RICHARD HAWKE – Speak of the Devil. Random House, hardcover, January 2006. Ballantine, paperback, February 2007.

   This one starts out in grand fashion, with a mass shooting at a Manhattan Thanksgiving Day parade by someone (perhaps) with a personal vendetta with the mayor. PI Fritz Malone, whose first recorded case this is, is a witness and chases after the killer. He shoots him in the shoulder … and then things start to get weird.

   Malone is nabbed by the police, put into a patrol car, a bag is placed over his head, and he is rushed off to places unknown. And the shooter, who was only wounded, somehow ends up dead, shot to death at police headquarters.

   Eventually things get straightened out re Fritz vs the cops, and (this is also not strictly kosher, I don’t imagine) Malone is asked by the mayor to work on the case: the unknown someone who hired the now dead killer now is blackmailing the city for millions of dollars, and to prove his point, he is methodically cutting the fingers off a kidnapped city official.

   So this is not exactly standard PI fare, yet in another way, Fritz Malone is very little different from other wisecracking PI’s with girl friends who try to be patient and understanding while their guys are off doing their PI thing. This part of the story I enjoyed a whole lot more than the bigger picture.

   Which reminds me of another thing. When I got to page 164 or so, which is about where the Gold Medal paperbacks of the 1950s used to end, I looked at where I was in the book, and I was surprised to see that I was barely over halfway through. And the second half, unfortunately, was not nearly as interesting as the first half. There is simply too much story in this book. (I have not yet told you about the novice nun who committed suicide in one of New York City’s many parks a while back. How she is connected, you will have to read the book.)

   One thing toward the end of the book annoyed me immensely. [This may warrant a SPOILER ALERT.] Malone has an important — no, crucial — piece of evidence which he gives to Margo, his girl friend, and asks her to take it to Brooklyn to give to her father, an invalid ex-cop, with the killer still on the loose. Have you seen this gambit on TV before?

   Pages 317-318, in which Malone explains everything after all the excitement has died down, are really a mess. These two pages are filled solid with Ramos did this so Carroll did that, Cox said this and Cox said that, then McNally did this in return, then Byron did this and Sister Natividad was — and who’s Margaret King?

   This book was given a big fanfare when it first came out, a big budget promotion, an huge advertising campaign, floor displays in bookstores, the whole works. I hope the author, in reality mystery writer Tim Cockey, got a big advance. There was one other book for Fritz Malone, Cold Day in Hell (Random House, 2007), but I don’t think the ad campaign worked. In spite of the hullabaloo and critical acclaim from several quarters, neither book seems to have gone anywhere.

THREE GIRLS ABOUT TOWN. Columbia Pictures, 1941. Joan Blondell, Binnie Barnes, Janet Blair, John Howard, Eric Blore, Una O’Connor, Hugh O’Connell. Bruce Bennett, Lloyd Bridges. Guest Star: Robert Benchley. Screenplay by Richard Carroll. Directed by Leigh Jason.

   Joan Blondell and Binnie Barnes are sisters who work as Convention Hostesses at the Merchants Hotel where Binnie has a thing for chief clerk, the much harassed Robert Benchley. It’s the busy season and things are more hectic than normal because a convention of magicians is being followed by a staid convention of morticians and because Joan’s boyfriend, reporter John Howard, wrote an article implying the ladies are more than just helpful to convention attendees. This has caught the attention of the head of the undertakers convention and a ladies group who meets weekly at the hotel.

   Add to all that a major union and the bosses are having nationally important talks at the hotel in hopes of avoiding a strike that could leave the country vulnerable, and as yet the mediator from Washington has yet to show.

   Howard just wants Blondell to quit so they can marry, but she and Binnie can’t think of themselves because younger sister Janet Blair is away at an expensive finishing school they are paying for. Which is why Blondell decks Howard for the first of several swings in this lightweight but fast and smartly written screwball comedy well played all around.

   Of course Blondell could do comedy blindfolded and still hit her marks, as could Barnes and of course Benchley and Blore, but Howard does surprisingly well as the fast-talking, fast-thinking reporter whose life is about to get complicated.

   Then there is a very drunk Eric Blore pestering everyone by asking where Charlie is.

   It’s at this point that maid Una O’Connor and her helpers find a body in the bedroom next to the girls’ room.

   Don’t get ahead of me. You are expected to get the connection.

   Joan and Binnie quickly convince Benchley, Binnie’s boyfriend, that the hotel can’t afford a body to be found like that, especially with those staid undertakers and pressure from the Ladies Club who have read Howard’s article and want answers, so they decide to move the body. Which is all well and good until Howard discovers the corpse and recognizes it is the mediator everyone is looking for. It’s the scoop of a lifetime for him and a certain raise at the paper if he can be the one to turn in the story. But Blondell is determined the body won’t be found in the hotel.

   Now, to make things decidedly worse, little sister Janet Blair shows up, and finishing school has about finished her. She sets her sights on sister Joan’s boyfriend John Howard from the get go, showing all about what she learned of the fine art of lip oscillation at that exclusive school for hormonal young women.

   There is also a cop, Hugh O’Connell, whose wife is having a baby that is taking its time getting here, the only thing he can think about until he discovers Howard is hiding a body.

   There is nothing startling or new here. If you have seen a screwball comedy you will recognize the form from the first scene, but here it works with almost perfect timing, an attractive cast of mostly B or minor A stars and supporting actors and some clever bits including Howard caught in a poker game where the corpse can’t lose a hand no matter how hard Howard tries — he throws away three aces and draws three queens to match the one he has — and a bit straight from The 39 Steps where he poses as the mediator and fast talks the settlement of the strike while the police look on.

   Meanwhile Eric Blore still can’t find Charlie.

   Not much more I can say, save that this is not a comedy mystery, though it plays much like one for most of its run. No spoilers to explain why it isn’t, save that the why would have you throwing things at the screen in frustration if you saw it in an actual mystery. Here it just seems to fit the whole screwball format of the film.

   Blondell looks as good as you ever saw her in a film, and Blair makes a satisfactory tempest of a sexpot little sister. Binnie Barnes couldn’t help but be good in this kind of film, and Eric Blore and Robert Benchley … well, do I really have to say it?

   It’s John Howard, who usually played rather stalwart unimaginative leads or decidedly stiff second or third leads (Lost Horizon, The Philadelphia Story), who is a surprise here, though if you watched him in the Bulldog Drummond films or The Invisible Woman, you might not be quite as surprised.

   He shows considerable charm and comic timing in this one, and the ending when he referees while Janet Blair receives a much deserved public spanking from sisters Joan and Binnie, and soon to be brother-in-law Robert Benchley actually rises to that kind of giddy high usually only achieved in major screwball comedies with people like Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in Bringing up Baby or James Stewart and Claudette Colbert in It’s a Wonderful World.

   I’m not comparing this to those classics, only pointing out it achieves one genuine lighter than air moment of sheer exuberance mindful of those found in those films. That’s quite an accomplishment for a film with these credentials.

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From this Grammy-nominated jazz singer’s 2015 CD For One to Love.

DIANE K. SHAH – The Makin Cover. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1977. Playboy Press, paperback, 1979.

   A pleasing addition to a growing list of female sleuths is magazine reporter Lindsie Hollis, who in her first crack at detective work finds herself hot on the trail of a missing pro quarterback. The effort is convincing, and the wit is genuine, but as the male-female relationship becomes ever more complicated, the mystery behind what may or may not be an actual kidnapping attempt seems to fall apart through holes of its own intricate nature. The result is flawed, but the story is far above average.

Rating:   B

[UPDATE] 01-14-16.   The details escape me, but I do remember liking this one. I was hoping there would be a second adventure of Lindsie Hollis, but as far as I can tell, it never happened. Shah did write two books about Paris Chandler, who was a “legman” for a gossip columnist in Hollywood, circa 1947. I’ve always meant to read these, but alas, I have not.

  A fourth book by Shah that’s included in Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV is High-Heel Blue, about Brenden Harlow, a female LAPD cop who’s recruited to work undercover trying to track down a serial killer. For better or worse, that brief story line suggests there’s little chance I’ll read that one.

   This is one for the books. This is Steve. Two days after my son Jonathan wrote up a review of this movie, I received an email from Dan Stumpf containing his comments on the same film. So here you are. Two reviews of Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, totally independently of each other, two for the price of one. I’ll let Dan go first.

TARZAN’S GREATEST ADVENTURE. Paramount, 1959. Gordon Scott, Anthony Quayle, Sara Shane, Niall MacGinnis, Sean Connery, Al Mulock and Scilla Gabel. Written by Berne Giler and John Guillermin. Directed by John Guillermin.

   Well maybe it is.

   I recall vividly and pleasantly seeing this as a kid when it first came out, and realizing even then that it had almost everything anyone could want in a Tarzan picture: quicksand, alligators (or were they crocodiles?) spiders, fights, vine-swinging and the Tarzan yell, as stirring in its own way as the Lone Ranger theme music. The only serious omission was a guy in a gorilla suit, but producer Sy Weintraub was going for a more Adult approach (if you can call any Tarzan movie “adult”) and, perhaps wisely, decided to dispense with the gorilla-fighting.

   The result is a tougher fantasy, less pre-adolescent and more … well, more adolescent if you will. Greatest even includes obvious lust from the bad guys for their boss’s sexy mistress and a discreet fade-out when Tarzan and the heroine embrace in the jungle. The action is considerably grittier here, with some memorably grisly death scenes, but the main distinction of Greatest is the time it takes with the bad guys.

   Said nasties are played by a cast worth taking the time for. Anthony Quayle and Niall MacGinnis were both in Olivier’s Hamlet ten years earlier; Al Mulock is less well known perhaps, but I remember him fondly as the bad guy who gets the first close-up in The Good the Bad & the Ugly; and Sean Connery….

   â€¦ well that makes for another interesting footnote: At one point in this movie Connery is cheerfully hunting down Tarzan in the jungle, and our hero is almost undone when a tarantula starts crawling up his leg. A few years later, Connery was promoted to Tarantula-Turf in Dr. No. Such are the vagaries of movie heroism.

    Director John Guillermin (who did my favorite PI flick of the 1960s, PJ) handles all this with speed and economy, pausing just long enough for the moments of character development without slackening the pace, and gracing the action scenes with fast tracking shots and evocative angles. Best of all, he seems to have a real feel for the Tarzan ethos: a man of few words and much courage; a man basically civilized but given to savage cries of challenge and triumph. In short, the Lord of the Jungle, perfectly evoked in a colorful package.

   If any action movie is deserving of critical reappraisal and a reintroduction to movie fans, it’s Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, a truly gripping feature from start to finish. Directed by John Guillermin, this grim and violent Tarzan film isn’t kids’ stuff. Filmed in glorious Eastman Color and on location in Africa, Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure has far more in common with the gritty, taut Westerns of auteurs Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann, than it does with the earlier black and white, filmed on set, Tarzan programmers.

   Now I’ll be the first one to admit that muscleman Gordon Scott wasn’t the finest of actors and that his portrayal of a noticeably more loquacious Ape Man is certainly adequate and gets the job done, but is hardly ranked among the greatest acting moments in cinema.

   But it works, for Scott’s Tarzan is effective as a brooding, strong silent type. With a bit more vocabulary and a hat and a gun belt, could have easily blended in quite nicely in a dusty Old West frontier town. He’s the type of man you could imagine getting caught up in a range war. There’s a lot less “man of the jungle” in this celluloid rendition of Tarzan than in those clunky, if not charming and innocent, RKO movies starring Lex Barker as the eponymous title character.

   The plot is elegant in its simplicity. Our protagonist, sans Jane (who isn’t featured in the movie at all, let alone mentioned), takes to his canoe and sets out after a gang of criminals responsible for murder and the theft of explosives. The outlaw gang is living on a houseboat and heading upriver to an abandoned mine in the hopes of finding diamonds and striking it rich.

   Helming this outfit of misfits and lowlifes is a dangerous sociopath named Slade (an exceptionally well cast Anthony Quayle). Among his henchmen are Dino, a former convict (Al Mulock); O’Bannion, a jovial trigger-happy scoundrel (a pre-James Bond Sean Connery); and Kruger, a serpentine Dutch diamond expert of dubious loyalty (Niall MacGinnis). Along for the ride – literally – is Toni, a sunbathing beauty (Italian actress Scilla Gabel).

   Like all criminals, and particularly like those stuck together in cramped quarters, this group is prone to not only mischief, but also toward turning on one another. Some of the movies most memorable scenes involve the fall out of one or more of the criminal group betraying another member in ways both big and small.

   As time goes on, Tarzan’s pursuit of the gang becomes less about these particular criminals and more about his need to enforce his own personal code of honor. He realizes that the outlaws need to be eradicated from his jungle home, for if they were to stay, they’d taint it with their presence.

   In many ways, the movie is less an adventure yarn and more about Tarzan’s psychological quest to rid his home of these unwelcome intruders. Romance and levity play little part in Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, a visually bright but emotionally dark film that seems to affirm Burke’s notion, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Suffice it to say, Tarzan chooses to not do nothing. And then some.

A track from blues-rock singer C. C. Coletti’s CD Bring It On Home: Sings the American Roots of Zeppelin:

   One of the most phenomenally successful versions of the mad killer roaming about in a gothic mansion on a stormy night is the Mary Roberts Rinehart / Avery Hopwood play The Bat. I don’t recall any version of that turning up at a Saturday afternoon matinee in my nonage, but I know of at least two film versions that precede my first matinee at the Bijou, a 1926 silent version, and a 1930 sound version, retitled The Bat Whispers.

   At an early stage in my mystery reading addiction, I was a great fan of Rinehart (especially of the delightful spunky spinster series featuring Miss Letitia Carberry), but I did not then encounter an errant bat.

   However, on a recent evening I turned out with a number of other “Friends of the Library” for a Mary Roberts Rinehart evening in the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library, of which an announced feature was to be a showing of an unidentified film version of The Bat.

   A call to the program coordinator would probably have cleared up the mystery, but I preferred to be kept in suspense, hoping against hope that it would be one of the early versions. My wife and I arrived in time to tour the collection of manuscripts, books, correspondence and other items on display from the library’s extensive Rinehart Archives, and I was delighted to find on display (but attracting no interest from the other friends) a number of original Howard Chandler Christy oils illustrating some of Rinehart’s early stories.

   They all featured dashing gentlemen in evening dress in close proximity to handsome ladies with elaborate hairdos and evening dresses that swept to the floor, all rendered in atmospheric browns and yellows, with only an occasional luminous, bloody red to suggest the criminal stories they had accompanied. This whetted my appetite for an unsettling film and it was with great anticipation that we sat in comfortable armchairs in a conference room improvised as a screening room and waited for the title and credits to flash on the screen.

   You have probably anticipated the disappointment that awaited me. The friends of the library and staff are not film buffs, and what they` had rented for our evening’s pleasure was a 1959 version made for ABC-Television, written and directed by Crane Wilbur, and starring Agnes Moorhead and Vincent Price, as spunky spinster and suspicious doctor with a penchant for experimenting on bats.

   The dialogue was awful, the budget was obviously minuscule and the movie was shot on a soundstage with a raging forest fire and exterior view of the country mansion so patently false that there was-some laughter from the audience. The saving grace was that, although the setting was rural contemporary, the film was shot in black-and-white.

   The interior of the “old” house had secret passages and dimly lit corridors that favored the action, and Moorhead was an enormously appealing spinster who, at intervals, gave some hint of the performance she might have delivered with the right materials.

   The script required that she be both a paragon of independence and a helpless female often trailed by a bevy of younger but not necessarily more attractive women while a series of suspicious male characters were alternately presented as defenders and threats.

   The last 30 seconds were beautifully handled and this was the conclusion that should have capped a brilliant rendition of the classic narrative. I have not lost my taste for such fare but it will not, I fear, be soon or well satisfied.

NOTE:   Part One of this two-part essay can be found here. Even if you read it earlier, you might wish to take another look, as several comments may have been added since your previous visit.

CHARLES ALVERSON – Not Sleeping, Just Dead. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, hardcover, 1977. Playboy Press, paperback, 1980.

   Joe Goodey is a private eye. Being a cynic comes with the job, but along with a sour view of the`world and a nasty way of saying his mind comes an unquenchable sense of justice that not even the soul-scouring impact of group therapy can touch.

   What he’s hired to do, and what he does, is to learn who caused the death of wealthy man’s granddaughter at a Big Sur drug rehabilitation commune. He also finds once again the success does not always bring satisfaction, much less gratitude.

   While there are some novelistic weaknesses in his approach, Goodey’s last statement on the matter is an impassioned defense of the moral point of view that explains society’s continued need for incorruptible investigators who are unafraid of the truth and willing to point fingers of guilt where they should. It’s not been done better since the days of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and praise greater than that cannot be given.

[UPDATE] 01-12-16.   I’ve not read either this, or Alverson’s Goodey’s Last Stand (1975), the first entry in an all-too-short two book PI series, in nearly 40 years. I liked both very much at the time, but I wonder how they would stand up today. I also have no idea why there were only the two books. Based on my opinion back then, there should have been more.

SUBMARINE RAIDER. Columbia Pictures, 1942. John Howard, Marguerite Chapman, Bruce Bennett, Warren Ashe, Eileen O’Hearn, Philip Ahn, Larry Parks, Forrest Tucker. Director: Lew Landers.

   If you can look past the “those treacherous Japanese fifth columnists” angle and production values that leave much to be desired, you may soon find that Submarine Raider is a decent enough flag waver that punches above its low budget weight.

   Directed by Lew Landers (along with an un-credited Budd Boetticher), this patriotic programmer is a highly fictionalized dramatization of events leading up to the December 7, 1941, Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. This isn’t Howard Hawks’ Air Force (1943), a film that benefited highly from James Wong Howe’s cinematography. Not even close. But it’s not nearly as much a total clunker as I expected it would turn out to be.

   John Howard, who went on to a highly prolific career in television, portrays Commander Chris Warren, a submariner in charge of a vessel that rescues damsel in distress, a surprisingly calm and collected Sue Curry (Marguerite Chapman), from a lifeboat floating along in the Pacific. All was going well enough for Sue and her friends aboard a civilian ship until the Japanese Navy decided to blow them out of the water on their way to Pearl Harbor.

   This, of course, is historical nonsense. But it gets the story moving and makes international politics into a personal story. And speaking of personal stories, Commander Warren’s brother, Bill (Warren Ashe), is a government agent in Honolulu investigating Japanese spies. When he gets killed on December 7, it’s gloves off for our intrepid submarine commander protagonist.

   Watching Submarine Raider ends up being less an exercise in film appreciation than it is a glance backward in time to an era in which American anxieties about the War in the Pacific remained at an all time high. Look for the scene in which Warren toasts the Japanese Navy: “Bottom’s Up!” It’s all terribly dated, but then again, not every movie was made to speak to timeless, universal themes.

From this Boston-based rock singer’s 1994 CD, Cockamamie: