ERLE STANLEY GARDNER “Night Birds.” Novelette. El Paisano, aka The Roadrunner #1. Argosy Weekly, August 5, 1933. Probably never reprinted.

   This is the first of five recorded adventures of yet another of Erle Stanley Gardner’s series characters he created for the pulp magazines in the 20 and 30s. Known as both El Paisano and the Roadrunner, and yet no other name, he is a man of mystery, flitting across the Mexican border and back with ease, invariably leaving dead villains, gang leaders and various henchmen in his wake.

   What makes him such a formidable foe is that he can see in the dark far better than most men. Whether better able to see unsavory characters with knives waiting for him in the night, or young beautiful women he can then follow across darkened rooms without them knowing, it makes his tales of adventure and narrow escapes all the more interesting.

   Being the first time any of Gardner’s readers had met this new hero, he spends considerable time making his abilities clear, but not to the expense of the story, which consists of a dead man in an alley, pursuit, rescue (in an inadvertent way) by a slip of a girl with her mind focused on a suitcase filled with a fortune in stolen money.

   It all ends well, but only once the young slip of a girl is fully convinced that the Roadrunner is on her side, which she finally does. There’s otherwise not a lot of depth to this tale, but I certainly wouldn’t mind reading another.

AT SWORD’S POINT. RKO Radio Pictures, 1952. Also released as The Sons of the Three Musketeers. Cornel Wilde (D’Artagnan Jr.), Maureen O’Hara (Claire, daughter of Athos), Robert Douglas, Gladys Cooper, June Clayworth, Dan O’Herlihy (Aramis Jr.), Alan Hale Jr. (Porthos Jr.), Nancy Gates. Director: Lewis Allen.

   I don’t wish to insult anyone, but if you can’t tell from the credits above what this movie is all about and 90% of the plot, you may be reading the wrong blog. But not being a person to send anyone packing without a second chance, I’ll talk some about the movie anyway.

   After the death of Cardinal Richelieu, it seems as though the ailing Queen of France is once again in trouble — the evil Duke de Lavalle is making plans to marry the Queen’s daughter Henriette and kill the young Prince, next in line for the throne. She calls for the assistance of The Three Musketeers and D’Artagnan. They have aged, however, and while willing, they each send one of their offspring in their stead.

   Three men and one woman, and she may be the best swordsperson of them all:

           Enemy soldier: I’ll not fight with a lady.

           Claire: I’m no lady when I fight!

   The movie is in Technicolor, and deservedly so. Maureen O’Hara was meant for color movies, and her presence in one must have doubled the box office receipts, at least.

   This one is told with a great sense of fun, and it only bogs down when things start to turn serious, as they do, but only every once in a while, but not too often. There are a lot of swordfights in this movie, and I mean a lot, and I meant it when I said Maureen O’Hara’s is right there, mixing it up with the rest of them, thrusting her sword into the enemy, through and through.

   It all turns out well, you can count on that. I enjoyed this one.

BONUS TRIVIA:   Taken from the IMDb page. Alan Hale Jr. plays the son of Porthos here. His father, Alan Hale, appeared in The Man in the Iron Mask (1939) as an aging Porthos. When that film was remade as The Fifth Musketeer (1979), that role was taken by Alan Hale Jr.. In that same movie the role of an aging D’Artagnan was played by Cornel Wilde, this picture’s son of D’Artagnan. Also here, the elderly Porthos is played by Moroni Olsen, who played that character in his younger days in the film of the original Dumas novel, The Three Musketeers (1935).

ALEXANDER KLEIN – The Counterfeit Traitor. Henry Holt & Co., 1958. Permabook M4122, paperback, 1959; Pyramid, paperback, 1967.

    THE COUNTERFEIT TRAITOR. Paramount, 1962. William Holden, Lilli Palmer, Hugh Griffith, Eva Dahlbeck, Carl Raddatz, and Klaus Kinski. Adapted for the screen and directed by George Seaton.

   An interesting effort, both for the story it tells and the way Klein — and later Seaton — tell it. But first a word of Background:

   Some of you may have already heard about World War II. If not, you should Google it and let us know what you think, because it’s been mentioned in these pages before. But to make a long story short (SPOILER ALERT!) Germany lost.

   But when Nazi Germany was at the height of its power, before America entered the war in ’41, generals and statesmen on what would be the Allied Side were already mapping their strategy. And a major element was to cripple the German Oil industry.

   The effectiveness of this approach cannot be overstated: as allied planes bombed refineries over and over, oil supplies dwindled, and Hitler could no longer use his heavy gas-guzzling tanks with the speed and mobility that made the blitzkrieg possible. Troops and artillery that once would have sped along the autobahn had to march or go by rail. Fighter planes that might have stymied the allies at Normandy stayed in Germany, and the pilots of these planes had their training severely reduced to save gas for the actual fighting. In short, when the allies crimped the flow of oil, they pinched off the lifeblood of the German war machine.

   Okay, that’s the background. One element in accomplishing this strategy was to find out where the oil refineries were, how they were camouflaged and defended, and, later on, how badly they were hit. To do this, the allies recruited one Eric Ericson, an American expatriate oil broker who, in the late 30s, married a Swede and adopted neutral Swedish citizenship in order to do business with both sides during the war.

   Working (reluctantly?) for the Allies, Ericson wangled himself into a position to visit German Oil suppliers on a regular basis throughout the early 40s, where he reported his observations back to American Intelligence and even recruited disaffected Germans to assist him. Later, when Germany was no longer selling oil, he cooked up a phony scheme to start a synthetic oil refinery in Sweden that would (a) supposedly supply oil to the Reich, and (b) actually provide an investment opportunity for wealthy Nazis who wanted to move their assets out of a now-losing Fatherland.

   With this as a cover, Ericson actually gained repeated access to Germany’s most highly-classified refinery sites, and reported their locations — and later, the progress of their destruction — to the allies.

   This is a fascinating bit of true-life espionage, and Alexander Klein’s telling is… well, it’s almost up to the challenge. Klein does a nice job of parsing his story out bit by bit, the way Ericson lived it, gradually building the suspense as his hero ventures into Nazi Germany, flirts with discovery, courts the favor of influential Nazis, and more than once heads straight for disaster.

   He also has a nice way of catching the small details of day-to-day life in a war-weary Germany, with off-hand details about the stench of a subway filled with working people whose soap was rationed, the weary air of sexual license, or the prevalence of bad teeth in a land where toothbrushes were a luxury and dentists pressed into service as doctors.

   Unfortunately, Klein’s gift for dialogue is much less compelling; he reconstructs conversations where characters don’t talk so much as they explicate, saying just enough to move the story along across a background of highly unconvincing small talk. As a result, his characters come off as a bit two-dimensional, real people who are never quite real to the reader. Klein himself seems aware of his weaknesses as a writer, though, and thoughtfully avoids these scenes as much as possible to concentrate on a story I found ultimately quite involving.

   When George Seaton adapted this for the movie in 1962, he overcame Klein’s expository problems very neatly indeed. With the aid of William Holden, playing a cynical businessman pressed unwillingly into the Allied Camp, he created a character who may not have been the real-life Ericson, but seems very plausible to the viewer.

   Holden’s voice-over narration replaces the functional dialogue of the book, and Seaton imparts a sense of realism with skillful playing by a talented cast: notably Hugh Griffith as an obdurate “recruiter” for British Intelligence, whose knife-like smile betrays his complete ruthlessness — this in dramatic contrast to Lilli Palmer’s conscience-stricken German informant, with Holden perched uneasily between the two as his own better feelings begin to surface.

   There are few actors who could have managed this as well as Holden and not many writer-directors who could have evoked it more ably than George Seaton, who could get more drama out of a bottle of cough syrup (The Country Girl) than most filmmakers could do with a disaster at sea. He also plays well on our expectations: When Holden volunteers for “one last trip” into Germany, we know things are going to go bad, but instead of seeming clichéd, it builds the suspense and segues into a dandy chase that goes on for some time but never feels protracted.

   Book and movie are well worth your time, and I recommend them both. But I recommend the film more highly.

   The trailer for Just Before Dawn (1981, directed by Jeff Lieberman) suggests that it’s a standard slasher film, one with perhaps some supernatural themes. While it’s true that the movie is undeniably a slasher film and part of that “craze” that swept drive-ins and cheap theaters in the early 1980s, it is also a survival film.

   Think: John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), which Lieberman credits as a major influence on his work. The trailer decribes the plot pretty well, but it fails to capture how hauntingly atmospheric the movie is. How the natural outdoor setting in the movie – it was filmed on location in Oregon – is as much as a character in the film as are the doomed protagonists.

   But let’s be honest. Just Before Dawn is an exploitation film, designed to appeal to the suburban fear of the backwoods. Just who are those inbred people who live up there, all alone in the mountains? The fun-loving kids in this movie with their fashionable clothes and their love for Blondie and Debbie Harry will soon find out, much as Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight’s characters did in that seminal work of 1970s cinema.

   One final note: for a slasher film, Just Before Dawns is relatively bloodless. There’s some gore, of course, but Lieberman didn’t go for the cheap thrills as much as he did the psychological menace of being chased and hunted in an unfamiliar, dangerous setting.

STUART PALMER “The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl.” Novelette. Hildegarde Withers. First published in Mystery, November 1933. Collected in Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles (Crippen & Landru, 2002). Reprinted in The Big Book of Reel Murders: Stories that Inspired Great Crime Films, edited by Otto Penzler (Vintage Crime, softcover, forthcoming November 2019). Film: The Plot Thickens, RKO, 1936, with Zasu Pitts as Miss Withers and James Gleason as Oscar Piper.

   Things were different back in 1933. When Inspector Oscar Piper of the NYPD gets a call from an associate curator at the Cosmopolitan Museum of Art asking for police assistance, he being shorthanded at the moment, sends schoolteacher Miss Hildegarde Withers to act in his stead.

   It’s a good thing she’s on hand, though, for as soon as she arrives she sees the man she is to meet falling down a long flight of stairs and landing on the floor below, quite dead. This is only the prelude to several other extraordinary things happening at the museum that day, including the disappearance of a extremely valuable Cellini cup, ordinarily kept under close guard at all times.

   While I was reading this early Miss Withers tale, I was somewhat annoyed by the clutter of characters, much more than usual, I thought, not to mention the flurry of activity surrounding them, almost non-stop. Once finished, though, and looking back, it’s easy to see how well the story was constructed, brick by brick, and everything in its place, precisely when needed.

   While there’s no depth to either the characters or the story, it is a lot of fun to read.

   I’ve not seen the movie based on this story in a long time, but I have to agree with Otto Penzler’s assessment in his introduction to the story that Zasu Pitts was the wrong person chosen to replace Edna May Oliver in the leading role. He adds that “The screenplay provides a different motive for the murder, different suspects, and a different murderer.” He does go on to say that the movie retains the same comic tone as the story, however.

CIMARRON CITY “I, the People.” NBC, 11 October 1958. Swaon 1, Episode 1. Cast: George Montgomery (Matt Rockford), Audrey Totter (Beth Purcell), John Smith (Lane Temple). Guest Cast: Fred MacMurray, John Anderson. Director: Writers: Gene L. Coon, Fenton Earnshaw. Director: Jules Bricken.

   The story is interesting enough, but as a first episode of the series, which lasted only one year, it really doesn’t do the job, as far as I was concerned. Of the three major cast members, only George Montgomery’s role is well defined. As Matt Rockford, he’s a successful cattle rancher but even more importantly, he’s also the son of the founder of Cimarron City, a small town north of Oklahoma City, and as such takes a decidedly paternalistic attitude toward it.

   Audrey Totter plays the owner of a boarding house in town, and is given a few lines every so often, but her role has nothing to do with the story. I never did figure out who John Smith was supposed to be. I have since found out that he was a town blacksmith, but if he did any blacksmithing during this episode, I apologize for missing it.

   I saw no reason for Audrey Totter to be in this episode, and apparently also saw no future for her in the part, for (I am told) she quit the series soon thereafter. To give Smith more of a part, in later episodes he becomes a deputy sheriff, while Montgomery is elected town mayor. But that all comes later. In “I, the People,” nobody in charge seems to know exactly what they are doing.

   Which allows Fred MacMurray’s character to come into town and ingratiate himself to the town elders as a substantial citizen, moving his way up first from town banker to being elected mayor. At which point, in the name of law and order, he really begins to tighten his smug self-satisfied grip on the town.

   And eventually Matt Rockford decides he’s had enough and that he’s the only one who can do anything about it. Otherwise it’s Fred MacMurray’s show all the way, at first anxious to please any way he can, but as time goes on, showing more an more of his inner character. Everything in this episode centers around him, not George Montgomery. As for Totter and Smith, they make no impression at all.

Eilen Jewell is a singer-songwriter from Boise, Idaho. “Warning Signs” is a song from her 2011 CD Queen of the Minor Key.

PETER CHEYNEY – Dames Don’t Care. Lemmy Caution #3. . Collins, UK, hardcover, 1937. Coward McCann, US, hardcover, 1938. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and soft. Serialized in The Thriller Library Jul 31, Aug 7, Aug 14, Aug 21, Aug 28, Sep 4, Sep 11, Sep 18, 1937. Film: Les Femmes En Balacent (1954) with Eddie Constantine, Nadja Gray; directed by Bernard Borderie.

   I am sittin’ in this bar minding my own business like any guy might, when I looks up and see this guy come sailin’ in like the owns the place, and from the greeting he gets you wonder if he might, ’cause people are happy to see him, though at first I wonder if maybe they mistake him for some actor named Constantine, but I know him for who he is.

   And who he is happens to be Ma Caution’s baby boy Lemuel H., sometimes called Lemmy for short cause he likes to play with words does Lemmy as in Le’Me caution ya.

   Quite a sport this Lemmy, the pride and joy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation he is, the damnedest G-Man since Gagney on the big screen. Of course he takes a bit of getting used to does Mr. Caution, because he speaks in the a style and lingo unique to him, kinda as if Damon Runyon had a run in with Edgar Wallace an’ neither of them came out of it quite right, all in present tense save when he forgets here and there, because present tense is a bitch to write in.

   Anyways, he says his hellos and comes over to me, shakes hands, orders a beer, and without much preamble starts to tell me what just happened to him out West in California and down Mexico way. And believe me, its a hoot.

   Says he:

   An’ that’s pretty much how Lemmy sounds, as if you was cornered in a bar by a pretty interesting guy who is determined to tell you a story whether you are determined to hear it or not. Mostly I am, but I’m aware many ain’t.

   Bein’ Lemmy, pretty soon there are dames and dead bodies in about equal proportions, some very bad bad men, some not quite as bad bad men, some dames that are lyin’ for good reason and some that are lyin’ for very bad reasons, and Lemmy is negotiating the lot of ‘em with frequent pauses for refreshment of the inebriating kind.

   It ain’t the things that dames do that worries me it’s the things that they get guys to do for ’em.

   Lemmy is not what you would call exactly woke when it comes to dames. Frankly he makes Mike Hammer look like a feminist. Just a friendly warnin’. Not that the ladies Lemmy encounters much deserve better sometimes.

   An’ while I’m do in the warnin’ it’s also the sort of book where a Hispanic character says “keel” instead of kill a few times.

   Just so’s you know.

   Lemmy is plenty hot on this case because a guy he was workin’ with called Sagers has been killed, an’ even though a counterfeiting ring is operating Lemmy takes that kind of personal.

   For a G-Man Lemmy is a lot more interested in justice than law.

   An’ bein’ Lemmy there is, of course, a nice dame left over, because it wouldn’t be Lemmy if he didn’t end up with a dame.

   All Lemmy’s stories are hoots, especially the ones with all those dames he stumbles over where ever he goes, mostly tall and classy though some fatale types. Cause the other thing you have to know about Lemmy is nothing is ever exactly what it looks like and no one exactly who they seem in any story he tells.

   I first heard of him in this book called This Man is Dangerous, where we meet Lemmy as an escaped criminal who makes his way to London an’ gets involved with gamblers, crooks, an’ dames before he reveals he’s an undercover G-Man on loan to Scotland Yard. It gets made into a pretty good film by the French with this guy named Eddie Constantine, who looks so much like Lemmy he could have posed for the book covers from twenty years earlier but didn’t. Guy even gets typecast playin’ Lemmy, though it don’t seem to bother him much.

   Funny thing is this Constantine guy is a well known crooner in France, an’ in this book Lemmy sings, something actually in the film they made out of it. After that he sings in most of the films ’cause this actor is like a music star in Europe an’ even has television specials and does musicals in between playin’ :Lemmy and guys so much like Lemmy they might as well be him save for the name.

   This book becomes a best seller over in England and then in France as written by an ex-journalist and publicist named Peter Cheyney who also chronicles the adventures of a British Private Eye named Slim Callaghan, and a series of Dark books about wartime espionage in England among others.

   This Cheyney sort of sets the British mystery genre on its head and eventually even influences this guy named Ian Fleming who writes about a spy named James Bond, 007 though Cheyney was never too hot here Stateside. Anyways not Lemmy’s adventures.

   Lemmy never gets a number that I know of, but in Lemmy’s mind if he did, it would be Number 1.

   An’ with that Lemmy excuses himself and fades into the night, off to another adventure, more dames, more crooks, more cliches, an’ more slightly cracked Americaneze, but for all that he ain’t bad company in the right mood, an’ it is a mood I am sometimes in though I admit it ain’t one I stays in very long at a time.

   Your mileage my vary like they says.

   Just don’t read too many of ’em in a row, ’cause brain damage is possible.

    Horror House aka The Haunted House of Horror is a strange movie that defies easy categorization. Essentially a British giallo film, this Tigon Productions release from 1969 stars a nearly thirty-year old Frankie Avalon as a hip British teen (!!) who becomes embroiled in a murder mystery outside swinging London.

   The trailer doesn’t do a particularly effective job in conveying just how stylish the movie is, nor how shockingly gory it is in a few particularly sequences. Apparently both David Bowie and Boris Karloff were considered for roles in the movie, with Dennis Price taking the role meant for the latter. I can’t say that the plot, after it unfolds, is all that coherent. But it isn’t easily forgotten.

—

TOMORROW AT SEVEN. RKO Radio Pictures, 1933. Chester Morris, Vivienne Osborne, Frank McHugh, Allen Jenkins, Henry Stephenson, Grant Mitchell. Director: Ray Enright.

   This one comes straight from the pulp magazines. I should know. I’ve read enough of them. Looking for some background for his next book, a mystery writer named Neil Broderick (Chester Morris) inveigles his way into the household of Thornton Drake (Henry Stephenson), a wealthy man who is said to know a lot about a mysterious killer nicknamed “The Black Ace.”

   The latter’s modus operandi is to send a warning the day before the victim is to die, in the form of course of a black ace of spades. Broderick manages to meet Drake by means of his secretary (Vivienne Osborne), but when Drake gets the black ace warning himself, off they all go to his manor house on a Louisiana plantation. And when I say “all” I mean Drake’s butler and two dimwitted Chicago cops who have maybe a half a brain between them.

   If you picked Frank McHugh and Allen Jenkins as the two cops just from the cast listing, you’d be right, and I’ll bet you’re not the only one. It is Drake’s butler who was murdered on the plane coming in, though, not Drake himself, and with only a limited number of suspects to choose from, it’s also not very difficult to figure out who the killer has to be.

   That’s not the point, though. This is half comedy and half a spooky old mansion mystery, not really a detective mystery, and depending on your tolerance for lowbrow comedy, the combination makes this an enjoyable if not very demanding film to watch. (If McHugh and Jenkins are the best that the Chicago Homicide Squad are able to offer, however, we really are in an alternate universe here.)