DAVID FROME – The Black Envelope. Farrar & Rinehart, hardcover, 1937. Popular Library, paperback, circa 1965. Published in the UK as The Guilt Is Plain, Longmans Green & Co., hardcover, 1938.

   That timid detective manqué, Evan Pinkerton, is in Brighton for the first time in fifteen years to enjoy the seashore. What he gets is foul weather — and foul play at the Royal Pavilion, where someone, probably part of her household sticks a knife in the odious Mrs. Isom.

   Lots of coincidence here, not least of which is the presence of Inspector Bull in Brighton at the time the murder takes place. Once he finds out what “take it on the lam” means, Mr. Pinkerton takes it, loses his clothes, and finally has to admit he was on the scene when the murder took place.

   Frome (aka Leslie Ford) writes well. Once you’ve adjusted to the coincidences and Pinkerton’s being not just rabbity but virtually hag-ridden at the beginning, you can enjoy a complex fair-play mystery.

RUTHE FURIE – A Natural Death. Avon, paperback original; 1st printing, January 1996.

   This is the second of only three cases on record for female private eye Fran Tremaine Kirk, as she introduces herself. Both the first one, If Looks Could Kill (1995), and this one were nominated for Shamus awards. The third was A Deadly Pate (1996), and that was the end of the series.

   This particular case begins with a death by pitchfork impalement at an organic farm somewhere in the Buffalo NY area, and widens to a totally dysfunctional family, lots of secrets, vandalized computers, a hotel burned to the ground (in which Fran is presumed to have been staying), a young missing girl with plenty of growing pains, a sheriff with competency issues and another murder.

   Fran Kirk also is having problems with the new man in her life, perhaps having to do with the first that her first husband was a wife-abuser. She’s also a member of a support group for women in similar situations, and one of the other member of the group was a “very close” friend of the first dead man.

   All of this makes for a very long book, over 280 pages, and even more detrimental to the story is that none of the characters — and there are a lot of them — are particularly likeable. Well, yes, I know, characters in mystery stories don’t have to be likeable, but they have to be interesting enough in their bad habits to care what happens to them. This one didn’t make the grade with me.

CHARLIE CHAN AT THE WAX MUSEUM. 20th Century Fox, 1940. Sidney Toler, Victor Sen Yung, C. Henry Gordon, Marc Lawrence, Joan Valerie, Marguerite Chapman, Ted Osborne. Based on the character created by Earl Derr Biggers. Director: Lynn Shores.

   There are enough plot holes in the movie that not even a top-notch police detective from Honolulu could easily solve. And it’s true that the acting talents on display here aren’t all that memorable. But Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum is nonetheless a spunky little programmer and, in my estimation, a particularly well photographed entry in the Charlie Chan series. The art direction is likewise top notch and serves the film well.

   The plot: Notorious gangster Steve McBirney (Marc Lawrence) escapes from police custody and seeks refuge at a crime-themed wax museum. The proprietor, Dr. Cream (C. Henry Gordon), who doubles as a plastic surgeon capable of giving escaped convicts new faces, invites Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler) to the museum.

   Although he and McBirney (Lawrence) are plotting Chan’s demise, he cajoles Chan to visit to take part in a live radio broadcast where Chan and Dr. Otto Von Brom (Michael Visaroff) can debate a controversial past criminal case.

   So, on a dark and stormy night, Chan and a hodgepodge crew arrive at the museum for the broadcast. Among them are an intrepid reporter, Mary Bolton (Marguerite Chapman); a radio announcer and his broadcast assistant; Dr. Cream’s assistant; and an attorney. Things seem to be going okay for the group. That is until someone cuts the lights (of course they do!) and Dr. Von Brom ends up dead.

   It’s then up to Chan, along with bumbling son Jimmy (Sen Yung) to solve the mystery. Who killed Von Brom and why? Was it McBirney, who is hiding out in the museum? Or maybe one of the wax dummies isn’t a dummy after all and is really alive? Or could it be someone else?

   As I mentioned earlier, there are more than a couple of plot holes in the story. Still, it’s not so much the destination as the journey itself that makes the movie worth a look. What struck me watching Charlie Chan and the Wax Museum is how much the Charlie Chan universe has its own particular rules that guide how both criminals and frightened individuals behave.

   When it comes time for Chan to solve a crime, for instance, he somehow is able to gather all the suspects in the same room with a mere wave of his hand, which may or may not be holding a small pistol. Suspects cower on cue and they nearly always comply with his commands.

   And despite the vicious crimes committed on or partially off screen, the Charlie Chan cinematic universe is a rather innocent world in which the players simply don’t ever come across as truly evil. Perhaps this partially explains why the Charlie Chan universe simply was no longer palatable to cinema-goers in the wake of the Second World War. Soon enough, seedy neon lit bars and dingy hotel rooms would replace wax museums and circuses as the predominant locales of far more cynical crime stories in what would later be termed film noir.

DARK STREETS OF CAIRO. Universal Pictures, 1940. Sigrid Gurie, Ralph Byrd, Eddie Quillan, George Zucco, Katherine DeMille, Rod La Rocque, Sig Arno, Yolande Mallott, Lloyd Corrigan, Nestor Paiva. Director: László Kardos.

   A very minor crime thriller taking place in Egypt (of course) in which the comedy relief takes up nearly as much playing time as does the story itself, that of a gang of crooks anxious to get their hands on a set of seven jewels dug up in a pharaoh’s tomb by an American archaeological expedition.

   Stealing the show from beneath the nominal hero, Ralph Byrd, is of course George Zucco as the ruthless head of the bad guys. The rest of the players are all along for the ride, including Eddie Quillan as Byrd’s goofy sidekick, Jerry Jones. Lots of secret doors and underground passages, eyes looking out from a mummy case, a knife-throwing act, and a trio of good-looking women, but nothing that would give this film more than a luke-warm recommendation from me.

   On second thought, that may be too harsh. I did watch it all the way through. That always counts for something.

CATHERINE DAIN – Sing a Song of Death. Jove, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1993.

   This is the second of seven recorded cases of Reno-based private eye Freddie O’Neal, all published as paperback originals between 1992 and 1997. This is back in the day when female mystery writers who wrote for the paperback trade did not have to write cozies, with series characters ranging from fudge makers to herbal shop owners to mediums with crystal balls and other assorted outré accoutrements.

   That Catherine Dain (in real life author Judith Garwood) wrote a series of PI novels instead does not make them — or rather, at least this one — more than Sue Grafton-lite, however. Freddie, who is tall and definitely shies away from romantic relationships, works as a bodyguard to a Lake Tahoe lounge singer in this one, but the case is cluttered with too many friends, family members and possible suspects when the singer is found dead anyway — few of whom are particular likable.

   It’s only when Freddie survives an attack on her life that the story picks up any speed, only to be done in by an ending that could best be described as mediocre, with the only interesting character other than Freddie murdered on a set of courthouse steps, his death apparently going unchallenged.

H. BEDFORD-JONES writing as ALLAN HAWKWOOD – The Gate of Farewell. Originally serialized in Argosy January-February 1914, as by H. Bedford-Jones. Hardcover edition: Hurst and Blackett Ltd., UK, 1928.

   Out east of Suez, in mysterious and sinister locales like Port Said and points East, West, North, and South, that’s where you will find the offices of John Solomon, Ships Stores, the canny deceptively gentle looking Cockney ship’s chandler who, with his greasy little red accounts book and stubby pencil, is a one man private secret service: “… if the Intelligence Department knew half as much about this part of the world as he does, the Foreign Office’d go crazy.”

   John Solomon is a mover and shaker, friend to native and kings, manipulator, schemer, adventurer, and the most dangerous man in dangerous waters, “… he has a finger in every pie from Jaffa to Zanzibar.” Underestimate the “… little plump man who wore a tarboosh jauntily cocked over one ear … and puffed a short clay pipe,” whose calm blue eyes “… spoke large of hidden secrets and unwritten lore …” at your own risk.

   The Gates of Farewell is the first novel in the John Solomon series, which would include eleven novels serialized in the pulps for the most part and many short stories and extend into the 1930‘s, all penned in book form as by Allan Hawkwood from the prolific ‘King of the Pulps’ Canadian writer H. Bedford-Jones, whose output includes 50 novels and over 1400 novels, stories, serials, and articles published in virtually every major and some minor pulps, including Blue Book, Argosy, Adventure, Weird Tales … and across all boundaries of pulp fiction; adventure, sea stories (The Second Mate), historical (The Wilderness Trail, Nuala O’Malley, Firehair Skald of the Haradee …), lost worlds (The Temple of Ten with W. S. Robertson), swashbuckler (tales of d’Artagnan, Cyrano, Denis Burke, and various others), mystery (The Mardi Gras Mystery), Holmes pastiche (one of his was so good that for years it was considered a lost Conan Doyle story until Bedford-Jones ‘fessed up), horror, gentleman crook (the excellent Riley Dillon series), Western (Arizona Argonauts, The Mesa Trail, The Sheriff of Pecos, Bowie’s Gold etc.), and more. Bedford-Jones listed Alexandre Dumas as his chief influence and it shows in his wide output and rich knowledge of so many different eras and places.

   This one sets the model for the later books and stories about John Solomon, where a good dependable professional man is drawn into mysteries involving Solomon in various ports of call and used by Solomon as a stalking horse until Solomon closes in at the end of the book on the problem at hand. You don’t write 1400 novels and stories without a respect for formula.

   The Gates of Farewell opens in pre-WWI Liverpool where Allan Tredgar, a young American importer (or “grocer” as he calls himself), is in a dive with his friend Lt. Krogness R.N., to hire a none to reputable, but honest tough little fighting cock of a Scots captain, one Hugh Cairn, to command his yacht the Spendthrift and sail to Port Said in search of his brother Bob, who disappeared and supposedly died five years earlier in Aden. Recently a ring of Bob’s showed up and Tredgar, believes his brother might still be alive.

   Complicating matters are the renegade American Colonel Lionel Parrish and his thug bodyguard Jerry Sloog who also want to hire Cairn to command their ship, and when Cairn turns them down Parrish threatens both Cairn and Tredgar by note to stay out of that part of the world. Cairn warns of Parrish, but Tredgar thinks it is all melodrama never having seen the man.

   Further complicating matters they rescue pretty Mary Grey, daughter of a missionary trying to reach her father in Berbera, when her ship goes down at sea East of Malta. She and Allan are attracted to each other and against Cairn’s wishes she decides to stay on at least to Port Said.

   It’s in Port Said that Tredgar is led by Cairn to the little store (“Solomon’s temple”) in the Arab quarter where Solomon keeps to himself “ Old friend of mine … gun runner and all that, but the best man to go to for what you want.”

   Solomon takes an instant liking to the young American and gives him an engraved silver ring to wear as a sort of passport should he need it (and it saves his life and plays a role . He also, aside from confirming Bob might be alive, confirms the fantastic stories Cairn has been telling of Parrish, a renegade soldier turned radical Moslem who is Mokkhadem of prefect of the Bab al Wida’s or El Woda, the gate of farewell of the title, named for one of the gates leading out of Mecca, a “.. strip of coast inside the Twelve Apostles across from Eritrea — so desolate not even a Bedouin lives there.”

   That is where he will find news of Bob, but it is also where the Senusiyeh, a radical secret society of Moslem extremist who are working to throw the Sultan of Turkey, the Padishah, and his rule out of Africa and Arabia, are building a fortress it is rumored, under the command of Parrish. Ironically the British are fighting to help the ‘Sick Man of Europe” the Turkish Sultan to hold on to Arabia, where from August of 1914 (this was serialized in January of that year) they would be desperate to drive the Turks out with the help of Allenby, Lawrence, and what is now the Saudi Royal family. It’s an irony Solomon himself would enjoy.

   After a great storm nearly wrecks the Spendrift (beautifully described by Bedford-Jones at his best), Tredgar and the rest end up captured by Hadji Abu Talib, a cruel and arrogant sort and member of the Senusiyeh, and taken to El Woda where they find hundred of slaves building a massive heavily armed fortress under the direction of Talib, none other than Parrish. There Tredgard also learns what role he and his brother play as he finds out Bob had learned from a dying Englishman in the states of the lost Abyssinian treasure of the Queen of Sheba, Solomon’s fabulous gift to her, which Parrish covets for the Senusiyeh to finance the campaign to throw the Padishah off the Arabian continent. Captured, forced into slavery, tortured along with his brother for the location of the treasure, watching as Parrish plans to take Mary Grey as his own, it all seems hopeless.

   But of course, that kindly spider John Solomon has been weaving his web, and the Tredgar brothers, Parrish, the brutish Sloog, and everyone else are only flies ensnared and waiting for the right time to strike, which this being adventure fiction is at the very moment when all is at its most desperate.

   This is an old-fashioned adventure story, though you can see the plot elements would not be too out of place in the latest Clive Cussler or James Rollins thriller with a bit of updating. It is somehow reassuring that the same secret societies and mad fanatics were at work then as now — in fact and fiction. There are flaws of course. There is absolutely no real reason for Mary Grey in much of the book, and she is barely characterized, though her ‘consent’ to the marriage to Parrish is key to the big finale and Solomon’s plans, and the scenes with Tredgar are well enough written and not overly mushy.

   And, there is some politically incorrect language, though not as much as you might expect. At worst it is the way people of the time actually spoke and thought, however disturbing to modern readers eyes and ears. Actually most of the Moslem characters, even some of the Senuisyeh, are portrayed as honorable and faithful, far from some of the extremes in popular fiction today, and Solomon is nowhere near as ruthless as most of today’s adventure heroes.

   The pulp origins show some in structure and story, but in a positive light it is much more stylishly and straightforwardly written for all that. The book is very cinematic as well, in a positive sense and it isn’t hard to cast the main characters in your minds eye, Gary Cooper and Olivia de Haviland for Tredgar and Mary; Tully Marshall or J. Farrell MacDonald for the tough little Cairn; Henry Daniell or C. Henry Gordon for the renegade Parrish; Lon Chaney Jr. or Mike Mazurki as Sloog; and a Cockney accented Edmond Gwynne, Charles Winniger, or Cecil Kellaway for Solomon.

   Considering, too, Bedford-Jones penchant for reproducing Solomon’s accent it is just as well he isn’t on stage for long in most of the books: “Paradise is werry nice no doubt; but I says as ’ow earth ’as its good points likewise.” A little of that goes a long way, but it is a small complaint about a splendid adventure series worthy to stand with Rider Haggard and Talbot Mundy, and dare I say it, John Buchan.

CRIME, INC. PRC, 1945. Leo Carrillo, Tom Neal, Martha Tilton, Lionel Atwill, Grant Mitchell, Sheldon Leonard, Harry Shannon, Danny Morton, Virginia Vale. Director: Lew Landers.

   Some reviewers believe this to be one of bottom-rung studio PRC’s better efforts, and while this may be true, it doesn’t mean that it’s very good. The plot is perfunctory at best, and while viewers in 1945 may have enjoyed watching Martha Tilton sing, the songs do nothing to hold the rest of the story together, nothing more than an out-and-out crime film, some scenes of which are filmed in a nightclub.

   While Leo Carrillo gets top billing as a mid-level higher-up in a local crime syndicate, this is really Tom Neal’s movie, from beginning to end. He plays a brash young reporter (the only other kind in movies like this are the old embittered ones) who gets an edge on the police by befriending an upwardly mobile gangster (Danny Morton) who is making enemies of the gang currently in power.

   It may or may not be relevant that Martha Tilton plays the latter’s sister, so she gets to have more lines to say than in some of the other movies she was in. She acquits herself well, but then again so do most of the other players, most of them long-time veterans of movies like this. It’s only too bad they didn’t have better lines to say.

PAT McGERR – Save the Witness. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1949. No paperback edition.

   Traveling to Rio to report on politics there, Andy Callahan chooses to go by freighter. It will be relaxing, he thinks, and he will be able to finish Act II of his play. With a doctor aboard who gave his wife poison “accidentally” and the doctor’s cousin traveling with him given to discourse on the most personal subjects, trouble ensues.

   When the cousin is lost overboard, neither the captain nor most of the passengers, for varying at least to them valid grounds, want the death investigated. Callahan is sure it’s murder and sure the doctor did it. He is also certain there was a witness, keeping quiet for an unknown reason, whom he must discover before the witness becomes a victim.

   Good but not great McGerr.

Editorial Comment:   My review of Pat McGerr’s Follow, As the Night also includes a short career perspective of the author. (Follow the link.)

From Melody Gardot’s 2009 CD My One and Only Thrill:

ATTACK! United Artists, 1956. Jack Palance, Eddie Albert, Lee Marvin, Robert Strauss, Richard Jaeckel, Buddy Ebsen. Director: Robert Aldrich.

   Jack Palance, whose extensive movie career ranged from art house to grindhouse, starred in two World War II films directed by auteur Robert Aldrich; namely, Attack! (1956) and Ten Seconds to Hell (1959). I happened to watch the second of these two films about a year ago and went so far as to re-watch it about six months after that to get a better appreciation for Aldrich’s skillful – one might even say, singular – aesthetic.

   As far as war films go, Ten Seconds to Hell is a fairly untraditional one, both in terms of subject matter and visual presentation. In that movie, Palance, along with Jeff Chandler, portray defeated German soldiers tasked with dismantling unexploded Allied ordinances left in the obliterated cities of the newly defeated Third Reich. Filmed in black and white, the movie presents the men in shades of grey, reflecting their morally compromised position as former German soldiers now nominally working for the Allies.

   The film is not only bereft of active combat sequences, but it is also an exceedingly claustrophobic one, with scenes often filmed in confined, semi-interior settings in which the near possibility of death looms large over the proceedings. Death, such as it occurs, is the indirect, long-term result of prior human action rather than a fate delivered immediately at the hands of a gun or a tank turret.

   The same cannot be said for Attack!, the first of the two Aldrich-Palance war film collaborations. In this earlier film, death is a cruel, personal fate that comes as the direct, immediate result of human action or, as in the case of the opening sequence of the film, human inaction. The movie opens fairly quickly into a gritty combat scene. In a battle set outside a Belgian city, Lt. Joe Costa (Palance) is hoping to get support for his men, but unfortunately for his men that doesn’t come to pass. The reason, as we soon learn is that the company’s CO, Captain Cooney (Eddie Albert in a stellar performance) is a drunken coward who never wanted to be in combat and just wants to make his father proud.

   After the disaster on the battlefield, Costa, along with Lt. Harold Woodruff (William Smithers) are determined to let Lt. Col. Clyde Bartlett (Lee Marvin) know how little they think of Cooney. There’s a problem, however. Cooney hails from the same Southern town as Bartlett. Not only that, the two men have known each other since childhood and Bartlett once clerked for Cooney’s father, a local judge who we are to understand to be a big man in a small pond. Bartlett, who isn’t completely unaware as to what type of man Captain Cooney is, isn’t about to do anything to jeopardize his relationship with his friend’s politically influential father.

   When Cooney orders Costa and his men into a yet another unnecessarily dangerous combat situation, Costa loses his cool. He threatens Cooney with death should the clearly incompetent captain falter again in his judgment. Not surprisingly, Costa and his men get pinned down in a farmhouse, only to be deprived of assistance from Cooney. It’s at that moment that we realize that Costa was deadly serious about returning back to base and murdering his increasingly erratic and inebriated captain.

   This, of course, makes Attack! a particularly subversive combat film, one that the Defense Department officially refused to grant production assistance. The enemy as it is presented in Attack! is not so much the anonymous, nearly faceless German soldiers on the opposite side of the battlefield, but rather the company’s commanding officer.

   Albert portrays the drunken, cowardly Cooney with nearly perfect combination of pathos and rage, making him an individual to be pitied as much as feared. Trust me when I say that the scene in which the mortally wounded Costa returns to confront the drunken, whimpering Cooney is wartime drama at its best.

   Aldrich, far more than most directors, knew how to get the very best out of Palance, as his performance is simply breathtaking to behold in this gritty, morally complex war film. I wouldn’t go so far as to posit that Attack! is a particularly pleasant viewing experience, but it’s certainly a nearly unforgettable one.