EMILY RAYMOND – Little Black Dress. BookShots, paperback, July 2016.

ANDREW HOLMES – Hunted. BookShots, paperback, September 2016.

   To begin with, before anything else is said, the idea behind this series of books under the James Patterson byline is a good one; to provide a series of short novels that can be read quickly, running from forty to sixty thousand words, filling the gap left when paperbacks blew to disproportionate lengths because of high prices. In that it isn’t unfair to think of these in terms of most books published in the fifties and sixties in paperback, paperback originals especially, like the Carter Brown books at Signet, Michael Shayne and Johnny Liddell at Dell, and many suspense and Western volumes at Gold Medal.

   James Patterson Bookshots are long novellas and short novels published in uniform trade paperback editions running in the $5.99 range, and written under the Patterson byline by mostly young unknown writers. Most feature original characters, although there has been at least one Alec Cross book (Cross Kill), a sequel to Zoo, and one featuring the Women’s Murder Club (The Trial). So far the books fall into the categories of Thrillers, Romance, and James Patterson Bookshots Flame series which are racier romance novels.

   Emily Raymond’s Little Black Dress is published and sold with the thrillers, but for no reason I can see. Coming in at a slender 108 pages it’s the story, told in the first person for most of the book, of Jane Avery, a book editor in New York who spends her nights alone until she buys the little black dress of the title.

   That dress soon changes her life as she becomes more adventurous and flirtatious embarking on a series of increasingly risky sexual adventures until she comes up missing and her panicked sister comes looking for her.

   Now I admit that sounds like it might have potential to be anything from a solid Mignon G. Eberhart mystery suspense novel to a dark Woolrichian glimpse of desperate women trapped by fate.

   It’s not.

   The telling is achingly flat. According to her biography, Emily Raymond has penned two books with Patterson and ghosted numerous young adult novels. If so, I am not very enthusiastic about looking any of them up. Little Black Dress takes most of its length detailing a number of dull and obvious sexual escapades that are too boring to be porn and too graphic and uninvolving to be romance.

   It picks up briefly when Jane fails to come into work one morning and her increasingly worried sister panics, only to find Jane in the most outright stupid predicament you can imagine, having learned her lesson and in a final even more pointless chapter returning the little black dress of the title to the store (and no one would want it after Jane was through with it) as she meets the handsome and wholesome new doorman at her apartment building.

   Not only isn’t it a novel, it’s barely a story– just a series of uninteresting sexual escapades that wouldn’t titillate a convent school teen, an anti-climactic climax, and a rushed finale that seems to suggest it’s fun to be a bad girl but you wouldn’t want to make a thing of it after a guy into B&D handcuffs you to a radiator and forgets to let you free.

   I can only say if this is the quality of Ms. Raymond’s young adult fiction I feel sorry for young adults. A Thriller it is not. It’s barely a vignette.

   Hunted by Andrew Holmes is a different matter. It seems to be the author’s first published work, and while it is in no way original, it is well enough written, and proceeds at a pleasantly suspenseful pace reminiscent of an episode of a sixties or seventies episode of the Saint, the Persuaders, or the Baron.

   David Shelly is a special forces type sent undercover by Clairidge of MI5 to investigate a mysterious high stakes game being played in the countryside where toughs from the city streets are being lured to play for their lives in yet another variation of Richard Connell’s oft copied tale “The Most Dangerous Game.”

   It’s Geoffrey Household, P.M. Hubbard, Allan MacKinnon, and Victor Canning country, hardly as assured or as deep as those writers, but still fun. The length is ideal (140 pages) and it is written with an eye toward keeping the plot moving.

   Shelly is ex-SAS with a wife and a need for money and soon finds himself dealing with the duplicitous Tremain and the beautiful bloodthirsty Claire. The plot moves smoothly, and the only real complaint I have might be that it is all a bit timid, in need of a more assured hand willing to go where this sort of thing needs to go to be fully satisfying instead of resembling a novelization of a television episode. The plot would have fit Bulldog Drummond or Jonah Mansel well enough, but I can’t help thinking even they would have been less timid in the telling of it. John Creasey likely did write it, but much better.

   The idea of the series is good, my only caveat being that the writing lacks the kind of energy the best of its fore bearers had. You find yourself missing that sleazy, slightly tacky, but assured voice that the best paperback originals used to have, and while $5.99 is a cheap enough price these days it certainly seems back when the same books cost 35 to 60 cents you got a lot more bang for your buck.

   To be honest I found these marked down to $3.98, or I wouldn’t have bought them then, but I’m glad, at least, I read the Holmes. Whatever its flaws it was nice just once to read a thriller that hadn’t been puffed out to four hundred pages of extraneous prose.

A. A. MARCUS – Post-Mark Homicide. Graphic #67, 2nd printing, 1953. Previously published as The Widow Gay by David McKay, hardcover, 1948; and Graphic #21, paperback, 1950.

   The covers and the interiors for the two Graphic paperback editions of this book are the same. Only the titles are different. I can easily imagine that it was decided that the word “gay” was no longer usable in the meantime.

   Not that the widow Gay is gay. That’s her last name, and the way she carries on with PI Pete Hunter, that’s also proof enough that she isn’t. This was Hunter’s first recorded case, in which he’s hired by a political mover and shaker to find some letters his pet District Attorney unwisely wrote someone — to whom he will not say. Dead is the widow’s husband, the opposition’s power behind the scenes.

   As for Hunter as a leading character, before the war he was an accountant of some renown, but what happened to him while fighting during the fighting changed his outlook on life considerably. This may explain why he decides to work for one of two unsavory political elements in town, but unfortunately that’s an aspect of his behavior that’s not gotten into in any depth.

   Also unfortunately this is one of those mystery yarns that starts well, but begins to run out of steam about halfway through. There are flashes of good writing now and then, but nothing worth making a note of, nor is the ending anything to write home about. Overall: adequate but no more.

Bibliographic Notes: This was the first of three Pete Hunter novels; the other two were published as paperback originals by Graphic: Walk the Bloody Boulevard (1951) and Make Way for Murder (1955).

   As for the author, unlike A. A. Fair, A(rthur) A(aron?) Marcus (1904?-1996?) was apparently his real name.

TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY. BBC Films, UK, 1990. Samuel Goldwyn, US, 1991. Juliet Stevenson, Alan Rickman, Jenny Howe, Carolyn Choa, Bill Paterson, Christopher Rozycki, Keith Bartlett, David Ryall, Stella Maris, Ian Hawkes, Deborah Findlay. Screenwriter-director: Anthony Minghella.

   You could not do much better than Truly Madly Deeply, a film I urge you all to rush right out and rent or buy. Now I realize I may be a well-known sucker for Love Stories, but I tell myself I’ve toughened up some in the last few years. Bushwah: This thing had me choking back big wet sobs almost as soon as it started.

   Plot-wise, Truly is sort of like Ghost for Grown-ups: Juliet Stevenson, a remarkably sensitive actress of whom I’ve never heard, has the Demi Moore part, a woman whose lover has been suddenly and senselessly taken from her. The film takes rather a bit of time detailing the crippling Blue Funk into which she’s fallen, but she’s a good enough actress that I didn’t mind.

   Then, back into her life, for no apparent reason whatsoever, and with a burst of absolutely no special effects at all, comes the ghost of her Departed played with quirky relish by Alan Rickman, who is best known as the baddie in Die Hard, Quigly Down Under and Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. Given a chance to do an out-and-out Good Guy for a change, Rickman wisely plays it cool and slightly aloof, never actually reaching out for the sympathy Patrick Swayze demanded in Ghost, but getting it anyway.

   The similarities don’t end there. Truly even revives an obscure 60s Rock ‘n’ Roll song, and the duet/dance that the two leads do to it is every bit as memorably bittersweet as “Unchained Melody” was in Ghost.

   The major difference, in fact, is in the Plot. There’s no fast-paced pulp-novel, edge-of-the-seat story moving Truly to a gripping conclusion. Instead the movie turns into sort of an allegory for the heroine’s adjusting to Loss and getting on with her Life. She simply learns (Warning!) that you just can’t keep on loving someone who’s dead the way you loved them when they were alive. (End of Warning!)

   Hmmm. Like most Great Revelations, this one’s obvious enough to seem profound when you put it right. And Truly, Madly, Deeply puts it across beautifully.

ADAM HALL (ELLESTON TREVOR) – The Tango Briefing. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1973. Dell, paperback, 1974. First published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1973.

QUILLER. “Tango Briefing.” BBC One; September 5, 1975. Written by Adam Hall, based on characters he created. Cast: Michael Jayston as Quiller and Moray Watson as Angus Kinloch. Guest Cast: Nigel Stock as Loman, Prunella Gee as Diane, Reg Lye as Chirac and Paul Angelis as Vickers Designer: Peter Blacker. Produced by Peter Graham Scott. Directed by David Sullivan Proudfoot.

   My experience with Quiller is limited. I began with the disappointing film QUILLER MEMORANDUM, then the good but nothing special book NINTH DIRECTIVE. Recently I read the book TANGO BRIEFING and watched a rare copy of the British TV episode based on the book.

   Both versions of TANGO BRIEFING were written by Adam Hall (Elleston Trevor) and featured Quiller searching for a lost plane in the Sahara desert. A mission that had already cost lives.

   I enjoyed the book, and even though it was fifth in the Quiller series it felt like an introduction story to the character. Narrated in first person by the character Quiller, and while he remained a self-effacing enigma, the book was filled with many details about his job and his life (which amounted to the same thing).

   Actor Michael Jayston (TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, 1979) was well chosen for the role, better than the film’s version played by George Segal. Quiller has a lack of respect and trust for authority figures. Segal played it with more Connery-as-Bond-like humor, while Jayston had a meaner, rude touch.

   The book TANGO BRIEFING was a well-written thriller full of tension and excitement. The TV episode was loyal to the book, but due to time and budget, made a few changes, changes that stripped the story of much of its suspense and drama.

   Few have ever seen the QUILLER TV series. Even in the collectors market the series is difficult to find. Apparently only three episodes of the series thirteen survive. Luckily TANGO BRIEFING was one of them. The short-lived series aired only once on the BBC and was never shown again. Its episodes met the same fate of many BBC genre series of that era such as DOCTOR WHO, and ADAM ADMANT LIVES (reviewed here ) when the stuffy old men at BBC in a fit of snobbery purged its entertaining non-socially conscious series from its warehouse.

   Anyone aware of the TV series probably best remembers it for its popular theme song written by Richard Denton and Martin Cook (HONG KONG BEAT, THE GREAT EGG RACE).

   The song was released on a 45 record with “General Direction” from QUILLER soundtrack on the B-side.

   The mission in TANGO BRIEFING was to recover the cargo of a downed plane in the Sahara desert. The mission had gone bad and The Bureau sends Quiller in to complete the job. He was not told why the plane’s cargo was so important or what it was, but he realized it was vital to the British government that he reach the plane before the local Algerian government or anyone else who might be looking for it.

   His “director” on the mission was Loman. Loman would make the plans and handle all the details while “the executive” or “ferret” Quiller was out in the field. The two had worked together before and neither liked the other or approved of the other’s methods.

   After Quiller met with Loman there is an attempt on his life. In the book Quiller barely escaped alive and was physically weakened for the rest of the adventure, while in the TV episode he escapes with no injuries as a young native sets off the trap. I am not sure why writer Hall made the change but it was an important one.

   The book Quiller is a superspy, a man able to do what few men can. Forced to overcome his injuries, Quiller goes beyond the average spy. From watching the three available episodes, the TV series producers seemed to want to make Quiller a more fallible realistic human but keeping Quiller’s arrogance and attitude. Unlike the book Quiller the TV Quiller was an unlikable one-dimensional character.

   Every scene in the book added to the risks for Quiller, with time running out and others getting closer. TANGO BRIEFING the book makes powerful use of time and its passing. But the TV episode limited by its hour length could not fit it all in and what was used often felt contrived.

   Four of the book’s characters made it from book to TV episode. Besides Loman, the other member of Quiller’s support team was inexperienced radio operator Diane. The character served a better purpose in the book with Quiller’s disapproval of her inexperience and concern for her youth adding tension and jeopardy to the story. The character of Diane was badly misused in the TV episode. TV Quiller was fast to forgive her inexperience and shook her hand accepting her to the team, there were G-rated hints of possible romance, and a scene was clumsily dropped in where she beat up a bad guy who attacked her in the radio room.

Two local characters, Chirac, the man who flies Quiller to the desert, and Vickers, the freelance oil driller, make it to the TV episode. Chirac goes from the book’s lovable old ex-war hero to the TV episode’s weak link. Vickers was a minor character in the book. His appearances in the TV episode were obviously forced by the need to foreshadow the TV’s version different ending.

   Then there is the desert search for the plane that takes up much of the book and the TV episode. The TV version greatest mistake was to abandon the book’s first person narration. The scenes in the desert are among the highlights of the book. Quiller’s narration allows us inside the character, fleshing him out. We may not learn his real name or details of his past but we do learn how he thinks and feels. This is where Quiller becomes someone we care about.

   In the TV episode, plot information and characterization was limited to the radio conversations between Quiller and Diane and Loman at the radio base in Kaifra. Without Quiller’s explaining his thoughts and exploring the details of his situation, we never feel his fear and stress as we do reading the book. This left the story in the TV version underdeveloped and less powerfully dramatic.

   While the QUILLER theme song is great, the episode soundtrack was awful and let down the episode. The desert scenes could have worked better if the soundtrack had supplied the emotions of the scenes that the narration gave readers in the book.

   Director David Sullivan Proudfoot (WARSHIP) did his best. His highlight was a shot of the shadow against a desert dune of a vulture circling over an unconscious Quiller.

   The two versions differed in endings. The book’s final scenes would have made an exciting end for a theatrical film. The TV ending was weak, contrived and obvious.

   The book is well worth reading. It is hard to believe the same man who wrote the book wrote the TV version. I suspect Hall’s final draft was not the final shooting script.

            SOURCES:

Action TV: http://www.startrader.co.uk/Action%20TV/guide70s/quiller.htm

The Unofficial QUILLER website http://www.quiller.net

The Encyclopedia of TV Spies by Wesley Britton (BearManor Media, 2009)

C. A. HADDAD – Caught in the Shadows. Becky Bielski #1. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1992. Worldwide, paperback, 1994.

   Carolyn Haddad has written several other books, none of which are typical murder mysteries; as is the case here. Becky Bielski is a computer hacker working for a “research firm” that digs dirt out of data banks. She has a somewhat murky,past, with a long-dead mother convicted of killing Becky’s stepfather. While working on a current case, she comes across her almost forgotten stepbrother, and soon is digging into her own past.

   I liked this considerably. Haddad is an excellent storyteller with a humorous but effective style, and a real flair for characterization.. Becky is a thoroughly appealing heroine, and, mirabile dictu, the plot was tight and credible. A good read.

Bibliographic Note:   The second, and last, of C. A. Haddad’s Becky Bielski series was Root Canal (Severn, 1994). She also wrote five other crime and suspense novels that are included in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV.

FACE OF THE SCREAMING WEREWOLF Diana Films, 1960. Jerry Warren Productions, 1964. Lon Chaney Jr, Yolanda Varela, Rosita Arenas and German Valdez (Tin Tan.) Written by Juan Garcia, Gilberto Martinez Solares, Alfredo Salazar, Fernando de Fuentes and Jerry Warren. Directed by Gilberto Martinez Solares, Rafael Portillo and Jerry Warren.

   Some films amaze the viewer by the very fact of their existence; they stretch the boundaries of Cinema and Reality to become not just movies but memorable experiences in themselves. Thus it is with Face of the Screaming Werewolf.

   A bit of backstory here: In 1960 popular Mexican comedian Tin Tan (German Valdez) starred in La Casa del Terror, as a sleepy wax-museum worker whose boss is actually a mad scientist trying to raise the dead. (His failures get covered in wax and put on display; well, what else would you do with them?)

   The mad doctor brings a mummy (Lon Chaney Jr.) back to life only to find that it was actually a mummified werewolf (also Lon Chaney Jr.) Got that? Hilarity ensues as the werewolf goes on a rampage and everybody chases everybody else around in the South-of-the Border equivalent of Abbott and Costello Meet Godzilla. “And so much for that movie,” you might think.

   But a few years later, American Producer Jerry Warren bought Casa del Terror, cut out almost all of Tin Tan’s scenes, spliced in some footage from The Aztec Mummy (1957) re-dubbed the whole mess into English (of sorts) and sprang it on an unsuspecting public as Face of the Screaming Werewolf.

   The results recall the eerie surrealism of early Cocteau melded with the gritty feel of Italian neo-realism. A bit of synopsizing is in order here, so I’ll insert a “SPOILER ALERT!” even though I have see the film twice and still can’t figure it out.

   We open with a couple of doctors hypnotizing Rosita Arenas into recalling a past life as an Aztec Princess. A young boy sneaks into the lab to eavesdrop and later stows away with the doctors and Rosita when they explore the lost temple (actually a Mexican tourist spot) and find the Aztec Mummy. Who is the boy and how does he figure in the interrelationships of the other characters? We never know because he drops out of the story as the scientists discover another mummy (Lon) and take them both back to civilization for study.

   Then, as the Scientists are exhibiting their mummified relics (to other scientists I guess; the writers never bother to tell us) the lights go out, shots are fired and gangsters make away with the Lon-mummy, which turns up in the Mad Doctor’s laboratory/wax-museum, is brought back to life and promptly turns into a werewolf. Occasionally we get a glimpse of someone sleeping in the Museum, whom I later discovered was Tin Tan.

   Are you following things so far? Good, because at this point it all gets a bit confusing. The werewolf is subdued by a flashlight and locked up in the lab where it turns back into Lon Chaney Jr, looking sad and agonized as ever. Meanwhile the Aztec Mummy (remember him?) also comes back to life and carries off Rosita (remember her?) and they both get run over in traffic.

   We now cut to a pair of detectives investigating all this and we find out Rosita has a sister (Yolanda Varela.) Lon turns back into the Wolfman, breaks out, carries off Yolanda and Tin Tan charges off to the rescue.

   Clearly this is a complex story, and one that will take several viewings to fully comprehend and appreciate. I should note that the DVD I watched had some jarring breaks and hesitations toward the end that tended to vitiate the experience. I consoled myself by reflecting philosophically that I could have paid more for a better copy, but it would still be Face of the Screaming Werewolf.

   A British cult favorite, The Jazz Butchers released a new album earlier this year entitled Last of the Gentlemen Adventurers. You can check it out and their history at their website here.

   The band’s name has had several different variations and members. Those most associated with Jazz Butchers are Pat Fish, Max Elder and Owen Jones.

   Their music features odd songs with darkly humorous lyrics such as “The Devil Is My Friend,” “Death Dentist,” and this salute to Peter Lorre…

TIM HEALD – Let Sleeping Dogs Lie. Stein and Day, US, hardcover, 1976. Ballantine, US, paperback, 1981. First published in the UK by Hutchinson, hardcover, 1976.

    “Nothing can go wrong. It’s out of the question.” When Simon Bognor says this, it is time for the person spoken to to increase his insurance and to climb a tree, preferably pulling it up after him.

    As an employee of the Special Investigations Department of the Board of Trade, Bognor is assigned — and he’s not happy about it as he is never happy about his assignments — to investigate charges that an international gang is smuggling dogs out of England and back in again to take part in shows and breeding. In this way, the dogs do not have to undergo quarantine on their return to England as required by law.

    Not only does Bognor not like the assignment, he also has another problem: He loathes dogs. Indeed, “He had been known to kick out at perfectly inoffensive animals when the owners weren’t looking.” Nonetheless he starts visiting kennels and dog shows; at the end he likes dogs even less than he did.

    Despite what I felt was an abrupt ending, this is another wonderfully amusing episode in the career, if that’s the correct word, of one of mysterydom’s woefully inept detectives.

Bibliographic Notes:   This is the fourth of thirteen recorded adventures of Simon Bognor, beginning with Unbecoming Habits in 1973 and continuing through Yet Another Death in Venice, which appeared in 2014 (with a gap of some 22 years between #10 and #11.)

   Four of the first five books, including Let Sleeping Dogs Lie, were telecast on British television as part of the series Bognor (ITV, 1981-82), starring David Horovitch in the title role.

ROBERT LESLIE BELLEM – Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective. Bowling Green University Popular Press, softcover, 1983.

   Anyone whose sense of humor leans toward the ribald, the outrageous, the utterly absurd is liable to find himself convulsed by the antics and colloquialisms of Dan Turner, Robert Leslie Bellem’s immortal “private skulk,” who fought, shot, wenched, and wisecracked his way to the solutions of hundreds of pulp-magazine cases from 1934 to 1950.

   The list of Bellem admirers is long and distinguished and includes humorist S. J. Perelman, who in a New Yorker essay titled “Somewhere a Roscoe …” called Turner “the apotheosis of all private detectives” and said he was “out of Ma Barker by Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade.”

   Although Bellem wrote a handful of novels, none features Dan Turner. Turner, in fact, appeared only in a few scattered anthologies until the publication of this collection of seven of his vintage cases from Hollywood Detective, Spicy Detective, Speed Detective, and Private Detective Stories.

   All are set in Hollywood, most deal with the (highly romanticized and inaccurately portrayed) film community, and all are wild, woolly, quite terrible, and very funny. “Drunk, Disorderly and Dead,” for instance, contains such typical Bellem lines as “A hulking lug in chauffeur’s uniform … barged out of the limousine’s tonneau and planted his oversize brogan on my running board. He had an improvised handkerchief mask over the lower section of his pan and a blue-barreled automatic in his duke. He said: ‘Freeze, snoop, or I’ll perforate you like a canceled check.'”

   And from “Dump the Jackpot”: “A thunderous bellow flashed from Dave Donaldson’s service .38, full at the propman’s elly-bay. Welch gasped like a leaky flue, hugged his punctured tripes, and slowly doubled over, fell flat on his smeller.”

   This delightfully wacky collection also contains an introduction, headnotes, and a biographical sketch of Bellem by John Wooley.

   Bellem’s novels, for the most part, are forgettable. The only exception is his first, Blue Murder (1938), which features a Dan Turner-like private eye named Duke Pizzatello and contains some of the same slangy, campy mangling of the English language.

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   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.

PATRICIA MOYES – Black Widower. Henry Holt & Co., US, hardcover, 1975. Penguin, US, paperback, 1977. Owl / Holt Rinehart Winston, US, paperback, 1985. First published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1975.

   When the racy Lady Ironmonger, wife of the new Tampican ambassador to the United States, promises to become a distinct political liability to her husband’s career, it occurs to someone that murder can sometimes become a necessity. It’s a long way to Scotland Yard from the Georgetown section of this nation’s capital, but since Tampica is a newly independent British colony, the few minutes of delicate diplomatic maneuvering that it takes to get Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett involved are easily managed.

   A deal for a U.S. naval base on the island turns out to be quite important, and with the scene jumping back and forth between Washington in springtime and the breath-taking vistas of the Caribbean, one looks forward with anticipation to the eventual unraveling of all the little secrets that the staff of a minor embassy can possess.

   However. Moyes seems to be greatly out of her depth working with a motive depending so greatly on high finance and international politics. The feeling is overwhelming that she’d feel much more at home with the domestic malice of the “body in the library” sort of tale. Some characters, never well defined, remain murky to the end, and with such an obvious clue as to the killer’s identity, I can only say I wasn’t overly impressed.

Rating:   C plus.