K. C. CONSTANTINE – Cranks and Shadows. Mario Balzic #11. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1995; paperback, 1996.

   I was less than impressed with Constantine’s previous book, Bottom Liner Blues, but there’s no doubt that this gas been one of major series in American crime fictionm bd in American regional fiction as well.

   Rocksburg, Pennsylvania Police Chief Mario Balzic is 65, and he’s just becoming aware that his world is crumbling around him. His city is broke, and he’s going to be forced to lay off men from his already understaffed department. Not only that, he’s suddenly become aware that a para-military law enforcement team has been formed under county aegis, and is operating in his town.

   The old-time politicians are remaking the town, and his wife Ruth is increasing her pressure on him to retire. All of the things he’s been ignoring and avoiding are pressing on him at once, and he doesn’t know what he’s going to do about them. Or what he can.

   Okay. The first thing to understand is that this is a Novel, not a crime novel, not a detective story — a Novel, It really shouldn’t be published by a genre imprint, though maybe the series is well enough known by now that it makes no difference.

   As always, you have Constantine’s unmatched ear for the voices and characters of small-town, ethnic Pennsylvania. The book is filled with people’s talk. Good people. Bad people. Indifferent people. You have an evocative, thoughtful, sad, and angry picture off what Constantine thinks is wrong with a good bit of America, and of course you have the final touches put to the continuing portrait of Constantine’s Pennsylvania.

   This is Balzic’s swan song, and probably Constantine’s; I think he’s said what he had to say. On its own terms, it’s an excellent book.

STELLA DALLAS. United Artists, 1925. Ronald Colman, Belle Bennett, Alice Joyce, Jean Hersholt, Beatrix Pryor, Lois Moran, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Vera Lewis. Based on the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty. Director: Henry King. Shown at Cinevent 22, Columbus OH, May 1990.

   One of the great all-time tear-jerkers, and I don’t imagine there was a dry eye in the room at the end. Colman was a major star before the talkies, and I’ve never seen him give a bad performance, but this Belle Bennett’s film, and she carries you with her all the way.

   Is her performance better than Barbara Stanwyck’s in the sound remake? Maybe not, but I think it’s just as good, and I am a great admirer of Stanwyck in almost everything she did in the thirties and forties.

BRUNO FISCHER – Murder in the Raw. Gold Medal #694, paperback original; 1st printing, August 1957. Cover art: James Meese. Reprinted as #1011, 1960.

   I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that Bruno Fischer wrote hundreds of pulp mystery stories, or if it is, it isn’t by much. (I’m counting stories under his own name as well as Russell Gray and Harrison Storm.) The first of these was “The Cat Woman” which appeared in the November 1936 issue of Dime Mystery Magazine under the Russell Gray byline.

   He wrote one hardcover mystery novel in 1939 (So Much Blood, for the obscure Greystone Press) but it wasn’t until the mid-1940s that he made the transition to novel length work for good. He was one of the early authors to sign up with Gold Medal when they began publishing, circa 1950, writing 11 novels for them throughout the first year they were in business.

   Obviously the most provocative thing about Murder in the Raw — well, make it two — are the title and the cover art, both designed to catch the eye of a would-be buyer (male, of course). I don’t know if the title was Fischer’s choice, but the scene shown is in the book.

   But even so, both the title and the cover art disguise the fact that this is a pretty good detective story and an even better character study. When newspaper reporter Clem Prosper tries to take a short vacation in a lodge along a lake, he finds his host missing and himself falling in love with a young woman living nearby who has been badly scarred by having been acquitted of killing her husband, a man she loved but did not know his secret life was that of a notorious gangster.

   Fischer does a good job of hiding the identity of the true killer, suggesting at one time it is one person, then another, and convincing the reader each time that it could have been him or her. I think that’s the sign of a good author, to flesh out and define his (or her) characters well enough to make what’s essentially a puzzle plot actually work.

FRANKIE AND JOHNNIE. Republic, 1936. Helen Morgan, Chester Morris, Lilyan Tashman, Florence Reed, Walter Kingsford and William Harrigan. Written by Lou Goldberg, Moss Hart(!) and Jack Kirkland. Directed by Chester Erskine and John H. Auer.

HER MAN, Pathé, 1930. Helen Twelvetrees, Philips Holmes, Marjorie Rambeau, Ricardo Cortez, James Gleason, Hary Sweet, Thelma Todd and Franklin Pangborn. Written by Tom Buckingham and Tay Garnett. Directed by Tay Garnett.

   Okay so now that everyone has the tune running in their head, here’s one of my favorites:

   Now let’s get on to the movies, starting with Frankie and Johnnie:

   Helen Morgan, the tragic hard-boiled chanteuse of the jazz age, and virile, roguish Chester Morris. They seem born for the parts. Add seductive Lilyan Tashman as a gal named Nellie Blye, Florence Reed as the Lady that’s known as Lou, and stately Walter Kingsford as a raffish gambler with a derringer tucked in his vest, and you have a cast that should have carried this off.

   Unfortunately, they don’t.

   Frankie and Johnnie was an independent production made in 1934 and finally picked up for distribution by Republic in ’36, and the delay should be a tip-off that there was something rotten in Screenland. In this case, it’s the saccharine, Disney-esque treatment of the early parts, as the lovers meet and court each other amid flowering gardens and fluttering songbirds. A little of this goes a long way, and we get a lot of it: about an hour’s worth in a film that runs 66 minutes. And yet….

   There are two moments here that will stay in my mind long after much better movies have fled my brain cells for greener pastures. They both involve brothel-madam Florence Rice, looking down from the mezzanine where she keeps an eye on things. Sensing trouble, she daintily takes out her handkerchief, whereupon the bartenders covertly pull iron. Then she drops it and we see the wisp of fabric drift languidly down to the floor as shots ring out. The first time, it’s an interesting scene. The second time, it has the fatal resonance of a ballad.

   Which suits it just fine.

   Much much much much better is Tay Garnett’s take on the tune from 1930, Her Man. In this version, Frankie (Helen Twelvetrees) is a cheap hustler working a seedy Havana bar, exploited by knife-throwing pimp Johnny (Ricardo Cortez) because she still has her looks – though he’s casting an eye on Thelma Todd as a gal named Nellie Blye.

   Into this seamy milieu comes Dan (Philips Holmes) a lusty young sailor looking for a good time, with his perpetually drunken buddies James Gleason and Harry Sweet, who raise their inebriated slapstick to a fine art. Frankie hustles Dan, but she’s touched by his innocence to the point where she aborts an attempt to slip him a Mickey, at the risk of a slapping-around from Johnny.

   Ms. Twelvetrees over-emotes a bit, but her whipped-dog look in the presence of Cortez at his nastiest speaks volumes. Philips Holmes, normally type-cast as feckless wimps, is amazingly virile as Sailor Dan; Marjorie Rambeau casually lays out her whore-with-a-heart act, and Franklin Pangborn has a typically amusing and unusually combative part as the guy who wants his hat back – with a laugh-out-loud finish. We can see where the story is headed, with True Love on a troubled horizon for Dan & Frankie, but director Tay Garnett handles it with such rowdy enthusiasm no one minds much.

   At a time when many more prestigious films were stage-bound and static, Garnett moves his camera easily, fluidly, through mean streets, meaner back rooms, and a raucous Havana Saloon that looks like one of the less reputable circles of Hell. In fact, sometimes he’s just showing off, as when waiter Vince Barnett loads the spiked drink onto a tray, raises it overhead, and we follow the tray in close-up across a crowded dance floor and right up to the lovers’ table.

   Garnett’s adept visual style shows itself best in the slam-bang finale, as Dan storms down a crowded street, knocking by-passers aside, and into the saloon like a gunfighter in a western, followed by a classic barroom slugfest – so good in fact that Garnett did it again, almost shot-for-shot, in Seven Sinners (Universal, 1940.)

   Come to think of it, there’s a whole lot of Her Man that reappears in Seven Sinners, including the knife-wielding bad guy, the disreputable side-kicks, and sundry other bits of business, but that’s a story for another day. I’ll just say here that this is not an easy film to find (I found one dealer, whose DVD proved to be incomplete – had to catch the ending on YouTube.) but if you take the trouble, you’ll enjoy it immensely.

JUANJO GUARNIDO & JUAN DIAZ CANALES – Blacksad. Dark Horse Comics. hardcover, 2010. Contains the first three stories: “Somewhere Within the Shadows,” “Arctic Nation” and “Red Soul.” Other albums are “Blacksad: A Silent Hell” and “Blacksad: Amarillo.” Originally published in Spanish.

   So opens the first adventure of John Blacksad, private eye in 1950’s New York and America. John Blacksad, the best new eye of this millennium for my money, a tough but compassionate man with the soul and voice of Philip Marlowe, the vengeful spirit of Mike Hammer, and the sheer cool of Peter Gunn, all wrapped up in the most fascinating private eye in decades. He is one cool cat, John Blacksad.

   A cool black cat. Literally. John Blacksad is an anthropromorphic cat in a world of anthropromorhic animals; racist polar bears, tough police dog cops named Smirnov, sadistic millionaire frogs (Ivo Statoc), a wisecracking fox newsman named Weekly (for how often he changes his underwear), serpent and rat assassins, you name it. It will probably come as no surprise that Blacksad’s creator Juanjo Guarnido is a Spanish Disney animator who worked on Zootopia, but this is no Disney cartoon.

   John Blacksad operates in Mean Streets as tough as any Raymond Chandler ever portrayed and in a world as corrupt. He would be at home in Black Mask if the pulp paper could have supported the lush drawings and beautiful coloring that marks the graphic novels. Frankly, in story terms, he wouldn’t suffer all that much as a prose hero, though those handsome graphics are impossible to underestimate in terms of impact.

   â€œSomewhere Within the Shadows” is the defining adventure, the origin of a sorts, Guarnido and Canales’ I, The Jury, John Blacksad’s mission statement. It opens with Blacksad summoned to the home of star dancer Natalia, an old flame, who has been found brutally murdered. Police dog cop Smirnov warns him off, but knows Blacksad won’t be stopped, and as Blacksad, who once protected Natalia from a stalker and was briefly her lover learns her love life was complicated. Complicated, and dangerous as a pair of killers, a knife wielding snake and a rat soon prove.

   Wounded, worked over, Blacksad isn’t about to stop, and when Smirnov comes to tell him the department has been ordered to lay off the case he surprises the private eye. A brutal and sadistic killer is trying to buy his way out of two murders, Natalia and another lover, a writer. Smirnov may be a cop but he won’t stand by and watch that happen. It’s an open invitation, find the killer and stop him and the Department will look the other way.

   Shades of Pat Chambers and Mike Hammer.

   Blacksad does find the killer and also his purpose in life. To avenge the helpless and take on the powerful and corrupt, but not before brief snapshots of various characters in the city (a walrus talent agent is memorable as is a literal gorilla bodyguard), and a surprising moment with a dying assassin in his office.

   The violence, when it comes, is cathartic, but there is far more to this, including rich humor and good storytelling. Blacksad owes something to Will Eisner and his famed Spirit, to whom Blacksad is a spiritual cousin visually and story wise.

   And so it begins.

   In “Arctic Nation” a missing little girl puts Blacksad in the middle of a series of brutal murders of black animals and against a Klan/Nazi like group of white animals called Arctic Nation. This is the one where he meets Weekly, his sidekick and eventually pal. “Red Soul” introduces a new female interest who will also become a regular.

   Private eyes have been around for a while in comics, before Superman, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel had Slam Bradley. Dan Turner had a long comic book run, and at various times tough PI’s like Ken Shannon and Sam Hill had runs in their own titles, Black Canary was even a private eye in her secret identity at one point. Most famously Mickey Spillane debuted Mike Hammer as the failed comic book hero Mike Danger.

   For the most part the two haven’t been as compatible as you might expect, even though there is a Golden Age adaptation of The Maltese Falcon. Some have done more with the genre than others, and likely the best was DC Comics Nathaniel Dusk by writer Don MacGreggor (who earlier created the independent Detectives Inc.) and artist Gene Golan, a visual and literary high mark for the private eye in comic book form. More recently there was a well done adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister done in black and white.

   But Blacksad is far and away the most successful of these attempts in terms of success with his audience. Somehow the anthropromorphic animals capture an aspect of the film noir universe that mere humans missed in this format. It’s as if Carl Barks of the brilliant Disney comics many of us grew up on had collaborated with Herge of the Tintin albums and added Robert B. Parker on the script. Shadows of Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Clifton Webb, George Sanders, Bogie, and Bacall appear in these pages transformed into their animal archtypes. The Blacksad saga turns everything you think you know about comics on its head, you have to see it to believe it, but don’t just look at the stunning visuals, Juan Diego Canales’ scripts and lyrical narrative are just as important.

   I’ll be surprised at anyone who loves private eyes, femme fatales, noir streets, or hard boiled tales isn’t taken by this no matter how much they may dislike or disdain comic books. Blacksad manages the neat trick of being both a paean to something nostalgic and itself entirely original and unique. No one is going to match this for a long time.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER “Cheating the Chair.” Sidney Zoom #14. Detective Fiction Weekly, 17 September 1932. [Added later:] Reprinted in The Casebook of Sidney Zoom, edited by Bill Pronzini. (Crippen & Landru, 2006).

   Alphabetically the last of the series detectives in the online Crime Fiction Index, I do not know if it is precisely correct to call Sidney Zoom a private eye. In this story, the only one of his adventures that I’ve read, he does not have a paying client, which would, I think, be one of the several criteria that must be satisfied to qualify.

   Zoom thinks of himself as a fighter for the underdog, and reads newspapers to find cases in which he believes justice is not being served. He appears to be independently wealthy. He has a devoted secretary named Vera Thurmond, and lives on a yacht with a captain on board to take him up and down the coast to wherever he needs to go.

   What attracts him to this current case, in which a disgruntled ex-convict is accused of killing the county attorney who sent him up, is that Zoom is convinced that the prosecutor’s version of what happened does not match the facts.

   In this regard, the detective work is fine, but the story gets muddled more than I’ve come to expect from Gardner. Zoom has to depend on bluffing the miscreants involved to secure the release of the accused man.

   As you can see from the list below, there were quite a few Sidney Zoom stories, but based on this one, while certainly readable, they may not be at the same level, quality-wise, as some of Gardner’s other series pulp heroes. I’ll have to investigate further.

       The Sidney Zoom stories —

The Higher Court (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly Mar 8 1930
(*) Willie the Weeper (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly Mar 29 1930
(*) My Name Is Zoom! (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly Apr 12 1930
The Purple Plume (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly May 24 1930
Time in for Tucker (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly Sep 13 1930
Strangler’s Silk (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Jan 3 1931
The Death Penalty (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Jan 17 1931
(*) Borrowed Bullets (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Mar 21 1931
The Vanishing Corpse (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Aug 15 1931
(*) Higher Up (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Sep 19 1931
(*) The First Stone (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Oct 24 1931
It Takes a Crook (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Feb 6 1932
(*) The Green Door (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Aug 20 1932
(*) Cheating the Chair (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Sep 17 1932
(*) Inside Job (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly Jan 7 1933
(*) Lifted Bait (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Oct 21 1933
(*) Stolen Thunder (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly May 19 1934

       (*) Included in The Casebook of Sidney Zoom.

NEVER TOO LATE. Reliable Pictures, 1935. Richard Talmadge, Thelma White, Robert Frazer, Mildred Harris, Vera Lewis, Robert Walker, George Chesebro. Director: Bernard B. Ray (as Franklin Shamray).

   This is not a movie I can recommend to you, and in fact, if I were to be perfectly honest, and why shouldn’t I be?, I’d advise you to stay away, even if ever you have an hour to spare and nothing else to spend it on.

   On the other hand, it is possible to find something interesting to see in it (and therefore to say about it). Leading man Richard Talmadge plays a police detective in this one, although that’s a fact that I don’t believe was made known right away. His task is helping a girl retrieve a set of pearls her sister, wife of the police commissioner, gave to an insidious (and pernicious) blackmailer.

   He knows the pearls are hidden in a shoe inside a trunk that for some reason is being sold at a police auction. To get there, he smacks up his car, gets into a police wagon heading for the auction, swings out the door in back up onto the roof and rides to the auction standing and swaying on top of the police wagon, then somersaulting to the ground when it stops.

   It turns out, not for the story’s sake, but in real life Richard Talmage was also a stunt man for much of his movie-making career, and as a result there are several scenes in which he is able to show off his prowess in that regard, somersaulting down stairs, jumping off second story balconies to the floor below, pivoting on tall pieces of lumber from the top of one building to another, and slugging it out with the bad guys, usually at odds of four or five to one against him.

   This is fun stuff, all right, but it really has nothing to do with the story, about which I’ve already said all I’m going to.

ROSS H. SPENCER – Kirby’s Last Circus. Birch Kirby #1 (and only). Donald I. Fine, hardcover, 1987. Worldwide, paperback, November 1989.

   Meet Birch Kirby, as the back cover of the paperback edition says. He’s a fourth-rate Chicago-based PI if there ever was one — and the CIA’s candidate to uncover what’s behind the secret messages being beamed to the Soviet Union from downstate Grizzly Gulch, the permanent site of Admiral Doldrum’s circus.

   Their rationale : anyone so obviously incompetent and inept must be an absolute genius, complete with open fly. Good-natured bawdy humor prevails. Slapstick so pure, you wonder if Spencer can keep it up for over 200 pages. He does. It’s the story that doesn’t.

Bibliographic Note:   Ross H. Spencer was also the creator of PI’s Lacey Lockington (3 books), Luke Lassiter (1 book), “Buzz” Deckard (1 book), and of course the legendary Chance Purdue (5 books).

   Lee Goldberg left this bit of good news as a comment following Richard Moore’s previously posted essay on author Ralph Dennis. Thinking the news deserves to be spread as much as possible, I’m reposting it here:

   I’m excited to announce that I’ve acquired the rights to all of Ralph Dennis’s work — his published and unpublished novels. Brash Books will be re-releasing his 12 Hardman novels, starting with the first four in December, and the rest through 2019. The Hardman books include a terrific introduction by Joe R. Lansdale … and subsequent books include afterwords by Richard A. Moore, Ben Jones and Paul Bishop. The first two titles in the series, Atlanta Deathwatch and The Charleston Knife is Back in Town are already available for preorder in paperback and ebook on Amazon, iBook, Barnes & Noble and Kobo.

   We’ll also be re-releasing in 2019 a substantially revised version Ralph’s WWII thriller MacTaggart’s War, which we’ve retitled The War Heist. It was his last published title and didn’t do as well as he, or the publisher hoped. I believe i know why… I’ve gone back to his original manuscript, rearranged chapters, deleted chapters, and made other revisions to heighten suspense, sharpen characters, etc… cutting the book by about 35,000 words along the way (it still clocks in at 100K words).

   And we’re also going to be releasing many of Ralph’s unpublished novels … which, if they need revision, I will be doing myself. One of the manuscripts is going to be slightly reworked as a sequel to his previous published novel Atlanta (which we are likely to retitle before re-publishing).

   This has been a passion project for me ever since Bill Crider and Paul Bishop introduced me to the Hardman novels five years ago. I immediately decided I had to get them back into print, so I sought out the advice of my good friend Joel Goldman … and as a result of those discussions, a partnership and a publishing company were born. Now, after the publishing nearly 100 titles together, we are finally putting out the novels that we’d hoped would be our first releases.

   I can’t thank Richard Moore enough for all of his help making this deal finally happen.

   I can’t wait to hear what you think of the books as they roll out… and I hope you will spread the word. We want Ralph Dennis to get the recognition and readership he’s long deserved.

THE WORLD’S GREATEST SINNER. Frenzy Productions, 1962. Written, produced, directed by & starring Timothy Carey. Music (some of it) by Frank Zappa. Narrated by Paul Frees.

   The more films I watch (and I’ve watched a few) the more convinced I am that Cinema in the last half of the 20th Century was all about Timothy Carey.

   Start with THE WILD ONE, EAST OF EDEN, THE KILLING, PATHS OF GLORY, ONE-EYED JACKS, RIO CONCHOS, then move on to BEACH BLANKET BINGO, MERMAIDS OF TIBURON, THE OUTFIT, POOR WHITE TRASH, HEAD, SHOCK TREATMENT, BIKINI BEACH, and FRANCIS IN THE HAUNTED HOUSE — the man seems ubiquitous. And often memorable. His wild dance in POOR WHITE TRASH combines the grace of Chaplin with the energy of Gene Kelley.

   Watching Carey on screen, straining at bit parts, one can sense the creative passion oozing from his pores. So it was probably inevitable that he made this very personal and idiosyncratic film, with nods to CITIZEN KANE, A FACE IN THE CROWD and THE IMMORAL MR TEAS. And while it’s touched with greatness, it’s still not very good.

   Most of the problem can be set down to budget. Much of THE WORLD’S GREATEST SINNER is beset by cheap sets, poor lighting, bad acting (Well it’s hard to tell about the acting since most of the actors have to declaim their lines just to register on the tinny sound track.) mis-matched stock footage, and the general air of desperate cheapness one finds in porno films — or ahem! at least I assume that’s what porno films are like. Not that I’d know first-hand, you understand.

   Withal, this tale of a bored executive who becomes a street preacher, then a rock star, and finally a demagogue teetering on the edge of a Presidency that will destroy the nation, has its moments. Some of the camera compositions are quite striking (Edgar G. Ulmer was one of the cameramen.) some of the ideas really imaginative, and Carey himself is always compelling.

   I read an article once about Timothy Carey protesting in front of a film festival that wouldn’t show THE WORLD’S GREATEST SINNER. The author interviewed Carey at length, then went to the director of the festival for his side of things, and got the comment, “It’s a really bad film.”

   Which it is. But this is not the inept badness of GLEN OR GLENDA, nor the overblown malaise of… of… Oh hell, name any expensive flop. Carey fills SINNER with a passion only partly obscured by its own awfulness. The result is memorable.

   All too often SINNER screams its passion so loudly it provokes unintended laughs: As when Paul Frees narrates as the devil and we cut to unrelated stock footage of a snake in the grass. Or when Carey stalks into a Church to the overblown accompaniment of “Mars” from Gustav Holst’s THE PLANETS. Or when the stock footage simply doesn’t match. Or when… well suffice it to say, there’s plenty of it here.

   But in my memory of this fiasco, I keep coming back to the really fine and imaginative parts –and there are plenty of them, too. So I’ll just finish by saying it’s a film to approach, if at all, with a tolerant attitude and a wary eye.

   And don’t look for talent.