AARON MARC STEIN – Moonmilk and Murder. Tim Mulligan & Elsie Mae Hunt #18. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1955. Curtis, paperback, 1968.

   Moonmilk consists of the cheesey calcium deposits the form on the surfaces of damp caves before it hardens into limestone, ad unlike archaeologists Tim Mulligan and Elsie Mae Hunt, I didn’t know that either. Here they’re in France, looking for caveman art.

   And they find murder as well. Ten years after the war, passions against collaborators still run high, setting off a complicated puzzle spoiled only slightly by the intrusive smell of coincidence. While the pieces fit nicely, the story doesn’t quite jell.

Bibliographic Note:   This was the last appearance of archaeological partners Tim Mullligan and Elsie Mae Hunt. Their first of eighteen mysteries was The Sun Is a Witness (1940). All eighteen were published under Doubledy’s Crime Club imprint.

NORTHWEST RANGERS. MGM, 1942. James Craig, William Lundigan, Patricia Dane, John Carradine, Jack Holt, Keenan Wynn and Grant Withers. Screenplay by Gordon Kahn and David Lang, story by Arthur Caesar. Directed by Joseph M. Newman (as Joe Newman.)

   MGM’s notorious Manhattan Melodrama, re-made with Mounties.

   Yeah, well, okay so it’s Mounties. I mean if that’s what the kids are doing these days…

   Actually, Northwest Rangers ain’t all that bad except in comparison. It has all the gloss MGM lavished even on its B-pictures, John Carradine and Grant Withers make a fine pair of villains with plenty of screen time, Jack Holt is tough as ever, and Keenan Wynn does well with rather less as comic relief.

   If you’re not familiar with the story, you’ll recognize it right off: two pals, orphaned as boys, are adopted by doughty old Mountie Sergeant Jack Holt. One (William Lundigan) grows up to be a doughty young Mountie, the other (James Craig) makes his way as a gambler and general rakehell, and with all of Canada to bounce around in, they just naturally come into conflict with each other when Craig wins the local gambling hall from John Carradine, and his girl falls for Lundigan. Small world, ain’t it?

   Director Joseph M. Newman had his moments, and he handles this predestined obscurity with more class than it really deserves. The problem here is with the leads.

   In the 1950s, James Craig matured into a pretty good actor in bad-guy parts. But in the 40s he was MGM’s back-up for Clark Gable — or maybe for Gable’s 1st-string back-up — and all he does here is grin and try to look roguish, an effort clearly beyond him at this stage.

   As for William Lundigan, well, he was always William Lundigan.

   With these two carrying the story – unlike William Powell and Clark Gable in Manhattan Melodrama — it’s hard to give a damn, and about the nicest thing you can say about Northwest Rangers is that it passes the time easily and nobody famous got shot leaving the theater.

TUMBLEWEED. Universal Pictures, 1953. Audie Murphy, Lori Nelson, Chill Wills, Roy Roberts, Russell Johnson, K.T. Stevens, Madge Meredith, Lee Van Cleef, I. Stanford Jolley. Director: Nathan Juran.

   Surprisingly stylish for an Audie Murphy oater, Tumbleweed isn’t a particularly well-known Western. Yet it’s a quite watchable movie and one that deserves wider recognition as well as an official stand-alone DVD release. Directed by Nathan Juran, whose significant work in art direction gave him a keen eye for staging scenes, this Universal-International release may not have anything in it that you probably haven’t seen before.

   But that doesn’t mean what it has isn’t solid. There are Indians on the warpath; a White man scheming with them (of course); a seemingly impossible love affair; a man wrongfully accused of a crime; and a sheriff who must face off against the town’s rabble who are determined to exact frontier justice.

   Murphy portrays Jim Harvey, a drifter who takes a job guiding a wagon trail through Yaqui Indian country. When the braves attack the caravan, killing the men, he gets blamed for their deaths. Some seem to think he ran away out of cowardice. Others seem to believe he may have been in cahoots with the Yaqui. After he’s sprung from the town’s jail by a friendly Indian tribesman, it’s up to Harvey to clear his name and find out the real reason the wagon trail was ambushed. Chill Wills and a youthful looking Lee Van Cleef, respectively, portray the town’s sheriff and his deputy. Van Cleef is very good here as the tougher and more brutal of the town’s lawmen.

   Now, I know what you may be thinking. It sounds like every other Western from this period. Well. Yes and No. Juran isn’t often thought of as a Western auteur the way in which someone like Budd Boetticher is. But he definitely has his own particular style, one that is highly notable in two scenes in particular: Harvey’s jailbreak and a fight scene in which our hero takes on the corrupt, greedy White man behind all the recent troubles. Well-staged and filmed with a sharp sense of what makes action scenes invigorating to an audience, they are but two standout moments in a film that punches well above its weight.

Hello Steve. Your blog is great!

I’m on a mission, and it occurred to me that you and your blog followers might be able to assist me. I’m helping someone identify a film they watched on TV many years ago. My efforts so far have failed to find a match, despite the fact that they can recall quite a bit of detail about what they saw. Here is their description:

A sci-fi film (or possibly a TV episode), from the 1970s-1980s.

A woman reporter is recruited into a secret spy organization. The agency is accessed by an elevator where you insert a key and the control panel flips over to a second one.

At the end of the movie/episode, the lead male character bumps into the woman just as the clock strikes the hour, and she suddenly forgets everything that has happened (like ‘Men In Black’, but this was decades before that movie).

The ‘Agency’ is organized by color-coded sections, and I think the black one had the power to make anyone forget their experiences with them.

Seen on Canadian TV (Ontario). Possibly a TV pilot movie, or from a TV series (I believe it’s American), and was definitely live-action. Set in locations that were summer-weather like.

[description ends]

Steve, it sounds like something I would probably enjoy watching myself, so I’m kind of hooked! I’ve been digging pretty deep trying to unearth it, and I feel my best hope now is finding that one human out there who recognizes this – whatever ‘this’ is.

Thank you,
Harry

 MARTIN H. GREENBERG, Editor – Deadly Doings. Ivy, paperback original; 1st printing, 1989.

#6. ERIC AMBLER “The Case of the Emerald Sky.” Short story. Dr. Jan Czissar #2. First published in The Sketch, 10 July 1940. Reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March 1945. Collected in The Waiting for Orders (Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1993; published in the UK as The Story So Far (Weidenfeld, hardcover, 1993) with one story addded).

   When Asst. Commissioner Mercer receives the following card, he at first refuses to see the man waiting in his outer office:

   Now in England, and apparently having plenty of time on his hands, Dr. Czissar has interfered with one of Scotland Yard’s investigations on one previous occasion. That Dr. Czissar was right and Scotland Yard was wrong did not go over well with Asst. Commissioner Mercer, and only a phone call from a superior convinces the letter to let the former in.

   There is no action whatsoever in this short concise tale. The two gentlemen discuss the death of a mean man by arsenic poisoning, and at length, after going through all of the various forms of arsenic and how they affect the human body, Dr. Czissar prevails. Scotland Yard was wrong again! Deservedly so. They did a very inadequate job of investigating.

   And sad to say, this is not a story I can recommend. It’s lifeless and worse than that, it depends far too greatly on esoteric medical knowledge that no amateur armchair detective in the world could be expected to know. I wish I could be more positive, but I can’t.

       —

Previously in this Martin Greenberg anthology: WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT “Never Marry Murder.”

        The Dr. Jan Czissar series —

The Case of the Pinchbeck Locket. The Sketch, July 3 1940
The Case of the Emerald Sky. The Sketch, July 10 1940
The Case of the Cycling Chauffeur. The Sketch, July 17 1940; also as “A Bird in the Tree”.
The Case of the Overheated Service Flat. The Sketch, July 24 1940; also as “Case of the Overheated Flat”.
The Case of the Drunken Socrates. The Sketch, Julu 31 1940; also as “Case of the Landlady’s Brother”.
The Case of the Gentleman Poet. The Sketch, August 7 1940

  WYNDHAM MARTYN “The Shadow’s Shadow.” Novelette. Bentley Mayne & Captain Dashwood #1. First appeared in Flynn’s Weekly, 14 May 1927. Probably never reprinted.

   Wyndham Martyn was the pen name that author William Henry Martin Hosken (1874-1963) seems to have used more often than several others. While he produced dozens of short stories for the pulps and other fiction magazines in the teens and 20s, Martyn may be more well known, if at all, for his long series of hardcover thrillers published in the UK featuring a master criminal named Anthony Trent, whose specialty was solving mysteries the police are having trouble with.

   Other than three serialized novels for Flynn’s, Trent appeared in only one pulp magazine story. The private eye in “The Shadow’s Shadow” is a young fellow named Bentley Mayne, who has obtained a fine reputation for cleverness and success for the cases he’s worked on.

   Enter steel magnate John Dawbarn, who has been trying to convince someone in Washington that his new method of processing steel is something our country’s government ought to have. Fearing that the secret may fall instead into enemy hands, Dawbarn calls on Mayne, who is happy to take the case.

   But instead of working on it himself, he assigns an associate named Captain Dashwood to act as Dawbarn’s bodyguard. Dashwood is (um) a dashing Englishman in dapper dress and a monocle, and fits in well with Dawbarn’s society-minded wife’s life style.

   After the secret plans is a master criminal known only as The Shadow (no relation to the fellow who came along later). The problem is, no one knows what he looks like. He could be anyone. Now Dashwood is competent enough, but his eye is as much on Dawbarn’s daughter Betty as on ferreting out who The Shadow might be or where he may strike next, but happily to say, both halves of the story work out well.

   [PLOT ALERT] There is a strange twist in the tale that I ordinarily wouldn’t bring up, but since it may not be easy for yous to obtain the copy of Flynn’s the story is in, I have decided to tell you about it anyway. It seems that Mayne and Dashwood are one and the same. I haven’t decided what purpose the hoax is for — he doesn’t even tell Dawbarn what’s going on — but personally I think Dawbarn is something of a dolt to not to have recognized Mayne’s alter ego almost immediately.

   But now that the impersonation has been revealed, it might explain why this was Bentley Mayne’s first and last appearance. That and the fact that at story’s end, he and Betty seem to be on their way to settling down in fine matrimonial fashion.

CHARLOTTE MacLEOD – The Recycled Citizen. Sarah Kelling (Bittersohn) #7. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1988; paperback, 1989.

   The senior citizens’ recycling center run by Sarah Kelling’s many relatives runs into hard times in this latest adventure. One of the members is a mugging victim, but leaves traces of heroin in his scavenger bag, and unaccountably, a fortune of $41,326.

   In recent books MacLeod has erred badly in assuming that we are all as fond of her characters as she is. Of the 250 pages in this one, 200 are filled with tweedle. Humorous, good-natured tweedle, but still tweedle. The other 50 pages consist of utter nonsense.

[FOOTNOTE.] Would you believe a drug delivery system based on filling empty antique cans of Grapercola soda pop with dope, then dropping them conveniently on the paths of senior citizens supplementing their incomes from retrieving them for salvage? Neither would I. (Yes, I know it’s meant to be funny. Believe me, I wish it were.)

(Give Me That) OLD-TIME DETECTION. Spring 2019. Issue #50. Editor: Arthur Vidro. Old-Time Detection Special Interest Group of American Mensa, Ltd. 41 pages (including covers). Cover image: Christianna Brand.

THE LATEST ISSUE of Old-Time Detection focuses primarily on an icon of Golden Age detective fiction, Christianna Brand (1907-88), whose work, with its emphasis on plot, seems emblematic of the era. As many mystery fans know, Brand was responsible for one of the best mystery novels of all time, Green for Danger (1944), which was made into one of the most highly regarded detective movies; not many mystery fans know, however, the extent of her involvement in the film’s production, but they’ll find it in this edition of OTD. Fans will also find out more about the origin of Brand’s series character, Inspector Cockrill, and why he appeared in only a limited number of her mysteries.

   A bonus is the first publication of one of her short stories in its unabridged form, “Cyanide in the Sun” (1958), an ingenious whodunit solved by the most amateurish amateur detective we’ve yet encountered.

   Knowledgeable introductions to Christianna Brand by Francis M. Nevins and to her story by Tony Medawar are nicely supplemented by both the transcript of a 1978 taped interview she gave to Allen J. Hubin, and Arthur Vidro’s reproductions of letters Brand wrote to an American fan.

   Toss in Dr. John Curran’s “Christie Corner” (“I am not going to waste words discussing this abomination . . .”); Michael Dirda’s incisive review of Conan Doyle for the Defense; Charles Shibuk’s evaluation of Golden Age of Detection (GAD) paperback reprints; Trudi Harrov’s concise reviews of several GAD classics; and you’ve got another winner by our estimable publisher/editor Arthur Vidro.

    Subscription information:

– Published three times a year: spring, summer, and autumn.
– Sample copy: $6.00 in U.S.; $10.00 anywhere else.
– One-year U.S.: $18.00 ($15.00 for Mensans).
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– Payment: Checks payable to Arthur Vidro, or cash from any nation, or U.S. postage stamps or PayPal.

    Mailing address:

Arthur Vidro, editor
Old-Time Detection
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Web address: vidro@myfairpoint.net

  DONALD WOLLHEIM, Editor, with Arthur W. Saha – The 1989 Annual World’s Best SF. Daw #783, paperback original; 1st printing, June 1989. Cover art by Jim Burns.

#9. B. W. CLOUGH “Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog.” Short story. First appeared in Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, June 1988.

   This was Brenda Clough’s first published short story, after four novels, and it’s a good one. Most of her work has been fantasy, but even though it’s told in the style of an rural fantasy, this one’s definitely science fiction.

   It’s about the owner of a comic book store — one who also carries other popular culture memorabilia, as most owners of comic book stores have to do in order to survive — and he’s realizes that he’s found a pot of gold when he begins to get repeat orders, many times over, for the aforementioned memorabilia.

   Not comic books, but X-Men bumper stickers, fuzzy dice, lawn trolls, iron-on decals of Disney characters, commemorative liquor bottles, Deely-Bobbers, and anything at all associated with Elvis, including plush floppy-eared dogs that you could wind up to play … you guessed it.

   Thinking that his new patron– who pays only in cash, brand new twenty-dollar bills — must be a reclusive millionaire, and having never met a reclusive millionaire before — makes the trek out to the wildest part of West Virginia mountain country to pay him a visit.

   What he finds there is the crux of the story, and obviously I dare not tell you. I think I’d react differently than does the teller of this story, but on the other hand, maybe just maybe he’s on to something.

       —

Previously from the Wollheim anthology: FREDERIK POHL “Waiting for the Olympians.”

The Time Jumpers are a western swing band that’s been around for over 20 years now, and I’ve just caught up with them. They’ve gotten several Grammy nominations and one win. This song was one that was nominated but didn’t win. Nonetheless, I thought it a perfect song for a late Saturday night.