All all-time favorite. This is the first time I’ve seen them play it live.

G. M. FORD – Who in Hell Is Wanda Fuca? Leo Waterman #1. Walker, hardcover, 1995. Avon, paperback, 1996. Thomas & Mercer, trade paperback, 2012.

   Is that a great title, or what? Okay, so it won’t mean anything to someone not familiar with the Northwest. I still think it’s great. And if “G. M. Ford” isn’t a pseudonym, it ought to be.

   Leo Waterman is a Seattle private eye who father was a long-term City Councilman. Leo’s had a problem with the bottle in the past, but seems to have it under control. He fee;s a thirst coming on, though, when the patriarch of Seattle organized crime, an old union associate of his father’s, asks him to help him.

   The old man’s granddaughter has left the family manse and is associating with a group of environmentalists who have a penchant for violence and ill-considered acts, and he wants Leo to find out what they’re up to. It’s one of those deals you can hardly refuse, so Leo marshals his helpers and starts to work. Oh, I ought to mention that the “helpers” are a group of alcoholics and some homeless who Leo met in his down-and-dirty days.

   If this sounds like a farce, it isn’t. At least mostly it isn’t. I think Ford had a few problems in drawing the line, bur for the most part it’s a straightforward if not overly grim and sometimes humorous PI story. The characters are entertaining and sympathetic, and Ford writes with an assurance and skill beyond most first-timers. (Was that a small homage to Chandler I caught at the beginning?)

   He obviously knows Seattle, and manages to bring the city to life without loading the narrative with the tiresome minutiae that often pass for a “sense of place” these days. If he can learn some sense of restraint with is characterizations — the villains were egregious over the top unless he wanted farce — and quit pulling rabbits out of the hat at the end (or if his editor will do it for him) I think he has the markings of a very good series.

         The Leo Waterman series —

   NOVELS

Who in Hell is Wanda Fuca? (1995)
Cast in Stone (1996)
The Bum’s Rush (1997)
Slow Burn (1998)
Last Ditch (1999)
The Deader the Better (2000)
Thicker Than Water (2012)
Chump Change (2014)
Salvation Lake (2016)
Soul Survivor (2018)
Heavy on the Dead (2019)

   SHORT STORIES

“Clothes Make the Man” (February 1999, EQMM)

FRED M. WHITE “The Scrip of Death.” Short story. Dr. Victor Colonna #1. First published in Pearson’s Magazine, London, July 1898. Collected in The Last of the Borgias: Being the Strange History of Victor Colonna, Professor of Science,and his Experiments in the Lost Art of Poisoning., hardcover, 1898? Reprinted by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, softcover, date? [Announced; may have never been published.] Available online here.

   The lady making the request is the beautiful Ellen Longwater, who claims her wealthy and famous family is in danger of ruin, and the man she has made the request of is none other than Dr. Victor Colonna, who has just given a lecture on his discovery of the rarest of all tomes, the poison book of none other than Lucretia Borgia (before history revealed she was more victim than monster), meaning, according to his own lecture, that he is master of poisons unknown to mankind, capable of bringing nations to their knees if he chose, and a veritable judge, jury, and executioner no court could hope to prove anything on thanks to his undetectable poisons.

   Of course Dr. Colonna was only speculating. Ellen Longwater is serious.

   Fred M. White was one of the most popular and prolific writers of the period, his name as well known on magazine covers as Conan Doyle, and his stories encompassed multiple series including adventure, mystery, secret service, and early science fiction. He particularly did well in the then popular disaster genre of which Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger story “The Poison Cloud” is one of the better known examples today.

   But Victor Colonna is surely the oddest detective hero anyone ever came up with, sleuth and avenger but far from the clean cut way of most British heroes, and the six long stories comprising the “Last of the Borgias” series are among the oddest of their kind, with Colonna one of those late Victorian supermen who are above mere law, a long haired aesthete with a no compunction about making God like interventions in the lives of mere mortals.

   To be fair to White and the genre, it wasn’t until Ellery Queen in The Door Between that anyone seemed to bring up the question of what all this God like behavior might lead to in classic detective fiction. Before then other than an occasional insight the brilliant sleuth’s mere existence seemed to justify his actions, even if Peter Wimsey wept over the execution of the man he sent to the gallows, he didn’t question his right or duty to do so.

   And to ruffle feathers further these stories violate the heck out of Detection Club Rules about “poisons unknown to science.” Dr. Fu Manchu could take a hint or two from Dr. Colonna.

   This being the Victorian age Dr. Colonna doesn’t hesitate to come to the aid of a lady in distress:

   So in his first case, Colonna is already up against a veritable Moriarity, though I have to say Felspar is a particularly thud ear name for a super villain. I suppose he could have named him Yardarm instead..

   Colonna assures us Felspar is a “bad un,” a brilliant chemist, but a blackmailer and worse, and his plot to marry the Princess Esme of Valdamir (names of people and places in this one aren’t White’s strong suit) not only threatens the happiness of Ellen Longwater’s son who also hopes to marry her, but also the fortune and fate of a great family because Felspar can prove Ellen’s son is not the heir to a great family he claims and destroy his hopes with Esme.

   You can almost imagine Victorian era audiences booing Felspar as they read. How dare a dirty foreigner interfere with a handsome young Englishman defrauding a foreign Princess.

   How Colonna confronts Felspar, and ultimately removes the Count as a threat frankly isn’t worth the build up. White writes well enough, but basically once Colonna accepts the commission to rid the family of Count Felspar the story grinds to a halt.

   There is some artificial suspense at a public gathering while the Count reads his prepared revelation and Colonna softly counts down to the moment Felspar falls victim to the poison, then a frankly anti-climactic reveal of how he administered the poison (not only unknown to science, but so mysterious we don’t even get a hint of what was in it — at least Fu Manchu used spider and snake venom) and used simple misdirection to steal the revealing papers in the dead man’s pocket.

   To be frank, by that point I was imagining Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Thorndyke, or Father Brown feeling quite content to have sent our hero to the gallows. Somehow this sort of thing was much more satisfying when the Saint disposed of a total rotter with a bit of cleaning fluid on his tie, or Bulldog Drummond snapped his neck. Nor does the not so subtle jingoism and xenophobia of Colonna using nasty Italian poisons, appearing quite foreign, and having an Italian name escape the modern reader.

   It’s no wonder there was only one series of adventures for Dr. Colonna, just reading the first one leaves the reader in need of a shower.

      Complete contents of The Last of the Borgias. All are Victor Colonna stories:

The Scrip Of Death
The Crimson Streak
The Holy Rose
The Saving of Serena
The Varteg Necklace
The Three Carnations

RACE STREET . RKO Radio Pictures, 1948. George Raft, William Bendix, Marilyn Maxwell, Frank Faylen, Harry Morgan, Gale Robbins. Director: Edwin L. Marin.

   Although available on DVD from Warner Archives, Race Street is largely a rather obscure one. even if considered film noir, a popular category now, if ever there was one. It has a decent cast, but I think the reason hardly anyone remembers or talks about it today, is that as a film, it’s mostly a mediocre one. It has its moments, including a few flashes of hard-boiled action, but it’s far too talky to stand out in a field filled with so many other crime films that came out around the same time and had a lot more to offer.

   George Raft plays the kind of bookie whom other bookies lay off their larger bets on, but a new gang is in town (San Francisco), and they’re beginning to push their way in,. What they offer is “protection” and they show no remorse in demonstrating what happens to guys who don’t take them up on it. William Bendix plays a childhood friend who’s also a cop, and who tries to persuade Raft to let the police take care of the problem.

   Raft will have nothing to do with it, of course, not even when one of his friends dies after being pushed around a little too hard. It doesn’t stop Bendix from talking and nudging and trying to persuade him otherwise. A couple of lengthy musical numbers featuring Gale Robbins as the lead vocalist are well done, but move the story along, they don’t.

   Marilyn Maxwell as a sultry brunette this time around plays Raft’s girl friend, a very eye-pleasing girl friend, to be sure, but her role in the story is, well, shall we say not particularly well filled out. If I’d been in charge of production, say, I’d have cut the musical numbers and given her story line the amount of running time it really needed.

   Since it’s far too late for the real director to have taken my advice, alas, he didn’t. While the end result is watchable, especially if you’re a George Raft fan — and to tell you the truth, I think his performance here is one of his better ones — you probably won’t remember it for more than ten minutes or so afterward.

CAVE OF THE LIVING DEAD. Schneider-Filmverleih, West Germany, 1964. Also released as Night of the Vampires. Original title: Der Fluch der grünen Augen. Adrian Hoven, Erika Remberg, Carl Möhner, Wolfgang Preiss, Karin Field. Director: Ákos Ráthonyi.

    Cave of the Living Dead , a West German-Yugoslav production, is a pretty standard vampire movie that checks all the boxes and uses all the tropes. Let’s see. You’ve got an urbane police inspector skeptical of the supernatural, superstitious peasants, an array of beautiful women (some undead, some not), and an eccentric professor living high up in a castle. And of course, some unexplained mysterious deaths.

   But for all its schlock, this movie is actually a lot of fun. Part of it comes from its mashup of genres. What starts off as a pulpy detective yarn in which a big city inspector is sent to the backwoods of Yugoslavia to investigate a series of murders slowly reveals itself to be a supernatural yarn about sultry female vampires.

   Although not a particularly graphic film in terms of violence or gore, Cave is drenched in atmosphere. Filmed in black and white with a lot of natural light courtesy of candles or torches, this somewhat obscure horror film exudes a neo-Universal Horror classics aesthetic. It transports the viewer into its own claustrophobic village world.

   True, the dialogue is hardly sophisticated. And the plot often runs around in circles. But if you are looking for a unique Halloween month viewing, this one, which I personally watched on DVD, is worth a look.

MARGARET MARON “Lieutenant Harald and the Treasure Island Treasure.” Short story. Lt. Sigrid Harald. Published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September 1989. Collected in Lieutenant Harald and the Treasure Island Treasure & My Mother, My Daughter, Me (Mystery Scene/Pulphouse Short Story Paperback #3, 1991).

   In this short but well-told tale Lt. Sigrid Harald of the NYPD finds herself far from her usual comport zone, the crowded concrete streets of Manhattan. Oscar Naumann, an old friend living in upstate Connecticut whom she apparently had met in one or more of her earlier novel-length cases, now needs her help. At stake is a young girl’s inheritance from her now deceased uncle.

   Living on an island configuration of land, the map, a lifelong lover of maps — and buried treasures — the key to finding what he left his favorite niece in his will is a map he was still working on when he died. This is the puzzle that Sigrid must decipher. Any lover of maps and Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale, “Treasure Island,” will enjoy this one as much as I did.

       __

Bibliographic Notes:   There have been nine novel length cases for Lt. Harald, the most recent being Take Out, which appeared in 2017 after a hiatus of 22 years. Her only other short story appearance has been “Murder at Montegoni” (EQMM, Sept/Oct 2008).

The vocalist for this hot jazz band, Parisian style, is Tatiana Eva-Marie:

JOHNNY COOL. United Artists, 1963. Henry Silva, Elizabeth Montgomery, Richard Anderson, Jim Backus, Joey Bishop, Brad Dexter, Wanda Hendrix, Marc Lawrence. Based on the book The Kingdom of Johnny Cool, by John McPartland. Director: William Asher.

   The character played by William Campbell in Backlash [reviewed here ], is named Johnny Cool, which is also the name of a violent low-budget movie from 1963 starring Henry Silva, who played Mexicans, Orientals and Indians in the movies, but was actually born in New York.

   Here he’s a Sicilian bandit exported to America to wipe out the rivals of deposed gang lord Marc Lawrence. Said rivals seem to be composed mostly of the outer fringes of Sinatra’s “Rat Pack.” (I think about half the cast was in Ocean’s Eleven) plus personalities and character actors like Mort Sahl, John Dierkes, John McGiver, Elisha Cook Jr and Jim Backus.

   With a line-up like that, Johnny Cool should have offered some fun, but it’s a largely mechanical thing, with lots of action but little excitement, dealt out by director William Asher — whose credits include Return to Green Acres, I Dream of Jeannie and the “Beach Party” movies.

   In Asher’s listless hands, the film gets no sense of progress or momentum; it’s simply a series of lackluster set pieces on the way to an oddly creepy ending that was probably accidental.

   Incidentally Johnny Cool was based on a Gold Medal Original by John McPartland, The Kingdom of Johnny Cool, which as the distinction of being unreadable.

ROBERT UPTON – The Faberge Egg. Amos McGuffin #4. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1988. No paperback edition.

   Amos McGuffin has been a San Francisco PI for 18 years, but he’s never had a case like this one. First. his ex-wife and daughter disappear. The trail leads to the man who killed his mentor in the PI business when he first started out., and then on to the egg hunt.

   A hunt conducted by a pair of gay German war vets, before the KCB gets involved, as well as his partner’s daughter. The resemblance to Hammett is unmistakable. I suppose you’d call it an homage. Whenever it’s this blatant, I think you’d have to, but it’s still enormous fun.

      The Amos McGuffin series —

1. Who’d Want To Kill Old George? (1977)
2. Fade Out (1984)
3. Dead On the Stick (1986)
4. The Faberge Egg (1988)
5. A Killing in Real Estate (1990)
6. The Billionaire (2017)