Bill Crane, Powell’s Nick Charles, Bogart’s Spade, and Nolan’s Shayne all the way down to Dick Powell and Bogie’s Philip Marlowe. Conte’s Chris Conlon is very much in that transition stage.

   I don’t want to oversell this. It is low budget, cliched (but good cliche). It does the tropes well, the cast is good, and the main disappointment is we don’t get more of Ann Savage’s Flo Cain as a smart female private eye. There was a good concept there that got thrown away in favor of a fairly standard story, however hard I try to review the movie they made and not the one they should have made.

   Film Noir was still in its formative stages at this point and this one captures some of the feel and look surprisingly well for its budget, with several actors who will play a role in the genre as it develops. I don’t know if it is on DVD, but you can find it on YouTube or Internet Archive in a decent print in several formats to watch or download in Community Videos. This one is definitely in Public Domain so there is little worry it violates anyone’s rights.

SHOTGUN SLADE “Crossed Guns.” Syndicated / Revue. 13 May 1960 (Season One, uEpisode 30). Scott Brady. Guest Cast: Barry Atwater, Sue Ane Langdon, Rick Turner, Larry Thor, Francis X. Bushman. Series created by Frank Gruber. Screenwriter: Barry Shipman, Director: Will Jason. Currently available on YouTube.

   One of the gimmicks of this show that separated it from other westerns at the time (and there were many) was that he was a PI for hire, only in the Old West. The other being his weapon of choice, a dual-barrelled hybrid shotgun combination that has a .32-cal. rifle upper barrel and a 12-gauge shotgun lower barrel. (Without IMDb I could not tell you otherwise.)

   The western PI aspect of the series is not much in evidence in this episode , however , unless you call himself his own client. When he rides into Grover’s Bend, it is to confront a man he sent to prison five years ago and who has just been released. The latter’s revenge, however, turns out to be by proxy, as he has lost his right hand while in prison, and a young local gunfighter named Billy has agreed to shoot it out with Slade on the main street of town.

   Complicating matters is that Billy has been secretly romancing the sheriff’s daughter. How Slade gets out of this without either himself or Billy killed is the essence of the story.

   Which is neither terribly good nor really down and out awful. It’s good enough to find another one to watch, and if/when I do, you’ll probably read about it on this blog.