WILLIAM L. DeANDREA – The Lunatic Fringe. M. Evans, hardcover, 1980. Mysterious Press, paperback, 1985.

   As far as mysteries go, the title of this one is a little bit of a puzzle in itself, perhaps. What it’s referring to is a group of dedicated election year radicals who have been rallying about the cause of the Democratic presidential candidate.

   Not enough information, you say? Take, then, the book’s subtitle, which is: “A Novel Wherein Theodore Roosevelt Meets the Pink Angel.” Yes, that Theodore Roosevelt – – but he’s not the one running for President. The year is 1896, and William McKinley is the Republican candidate. Running against him, on the Democratic ticket, is William Jennings Bryan, the silver-tongued orator from Nebraska.

   Bryan and his campaign are being backed by William Randolph Hearst, the new publisher of the New York Journal. Roosevelt is still only the president of that city’s Police Board, and his staunch ally in fighting corruption in the ranks is a young police officer named Muldoon. And it is Muldoon who innocently begins to unravel a plot which, left unchecked, would spell doom for half the city.

   These were the days of an entirely different era, politically as well as socially. DeAndrea, whose two previous books have each won him an Edgar award, has caught the flavor well. There is a touch of Horatio Alger in Muldoon, a rough but ready Irish cop, and a warm sense of proud propriety in Katie, his older but still unmarried sister.

   Regrettable are DeAndrea’s occasional lapses, as in much bad science fiction, into allowing his characters to talk to each other of things it seems they should already know. As a detective story, though, which ls what this is, parts fit, and parts don’t. Those that do are often muddled, though seldom beyond repair. Minor inconsistencies in character sometimes have a reason behind them, and sometimes they take the appearance of whims, fashioned to fit passing reflections.

   Even so, although the motive for the murder Muldoon and his superior find themselves investigating seems in the end to have been rather nebulous, DeAndrea as the author produces a creditable surprise as to the identity of the killer.

   It does not seem enough, unfortunately, to keep his award-winning streak alive at three.

Rating: C plus.

   
Editorial Update: William DeAndrea won three Edgars in all:

      Killed in the Ratings 1978 (Edgar winner: Best First Novel)
   
      The HOG Murders 1979 (Edgar winner: Best Paperback Original)

   He won his third Edgar in 1994 for his reference work, Encyclopedia Mysteriosa.

REVIEWED BY RAY O’LEARY:

JOHN SANDFORD – Shadow Prey. Lucas Davenport #2. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1990. Berkley, paperback, 1991.

   Over 20 years ago, Larry Clay was a policeman who used his uniform to get away with raping 12-year-old Native American girls. Now, Lawrence Duberville Clay is Director of the FBI — and a small group of Native Americans have devised a plan to lure him to Minnesota, where they plan to kill him.

   Realizing Clay is a Publicity Hound, the group plans to draw his attention with a series of well-publicized murders. But since the killings began in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where most of the Indians live, the bulk of the investigation is handled by Lt. Lucas Davenport of the Minneapolls PD.

   I found this inordinately easy to put down. Davenport is hardly a likeable character — he has proposed marriage to the unwed mother of his child, a Murphy Brown clone, but has no qualms about starting an affair with the female cop sent to assist him — and the ending is swiped from an earlier — and better — book by William Goldman.

RIVIERA. “Villa Carmella.” Sky Atlantic, UK, 15 June 2017 (Season One, Episode One). Anthony LaPaglia as Constantine Clios, a billionaire philanthropist; Julia Stiles as Georgina Marjorie Clios, an American art curator, and second wife of Constantine; Lena Olin as Irina Atman, Constantine’s first wife. Written by Neil Jordan & John Banville. Director: Philipp Kadelbach. Currently streaming on Amazon Prime (until September 1).

   There’s a much larger cast than this, of course, and lots of views of the beautiful Riviera shoreline, as well as intimate peeks inside the lives of the Rich and Famous. What more could a viewer want? Well, a faster moving story line for one thing, but looking back after watching this, the first episode of the first season, maybe it just seemed slower than usual. It is, after all, one long ten hour story, told one segment at a time. Not everything has to be crammed into the first 60 minutes.

   Or maybe it’s that the story sounds so familiar. Georgina is Constantine’s second wife, and she is in New York City bidding in an art auction while he’s back home in France, entertaining himself on a large luxury yacht when it suddenly explodes, leaving no survivors. After the funeral, Georgina begins to learn that her husband had, shall we say, all kinds of secrets. End of episode one.

   It is clear, in a very general sense, where the story goes from here. It’s the details that are missing, and I suspect that it will not be until episode two before I will decide whether watching more than that may be worth doing. There are, of course, hints that Constantine may not even be dead, even though the police have matched his dental records.

   What is not clear is, once this first season’s story line is finished, what can be left for an already aired second season, and a third one that is already in the works. Time, as they say, shall tell.

HARLAN ELLISON “Find One Cuckaboo.” PI Sheckley Scodell #1. First published in The Saint Mystery Library #11, edited by Leslie Charteris; paperback original, 1st printing, February 1960. Collected in Again, Honorable Whoredom at a Penny a Word (Edgeworks Abbey, trade paperback, September 2014).

   I’m not 100 percent positive, but in all likelihood this was the first and only appearance in print of New York City based PI Sheck Scodell. In the early days of his writing career Harlan Ellison scraped out a living writing all kinds of stories, not only science fiction, but crime stories, too, mostly in the lowest level magazines, such as Guilty, Trapped, Pursuit, and so on, and I wouldn’t be surprised to be told he wrote westerns as well.

   Of these, several others were private eye tales, three with Jerry Killian and one with Big John Novak (who in reality was three foot two). You can read more of them by following the links to the Thrilling Detective website. Scodell describes himself as being a dead ringer for the man in all of these shirt advertisements: “the fellow with the slight moustache, wearing a black eye patch, smiles at a wench..”

   He also admits that he’s not always the brightest bulb on the block, and that’s probably why he was hired on this case, which if the word wacky hadn’t be invented, they’d have to in order describe this one properly.

   It seems as though one of three eccentric sisters, all in their fifties and each a  millionairess several times over, has been raped and murdered. All three of them hated each other, even though they lived together in the same house, but nonetheless the two remaining ones have taken up with guns and have vowed to kill the culprit on sight.

   Their financial advisors call on Sheck for help. His job: stop them.

   This one comes straight from the old pulp magazines, but with a somewhat distasteful twist to it that the pulps most certainly wouldn’t have allowed their writers to get anywhere near. It’s one of those tales in which all kinds of crazy things happen but they all get straightened out in the end. Ellison always had  imaginative ideas and a very readable way with words, even when he was first starting — and probably getting a fraction of a cent a word — and “Find One Cuckaboo” is no exception.

REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

THE PETRIFIED FOREST. Warner Brothers, 1936. Leslie Howard, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Genevieve Tobin, Dick Foran, Charlie Grapewin, Joe Sawyer, Porter Hall, and Adrian Morris. Screenplay by Charles Kenyon and Delmer Daves, from the play by Robert E. Sherwood. Directed by Archie Mayo.

   Sherwood’s play and the film made from it have not aged well, but if you can accept the artificiality and pardon the pseudo-poetics, it remains oddly fascinating and very watchable.

   The contrived plot has wandering writer manqué Leslie Howard turning up at an isolated eat-here-and-get-gas joint owned by self-styled militiaman Porter Hall, run by his would-be poet daughter Bette Davis (she reads Francois Villon and dreams of seeing Paris) with the eager assistance of lustful pump-jockey Dick Foran, and the interference of grandfather Charles Grapewin, who never stops cadging drinks and telling about the time he met Billy the Kid.

   Then into this mix of flammable futility walks Duke Mantee (Bogart) and his retinue of desperadoes, weary with hunting and fain would lie down. And the rest of the show is the collision of the gangsters’ irresistible force against the all-too-moveable dreams of the others.

   It’s all quite talky and contrived, but I found myself drawn into it anyway. Time and again the aspirations of the ordinary folk get dashed to bits by the bad guys till only Leslie Howard’s doomed romanticism is left to counter Bogart’s lethal fatalism. They spar like gunfighters jockeying for position, edging toward the final shoot-out that must leave one of them dead in the dust, and when it comes, it hits with real intensity.

   The actors carry Sherwood’s ideas with a bluff grace that rises to poesy. I was particularly taken by Dick Foran’s horny has-been football star and Porter Hall’s would-be tough-guy, perfect foils for Howard and Bogart. Davis evokes just the right note of dream-struck, and Grapewin’s old-timer is simply delightful, needy and comic at the same time.

   And then there’s Bogart, splendidly awful in the film that established him in Hollywood.

   Warners bought the play in a package deal with Leslie Howard pre-set to star. They had Cagney and Robinson under contract, but Howard insisted on Bogart, who played Mantee in the stage production. Bogey’s performance is stagey, mannered and over-emphatic, but it’s riveting. The minute he lurches in, arms akimbo, face stamped with the mask of tragedy, it’s as if Frankenstein’s monster had invaded the set. You simply can’t take your eyes off him, bad as he is. And he gets the best line in the whole movie: “You can talk sittin’ down, I heard ya doin’ it.”

   Yes, he’s way too theatrical, but somehow Bogie fits this film as no other actor could have. I’m glad he shed the mannerisms and moved on to become the legend that he was, but I still appreciate this hammy debut into the ranks of the Tough Guys.

THE STRIP. “Pilot.” UPN, 60m. 7 July 2000 (Season 1, Episode 10). Sean Patrick Flanery, Guy Torry,  Joe Viterell. Director: Félix Enríquez Alcalá.

   Taking full advantage of the popularity of TV shows set in Las Vegas, except for the inclusion of naked showgirls, The Strip followed the adventures of private security consultants Elvis Ford (Sean Patrick Flannery) and Jesse Weir (Guy Torry) as the in-house detectives for Caesar’s Palace owner Cameron Green (Joe Viterelli). For reasons unknown to me, the pilot was shown last, six months after a nine week run on UPN between 19 October 1999 and 11 January 2000.

   Some of their background is filled in, albeit rather sketchily. Circumstances required their resignation from the police force on unwarranted grounds, but Mr. Green saw fit to offer them a job as his personal trouble-shooters (there may be more to this). In this, the actual first story, they are asked to solve the murder of a young woman found dead in an unoccupied hotel room, without causing any fuss that would drive customers away.

   I will possibly be giving away too much of the plot here. I’ll try to be careful. It seems that a heist of the casino is in the works, and to that end a female circus body manipulation specialist (contortionist) is required to make her way through a long passage of ceiling ducts, then out two rather bland good guys have a final confrontation with the bad guys.

   It’s obvious that the producers assumed that Las Vegas glitz and a the timeworn story line of two detective buddies on the case would be all the series needed.They were at least partially correct. There was just enough in this first/last show of the series to keep me watching without looking at my watch, which is always a good sign.

   The series didn’t last long, but then again, with the exception of Star Trek: Voyager, none of the series ever shown on UPN really did, either.

THE LADY CONFESSES. PRC, 1945. Mary Beth Hughes, Hugh Beaumont, Edmund MacDonald, Claudia Drake, Emmett Vogan. Director: Sam Newfield.

   Add this to a small list of mystery movies from the 1930s and 40s in which the detective on record is female and working on her own. When the wife of her fiancé Larry Craig (Hugh Beaumont) suddenly shows up after an unexplained absence of seven years, then even more suddenly is found murdered, it is up to Vicki McGuire (Mary Beth Hughes) to go undercover at the nightclub where Craig has an alibi.

   Everyone there will vouch for him, except for the owner, Lucky Brandon (Edmund MacDonald, as slick and sleazy looking as usual). When Lucky’s secret financial dealings with the dead woman are discovered, Vicki does her best to find out more.

   It really isn’t much of a story, and some of the loose ends are never tied up (to put it mildly), but both the photography and direction are above average for this level of B-movie, and it is fun to see a well motivated lady detective at work.

   
REGINALD HILL – One Small Step. Dalziel & Pascoe #12. Novella. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1990. No US print edition.

   This is a slender (108 pages) little oddity that I’d heard about for some lime and finally managed to borrow a copy of. It takes Hill’s mainstays, Dalziel & Pascoe, into a future where a French astronaut becomes the first man to be to murdered on the Moon, in the year 2010. Pascoe is Commissioner of the Eurofed Justice Department, and Dalziel is in gouty retirement when the former is handed the politically sensitive case and enlists the aid of the latter. So there they are on the moon, grilling the international crew of the murdered man’s moon lander.

   It’s a bit odd seeing Dalziel and Pascoe with their roles reversed, and even odder “hearing” Dalziel’s dialect in a hi-tech setting. In a way it seems almost like a parody, though in others there’s Hill’s always excellent prose and often mordant view of the human condition. There isn’t enough space for much characterization apart from the two detectives, but all told it’s an enjoyable if minor piece.

FRED ZACKEL – Cinderella After Midnight. Michael Brennen #2. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, hardcover, 1980. No paperback edition.

   When private investigator Michael Brennen agrees to help find his client’s daughter, he thinks he’s working on a run-of-the-mill custody case. Instead, the trail leads him straight into the gritty, grimy pesthole of San Francisco’s notorious Tenderloin district.

   One of the primary obligations of the California private eye novel has always seemed to involve the public display of some of the sorrier undersides of the once-proud California dream. Here we get an eyeful. We’re led from alley to gutter and back again, and just as we’ve begun to feel there’s no escape – and for most of the inhabitants of this noxious world there is not – the trail suddenly takes a surprising twist upward, into the light of day and into the inner offices of some of the state’s leading politicians and financial leaders.

   Brennen’s client turns out to be a hooker, but at one time she was a call girl with powerful government connections. He spots the daughter in a porno film, one she made with a live-in lesbian lover. The mother is murdered, the girl is kidnapped, and the underground revolution is blamed – but we know better. Big Business and Big Government are both involved – the twin Boogie Men that may grab us all yet.

   The story is steeped in sour sex and melancholia. There is little to blow away the pervading gloom. The plot is wonderfully convoluted, a mystery addict’s delight, but its grip on the reader never wholly takes hold. Why this should be so is not entirely clear. There may be cause for beginning to wonder whether, just maybe, a message like this one might not have been a measure too much for its limited means of conveyance to handle.

Rating: B

      The Michael Brennen series —

Cocaine and Blue Eyes (1978)
Cinderella After Midnight (1980)

TEQUILA AND BONETTI.  “Street Dogs.” CBS, 60m. 17 January 1992. (Season 1, Episode 1.) Jack Scalia as Detective Nico “Nick” Bonetti, Charles Rocket as Captain Midian Knight, Mariska Hargitay as Officer Angela Garcia, Brad Sanders as Tequila (voice). Writer: Donald P. Bellisario. Director: Michael Zinberg.

   In case you’re wondering, Tequila is a dog, a police dog, mind you, and a good one, but a dog, and one of the ugliest dogs you’ve ever seen. Police detective Nick Bonetti is a transplant to L.A. from New York City, and part of the basis thesis of the series is that he’s a fish out of water. I think Jack Scalia made a good part of his acting career playing an Italian from Brooklyn, a role which I’m sure came very easy to him, because that’s exactly who he is.

   In “Street Dogs” he solves a murder which everyone else thinks was a suicide, but it takes Tequila’s strong sense of smell to catch the killer. And having written that, I see that I’ve neglected telling you what the kicker is in all this. We, the viewer, get to hear Tequila’s wry commentary on what’s going on around him. No one else, only us.

   Well, someone thought this was going to be a very funny concept, and audiences would lap it up. It might have been a go – audiences like talking animals, as you well know – but in spite of Bonetti’s natural brashness, he also comes with his own baggage. He accidentally killed a 12-year-old girl while on duty back in NYC, and he still hasn’t gotten over it. Breaking down and crying in the arms of his ex-wife just doesn’t go with the flow. It broke the comic mood entirely, I can tell you that.

   Apparently 10 of 12 episodes that were filmed actually made it onto the air. It’s a wonder it lasted as long as it did.