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.

ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE – May 1967. Overall rating: ***½ stars.

CHRISTIANA BRAND “Twist for Twist.” Novelette. Inspector Cockrill solves the murder of a man no one wanted to see married, especially the bride. Good detection. (4)

MORRIS COOPER “As It Was in the Beginning,” Quite possibly the first detective story, occurring some 20,000 years ago. (5)

ELAINE SLATER “The Way It Is Now.” In contrast to the previous story, a search for lost romance in a modern-day marriage ends in murder. (4)

ARTHUR PORGES “The Scientist and the Invisible Safe.” A diamond thief hides them in light bulbs. (2)

MICHAEL GILBERT “The Road to Damascus.” Novelette. Previously published in Argosy (UK), June 1966.  A Calder and Behrens spy story of a World War II impersonation discovered only when an old resistance post is uncovered, fascinating in its accounts of past and present espionage. (5)

ALICE SCANLAN REACH “Father Crumlish and His People.” The hypocrisy of a murdered social worker is discovered. Good social comment. (3)

HENRY STONE “The Impersonator.” Psychiatrical fare. (1)

NEDRA TYRE “A Case of Instant Detection.” A cop in a sociology class is forced to make deductions on the spot. Interesting background. (3)

ROBERT L. TILLEY “The Other Man.” An escaped convict finds refuge in a country cottage, an ideal sanctuary. Personal involvement clashes with the ending. (2)

VERA HENRY “What They Don’t Know Won’t Hurt Them.”  The hired help take advantage of two suspicious deaths. (2)

JON L. BREEN “The Crowded Hours.” First story. Pastiche. A murder investigation by the 97th Precinct Squad. McBain’s style deserves this. (4)

ED McBAIN “The Empty Hours.” Short novel. Previously published in Ed McBain’s Mystery Book #1, 1960. A murder investigation by the 87th Precinct Squad. A girl posing as her cousin is killed by a burglar, but the police must learn everything through determined work. The plot is obvious from the beginning, and it is the emotional involvement that makes the story at all attractive, McBain has a flair for detail, but his style can be overdone and irritating. ***

GEORGE CRONIN – Answer from a Dead Man. Virgil Fletcher #1. Condor, paperback original; 1st printing, February 1978.

   PI Virgil Fletcher is hired by a lady friend to investigate the disappearance of her brother. While Chantal Montez is a Hollywood movie star, her brother is a New York City accountant. His last audit was of halfway house for heroin addicts, a charity case.

   Cronin wrote one other book, Death of Delegate, but according to Hubin, Fletcher’s not in it (*). The guy’s not in Marlowe’s league – this case doesn’t set the world on fire, to be honest — but it’s solid enough, a job by a professional.

(*) According to the latest version of Al Hubin’s Bibliography of Crime Fiction, Fletcher is in the other book. It also came out in 1978, but I’m calling this one his first appearance, only because of its so early in the year publication date.

ANTHONY BERKELEY – The Mystery at Lover’s Cave. Roger Sheringham #3. Simon & Schuster, US, hardcover, 1927. Published in UK as Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery (Collins, hardcover, 1927). Spitfire Publishers, softcover, 2023. Also currently available in eBook form.

   “You are getting ready to be Roger Sheringham,” Tommy remarked to Tuppence in Agatha Christie’s Partners in Crime. “If you will allow me to make a criticism, you talk quite as much as he does, but not nearly so well.”

   As befits someone whose early works were sketches for Punch, Anthony Berkeley excelled at light, witty dialogue. He began writing about Roger Sheringham to satirize the great detectives of literature, and this book, like the later and more famous Poisoned Chocolates Case, emphasizes the detective’s foibles rather than his brilliance.

   The plot is relatively simple. A nasty woman has been pushed off a cliff, and Roger hies off to investigate the case for a newspaper. He sometimes make clever deductions, sometimes misreads the evidence, and always has the amused attention of the official policeman, especially after Roger’s cousin falls in love with the chief suspect.

   Berkeley handled physical evidence and setting well, but the book is worth reading primarily for the dialogue. As Agatha Christie pointed out, Roger talks constantly but always entertainingly.

DOUGLAS OF THE WORLD. “The Terrorists.” Armed Forces Radio Service, 1953. Jack Moyles, as world-traveling reporter Brad Douglas, with Peter Leeds, Harry Bartell, Karen Steele, Paul Richards. Available online here.

   Brad Douglas, working as a reporter for the (fictional) New York World has a job that takes him to all of the hot spots of the world, including in this episode, Iran, where he goes to talk to the ordinary people of the country about their view of their new prime minister.   Oil is the big news of the day, and some things have never changed since then.

   But while doing due diligence to this week’s assignment, Brad also has an eye out for a pretty girl (played by Karen Steele), but she has an ulterior motive: her brother, a petroleum engineer has gone missing.  Brad offers to help, of course, and fairly soon all three of them are being held captive in a dark room who knows where. Faced with death at dawn as the only alternative, Brad agrees to write the news article their captors want published, only … he has a plan.

   Brad Douglas was portrayed by Jack Moyles, whom OTR fans remember best as the voice of Rocky Jordan, the American restaurant owner in Cairo whose weekly adventures in that exotic city were filled to overflowing with adventure and intrigue of all kinds.

   In spite of a fine cast, Douglas of World isn’t nearly as good — there’s just not enough juice to it — but perhaps the comparison is unfair. Rocky Jordan was one of the finest adventure shows on radio that wasn’t entitled Escape.  Information on DoW is skimpy, but it may have produced directly for the Armed Forces Radio Service. Perhaps only four or five have survived to this day.

D. R. BENSEN, Editor – The Unknown Five. Pyramid R-962, paperback original; 1st printing, January 1964. Cover art by John Schoenherr.

   A collection of five stories in all, four of them reprinted from the pages of Unknown, plus one by Isaac Asimov which was accepted for publication shortly before that magazine folded, but never actually having appeared in print in it before it did. Strange to say, that one is also the weakest of the five. But even knowing that the other four were chosen from the best of the magazine, the only restriction being the stories never having been published in book form before, Unknown well deserves its reputation among fantasy fans.   Overall rating: ****

ISAAC ASIMOV “Author, Author!” Novelette. In which author Graham Dorn’s famous detective Reginald de Metzter comes to life and demands his say in future plots. Too slaphappy and hectic rather than truly funny.  (2)

CLEVE CARTMILL “The Bargain.” (From Unknown Worlds, August 1942.) Death gives immortality to a woman in exchange for information the world should not have. The “folksy” approach entertains.  (4)

THEODORE STURGEON & JAMES H. BEARD “The Hag Saleen.” (From Unknown Worlds, December 1942). A man and his wife and daughter living in a small cabin in the bayous arouse the anger of a swamp witch. Besides the basic background, the story’s excellence depends on balance between fantasy and the explainable.  (5)

ALFRED BESTER “Hell Is Forever.” (From Unknown Worlds, August 1942,) Short novel. Five degenerate people, in the search for newer and stranger sensations, enter into a bargain giving them their choice of realities. Their new worlds are not what they expect, however:
   An artist can create only in his own distorted image. A woman wishing the strength to kill her husband finds that strength only in an unhappy extension of herself. An imaginative man find truth only in hell, or is it heaven?  A woman without love becomes the Consort of a God. A logical man finds he cannot kill himself — for they are all dead already.
   The meaning of hell is twisted to suit each personality, resulting in a story that should be analyzed more deeply and thoroughly to reveal all its implications.  *****

JANE RICE “The Crest of the Wave.” (From Unknown Fantasy Fiction, June 1941.) A St. Louis gambler is tossed from a bridge, but his drowned body revenges his death. Extremely picturesque language adds to a rather average ghost story. (3)

RICHARD DEMING – Anything But Saintly. Matt Rudd #2.  Permabooks M-4286, paperback original, 1963.

   Richard Deming wrote original mysteries and novelizations of numerous TV series, including two books based on Dragnet. The two Dragnet books appeared in 1958 and 1959 and perhaps led to Deming’s writing his own police procedural series in the early 1960s. Although the series was only three books, it was competently written and entertaining.

   The setting of each of the books is the riverside city of St. Cecelia, and the first-person narrator is Sergeant Matt Rudd (real name Mateusz Rudowski), a member of the city’s Vice Squad.

   In Anything but Saintly, a businessman visiting the city is rolled by a prostitute and robbed of $500. Rudd and his partner, Carl Lincoln, set out to recover the money, only to find that the girl was murdered shortly after returning to her apartment. Being a member of the Vice Squad does not keep Rudd from getting involved in the killing, because an attempt is soon made on his own life.

   What looked at first like a simple case suddenly escalates into something more, with a heavily protected procurer and a big-time politico getting dragged in. The procedural details, including the peculiar workings of the St. Cecelia Police Department, are well done, and the story is terse and fast, with a good depiction of a racket-ridden city and how it is run.

   Matt Rudd appeared previously in Vice Cop   (Belmont, 1961) and again in Death of a Pusher (Pocket, 1964 ). An equally good, but very different, paperback original by Deming is Edge of the Law (Berkley, 1960). He also created a one-armed private detective, Manville Moon, who appears in three novels published in the early 1950s, beginning with The Gallows in My Garden (Rinehart, 1952). Other of his mysteries appeared under the pseudonym Max Franklin, notably Justice Has No Sword (Rinehart, 1953).

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Updated and 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.

YOURS TRULY, JOHNNY DOLLAR. “The King’s Necklace Affair.” CBS, 17 March 1953. John Lund as Johnny Dollar, with Jack Moyles, Howard McNear, Lilian Buyeff, Jack Moyles, Tom Tully. Scriptwriter: Sidney Marshall. Easily found streaming online.

   This is the first episode of Johnny Dollar I remember listening to which has had John Lund in the leading role. He played the part for two seasons, from November 1952 to September 1954, followed by Bob Bailey’s long run beginning in October 1955 and ending in November 1960.

   For most of the time the show was on the air Johnny Dollar, the man with the “action-packed expense account” was a freelance insurance investigator working out of Hartford CT, but traveling all over the country checking out the validity of false claims and the like.

   In “The King’s Necklace Affair,” though, he goes even further, to a small island near Cuba which one man owns in its entirety, complete with a huge mansion and a valuable collection of art objects to go with it. One of these is a necklace worth a small fortune, which he thinks someone is trying to steal. When Johnny gets there, together they open the safe where it should be, only to discover it is only paste.

   When the owner is soon thereafter found dead on a balcony, Johnny finds that he really has a case on his hands. Unfortunately, from the perspective of an armchair detective listening at home, there are less than a handful of suspects, one of which is a sexy-voiced young lady (Lillian Buyeff) one suspects lives there for less than wholesome purposes. Not surprisingly the script does not go in that direction very far at all. Nonetheless, in spite of a paucity of suspects, the scriptwriter (Sidney Marshall) manages to pull off a small trick he had up his sleeve all along, and a well-clued one to boot.

   John Lund had a strong voice for radio, but not a distinctive one. I am speaking for myself, mind you, but if I were listen to another episode in which he was the star, I’m not sure I would recognize it, and for all of the others in the cast, I would.