JACK FINNEY – The House of Numbers. Dell First Edition A139, paperback original, May 1957. Expanded from a novella in Cosmopolitan, July 1956. Film: MGM, 1957, with Jack Palance, Harold J. Stone, Edward Platt, Barbara Lang.

   Jack Finney has the unusual ability to create edge-of-the-chair tension and sustain it throughout a long narrative. In this riveting tale, Ben Jarvis and Ruth Gehlmann conspire to help Ben’s brother, Arnie, escape from San Quentin. Arnie, who was sentenced for passing bad checks while trying to raise money to buy Ruth an expensive engagement ring, has attacked a guard; there is a paroled prisoner on the way back to San Quentin to testify about the assault, and the penalty for attacking a guard is death.

   Arnie appeals to Ben for help and lays out a dangerous but basically simple scheme for escape. Ben wavers but finally he and Ruth agree to aid Arnie. The scheme unfolds bit by bit, and the reader is solidly on Ben and Ruth’s side throughout, experiencing their apprehension and terror — and eventually agonizing over the same terrible decision they face.

   Finney knows San Quentin, although his view of it is colored by his association with then-warden Harley O. Teets, a humanitarian administrator to whom the book is dedicated. (In fact, the dialogue of the fictional warden reads a little like a public-relations release.) However the method Finney devises for the escape is ingenious, and characters are well drawn. The suspense, as with all of Finney’s works, is guaranteed to keep you turning the pages.

   Although best known for his science fiction and fantasy works, such as the popular Body Snatchers (1955), which was twice made into a film under the title Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 1978), Finney has also written three other suspense novels: Five Against the House (1954), Assault on a Queen (1959), and The Night People (1977). Five Against the House was made into an excellent film in 1955, starring Kim Novak and Brian Keith, and directed by Phil Karlson.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

KING OF THE JUNGLE. Paramount, 1933. Buster Crabbe, Frances Dee, Sidney Toler, Nydia Westman, Robert Barrat, Irving Pichel, Douglas(s) Dumbrille. Based on the novel The Lion’s Way, by Charles Thurley Stoneham. Directors: H. Bruce Humberstone & Max Marcin. Shown at Cinevent 31, Columbus OH, May 1999.

   I saw this on TV several years ago and was not impressed by it, but this time I found it a pleasant diversion, with Buster Crabbe as Kaspa, raised in the jungle after the deaths of his parents, and brought to the states with his lions to perform in a circus.

   Frances Dee, a teacher who’s hired to teach Kaspa English, teaches him a couple of others things as well before the predictable fade-out in the studio backlot studio set.

   This doesn’t give the first couple of the first MGM Tarzan films any real competition (Frances Dee, while attractive, is not Maureen O’Sullivan), but a spectacular circus fire provides some genuine excitement and the animals are magnificent specimens and out-act some of the supporting players.

H. P. LOVECRAFT “The Terrible Old Man.” Written January 28, 1920, and first published in the Tryout, an amateur press publication, July 1921. Appeared in Weird Tales, August 1926. Reprinted many times.

   Although there really isn’t that much literary value in the story, H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Terrible Old Man” could certainly be built upon and skillfully adapted into a truly captivating Gothic horror film. Originally published in the amateur journal Tryout (1921) and subsequently reprinted many times, including Pirate Ghosts of the American Coast (1988), the very brief story is notable for its New England coastline setting, one that Lovecraft would return to time and again in his more sophisticated writings.

   The plot is simple, but loaded with noticeable xenophobic undertones that make this little known story even less valuable than it otherwise would have been in light of Lovecraft’s far more historically significant later works. While the titular character, the Terrible Old Man, is never given an identifying name, the men who plot to steal from the old mysterious pirate are most explicitly marked by their “ethnic” sounding names: Angelo Ricci, Joe Czanek, and Manuel Silva.

   Not only am I guessing Italian, Polish, and Portuguese, but that these three aforementioned nationalities were among Lovecraft’s least favorite immigrant groups in his home town of Providence, Rhode Island. For it is this gang of three men – three “foreigners” in Protestant New England – who seek to rob the story’s old man – a former sea captain – of his treasure.

   Yet, it is the sea captain who has the last laugh. For he is terrible indeed! Although the supernatural elements in the story are relatively attenuated, at least for an H.P. Lovecraft story, the reader learns that the three would be robbers are found murdered. The old man, clearly the responsible party, is said to have yellow eyes. Is he a ghost or a zombie? We never learn, which allows our imaginations to run wild.

   As I said at the outset, this is hardly a commendable work of literary fiction; in many ways, it is amateurish in the extreme. But there’s something there, some genuine imaginary terror lurking behind the terrible old man’s eyes. It’s a chilling little tale, one that I thought I’d soon forget after reading it, but oddly enough one that has stuck in my mind for a while.

LAND RAIDERS. Columbia Pictures, 1970. Telly Savalas, George Maharis, Arlene Dahl, Janet Landgard, Guy Rolfe, Phil Brown, George Coulouris, Jocelyn Lane, Fernando Rey. Director: Nathan Juran.

   As far I call tell, the title of this European-filmed Western has nothing to do with the story, but it’s an entertaining tale that I enjoyed more than I do most of the so-called “spaghetti westerns” of the same era. Not that it’s without its flaws, but both the direction and the camera work show more intelligent thought went into the making of this movie than most low-budget westerns of the late 60s and early 70s.

   One visual point you may have to concede on, and admittedly it is a tough pill to swallow, is that Telly Savalas and George Maharis are brothers in this film, the latter embracing his Mexican heritage and the former doing his best to rise far above it. He is, even more than that, not only the richest land-owner in the area, southern Arizona, but he is also the greediest, with only the threat of the US Government taking his open land from him to use for an Apache reservation threatening his wealth and power.

   To that end, his primary obsession is that of fomenting war against the Apaches, whom he considers vermin who must only be exterminated. Threatening this, there is a feud between himself and his brother, which has something to do with the woman the latter intended to marry.

   Flashbacks, rather skillfully done, are therefore an important part of the way the story is told. On screen there is plenty of stampedes, runaway stages, scalping, pillaging, raping and even a bloody massacre to keep the action going in non-stop fashion. (Some of this appears to be stock footage from other films.)

   George Maharis acquits himself well throughout. Bald, without a hat, Telly Savalas is more than adequate as one of the most evil men in the West, but with a cowboy hat on, I’m sorry to say that he just looks silly.

RAWHIDE. 2oth Century Fox, 1951. Tyrone Power, Susan Hayward, Hugh Marlowe, Dean Jagger, Edgar Buchanan, Jack Elam, George Tobias, Jeff Corey, James Millican. Director: Henry Hathaway.

   Tyrone Power isn’t exactly what you’d call a Western icon. He’s no Gary Cooper or a James Stewart, let alone a Joel McCrea or a John Wayne. But that doesn’t stop Henry Hathaway’s Rawhide from being an excellent, if not widely heralded, Western film about a man forced out of his daily life and into a dangerous maelstrom.

   Filmed in crisp black and white, in which many frames seem like exquisitely staged photographs, Rawhide avoids many of the melodramatic pitfalls that made far too many early 1950s westerns bland and altogether forgettable movies about good guys battling bad guys and love triumphing over hate. There’s not much in the way of lighthearted banter or comic relief in this film. The movie is brooding and claustrophobic, not lighthearted and warm. Romance takes a back seat to fear and violence. To that extent, the film can be seen as a precursor to Budd Boetticher’s dusty and gritty Westerns starring Randolph Scott.

   The plot is relatively straightforward. Power portrays Tom Owens, the educated son of an Overland Mail Company executive who’s learning the family business. To that end, he’s living and working at a relay station for the stage called Rawhide Station. Owens isn’t a particularly tough guy; he’s just there to learn the ropes. But when he learns that there are escaped convicts in the area, he becomes determined to make sure that stage passenger Vinnie Holt (Hayward) doesn’t fall into their grasp.

   A noble effort, but a failed one, given that pretty soon the outlaw escapee gang lead by Zimmerman (Hugh Marlowe) invades Rawhide Station and takes Owens and Holt captive. Making matters worse is the fact that one of Zimmerman’s partners in crime, Tevis (Jack Elam) has his predatory eyes on Holt. Elam plays the sociopath Tevis with such skill that it’s occasionally difficult not to like this rakish villain, even though you know better.

   Although set out West in the midst of solid desert and howling coyotes, Rawhide plays out less like a Western than a home invasion film, a story of a man and a woman who are forced to confront evil in the most domestic of settings. It’s a gripping portrayal of a man forced to his limits and one which ever so subtly asks the questions: What would you do in a situation like this? How brave are you?

GORDON YOUNG “Born to Be Hanged, But…” Adventure, 03 December 1919.

   So speaks young Don Everhard, the hero of Gordon Young’s tough novelette that headlined the December 3, 1919, edition of the great pulp Adventure. It was a pretty good issue too, Harold Lamb’s “Said Afzel’s Elephant”, and stories by J. Allan Dunn, and Arthur O. Friel, but it’s the Young novelette and Don Everhard the character that are of interest here.

   The story is pretty straight forward. Young Don Everhard, actually Don Richmond of a respectable San Francisco family, is a professional gambler with a fast and deadly gun in contemporary San Francisco. During an election year he comes upon an incriminating letter that would embarrass reform candidate Congressman Bryan and beautiful Helen Curwen and favor James H. Thorpe, a lumberman and Bryan’s opponent for the governor’s race. Everhard has a history with Thorpe and roundly hates him. (“If he was a Republican I would vote Democrat, and if he was a Democrat I would vote Republican”).

   In knightly style Everhard returns the letter unread to Mrs. Curwen, but when word gets out he had the letter he is approached by two men to buy it; one the mysterious Ellis, and the other an agent of Thorpe. Everhard isn’t having any of it, but when Thorpe tries to set him up in a poker game with a professional gunman, he kills the man and has to go to ground, which he does hiding out as a crew member on a ship, until the truth comes out.

   When he is cleared Mrs. Curwen approaches him. She is meeting with Thorpe to try and beard the lion over the letter, but when the meeting ends in a blaze of gunfire … well, as Everhard opens the story:

   Of course he gets out of it and retains his honor and the ladies, but the really interesting part of this story is in the telling, because years before Carroll John Daly or Dashiell Hammett, the only thing distinguishing Don Everhard from the hard boiled private eye of a thousand pulp stories is that he’s a gambler and not a detective. The language is the same, all-American unsentimental (but actually very sentimental) voice of Twain and London, out of Bret Harte and the Dime Novel. Young is a better writer than Daly, but if Daly didn’t read these and Race Williams and wasn’t influenced by the diamond-hard fast-shooting gambler I would be greatly surprised.

   A “witch’s mirror of blood.” If that isn’t the hardboiled voice of Black Mask, I never heard it.

   Robert Sampson wrote more about Gordon Young and Don Everhard in Yesterday’s Faces, his massive work on the early pulps. Today Young is best remembered for his South Seas adventure tales about Hurricane Williams, with only one expensive edition of Everhard stories reprinted, but if Young and Don Everhard are not quite the hardboiled private eye that soon followed they are so close that the difference is difficult to measure.

   Like his private eye pulp descendants Everhard is a tough, no nonsense, cynical, fast-thinking, fast-shooting hardboiled egg with a soft center, an errant knight on the edge between respectable society and the underworld, a man with his own code and his own rules navigating a twisting course between the innocent and not so innocent and the truly guilty, brutal, corrupt, and dangerous.

   The voice and the idea may not be quite there yet, but like the last half of Conan Doyle’s Valley of Fear, we are so close to the hardboiled private eye we can feel his breath on the back of our neck. I would argue that with this story alone Young was already ahead of Daly’s “Knights of the Open Palm” or Three Gun Terry Mack by a mile.

REX STOUT “Man Alive.” First published in The American Magazine, December 1947. Included in the collection Three Doors to Death (Viking, 1950; Dell #626, 1952; Bantam, 1966).

   It’s been too long, far too long, since I’ve read one of Rex Stout’s tales of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin on a case together, and if I can, I’m going to make a point of going back and re-reading as many of them this summer as I’m able to, with a special point of emphasis on the few that I’ve never gotten around to read. Shame on me.

   It is difficult to say exactly why it is so, but the stories are very much timeless. I had no difficulty at all in slipping back in a time bubble to the insular world of a Manhattan brownstone office and home, picking up when I left off, with another case at Wolfe’s door. It is difficult to believe that this story was written in 1947. The few references to the outside world are Archie’s new Cadillac and the fashion show that Archie attends in hopes of spotting the father of their new client, female and the about to become the new owner of the firm.

   Why, you may ask. It so happens that the girl’s father is dead, having committed suicide by jumping naked into a geyser at Yellowstone Park. This being a Nero Wolfe mystery, of course he is not dead, and although he was in disguise, the girl knows she saw him at a previous show.

   Also, because this is a Nero Wolfe mystery, it is no surprise to the reader when her father turns up dead for real, and Wolfe’s client is suspected of the murder. This is also one of those affairs in which Wolfe gathers all of the possible suspects in his office, police in presence, to determine the real killer.

   He is flummoxed, though, when all of the suspects alibi each other. None of them could have done it, save perhaps his client. Although taken aback, Wolfe probes further, digs deeper, and after some pursing of his lips, is able to steer the conversation around to the only solution there could be to the crime.

   It’s a very good detective story, but even better was the company and familiar surroundings.

P. G. WODEHOUSE – Jill the Reckless. Herbert Jenkins, UK, hardcover, 1921. George H. Doran, US, hardcover, 1920. Serialised in Collier’s, US, 10 April to 28 August 1920, as “The Little Warrior,” and in Grand Magazine, UK, September 1920 to June 1921. Reprinted many times.

   A sizzling, searing look at the sleazy underside of Broadway and the downtrodden dreamers who dance desperately to the sordid melody of despair.

   Well, maybe not quite, but it is a bit different from Wodehouse’s usual thing. We get the customary mismatched engagement, disapproving dowager, silly-ass aristocrat and captivating young things in love, but Wodehouse serves it up with a bit of a change here.

   For one thing, the central character in this book is female — a rarity in Plum’s male-centered universe — a well-to-do young lady, Jill Mariner, of a rather impulsive disposition (hence the title of the piece) engaged to tall, handsome and politically rising Derek Underhill, whose domineering mother looks on the planned nuptials with something less than enthusiasm, particularly when Jill is seen chatting with a friend from her childhood, now grown into a bemusing playwright.

   With a nod to classical Greek tragedy, Wodehouse engineers a day for Jill that includes being arrested (for assaulting a man who was beating a parrot) getting jilted by Derek, and discovering that her guardian, lovable old Uncle Chris, has spent her trust fund and she is now penniless.

   Well, characters in Wodehouse novels are almost always short of cash, but they are never actually destitute and desperate as Jill is here, and in short order, Uncle Chris takes her to upstate New York and berths her with some distant and miserly relations who soon begin treating her like a servant.

   Wodehouse, however, is no David Goodis, Jill Mariner is no Jane Eyre, and we soon find her in Manhattan, employed as a chorus girl for a Broadway show-in-the-making, and being romantically pursued by the author of the show, the producer, and her bemused playwright friend who has been hired to re-write and fix it.

   But wait, there’s more: Back in London, word has got out that Derek (remember him?) jilted Jill because she went broke; bad show, that, in everyone’s opinion, and when their mutual friend Freddie (the silly-ass of the piece) tries to explain that the break-up arose from a man beating a parrot… well Wodehouse fans know what sort of scenes will ensue, and Freddie is dispatched to America to find Jill and bring her back, only to have his mission run off the tacks when he inadvertently becomes a Broadway star.

   You have guessed by now that Wodehouse’s view of struggling in the Big City is never terribly grim; when Plum writes about poverty, he treats it with the same sly humor (or humour, as he would have called it) he applied to his own deprivation in a Nazi internment camp: Keep calm and dither on.

   There is also a bit more emotional complexity here than usual. Characters in Wodehouse stories get engaged, disengaged and re-engaged with the metronomic ease of a well-oiled clockwork toy, but here there’s heartbreak to endure and be gotten over. There’s a very telling scene where Jill explains to one of her suitors that her heart is like a room full of old ugly furniture and she won’t have room for anything new there until she can get rid of the old stuff. It’s an apt metaphor, unusually melancholy for Wodehouse, and perfectly sweet.

   Fear not, though; this is still a Wodehouse novel, filled with its full quota of laughable situations and colorful characters who seem as briefly real and amusing as usual. Jill the Reckless may surprise Plum’s fans, but it won’t disappoint them.

  ANTHONY BERKELEY – Dead Mrs. Stratton. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1933. First published in the UK as Jumping Jenny, hardcover, 1933. Reprinted by The Hogarth Press, UK, softcover, 1984.

   In 1933 mystery writers were still playing around with the conventions of the puzzle aspect of the detective story, with authors having lots of fun playing games with the reader, pulling the wool over their eyes, and otherwise very much playing magician in a literary format. Dead Mrs. Stratton, the US title, is solidly in that tradition.

   Which makes it difficult for a reviewer (not a critic) to talk about a book such as this one, for fear of saying too much, giving too much away that the reader would far rather find out for his or her own. My way of compensating for this is by warning you that from this point on nothing I say will be exactly true. Or it may be true, but I won’t tell you whether it is or not. On the other hand, everything may be true.

   The protagonist of this tale is noted amateur criminologist Roger Sheringham, in the ninth of ten appearances. Dead is a woman whose mad and outrageous behavior is uniformly despised by all. Her husband, a mild-mannered man who may have loved her once but no longer and is said to love another, but he dare not bring up the subject of divorce, for fear of her reaction and perhaps other secrets about their friends and family that she may reveal.

   At a party hosted by her husband’s brother she also threatens suicide, and it is no surprise for the assembled guests to discover toward the end of the evening that she has done precisely that. Roger, a good friend of the host, is suspicious, and realizing that it was murder and the husband is the most obvious suspect, finds himself manipulating the evidence to insure the coroner’s verdict is that of suicide.

   Here is where the author steps in and makes sure we know more than Sheringham does, so it becomes extremely amusing to watch the latter eliminate the real killer and discover that he has inadvertently made himself the obvious suspect instead, should the police be intelligent enough to look beyond surface appearances. Which, as it turns out, they are, and they do.

   There is much heavy huddling around by Sheringham with the other guests at the party to get their stories to gibe with his, and much smile-provoking consternation on his part as well, when they don’t. This means that there isn’t a lot of action in this novel — practically none — but the plotting is extremely intricate and detailed. This is not a book that is designed for modern day readers, but outdated or not, I found that doing my best to stay abreast of Sheringham’s trials and tribulations was a very enjoyable task, and the ending was just a huge, huge bonus. (At is turns out, Sheringham never does know who the killer is.)

G. G. FICKLING – This Girl for Hire. Pyramid G274, paperback original, 1957. Reprinted at least four times by Pyramid. Cover art by Harry Schaare.
   

   G. G. Fickling was the pseudonym of the writing team of Forrest E. (“Skip”) Fickling and his wife, Gloria, creators of Honey West, billed on the front cover, the back cover, and even the spine of This Girl for Hire as “the sexiest private eye ever to pull a trigger!” Honey’s sex is made much of in the course of the book: She spends as much time getting into and out of bathing suits as she does working on the case,and her measurements (38-22-36) are cited both on the back cover and in the text.

   The case itself, which involves eight deaths before it ends, begins when Honey is hired by a down-and-out actor whose apparent murder leads to the other killings, all of people involved in the television industry. Despite the setting, there is little actual insight into television, unless the actors, producers, and directors really do spend most of their days and nights drinking and carousing.

   The book is filled with incident, even including a strip-poker game, but the plot is so confusing that the reader is unlikely to be convinced by its unraveling, which comes about more by accident than by good detective work. Still, there is a certain pre-feminist charm in seeing the hard-boiled Honey at work in a man’s world, despite Lieutenant Mark Storm (his real name) and his attempts to persuade her to leave the brain work to the men.

   Pyramid Books occasionally referred to Honey West as “literary history’s first lady private eye,” and undoubtedly the novelty of a female first-person narrator helped sell the series, but James L. Rubel’s Eli Donavan was playing the same part years earlier in Gold Medal’s No Business for a Lady (1950). Still, it was Honey who wasa success, starring in eleven books and a TV series in which she was portrayed by Anne Francis.

   The Ficklings produced one other short-lived series for Belmont Books, this one featuring a male private eye named Erik March, in such titles as The Case of the Radioactive Redhead (1963).

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.