LUKE SHORT – Last Hunt. Bantam A2437, paperback original. First printing, August 1962. Reprinted several times, including: Dell, paperback, 1990.

   You take a glance at the cover, it looks like a western: pictured is a man with a rifle on a horse, bundled up against the cold. You read the cover, it sounds like a western: “Luke Short’s new novel of murder, revenge in the rugged, high country of the west.” You start reading the first chapter, you could easily be confused into thinking it is a western — it is a Luke Short novel, after all.

   That’s assuming, of course, you’re as easily confused as me. It wasn’t until page 7, where you will find a reference to someone unzipping his Eisenhower-type jacket that it dawned on me. It’s not a western.

   Not one of the Old West, that is. What this is a modern day crime story, a detective story, one that takes place in the west, and yes, it’s in Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV. Murdered while hunting elk is a judge, a man who has just recently made a bitter enemy in a messy divorce case that just concluded in his courtroom.

   Keeping in mind that I never really enjoyed the TV show Columbo all that much — you know the routine: the killer is known from the very beginning, and for the remainder of the program, the pleasure comes from watching the Lieutenant putting the pieces together and figuring out and trapping the culprit — I found it annoying that the same approach is what Short uses here. Let me quickly qualify that and say “mildly annoying.”

   For the most part, this is a man’s sort of book, filled with men who enjoy hunting, enjoy the out-of-doors and the companionship of other men, and with women who put up with, if not love, the kind of men who enjoy hunting — and so on. This is the time and place when people left their cars parked with the keys left in them, and there’s a definite nostalgia for times that no longer exist that comes into play as well.

   In a small way this short novel (only 122 pages) reminded me of one the the old Gold Medal paperback originals that started coming out in the early 1950s, but upon second thought, I finally decided it lacks the pulpish edge (bordering on sleaziness) that those old GM paperbacks had.

   In terms of the quality of the writing itself, Luke Short’s second of two entries (*) into straight crime fiction has a pulpish tinge, all right, but you also get the feeling that the story first appeared in — and was filtered through — a slick magazine like Collier’s or The Saturday Evening Post, which of course, it probably did.

   The people that are encountered here are friendlier, and with perhaps one exception, they lack the quiet desperation in their lives the inhabitants of the Gold Medal novels usually had, the kind that pushes them into situations in which they soon discover that they’ve lost control of the events that follow.

   What the big difference may be, and this may sound overly sentimental, is that when Last Hunt ends, you’ve become friends with the people in it, and you’re left wanting to know what happens to each of them in the rest of his or her life, and if it turns out as well for them as you want it to do.

(*)   The other title is Barren Land Murders, which as a matter of fact was a Gold Medal PBO, from 1951.

Hi Steve,

   W. B. M. Ferguson’s dates are given everywhere, including Crime Fiction IV, as 1881-1967. The birth is correct according to the Irish births registration, but I have now found in the English National Probate Calendar the death of a William Blair Morton Ferguson on 12 January 1958 in Londonderry.

   I have told Allen Hubin as it seems unlikely there are two people of that name, though one never knows.

   But, as I have said, as the 1967 death is given everywhere, I wonder if you could mention this to see if anyone can provide more information. It would also help to spread the word of that incorrect date – if it is incorrect.

   Many thanks

               John

      BIBLIOGRAPHY     [Taken from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin] —

FERGUSON, W(illiam) B(lair) M(orton) (1881-1967); see pseudonym William Morton; Born in Belfast.

* *The Big Take (Long, 1952, hc) [U.S.]
* *-Black Bread (Long, 1933, hc)
* *The Black Company (Jenkins, 1925, hc) [New York] Chelsea, 1924.
* *Boss of the Skeletons (Long, 1945, hc) [New York City, NY; 1920 ca.]
* _The Clew in the Glass (Chelsea, 1926, hc) See: The Clue in the Glass (Jenkins 1927).
* *The Clue in the Glass (Jenkins, 1927, hc) [U.S.] U.S. title: The Clew in the Glass. Chelsea, 1926.
* *Crackerjack (Long, 1936, hc) Film: Gainsborough, 1938; released in the U.S. as Man with 100 Faces (scw: A. R. Rawlinson, Michael Pertwee, Basil Mason; dir: Albert de Courville).
* *Dog Fox (Long, 1938, hc)
* *Escape to Eternity (Long, 1944, hc) [Dan Cluer; New York City, NY]
* *The Island of Surprises (Long, 1935, hc)
* *London Lamb (Long, 1939, hc)
* _The Murder of Christine Wilmerding (Liveright, 1932, hc) See: Little Lost Lady (Hurst 1931), as by William Morton.
* *Other Folks’ Money (London: Nelson, 1928, hc) Chelsea, 1926.
* *Phonies (Long, 1951, hc) [New York City, NY; U.S. West]
* _The Pilditch Puzzle (Liveright, 1932, hc) See: The Murderer (Hurst 1932), as by William Morton.
* *Prelude to Horror (Long, 1943, hc)
* *The Riddle of the Rose (Jenkins, 1929, hc) [New York] McBride, 1929.
* *Sally (Long, 1940, hc)
* *The Shayne Case (Long, 1947, hc) [Dan Cluer; New York City, NY]
* *Somewhere Off Borneo (Long, 1936, hc)
* *The Vanishing Men (Long, 1932, hc)
* *Wyoming Tragedy (Long, 1935, hc) [Wyoming]

MORTON, WILLIAM; pseudonym of W. B. M. Ferguson, (1881-1967)

* *The Case of Casper Gault (Hurst, 1932, hc) [Police Commissioner Kirker Cameron; *Insp. Daniel “Biff” Corrigan; New York]
* *The Edged Tool (Chelsea, 1927, hc)
* *Little Lost Lady (Hurst, 1931, hc) [New York] U.S. title: The Murder of Christine Wilmerding, as by W. B. M. Ferguson. Liveright, 1932.
* *Masquerade (London: Nelson, 1928, hc) [*Insp. Daniel “Biff” Corrigan; New York] Chelsea, 1927.
* *The Murderer (Hurst, 1932, hc) [*Insp. Daniel “Biff” Corrigan; Police Commissioner Kirker Cameron; New York City, NY] U.S. title: The Pilditch Puzzle, as by W. B. M. Ferguson. Liveright, 1932.
* *The Mystery of the Human Bookcase (Hurst, 1931, hc) [*Insp. Daniel “Biff” Corrigan; Police Commissioner Kirker Cameron; New York City, NY] Mason (U.S.), 1931.

WILSON TUCKER – The Chinese Doll. Rinehart, hardcover, 1946. Detective Book Club, hardcover, 3-in-1 edition, May 1947. Dell #343, mapback edition, 1949.

   While you might think that a private detective in Boone, Illinois, would be underemployed, you would be right. In this documentary novel — in the form of letters from Charles Horne to Louise, the woman he is in love with — Horne is in his office trying to keep warm and working on his book, Lost Atlantis, of which seven chapters have been completed.

   Into the office comes Harry W. Evans, who gives Horne $500 to bail him out of jail since he claims he will inevitably be arrested for spitting on the sidewalk, or jaywalking, or shoplifting, or whatever.

   Naturally, Home is somewhat nonplussed, for the authorities in Boone are not noted for monkey business. To coin a phrase — or is it a clause? — little does he know. Evans leaves Home’s office, and as Horne is watching, a Studebaker sedan with supercharger strikes Evans, killing him, and then speeds off. Later Horne is invited into another Studebaker with supercharger, this time a coupe, driven by a beautiful Chinese girl, and ends up at an illegal gambling club.

   All of this and another “accidental” death tie in with Evans. Horne doggedly and intelligently — though not brilliantly — investigates, getting some idea of who Evans was through Evans’s membership in an amateur publishing association and discovering another beautiful Chinese girl.

   Even after he’d metaphorically rubbed my nose in it, Tucker fooled me on the villain, for which I give him great credit. The novel is well-written, amusing, and believable, up to the point of revealing the villain.

   While I probably won’t make myself clear here, I accept that the villain was who Tucker says it was — the facts, once Horne pointed them out, prove it — but I don’t accept that the villain was who Tucker says it was. You’ll have to read the book to see what I mean, and you ought to read it anyhow, for it’s an excellent private-eye novel.

   
NOTE:   Wilson “Bob” Tucker, was much more well known as a Science Fiction fan and author than he was a mystery writer. His entry on Wikipedia can be found here.

       The Charles Horne series:

The Chinese Doll.Rinehart, 1946.
To Keep or Kill. Rinehart, 1947.
The Dove. Rinehart, 1948.
The Stalking Man. Rinehart, 1949.
Red Herring. Rinehart, 1951.

HARRY O. ABC / Warner Brothers. Season 2, Part 2. Midseason 1976, Thursday at 10-11pm. Cast: David Janssen as Harry Orwell, Anthony Zerbe as Lieutenant. K.C. Trench, Paul Tulley as Sergeant Roberts. Created by Howard Rodman. Executive Producer: Jerry Thorpe.

   For the rest of the credits and Part One of this review please click here.

   In 1975 Fred Silverman left CBS and became the head of the programming department of ABC. His midseason 75-76 changes to the ABC schedule had been a surprising success, and for the first time in the history of television ABC had a real chance to become the number one network in the ratings. ABC’s success would not be good news for Harry O.

   Meanwhile, Harry O began 1976 with one of my favorite episodes:

“Mister Five and Dime.” (1/8/76): A female classmate (Glynnis O’Connor) of Lester Hodges (Les Lannom) is arrested for passing counterfeit money and she asks him for help. Lester, of course, turns to Harry.

   Robert C. Dennis script featured a far-fetched plot and was laugh out loud funny. The script had enough twists to please Chubby Checker. What made the story so much fun was how Harry continued to get Trench into trouble with one federal agency after another. Director Richard Lang added some nice comedic touches to the jail scenes.

“Book of Changes.” (1/15/76): Jamie (Joanne Nail), a twenty year-old employee of a gambling club, witnesses the murder of her boss, Kate (Barbara Cason) during a robbery. Jamie runs, but does as Kate had earlier instructed her and delivers a tape addressed to: Harry Orwell, 1101 Coast Blvd, Santa Monica. On the tape the now deceased Kate hires Harry (Trench had told her Harry was the best PI in the business) to find her book of names she had for protection and for Harry to destroy it.

   An average Harry O story with little mystery, less logic, and made watchable by Janssen and Zerbe. Harry’s love life takes a twist as Jamie tries to get Harry into bed and Harry resists due to the age difference. Director Russ Mayberry adds a nice visual touch to the cliché TV fight scene at the end with an overhead shot that gave us a great look at Harry’s home.

   Trivia: Before he destroyed the book, Harry teased Trench by (pretending?) to read the name of K. C. Trench in the book. This is the only time K.C. was used, until then we wondered if Trench’s mother had named him Lieutenant.

“Past Imperfect.” (1/22/76): After spending eight years in prison, a conman turned killer (Tim McIntine) is out and looking for his old suitcase he had left with his now ex-partner (Susan Strasberg). Not knowing the old suitcase was important, she had left it behind in San Diego when she went straight and moved to L.A. Two mob-hired killers (Granville Van Dusen and Edward Power) and a mysterious man (David Opatoshu) also want the suitcase.

   One of the worse episodes of the series as it was one stupid illogical scene after another. In between pointless scenes of violence, Harry beds another client, this time rudely rejecting Sue (Farrah Fawcett-Majors). Trench nearly gets the client killed in the most inept stakeout in Harry O history. And the solution to the mystery of what is in the suitcase is obvious to any student of mysteries.

“Hostage.” (2/19/76): Richard (John Rubinstein) robs a liquor store where drug dealers were scheduled to purchase a large amount of heroin. But the buyers were late, and instead of the cash there is only drugs in the safe. To make matters worse, cops spot the hold-up and one of them is shot, creating a hostage situation that is televised live. Harry has to find Richard’s junkie girlfriend (Ayn Ruymen) before the young man starts killing the hostages: Trench, a rich politician’s beautiful daughter (Collen Camp), and the drug-selling storeowner (George Loros).

   A serious social problem (drugs) turned into a simplistic TV melodrama made entertaining only because of the cast. Paul Tulley as Roberts has more to do than usual and does it well.

“Forbidden City.” (2/26/76): A friend of Harry’s, PI George Dillard (Jerry Hardin) phones Harry for help (interrupting Harry and Sue’s “quality” time). Dillard asks Harry to meet him in Chinatown but is killed before he gets there. Harry learns how difficult it is for an “outsider” to find answers in Chinatown.

   Entertaining mystery but with few surprises.

“Victim.” (3/4/76): A woman (Cynthia Avila) hires Harry to prove two of her co-workers (Michael Lerner and Cal Bellini) raped her.

   Predictable as it sounds, the only scenes worth watching feature Harry, Trench and Roberts, who does a great Trench impression.

“Ruby.” (3/11/76): Prostitute and one of Harry’s contacts, Ruby (Margaret Avery) asks Harry for help. She has changed careers to Nurse after she took in her nephew (Stanley Bennett Clay) when his father died. Now the nephew is in jail for stealing a car and killing a cop in a car accident. In a wasted Charles Dickens inspired twist, a mobster (Joe Ruskin) has a gang of poor young men stealing cars for him.

   Typical TV drama with some terrible dialog and obvious twists, but the episode was a good example of how PI (hunch player) Harry and cop (just the facts) Trench worked together, with Trench handling the “by the book” procedural side and Harry doing the PI “without rules” side.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmDZ0KqsZRg

“The Mysterious Case of Lester and Dr. Fong.” (3/18/76): Old rich man (Dean Jagger) gathers his family together to announce he has hired Harry to find out which one of them has threaten to kill him. He then dies…of natural causes. But one family member, Lester Hodges believes the old man was murdered. Lester convinces famous criminalist Dr. Creighton Fong (Keye Luke) to look into the death, and the good Dr. Fong finds evidence of poison.

   Janssen had a reduced but important part in this backdoor pilot for a possible series featuring Lester and Dr. Fong. Trench was thrilled to work with the brilliant and respected Dr. Fong even if it meant having to deal with the aggravating Lester. Every time Fong found evidence that lead Lester to convince Trench to arrest a suspect, that suspect would die.

   Lester and Fong were two supporting characters in need of a lead character strong enough to carry a series. By the end of this you will realize how much of the success of the characters Trench and Lester were due to Harry Orwell and David Janssen.

“Death Certificate.” (4/29/76): Young widow (Denise Galik) and her demanding mother (Ruth Roman) had filed a malpractice suit over the death of her husband. The widow had been beaten and ordered to drop the suit. They go to Harry for help. Harry finds little to help the malpractice suit, but all the threats and violence makes him (and Trench) wonder if the husband had been murdered.

   As usual, we are more interested in what happens to Harry and those around him than the case itself. Harry’s car again fails him, this time with tragic consequences.

   While David Janssen and the chemistry of the cast and characters are the primary reasons for us remembering Harry O as one of television’s best mystery dramas, the series had other virtues as well.

   In Television Chronicles #10 (thanks again to Randy Cox for the copy), Ed Robertson quoted executive producer (who we today would call the series “showrunner”) Jerry Thorpe about the different visual style of Harry O. “…I began to stage exclusively in forced perspective – that is, ‘up and down stage,’ as opposed to ‘stage left and stage right.’”

   This reduced the need for wide angles and master shots. It was a style Thorpe learned from Sidney Furie’s The Ipcress File (1965). Among the series directors, Richard Lang was the best at using the style and directed eighteen of the series forty-four episodes.

   The writers, starting with Howard Rodman and followed by Robert Dozier, Michael Sloan and the rest understood the importance of David Janssen. They focused on how to exploit the talents of Janssen, and (in the Santa Monica episodes) the relationship between Harry and Trench by using a delightful mix of humor and situations hidden inside, at first Rodman’s darker nourish tales, then the ABC approved average TV melodramas. As a result, the series gave us two of TV’s most entertaining and memorable characters, Harry Orwell and K. C. Trench.

   To the surprise of many, ABC cancelled Harry O at the end of the season.

   Jerry Thorpe explained in Television Chronicles #10, “(Silverman) was looking for shows that he thought had the potential to be runaway hits. That was his philosophy. He didn’t want to settle for the ‘average.’ He wanted to take chances with shows that could really elevate the network’s standing-which was exactly what ABC needed to do at the time.”

   The article mentioned the series’ ratings had dropped by one point from the first season but was “still winning its time slot on a consistent basis.” It also noted Variety (April 1976) reaction that while Harry O was the best series of those cancelled, ABC felt Harry O’s ratings would not get any better.

   It is a shame that because of ABC sudden rating success there was no longer a place for Harry O, and we never again got to watch Harry drink the last of Trench’s coffee or hear Trench scream “Roberts!” as he followed Harry out of his office to question the next suspect.

   Now if only Warner Brothers would release the second season on DVD.

      Links to the rest of my series of Harry O reviews:

GERTRUDE

SAN DIEGO

SEASON ONE, PART TWO

ELIZABETH BACKHOUSE – Death Came Uninvited. Robert Hale, UK, hardcover, 1957.

   You can find unusual items on eBay, and for me, this is one I recently ended up winning. My copy is a rather shabby ex-library edition which cost me perhaps a pound, plus double that for shipping from England.

   Elizabeth Backhouse, the flap of the jacket says, is a young Australian writer, and this is her first novel. This sends me to Al Hubin’s [Crime Fiction IV] almost immediately, mostly out of curiosity to see if she ever wrote another.

   And indeed she did. Here are all her books of crime fiction, at least, in chronological order:

         Death Came Uninvited. Hale, 1957. [Inspector Christopher Marsden]
         The Mists Came Down. Hale, 1959.
         The Web of Shadows. Hale, 1960. [Inspector Prentis]
         The Night Has Eyes. Hale, 1961. [Inspector Marsden]
         Death of a Clown. Hale, 1962. [Inspector Prentis]
         Death Climbs a Hill. Hale, 1963. [Inspector Prentis]

   Inspector Marsden is her English policeman, while Inspector Prentis, about whom I know nothing else, is Australian. It may be that Ms. Backhouse’s story-telling techniques took on extra dimensions as she continued to write, but in at least her first book, we see and follow Marsden when he’s on the job, and nowhere else, so as it turns out, I know very little about him as well.

   No wife, girl friend, no home life, nothing at all except — it’s not much, but it will have to do — he does have a dog, one who follows his master around with him as he interviews suspects and follows clues. The dog’s name is Spodge, which sounds terribly authentically British to me.

   In pure pulp fashion, you might say — not the hard-boiled Hammett stuff — but the gentleman-adventurer-slash-drawing-room sort of tale, the murderer kills his first victim using a sealed envelope filled with ammonia, leaving a calling card for the crime, signed “The Uninvited.”

   And so the pursuit is on. There are lots of suspects in an increasingly complicated plot, but what Marsden and his men failed to do, it seems to me, is to ever ask the question, “Why such a complicated means to do murder?” and “Why did the murderer feel that he was uninvited?”

   Or, where is Ellery Queen when we need him? As for me, I let Marsden and his men do all of the legwork, I concentrated on the second question (the first one has no answer), and I worked out the entire solution before any of them.

   I don’t brag. I only tell it how it is. The case is still entertaining, save for a small amount of muddled telling toward the end, and I could see why. The author was trying to keep the surprise ending up her sleeve for as long as she could, and there wasn’t nearly room enough for her to maneuver.

GIL DODGE – Flint. Signet #1414, paperback original, 1957. Included in 3 Steps to Hell as by Arnold Hano, Stark House, softcover, October 2012, along with So I’m a Heel and The Big Out.

   Flint offers some fine Western characters and a terse, hard-boiled opening, but ultimately it’s more interesting for the story behind it than the story within.

   Arnold Hano, the editor-in-chief at Lion Books back in the 1950s ought to be legendary for the quality of the work he sustained. While not every Lion Book was a classic of its time, Hano gave work to writers like Jim Thompson, Robert Bloch, David Goodis and Richard Matheson when they needed it most. And he didn’t just give them work, he gave them free rein to indulge their pulpy passions on the printed page.

   Books like The Kidnaper, The Killer Inside Me, The Burglar and Someone Is Bleeding teem with genuine artistry inside their gaudy covers that would be admirable anywhere, and simply amazing inside a cheap paperback.

   So when I learned that Hano himself wrote a western based on Jim Thompson’s Savage Night (with Thompson’s blessing) I came to it with high expectations — maybe too high. It starts well, with Flint, a notorious Hired Gun, previously lung-shot and in hiding, making his painful way across barren countryside to keep a rendezvous with a mysterious cattle baron named Good who needs a job done right—very close to the same situation the tubercular Charlie Biggers walks into in Savage Night.

   And in short order, Flint finds himself working a run-down ranch with his intended target, a rancher named Thomason (get it?) romancing a buxom wife and playing cat-and-mouse with Good’s henchman and a slovenly sheriff.

   And then [SPOILER!] everything just kinda stops as Flint gets sucked into an elaborate, nay byzantine, game with the man who hired him, trying to figure out his place in the scheme of things and the roles and motives of the various other players. Every move Flint makes, Good has seen coming, everything he tries gets him nowhere, or leads him to where Good has figured he’d go… and nothing really happens as several chapters go by with Good’s schemes getting more complex and Flint’s efforts more futile.

   Okay now, maybe this is a personal thing with me, or maybe it’s the vision and talent of the writers in question. I’ll entertain both possibilities, but in Savage Night, Jim Thompson conveys the notion of a cruel and mocking universe through which his doomed characters must wander.

   And this to me was more compelling — more convincing, even — than Arno/Dodge’s picture of a nasty old man cooking up murderous plots just for the fun of seeing folks squirm. I guess the difference is that Thompson’s characters do battle with nightmares while Arno/Dodge’s simply grasp for the banal — and find it all too readily within their reach.

ALICE MacGOWAN & PERRY NEWBERRY – The Million Dollar Suitcase. Stokes, hardcover, 1922; International Fiction Library, hardcover reprint, n.d.

   Impossible-crime fanciers get a bonus and a debit here. The bonus: There are two locked-room situations. The debit: They aren’t very good.

   The first occurs when a San Francisco bank teller absconds with nearly a million dollars. Close on the teller’s heels is the bank’s private detective, Jerry Boyne. He arrives at the teller’s hotel room to find the windows latched with burglar-proof locks and the door closed with the usual spring lock.

   In front of the door is a woman repairing a rug, and she had been there since the teller had entered his room. The teller had not left by the door, but neither he nor the money was in the room.

   Worth Gilbert, whose father has stock in the bank, offers the bank’s board $800,000 for the contents of the suitcase. It seems he needs a challenge. While Gilbert can raise most of the money, he has to ask his father to provide the rest. After a fight with his father, he doesn’t get the money. Shortly thereafter his father is found shot to death in the second locked room.

   Fortunately for Boyne, who would not have been chosen by his predecessor to head the detective agency and one can see why from the many mistakes he makes in this investigation, he has the aid, on the rare occasions he’s sensible enough to use it, of a young woman whose psychologist father trained her from childhood to be a lightning observer and reasoner. She figures out the first locked room; Boyne, after having the solution shoved under his nose, solves the second.

   This novel apparently appeared first in the Saturday Evening Post as “Two and Two.” As far as I can recall, the Post printed no bad stories, but it did publish some mediocre material, in which category this falls, despite an occasional good observation such as “A financier’s idea of indecency is something about money which hasn’t formerly been done.”

   Since this is the first in a series of books featuring Jerry Boyne, I’ll be looking for the other novels by MacGowan and Newberry but only to establish who solves Boyne’s other cases.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Alice MacGowan & Perry Newberry —
             [All with Jerry Boyne.]

      The Million Dollar Suitcase. Stokes, 1922.
      The Mystery Woman. Stokes, 1924.
      Shaken Down. Stokes, 1925.
      The Seventh Passenger. Stokes, 1926.
      Who Is This Man?. Stokes, 1927.

   For my last column I revisited one of the Bertha Cool/Donald Lam novels written by Erle Stanley Gardner as A.A. Fair, and for this one I tackled another. Fools Die on Friday (1947) is more straightforward than Bedrooms Have Windows and the plotting more under Gardner’s control.

   The firm is hired to protect a real-estate tycoon from having his food poisoned by his second wife, who married him after his first wife died of, you guessed it, food poisoning. Donald quickly catches on that his new client isn’t who she claims to be. Then he devises a scam to delay the poison plot by posing as PR man for a manufacturer of anchovy paste and offering to put Wife Two in ads for the product.

   The realtor is poisoned anyway — with arsenic in the paste Donald left at his house as samples — and so is his wife. He recovers but she doesn’t. Then his secretary is strangled and Donald finds the body. Mixed into the ragout are a devious dentist, a machine that handicaps horse races, and a wandering package of arsenic.

   There’s very little detection in this opus, but the pace is furious (as usual with Gardner) and the climax, with one character literally getting away with murder, would never have been allowed in a contemporaneous Perry Mason novel since the Masons were being serialized in the Saturday Evening Post and the Cool/Lam books weren’t.

   Among other dividends in Fools Die we get to learn a new word. In Chapter 5 Cool tells Lam she’s trying to get the firm’s client “in a position where she has to pungle up more money.” In Chapter 15 she asks him: “You pungled up a hundred bucks in cold cash on the nose of one pony on the strength of it [i.e. the handicapping machine]?”

   I’ve never seen the word before in my life but Webster’s New International Dictionary assures me that it’s a genuine verb, meaning to pay or contribute. I wonder where Gardner came across it.

   Ever hear of Walter Kaufmann? He was born in Germany of Jewish parents in 1922, left his homeland on a scholarship to an American college just before Hitler launched World War II, returned to Germany with Military Intelligence during the war, and eventually was hired by Princeton University as a professor of philosophy. I discovered him in my teens and have been reading him all my life.

   Why am I recounting all this here? Because in one of his best-known books, Critique of Religion and Philosophy (1958), he tossed off a comment about our genre that is well worth preserving:

   The balance of this sentence is for our purposes (if I may cite a Gardnerism) incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that among Kaufmann’s favorite whodunits were those in which the detective acted as historian, for example Ellery Queen’s The Murderer Is a Fox (1945) and Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time (1952).

   We’ll never know for sure. Kaufmann died horribly in 1980 at age 58. Anyone interested in the details can access his brother Felix Kaufmann’s account of his death by googling both men’s names.

   Still bogged down as I am in the index for The Art of Detection, I’ll pad out this column to its usual length with the help of that nonpareil, that nonesuch, that Ed Word of the written wood, Michael Avallone.

   Over the decades I’ve culled from his 200-odd novels well over a thousand prime specimens of the Avalloneism. Both Bill Pronzini and I as well as some others have offered samples taken from his Ed Noon PI novels, but readers of this column are less likely to have seen those he perpetrated in the dozens of paperback Gothics he wrote under female bylines back in the Sixties.

   From The Second Secret, as by Edwina Noone (Belmont pb #B50-686, 1966) I’ve harvested 7½ single-spaced pages of howlers, which I hope to dole out over the next several columns. Page numbers are provided in case anyone wants to quote these in an academic journal. Hold onto your hats and here we go:

   Of course, any number of Avallone’s Gothics are utterly devoid of such gems. When I find one of these I usually fling it across the room, snarling: “Why did I pungle up good money for this garbage? Someone edited it!” But so many of his immortal works are so lavishly studded with verbal cow pies that I could keep quoting like this till at least my 90th birthday. If there should be one.

[Editorial Comment.]   11-7-12.   By the time Dell got around to reprinting their 1951 edition of Fools Die on Friday (#542), the first cover was considered risque enough that some changes had to be made. See below:

THE WEB. Universal, 1947. Ella Raines, Edmond O’Brien, William Bendix, Vincent Price, Maria Palmer, John Abbott, Fritz Leiber, Howland Chamberlin. Director: Michael Gordon.

   Films beget films. At least the popular ones do. In a process not unlike evolution, successful films breed films like themselves which in turn permutate into others like themselves, and on and on until the trend overpopulates itself and dies off.

   But along the way, some interesting specimens pop up. Case in point: The Web, a nifty little semi-noir mystery that deserves to be better known. Unpretentious, fast-paced and intelligent, this was scripted by a team of writers (William Bowers, Bertram Milhauser and Harry Kurnitz) with solid credentials, and directed by Michael Gordon (who he?) with an eye for personality and atmosphere.

   The forebears of this film are of interest: Back in 1944, Fox came out with Laura, a mega-hit starring Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, with meaty roles doled out to Clifton Webb and Vincent Price as a pair of soigné suspects. Two years later, Fox decided to rework the motif with The Dark Corner, featuring Clifton Webb again as a cultured criminal type, this time backed up by William Bendix as mindless muscle. Then for its own variation on the theme, Universal populated The Web with Vincent Price and William Bendix — and did quite nicely by them both.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThW7t0kYHnY

   Edmond O’Brien (back when he was merely chubby) stars as a struggling young attorney hired by wealthy industrialist Vincent Price (back when he was merely nasty) as a bodyguard. So, all obvious jokes aside, why hire a lawyer as a bodyguard?

   Well, there’s a complicated story about an ex-partner (Fritz Leiber) convicted of stealing bonds, now out of jail and maybe carrying a grudge — though Vinnie assures us he himself had nothing to do with the whole messy business. To further complicate matters (he goes on, in his most urbane manner) there’s a business deal pending, and if word got out his life was threatened it might scare away investors. So what more natural than to have a lawyer on his staff who happens to carry a gun?

   Yeah, any mystery fan can see something phony coming down the road like a float in a Macy’s parade, and O’Brien senses it too, but he takes the job anyway, mainly because of Price’s Personal Assistant, played by Ella Raines, one of the most uniquely alluring femmes of the 40s. The script says there’s a romantic spark between them, but frankly, she looks so far out of his class he might as well be in another movie.

   And it seems Price has another personal assistant, this one more appalling than appealing, played by John Abbott, a 40s character actor who projects a prissy ghoulishness all his own. Just what work he does for Price ain’t exactly clear, but one quickly gets the impression it’s nothing very saintly.

   So with some misgivings, O’Brien sees his old cop-pal (William Bendix, surprisingly bespectacled and cerebral here) gets a gun permit, and the show is on. What follows is a splendid game of move and counter-move involving murder (or is it?) blackmail (or is someone bluffing?) and carefully-plotted traps that seem to snare those who set them. Or as Bendix puts it to O’Brien, “Don’t you see? If you prove it’s murder, then you’re the murderer.”

   This is an unusually intelligent film, with stops along the way for well-realized minor characters, like Leiber’s bitter daughter, broodingly portrayed by one Maria Palmer, an actress who should have gone further. And we also get the patently unsympathetic Howland Chamberlain — you may recall him as the loathsome druggist in Best Years of Our Lives or the smarmy hotelier in High Noon — as a pretentious author with clues to Price’s past. Fleeting pleasures in a film that provides an engaging and entertaining eighty-seven minutes well worth your time.

HARRY O. ABC / Warner Brothers. Season 2, Part 1. Fall 1975, Thursday at 10-11pm. Created by Howard Rodman. Cast: David Janssen as Harry Orwell, Anthony Zerbe as Lieutenant K.C. Trench, Paul Tulley as Sergeant Roberts. Recurring Cast: Farrah Fawcett-Majors as Sue Ingham, Bill Henderson as Spencer Johnson, Les Lannom as Lester Hodges, Margaret Avery as Ruby Dome (aka Ruby Lawrence), Barbara Leigh as Gina, Richard Stahl as Pathologist Dr. Samuelson, Susan Adams as Police lab tech Jean Parnell. Executive Producer: Jerry Thorpe. Producers: Robert Dozier and Alex Beaton.

   From the beginning what made Harry O special was David Janssen and how the series used his talents to explore both the dark and comedic side of his character. Howard Rodman’s dark social noirish stories from the first half of Season One had been replaced with the more typical TV melodrama. Happily, the second season continued to take advantage of the special chemistry between Janssen and Anthony Zerbe and the relationship between Harry and Police Lieutenant Trench.

“Anatomy of a Frame.” (9/11/75): Trench is framed for the murder of one of his informants. One of the best episodes of the series, it showed how important great characters and chemistry between the actors is to any TV series.

   The episode has a wonderful scene where Trench comes to Harry for help. We learn Trench is married with two young children, one boy and one girl. We enjoy watching Trench open up and reveal more about himself such as his shared interest in Harry’s unfinished boat “The Answer.” The boat was meant to be an allegory for Harry’s endless search for answers in life. The two men may have opposite views of how to work and live, but they shared the same purpose and dreams.

“One for the Road.” (9/18/75): A brilliant lawyer (Carol Rossen), who denies a drinking problem, hires Harry to find out if she was behind the wheel of a car in a hit and run accident. This episode as a weak melodrama saved by a decent mystery.

“Lester Two.” (9/25/75) features the return of Harry’s biggest fan Lester Hodges. An international jewel thief (Clifford David) hides some stolen diamonds in a bottle of cologne that the unknowing Sue brings back from Paris for Harry. It is Sue’s birthday and all she wants is some quiet time with Harry, but those plans change with the arrival of the thief who wants his diamonds (that are not in the bottle).

   The series had a fondness for having odd scenes dropped in for comic relief. In this episode, we have a scene where Trench introduces Harry to Professor Kroner (Paul Harper) a mad scientist working for the police department creating gadgets James Bond’s Q would admire. The story is full of flaws from the actions of the thief to Lester at his most annoying, but Janssen as Harry makes the episode watchable.

“Shades.” (10/2/75): Harry is hired by a rich woman (Anjanette Comer) to clear her maid (Maidie Norman) of murder. Set against the backdrop of racial prejudices of the time, Harry unites with the local bookie, Cleon (Lou Gossett) who has his own reasons for finding the true killer.

   A good episode made better by Lou Gossett and a strong mystery. One fun scene features Harry’s mechanic Spence escorting Harry through the “black” section of town.

   Trivia: Harry was born in Philadephia. After the Korean War, he looked around and found he liked San Diego. And while Harry can run with no problems, the bullet is still in his back.

“Reflections.” (10/9/75): Harry’s ex-police partner in San Diego, now a Los Angeles PI is found dead. Harry discovers the man’s client is Harry’s ex-wife Elizabeth (Felicia Farr) who is being blackmailed.

   A welcome look at Harry’s past, weakened by the lack of logic in the bad guy’s actions and Harry’s car. In the beginning the car was a symbol of Harry’s beach bum lifestyle, then it became a comedic device. But here the car breaks down and lets the killer escape. Why does Harry continue to use the car when his and others lives are on the line? And after this, how can we still find Harry’s choice in transportation funny?

“The Acolyte.” (10/16/75) Harry is hired to find a woman (Kristina Holland) who will soon inherit her family’s fortune. He finds her taken in by a religious cult. She is convinced the cult is protecting her from being charged with murder.

   The episode had a nice subplot about old movie actors, but it was wasted in this predictable mystery with some of the worse acting by guest stars in the series.

“Mayday.” (10/23/75) A Senator (Geoffrey Lewis) is nearly killed when his private plane crashes. Harry gets involved because the plane’s pilot, who died in the crash, was a buddy from his time in Korea. When the dead pilot’s wife (Maggie Blye) returns from the funeral to find her home trashed, Harry suspects the crash may not have been an accident.

   Highlights of the episode include the choice of murder weapon and the scenes between Harry and Trench. Harry’s love life has a setback as he spends time protecting his female client rather than with his girlfriend, DMV contact and neighbor Gina. Gina is less forgiving than Sue.

“Tender Killing Care.” (10/30/75): Spence asks Harry for help as his father (Jester Hairston) had escaped from a senior care center and broke into a small convenience store. Meanwhile, Sue asks Harry to find the missing father of three Korean children.

   Cheap melodrama at its worst. You have a white doctor (Kenneth Mars) with a thick Southern accent mistreating seniors such as Spencer’s father (who is black). Meanwhile, the story of the missing daddy was a pointless waste of time. Then we have an important part of Harry’s character (he has no family except his friends) ignored for a condescending ending.

“APB Harry Orwell.” (11/6/75) Its Harry’s turn to be framed for murder. Trench is forced to balance his sense of duty as a policeman with his friendship to Harry. Harry escapes from jail, an innocent man on the run for a murder he did not commit. This time we know the one-armed man didn’t do it.

   Harry is fun to watch again. This is the episode that won Anthony Zerbe the Emmy for Best Supporting Actor. The humor is typical for the series, such as the reason Harry gives Trench to why he is innocent, “As an ex-cop charged with murder is bad enough, but to leave clues as big as billboards is down right embarrassing.”

“Group Terror.” (11/13/75) Lady psychiatrist (Joanna Pettet) thinks one of her group therapy patients killed another member of the group. Trench is pleased to learn Harry has joined the group (he goes undercover). Harry’s love life gets some attention as he beds the client.

   A weak attempt at a locked room murder, as the only way the killer could have gotten out is through a small window in a third floor apartment. As with too many of this season’s episodes, the story fails to take us anywhere unexpected. Fortunately, because of Harry and Trench (with Roberts), we enjoy the ride.

“Portrait of a Murder.” (11/20/75) Harry is hired by the parents (Lou Frizzell and Katherine Helmond) of a mentally challenged 19-year old boy (Adam Arkin) to find out where the boy had snuck out to the night before. Harry makes friends with the boy who becomes a suspect in the murders of three young women.

   This episode handles the issue of the mentally challenged with sensitivity, though some of the language and attitudes are dated.

“Exercise in Fatality.” (12/4/75) Hotheaded cop (Ralph Meeker) hires Harry to find his runaway teenaged daughter (Nora Heflin) who is also a pregnant junkie. Before Harry finds her, his client is framed for the murder of the daughter’s boyfriend. The daughter believes her father did it but had seen the two real killers leave the scene of the crime. Harry tries to find the girl before the real killers can. Meanwhile, an ex-lover of Harry shows up and asks to stay while she hides from her mobster boyfriend.

   Two separate plots for one episode was rarely used in the series and never worked. None of the characters were developed enough for us to care about them and the use of the pregnant junkies is too over the top melodramatic. But watch Janssen, he makes you care about what happens to Harry.

“The Madonna Legacy.” (12/11/75) An eight-year old murder is the key to the death of an alcoholic ex-cop turn PI, and friend of Harry. Harry is driven by guilt as he realizes he was the last of four people the PI tried to call before he was killed. The names of the other three are from the same family, each is in danger from someone who wants them dead. This episode was the best mystery of the season so far.

   ABC made major changes in its midseason schedule with seven new shows, six cancelled and three moved. Harry O would remain behind the successful Streets of San Francisco on ABC’s Thursday night schedule. But CBS and NBC changed its Thursday schedules with CBS dropping CBS Thursday Night Movies for Hawaii Five-O followed by Barnaby Jones, and NBC moving Ellery Queen and dropping Medical Story for NBC Thursday Night Movie. The year 1976 would bring major changes to the TV network world, changes that would not be good for Harry O.

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS BLOG: HARRY O: Season 1, Part 2.

NEXT: HARRY O: Season 2, Part 2 (Midseason, 1976).