THE CROOKED CIRCLE. World Wide, 1932. Ben Lyon, Zasu Pitts, James Gleason, Irene Purcell, Burton Churchill, Frank Reicher, Tom Kennedy. Director: H. Bruce Humberstone. Shown at Cinefest 19, Syracuse NY, March 1999.

   This hit all the right buttons for me, although some people felt it was one of the worst films of the weekend. Lyon, Churchill and Karns are members of the Sphinx Club, a group of amateur criminologists. Their opposite number is The Hooded Circle, a gang of masked villains, who appear to have infiltrated the Sphinx Club and to be poised to eliminate their competition.

   Much of the action takes place in an old house, reputed to be haunted, and it has the requisite sliding panels, chairs that dump occupant down chutes, and a clock that strikes 13 times.

   Almost nobody is what he (or she) appears to be, and you may not care, but I had a good time and I would like to think I wasn’t the only one. Yes, Zasu flutters like an inebriated butterfly, but Gleason’s dry style manages to provide something of a tonic.

PATRICK QUENTIN – Puzzle for Fiends. Avon, reprint paperback, 1979. Originally published by Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1946. Other paperback reprints include: Pocket #614, 1949, as Love Is a Deadly Weapon; Ballantine F778, 1970; Penguin, trade paperback, 1986.

   Since late last year Avon has quietly been reissuing the Quentin “Puzzle” series, although unfortunately they haven’t bothered to publish them in chronological order. This was the first one they did, and as it turns out, it’s one of the later ones in the series.

   But I hope you’ve seen them — the attempts at period photography on the covers came out well, and they’re certainly designed for eye-appeal — and even though the asking price of $2.25 seems a little stiff, if you’ve never read any of them, here’s a part of what the Golden Age of Mysteries was all about.

   As a detective, Peter Duluth was purely an amateur. As a civilian, he was usually a theatrical producer; his wife Iris, a glamorous Hollywood star. In this book, though, she makes only the briefest of appearances, as she’s off on an ex-tended overseas entertainment tour just as Peter arrives home, Navy discharge in hand.

   And for that matter, neither does Peter do any producing, since in true tour de force fashion he wakes up from a mugging attack to find himself without a memory to call his own, casts on both arm and leg, and being taken for someone called Gordy Friend, and by the latter’s own family, no less.

   Still, there’s nothing like waking up from a nap and finding yourself rich, is there?

   Nevertheless, accident and all, Peter has not been weakened enough mentally to sense that appearances, as always, can be deceiving. He soon learns that he is a central figure in a small fiendish scenario involving both himself and a will about to be contested in unusual fashion by the West Coast branch of the Aurora (Minn.) Clean Living League.

   A number of nicely thought out twists follow before Duluth finds his befogged way out of this mess, with one of them depending greatly on — how does the riddle go? — a “particularly nasty spell of weather.” Well done — Bravo!, in fact — with a couple of scenes decidedly more erotic than anything you could ever find in the complete works of, say, Christie, Carr and Gardner, combined.

Rating:   A.

Bibliographic Note:   Peter Duluth appeared in nine mysteries, the first six of which were in the “Puzzle” series, of which this is the fifth.

TELL NO TALES. MGM, 1939. Melvyn Douglas, Louise Platt, Gene Lockhart, Douglass Dumbrille, Florence George. Dorector: Leslie Fenton.

   Tell No Tales offers a Good Idea for a Movie, almost buried under MGM production gloss. Melvyn Douglas — who, in his day, starred opposite Greta Garbo and Boris Karloff with equal aplomb — plays a big-city newspaper editor who gets a break on a kidnapping case: a Hundred Dollar bill marked as part of the ransom payment falls into his hands. Using his connections and newsman’s instinct for a story, he follows the bill from hand to hand, back to the kidnappers.

   This is fairly standard stuff for a 30s crime reporter story, but writer Lionel Houser milks a lot of extra interest from it. As Douglas tracks the bill from person to person, we get unsettling glimpses of the lives he’s walking in on: an older man whose pretty young wife bought a gift for another man with it; a black prizefighter who paid his doctor bill before dying or a prestigious singer afraid it will betray a sordid secret.

   Writer Houser and director Leslie Fenton make the most of this Woolrichian bent (the scene at the prizefighter’s wake, held over a seedy nightclub, is particularly unsettling) with flashes of insight that lift this film well out of the ordinary.

   Unfortunately, there is that MGM Gloss to contend with, and it almost suffocates a very intelligent little B-movie. At Warners, Tell No Tales would have established the lead character cracking a case with a quick montage of sirens, bullets and screaming headlines; Monogram would have opened the film with economic stock-footage and a wise-cracking talk on a pinch-penny Editor’s Office Set.

   But not MGM. No sir. They open Tell No Tales with a big money shot of editor Douglas walking through a busy newsroom packed with extras, taking a few minutes of his (and our) time to give a break to an honest politician, and organizing a surprise party for file paper’s oldest employee, thus establishing him as a man of character and sensitivity (like all big city newspaper editors) and incidentally wasting about ten minutes of a one-hour movie.

   The surprising thing is that once you get past this yawning chasm, Tell No Tales still manages to pack a lot of interest, thanks mainly to fine writing and the considerable charm of leading players Melvyn Douglas and the under-used Louise Platt (who played the pregnant army wife in Stagecoach that same year) seriously abetted by veteran nasties like Douglas Dumbrille and Leroy Mason.

   Look for this one.

Editorial Comment:   This movie has been reviewed once before on this blog, the earlier post contributed by David L. Vineyard. Check out what he had to say here.

WARNING: Part Two of the YouTube video provided is incomplete. (See Comment #1.)

ROBERT MARTIN – Just a Corpse at Twilight. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1955. No paperback edition.

   In this investigation by Jim Bennett, he has been farmed out by his agency’s head to work for an unnamed state checking into industrial accidents and occupational diseases. In Beech Tree to get permission from the widow to perform an autopsy on her husband, who was collecting compensation for silicosis but died of a heart attack, Bennett encounters obstruction from all but the widow.

   The town’s doctor, who is also the county coroner, the funeral director, and the sheriff, a conniving alcoholic, are opposed to the disinterring of the late and at least lamented by the widow. These gentlemen are also all interested in the widow.

   Not one of the world’s quick thinkers, Bennett. He has to be shot at twice before he reluctantly concludes someone doesn’t care for his presence in Beech Tree. Still, he does clear it all up with the aid of Rosemary the cat.

   A character says of a fictional mystery writer’s books: “No cliches, no hard-boiled stuff, no whiskey and blondes and all the rest. He just writes about real people with real problems. Why, even without the murders, his books are interesting.”

   The last sentence may be a bit extreme; otherwise she’s pretty much summed up this novel.

Editorial Comment: For a long overview of author Robert Martin’s career by Jim Felton, followed by a complete bibliography put together by myself, follow this link now.

SARA GRAN – Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, June 2011. Mariner Books, trade paperback, May 2012.

Genre:  Private eye. Leading character:   Claire DeWitt, 1st in series. Setting:  New Orleans.

First Sentence: “It’s my uncle,” the man said on the phone.

   Claire DeWitt advertises herself as the world’s greatest private investigator. As such, she accepts a case in recent post-Katrina New Orleans. Her client is the nephew of Vic Willing. The case is to find out what happened to him, the city’s wealthy district attorney who disappeared during the flooding after the hurricane.

   Every now and then, an author comes along with a voice and style that it is almost impossible to describe, quantify, or explain. That was my reaction to Ms. Gran’s first book in a series, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead.

   At its heart, it’s a classic hard-boiled mystery, complete with drugs, guns, liquor and bad guys. Then intermix with that a detective who was trained by a wealthy New Orleans woman, Constance Darling, and the book Detection, by Jacque Silette.

    “Clues are the most misunderstood part of detection. Novice detectives think it’s about ‘finding’ clues. But detective work is about ‘recognizing’ clues — plus a layer of dreams, intuition. — “Never be afraid to learn from the ether. That’s where knowledge lives before someone hunts it, kills it, and mounts it in a book.” … and the I-Ching, and you have something that is unique and wonderful.

    Claire is anything but your usual female detective. She’s from Brooklyn, she knows death and drugs and liquor. She’s not a comfortable protagonist. We learn details of her past and life throughout the story. What is interesting is that every character Gran creates is vivid and memorable, including those who don’t exist, such as Constance and Silette. It’s a story that doesn’t really have any minor players, only short scenes.

   Gran’s descriptions are powerful. New Orleans is a city unlike any other yet, particularly in this time setting, she does not make any effort to romanticize it. It is ugly, violent, sad, desperate and very real. Remarkably, however, at the end we’re left with a sense of hope, both for the city and the characters. You want to know what becomes of them, even if they break your heart.

   The true sign of a book that stands above the usual, is that it makes you stop and consider: “What will fill the void left by the missing person? … Who will now breathe his air, eat his food marry his wife? Who will fill his seat at the university lecture, the foot ball game, in the old armchair at home?…” Gran has a different perspective than I’ve ever found.

   The story’s plot may not always be the easiest to follow, but it is so worth paying attention to every word and every clue and giving each page a bit of thought. That’s easy to do as it is thoroughly and completely engrossing. There are times it may seem trite or pretentious, but you then find yourself going back and reading sections again because something about them resonates. Only because I needed to sleep at night, did I ever put it down.

   Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead is a remarkable book. I suspect you will either love it or wonder whether I was indulging in one of Claire’s vices.

Rating:   Excellent.

Bibliographic Note: Book two in this series is Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (June 2013).

SONG OF THE EAGLE. Paramount, 1933. Richard Arlen, Charles Bickford, Jean Hersholt, Mary Brian, Louise Dresser, Andy Devine, George E. Stone. Director: Ralph Murphy. Shown at Cinefest 19, Syracuse NY, March 1999.

   Hersholt plays a genial brewery owner who attempts a comeback after the lifting of Prohibition, but refuses to go along with the extortion scheme of former employee and now big-time mob boss, Charles Bickford.

   Arlen is the honest son, Dresser the naive, and Devine a brewery employer who stays with Hersholt while certified rat George E. Stones casts his lot with Bickford. The scene in which Bickford gets his comeuppance is highly improbable although enormously satisfying.

   This plays like a Warner Brothers meller that got a bit soft in the head when it was re-routed through Paramount, but it’s still great fun.

   Readers and Collectors! We are down to the final minutes now. It’s time to separate the non-collectors from the collectors. Yes, it’s that time of year again. Pulpfest begins this Thursday, July 25 and continues through Sunday, July 28 in Columbus, Ohio. The complete details are at pulpfest.com.

   Will you be one of the millions of poor souls that do NOT attend PulpFest? Or will you be among the elite of old magazine collectors, those that DO attend? I’m talking about the 400 or so pulp, digest, paperback, book and original art collectors who will be swarming to the pulp collecting center of the universe. In April it was Chicago for Windy City and now in July, it is Columbus, Ohio.

   I’ve heard all the reasons for not attending this pulp convention and there is no acceptable excuse! Illness? Hell, I knew a collector who attended knowing he had a terminal illness and would be dead in a few months. I once attended with a busted back, wrapped up like a mummy, not able to sit down for the entire convention. Every 40 minutes I had to stop the car and get out to stretch and walk around. For awhile I was almost positive that I wasn’t going to make it and I started stopping near hotels in case I had to give up and just lay in a bed for a couple weeks.

   But the thought of my collection kept me going. The visions of more SF magazines, more detective and adventure pulps, more westerns. The artwork, the original cover paintings, the interior illustrations. The stacks of digest magazines, the vintage paperbacks. The friends and old pals that I enjoyed talking to and seeing once again. Some of the best friendships in my life are now stretching beyond the 40 year mark. I just had lunch with a collector that I’ve know since 1970 and we talked about books for 3 hours straight. How could I not attend the pulp convention? When I returned home, I took 4 weeks off from work to recuperate from my back problems. Let’s face it, our collections are more important than some job that just pays the bills.

   Speaking of money, I’ve heard the excuse about not having the cash to attend the convention. I never let this stop me. Sometimes I borrowed the money from the bank or the credit union. I even borrowed money from my wife. You know you have to be desperate to ask for help from a non-collector! I’ve used my credit cards, pension money, money set aside for bills. I mean we are talking about a serious addiction here!

   To be a serious book or old magazine collector, is a calling of the highest order. You are not just some wage slave like the other millions of non-collectors. No, you are a Collector with a capital C. You don’t just eat, work, watch TV, and sleep. And then repeat it day after day like most poor bastards. YOU READ! You Collect valuable and rare artifacts.

   In this era of electronic gadgets, you actually collect non-electronic books and pulps. I mean how cool is that? No computer geek can stand up to that. E-books look pitiful next to a beautiful real, hard copy book. You can’t collect E-books like pulps. A stack of pulps is a thing of beauty. The smell, the look, the feel. And they are worth money!

   I’ve tried many addictions and they can’t compare to collecting books and pulps. Drugs, alcohol, gambling, all can destroy your health and finances. I won’t even get into sex. Sexual habits can ruin you just like any addiction or at the very least, you will find yourself married to a non-collector!

   So there is still time to say to hell with your job and personal responsibilities. Your family can do without you for a few days. Your book addiction needs to be fed. Your Collection must be extended and made larger. You need more books!

   PulpFest awaits…

MICHAEL Z. LEWIN – Night Cover. Berkley, reprint paperback, 1980. First published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. Also: Perennial Library P-721, paperback, 1984; Foul Play Press, softcover, 1995.

   False advertising!

   This was supposed to be an Albert Sampson mystery, or at least that’s what is said on the front cover of the paperback edition I just read. As you may have heard, Albert Samson is a private eye, and his reputation is that he is the cheapest in Indianapolis. I read and reported on another of his adventures a while ago, and while it doesn’t seem to me that I recall him giving out green stamps, I do remember enjoying it.

   Samson appears in all of perhaps seven pages of this one.

   In center court instead is Lt. Roy Powder, the cop in charge of the Indianapolis Night Shift for nearly nineteen years. His dominating, gruff personality has grown now until it overshadows most of his cases, two of which involve a school’s missing cashbox, a Maoist hippie, and a runaway girl.

   It’s not surprising that when they meet, which they do, Powder and the outspoken Samson do not get along very well.

   But Powder also uncovers a series of multi-murder crimes and undergoes a change-of-life that surprises even him. In other words, in case you haven’t realized it yet, this is not a private eye story at all. It’s a book with a gritty feel of real small-city police work, enhanced by the deductive instincts of a veteran cop, who has sharpened and tempered them by years of experience on the job.

   It’s a book I’m glad I read, but it sure wasn’t what I expected when I picked it off the shelf.

Rating:   B minus.

[UPDATE] 07-21-13.   I apologize for not being able to find a cover image for the paperback to show you the blurb I was unhappy about. You’ll have to make do with the cover of the original hardcover edition, which was all I was able to come up with.

TYLER DE SAIX – The Man Without a Head. Moffat, Yard & Co., 1908. Illustrated. $1.50. Reprinted as The Cottage on the Fells (Werner Laurie, UK, 1908), as by H. De Vere Stacpoole, the author’s real name. Later reprint (shown), Laurie, 1950. Currently available in several Print on Demand editions.

   It is a question whether the mere ingenuity of horror comes within the bounds of art; but whatever one’s personal view, one cannot shirk the admission that such work has a reading public of its own, ready to encourage an increasing output.

   The Man Without a Head will doubtless find many admirers, as it is good of its class. The author has the gift, invaluable to the contriver of a detective story, of plausibly allowing the reader’s suspicion of the truth to precede that of the detective; not with gross obviousness, but with sufficient skill to make the resulting conviction of one’s own astuteness genuinely if briefly satisfactory.

   But the murderer’s device for concealing his crime, while indubitably clever, would insure almost immediate detection of any unfortunately trustful homicide who sought to put it in practice. The story of it moves with interest, however, even under the ballast of aphorisms sprinkled upon the pages with pedagogic heaviness of hand.

Editorial Comment:  Thanks to Mike Tooney for continuing to uncover old reviews such as this one, and posting them on Yahoo’s “Golden Age of Detection” group.

MICHAEL CARDER – Decision at Sundown. Macrae Smith, hardcover, 1955. Ace Double D-160, paperback, no date [1956]. Bound dos-à-dos with Action Along the Humboldt, by Karl Kramer. First serialized in Ranch Romances magazine, January 1955. (Part Three can be found online here.)

DECISION AT SUNDOWN. Columbia, 1957. Randolph Scott, John Carroll, Karen Steele, Valerie French, Noah Beery Jr., John Archer, Andrew Duggan. Based on the novel by Michael Carder (screen credit given to Vernon L. Fluharty). Director: Budd Boetticher.

   My mention a while back of Jim O’Mara’s Wall of Guns elicited a comment from James Reasoner (a worthy western pen-slinger in his own right) revealing that O’Mara was actually one Vernon Fluharty, who also wrote westerns under the name Michael Carder, among them Decision at Sundown (Macrae Smith, 1955; originally serialized in Ranch Romances, January 1955) which two years later at Columbia studios was turned into one of Budd Boetticher’s most complex and least satisfying westerns.

   The book Decision at Sundown bears some interesting similarities to Wall of Guns; in both a bitter loner rides into town seeking revenge, and in both he runs into a range fraught with intrigue: crooked locals grabbing for power, ranchers nursing long-simmering grudges, neighborhood bad guys, loyal friends and a woman who should hate him but finds herself strangely attracted to the handsome stranger (yawn).

   The difference is that Wall of Guns was enlivened by some deeper-than-usual supporting players whose actions — whether short-sighted, passionate or surprisingly thoughtful — sent the book places where lesser tales don’t go.

   In Decision at Sundown however, the ensemble remains depressingly stale: Tate Kimbrough, the town tyrant, is just a double-dyed rat; Lucy, his intended bride comes off like Daisy Mae on the printed page, too purely wholesome and impulsive to believe; Swede and Spanish, the hired guns are nothing but thug-uglies, and — and so it goes: the blowsy ex-mistress, the gruff doctor, grizzled rancher, doughty pardner … they all remain firmly in the cookie-cutter.

   There’s a trace of depth as the plot develops and our hero suddenly finds his revenge turned laughable, but it’s quickly drowned in the shallow characters charged with putting it across.

   When the novel reached Hollywood two years later, director Budd Boetticher and writer Charles Lang (story credit goes to Vernon Fluharty) picked up on that particle of originality and ran with it, adding some depth to the characters along the way and coming up with a B-western that if not completely satisfying, is at least original enough to remember.

   The hero here is Randolph Scott, and when he rides into town it’s with the easy assurance of two decades of westerns behind him, abetted here by Boetticher’s graceful camerawork and feel for action. Unfortunately, he and the viewer get quickly mired in the story’s rather static complications, and the drama plays out in a few rather cramped and confining sets.

   When one thinks of Budd Boetticher’s films, it’s with appreciation of his feel for characters framed against an open, rugged landscape, dealing warily with their issues and each other as they traverse hostile terrain that reflects some inner conflict. (Or as Andrew Sarris put it, part allegorical odysseys and part floating poker games.) But in this movie, we’re just stuck in a stable.

   Stylist that he was, Boetticher managed a few fine moments, notably a couple of deliberately theatrical showdowns in the middle of Main Street, first with Andrew Duggan metaphorically stripping himself down for the performance, and later with John Carroll trying to hide his fears and live up to the Bad Guy’s Code of Conduct, murky as that may be.

   In fact, Boetticher’s attention to this stock character almost brings the film to life. We first see Tate Kimbrough in standard attire for dress heavies in shoot-em-ups: fancy vest, dark coat, and the snide moustache worn by thousands of B-western baddies before him.

   Then he starts to show some depth; he’s thoughtful and loving to his trampy ex-girlfriend, frank about himself and his past with his bride-to-be, and toward the end, when he has to go out and face Randolph Scott alone (a pre-doomed enterprise in films of this sort) there’s a rather touching moment when he confesses his fears to his ex-gal (a fine performance from Valerie French, who specialized in this sort of thing) but goes out there anyway.

   I said this was a complex film and I meant it. I also said it was unsatisfying and I meant that too. In Westerns, action is traditionally cathartic, but in this one it simply becomes irrelevant, leading to an ending that Boetticher seems unprepared to handle.

   There’s a lot of stage business between the dramatic climax and the actual ending of the film, and it dilutes the impact of what could have been a uniquely powerful Western. And that’s kind of a shame.

Note: To read Mike Grost’s extensive comments on this same film, check out his website here.