TOM LEA – The Wonderful Country. Little Brown, hardcover, 1952. Bantam Giant, paperback, A1190, 1954. Reprinted many times since.

THE WONDERFUL COUNTRY. DRM Productions/United Artists, 1959. Robert Mitchum, Julie London, Gary Merrill, Albert Dekker, Pedro Armendariz, Jack Oakie, Charles McGraw, Leroy “Satchel” Paige, Victor Mendoza, Chuck Roberson and Chester Hayes. Screenplay by Robert Ardrey, based on the novel by Tom Lea. Directed by Robert Parrish.

   One of those instances where seeing the movie prompted me to read the book, which I found very different but just as fine.

   As the novel starts, Martin Brady enters the story as an unlucky rider who breaks a leg while on a gun-running errand in a Texas border town. As he spends months recovering, surrounded by curious townspeople and shifty business associates, we learn that when he was a boy of fourteen in Missouri he murdered the man who killed his father and fled to Mexico where he has made his living for the last fifteen years as a pistolero for a wealthy Mexican land-owner.

   We also learn about the citizens of the town and the soldiers at the nearby Army Outpost: Gruff & thoughtful Doc Stovall who sets Brady’s leg; Major Colton, the new Post Commander and his tearful, unhappy wife; Captain Rucker of the Texas Rangers and his fiercely loyal men; the shopkeepers and soldiers in and around the town…. Lea takes time to evoke them all but manages it without slowing his story down.

   Ah yes, the story: As Brady recovers he finds himself growing closer to the community. It seems no one is interested in the unsolved murder of a no-good years ago in Missouri. The townspeople are warming to him, and Captain Rucker would like to recruit a man who knows Mexico and can speak the language. Brady seems set to rejoin the human race…. until he kills a man in a fight and has to flee back south of the border again where more grief awaits him till he can find a way back into humanity.

   Lea has his own unique way of recounting Brady’s labors as a hired pistolero; he gives us the expected bursts of terse action, quite well handled, but what he concentrates on is the ordinary unglamorous hardship of getting around in a hostile land. He makes us feel the heat, the cold and the ache in your bones crawling through wet grass on a cold night, or the saddle-soreness of long, long rides and the gritty business of pursuing and fighting hostile Apaches, lending a tactile realism to things most Western writers just ignore. He also does a skillful job of keeping his bad guys off-stage, lowering like clouds gathering at the edge of the story, then thundering in for a torrential impact. The result is a book I’ll come back to again.

   They couldn’t capture all of this in the movie; the film is set in that perpetual sunny Summer that seems a staple of the Western; characters are changed around, the plot is simplified, but The Wonderful Country is a film to treasure.

   Robert Mitchum, a great actor who phoned it in too often, gives himself fully to the part of Martin Brady: scruffy and unshaven for most of the movie, he evokes that kicked-around look he did so well in Out of the Past, combined with the leathery toughness you need in a Western.

   He’s supplemented with a worthy cast. The movie doesn’t have time to for all the personal details in the novel, but makes up for it with sharp performances from memorable actors.

   Charles McGraw evokes Doc Stovall in a few telling lines and gestures; Pedro Armendariz and Jack Oakie strut their arrogance and cupidity; Albert Dekker, Satchel Paige and Gary Merrill make tough fighting men, and even bit players like Chuck Roberson and Victor Mendoza (both as local bullies) stay in the memory long after their brief time on screen has flashed by. And the nasties kept off-page in the book are given a few memorably menacing shots early in the film so they seem to come out of the story naturally when it’s time to bring them on.

   Best of all is Julie London as the unhappy officer’s wife. No tears for her, though; Julie plays it with a sexy toughness that seems to bubble up out of the Texas heat and spread across the screen. Add to that a manner of frank self-appraisal, and we get a characterization of unusual depth and a few surprises.

   Director Parrish handles the action well enough, but this is basically a film about the characters. And it’s a memorable one.

NEAL BARRETT, JR. – Pink Vodka Blues. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1992. Kensington, paperback, 1997.

   I was familiar with Barrett as an entertaining, really quite good, science fantasy writer. However, though John D. MacDonald and others have crossed the genre lines successfully, it’s far from a sure thing, and I didn’t set my expectations too high.

   PVB is the kind of story that really doesn’t lend itself well to summarization. Russell Murray, an alcoholic small-time reporter, awakes with a strange woman in his bed and missing a day; not too uncommon for Russell. This time, though, his blank spot includes murder, Mafia hit men on his trail, and a Mafia boss’s boyhood chum who wants to be President.

   Russell ends up in a detox center and is befriended by Sherry Lou, a rich girl with a vodka jones. They flee together, hunting a briefcase he has lost which everyone seems to want, and trying to stay a step ahead of the hit men.

   The above doesn’t begin to give the flavor of the book. In some ways a black comedy, some ways a straight story, it is in all ways a bravura performance. Barrett has a marvelous ear for dialogue and a fine narrative skill. A good friend has said that this reminds him of Thorne Smith, and while I don’t see the similarity as strongly as he does, the comparison is not inappropriate.

   Russell and Sherry Lou are funny and human, and more than a little tragic. Barrett’s depiction of alcoholism is as matter-of-factly, even humorously, chilling as you’re likely to find. The plot is a little too wild to be realistic (a 70 year old granny hit-lady?), but I’m sure it was intended to be.

   I don’t usually like this kind of book — witness my aversion to Carl Hiaasen — but I liked this one. You’ll either love it or hate it, but you ought to try it.

THE ASSASSIN. United Artists, US, 1953. Originally released in the UK by General Film Distributors, 1952, as Venetian Bird. Richard Todd, Eva Bartok, John Gregson, George Coulouris, Walter Rilla, Margot Grahame, Sidney James, Eric Pohlman Screenplay by Victor Canning, based on his novel Venetian Bird. Director: Ralph Thomas.

   The Assassin is an effective British noir thriller shot on location in Venice that follows the fate of low-rent private detective Edward Mercer (Richard Todd), a tough and deceptively honest man, who steps into a nest of vipers when he arrives in Venice to find Renzzo Ucello, a member of the Resistance who helped an American trapped behind enemy lines in WWII. It seems the GI’s family wants to reward Ucello, and Mercer has been hired by a firm of lawyers in Paris to find the man and help him.

   Almost from the start things are dicey. Two thugs are following him and the only person he finds willing to talk about Ucello disappears and later shows up dead. The police in the person of Spadoni (George Coulouris) are none too friendly and he is being followed by Cassona (John Gregson) an undercover cop who works as a street photographer.

   The only help he gets is from an old friend, Rosa (Margot Grahame) who runs a minor racket as a medium and palm reader, and her boyfriend Bernardo (Sydney James) in the funeral business.

   Following Ucello’s cold trail he learns he was once a promising artist, but that he also has a streak of violence and a nasty record, he is also, the police insist, dead. Mercer is led eventually to Adriana (Eva Bartok) who is restoring a painting (the Venetian Bird of the title) for one Count Borla (Walter Rilla); there is a tie to Ucello, but he isn’t sure what, other than drawings of the bird done by Ucello.

   Much more discussion of the plot, and I would give things away. Needless to say the title of the film as released in the US refers to the latter half of the movie when Mercer stumbles on a fascist plot to plunge Italy into chaos and seize power by assassinating a popular visiting political figure, and Mercer finds himself the perfect fall guy with all hands turned against him.

   The mostly British cast with such familiar faces and names as Eric Pohlman (the voice of Blofield in the early Bond’s and the gypsy chief in From Russia With Love), John Gregson (Gideon’s Way on television and a popular leading man in films like The Cruel Sea), Sydney James (the “Carry On” films and countless comic roles), and Michael Ripper (many many films including Hammer horror) does remarkably well playing mostly Italian roles. Rilla is always a smooth villain, in these things, and it is nice to see George Courlouris in a more or less sympathetic role for a change.

   Richard Todd was an Oscar-nominated actor who had some success in American films (A Man Called Peter, Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, Lightning Strikes Twice), and returned a big name in British films in this era (The Dam Busters). His Mercer strikes all the right notes as a cynical man who mostly believes in his work and won’t be threatened or used without due payback, his willingness to follow the truth even when he is no longer being paid to is well within the hardboiled tradition of the American private eye, and readers may recall Victor Canning revisited the genre both in his Rex Carver series, and in The Rainbird Pattern, which became Hitchcock’s Family Plot. The romance with Bartok is well played, and without any phony sentiment. She is attracted to him but there are other things in her life, and he is falling for her, but aware she is involved in something dangerous.

   Victor Canning’s adaptation of his own novel is quite good. The film features some actual detective work, both of the legwork variety and the cerebral, the atmosphere of Venice is captured better here in black and white than it usually is in Technicolor, and there are several nice pieces including an exciting roof top chase with the real assassin, and violence when it does break out is sudden and has consequences. There is also a nice twist toward the end of the film you may not quite see coming that makes things considerably more complicated for the hero.

   Somewhere along the way this well done British thriller has gotten a bit lost. It can be hard to find though it has a good reputation; currently it is available on Amazon Prime. It is well worth looking up though, if only to see a master craftsman of the suspense, spy, and adventure school of British thriller (Silver Dagger winner) adapt his own work to the screen with a top notch cast capable direction and handsome use of location in one of the world’s great cities.

ANDREW BERGMAN – The Big Kiss-Off of 1944. Holt Rinehart & Winston, hardcover, 1974. Ballantine, paperback, March 1975. Perennial Library P673, paperback, 1983.

   Andrew Bergman’s novels about Manhattan-based private eye Jack LeVine are very much in the Raymond Chandler vein, which is not a bad vein to be in at all.

   From page 15:

   Jack is a big guy, bald, Jewish, once married but no longer, smokes Luckies, drinks Blatz, and is a very good guy for a Broadway chorus girl being blackmailed for making the wrong kind of movie to have on her side. What Jack doesn’t count on is that the case will end up with him deeply involved in the Roosevelt-Dewey election campaign of 1944.

   Mr. Dewey, in fact, makes a major appearance. Mr. Roosevelt does not. Mr. Bergman, who later on became a well-known scriptwriter and director, knew his way around a typewriter even at this early date, and the story goes down nice and easy. Very enjoyable.

Bibliographic Note:   There was one immediate followup novel, Hollywood and LeVine (Holt, 1975), then nothing was heard from Mr. LeVine for over 25 years, when Tender Is LeVine came out from St. Martin’s in 2001.

PATRICK QUENTIN – The Puzzles of Peter Duluth. (Richard Webb, 1901-66, and Hugh Wheeler, 1912-87.) Crippen & Landru Lost Classics Series, February 2016. Collection: 2 short stories and 2 novelettes. Introduction by Curtis Evans. Postscript by Mauro Boncompagni. Afterword by Joanna Gondris.

   Crippen & Landru — and Douglas G. Greene in particular — have once again done mystery readers a great service by collecting the very rare, less-than-novel-length fiction of Patrick Quentin featuring that slightly screwball duo of thespians turned amateur detectives, Peter and Iris Duluth. The stories are book-ended with a fine introductory essay about the author by Curtis Evans (“Puzzles for Posterity”), an amusing anecdote about Richard Webb (“Postscript: Puzzle for Proustians”) by Mauro Boncompagni, and a personal memoir about her great-uncle by Joanna Gondris (“Afterword on Hugh Wheeler”).

      The stories:

(1) “Death Rides the Ski-Tow.” Novelette. First appearance: The American Magazine, April 1941.

   Peter Duluth is a bibulous Broadway producer who, fortunately for him, is married to Iris, dazzlingly beautiful and, as subsequent events will show, the real brains of the outfit.

   In “Death Rides the Ski-Tow,” during a long winter’s night, Peter has one too many at a cocktail party and is staggering home in a steady fall of snow when he encounters a woman who, just moments later, is gunned down on the frozen street — but not before she unloads some vital information on him, practically painting a target on Peter in the process. Suddenly people he has never heard of are anxious to see him dead; thus begins a cat-and-mouse game between Peter and Iris and a ruthless gang of smugglers who won’t balk at murder to get what they want—and that includes a $10,000 hot dog.

   Comments: An extremely well-written story with vivid descriptions, nice bits of humor, and perfect pacing. As Curt Evans says in his introduction to the Crippen & Landru collection, it and its companion piece (“Murder with Flowers”) are “intriguingly kaleidoscopic affairs reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock films.”

(2) “Murder with Flowers.” Novelette. First appearance: The American Magazine, December 1941. Expanded into Puzzle for Puppets (1944) and subsequently filmed as Homicide for Three (1948).

   In “Murder with Flowers,” Peter and Iris learn that a rose by any other name would smell of murder — two of them, in fact, with a third homicide in the offing, the victims being drenched in blood-spattered flowers according to some sick psychotic revenge scheme. Peter and Iris, as usual, manage to get themselves inculpated in the killings and have to play hide-and-seek with the police while frantically trying to track down the guilty party. Although it’s certainly no day at the beach for our agile terpsichoreans (they do rumba extraordinarily well, these two), their perilous situation, against all expectations, does turn into a day at the circus.

   Comments: It may not be as good as “Death Rides the Ski-Tow,” but the plot holds enough interest and is more than adequately sustained by rapid pacing and amusingly eccentric characters.

(3) “Puzzle for Poppy.” Short story. First appearance: EQMM, February 1946.

   What do Peter and Iris Duluth, a last will bequest, a nervous guardian, and a pregnant St. Bernard have in common? It will take a realization on Iris’s part (one very reminiscent of a well-known G. K. Chesterton story) and a lucky shot by a precocious little girl with a charming lisp to expose (and we do mean “expose”) a carefully-planned murder plot against an unusual intended victim.

(4) “Death and the Rising Star.” Short story. First appearance: Better Living Magazine, June 1955; reprinted in EQMM, December 1957.

   For Peter Duluth (here flying solo without Iris), being a Broadway producer is hard enough, but when the leading lady for what he confidently believes will be a sure-fire hit becomes unavailable and her brilliant replacement gets herself neatly framed for murder, he could be forgiven for feeling that it’s just not his day; in order to extricate his rising star, get his play before the public, and avoid the breadline, Peter will have to set a trap for the real killer, without the slightest inkling of who it might be.

   Previous Mystery*File reviews and posts about Patrick Quentin:

The Crippled Muse (here)
A Puzzle for Fools (here and here)
Puzzle for Players (here)
Puzzle for Puppets (here)
Puzzle for Fiends (here).

REX DOLPHIN “Off the Map.” First published in Weird Tales, July 1954. Reprinted in 100 Wild Little Weird Tales, edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, & Martin H. Greenberg (Barnes & Noble, 1994).

   Rex Dolphin (1915-1990) was the pen name of one Reginald Charles Dolphin, a British accountant who also wrote under the pseudonyms Peter Saxon and Desmond Reid. His sole contribution to Weird Tales, a story entitled “Off the Map” appeared in the pulp magazine’s July 1954 issue.

   The product of a vivid imagination and a mind steeped in fantasy literature, “Off the Map” is a minor, albeit imperfect, gem of a tale. The story is based on a premise that readers of historical fantasy and weird fiction have surely encountered in myriad forms over the years: what if there’s a city that’s marked on an older map, but that doesn’t appear on any contemporary ones:

   
   The town in question is Wychburne, an English city that no longer appears in modern cartography. In “Off the Map,” the story’s unnamed protagonist-narrator sets out to discover what happened to this village. Does it still exist? And if so, what happens there?

   The story unfolds in a rather predictable manner, with one local who learns of the narrator’s quest showing his absolute displeasure with the notion. As it turns out, the village — or some phantasmagoric facsimile of it, does still exist. But the small burg’s historical trajectory has been scarred by the experience of a great plague, making this town off the map a burial ground for the ages.

   It must be said that, while “Off the Map” has a more interesting premise than a conclusion, the work does demonstrate that the writer was certainly well versed in both the style and substance of early twentieth-century high fantasy literature.

   Not long ago I felt the urge to read another novel by that king of the humdrums, John Rhode (1884-1964) and, from the specimens on my shelves, chose THE CLAVERTON AFFAIR (1933). Judging by Rhode’s foremost admirers, it was an excellent choice. “A fine example of good early Priestley,” say Barzun & Taylor in A CATALOGUE OF CRIME. “The puzzle is sound, the atmosphere menacing in a splendidly gloomy way, and the treatment of spiritualistic seances above reproach….[This is] a book to hang onto.” I found it somewhat less impressive.

   As in almost every one of the Rhode novels, the protagonist is curmudgeonly Dr. Priestley, whose rarely seen first name is Lancelot and who is not a doctor, at least not a physician. Paying a visit to his old friend Sir John Claverton, Priestley discovers newly ensconced on the premises Sir John’s estranged sister, who’s a psychic medium, and her daughter, who is nursing him through some gastric problems.

   His physician Dr. Oldland, soon to become a regular character in the series, tells Priestley in confidence that the cause of Sir John’s most serious attack was arsenic. A few days later Sir John dies. Priestley naturally enough suspects another dose of arsenic but medical tests rule out that poison conclusively. Sir John had recently changed his will, replacing what had been a simple testament with an exceedingly strange one. After two seances, the second rigged by Priestley, our sleuth solves the puzzle and the murderer obligingly confesses the whole plot.

   For the most part THE CLAVERTON AFFAIR is on a par with the dozens of other Rhodes. One aspect that makes it unusual is that there are only three suspects, hardly enough for a book that runs more than 270 pages. Another is that the soporific prose is marred by some grammatical lapses of the sort one rarely encounters in the humdrums. “I should like, if possible, to see this Doctor Oldland, whom you say was attending Sir John.” “But that wasn’t the worse.”

   What surprised me more than the moments of bad grammar was some unusual dialogue. Here speaking to Priestley is a man who left his wife for a wealthy younger woman. “I honestly believe that an impartial deity would count her [i.e. the wife’s] petty suffering a very small thing to put against our surpassing happiness.”

   And here is a married woman who had an affair and a child with another man while her husband was overseas in World War I. “…I’m proud of every moment that we spent together. I wouldn’t give up a single one of my memories to save myself from eternal damnation….To me, he was the most wonderful lover that ever lived!” Sentiments like these are rare to say the least in a detective novel more than 80 years old. Is it possible that a stodgy Brit like Rhode was host to an inner swinger?

   There is no Rhode biography and it’s hard to believe that someone who wrote so many books actually had a life, but apparently he did. One of his closest friends among crime novelists was John Dickson Carr, who said of Rhode that he “once boasted of being the Detection Club’s heaviest member, always excepting G.K. Chesterton. I have watched him polish off ten pints of beer before lunch, and more than that after dinner.” I gather from the Web that for many years he lived with a woman whom he married only after his first wife’s death. Swinger indeed!

   In a letter from decades ago, novelist and playwright Ira Levin (1929-2007) described Rhode to me as “still my favorite narcotic and traveling companion.” For me he doesn’t fit well in that slot. Why? Because you can’t read Rhode without keeping your mind engaged to a certain extent. At bedtime and on the road I prefer Peter Cheyney (1896-1951), at least when he’s writing about that rootin’ tootin’ two-gun shootin’ G-man Lemmy Caution.

   Cheyney was blessed with the un-British gift of chutzpah: knowing nothing about the U.S. or the American language, he cranked out a whole series of novels with an allegedly Yank narrator who not only writes in first person but in present tense in what his creator fondly imagined to be the manner of Damon Runyon. I’ve found that the best way to read a Lemmy Caution exploit is to start with the first couple of chapters and then skip around, on the prowl for the Cheyneyisms with which the books are strewn.

   Recently I pulled down my tattered copy of the second Cautionary tale, POISON IVY (1937), which seems never to have been published on this side of the pond. With superhuman restraint I’ll limit myself to quoting seven splendiferous sentences.

      â€œIt sounds to me like a pipe dream from a police nose.”

      â€œToo many guys have had to use hair restorer over goin’ out and meeting a whole lot of grief before it got there.”

      â€œI reckon that they think I’m the cat’s lingerie.”

      â€œLemmy Caution without a Luger under his arm is about as much use as a lump of pickled pork to a rabbi.”

      â€œHe is a big guy with a derby hat an’ he is smilin’ and lookin’ as happy as a sandboy.”

      â€œIf you start anything I reckon I’m goin’ to fill you so full of holes that you’ll think you was a nutmeg grater.”

      â€œWell, sweetheart, if you’re a lady then I’m the King of Siam gettin’ himself elected President of Cuba in a snowstorm.”

   Take that, Raul Castro! And the next time you meet a sandboy, toss him a lump of pickled pork.

   I quoted John Dickson Carr a few pages ago so it’s only fair that I close this column with him too. THE THIRD BULLET is of an unusual length that Carr had never attempted before or since, much shorter than any of his novels but considerably longer than, say, most of the Nero Wolfe novelets.

   It was first published under his Carter Dickson byline in 1937, the same year as Cheyney’s POISON IVY, in a short-lived series of Hodder & Stoughton paperback originals advertised as “new at ninepence.” The only other title in the series likely to be familiar to mystery fans was Margery Allingham’s THE CASE OF THE LATE PIG.

   The detective in Allingham’s contribution was the well-established Albert Campion but Carr’s sleuth was a newcomer, Colonel Marquis, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and something of a rough sketch for the better known Colonel March of Dickson’s later Department of Queer Complaints stories.

   A retired judge is found shot to death in the pavilion behind his Hampstead house. The room is locked — how could it be anything else in a Carr story? — and its only other occupant is a man whom a few years earlier the judge had sentenced to be flogged with a cat-o’-nine-tails and who’s found carrying a pistol with one shot fired. He claims that the shot from his pistol had missed and that a third person had fired the fatal bullet with a second gun, which is discovered in the room. There’s a bullet hole in the judge and another, from a different weapon, in one wall of the pavilion.

   But medical evidence establishes that the fatal bullet was fired from yet a third weapon, which is nowhere to be found. Colonel Marquis solves the puzzle neatly, although I doubt that one reader in a million could anticipate his solution and it’s hard to imagine anyone except a Carr character devising a scheme like the one at the center of this story.

   The tale never appeared in the U.S. until after World War II, when Fred Dannay published a heavily edited version in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for January 1948 — edited, I should add, with Carr’s approval. “[D]on’t you think you had better do a lot of cutting?” he wrote Fred. “I remember being uncomfortably verbose in those days.”

   By that time Carr had apparently lost all copies of the Hodder & Stoughton version, which means that Fred must have edited from a carbon of the typescript. It was the Dannay condensation that was used when the tale appeared as the lead item in the Carr collection THE THIRD BULLET AND OTHER STORIES (Harper, 1954) and in all subsequent reprints until Douglas G. Greene included the full original version in FELL AND FOUL PLAY (International Polygonics, 1991).

   Anthony Boucher in the New York Times Book Review (May 30, 1954) described the condensed version as “a somewhat conventional but admirably detailed and intricate locked-room puzzle, ranking as good Grade B Carr.” Barzun & Taylor in A CATALOGUE OF CRIME said: “It is ingenious but told without vim.” By that I assume they meant that it lacks the Poesque atmospheric touches that distinguish so many of Carr’s early novels, as indeed it does, although there’s a tad more atmosphere in the uncut version that only became available after these comments were written.

   THE THIRD BULLET may not be in the same league with Carr classics like THE THREE COFFINS (1935) or THE CROOKED HINGE (1938), but it’s a smooth specimen of the kind of story that will still be linked with JDC when our great-grandkids are reading him on their wristwatch computers as they rocket their way to other galaxies.

BAD BLOOD. Made for TV, UK, 1981. Southern Pictures / Kerridge Odeon, New Zealand, 1982. Jack Thompson, Carol Burns, Denis Lill, Donna Akersten, Martyn Sanderson, Kelly Johnson, Bruce Allpress. Based upon the book Manhunt: The Story of Stanley Graham, by H. A. Willis (Whitcoulls, 1979). Director: Mike Newell.

    Bad Blood opens with a telling scene that, in retrospect, tells the viewer a lot about how the story is going to unfold. In a small New Zealand farming community, the community men aim their rifles and fire at targets. The Second World War is on and the local, God-fearing, upstanding townsfolk are preparing to do their part (if called upon) to fight alongside Britain and against the Germans.

   Notably absent from the rather giddy group of would-be soldiers is Stan Graham, a local oddball who, along with his wife and kids, live on a small homestead in town. From the get go, the viewer learns two things: rifles are going to play significant roles in the narrative and that Graham is an outsider.

   Not surprisingly, guns and outsiders do not go well together, at least they don’t in director Mike Newell’s cinematic exploration of the life and times of real life New Zealand mass murderer Stan Graham (1900-1941).

   Portrayed with a combination of pathos and unbridled rage by Australian leading man Jack Thompson, Graham is an antisocial sort, a man consumed by bitterness whose devotion to his firearms leads to a catastrophic confrontation with local law enforcement. This triggers a large-scale manhunt in which Graham is finally captured. But not before killing more men who he blames for his failing farm.

   It’s a story that is once particular to a certain time and place in Depression-era western New Zealand and also easily transferable to any rural farming community that divides people into insiders and outsiders. Graham, as depicted in the film, is a paranoid man, so completely consumed by hate that it’s difficult to identify with him.

   And yet, we also get the sense that Graham’s financial failures and isolation are also due in part to a rather rigid community, one so caught up in the ways of propriety that they can’t stand the presence of the rude, uncouth Graham family in their presence. The real life Graham was surely a mass murderer and a villain, a man responsible for taking many lives, but the Graham portrayed on screen is a bit more nuanced. He’s something approaching an anti-hero, but not quite.

   He’s almost an anarchic figure whose refusal to conform leads to unspeakable tragedy for a close-knit community. Still at the end of the day, Graham is responsible for his own actions. After watching Bad Blood, it struck me just how subtle the director’s approach was. Without any sensationalism or over-moralizing, this New Zealand classic tells a “rural noir” story and lets the viewer wrestle with the uncomfortable implications.

PAUL CAIN – Seven Slayers. Saint Enterprises, paperback original, 1946. Avon #268, paperback, 1950. Vintage/Black Lizard, paperback, 1987, 1994.

   And Pulp is a many-splendored thing as witness the stories by Paul Cain (aka screenwriter Peter Ruric) first collected in paperback in 1946 as Seven Slayers. The prose is never more than functional, the characters no deeper than the thickness of a page, but these things move faster than a speeding bullet, impelled by a ruthless logic that goes from Problem to Solution with fast action and not much fuss about what it all means.

   Where Chandler’s five murderers seem driven by ethics, sentiment or an innate decency, Cain’s seven slayers are motivated mostly by greed, and sustained by nothing more than their own expertise. The result lacks the satisfying depth of Chandler’s prose, but it sure makes for satisfying stories.

       Contents:

Black. Black Mask, May 1932
Murder in Blue. Black Mask, June 1933, as “Murder Done in Blue”
One, Two, Three. Black Mask, May 1933
Parlor Trick. Black Mask, July 1932
Pigeon Blood. Black Mask, November 1933
Pineapple. Black Mask, March 1936
Red 71. Black Mask, December 1932