From Dianne Reeves’ 1997 album That Day:

   Everyone has heard of the rivals of Sherlock Holmes. Sir Hugh Greene (Graham’s brother) is best known for having compiled some anthologies of “Rivals” stories that later became the basis of a popular British TV series. Very few would disagree that the most eminent and durable of Holmes’ rivals is Nero Wolfe: the brilliant detective, the Watson, the unforgettable place where sleuth and narrator live, and so on. But are there any rivals of Nero Wolfe? Every so often one finds a character, usually obese and irascible, whose first name comes from Roman history and his last from an animal: Trajan Beare, say, or Tullius Dogge. But if that sort of name were necessary, Wolfe would have few rivals indeed.

   Back in the Thirties and Forties Robert George Dean wrote a series about Tony Hunter, a PI working for an agency at whose head sits one Imperator Schmidt. What makes this series distinctive is that Tony does both the legwork and the brainwork and Schmidt is never seen, at least not in the few Hunter novels I’ve read.

   Then there’s a pulp series by D.L. Champion about an acerbic and sardonic investigator named Rex Sackler. This character is not fat and intellectual like Wolfe but pathologically thin and a compulsive pennypincher. He spends money “with all the ease of a bantam hen laying a duck’s egg” and is addicted to maneuvering his legman Joey Graham (whose narrative style is vaguely Archie-esque) into poker games at which he wins back most of the poor schnook’s salary.

   But for my money the most notable of the Wolfe-and-Goodwin rivals is the duo created by Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A.A. Fair: the team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, whose debut dates from 1939, five years after Wolfe’s debut in Fer-de-Lance.

   Bertha is certainly obese and irascible enough for a Wolfe rival, but she’s also foul-mouthed and money-mad and not at all brilliant but dependent on her legman and later partner for brainwork. Donald Lam is certainly no match for Archie Goodwin when it comes to brisk crisp narration but the way he tells his stories is far livelier than the relentless business English of Gardner’s Perry Mason novels.

   One rarely finds law as a central element in a Nero Wolfe novel (although 1959’s Plot It Yourself has a lot to do with copyright law and reflects Stout’s years of work with the Authors’ Guild), but it’s a rare Cool & Lam novel which doesn’t revolve around law in one way or another.

   Gardner was no expert on the history of the kind of fiction he wrote but he clearly knew Melville Davisson Post’s “The Corpus Delicti” (1896), which introduced criminal lawyer Randolph Mason. The heart of that classic story was the attorney’s ability and willingness to advise a client how to commit a cold-blooded murder, admit the deed in open court and walk away free. Gardner developed the core of Post’s story into The Bigger They Come (1939), first and perhaps finest of the C&L novels. Here’s the crucial conversation between Lam and his new employer.

   After such a buildup I’d be a toad if I didn’t explain Lam’s scheme without, I hope, ruining The Bigger They Come for those who have never read it. I commit a murder in California. Then I drive across the state line into Arizona where I proceed to frame myself on a charge of obtaining property under false pretenses, although leaving open a legal escape hatch for myself.

   I then drive back to California, run through the quarantine station at the border, get chased and caught by California cops who lock me up in the border town of El Centro. In due course I am legally extradited to Arizona to face the false pretenses charge. Once I clear myself and that charge is officially dropped, I confess to the California murder. But when California moves to extradite me, I file a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that on these facts I can’t be compelled to return.

   Except that he doesn’t actually commit a murder, this is exactly what Donald Lam does in The Bigger They Come: “The only authority which one state has to take prisoners from another state comes from the organic law which provides that fugitives from justice may be extradited from one sovereign state to another. I am not a fugitive from justice….[A] man is not a fugitive from a state unless he flees from that state. He doesn’t flee from that state unless he does so voluntarily and in order to avoid arrest. I did not flee from California. I was dragged from California. I was taken out under legal process to answer for a crime of which I was innocent. I claimed that I was innocent. I came to Arizona and established my innocence. Any time I get good and ready to go back to California, California can arrest me for murder. Until I get good and ready to go back, I can stay here and no power on earth can make me budge.”

   Is this good law? Gardner’s good friend John H. Wigmore, dean of Northwestern Law School, first scoffed at the argument. Then, after Gardner had literally written a brief for him on the issue, he admitted that the loophole had greater possibilities than he had first supposed. But I wouldn’t advise anyone to try it today. The principal case on which Gardner relied was all but overruled by the California Supreme Court in 1966, a few years before his death.

   Perry Mason was portrayed by many different actors in the movies, on radio and of course on TV. As far as I can determine, Cool and Lam have appeared in the media only three times. The second novel in the series, Turn on the Heat (1940), was the basis for an episode of ABC Radio’s U. S. Steel Hour, June 23, 1946. Who played big Bertha remains unknown but Donald was portrayed by, of all unlikely people, Frank Sinatra.

   During the golden age of live TV, The Bigger They Come was adapted for the 60-minute CBS anthology series Climax! with Art Carney as Donald and Jane Darwell as Bertha. The date was January 6, 1955, my twelfth birthday. I don’t remember if I was drinking coffee at that age but if I had been, I’m sure it would have come pouring out my nose like the waters of Niagara at sight of Ed Norton from The Honeymooners playing a PI.

   Finally, in 1958 Gardner’s own company, Paisano Productions, produced a 30-minute pilot for a projected C&L TV series, directed by Jacques Tourneur, with ex-jockey Billy Pearson as Lam and Benay Venuta as Cool. Gardner himself introduced the characters from the Perry Mason office set but the pilot failed to attract any sponsors, although it can be seen today on YouTube.

   Personally, I regret that the role of Donald was never offered to the young Steve McQueen. He wasn’t pint-sized like Billy Pearson but short enough, and judging from his role as Western bounty hunter Josh Randall in Wanted — Dead or Alive he would have been great at projecting Donald’s cockiness and insolence. Any dissenting opinions?

THE SHEPHERD OF THE HILLS. Paramount Pictures, 1941. John Wayne, Betty Field, Harry Carey, Beulah Bondi, James Barton, Samuel S. Hinds, Marjorie Main, Ward Bond, Marc Lawrence, John Qualen, Fuzzy Knight. Based on the novel by Harold Bell Wright. Director: Henry Hathaway.

   Directed by Henry Hathaway and filmed in glorious Technicolor, The Shepherd of the Hills is an ambitious melodrama that, despite its best intentions, misses the mark. While the film boasts a superb cast and a series of conflicts that propel the plot forward, it nevertheless comes across as both too stagey and extraordinarily dated in terms of both dialogue and subject matter.

   Deep in the Ozarks lives the Matthews family, a superstitious clan of moonshiners who believe that they’re living under a curse stemming from Young Matt’s (John Wayne) father abandoning his wife, Sarah, as she lay dying. For years, Young Matt has been indoctrinated with hate for his missing father and has even gone so far as to swear a blood oath to kill the man, if and when he should find him.

   So when an urbane stranger from the city by the name of Daniel Howitt (Harry Carey) arrives in the Ozarks and purchases some Matthews land, it doesn’t take long to figure out that our Mr. Howitt is Young Matt’s long lost father returning to make amends. Making matters even more complicated for Wayne’s character is his begrudging love for Sammy Lane (Betty Field), a goodhearted young woman. She is the first to figure out that Daniel Howitt is actually Young Matt’s long lost father.

   Although some scenes in the film are far better than others, both in terms of acting and in staging, The Shepherd of the Hills really doesn’t have any memorable lines or scenes that remain ingrained in a viewer’s mind for very long. This movie isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, John’s Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, also released in 1941. If you’re a John Wayne fan and haven’t seen this particular film, by all means go right ahead. But just don’t go into it expecting the type of Hathaway-Wayne movie magic that was still years in the making.

THE LADY IN THE CAR WITH GLASSES AND A GUN. France, 2015. French title: La Dame Dans L’Auto avec des Lunettes et un Fusil. Freya Mayor, Benjamin Biolay, Elio Germano, Stacy Martin. Screenplay by Gilles Marchand and Patrick Godeau, based on the novel by Sèbastian Japrisot. Directed by Joann Sfar.

         â€œI’ve never seen the sea.”

   In any good suspense story, one key element is how fate intervenes. A small misdeed can be blown out of all proportion, a moments misstep can derail a life, adventure is a single step away, but so is danger. For Dany Doremous (Freya Mayor), in Sebastian Japrisot’s novel, and this 2015 French production adapting it, the only crime she ever commits in her life both saves it, and plunges her into jeopardy and doubt of her own sanity.

   Neurotic nearsighted Dany Doremous is a secretary in Paris circa the late sixties or early seventies for Michel Caravelle (Benjamin Biolay) whom she has a crush on. When he asks her to come to his home, just before a bank holiday begins, to finish some paperwork for the ad agency she works at, she wants to say no, but can’t. There she is reunited with Anita (Stacy Martin), Michel’s wife, a rather bitchy girlfriend she started in the secretarial pool with eight years before.

   Staying overnight to finish the papers, she is asked by Michel to drop his family off at the airport for a flight out and drive their Thunderbird back to their house, but on the way back from the airport Dany doesn’t take the turn toward Paris, she takes the turn South, toward Cannes and the South of France. She has never seen the sea.

   Almost immediately things spiral out of control. People keep mistaking her for someone else, a woman who passed the night before and earlier that morning in the same car. At a gas station she is attacked in the ladies room and her hand is viciously injured, so she has to have it bandaged, but no one believes her and all believe she was there the night before when she was sleeping at her employers.

   That night she picks up a man, Georges (Elio Germano), they make love, and the next day she drives him south, but as soon as he can he steals her car. With the help of a friendly truck driver she finds the car — and in it the dead body of a man, and when Georges shows up he swears she killed the man. They try to dispose of the body, argue, and he knocks Dany out, but when she comes to, Georges is dead too, murdered.

   Desperate, Dany calls her boss for help, only to find she is in even more danger.

   The film has a noirish dream-like quality, handsomely shot on location and very much a star turner for Mayor, whose long legs, large eyes, and flame red hair and freckles behind large glasses give Dany a vulnerable almost otherworldly quality. Stylish and beautiful to look at, the film is not hard-hitting suspense as much as a modern noir fable about a young woman coming into her own, a kind of Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty awakened from the dull dream her existence has been up to now, through terror, madness, and in blood.

   That fairy tale reference is no accident. One of Japrisot’s early novels was A Trap for Cinderella.

   The book this film is based on was a bestseller, and came to the screen before in 1970, the last work of director Anatole Litvak, with a screenplay by Japrisot himself, and starring Samantha Eggar and Oliver Reed. That version was a gorgeous eye-popping tour of gorgeous locations, Christian Dior fashions, pop art colors, and twisty plot. I’ve always found it a much better film than critics of the day did, though the Hitchcockian elements of the plot are perhaps lost in the eye-popping look of the film. I’m not sure it has ever been on DVD, though a rather mediocre print was available on YouTube. The French version is available both on DVD and currently on Netflix.

   Don’t mistake this later version for nerve-jangling suspense in the American style. Nothing leaps off the screen at you or says boo. It is very much a dreamy mood piece, but a truly attractive adaptation of a bestseller of the past by a French master of the suspense novel, with a truly puzzling plot that is actually neatly and logically resolved.

WARREN B. MURPHY – Leonardo’s Law. Carlyle Books, paperback original, 1978. PaperJacks, paperback, 1988.

   Along with co-author Richard Sapir, Warren B. Murphy was the creator of Remo Williams, aka The Destroyer, who appeared in nearly 150 men’s adventure novels over a period of some 35 years, many of them ghosted all or in part by other writers. In Leonardo’s Law, Murphy tried his hand at the classical detective novel, with decidedly mixed results.

   Let’s take Leonardo first. He’s Doctor David Vincent Leonardo, a professor of mathematics at a small college in Connecticut who also has a small interest in solving crimes, although this one is the only one of his ventures in that regard to have seen print. He is also something of an enigmatic genius, with additional degrees in philosophy, anthropology and psychoanalysis, among others.

   Dead is Barry Dawson, writer of mysteries, who is found dead in his study — the usual blunt instrument — in a room with a door that can be locked only from the inside, and in his hand is the only key, along with a tie-tack that Inspector Drossner, dashing representative of the Connecticut State Police with a fine eye toward good press coverage, is sure will lead directly to the killer.

   Leonardo demurs. Telling the story is Lt. Anthony Jezail, second-in-command of the local Walton police force, a sour-minded misanthrope who thinks very poorly of the world and believes that all those with more power than he are idiots, and who says so at length and often profanely. It does not help matters that he is correct, beginning with Police Chief Waldo Semple, a man who can barely be trusted with a gun.

   As far as the solution to the locked room mystery is concerned, which in many respects is an audacious one, Murphy proves to be more than adequate in misdirection and yet providing all of the details you might need to solve the case yourself, maybe. What I don’t understand is the need to make Jezail not only a bitter observer of humanity in general, but a victim of virulent homophobia as well.

JOHN WYNDHAM – Out of the Deeps. Ballantine #50, US, paperback, November 1953. Michael Joseph, UK, hardcover, 1953, as The Kraken Wakes. Reprinted several times under both titles.

   From the front cover:

      *All over the world, great slimy monsters crept out of the seas — to feed on human flesh!

   I think “slimy” is a nice touch; don’t you?

   In any case, this is a fast-moving and fairly gripping tale of one of those idiosyncratic Alien Invasions typical of British Sci-Fi, unfolding over a period of several years and narrated by a journalist of the Clark Kent school: handy at crucial moments, and observant enough to see the implications.

   It all starts conventionally enough as strange objects streak to Earth from somewhere around Jupiter and mostly plunk into the ocean deeps, except for a few that streak across the U.S. and/or Russia and are promptly shot to space-smithereens, since this was at the height (or depth, if you prefer) of the Cold War.

   Some time passes before the Government organizes a research team that includes our narrator and the usual insightful, eccentric) and politically inconvenient) Scientist to see what became of the things, leading to a suspenseful chapter where bathyspheres are dropped, only to have loose cables hauled back up, severed and fused by some awesome heat.

   Things progress from here to worse: depth bombs are dropped, ships disappear, then more ships, and finally whale-size blobs start crawling out on land, discharging “millebrachiate tentacular coelenterates” (big honkin’ jellyfish) to devour the locals.

   There are some really fine pages of pitched battles with the damn things until (SPOILER ALERT!) they put the blighters to rout, And everyone slaps himself on the back for vanquishing the foe…. And then, very slowly, the polar ice caps start to melt — and at this point the whole thing got unbelievable.

   The thing is, there’s a strong subtext in this book of Official dithering and Politicized inaction. Wyndham spreads his story over years, with connecting phrases like “It was not till months later…” or “the following summer…” and that sort of thing. The icecap-melt uses a lot of these, as elected officials all over the world argue over what’s going on and whose fault it is.

   Well, I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to swallow the notion that responsible elected officials, faced with clear evidence of climate change, would mostly just ignore it. There’s even a short bit about New Orleans getting flooded… makes the whole thing unbelievable.

   If you can get past this, however, there’s some good reading here, with large-scale catastrophe, small-scale personal crises, and a real feel for the characters involved. What impressed me most though was that Wyndham brought this whole epic in under two hundred pages. If it were done today, he’d have to spend five volumes detailing pointless subplots and diversions to tell the same damn story. No wonder I miss the fast, sharp writing of yester-pulp!

The first track from an album recorded live in Montreux, 1990:

GEORGE BAGBY – The Original Carcase. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1946. Jonathan Press Mystery J71, digest-sized paperback, abridged, no date stated [1954], as A Body for the Bride.

   Time out for a lesson in the antique furniture business. First of all. the word carcase — a more elegant word for carcass — has the meaning you think it has, but it’s also the large bottom cupboard space found in antique dining-room sideboards. Of course, it’s also true that if certain partitions were removed, there’d be room enough to stuff a corpse for safe-keeping, and so it happens, to the newly-wed neighbors of George Bagby.

   That the husband’s brother is a retired gangster of no little repute, and known for a long time by Bagby’s friend Inspector Schmidt, is also worth pointing out.

   There never was a night like this in the old days, as even the old bootlegger is forced to admit, and as morning arrives, another killing occurs, and things get even goofier for a while. Schmitty is never at a loss for theories, however, and a final round-up of the suspects leads to a climactic solution scene that lasts for all of twenty-five pages.

   Except for an unexplained lapse on the part of one of the characters, which makes him an unwitting accomplice of the real killer, this is really a fine example of how the light touch can liven up the serious business of police work– as long a it’s the events that amuse rather than characters that are utterly wacky.

Rating:   B minus.

PETER ROBINSON – The Hanging Valley. Alan Banks #4. Charles Scribner’s Sons, US, hardcover, 1992. Berkley, US, paperback, 1994. First published in Canada by Viking, hardcover, 1989.

   Robinson’s Yorkshire detective, Chief Inspector Alan Banks, has gotten some pretty good ink from the critics. As a confirmed village mystery lover, I’d place him somewhere in the mid-ranks. Here, a faceless, maggot-ridden corpse is discovered in a tranquil valley. Links are suspected with the disappearance five years earlier of a private detective, still unsolved. The villagers aren’t talking. Eventually, the case takes Banks to Canada in search of the truth.

   I find Banks to be a moderately realistic, moderately engaging character, and Robinson’s writing to be quite good. There’s a very good story of an abused wife mixed in with the mystery, and the characterizations are well done. The ending is distinctly offbeat and unexpected. No raves, but a good solid read if you like village mysteries.

Bibliographic Note:   Including Sleeping in the Ground, scheduled for publication in 2017, there are (or will be) 24 books in Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks series.

MAX BRAND – Valley Thieves. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1946. Reprinted many times, including Pocket #668, paperback, January 1950. First serialized in Western Story Magazine, Oct 28–Nov 25, 1933.

   Jim Silver, also known as Silvertip, so called for the small tufts of gray hair up above his temples, comes on the scene relatively late in this tale, but the story’s a doozie from page one on. A newcomer to the West, a bold braggadocio of a man, but likeable for all that, tells a woman who has quickly caught his fancy that he can bring her Jim Silver’s horse for her to ride, but not only that, but the wolf who is the man’s constant companion.

   No one, of course, believes him, but lo and behold, that is exactly what he does. But then disaster happens, as both horse and wolf are stolen from him. It seems that Barry Christian, Silver’s mortal enemy, recently escaped from prison, may have had a hand in it, but no matter who the thief may be, it is essential that both Parade and Frosty must be found and returned to their master.

   When it comes to the Silvertip series, Max Brand was not just writing westerns, he was writing legend. He was writing mythology. Jim Silver is the purest, the most honest man you could ever hope to know, and if he is on your trail, you had best never sleep at night.

   The result, the book at hand, is one with the substance of cotton candy, and as enjoyable. To allow the series to continue, or so my sense of the matter is, the tale ends both a little abruptly and predictably, but until then, it’s a mile a minute through some of well-designed Western prose you’ll ever read, bar none.

       The Silvertip series —

1. Silvertip, 1941.
2. The Man from Mustang, 1942.
3. Silvertip’s Strike, 1942.
4. Silvertip’s Roundup, 1943.
5. Silvertip’s Trap, 1943.
6. The Fighting Four, 1944.
7. Silvertip’s Chase, 1944.
8. Silvertip’s Search, 1945.
9. The Stolen Stallion, 1945.
10. Valley Thieves, 1946.
11. Mountain Riders, 1946.
12. The Valley of Vanishing Men, 1947.
13. The False Rider, 1947.

   This list is tentative and subject to verification. Publication dates are of those of the hardcover editions, not the prior magazine versions.