LOREN ESTLEMAN – King of the Corner. Detroit trilogy #3, Bantam, hardcover, 1992; paperback, 1993.

   Loren Estleman doesn’t know how to write a bad book. Westerns, PI’s, hit men, whatever, I’ve enjoyed everything he’s written. His latest project has been a series of three books that attempt to capture the essence [and] trace the life of the city of Detroit from the gangster era (Whiskey River) through the heyday of automotive industry (Motown) to the present day and book.

   The story is told through the eyes of Kevin “Doc” Miller, a one-time star relief pitcher for the Detroit Tigers who has just been paroled after serving seven years in prison for hosting a party at which drugs were used and a teenaged girl died. He moves in temporarily with his brother and soon gets a job with the city’s leading bailbondsman, more or less by happenstance.

   Through his work with the bondsman, Doc meets various members of the city’s black power structure, both legal and illegal. The city’s real-life mayor, Coleman Young, is portrayed interestingly and, if television and newspapers are to be believed, at least semi-accurately. Against Miller’s will he becomes involved in situations which could result in his return to prison, or worse.

   But Detroit is the real story, and as in the first two books, Estleman brings it alive. It has long been apparent in his Amos Walker books that he has both deep feeling for and knowledge of the troubled city, and in this trilogy he has used it all. The three in sum paint a vivid picture of a fascinating part of American urban history.

   Don’t misunderstand me; this isn’t undying literature, nor were the first two. All three are, however, prime examples of what Estleman does as well as anyone writing, and that is telling an interesting and entertaining story.

   I’l1 admit it: I’m glad to see him finish the trilogy, because I’m ready for another Amos Walker. I’m glad he wrote them, though, and would recommend them to anyone who enjoys good fiction.

JOHN LE CARRÉ – Absolute Friends. Hodder, UK, hardcover, 2003. Little Brown, US, hardcover, 2004. Back Bay Books, US, softcover, 2004.

   Those of you who follow the comments section here know I have a love/hate relationship with John Le Carré’s work. I find it amusing that a relatively low level diplomatic operative who ran a Post Office drop in Germany in the Cold War, and who makes up ninety percent of his tradecraft and jargon, is considered to be an authority on intelligence work, and whose knee jerk anti-Americanism is a tired rehash of sixties leftish British politics the rest of the world long outgrew, is praised by so many critics who fail to note that his dialogue is often painfully stilted, his prose heavy, and his turn of phrase almost never gracious or smooth.

   I sometimes liken him to Mark Twain’s criticism of James Fenimore Cooper, in that I’m not sure the critics actually praising his work read it or much care for thriller fiction. They seem to feel the more difficult he is to read the more gifted he must be. As a stylist he is closer to Cooper or Dennis Wheatley than Graham Greene or Ian Fleming, but lacking their flair for melodrama.

   Despite all that, at his best Le Carré can be a compelling and intelligent writer. Call For the Dead, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, The Looking Glass War, A Small Town in Germany, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honorable Schoolboy, Smiley’s People, The Little Drummer Girl, The Night Manager, Our Game, and The Constant Gardner are all books that I enjoyed and admired.

   For every bad book like A Most Wanted Man, where he shows his considerable limitations politically as a pundit and as a writer with a thoroughly disproven thesis and poor handling of a non-Brit protagonist, he wrote something like The Perfect Spy (his best novel if not spy novel) or this book, Absolute Friends.

   It probably helps that Absolute Friends is a young man’s book despite Le Carré’s age; angry and passionate in its politics and point of view. It follows three unlucky people from the sixties to the run up to the post 9/11 invasion of Iraq; Ted Mundy, a radical Brit academic, Sasha, a leftish friend of his youth, and Zara, a young Turkish single mother who is now Mundy’s partner and lover.

   The book deals with how two young leftist activists in sixties Germany become caught up in intelligence working for the British, and how they are brutally used by American and British intelligence as well as the Bush and Blair governments eventually as part of the conspiracy to justify the Iraq war. That the big payoff comes across as rather silly as terrorist plots go is a weakness, but he handles the characters so well here it matters less than it might. Frankly, most writers on the other end of the political spectrum don’t handle this part much better, and they are trying create serious threats.

   Le Carré has always wanted to be Graham Greene, but has always lacked Greene’s strengths, his wit and humor, his Catholic guilt, or his compassion for all of his creations, even the Americans like Pyle in The Quiet American. The fact that in five decades of writing thrillers Le Carré has never created a single believable American character shows his limitations. He has come close to Greene a few times not including his rewrite of Greene’s Our Man In Havana, The Tailor of Panama, a book I found largely embarrassing, and here he is probably as close to Greeneland as he will ever get. That is a compliment for anyone who cares.

   Like or hate the politics or his great theme here, dismiss his knee jerk anti-American tendencies or loathe them, face that he really never has written women very well (all the women in his books are basically men with breasts when he bothers to write about them at all, either all brilliant and beautiful or troll-like and smart), even dislike his at time difficult prose, this is a young man’s passionate book and better for it.

   Absolute Friends is both a good post Cold War spy novel and a good novel. It is Le Carré at his best, and for once deserving of the praise it receives from critics. If nothing else, the sections in Germany in the sixties are as good as anything he has written since A Small Town in Germany, and that was very good indeed. For once the most over-praised writer in thrillerdom deserves the accolades his work received.

JACK HIGGINS writing as JAMES GRAHAM – The Khufra Run. Berkley, paperback reprint, February 1985. British hardcover edition: Macmillan, 1972. US hardcover edition: Doubleday & Co, 1973. Other paperback editions include: Fawcett Crest, 1976; Pocket Books, 1990; Berkley, 2002.

   Here’s something that’s interesting, and maybe you know this already, but of the two authors’ names on the cover of the 1985 paperback I just read, neither is the author’s real one. “Jack Higgins,” still writing today, was born in 1929 as Harry Patterson, and his first several books were published under that byline.

   Other names he also went under are: Martin Fallon, Hugh Marlowe and Henry Patterson, but over the years most of his work has been reprinted as by Higgins, the name he’s most known by. (I haven’t checking into that statement, but those that haven’t, if any, would therefore have to be the ones he’s least happy with, looking back at them today.

   No matter. It was The Eagle Has Landed, the 1975 thriller about a German attempt to infiltrate England in World War II and capture Winston Churchill, that made Higgins a multi-millionaire. The Khufra Run isn’t in that league, by any means, but it’s hugely entertaining, and if done with a decent B-level budget, it would make a really decent B-grade action movie.

   Here’s the opening paragraph:

   
   Here are the last two paragraphs from Chapter One:

   
   It is the girl who is the key figure in the rest of the story, which involves a flight Jack Nelson, who tells the story, intends to make from Cartagena to Ibiza (an island off the Spanish coast), a trip for which he most definitely has an ulterior motive.

   By profession, Nelson is an island-hopping pilot and small time smuggler. The naked girl is Claire Bouvier, or as it happens, Sister Claire, of the Little Sisters of Pity, on leave from a convent near Grenoble. And as it eventually transpires, she has a proposition for Jack.

   Somewhere in the Khufra Marshes off the Algerian coast is a fortune in silver, and Claire, one of the most naive and single-minded women you will ever meet, in fiction or not, needs Jack and his friend Turk to help her find it. On page 20, she tells Jack that “you are a good man in spite of yourself.” Jack is not so sure, nor is the reader, except for the reader who knows exactly how predictable such adventurers (and their adventures) are.

   It’s still a rattling good story, whatever that means, even if Jack is rather careless about the bad guys on their trail, and yes, or course there are, and if I didn’t mention them, you should have known without my telling you. Once they all start making their way through the marshes, a very picturesque narrative suddenly goes into overdrive. If you can put the book down after page 138, you are a better man (or woman) than I.

   The ending is even better. I like the idea of Audrey Hepburn in the role of Claire, while any tall, slim, grizzled tough guy actor could be Jack. But Audrey Hepburn. She may have been a little slim for the part, but other than that, nothing but net.

CRY DANGER. RKO Radio Pictures, 1951. Dick Powell, Rhonda Fleming, Richard Erdman, William Conrad, Regis Toomey, Jean Porter, Joan Banks, Jay Adler. Director: Robert Parrish.

   This was the next to last of the black-and-white crime movies that Dick Powell made, and it’s the last if you don’t count The Tall Target, released later the same year. I wouldn’t call Cry Danger a noir film, unless you define a noir film by style rather than content. It’s a crime film, but with the lighting and semi-sleazy setting of a film noir, with characters to match, but without the sense of inevitable doom that some viewers feel that a true noir requires.

   But why quibble? It’s a crime movie that’s a lot of fun to watch, and if you do, be sure to obtain a copy of print recently restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. The picture quality is sharp and clear, showing us once again that the people who made black-and-white movies back before color took over completely knew exactly what they were doing.

   Dick Powell plays Rocky Mulloy, a guy who’s just been released from prison after five years. A witness has surprisingly shown up and given him an alibi for the time of the robbery and murder.

   Not as lucky is his friend Danny Morgan, who’s still in jail for the same crime. Richard Erdman plays Delong, the fellow who supposedly cleared Rocky, but in reality has given himself an opportunity to obtain a share of the missing loot, just as he’d planned.

   While Rocky, who really was innocent, tries to clear his pal still in jail, the two of them hole up in a rundown trailer court in an even more rundown trailer. Danny’s wife (Rhonda Fleming) lives in the same court, as does Darlene (Jean Porter), a blonde bimbo who also has the nimble fingers of a skilled pickpocket. She and Delong get along just fine, sort of, in a serio-humorous kind of way.

   I should also mention Castro, the bookie who Rocky is sure planned the robbery. He’s played in super sleazy fashion by William Conrad, who like Raymond Burr made an early career for himself playing characters just like this.

   The dialogue between Rocky and Delong is sharp and witty, and very nearly worth the price of admission in itself. Add the two ladies to the mix, along with Castro and a cop (Regis Toomey) who doesn’t believe a word of Rocky’s alibi, and you have a story that can easily suck you in without letting go.

   Of the players, I think Rhonda Fleming is the least believable She’s simply too good-looking to be the wife of anyone in a movie like this. As for Dick Powell, he certainly knew what he was doing when he made a such a sharp turnaround in his career, and started making movies like this.

COWBOY FROM BROOKLYN. Warner Brothers, 1938. Dick Powell, Pat O’Brien, Priscilla Lane, Dick Foran, Ann Sheridan, Ronald Reagan. Director: Lloyd Bacon.

   Dick Powell is at his comedic best in this predictable, yet light and amusing musical comedy about a guy from Flatbush, Brooklyn pretending to be a singing cowboy. Directed by Lloyd Bacon, Cowboy From Brooklyn has an innocent charm to it, allowing us to see Powell as a gifted physical comic, rather than as a hard-nosed film noir man with a gun.

   Powell portrays Elly Jordan, an aspiring singer and a man deathly afraid of animals, big and small. On his way to California with his band, Jordan takes a detour in Wyoming and ends up spending time at a local ranch where he befriends the lovely cowgirl, Jane Hardy (Priscilla Lane) who teaches him how to talk like a cowboy.

   Pretty soon, Jordan’s dressed up like Roy Rogers and singing ballads. Then, out of the clear blue sky, talent agent Roy Chadwick (Pat O’Brien) and his assistant, Pat Dunn (Ronald Reagan) show up and pretty soon Elly Jordan is transformed into singing cowboy star Wyoming Steve Gibson!

   At a running time of an economical seventy-seven minutes, Cowboy from Brooklyn doesn’t have all that much depth to it. There are some hilarious moments, however, with nearly perfect comedic timing. This is the type of comedy that makes you like comedies — fast-talking, wisecracking characters running amok. It’s a timeless story about a fish out of water, a man pretending to be someone he’s not for money and fame, and a rather innocent love story all lassoed together.

THANKS A MILLION. 20th Century Pictures, 1935. Dick Powell, Ann Dvorak, Fred Allen, Patsy Kelly, Paul Whiteman and Band, Ramona, Raymond Walburn. Screenplay: Nunnally Johnson, based on a story by Darryl F. Zanuck. Director: Roy Del Ruth.

   I’ll remember this movie as the feature film debut of Fred Allen, the radio comedian, more than I will of just another early Dick Powell lead in a 1930s romantic comedy musical. Allen made very few movies. I think it was himself who said, “I have the perfect face for radio.”

   Allen plays the business manager of a group of touring musicians, who when the troupe in stranded in a small hick town somewhere near New York City, offers their services as entertainment for a gubernatorial candidate for the state, a besotted old gentleman who on his own drives his audience away in droves.

   But after one too many incidents of being too besotted, the powers that be for the party decide that singer Eric Land (that is to say, Dick Powell) ought to take his place. Things proceed about as expected from here. When the campaign starts to really roll, friction starts to build up between Powell and his lady friend, singer-dancer Sally Mason (Ann Dvorak), who finds the time she’s able to spend with him dwindling away.

   The latter does her own dances, surprisingly well, and apparently her own singing as well. Powell does his own, of course, as well as playing (and very well, too) an apparently vacant-minded young lad barely more than wet behind the ears.

   It was roles such as this one that were left far behind when Powell wisely made the transition to a new tough-guy persona, beginning with Murder, My Sweet in 1944.

   But as I say, I watched this one to see (and hear) Fred Allen in action. His quick-on-the-trigger witticisms, delivered in a sour, dead pan fashion, is exactly where my sense of humor lies. I see from IMDb that he supplied (uncredited) some of the dialogue. All his own, I would imagine, but I haven’t yet researched that.

   In passing, however, this film does have a lot to say about the political climate of the time, with entertainment mattering more than issues, when a jazz band leader could end up be elected the Lt. Governor of the state of Washington. (A true fact.)

SILVERFOX. ABC, 6 July 1991. 60min. James Coburn (Robert Fox), Julia Nickson-Soul, M. Emmet Walsh, Jillie Mack, Leigh Taylor-Young. Story: Chris Abbott, Tom Selleck & Chas. Floyd Johnson. Director: Rod Holcomb.

   This is one busted TV series pilot that had some potential, or at least the basis for some. The idea and the leading player were fine. In terms of what made it onto the air, one time only, it’s the story and the execution that misfires, and badly. It was billed as The ABC Saturday Night Movie, but according to the review in Variety, it ran only from 10 to 11 pm, which matches the length of the copy I have.

   Which was long enough to tell that the series wasn’t going to be going anywhere. James Coburn is the star, obviously, and he’s definitely not the problem. The concept is not bad, either. He plays a spy who’s been number one in the game all his life, but now that he’s getting older, does he want the comfort of a desk job, or does he want to put off retirement for just one more job?

   And frankly, I didn’t really understand what the job was. Something to do with a murdered gangster and some plates for counterfeiting Japanese yen, but other than the young Asian agent named Shimoi Chen he teams up with (Julia Nickson-Soul), I really didn’t put any other names and faces together. A story that’s strictly by the numbers tends to do that to you.

   As a younger actor, James Coburn I often found a little too smug and cocky to enjoy his performances, although to be honest, I may have changed too. As Silverfox in this film and at the age of 63, he had mellowed a lot, and I found him relaxed and easy-going and playing a role he was meant to play, at least at that time of his career.

MAX MURRAY – The Doctor And The Corpse. Michael Joseph Ltd, UK, hardcover, 1953. Farrar Straus & Young, US, hardcover, 1951. Detective Book Club, US, hardcover reprint, 3-in-1 edition. Penguin Books, UK, paperback, 1957.

   If you should know rich, nasty, and hateful old men or women, suggest to them that the reading of mystery stories might be salubrious. With the wisdom gained from that reading, they might reconsider plans to surround themselves with people who have reason to despise, loathe, and hate them, and maybe desire their money.

   They may even pause in their attempts to make additional enemies. No one gave that advice to the unpleasant wealthy man in this novel, and he blithely creates more enemies. What is worse, he does it in a closed environment — that is, aboard a cruise ship.

   The corpse in this novel, before he becomes a corpse, of course, sends a note to the Singapore police, where the ship is temporarily anchored, telling them he has reason to believe there is a murderer aboard. Indeed there is — his.

   The police arrive in the person of Inspector Michael West to interview the note writer, who just a bit earlier had taken poison, unwittingly. West is thus limited to interviewing the living, which he does rather desultorily, in my opinion, and mildly. Interrogation is not for him, for he is a gentleman. Conversation has to suffice.

   The case is admittedly a difficult one, with so many suspects, but West really never seems to buckle down to a thorough investigation. His conscience says let the ship sail, as the man’s death was fully justified. His sense of duty says carry on and capture the culprit. It’s a dilemma he never satisfactorily resolves, though the person responsible ultimately confesses.

   For those who worry about such things, West gets the girl in the end. I was not aware he was interested in her. Nor was I aware that she was interested in him. I was tempted to go back and see what I had missed, but I resisted the temptation, which was not that strong anyhow.

   The novel is competently written, and there are a couple of interesting characters.

MAX BYRD – California Thriller. Bantam, paperback original, April 1981. Reprinted several times.

   This is the first of three private eye novels written before the author turned his hand to historical fiction and three well-received novels about three of this country’s presidents: Grant, Jefferson and Jackson. The PI in California Thriller, though, is Mike Haller, who calls San Francisco home, having made the transcontinental trek from Boston some twenty years before.

   When I read this book when it first came out, I recall not caring for it all that much, although I haven’t been able to locate the review I’m sure I wrote about it at the time. I thought the characters too similar to those of a certain Robert B. Parker. Haller has a good lady friend named Dinah Farrell, who is a well-established psychiatrist in town, and while he doesn’t have a good Hawk-like buddy, Haller does have a world-weary fellow working for him named Fred Wrigley, an older fellow whom he can talk the case over with and exchage witty dialogue with each other at the same time.

   Haller is hired to find a missing newspaper columnist in this one, a married man who is probably off on some kind of fling, whch would have been interesting enough, but the more Haller begins to connect the case up with some academic biochemists who have competing theories of how to treat problems with the brain — surgery vs. medical therapy — the more I began to lose interest.

   Then came the thugs working for a big shot in the security business, and a Chinese crime lord who quotes to Haller inscrutable passages from the Koran. I apologize to you by saying that here is where I gave up, after already having worked my way through 100 pages of long, dense and overly descriptive paragraphs. I said to myself, even though this is a private eye novel, this is not the book for me.

   To me, the book simply didn’t flow. Byrd, on this first attempt, doesn’t show the down-to-earth appeal that dozens of paperback PI writers of the 50s and 60s had. Those are the writers whose tales went down the same streets this book tries to do, without succeeding. Not for me, it didn’t.

   On the other hand, California Thriller was awarded a Shamus for Best Paperback novel of 1981.

      The Mike Haller series —

California Thriller. Bantam, 1981.
Fly Away, Jill. Bantam, 1981.

Finders Weepers. Bantam, 1983.

TIME LOCK. British Lion Film Corporation, UK, 1957; Robert Beatty, Lee Patterson, Betty McDowall, Robert Ayres. Screenplay by Peter Rogers, based on the play by Arthur Hailey. Directed by Gerald Thomas.

   Mediocre acting, claustrophobic sets, no production values, trite dialogue, short running time, this film is little more than a television episode with an attitude, all of which begs the question, why is it so damn suspenseful

   Based on a play by Arthur Hailey (Runway Zero Eight aka Zero Hour , Airport, Hotel) the entire story takes play just before the weekend as accountant Lee Patterson’s little boy wanders in and gets locked in the vault of a small Canadian branch bank on his birthday. The time locks are set for 63 hours and can’t be opened. The boy can’t possibly survive that long with only 500 square feet of oxygen. The vault cannot be broken into or forced , and the only man who can open the safe just left on a fishing trip.

   With a little money, a better cast, and production values higher than a high school play the team responsible for some of the “Carry On” films could have done better, but none of those things are present, and the acting is uniformly one note, and a sour one at that.

   But this film gets under your skin. Despite the bad acting and trite script, despite the lack of production values, despite the by rote suspense, the damn film gets under your skin and keeps egging you on until there is real relief in the final moments of the film.

   It may be the best amateur bad professional movie ever made.

   No one comes off looking too good here, but there is a young Sean Connery, who at least can act more than anyone else in the film, as a welder battling to cut into the vault in time to save the boy and knowing it is an impossible job. You might not predict a great career for him based on this, but he does show screen presence, which no one else in this film has.

   Robert Beatty could act, and Lee Paterson has some charm, neither of which shows here, but as you sit cursing the production values and acting you will still be wracking your nerves waiting to get the kid out of that damn vault. How a really inept bad movie generates that much suspense is a mystery someone else will have to solve.