BERNARD DOUGALL – The Singing Corpse. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1943. Pony Book #46, paperback, 1945.

   This is the second of two mystery novels by an author, Bernard Dougall, much better known in his day as a scriptwriter for such radio shows as Maxwell House Show Boat, Front Page Drama and Jungle Jim. As a nephew of Jerome Kern, he was also an occasional Broadway lyricist.

   There is a strong musical component to The Singing Corpse as well, as the first of two murder victims is a much disliked female singer for a small nightclub band, and the second the group’s traveling manager.

   Tackling the case with only a purely amateur standing is Steve Borden, husband of the band’s other vocalist, Linda Sheridan, a pair who also appeared in Dougall’s first mystery, I Don’t Scare Easy (Dodd Mead, 1941). The work of making a success of it in the big band era is gone into in fine detail, but this otherwise lively and breezy tale is undone by an utter lack of knowledge how the police and district attorney actually handle a homicide. From page 108 on, out of 186, the book lapses into bland and nearly incoherent storytelling.

   Not a keeper.

80,000 SUSPECTS. J. Arthur Rank, UK, 1963. Richard Johnson, Claire Bloom, Yolande Dolan, Cyril Cussack, Michael Goodliffe, Mervyn Johns. Based on the novel The Pillars of Midnight by Elleston Trevor. Written and directed by Val Guest.

   A tense medical disaster movie with soap opera undertones, 80,000 Suspects, based on the novel The Pillars of Midnight by Elleston Trevor (Flight of the Phoenix, The Quiller Memorandum as Adam Hall …) takes place in the vacation spot of Bath in England starting on a bitter cold and snowy New Year’s Eve as Dr. Stephen Monks (Richard Johnson) and his wife Julia (Claire Bloom) are about to find their lives upended by lies, deceit, and an outbreak of a deadly disease.

   After a New Year’s party from Hell ends up with Ruth (Yolande Donlan), the drunken wife of Dr. Monks’ colleague Dr. Clifford Preston (Michael Goodliffe), confessing to Julia she had an affair with Stephen, he is called into the hospital on the eve of their European vacation to see a patient who proves to have smallpox.

   As the city tries to muster forces to prevent an outbreak and trace the path of the original victim, tensions rise with overtaxed forces, raw nerves, and guilty secrets all overshadowed by the specter of the disease.

   At times it is all a shade overdone, but in general. there are top notch performances all around from leads Johnson (who manages to be both heroic, flustered, guilty, and annoyed all at once) and Bloom (who pulls off hurt, betrayed, frightened, and obviously in love at the same time), but also Cyril Cussack as Father McGuire, a canny priest with an eye for sin, Goodliffe as the too good Dr. Preston who knows all too well what his wandering wife is and who she has wandered with, and Mervyn Johns as Buckridge, the overtaxed policeman in charge, contribute to a suspenseful adult film that holds the interest and builds quite a bit of understated suspense.

   Along the way, Monks will see his love for his wife tested and deal with lingering feelings for the woman he had an affair with, Julia will face death from the deadly disease and betrayal by the man she loves, and a twist will put the whole city at risk when it seems everything is finally under control. The soap opera is never allowed to crowd out the other elements, but instead used as counterpoint to the immensity of the problem at hand.

   It is common for viewers to complain about soap opera elements in this sort of film, but they are there to remind you that life goes on even in a crisis, and that the people responsible for handling such things are under pressures of their own at the same time.

   The Bath locations are well used, as is the winter landscape (apparently 1963 was one of the worst winters on record and it shows). The drama is understated and well handled by a solid cast of familiar British actors and actresses with more familiar faces than names.

   A few minor quibbles, smallpox vaccinations are given for life, boosters only given if you have gone years without them, and the disease is kept confined to Bath awfully easily, even though one key character travels to London with no one seeming to be concerned, but those are minor things.

   All in all, this is an attractive little film with a good cast and an intelligent script well written and directed by veteran Val Guest. It doesn’t hurt that it is based on a novel by Elleston Trevor (Trevor Dudley Smith), who was a fine suspense and adventure novelist as Trevor long before he created Quiller under his Adam Hall pseudonym.

ELISABETH BOWERS – No Forwarding Address. Meg Lacey #2. Seal Press, hardcover, 1991; trade paperback,, 1994.

   I didn’t have really high expectations for this, as it was only a second novel, published by a specialty press devoted to women writers and feminist issues. I was pleasantly surprised, and if you think you detect condescension, you misapprehend; its just that I’ve found that -isms (whatever the brand) and fiction often mix poorly, and I always approach`books with that potential cautiously.

   Meg Lacey is a middle-aged, divorced private detective in Vancouver, British Columbia. She is hired to find a client’s sister, who is believed to be mentally disturbed and has left home with her small son. The simple (?) job leads to two murders, and more trouble then she could imagine.

   I found Meg to be a very appealing character, strongly but not shrilly feminist, capable, and not inured to the horrors that human beings visit upon each other. The book isn’t without its faults; the relationship with the police (the Achilles heel of so many PI novels) was quite unrealistic, and some elements of the plot seemed unlikely at best.

   The writing, however, was very good, and I enjoyed the book. Recommended.

Bibliographic Note:   The first book in this two book series was Ladies’ Night (Seal, 1988). There was not a third.

ANGEL UNCHAINED. American International Pictures, 1970. Don Stroud, Luke Askew, Larry Bishop, Tyne Daly, Neil Moran, Jean Marie, Aldo Ray. Director: Lee Madden.

   You might find this a bit surprising, but Angel Unchained is a minor, if not completely kitschy, gem. Based on the premise of “what would happen if a biker outfit and a bunch of hippies teamed up against a bunch of rednecks,” you might think that this American International exploitation film would be yet another completely forgettable biker film. Solid performances by stars Don Stroud and Larry Bishop as biker buddies, a cameo by veteran character actor Aldo Ray as the local sheriff, and a genuinely heartfelt ending all ensure that this movie roars right along.

   Soon after Angel (Don Stroud) decides to leave his biker outfit and set out on his own, he runs into a situation at a gas station when he witnesses townie rednecks harassing a couple of hippies. Angel decides he’s going to side with the hippies. After all, they weren’t doing anything wrong.

   This leads him straight to the hippie agricultural commune on the outskirts of town, where he falls for Merilee, a local hippie girl (Tyne Daly) and forms a bond with commune leader, Tremaine (Luke Askew). When the townies threaten the commune with annihilation, Tremaine urges Angel to enlist the help of biker leader Pilot (Larry Bishop) and his old crew in order to stave off the redneck horde. So the bikers and the hippies have to learn to work together for a common purpose!

   Add in some both comedic and tragic moments, an Indian medicine man with a penchant for peyote-laced chocolate chip cookies, and some action sequences and you’ve got yourself one genre bending biker-themed, “hippiesploitation” film.

   For those skeptics out there, I’d recommend watching this movie, if for no other reason, for the scene in which Pilot has a polite conversation about the weather with the sheriff (Aldo Ray) right as the bikers and the townies go at it in a parking lot. It’s one of those quirky, completely mesmerizing little scenes that dot so many 1970s low budget productions and one that makes the occasionally overly formulaic Angel Unchained worth seeking out.

   If I had gone to New York for this year’s Edgars dinner, I would have known a few weeks sooner. As it was, I read the news in the program booklet, which reached me in the mail a few days ago. Among the MWA members who died in 2015 was one I knew. His name was Charles Runyon. To friends he was Chuck.

   He was born in rural Missouri in 1928 and died last June, a few hours short of his 87th birthday. He was well-known in the science-fiction field and also as a writer of paperback crime-suspense novels like THE PRETTIEST GIRL I EVER KILLED (1965) and the Edgar-nominated POWER KILL (1972). My first contact with him was more than three decades ago, probably in the year that will be forever linked with George Orwell. His first story for Manhunt had been adapted into an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and I wanted to include it in my anthology HITCHCOCK IN PRIME TIME (1985), which brought together twenty tales that had served as episodes for that long-running series, with each author who was alive and willing being offered a bonus if he or she would write an afterword for the book. (For those who were unwilling or dead I did the honors.) Chuck was both alive and willing and contributed by far the longest afterword of the twenty.

   A few years later, on my way back from a gig somewhere west of St. Louis, Chuck invited my late wife and me to stop off in the small Missouri town where he was then living and visit with him. We did. I remember it was a Sunday morning. While I was using the facilities, Patty started asking Chuck about his work, and when I came back to the conversation she told me excitedly that Chuck had just told her he’d ghosted three of the paperback originals published in the Sixties as by Ellery Queen.

   For me this was tremendous news. I had been trying to track down the authors of all those faux-EQ paperbacks but was still missing some. Suddenly out of the blue, three more pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place. Patty: Thank you, thank you, thank you.

   The Queen paperback originals had come about during the years when Manny Lee, whose function in the partnership had been to expand his cousin Fred Dannay’s lengthy synopses into novels, was suffering from writer’s block. At the same time the literary agency representing the cousins was looking for ways to expand the Queen readership beyond the confines of formal detective fiction. The result was an arrangement whereby other clients of the agency would be paid a flat fee per book to write paperback novels — standalones, without Ellery or the other Queen series characters — to be edited by Manny and published as by Queen.

   It was a terrible idea, which Fred Dannay strongly opposed, but in view of Manny’s situation and the large family he had to support, there seemed no alternative but to agree. Between 1961 and 1972 a total of 28 books ghosted by nine authors were published under this arrangement. In order of their assumption of the Queen byline, the authors were Stephen Marlowe (1), Richard Deming (9), Talmage Powell (6), Henry Kane (1), Fletcher Flora (3), Jack Vance (3), Chuck Runyon (3), Walt Sheldon (1), and Edward D. Hoch (1). Jack Vance (1916-2014) was the longest-lived of the nine but Runyon was the last man standing.

   He had authored a few paperback original crime novels for Fawcett Gold Medal and some hardboiled stories for Manhunt when he took on the Queen mantle, debuting with THE LAST SCORE (Pocket Books pb #50486, 1964), which Anthony Boucher in the Times Book Review (January 24, 1965) rightly called “a straight-out adventure thriller.” Tough tourist guide Reid Rance is hired to chaperon a wealthy teen-age sexpot on a journey through Mexico, a country with which Runyon was intimately acquainted. When the girl is kidnapped and held for ransom, our macho protagonist doesn’t bother to notify the authorities but launches a one-man war against the abductors. The background is vividly evoked, the descriptions of a marijuana “high” ring true, and despite some implausibilities in the slender storyline this is a model of men’s-magazine adventure fiction. “Good violent excitement,” said Boucher, “tightly told.” But — an Ellery Queen novel???

   Runyon brought another macho action yarn under the EQ umbrella in THE KILLER TOUCH (Pocket Books pb #50494, 1965). A tough Florida cop, tormented by a wound and his guilt at killing a teen-ager in line of duty, comes to a tropical island resort where a gang of thieves headed by a doom-haunted sadistic intellectual has just moved in after pulling off a diamond robbery.

   The writing is vivid, the incidents lurid, the climax rushed, and Runyon crams in enough torture scenes, sex teasing and carnage to satisfy the most rabid. Was Boucher turned off by all the bloodletting? For whatever reason he chose not to review this one.

   Roughly four years passed before Runyon sailed under the EQ flag for the last time. KISS AND KILL (Dell pb #4567, 1969) is a tornado-paced novel of pursuit and menace complete with sex, sadism, machismo and a psychopathic creep. When a young Chicago housewife vanishes after returning from a tour of — here we go again! — Mexico, her distraught husband and a local PI take up the trail and soon discover that everyone else on that tour has either disappeared or suffered a violent death.

   About halfway through the book the action shifts to south of the border and the two urban male protagonists, joined by a woman photographer from St. Louis, become instant experts at guerrilla warfare against professional killers. But neither this implausible development nor the recycling of tough-guy fiction’s most overused climactic “surprise” diminishes the pure headlong storytelling drive that makes Runyon’s ultimate men’s-mag adventure unputdownable. Boucher didn’t review this one either but not by choice: he had died the year before it came out.

   From the Runyon file in one of my cabinets I discovered something that thanks to old age I had totally forgotten: Chuck and his wife had actually stayed with Patty and me around Christmastime one year, and we had hosted a little party to introduce him to some other St. Louis-area mystery writers. Several of his novels are on my shelves, a few of them inscribed to me, probably during his visit. If those who are interested in the books he wrote under his own name follow this link to Steve’s primary Mystery*File website for an interview conducted several years ago by Ed Gorman. I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about Chuck’s life and work. I only wish I had known him better.

HIT LADY. Made-for-TV, Spelling-Goldberg / ABC-TV, 08 October 1974. Yvette Mimieux, Joseph Campanella, Clu Gulager, Dack Rambo, Keenan Wynn. Screenwriter: Yvette Mimieux. Director: Tracy Keenan Wynn.

   It must have seemed to be a good idea on paper, or even in publicity stills, as Yvette Mimieux does look very good in a bikini as a drop-dead gorgeous assassin-for-hire in this made for ABC-TV movie production. While romancing would-be targets, she has a boy friend on the side whom she must keep the truth from. But from there the story is extremely weak, and there are huge questions left unanswered — if not gaping holes in logic — in terms of the final product, even regarding the “surprise” twist at the end.

   I was going to say more, but why should I? I’ve already said everything I can think of to say.

JOHN M. PATTERSON – Doubly Dead. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1969. Curtis #6118, US, paperback, no date. First published in the UK by Robert Hale, hardcover, 1969.

   Can recuperation be considered a holiday? I certainly hope so. Recovering from influenza, Henry Moffatt goes with his wife, Poncie, to regain his strength with Henry’s old friend, Piers Hartley, on the Isle of Jersey. For a while the visit is idyllic, but then murder intrudes and Poncie is a prime suspect.

   Lots of humor here, with some interesting and likable characters, though the baddies are a bit too evidently villainous. Crime-novel readers who like the scenic tour will be especially pleased, for the author provides fascinating information about Jersey.

   As I was reading this novel, I got the impression there was at least one with Henry and Poncie preceding it. It turns out though, to be Patterson’s only mystery. A pity.

HOUSE OF THE ARROW Associated British Pictures, UK, 1953, Oskar Holmoka, Yvonne Furneaux, Robert Urquhart, Josephine Green, Harold Kasket, Pierre Le Fevre. Screenplay by Edward Dryhurst, based on the novel by A. E. W. Mason. Directed by Michael Anderson.

   Alfred Edward Wooley Mason was a bestselling novelist whose works included such classic tales of adventure and mystery as The Four Feathers, No Other Tiger, Sapphire, Fire Over England, The Drum, and stories such as “The Crystal Trench” (adapted on Alfred Hitchcock Presents with Hitchcock himself directing); a literary icon whose circle of friends and collaborators in theater included Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ford Maddox Ford, Anthony Hope Hawkins (The Prisoner of Zenda), and Stephen Crane; an agent of British Naval Intelligence whose pre-WWI Spanish network would still be functioning successfully, and much to the benefit of the Allies, in the Second World War and into the post War era; and, perhaps most importantly here, the author of five acclaimed mystery novels and one short story featuring Inspector Hanaud of the Sureté who was the inspiration for Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and his “little gray cells.”

   House of the Arrow is perhaps the most famous of the Hanaud novels, as evidenced by it having been filmed three times, first in 1930 with Benita Hume and Dennis Nielson-Terry as Hanaud; then in 1940 with Diana Churchill and Kenneth Kent as Hanaud; and, finally, this version in 1953 with Yvonne Furneaux and Oscar Holmoka as Hanaud.

   This version, updated to modern post-war France begins in Dijon in the Burgundy region of France where Jeanne Marie Harlowe, an elderly and sickly widow, has just died apparently in the natural order of things. At the reading of her will Madame Harlowe leaves her fortune and estate to her adopted daughter Betty (Yvonne Furneaux) much to the consternation of her brother-in-law, from her first marriage Boris Waberski (Harold Kasket), who believes the fortune should go to him.

   Shortly afterward Waberski makes a formal accusation against Betty of having murdered her adopted mother, prompting Betty’s companion, Englishwoman Ann Upcott (Josephine Green), to write Betty’s British solicitor for help.

   Responding is Jim Frobisher (Robert Urquhart) who arrives in Paris to talk with the officer of the Sureté assigned the case, Inspector Hanaud (Oskar Holmoka, dapper rather than rumpled for once, even the famous eyebrows tamed), who seems quite surprised his upcoming visit to Dijon is known since he only just decided to go.

   Hanaud settles the phony case brought by Waberski in short order, but things aren’t as they seem, he is certain of one thing: “If murder was done I mean to know, and I mean to avenge.” And what with a mysterious seller of illicit chemicals, accusing letters popping up everywhere, mysterious voices, and a missing arrow — it’s waxed point preserving an exotic untraceable poison — it becomes clear Hanaud has every reason to be suspicious.

   What, if anything does the empty house next door, once occupied by the Germans, have to do with the mysterious goings on? Who is writing the poison pen letters and why? Why are the two young women so secretive? Whose voice did Ann hear the night of the murder, and why does the clock she saw seem smaller in daylight? Where is the mysterious poisoned arrow Hanaud discovered referenced in a book from the Harlowe library at the drug sellers business?

   When a second murder, that of the seller of illicit drugs, occurs Hanaud must act fast before a third murder and injustice can further complicate matters.

   Mason’s longish novel is savagely condensed, but thanks to atmospheric direction by Michael Anderson (Around the World in 80 Days), good use of shadow and light and clever but unobtrusive camera angles in limited but well done sets, above all Holmoka’s delightful turn as the vain, brilliant, playful, and very Gallic Hanaud, and a script that manages to keep things mostly clear in the mind of the viewer while still preserving a few surprises, this is a superior mystery film.

   Though, as in the novel, and in many mystery novels and films, Hanaud causes quite a bit of the tension himself by revealing so little, but at least in this one with some justification.

   I first read of this film ages ago in William K. Everson’s The Detective in Film, and it has taken me forty some years to catch up with it, but it proved well worth it. House of the Arrow is a wry, intelligent, atmospheric, fast paced, mystery with a tour de force performance by Oskar Holmoka as Hanaud. Whatever its minor flaws, they are more than compensated for by the films intelligence, wit, and fidelity to the spirit if not the exact word of Mason’s classic novel.

   If you are looking for a fine adaptation of a classic mystery novel ably brought to the screen with skill and wit, you could not do better.

20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA. Walt Disney / Buena Vista, 1954. Kirk Douglas, James Mason, Paul Lukas, Peter Lorre. Based on the novel by Jules Verne. Director: Richard Fleischer.

   Although this 1954 Walt Disney production, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea doesn’t quite hit the mark as a cinematic adaptation of a literary text, it nevertheless succeeds wildly as an auditory and visual spectacle. As the first science fiction film to be shot in CinemaScope, this Technicolor film resonates with some absolutely lavish color schemes, beautiful underwater photography, and crisp portraits of the main characters.

   Add to that the wonderful score by Paul Smith, and you have yourself a borderline operatic experience in which repetitive leitmotifs guide the viewer off the California coast, into the vast Pacific, and underneath the ocean in Captain Nemo’s proto-steampunk submarine, the Nautilus.

   Based on the eponymous Jules Verne novel, this Richard Fleischer directed movie features James Mason as Captain Nemo, a mysterious man who is a renegade madman/visionary. He and his crew have been sailing underneath the Pacific in a (for its time) technologically advanced submarine, destroying warships in its wake. On board are his three captives, all survivors of an American naval vessel that he ordered destroyed. The three men could not be more different, in both personality and temperament. There’s the brawny Ned Land (Kirk Douglas); the erudite scientist, Professor Pierre Aronnax (Paul Lukas); and his neurotic, stout assistant, Conseil (Peter Lorre). Of all three four leads, it is Mason and Lorre who steal the show.

   Unfortunately, the film takes its slow time in revealing the thrust of the story; namely, that Captain Nemo was once enslaved on a penal colony and is now seeking revenge against the “hated nation” that persecuted him and was responsible for the death of his family. He’s learned to love life underneath the sea, finding it a palatable alternative to man’s humanity to man on the surface. Problem is: Nemo has become so filled with bitterness and hatred that he doesn’t realize that he’s not all that different from the warmongers he so dramatically opposes.

   But it’s not really the slow moving and predictable plot that makes 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea an enjoyable moving watching experience. Instead, it’s the spectacle of it all. This is a movie in which special effects really are indeed quite special. Case in point is the famous sequence in which Ned Land (Douglas) battles a giant squid. As a Disney film, there are naturally some family friendly moments, such as when Ned sings a seafaring ditty, “A Whale of a Tale,” and a few lighthearted moments with a seal.

   All told, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a work of movie magic, one that I am sure is a completely different experience watched in a theater.

MATT & BONNIE TAYLOR – Neon Flamingo. Dodd Mean, hardcover, 1987. St. Martin’s, paperback, June 1990.

   This is the first in the series of three Palmer Kingston novels. I posted Barry Gardner’s review of the third, Neon Dancers, a couple of weeks ago. He liked it well enough that when I had the chance to read this one, I couldn’t turn it down.

   To save myself of thinking up the same words to describe the two main series characters, both newspaper reporters, I’ve decided to use Barry’s instead: “Kingston is something of an eccentric, living in a garish mansion surrounded by neon signs and antique cars. [His lover and rival, A. J.] Egan is a tenant in the mansion. If it all sounds a little strange, well, it is.”

   This novel chronicles the first time they met, with A. J. moving in and their working on the same case together, but from opposite sides of the fence, working as they do for two directly competing newspapers.

   They make for a compatible if somewhat lightweight couple who somehow drift into sharing the same bed, on occasion, but I didn’t find the case they’re working on to be of much interest. The killing of a retired police captain seems to Palmer to be directly connected to a kidnapping that took place some 20 years when he was the new kid in town. I didn’t make the same jump in logic as quickly as he did. I found myself continually playing catch-up and never feeling as filled in as I thought I should.

   Most of the characters are only there. None stand out, not even the two leading ones. The book’s not bad, the setting is fine — a mid-sized town on the Florida coast — but the story is weak, and it’s tough to get over that. All in all, it’s a book that could have been a whole lot better.