LOVE, CHEAT & STEAL. Showtime, 1993. John Lithgow, Eric Roberts, Mädchen Amick, Richard Edson, Donald Moffat, Dan O’Herlihy. Screenwriter/director: William Curran.

   There are some bits and jots of a good film noir story here, along with a bank heist that goes bad — don’t they all in movies like this? — but the pieces didn’t really jell for me. I believe this movie, which I taped off the Showtime movie channel back in 1993, is also available on DVD, but if you want my advice, in spite of some good reviews left by commenters on IMDb, I don’t believe you want to shell out a lot of money for it.

   Here’s a quick outline of the story, or as quick as I can make it. John Lithgow is an older man with a young attractive wife (Madchen Amick), the basis of plenty of good stories already. It turns out, though, that she was once married to a nogoodnik (Eric Roberts) whom she failed to get a divorce from after making sure he was safely in jail. He has now broken out and is coming to find her.

   It also turns out that Lithgow’s father’s bank has been used as a money laundering way station. The men overseeing everyday operations have been working hand-in-hand with the local gang of drug crime lords. Roberts is appropriately slimy — he introduces himself to Lithgow as Amick’s brother — and what can she day to stop him?

   She’s caught in middle, in other words. Does she love Lithgow, or is she really interested only in his money? Is she still attracted to Roberts, her real husband? I will not tell you, but even with the aforementioned bank heist that goes bad, not really interesting happens until the end, which is worth waiting for, but until then the tale is only indifferently — and often confusingly — told.

   A better femme fatale may have helped. In daylight Madchen Amick is quite pretty if not really strikingly beautiful, but indoors and in bad light, she is so physically tiny that the darkness seems to simply swallow her up.

   I would like to go back and see how well the ending — which is a doozy — actually fits, but all in all, one time only is the limit I’ve restricted myself to for this one.

PETER RABE – Stop This Man! Gold Medal #506, paperback original, 1955. Reprinted by Gold Medal at least twice. Hard Case Crime #58, paperback, 2009.

   For reasons best known to themselves, Gold Medal packaged Peter Rabe’s Stop This Man! to look like one of their rustic melodramas — “I couldn’t put this book down!” says Erskine Caldwell, author of God’s Little Acre — when in fact it’s a savvy, mostly urban tale of a robbery and its aftermath that prefigures the best of Westlake/Stark’s “Parker” novels.

   Catell, the more-or-less hero of the piece, is a career criminal very much in the tough, calculating Parker mold, before there was a Parker mold to fit into, and Stop This Man! deals with his efforts to get away with a brick of radioactive gold and somehow dispose of it at a profit.

   Rabe knows how to do this thing right: straight-up and savage, with that paperback toughness that typifies the best of the hard-boiled writers. The action scenes are fast and inventive, the characters engagingly seedy, and the plot controlled and energetic as a racehorse.

   If there’s any problem at all, it lies in the mood of the times, when an informal censorship mandated that Justice Must Triumph in this sort of thing, and Rabe is clearly more interested in his small-time hoods, strippers, lushes and oily promoters than in the lawmen who put in token appearances like time-out-for-a-word-from-our-sponsor.

   The result is a rather contrived ending, but it comes late in a book that is mostly pretty enjoyable.

JOHN BIRKETT – The Last Private Eye. Avon, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1988.

   Even if you’re a diehard private eye fan as far as your reading material is concerned, I’m sure that you’ll have to admit that, well, some of the books you read are better than others. This one’s a case in point.

   The Last Detective is the first of two recorded adventures of Louisville PI Michael Rhineheart, the second being The Queen’s Mare (Avon, 1990), both being nominated for Shamus Awards by the MWA in the category of Best Paperback Original PI Novel.

   Birkett has a nice breezy style of writing that goes a long way in disguising the fact that there isn’t much here that you haven’t read before, unless this is the first PI novel you’ve ever read. Rhineheart has a secretary who is not very good at typing but who wants to go out assisting him on cases instead; he has a former mentor in the PI business, now an aging old man who shows up on this case just when he’s needed most.

   Along the way Rhineheart plays with fire and falls in love with the wife of one the more important men in town. When he’s clobbered on the back of the head after he finds a source lying dead in her room, he’s up and around the next day, just fine. He’s offered a high-powered job in the state capital if he would be so kind as to close down his agency, but he turns it down. On the other hand, his client is the one who backs down when the going gets tough.

   What else? Let me tell you. He works out of Louisville, Derby Day is coming up soon, one of the rich guys in town is obsessed with winning the thing — the one with the wife — and the fellow Rhineheart is hired to find is a low level stable guy whose trail leads to a locker in which he finds a hypodermic syringe and a residue of brand new unidentifiable chemical substance.

   What do you think?

   Don’t get me wrong. The book is fun to read, and there is an interesting twist or two toward the end. Overall though, I wouldn’t recommend going out of your way to find this one — not very far, that is.

TERROR IS A MAN. Valiant Films, 1959. Re-released as Blood Creature. Francis Lederer, Greta Thyssen, Richard Derr, Oscar Keesee, Lilia Duran. Screenplay: Harry Paul Harber, based on the novel The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells (uncredited). Co-directors: Gerardo de Leon (as Gerry de Leon) & Eddie Romero.

   The long shadow of H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau hangs over the incredibly bleak Filipino-American film Terror is a Man (aka Blood Creature). Produced in stark black and white, the movie feels more like a late 1930s or early 1940s horror film than one made at the tail end of the 1950s. This is a film that, with modifications, could have just as easily been made by John Brahm at the height of his creative output.

   Co-produced by Eddie Romero, the esteemed Filipino director whose vast corpus of work includes of a series of English-language exploitation and horror films in the 1970s, Terror is a Man features Francis Lederer in a leading role. He portrays Dr. Charles Girard, a mad scientist clearly inspired by Wells’ eponymous Dr. Moreau. He’s a man guided by both a zealous quest for knowledge and a desire to create a new kind of man, one unburdened by the effects of natural evolution. Indeed, his quest is not, in itself, malicious. Rather, it is a noble quest, but one that deliberately goes against the laws of nature.

   The plot of the movie is rather straightforward. William Fitzgerald (Richard Derr) is an American sailor who washes up on a South Pacific island. His ship went down and he’s the only survivor. It’s up to Dr. Charles Girard and his beautiful blonde wife (Greta Thyssen) to make a home for the stranded Fitzgerald.

    It doesn’t take long for our intrepid sailor to discover that there’s a panther on the loose on the island. He soon discovers that Dr. Girard’s experiments have something to do with the panther’s lethal behavior and – oh yes – that the panther may actually be a man!

   All of the tension that’s built up during the exceedingly talky first hour of the film ultimately comes to a series of catastrophic and violent clashes between the panther-man and the main characters. If the movie could be faulted for anything, it’s that it takes a little too long for any real action to occur. But when it does, it’s handled skillfully and with a genuine sense of impending doom.

   All told, Terror is a Man is a better horror movie than you might expect. True, the movie feels a little slow going at times and it wears its message of not tinkering with the laws of nature on its sleeve. But it’s much better than a lot of the American horror movies released at the time, particularly those derivative productions that blended horror with science fiction and atom age anxieties.

   What makes Terror is a Man a true horror film, as opposed to a work of science fiction, is that the real beast in the movie isn’t the panther-man, but his creator. Recommended for those viewers who don’t mind an occasionally stagey production and especially for admirers of Francis Lederer as a leading actor.

ELLIOT WEST – The Killing Kind. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1976. No US paperback edition.

   It starts fast, beginning just as private detective Jim Blaney takes out two hoodlums seen shooting a pair of undercover cops, and from that moment on, events flow in a swirling multitude of directions: a missing wife and some stolen diamonds, a raid on the home of a Las Vegas casino owner, a daughter strung out on an overdose of heroin, a $150,000 reward out the window when a client is murdered — or is it?

   That’s not all. Blaney has woman trouble as well, being happily divorced and 30 years older than his secretary, who wouldn’t at all mind his moving in with her. He may have found the case he can retire on, and if straddling the limits of the law will do it, well, maybe it’s worth the chance.

   Two murders need a solution, however, and if there’s a weakness in the tale West tells, it’s that it takes some questionable behavior on Blaney’s part before his deductions can be made to work — an objection outweighed in my mind by the many fine pages of character development and suspenseful action, with action the key ingredient of the mixture. (If you’ve come to think that I’m biased in favor of tough private eye yarns, I’d have to say you’re right.)

Rating:   A

Note:   Of the five novels by Elliot West included in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, this is the only one in which PI Jim Blaney appears.

MATT BONDURANT – The Third Translation. Hyperion, hardcover, 2005; trade paperback, April 2006.

YXTA MAYA MURRAY– The Queen Jade. Rayo / HarperCollins, hardcover, 2005. Harper, trade paperback, June 2008.

   Although neither of these novels appeared to be a conventional mystery, each of them had some element that caught my eye.

   Bondurant’s first novel traces the frantic adventures of Dr. Walter Rothschild, an American Egyptologist, who’s working on a translation of an Egyptian funerary stone at the British Museum. A night on the town with some questionable associates leads him to the unwise decision to slip into the museum after hours with an attractive young woman who expresses an interest in his work. After some steamy sex, she flees, taking with her a papyrus whose recovery leads Walter into some strange byways of London and environs that leave him both emotionally and physically damaged.

   Murray’s The Queen Jade, identified as a novel of adventure, features a young bookstore owner, the daughter of archaeologists, who treks into the hurricane-damaged jungles of Guatemala in search of her mother who disappeared looking for the legendary Queen Jade, a stone that could offer great power to its possessor.

   Bondurant is the more academic of the two writers, and his choice of a flawed protagonist who runs from one threatening situation to another, is stronger in its flashbacks, which evoke Walter’s childhood in Egypt with his engineer father, than in its somewhat muddled framing story. I read this with increasing distraction but did manage to finish it.

   Murray, the author of three previous novels, has created an attractive heroine (Lola Sanchez), with just enough of an ersatz archaeological underpinning to ground her suspenseful and, at times, exciting story. A book dealer heroine and a quest for an archaeological treasure are the perfect complements for a well-written adventure novel, and they quickly replaced the disappointment I felt with The Third Translation with a great deal of serendipitous pleasure.

Bibliographic Note:   A followup to the Yxta Maya Murray book is The King’s Gold (2008), in which Lola Sanchez must deal with “a stolen fortune in Montezuma’s gold — and of the thief’s transformation from conquistatore to alchemist … to werewolf.”

PATRICIA CORNWELL – All That Remains. Kay Scarpetta #3. Scribner’s, hardcover, 1992. Avon, paperback, 1993.

   Cornwell is one of the lucky ones who have caught the public’s attention, and is selling a ton of books. Doesn’t hurt, I imagine, that she’s into serial killers. At least it’s clear from the start that that’s what this one is about, which wasn’t the case in one of her earlier books.

   Over the past two years four young couples have disappeared within a fifty-mile radius of Williamsburg, Virginia, not being found until months after they were reported missing. All were found deep in the woods, decomposed, and without shoes and socks. The latest couple to disappear included the daughter of the national drug czar, and immense pressure comes to bear on the Richmond police, federal agents, and our hapless Kay Scarpetta.

   Kay, Virginia’s Chief Medical Examiner, has been unable to determine causes of death. It becomes apparent that the FBI has been withholding evidence from the various jurisdiction, and this, coupled with a reporter’s probing of the case, leads Kay into unexpected and dangerous paths.

   Cornwell knows how to write a page-turner. As an ex-reporter and computer analyst in a medical examiner’s office, she brings an expertise to her stories that enhances them considerably. I found Scarpetta herself to be more appealing than in the first two books, though I still couldn’t really warm to `her. Given that a serial killer is insane by definition, fair-play detection doesn’t enter into the picture; even so, the ending seemed to come a little out of left field to me.

   All told, I liked and recommend the book. I don’t think I liked it as much as many others seem to, though.

Bibliographic Update: There are now 24 books in the Kay Scarpetta series, the most recent being Chaos (2016).

  JOHN SPAIN – Death Is Like That. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1943. Detective Novel Classic #35, digest-sized paperback, no date stated [1944]. Popular Library #178, paperback, 1949.

   “Spain” was a pseudonym of Cleve F. Adams, a popular L.A. hard-boiled writer of the forties who is largely forgotten today. This book is one of his very best.

   Hero Bill Rye is a trouble shooter for millionaire Ed Callahan. Callahan once saved Rye’s life (we’re never told just how) and there is a far deeper bond running between the two than mere employer/employee.

   Callahan owns the Governor of California. However, it’s election time and the campaign is a bitter, under-handed one. The candidate opposing Callahan’s man is owned by a ruthless newspaper magnate who would like nothing better than to dig up a juicy scandal on either Callahan or the Governor to smear across the front pages of his dailies and shoo his own man into office.

   Since Callahan’s family is comprised of a promiscuous alcoholic wife, a short-tempered, hell-raising son, and an ex-showgirl daughter-in-law who still yearns on occasion for the fast life, Rye, needless to say, more than has his hands full.

   If the Rye/Callahan relationship and the casual acceptance of all-pervasive political corruption reminds one of Hammett’s The Glass Key at times, Adams was nonetheless a supremely gifted, original talent and Death Is Like That is a tough guy masterpiece of intricate plotting, non-stop pace, colorful characterization, incisive wit and a writing style evocative of Chandler at his best:

   A hard one to find, but well worth the effort to any fan of the hard-boiled genre.

Bibliographic Notes:   There was one earlier Bill Rye novel, Dig Me a Grave (Dutton, 1942). Adams (1895-1949) also wrote one other book under the Spain name, a standalone novel titled The Evil Star (Dutton, 1944).

Here’s the first track on this singer-songwriter’s only album, Gordon’s Buster, released in 1968 by Columbia.

TONIGHT WE RAID CALAIS. 20th Century Fox, 1943. Annabella, John Sutton, Lee J. Cobb, Beulah Bondi, Blanche Yurka, Howard Da Silva. Director: John Brahm.

   Although Tonight We Raid Calais is most certainly a war film, it is emphatically not a combat film. Rather, it belongs to that particular subset of movies, filmed and released as the war was raging in Europe, in which ordinary people are forced to make a choice between accommodating themselves to the Nazi occupation or fighting back against the Third Reich despite great personal risk to their families. It’s a morale booster, to be sure, but one benefits from John Brahm’s direction and Lucien Ballard’s cinematography.

   Much like the superb Edge of Darkness (1943) starring Errol Flynn and Ann Sheridan, which I reviewed here, Tonight We Raid Calais tells that story of a small-town community that summons the will to take on the Nazis. Instead of a Norwegian fishing village, this film unfolds in northern France, not too far from the eponymous port city that sits across the English Channel.

   Geoffrey Carter (John Sutton), a French-speaking British commando lands in Nazi-occupied France with a mission. He is to seek out the precise location of a German munitions factory and to find a means of relaying that information to the RAF. After attacking and killing German soldiers, Carter hides out in a French farmhouse. The family, lead by patriarch M. Bonnard (Lee J. Cobb) is a house divided: Bonnard is a staunch French patriot opposed to the Nazis; his wife (Beulah Bondi) is grief-stricken by the loss of her son, Pierre; and his daughter, Odette (Annabella) who distrusts the British and is ready to somewhat accommodate herself with the German presence in her country.

   The plot, which runs at a steady clip, follows Carter as he both tries to ensure that Odette doesn’t betray his plans and works to enlist the local townsfolk into a plan to burn their crops at night so as to give the RAF a clear view of the factory. Getting in his way is the occasionally bumbling, but clearly devious Sgt. Block (a truly miscast Howard Da Silva who simply is not believable as a Nazi) who has more than a fleeting romantic interest in Odette.

   What really makes Tonight We Raid Calais a standout film, however, is not the rather standard “commando behind enemy lines” storyline, but rather a subplot that takes place (Spoiler Alert) toward the end of the film. After the local German commander executes M. Bonnard and his wife for their resistance activities, Odette takes it upon herself to avenge her parents’ deaths.

   Indeed, due to the aforementioned actions of the character portrayed by Annabella, Tonight We Raid Calais also belongs to the “female revenge thriller” subgenre that can exist comfortably within film noir, action films, or martial arts films. In this case, the female revenge narrative occurs within the context of a war film, making Annabella’s character much more memorable than the British commando she is aiding.

   Overall, this is one of the better World War II films released during the course of the war. It’s at times overly sentimental, but with an edge to it. There are some genuinely tense moments, much of it due to Brahm getting the most of his actors, including Lee J. Cobb who, although he was in his early 30s at the time of filming, was very convincing in his role a late middle-aged French farmer willing to sacrifice his life for a cause greater than himself.