CHARLOTTE MacLEOD – Wrack and Rune. Doubleday/Crime Club, hardcover, 1982. Avon, reprint paperback, 1982.

   Charlotte MacLeod is a relative newcomer to the field of mystery writing, but in the past two or three years she has certainly shown all the signs of becoming a name to reckon with.

   Agatha Christie is no longer with us, but even if she were, she’d have no cause for fear. What makes these adventures of Peter Shandy so highly anticipated, at least in some circles, is hardly the detection involved, though never fear: there is that, too.

   But it’s rather the pure laugh-out-loud sort of humor that pervades MacLeod’s stories; that, plus the fact that the large proportion of her characters, many of them old friends to us now, actually like each other. Shandy is a professor of agrology at Balaclava College, up somewhere in nearby Massachusetts, but his fame at becoming involved in cases of murder has spread from the campus clear across Balaclava County, clearly the wildest piece of country this side of Appalachia.

   A runestone found in an ancient farmstead may be the harbinger of buried Viking treasure to come. The prospect brings out the worst in some people, and before you can say Thorkjeld Svenson, more than the college experts have quickly overrun the site.

   Death by quicklime also results, as well as a few other assorted attempts at murder. There’s never been such excitement in Lumpkin Corners as this.

   This particular outing, Shandy’s third appearance now, may be too long by about a third for a constant level of such inspired insanity to be properly maintained, but I doubt you’ll have as much fun with a detective novel as you will with this one.

   That is, until the next one.

Rating: C plus.

CAPTAIN A. E. DINGLE – Gold Out of Celebes. Little Brown and Co, US, hardcover, 1920. Previously serialized in The Argosy, October 5 through November 2, 1918. Several POD editions are currently available, as well as a free download from Project Gutenberg.

   Jack Barry, a seaman stranded in Batavia, and Tom Little, an enthusiastic salesman lusting for adventure, join forces in the employment of one Cornelius Houton, the owner of various interests in the island of Celebes. Thither the two men journey in a boat provided by Houten and commanded by Barry to investigate an agent of whose honesty Houten has become suspicious.

   On their arrival the two quickly proceed to concern themselves with an effort to save a fair young missionary from the evil intentions of another agent. Things happen quickly to the two young men, not always pleasantly, and Little’s thirst for action is fully gratified, while the perplexing attitude of the charming missionary, who apparently does not wish to be saved, reduces Barry to desperation.

   Bewilderment succeeds bewilderment in their minds as they pass from one puzzling circumstance to another, but doggedly they hold to their purpose. Not until the very close of the story do the incidents link up and the mystery unfold itself to the two adventurous spirits.

LEO BRUCE – Case with No Conclusion. Academy Chicago, paperback, 1984. First published in the UK by Bles, 1939.

   William Beef, former sergeant in the police force, has retired and taken up private investigation from quarters near Baker Street. Lionel Townsend, who recorded Beef’s previous two investigations, asserts that any claim that Beef “should be able to earn a living as a private investigator was beyond all human credulity.”

   Nonetheless, a client reasonably prompt!y appears, one Peter Ferrers, whose brother has been arrested for murdering a doctor. The doctor’s body was found in Stewart Ferrers’ library, with Stewart’s knife in the corpse’s throat and only Stewart’s fingerprints on the knife. There had, as is usual in such cases, been a violent quarrel between the two men only hours before. But what means the whiskey in the library that had been adulterated with arsenic?

   Beef does an excellent job of investigating in his own inimitable manner and concludes that Stewart Ferrers is indeed not guilty. Beef is, however, unable to prove that Ferrers didn’t do it or to apprehend the someone else who did do it.

   There is consternation, of course, among mystery writers and amateur detectives. As one publisher put it, “If novelists’ investigators cannot solve the problems created, who in the world can?” Monsieur Amer Picon, who appeared in Beef’s first major investigation, Case for Three Detectives, and who bears a distinct resemblance to Hercule Poirot, reacted this way: “Helas! Mon Dieu. Je ne sais quoi.”

   Such a failure by an amateur investigator is certainly unprecedented, and this may have been why Case with No Conclusion was not published in the US until 1984, whereas the next book in the series, Case with Four Clowns, a considerably lesser mystery, did find a publisher here in 1939.

   Suffice it to say that there is more here than meets the eye, but reviewers rules do not permit that additional information to be disclosed. Read and enjoy.

LEO BRUCE – Case with Four Clowns. Frederick A. Stokes, US, hardcover, 1940. Academy Chicago, US, paperback, 2010. First published in the UK by Davies, hardcover, 1939.

   Sergeant William Beef, formerly of the police force, is now in unwilling retirement as a private investigator because of his last investigation, Case with No Conclusion. Beef was unable to prove that the man charged with a murder had not done it, although Beef was certain that the man had not committed the crime.

   No one will hire Beef, but he gets a note from his nephew, who is traveling with a circus. The nephew says he has been told by a gypsy fortune teller that there will be a murder at the circus.

   Beef manages to talk Lionel Townsend, the doubting chronicler of his investigations, into joining him in a tour with the circus. There Beef uncovers lots of enmities and jealousies, what might be an attempt at murder, and several “accidents” that could have been efforts at homicide.

   Despite a great deal of confusion and conflict, Beef, using his vast common sense, manages to make sense of the case. A murder does occur, but it’s not Beef’s fault.

   Circus fans should enjoy this one, and so should Beef admirers. I found it a bit slow, but Beef’s comments about mystery writers and amateur detectives kept me entertained. Townsend as chronicler is always amusing, as when he seriously tells Beef:

    “… Before we started on this business I had my eye on a young lady school-teacher in Murston who, I have been told, solves every interesting crime by an algebraic process which she works out during her scripture classes. She would, I believe, have made an excellent investigator for me to chronicle, instead of wasting my time running in and out of public-houses after you.”

   Why Beef puts up with Townsend and vice versa is as big a mystery as any that Beef has investigated.

JOHN R. RIGGS – Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. Dembner Books, hardcover, 1989. Jove, paperback reprint, 1993.

   Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing is the first of John R. Riggs’ five novels about Garth Ryland I’ve read, and on this evidence I’ve missed four previous treats.

   Ryland publishes a weekly newspaper in the small Wisconsin town of Oakalla. Here he’s concerned about Diana, whom he loved and lost to English professor Devin LeMay. She and LeMay went to a cabin somewhere in northern Minnesota and both are overdue to return.

   His anxiety mounting, Garth checks out LeMay’s home (vacant, but with one most peculiar room, and watched over by a lovesick neighbor) and the one-time local resident who owns that Minnesota cabin. These trails lead to fearsome territories.

   Solid suspense, atmosphere thick enough to cut and package, vivid characters. Memorable stuff.

       The Garth Ryland series —

1. The Last Laugh (1984)
2. Let Sleeping Dogs Lie (1986)
3. The Glory Hound (1987)
4. Haunt of the Nightingale (1988)
5. Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing (1989)
6. One Man’s Poison (1991)
7. Dead Letter (1992)
8. A Dragon Lives Forever (1992)
9. Cold Hearts and Gentle People (1994)
10. Killing Frost (1995)
11. Snow on the Roses (1996)
12. He Who Waits (1997)
13. The Lost Scout (1998)
14. Nothin’ Short of Dyin’ (2011)
15. After the Petals Go (2012)

Editorial Comment:   For a local newspaper story on John R. Riggs and his resumption of the Garth Ryland series after a lapse of 12 years, go here.

THE GIRL HUNTERS. Colorama Features, 1963. Mickey Spillane (Mike Hammer), Shirley Eaton, Scott Peters, Guy Kingsley Poynter, James Dyrenforth, Charles Farrell, Kim Tracy, Hy Gardner, Lloyd Nolan. Based on the novel by Mickey Spillane. Director: Roy Rowland.

   A film with credentials is The Girl Hunters, directed by Roy Rowland and co-written by Mickey Spillane who also portrays his own creation, Mike Hammer.

   Casting-wise, this is just about plu-perfect. The ideal actor in a part that was (subconsciously, at least) written just for him, even by him. It’s like Onan Meets Pygmalion, and the fact that the rest of the film is somewhat routine cannot dim the brilliance of this concept.

   For the record, The Girl Hunters deals with Mickey/Mike’s search for his missing-presumed-dead Girl Friday Velma, who disappeared years ago, turning the once-tough PI into a gutter-drunk . Which is where the story opens.

   Two minutes later, M/M gets a clue that Velma may still be alive and he’s the Old Hammer once more. Clean and sober now (if still a little reminiscent of Thomas Hobbes’ description of Life — nasty, brutish and short), M/M becomes a trenchcoated juggernaut, mowing through the legions of cheap punks, commie spies and panting dames who beset his path.

   Like I say, this is all fairly routine stuff for anyone familiar with Spillane: there’s a helpful but handcuffed-by-the-law G-Man (played by Lloyd Nolan, still smooth and professional 20 years after his days as a B-movie PI but looking a bit bored), a helpful but nerdy plot-device newsman Hy Gardner, always there with information to move the story along, and helpful but slightly-suspect Black Widow Shirley Eaton, whose crusading anti-communist husband was killed by a burglar who didn’t set off the alarm while riffling the safe with the Government Secrets, and if you can`t pick the Killer out of this lineup you just don’t know your Spillane.

   In terms of execution, it’s all a little bland, but the acting is surprisingly not-awful. Surrounded by consummate professionals, Spillane lives up to the thesping around him, looking very relaxed and convincing, and while I wouldn’t care to see him play King Lear, I have to say that he delivers his lines well … which, since he wrote them, may be less surprising than I thought.

　

   It is common on this blog for myself, and others, to bemoan why so many of the great (and admittedly not so great) writers of the past are not represented in today’s book market. The lament usually goes something like this:

   They don’t write them like they used to, and all the great old books are lost, forgotten. You can’t find (choose the name of your choice) in print. The only books out there are dull and badly written in comparison. The new generation doesn’t know what it is missing …

   In the immortal words of Seinfeld: ‘Yada yada yada…’

   Well, I sorry to deny my fellow curmudgeonly collectors and readers one of our pet hobby horses, but our favorite lament is no longer true, and so untrue that the solution to the problem is not in some dusty musty smelling used bookstore, crowded book fair or busy convention where you have to cram a year’s worth of book hunting and buying into a few cramped hours, but no farther away than a fingers touch away and under $10 in cost.

   In the last 24 hours I have recreated some major elements of my lost collection, and the most it has cost me for a single volume has been $4, in many cases less than $1. Understand I’m not just talking about obscure or once famous writers from another age, though I’ve recovered my complete Charlie Chan, Philo Vance, Mr. Moto, Bulldog Drummond, Dr. Thorndyke, Father Brown, Sherlock Holmes, Raffles, and Tarzan collections — all for a grand total of $1.99 (the Tarzan); those have been around almost from the beginning, in public domain.

   No, I’m talking about a second paperback and pulp revolution equal to the first, and, like the first, in cheap readily accessible attractive and easily transportable editions. Oh, and I might add so far I haven’t spent a dime for the devices to read them, though I certainly plan to buy an inexpensive Kindle soon. Carrying a thousand books in a device smaller than a trade paperback gives a new meaning to the word ‘pocketbook.’

   More importantly, some of these writers haven’t been available at these prices since the 1980‘s.

   Who am I talking about?

   John D. MacDonald, Dan J. Marlowe, William Campbell Gault, Ross McDonald, Peter Rabe, Wade Miller (the complete Max Thursday for .99 each), Frank Kane, Brett Halliday, Mickey Spillane, Donald Hamilton, Stephen Marlowe, Ed Lacy, Henry Kane: and from the pulps, Nebel, Chandler, Hammett, Paul Cain (for free), Carroll John Daly, Robert Leslie Bellem, not to mention Doc Savage, the Spider, the Avenger, the Black Bat, even Nick Carter, Frank Merriwell, and the Rover Boys …

   Almost all those books are under $10, most under $5 and many under $1. Some are even free.

   Granted, you don’t have the pleasure of an actual book in your hands, and it takes a bit of time to adjust to reading in this format (arguably the Kindle, Nook, etc are closer to actually reading a book), but many of the complaints I’ve heard lodged against e-books here echo what was said of the pulps and paperbacks as well. E-books will never replace the feel of a book, certainly not a leather bound or quatro buckram edition with its scent and heft, but frankly I had less than 100 such books in my extensive collection and few of them were worth what I paid for them. E-books won’t appreciate in value either, but they are here, available, and no doubt will develop their own following.

   To quote James Joyce, I’m not trying to convert you or pervert myself, but I am trying to point out that this is far and away the most important revolution in books since the paperback was born. When I began collecting it took me years to accumulate books by John Buchan, Sapper, Dornford Yates, Louis Joseph Vance, Maurice Leblanc, Talbot Mundy, Edgar Wallace, Rohmer, Van Dine, and others. Now all it takes is a few keystrokes and a WiFi or DSL connection. I could, with a little effort, and under $500 dollars, download my entire collection of over forty years worth close to $100,000, in less than eighteen hours — and that only because of sheer volume.

   I don’t ask that you adapt to the e-book, or even read one, but don’t complain about expensive limited reprint editions or the scarcity of this material. Everyday more volumes are being added and new generations of readers are discovering these writers, people, I might add, who would not have purchased them from a paperback kiosk and certainly not in limited overpriced editions. Most of these books have reviews by people who read and enjoyed them and don’t know there ever was a paperback revolution.

   I currently reside in a small town, a small and spectacularly illiterate community, where the only source of books are a high school library and the Dollar General, and neither updates its stacks often or carries much more than women’s soft core porn, vampire and ‘romantic suspense’ novels. A treasure is a remaindered Preston and Childs or Cussler. Once a month, if I’m lucky, I get to a Hastings. For now that’s it. But, at my fingertips I have access to books from around the world in countless languages and libraries as important as Oxford’s Boedelian and Harvard.

   Like the first paperback revolution this includes an entire new world of original e-books, many better than you could hope, or no worse than what you find on the mass market book stands at Wal-Mart, and numerous sources of free books. I can also, for far less than the near $30 they cost on the stands, purchase the latest bestseller. You can even purchase an e-book “safe” for $20 to protect your collection — more than I can say for actual books.

   Then too, those of us who have been married should welcome the end of those long forbearing stares when our collection threatens to over run the house having already driven the cat and both cars out of the garage and threatening to cause the ceiling to collapse by their sheer weight in the attic…

   Books and collecting have always evolved. Don’t be the guy complaining because some German named Gutenberg put all those monks copying books out of business. This is not a fad, it’s a revolution, and standing in the way of one has never been a good idea.

   How could any of us complain about our favorite writers being in print and finding new and enthusiastic readers? Because digital editions take up no actual physical space (a Kindle can hold 10,000 books and will only get more powerful), and cost virtually nothing to reprint, the possibilities are endless.

   Most of us converted without pain from 16 mm to VHS to DVD, to Blu-Ray. This is the same thing, only here when a format goes kaput you don’t have to replace everything you own in Beta, you download a free converter and soon it’s all back. Granted Kindle won’t play on Nook and so on, but you can get a free app to read any format or get a free Calibre converter for extinct formats like Microsoft Readers LIT that take up little space on your PC and require no tech savvy to use.

   For those of us born in the shadow of the first paperback revolution this one is even bigger, and likely more fundamental culturally. You don’t have to embrace it, but recognize what it means. Book collecting will never be the same again. This is the most important thing to happen to books since Gutenberg, I have no idea where it is going, but if it keeps my favorites from the past available I say it’s going in the right direction.

   Somehow I don’t think Erle Stanley Gardner or Mickey Spillane would be the least bothered by having their work bring in money in another format — I can promise you Alexandre Dumas, the most business savvy author who ever lived (despite losing everything numerous times) wouldn’t mind at all.

   Collectors, and I include myself, need to dismount our high horses before we fall off of them.

   Oh brave new world that has such formats in it.

   Feeling tired and lazy in these dog days of early autumn, I began asking myself whether I could cobble together a respectable column from the mystery reviews I wrote for my eyes only back in the Sixties and Seventies. To provide a soupcon of unity I decided early on to limit myself to U.S. writers and to novels I wasn’t terribly happy with. Shall we see how the experiment came out?

   Baynard Kendrick’s Blind Allies (Morrow, 1954) begins promisingly as a seedy character who claims to be but obviously is not the son of an oil tycoon retains blind detective Captain Duncan Maclain to go to his dad’s mansion at 3:00 A.M. and open a safe whose combination is in Braille.

   May I jump to the first murder? The lights go out in the old dark house, all the suspects run around like buffoons, the lights go on and voila! a body. Back in 1968 I couldn’t find a single kind word for this disaster of a book, which struck me as wretchedly organized and plotted and written, stuffed with implausibilities and contradictions, padded beyond endurance, and resolved by blatant guesswork.

   My reaction would probably be the same were I to re-read it today, but if you’ve tackled this or any other book discussed here more recently than I and think I was too harsh, please say so.

   In recent decades dozens of female private eye novelists have flourished, most if not all of them writing about female private eyes. But back when Chandler ruled the genre the only woman in the field was M. V. (Mary Violet) Heberden (1906-1965). She seems to have been heavily influenced by Brett Halliday, and her PI Desmond Shannon is best described as Mike Shayne seen through a woman’s eyes.

   His problem in The Lobster Pick Murder (Doubleday, 1941) is to find out who stuck the pick into the sadistic plastic surgeon’s medulla oblongata. Nothing about this exercise — plot, prose, characterizations, upper-crust Long Island setting, theatrical milie — rises above the drearily competent, and most readers will identify the perp about 200 pages before Shannon. Some of the later Heberdens I’ve read are much better but they’re not on the table this month.

   The writer who was born Milton Lesser (1908-2008) and is best known as Stephen Marlowe, creator of globe-trotting PI Chester Drum, also used other bylines. Roughly 90% of his Find Eileen Hardin — Alive! (Avon #T-343, PBO, 1959), signed as by Andrew Frazer, is the mixture as before.

   Private dick and former football hero Duncan Pride returns to his alma mater when his old girlfriend, now married to his old coach, begs him to help find the coach’s missing teen-age daughter, who’s rumored to have become a call girl. The search brings him up against criminal enterprises like prostitution, abortion (remember this was a dozen years before Roe v. Wade), the enticing of innocent virgins into a life of sin and the fixing of college athletic events, not to mention murder.

   Frazer does give us a few reasonably vivid scenes at a deserted oyster cannery and the old Idlewild air terminal, but the book is too long and full of cliches, much of the motivation would not be out of place in a soap opera, and the sniggering attitude towards sex is a turn-off.

   The success of Mary Roberts Rinehart, Agatha Christie and countless others disproves the thesis that sexism forced all or most women mystery writers of the pre-feminist era to adopt male bylines. But it was common practice for women writing the sorts of mysteries generally associated with men, like M.V. Heberden with her PI series, and also like DeLoris Stanton Forbes (1923- ), whose novels about police detectives Knute Severson and Lawrence Benedict appeared under the name Tobias Wells.

   Dead by the Light of the Moon (Doubleday, 1967) is a readable but uncompelling semi-procedural about the murder and de-breasting of an old woman in a Boston apartment building during the great East Coast blackout of 1965. Wells has just finished spreading suspicion evenly among various fellow tenants of the victim when suddenly and arbitrarily the guilty party confesses. Sure, real-life crimes often end this way, but a fiction writer must do better.

   The novels of Robert Portner Koehler (1905-1988) were published almost without exception by a house at the absolute bottom of the literary food chain, although it does hold the distinction of having been the last U.S. publisher of that great wack of American literature, Harry Stephen Keeler.

   Koehler’s The Hooded Vulture Murders (Phoenix Press, 1947) deals with two hapless California PIs who stumble upon the murder of a blackmailing journalist while driving through southern Mexico on the uncompleted Pan American Highway. Naturally the bumbling native officials welcome with open arms the intrusion of these brilliant Anglo sleuths, although readers may wish the boys had stayed home.

   Koehler paints local color vividly enough but the book is ineptly plotted, woefully written, pathetically characterized, laughably clued, and all in all a pretty lame excuse for a whodunit.

   Enough for one month. It took more time and work than I expected to unstiffen the language of these ancient jottings without changing anything substantive. But it’s good to know that I have enough material in the archives for a few more columns if I get to feeling tired and lazy again.

THE WRONG BOX. Salamander Film Corp., UK, 1966. Michael Caine, Nanette Newman, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Ralph Richardson, John Mills, Peter Sellers, Wilfred Lawson, Tony Hancock. Director-producer: Brian Forbes. Based on the book by Robert Louis Stevenson & Lloyd Osbourne. [Osbourne was Stevenson’s stepson.]

   This 1966 version of The Wrong Box is a movie graced by the beetle-like humor of Dudley Moore and a perfect caricature of a fact-spouting pedant, played by Ralph Richardson.

   The film is not as good as the sum of its parts, and is not particularly enhanced by a romantic subplot involving Michael Caine and a forgettable British actress, but the manic attempts of two members of the inimitable “Beyond the Fringe” company, Moore and Peter Cook, to make certain that their uncle, played by Richardson, is the last surviving member of a “tontine” and, thus, inheritor of a fortune of some one hundred thousand pounds, are often very funny.

   Cook is the fast-talking “brains” of the team, constantly maneuvering around the sweet-talking bumbling of overactive Lothario Moore, but Moore gets the best line. After it is pointed out that Cook has altered a death dertificate but inadvertently put on the next day’s date, Moore comments, “here today, gone tomorrow,” a perfectly logical statement in the context of this zany Victorian comedy.

   It is one of the few films I have seen in which the line “the butler did it” is uttered to truly comic effect, and the final scene is a triumph of comic miscalculations that somehow seem inevitable and right.

   A funny take-off on caper-and-chase films, The Wrong Box did not find much of an audience in this country in its original release and is sometimes hampered by a too-obvious and arch adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson original story by the America scriptwriters, but the talented cast surmounts most of the weaknesses, and the film is worth watching for.

Editorial Comment:   My own review of this film, posted here on this blog almost six years ago (!) agrees with Walter in all but one important aspect.

GAMBLING SHIP. Paramount, 1933. Cary Grant, Benita Hume, Jack La Rue, Roscoe Karns, Glenda Farrell, Arthur Vinton, Marc Lawerence. Screenplay: Max Marcin, Seton I. Miller. Adaptation: Claude Binyon. Based on the serial “Fast One” appearing in Black Mask magazine by Paul Cain (Peter Ruric). Directors: Louis Gasnier and Max Marcin.

   That passage from the Paul Cain novel is as close as this movie gets to the hardboiled classic it was based on, Fast One, though more than a bit of the basic plot is used — just not to the same effect as in the book.

   How Fast One, a novel that was so terse and stacatto it made Hammett read like a Victorian triple decker, became this romantic dramedy with Cary Grant and Benita Hume is one of those mysteries only a Hollywood producer could explain — or justify — but that’s what happened on the classic Black Mask serial’s way to the big screen as Gambling Ship.

   Gone are Gerry Kells, the tough as nails gambler and gunman, and Grandquist (Kells looked at the woman. She was blonde — but darkly, warmly. Her mouth was very red without a great deal of rouge, and her eyes were shadowed and deep. She was a tall woman with very interesting curves. Fay said: “This is Miss Granquist.”), a femme fatale so fatal and tough she could give lessons to Hammett’s Diana Brand and Brigid O’Shaunessy as well as Chandler’s Velma, and in their place we have a tough but much smoother Cary Grant as Ace Corbin (replete with gray at the temples and a streak in his wavy dark hair), a New York gambler finding it hard to go straight and Benita Hume as the most lady like (if not entirely wholesome) moll you can imagine (well kept too, her apartment in Los Angeles has a bathroom the size of most bedrooms).

   Gambling Ship opens in New York where the newspaper boys are hawking the extra that gambler Ace Corbin has just been acquitted of a murder charge, a fact that seems to amuse police and public alike:

   Kells has similar problems in the book:

   That pretty much sums up this semi-tough film that might be a dress rehearsal for one of Cary Grant’s later iconic roles as gambler Mr. Lucky. Here Ace Corbin is sick of New York and the rackets, and having walked from a frame set up by hood Pete Manning (Jack La Rue), all Corbin wants is to head to the coast and take a vacation.

   Not so easy, as flunky Marc Lawerence points out when one of Ace’s men tosses Ace’s shoulder holster and gun in his bag: “Sometimes even a good man has to blast his way loose.”

   It’s hard to imagine Kells having to be persuaded to “blast his way loose”:

   On the train to the coast Ace meets beautiful society girl Eleanor Kiniston and a romance blossoms, Ace introducing himself as Bruce Grahame. Ace isn’t the only one with a secret. Eleanor is really Eleanor La Vere, girlfriend of Joe Burke (Arthur Vinton), a west coast gambler who runs an off shore casino.

   Burke’s in a bind for money, thanks to his chief competitor hijacking his customers for his own ship, Pete Manning’s Paradise. Once home Eleanor finds out what a bind Burke is in, and being to noble to walk out on him drops Bruce.

   Meanwhile Burke’s henchman Blooey (Roscoe Karns) is an old friend of Ace, and tries to convince Ace to go in with Burke, a chance to buy into a good deal and take revenge on Manning, but Ace is in love and wants none of it.

   But Manning won’t leave Ace alone so he agrees to go in with Burke. and starts by hijacking back all the players Manning hijacked in the first place.

   That does sound like Kells.

   Again, this hews close to the novel:

   His first night on the ship Eleanor shows up and finds out he’s Corbin, but he still thinks she’s a classy society woman, an illusion that will have to stay in place when Manning fire bombs the ship.

   The ending is well done and exciting, and being pre-Code, neither Ace nor Eleanor have to repent or suffer for the error of their ways. A clinch, a kiss, and Ace is ready to turn that vacation into a honeymoon, assuming he still has marriage on his mind after finding out who she is. This being the pre-Code era, happily ever after didn’t always need a license and a justice of the peace. It’s a very different ending than Fast One.

   Gambling Ship has a bad reputation among fans largely because it is based on Fast One, the legendary hardboiled extravagansa of flying bullets and McGuffey’s reader prose by screen writer Peter Ruric (The Black Cat, The Raven, Grand Central Murder …) writing as Paul Cain.

   Granted it would have been nice to see his novel get the pre-Code treatment with Grant as tough-as-nails lethal gambler gunman Kells (though reading the book I always have Alan Ladd in mind), but that aside this isn’t a bad little film and like any decent pre-Code film (or is that indecent?) it’s interesting to note the little touches like the teasing dialogue bordering on double entendre, the suggestion of nudity (Hume outlined fairly clearly in a pebbled glass shower), skimpy lingerie (and not a lot of it), and a cavalier attitude to sex, without moralizing or due punishment, that could only be hinted at in later films.

   To be fair, any movie that has both a journey on a train and a gambling ship can’t be all bad.

   It’s interesting to note as well just how much of the Grant persona and the familiar gestures and slow takes are already established even at this point. It’s not hard to see watching this how Leslie Charteris and Raymond Chandler both could envision the Saint and Philip Marlowe as played by Grant (who was also a pick to play James Bond). He dominates every scene without doing much of anything but being Cary Grant, and for an actor at this early stage in his film career that’s no mean feat.

   Gambling Ship is no masterpiece, but it is a swift moving well done film with crisp direction, a smart script filled with clever quips, a first class cast, and an exciting finale, as well as good camera work by Charles Lang.

   If you can manage to forget what it might have been considering its source you will likely enjoy it. And it’s not like Hollywood reserved this treatment for Ruric’s book, or have we forgotten Satan Met a Lady, the second version of The Maltese Falcon?

   That said, once or twice toward the end of the film you get a glimpse of how Grant might have played Kells, and you have to at least think about what might have been, Fast One is a very violent book that reads more like it was written with a tommy gun than a typewriter.

   Machine gun country is where Ruric’s book would feel at home, if not the film based on it.

Note: The novel Fast One has been reviewed by Bill Pronzini some time back on this blog. Check it out here. And both the novel and the author are discussed in depth by Walker Martin in his review of The Complete Slayers, by Paul Cain. It’s worth your reading again, or for the first time, if you haven’t already.

HOSANNA BROWN — I Spy, You Die. Victor Gollancz Ltd, UK, hardcover, 1984. G. K. Hall, US, hardcover, 1985. Back-In-Print Books, UK, softcover, 2004.

   The Kavendish Laboratory at Cambridge is developing the Pasar. The Pasar could be used to supply, among other things, free power to the world, or it could be employed to destroy the world. Someone is providing the Chinese, it seems, with piecemeal information about the research.

   Three of the scientists at the laboratory are members of Michaelhouse College, a rather hidebound group who have only recently and reluctantly discovered that females can be scholars. Thus, Her Majesty’s Government, with that delightful government ability to ignore the obvious, concludes that a female investigator is what is needed.

   Adding to what would appear an already chilly reception, the government decides to choose an American. Frank le Roux has achieved some reputation doing investigations for IBM. She is young and beautiful — it goes without saying, doesn’t it? — and she is black, if one-eighth part on her mother’s side qualifies her to describe herself as such. But just to prove her bona fides in this matter, she is a natural blonde.

   At her first evening at Michaelhouse during a Festive dinner, a goblet is passed around the table for all to drink from. Frank is the penultimate imbiber, but something keeps her from tasting. The last drinker, the Master of the college, partakes and dies, poisoned with choral hydrate. If Frank had not put the poison in the goblet, then either she was the target of the poisoner or the poisoner didn’t care if she died along with the Master. Does this bother Frank or even pique her curiosity? Nope.

   The next morning Frank has breakfast with the director of the laboratory, a man now in the running for the mastership of the college. On being shown around his apartment, she spots his four-poster bed. A bed, it becomes clear, means sex to Frank, and she invites the director to have at it.

   He does, and it is, of course, perfect, despite its quickness. “Gruff, half-swallowed professorial grunts of pleasure as Frank herself seemed easily, lightly, to peak. A deep contented moan of ecstasy, like a long-held trumpet note.”

   (Mystery writers, should they wish to make a great deal of money, ought not to write novels but a nonfiction work about how their heroes and heroines manage perfect sex both quickly and under unusual circumstances, And how do “professorial grunts of pleasure” differ from ordinary grunts? But I digress.)

   Frank then proceeds to tell her bedmate, one of the possible suspects of the leaks, all about her top-secret investigation.

   Page 44 had been reached. The world, as far as I could tell, had not been destroyed. Frank, in her own inimitable fashion, must have been successful. Was it really necessary to read on? I decided it would be more enjoyable to abandon the book and read about the adventures of Pooh Bear in a world much more realistic than is contained in I Spy, You Die.

Bibliographic Notes:   There was one further adventure of Frank le Roux, I am mildly surprised to say — I am inclined to trust Bill’s judgment on all matters criminous — that being Death Upon a Spear (Gollancz, 1986).

   As another point of interest, I am sure that Bill did not know — else he would have mentioned it — that “Hosanna Brown” was the pen name of Robert Malcolm Ward Dixon, who has no further entries in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV.