FOUR HOURS TO KILL. Paramount, 1935. Richard Barthelmess, Gertrude Michael, Ray Milland, Helen Mack, Dorothy Tree, Henry Travers, Roscoe Karns. Director: Mitchell Leisen. Shown at Cinefest 19, Syracuse NY, March 1999.

   A sort of Grand Hotel that’s set in a theater, and with a good cast rather than the constellation of stars in the MGM film. Leisen, one of the interesting stylists of the period, concentrates on keeping the interlocking plot lines moving smoothly, which he does more than capably.

   Barthelmess (one of the most popular of silent film stars, here in the twilight of his career) is attending a play handcuffed to a cop who’s killing time waiting for the next train to take Barthelmess back to the prison he’s escaped from.

   Roscoe Karns, usually the quintessential wisecracking reporter, plays an expectant father who keeps making phone calls to the hospital where his wife is in labor. (It’s not clear why he’s at the theater rather than the hospital, but given his manic behavior, somebody probably didn’t want him around to upset his wife.)

   Ray Milland, in an early role, is a smooth gigolo rendezvousing with his elegant girl friend (Gertrude Michael), stepping out on her rich husband, and willing to save his hide by letting an usher be arrested for a theft for which Michael is unwilling to press charges. The pot is already boiling when Barthelmess escapes but hangs around waiting for the arrival of the man he broke out of prison to kill.

   All this, and no commercial breaks.

“The Monster of Comus Towers.” From the Ironside TV series. Season 1, Episode 10 (of 196 total). First telecast: 16 November 1967. Regular cast: Raymond Burr (Ironside), Don Galloway (Det. Sgt. Ed Brown), Barbara Anderson (Officer Eve Whitfield), and Don Mitchell (Mark Sanger). Guest cast: Warren Stevens, David Hartman, Joan Huntington, Michael Forest, Donald Buka, Kevin Hagen, Evi Marandi, Renzo Cesana, Harper Flaherty. Teleplay: A. J. Russell and Stanford Whitmore. Story: A. J. Russell. Director: Don Weis (58 Ironside episodes to his credit).

   Most long-running crime dramas seem to find it impossible to produce genuine whodunnits on a regular basis (it does require thinking a lot), so the majority of them work on the Encyclopedia Brown level of complexity.

   This particular episode, however, is something of an exception to the general rule.

   A collection of one-of-a-kind art masterpieces valued at $20 million is being displayed on an upper floor of Comus Towers, headquarters of a computer firm. With alarms still sounding, security guards rush to the art exhibit only to find another guard with a knife sticking out of him and the head of security lying on the floor nearby, unconscious and wounded.

   The 6-foot-long, 40-pound centerpiece of a triptych has apparently been spirited out of the high-rise through a smashed plate glass window by someone who can either fly in gale force winds or shinny up the side of a tall building while wearing tennis shoes.

   When Ironside & Co. are called in, the chief has no shortage of suspects, some more obvious than others: the wealthy owner of Comus Towers, the self-assured head of security (no one is above suspicion to Ironside), the bespectacled art insurance expert, the cool female employee of the firm, the two-timing ex-con she’s having an affair with, the Italian sponsor of the art exhibit who’s hard up for money, and his abnormally nervous young wife.

   The sponsor, however, soon eliminates himself from the suspect list by literally dropping dead from cyanide poisoning, leaving Ironside with two murders to solve.

   In Golden Age detective fiction style, the chief gets proactive, gathers all the remaining suspects together, and sets a trap according to the old adage of divide and conquer.

   You can watch “The Monster of Comus Towers” along with lots of annoying commercials on Hulu here.

DICK FRANCIS – Whip Hand. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1979. Pocket, paperback, 1981. Reprinted many times since, in both hardcover and soft.

   Thanks to some exposure on public television’s recent venture into mystery drama, this the latest of Dick Francis’ novels on racetrack chicanery has been flirting in recent weeks with the lower extremities of various best-seller lists.

   Mystery fans may not be so pleased with this state of affairs once they realize that Harper & Row have been pushing it as straight fiction, not what it actually is — a straightforward private eye detective thriller. But of course, as everyone knows, private eye stories just don’t sell.

   Sid Halley, the jockey who lost a hand in a previous Francis adventure, has had some success recently as a PI dealing largely in horsey matters, perhaps too much so for his own good. When the villains see him coming, they think they know what it will take to scare him off.

   And they’re not so very far from wrong. Halley has to come to some strong grips with himself before he can start tackling the end of the case. But because of all the soul-searching, perhaps, the pace seems to plod more than it has in much of Francis’s previous works. The violence seems to be too calculated and perfunctory, and in spite of the odds, Sid Halley comes up smelling of roses, just as expected.

Rating:  B

JIM O’MARA – Wall of Guns. Dutton, hardcover, 1950. Pocket #816, paperback, June 1951. Signet, paperback, 2002.

   I almost started this review by saying that Jim O’Mara’s Wall of Guns is Western writing at its finest. On second think, that honorific is better suited to books like The Big Sky, Saint Johnson and True Grit. Perhaps it’s more apt to say Wall is Western writing at its most enjoyable.

   Frank Landry drifts down from Montana to the Rio Grande to find out who killed his brother and stole their ranch, eventually ending up in Broken Wheel, Texas, a town like something from Red Harvest, with sundry factions in a range war at each other’s throats, various hombrae and varmints crossing and double-crossing one another, and a general feel of violent malfeasance roaming the plains.

   Landry’s fit for it, though, being one of those Western hero-types who never loses a gun-or-fist fight, thinks faster and smarter than any sidewinder, and draws the women-folk to him like kids to Christmas.

   And we’re still in the first chapter when he meets up with Mary Wayne, purty as prairie flower, whose dad is a local rancher being squeezed out by a bunch of cattle thievin’ no-goods over on the next range, and whose weak-willed brother has fallen under the spell of one Carolina Steele, the local cattle queen and de facto head of the rustlers.

   From this clichéd start, and with those boiler plate protagonists, Wall of Guns could have been a very ordinary western, no better or worse than most. But O’Mara has a smooth, vivid way of evoking the landscape, a good hand with action, and he peoples his story with a supporting cast far from the usual stock types. A dumb goon-type shows a surprising, gentle loyalty to his spineless boss, one of the good guys goes wrong when Landry’s girl dumps him, people make dumb mistakes now and then, and show surprising insight at other times — it’s as if a spear carrier in Aida suddenly dropped his lance and burst into an aria.

   There’s a remarkable moment late in the book where one of the bad guys starts thinking about how he took the wrong road, and wonders if it’s too late to retrace his steps. At which point the good guys catch up with him and

   Characters like that, propelling a violent, fast-moving story, lift Wall of Guns well out of the usual rut and make it one to look for. And remember.

JACK FREDRICKSON – The Dead Caller from Chicago. St.Martin’s Minotaur Books, hardcover, April 2013.

Genre:  Mystery. Leading character:   Dek Elstrom, 4th in series. Setting:  Chicago.

First Sentence:   It was March, well past midnight, and it was cold.

   Free-lance investigator Dek Elstrom is still trying to fight his local city hall to regain zoning rights to the tower — no castle, just a tower — in which he lives, but strange things start occurring. A large hole is dug for a new McMansion in a block of bungalows, a phone call from someone thought to be dead, and Dek’s best friend and loved ones suddenly disappearing. Dek is on the trail of answers and trying to stay alive.

   I have two admissions from the very start; 1) I have loved this series but, 2) this is not my favorite book of the series.

   Among Fredrickson’s strengths is his ability to create a vivid atmosphere from the very beginning. He has a great eye for detail and conveys it in a way that you are part of the scene. You feel the cold, you experience the turbulence of the boat ride and the
driving rain; the tension becomes real and the atmosphere, threatening.

   He also has an excellent ear for dialogue, whether in the narrative or between characters. It’s clear, it has the right edge to it and just enough dry humor.

   The main characters are impossible to resist; Dek, who is trying hard to rebuild his life and his wonderful brilliant, completely devoid of any fashion-sense friend Leo are
interesting and people about whom you want to know more. A few characters, however, feel as though they have become a bit of a joke that has gone on too long.

   The weakest element, I felt, was actually the plot. It seemed we didn’t really knowwhat was going on until nearly half-way through the story. Sometimes, this can work. In this case, it was only the question of Leo and an act of faith that draws you on.

   The Dead Caller From Chicago is still a good read. If anything, I feel my frustration is in feeling that Mr. Fredrickson is capable of doing so much more. I’m waiting….

Rating:   Good.

       The Dek Ekstrom mysteries —

1. A Safe Place for Dying (2006)

2. Honestly Dearest, You’re Dead (2008)
3. Hunting Sweetie Rose (2012)
4. The Dead Caller of Chicago (2013)

MIKE FREDMAN – You Can Always Blame the Rain. St. Martins, US, hardcover, 1980. First published in the U.K. by Paul Elek, hardcover, 1978.

   If Harry Stoner [the PI hero of The Lime Pit, reviewed here not too long ago] can be considered a member of the knighthood for his willingness to rescue damsels in distress, so also should Willie Halliday, the British private eye making his American debut in You Can Always Blame the Rain.

   That both Fredman and Halliday are English may or may not have a great deal to do with it, but the action here is noticeably more refined than much of anything found in Jonathan Valin’s deliberately shocking expose of false Midwestern piety.

    But, needless to say — or I wouldn’t have started this review the way I have — there are similarities. There are pictures, and one of the daughters that Halliday is hired to protect is nude in them — but that is all we are told about them. There are also some references to Moroccan white slave traffic, but perhaps thankfully we are spared any further details.

   Willie Halliday is a vegetarian, by the way, and he neither smokes nor drinks, He is well-versed in the history of Eastern religions, seems to have a good deal of money on his own, and none of the girls he attracts, including his new secretary, ends up in bed with him.

   His first case is entertaining fun, in a quiet, genteel sort of way, but especially in comparison to a book like that of Valin’s, hard-boiled detective buffs are going to end up wondering just what scandal it is that he’s saving the girls from.

Rating:   C.

NOTE: There was a second case in which Willie Haliday is known to have been involved, that one being Kisses Leave No Fingerprints (1979/1980), but nothing has been heard of him since.

MURDER BY THE CLOCK. Paramount, 1931. William (Stage) Boyd, Lilyan Tashman, Irving Pichel, Regis Toomey, Sally O’Neil. Based on the novel by Rufus King (Doubleday/Crime Club, 1929). Director: Edward Sloman. Shown at Cinefest 19, Syracuse NY, March 1999.

   This was an end-of-day screening (after 11 p.m.) that I would probably have skipped had the notes not pointed out that the film is “celebrated” by William Everson in his Classics of the Horror Film.

   Tashman had a brief Hollywood career (she died shortly after the release of this film, according to the notes), but she was worth staying up for. She’s the sultry villainess who masterminds three homicides and appears to be getting off Scot-free until Boyd upstages her in the final minutes of the film.

   This is an old-house mystery with a crusty dowager heiress who rigs her coffin in the family crypt so that an alarm can be sounded if she’s buried alive. As indeed, she appears to have been. Pichel (whose most memorable screen performance was as Gloria Holden’s minion in Dracula’s Daughter) has a hoot playing a deranged legatee and he almost manages to steal kinky acting honors from Tashman.

   An improbable but delicious early sound romp among the corpses.

ARIEL S. WINTER – The Twenty-Year Death. Hard Case Crime, hardcover, August 2012; trade paperback, August 2013.

    Ariel S. Winter’s The Twenty-Year Death sets a challenge both ambitious and unique: three crime novels, each in the style of a different writer, that could individually stand alone but as a group tell a connected story.

    “Malniveau Prison,” set in France in 1931, is a classical detective story with a bizarre plot in the style of Georges Simenon. “Falling Star,” set in 1941 Hollywood, is a hardboiled detective novel inspired by Raymond Chandler. “Police at the Funeral,” set in 1951 Maryland, is fiction noir in the Jim Thompson vein. (That last is one of the great mystery-novel titles, previously used by quite a different writer, Margery Allingham.)

    The common character in the trilogy is novelist and screenwriter Shem Rosenkrantz, whose drinking problem and institutionalized wife make clear he was inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who for all his faults surely was not as unsympathetic, weak, and pathetic as Shem. Just as well we don’t have to live through three whole books with him. He’s just a minor presence in the first two but no more likable when you get to know him better in the third one.

    I believe Winter has done a superb job on all three stories, and they’re worthy of the praise they have received. But what I want to discuss here are some errors and odd choices.

    Anachronisms are the bane of historical writers, and as I’ve pointed out before they are both harder to avoid and more likely to be noticed when the history is relatively recent. I don’t believe the term “senior citizens” or a French equivalent was current in 1931, nor was the meaningless expression, “It is what it is.” Nor was Ms used to designate women in 1951, except maybe in regional dialect which is not how it’s used here.

    In the Chandler pastiche, British expressions not likely to be used by an American turn up: “the chemist’s” for druggist’s, “in the cinema.” I don’t think Winter, who lives in Baltimore, is British. Is it a nod to the fact that Chandler was educated in Britain? Unlikely, and the typically British phrase “on about” occurs later in the Thompson pastiche. (While it’s true the co-publisher with Hard Case Crime, Titan Books, is headquartered in London, I would assume Charles Ardai was at the editorial reins.)

    In “Falling Star,” a horse race is started with a pistol shot. It’s never been done that way to my knowledge, and the odd terminology describing the race makes clear the track is not the author’s milieu.

    Moving from errors to odd choices, “Falling Star” takes place in a fantasy Hollywood. Where Chandler famously renamed Santa Monica as Bay City in his Philip Marlowe novels, Winter carries it to a greater extreme, changing place name and street names in a manner disorienting to the Southern California reader. Sunset Boulevard becomes Sommerset, Wilshire becomes Woodsheer.

    Even Los Angeles is not called by its right name, becoming San Angelo. As for the racetracks, Santa Anita in Arcadia becomes Santa Theresa in Arcucia, but Hollywood Park keeps its right name, though it is not and never was actually in Hollywood.

    Finally, in “Police at the Funeral,” one character reacts to unwelcome news with the following bit of censored dialogue: “S—t! S—t, s—t, s—t.” Now surely, the style book of Hard Case Crime allows for the use of the actual spelled-out obscenity. Would it have been presented this way in Thompson’s day, and is that the reason?

    Anyway, quibbles aside, I highly recommend this three-part book. I’m just curious how these particular errors and decisions came to be. Anybody want to speculate?

STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR. RKO Radio Pictures, 1940. Peter Lorre, John McGuire, Margaret Tallichet, Charles Waldron, Elisha Cook Jr. Director: Boris Ingster.

   Stranger on the Third Floor is sometimes cited as the first film noir, and it certainly is the first film I know of to combine that sense of bleak oppression and German expressionism in a contemporary crime film. And if it’s not completely successful, one has only to look at the obvious effort involved and give it high marks for trying.

   The story is certainly essential noir: reporter Mike Ward has just gotten a big promotion for being the star witness in a murder case, he’s about to marry his girl and move out of his crummy apartment… in short one of those guys coming up in the world who, in movies like these, invariably comes crashing down.

   In this case it starts with Ward’s fiancée having doubts about how Mike’s testimony helped convict a man who may be innocent — doubts enough to break off their engagement. This segues into an extended nightmare sequence wherein Ward dreams he’s executed for a murder he didn’t commit. From there, it’s just a short step to Ward actually being arrested for Murder, and his girlfriend’s lonely, desperate efforts to save him (a theme to recur in films like Phantom Lady and Black Angel).

   This echt-noir story is ladled out with generous helpings of dark photography, ominous music and corrosive characters: an inattentive judge, nosy neighbor and sanctimonious landlady, cops both brutal and dumb (when two identical murders occur within a block of each other, Ward has to point the similarity out to the investigating officer) and the stranger skulking about the third floor. And then there’s that long nightmare, a tour-de-force that outdoes Caligari in its use of surreal lighting and sets.

   Unfortunately, director Boris Ingster (whose career stretched from The Last Days of Pompeii to The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) and writer Frank Partos (The Uninvited) took it all a bit over the top. Except for Ward and his girlfriend, there are simply no likeable characters in this dark, seedy world. In fact, everyone seems to go out of his way to be a little more unpleasant. Ingster also seems to have directed his players to put it on the edge of hysteria; only Margaret Tallichet, a talented Maureen-O’Hara-type, seems at all natural or convincing.

   On the balance though, Stranger is saved from itself by Peter Lorre, who is only in the movie maybe ten minutes as the—well, as the stranger on the third floor. Seen only in quick haunting glimpses at first (like Raymond Burr in the thematically similar Rear Window) Lorre finally emerges as a supremely terrifying and oddly sympathetic little boogeyman, just the type to chill your spine and tug your heart strings. It’s a memorable bit of casting in a film that for all its faults deserves a look.

PAUL McGUIRE – The Black Rose Murder. Brentano’s, US, hardcover, 1932. First published in the UK: Skeffington, hardcover, 1931, as Murder in Bostall.

   At first appearance, it’s a simple case: Lord Barbary wants his wife investigated for possible adultery. The firm that Jacob Modstone heads has undertaken the task. Modstone is an elderly private detective who is “kindly and honest except in the way of business and old furniture.” His nephew, the firm’s chief operative, is in charge of the investigation. Unfortunately, despite his uncle’s misgivings, the nephew doesn’t reveal all of the facts to Mr. Modstone and is soon found dead.

   It appears that Modstone’s nephew may have been blackmailing someone. In order to clear his nephew’s reputation, Modstone begins a search for the murderer, a search that pits him directly against Inspector Cummings, of no known first name. Occasionally Modstone is ahead of Cummings, but not very far, and Cummings always catches up.

   The plot isn’t much here. It is the characters of Modstone, a most unusual private investigator — on one occasion he carries a revolver but is “not certain what happened when you pulled the trigger thing” — and Cummings that make the novel enjoyable reading.

   
      The Chief Inspector Cummings series —

Murder in Bostall. Skeffington 1931. Brentano’s, US, 1932, as The Black Rose Murder.
Three Dead Men. Skeffington 1931. Brentano’s, US, 1932.
Daylight Murder. Skeffington 1934. Doubleday, US, 1935, as Murder at High Noon.
Murder in Haste. Skeffington 1934. No US edition.
7:30 Victoria. Skeffington 1935. No US edition.

Note:   Previously reviewed on this blog by Al Hubin was Murder by the Law (Skeffington, 1932). For more on the author himself, plus a more complete bibliography, check out this page on the Golden Age of Detection wiki.