LOUISE PENNY – The Beautiful Mystery. St. Martin’s/Minotaur Books, hardcover, August 2012; trade paperback, July 2013.

Genre:   Police procedural. Leading character:   Chief Inspector Gamache, 8th in series. Setting:   Canada.

First Sentence:   In the early nineteenth century, the Catholic Church realized it had a problem.

   The cloistered monks of Quebec’s self-contained Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups monastery focus their lives on prayer and the simplicity of Gregorian Chants. The murder of their prior and choirmaster, Frère Mathieu, has forced open their doors to Inspector Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir of the Sûreté du Québec

   Penny’s writing is simply superb. Her prose is more than mere words telling a story, her phrases are stories in themselves:

   Penny wonderfully and accurately describes the way in which music can transport the soul. Her analogies are highly evocative:

   The inclusion of humor adds levity, yet there is anger and pain as well. Her words are thoughtful and thought-provoking. There are contrasts such as describing one particularly dour monk as “The Eeyore of the monastery.”, while having a doctor describe how “People die in bits and pieces.” Her writing causes you to stop and consider the concepts behind the words and can compel one to share passages with others. I’ve been known to call friends at odd hours insisting that they “Listen to this.”

   Penny’s descriptions bring places and people to life, placing you at the scene and causing you to see, hear and know the things and people around you. Among Penny’s many strengths is her ability to create characters about whom you want to know more.

   This is finally, I feel, the first time we see Gamache truly at his strength in his role. At the same time, we are made painfully aware that although he has a very close relationship, both to its credit and detriment, with his second, Jean-Guy, there are others who would do anything to discredit him.

   There is a wonderful segment where we learn of the same information but from two separate perspectives. Rather than being redundant, it truly exposes the differences in the personalities of Gamache and Jean-Guy. We also learn the details of the enmity between Gamache and his superior in whom she has created a distinct type of evil; a character who truly excels at manipulation and cruelty.

   The story is very well constructed with plots and sub-plots each as interesting as the next. Lest you think this is a cozy, it is not. It is a traditional police procedural solved by investigating and following the clues. It is also a story of relationships and strong emotions, and there is nothing cozy about them.

   Staying up most of the night reading is not something one would normally recommend. Staying up most of the night with a new book by Louise Penny is almost unavoidable.

   A reader begins every book with the hope of finding something wonderful. The Beautiful Mystery is the realization of that hope. It is an excellent, beautifully written book that stays with you long after closing the cover yet leaves you wanting to demand the next book immediately. It is also only the latest in excellent series I recommend reading in order from the beginning.

Rating:   Excellent.

   The question reportedly began at TVGuide.com. If you could program one night of prime time using any television series you wish, what would your schedule look like?

   For this “make a list” post I am more interested in opinions than who is correct. The question is an impossible one to answer for reasons beyond the obvious. A prime time schedule is more than just scheduling the best programs. But we can still have fun. There is only one rule. You are limited to three hours.

   Below I have three different schedules using only mystery series (for those who wish to play, a mystery series is whatever you say is a mystery series). Feel free to make your own lists and post them in comments. Be nice to others but feel free to say whatever you please about my “perfect” schedules. My schedules feature “Forgotten Mysteries,” “Today’s Mysteries,” and “All Time Mysteries.” Some suggestions for other schedules include traditional, hardboiled, crime, thrillers, noir, PIs, cops, comedies, docudramas, and mysteries with actors named Fred; whatever you want.

         FORGOTTEN TELEVISION

   My favorite. TV mysteries no one remembers and few ever watched.

8 to 9pm: DELPHI BUREAU

ABC, 1972-73 – https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=13963

9 to 9:30pm: T.H.E. CAT

NBC, 1966-67 – https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=11133

9:30 to 10pm: DANTE

NBC, 1960-61 – https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=21369

10 to 10:30pm EYES

ABC, 2005 –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf0mgwbnC0s

   Judd Risk Management was a gadget happy PI agency run by a man with the morals of Sam Spade and the looks of Tim Daly. Cases were rarely standard TV plots and the twists actually surprised. In one case they were hired to find the client’s kidnapped mistress before the wife found out.

   SPOILER: An example of the series’ typical clever twists occurred in the kidnap episode. They convince the kidnapper to turn over the girl by giving him the money he wanted, plus they volunteered to forge a passport and give him a plane ticket to escape the country. What they didn’t tell the kidnapper was his new ID was for a Most Wanted terrorist on the no fly list.

   Series that almost made my schedule: RAINES (https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=7791) I prefer the fun of EYES instead of the depressing endings of RAINES.

         TODAY’S TELEVISION

   The 2012-13 season has featured over seventy five different mystery series including CASTLE (ABC), NCIS (CBS), BONES (FOX), THE AMERICANS (FX), HANNIBAL (NBC), NIKITA (CW), WHITE COLLAR (USA), SOUTHLAND (TNT), CONTINUUM (SYFY) RIPPER STREET (BBCA), MASTERPIECE MYSTERY (PBS), BOARDWALK EMPIRE (HBO), HOMELAND (Showtime), STRIKE BACK (Cinemax), BOSS (Starz), THORNE (Encore), HOUSE OF CARDS (Netflix), ROGUE (DirecTV), RECTIFY (Sundance), and BRAQUO (Hulu). There should be enough good mysteries for everyone to find three hours worth watching.

8 to 9pm: ZERO HOUR

ABC, 2013, returning in June to “burn” off the remaining 10 episodes –

   Yes, there are better series than this personal guilty pleasure, but none of them hooked me like this train wreck. Publisher of a skeptic magazine with unlimited funds, Hank has to weekly choose between trying to save his kidnapped wife or the world. From Christian mystics hiding a map in twelve clocks to the “new apostle Thomas” being an old woman who hasn’t sat down for seventy years, from a mysterious Nazi baby to the hero finding a dead Nazi on a WWII Nazi sub at the North Pole who is his exact double, this series is non-stop weird with lol over the top mysteries.

9 to 10pm:PERSON OF INTEREST

CBS, Thursday at 9pm – http://www.cbs.com/shows/person_of_interest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvpYO8ldP-0

   The Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of all TV series, PERSON OF INTEREST combines the popularity of procedural episodic TV mystery with one of TV’s best ever conspiracy arcs. Every episode features our heroes trying to save or stop a person of interest from some crime that had not yet happened. That mystery is self-contained in one episode, however the good guys are also dealing with a mysterious complex conspiracy, and a growing number of recurring villains with a variety of evil ambitions.

10 to 11PM: JUSTIFIED FX, Will return for season five TBA. http://www.fxnetworks.com/justified

   Each of the prior four seasons have featured its own storyline involving Elmore Leonard’s character Rayland Givens, Federal Marshall in Harlan County, Kentucky. Adapted with Leonard’s style, the series is blessed with great stories and characters as well as some of the best writers, actors, directors, producers, and probably even craft services in television today.

   Series that almost made my schedule: MASTERPIECE MYSTERY (PBS via England) has been a must see for mystery fans, especially traditional mystery fans for decades, but there was no room left on the schedule for the ninety minute program.

         ALL TIME MYSTERY

   There is too much choice to ever settle on one final schedule of three hours, but this will do until I change my mind again. Lists we create can often reveal secrets about ourselves. I am a sucker for characters that interest and entertain me. Maybe it’s the writer in me, but I fall easily for any show that can surprises me or just tries to do something different. Style plays an important role, with my favorite style being the cool and confident hero of the 60s/70s with wit and a nice jazz soundtrack.

8 to 8:30pm: T.H.E. CAT

(See Forgotten Television)

8:30 to10pm: BANACEK

NBC – 1972-74 –

TV’s most underrated series is too often overlooked in a sea of longer running great mystery series from the 70s. But this is one of the rare series I could enjoy on an infinite loop, George Peppard’s cool confident role model, the wit of the dialog, the appeal of the characters, and the fair play mysteries. Yes, it was formulaic, but it’s a formula I never tire watching.

10 to 11pm: JUSTIFIED

(See Today’s Television)

   Series that almost made my schedule: DELPHI BUREAU and DANTE are more examples of my fondness of style and characters. Series such as EYES, RAINES, and PERSON OF INTEREST all have characters I find interesting, and the series are also risk takers, shows that try new approaches to telling the TV mystery.

BELLA DONNA. Twickenham Studios, UK, 1934. Mary Ellis, John Stuart, Nigel Armine, Cedric Hardwicke, Conrad Veidt, Jeanne Stuart. Based on a novel by Robert Hichens. Director: Robert Milton.

TEMPTATION. Universal Pictures, 1946. Merle Oberon, George Brent, Charles Korvin, Paul Lukas, Lenore Ulric, Arnold Moss. Based on a novel by Robert Hichens. Director: Irving Pichel.

   Bella Donna is one of those unique little films that will stay on my mind long after better-known flicks have gone their way. Based on a novel by Robert Hitchens and a play by James B. Fagan, it weaves, rather than tells, the story of a divorcee apparently used to using men and using them up, who marries a chump and goes with him to Egypt where he’s apparently some sort of busy muckety-muck with a job that entails long separations.

   Bored and horny, she falls under the spell of a sinister Egyptian — himself something of a rat with women — and finds herself hopelessly addicted to his charms. So much so that when he expresses annoyance at her husband’s infrequent presence, she decides on divorce-by-poison, with intriguing consequences.

   This story is put across in a series of rather stagey confrontations — the plot is developed and moved around by long scenes of dialogue rather than action — but this in no way diminishes the charms of a film whose chief allure is in mood and atmosphere. Bella Donna starts out as a very properly British sort of thing, with smoking jackets, drawing rooms, and a nearly palpable sense of Stuffie Olde Englande, furthered by the playing of Mary Ellis as the divorcee, John Stuart as the chump, and especially Sir Cedric Hardwicke as the chump’s wise doctor-friend, looking ruefully on as his old chum hastens to ruin.

   Once the couple leaves England, though, we get an equally visceral sense of Egypt as some eerie fairyland, a kingdom suffused with dread and desire in equal measure. Conrad Veidt turns in a magnetic performance as the sinister Egyptian (despite the fact that his makeup keeps changing from pale Eurasian to something resembling a minstrel show) stalking through sets of literally byzantine splendor, and director Robert Milton maintains a slow but insistent pace, like the music of a snake-charmer, as the story plays itself out to a conclusion I will probably never forget. The last shot of Bella Donna is one of those rare cinematic codas, like the last shot of Vertigo, The Searchers or Shock Corridor, that says much more than words ever will, and one that’s a lot of fun to get to.

   The story was remade in Hollywood in 1946 as Temptation, directed by Irving Pichel, with Merle Oberon as the femme-would-be-fatale, who marries George Brent over the objections of Paul Lukas and subsequently falls for Charles Korvin. Temptation seems to have set the pattern for subsequent Victorian noir films like Ivy (1947) and So Evil My Love (1948) but it also shows the sad censorial effects of its time:

   Where the Mary Ellis in the earlier film seemed warped by lust, Merle Oberon is merely enslaved by passion. Poisoning the chump becomes her lover’s idea, not her own, and both lover and erring wife must come to some explicitly sticky end. And I mean sticky. The writers apparently got themselves into a corner on this one, deciding that a big star like Merle Oberon had to meet her own fate (rather than get picked up by the cops) but Suicide as a plot resolution was not permitted in films then.

   The result is a rather muddled off-screen affair recounted by Lukas to an unbelieving cop (nicely played by Arnold Moss, usually a heavy in the movies, and a very good one). There is, however, a rather nice wrap-up, and the rest of the film is done with enough grace and Hollywood polish to make it a pleasant 98-minute trip.

MAX BRAND – The Phantom Spy. Pocket, reprint paperback, December 1975. Dodd Mean, hardcover, 1973. First serialized in Argosy magazine, as “War for Sale,” April 24 to May 15, 1937.

   They don’t write spy novels like this any more, and even when they did, I have a feeling that it was only Max Brand who wrote them. He had a highly romanticized view of the world, one in which friends were friends, lovers were lovers, and enemies were enemies, and even on occasion when there was some well-constructed confusion as to which was which, the reader always knew.

   Lady Cecil de Winter is the early star of this one, a delightful young lady with a real feel for the game of espionage. Recruited by the British government in those days immediately prior to World War II to retrieve missing plans for the Maginot Line – a grand line of defense designed to protect France and Western Europe on the chance that war should break out — she recruits in turn a fellow named Willie Gloster, a cheerful, happy-go-lucky American who provides the help she needs, only to have her lose them again (the plans, that is) to the hands of a suave but evil mastermind by the name of von Emsdorf.

   And the game is on. Not since reading the adventures of the early Saint have I read a tale of down to earth swashbuckling, without a single swash or buckle in sight. There is, of course, a phantom spy, a chap named Jacquelin, whom Lady Cecil believes to be another fellow named Cailland. We know better, and we groan in despair when she leaves the love of her life, Willie Gloster, who comes to her aid again anyway.

   There is blood, there is danger, and there is one hell of a grand impersonation, and there is more. This is the real stuff, but written well before we know how far Hitler would go and how the war would really be waged. Max Brand, who of course is much better known for his westerns, was well aware of what causes countries to wage war with one another, but only close to the end of this book does he let the details intrude, and truth be told, I’d’ve rather he hadn’t.

   This is very much of a period piece, if you haven’t gathered that already, but as I suggested at the beginning, perhaps it was even at the time it was written.

   I guess if you live long enough and hang out in the appropriate dives, you will eventually see fistfights and guys swinging beer bottles at each other. Normally you will not see book or pulp collectors try to strike and harm another collector. I’ve always said my favorite type of people are book collectors and since there are so few pulp collectors left, I don’t want to get into any arguments with the few that are still around.

   Today, a friend sent me an email about a British first edition by H. Bedford Jones. He mentioned that he might consult the resident H. Bedford Jones expert, Digges La Touche (see above). Upon reading this, I almost fell out of my chair laughing and yelling “So you’re the expert on H. Bedford Jones!” I was thinking back more than thirty years ago when the Pulpcon convention almost ended in a drunken brawl.

   Rusty Hevelin, the head honcho and boss of the convention, never scheduled the evening panels ahead of time. He just about always would give you an hour or even a few minutes notice that he would like you to talk about a pulp author or be part of a panel discussing some aspect of pulpish literature.

   I remember once he approached me about ten minutes before the start of the evening programming and wanted me to interview Robert Bloch. Sometimes I turned him down due to not being prepared on short notice but other times I accepted.

   Evidently, at the last minute, Rusty decided to have a panel discuss H. Bedford Jones. He found three collectors who agreed and up to the stage stepped veteran pulp collectors Darrell Richardson, Harry Noble, and Digges La Touche. All were fans of the author and the discussion kept everyone’s attention.

   Everyone behaved themselves and there was no problem. Until the banquet that night. Harry Noble and I were sitting at one of the dinner tables waiting for our food and drinking beer. Another long time pulp collector, Andy Biegel, also sat down. Without any preface or explanation, Andy blurted out, “So you’re the expert on H. Bedford Jones.” At first Harry and I thought that he was kidding and we just laughed. Andy didn’t laugh however and he repeated in a louder voice, “So you’re the expert on H. Bedford Jones.”

   We now realized that Andy Biegel was drunker that we were and was in fact insanely jealous because he had not been chosen to be on the Bedford Jones panel. Harry tried to explain that he was not an expert but just a fan of the writer and loved to talk about his books. Andy was having none of it and repeated for the third time, at the top of his voice, “SO YOU’RE THE EXPERT ON H. BEDFORD JONES!”

   At this point it was obvious that in another minute Biegel was going to fling himself across the table and try to strangle Harry Noble. Though Harry was older than Biegel, such an action would not be a good idea since Harry was a fitness buff and body builder. Since I considered Harry my best pal, I certainly would have joined in the fight and probably we all three would have been rolling over on the floor punching and flailing.

   To make things worse, Andy had a disability involving one leg being shorter than the other. I’m sure Harry and I would have been banned from Pulpcon for life for the drunken beating of a person with a physical handicap. So fortunately we stood up and without saying a word to Andy, we left the room. The next day Andy Biegel evidently didn’t remember anything about the incident and talked to us just as though nothing had happened.

   Harry Noble and Andy Biegel are no longer with us but I still remember the Pulpcon brawl that almost happened over 30 years ago. Everytime I hear that someone is an expert on H. Bedford Jones, I start to scream, “So you’re the expert on H. Bedford Jones!”

The weather has been nice all week, but I’ve been ill, and I haven’t had much time to enjoy it. I’ve managed to get a couple of reviews and articles posted, but that’s been it. Now that I’ve started to get my legs back again, my wireless network connection, which has been iffy all spring, has gone completely kerflooey. I may have to scrap everything, router, adapter, extender, and start over, and at the moment, I’m not up to it. Without the use of a thumb drive to transfer data from one spot to another, there are too many programs on my upstairs computer that I can’t access from down here on my laptop. It might be time to call in the professionals.

I may not take a solid break, but it sure sounds to me as though it’s time to cut back on blogging until I get everything under control again. (I might even start getting caught up on emails, a task I’ve been promising myself since ever so long, longer than I care to admit.)

   Ryerson Johnson (1901-1995) is known primarily as an author of Westerns, but he also wrote numerous crime novels. Only two were published in his own name:

         Naked in the Streets, Red Seal #10, Fawcett, 1952, cover art Carl Bobertz.

         Lady in Dread, Gold Medal #459, Fawcett, 1955, cover art Barye Phillips.

   Naked in the Streets begins like a noir novel. Herbert Hopson is employed in a company that manufactures perfume. On the way to work he is knocked from the sidewalk into the street by an unknown passerby and almost run over. He cannot believe that this happened intentionally. As he suffered a minor injury and tore his clothing in the fall, he returns home to change clothes.

   A strange scene awaits him in his apartment. In the half-light his wife, Sybil, sits on a chair as if on a throne in an almost naked state, with a dog whip in her hand and stilettos on her feet. She is enraged at her husband because he has returned home unannounced. She explains the strange scene by claiming that she will be appearing at a charity bazaar as an animal trainer.

   Hopson goes back to work wearing fresh clothes. There he behaves in such a provocative manner that he is fired instantly. He goes to a strip club to see Sally Dawn, whom he worships, stripping. During this time, a man seated in the seat in which Hopson should have been sitting is murdered. Hopson flees from the club and later returns to his apartment.

   In an argument with Sybil he rips the clothes from her body, while she scratches his face. Whereas Hopson is ashamed, his wife is turned on by the violent behaviour and wants him to punish her with the whip. Her husband is disgusted and leaves the apartment in a state of shock. When he returns shortly afterwards in order to talk things through with her, she is dead, strangled.

   Hopson fears that the police will not believe in his innocence, which is why he does not call them. He suspects that the murder is somehow connected to his wife’s double life. In the apartment he catches the scent of a perfume produced by his company that is still in the testing phase and which has not yet been released to the market.

   For this reason Hopson suspects that someone from the company is involved in the murder plan. He sets off to find the suspects and to reveal the real murderers. In the process he is hunted by both the murderers and the police. He ends up in turbulent scenes, but he constantly finds people who trust him and help him. The story naturally includes a prostitute, who falls in love spontaneously with our hero and provides him with an alibi. And then of course there is also the mysterious Sally Dawn.

   Although the story of Naked in the Streets is at times unrealistic and kitschy, the action is very varied and the dramaturgy of suspense is well done.

   Already after reading the first two pages of Lady in Dread we know that the author has very clear ideas of Good and Evil, and where his position is in relation to each. The novel is set in Coalfield, a city to the south of Chicago, which has been dominated by gambling and crime since the decline of the coal-mining industry.

   Tessie Cullen, a beautiful young woman, applies for a job as a “twenty-six girl” at a dice table in Farmer McGivern’s Top Money Tavern, and gets it. Farmer McGivern is one of the rulers of the city. A scene takes place every day at around the same time, opposite his gambling saloon, upon which the spectators place bets. A hawk sits on the flagpole of the courthouse and watches sparrows. Then, suddenly, it pounces on one of the sparrows and takes it as its prey. The spectators bet on the time of day at which the hawk carries out this act.

   Hally Harper, a good-looking young lawyer, comes to Coalfield on behalf of an animal welfare organisation, in order to combat the betting spectacle. In reality, however, he is a narcotics officer pursuing a truckload of opium. The opium belongs to a Chicago gangster syndicate and was stolen in the vicinity of Coalfield. The syndicate has a premises in Coalfield, a glamorous nightclub with a casino at the city limits. It is trying to extend its influence over the city. The syndicate gets Tessie Cullen to spy on the Farmer, especially to see if he has claimed the opium.

   There is yet a third party that also rules over Coalfield, the mayor. Which of the three parties has got hold of the opium delivery? Or is it a fourth, unknown entity? Harper tries to find out by questioning different people and searching for possible hiding places. In the process he whips up a storm and frequently ends up in danger of his life.

   Tessie Cullen, who first tries to trap Harper on behalf of the Farmer, later joins his side. She asks Harper how he can be so ambivalent in the face of impending death.

   The novel is varied and full of action, albeit rather conventional. A particular moment of tension is created by the fact that, while the hero and heroine act in a covert manner and are thus forced into falsifications and lies, they nevertheless try to maintain the core of their moral identity, in other words, to remain true to themselves. The narrative style tends towards hard-boiled, but not to noir fiction, as the protagonists are not subject to any calamitous fate. I always had a good feeling while reading the novel.

BILL PRONZINI – Scattershot. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1982; $10.95. PaperJacks, paperback reprint, 1987.

   Business, as they say, is booming. For Bill Pronzini’s pulp-collecting detective, for one, and for readers of private-eye fiction, for hundreds, if not thousands of others.

   Doomsayers to the contrary, the PI story is alive and — would you believe? — thriving. I’ve got a stack of PI novels here you wouldn’t believe how high, and if I weren’t awfully careful about it, I could read nothing but. Not that I would. I’d be burned out within a month if I did. I need a Leslie Ford every now and then, just to keep a proper perspective on things.

   But back to “Nameless,” as he has more or less officially been dubbed. All of a sudden he has more cases than he needs, especially just as his love life with Kerry (the lady he hit it off with so well in Hoodwink) is turning sour.

   Strangely enough, so do each of the three cases recorded in this book. Each becomes an impossible crime: a locked-room murder, a man who vanishes out of a constantly watched car, a wedding present that disappears out of a constantly guarded room.

   Terrific stuff , but 100 percent guaranteed to produce ulcers for the detective who is supposed to solve them or else. Lose his license? Nah, it couldn’t be … could it ? Life’s never this rotten. Is it?

   People not in the know constantly confuse PI fiction with hard-boiled fiction. There is an overlap, but nothing could really be much further from the truth. “Nameless” tries — he’s a man, and he has a macho image to maintain, whether consciously or not — but in many ways, in spite of all his rough edges, he’s also too soft and vulnerable. And likeable. He’d be hell to live with, but Kerry will come back. Won’t she?

   Hey, Bill! How long will we have to wait for the next one?

Rating: A minus.

[UPDATE]   If I have my chronology straight, the next book in the series was Dragonfire, which came out later the same year. I won’t tell you how the romance with Kerry came out, though. If you’re a fan of the series, you already know.

   I missed out on Patti Abbott’s multi-blog salute to Bill Pronzini on the occasion of his 70th birthday a couple of weeks ago. I had this review in mind to be included, but … time got away from me.

   Scattershot was the 8th book in the Nameless series, and now there are 30 more, or 38 in all, not including short stories, novelettes, and novellas. Best wishes for many more birthdays, Bill, and for many more books in the series.

JONATHAN STAGGE – The Yellow Taxi. Popular Library 63, no date (ca. 1945). Originally published by Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1942.

   I have commented previously in these pages about the works of the authors [Richard Webb and Hugh Wheeler] who used the pseudonyms Q. Patrick, Patrick Quentin and Jonathan Stagge. The Yellow Taxi, I believe, is their best book. For one thing, rather than picking a rather obvious least-likely suspect (as Webb and Wheeler often did, especially in the Patrick Quentin books), in The Yellow Taxi they distribute suspicion evenly among a number of possible miscreants. For another, the plot is bizarre, elaborate and yet beautifully dovetailed.

   A terrified young woman approaches Dr. Westlake, the narrator and detective of the Stagge books, with a story about being hounded in a small New England community by a yellow New York taxicab. Westlake is inclined to pooh-pooh the story until he himself sees the taxi. (Webb and Wheeler are much more successful than certain creators of horror films in making an automobile an object of terror.) When the woman is killed falling off a horse, Westlake’s daughter, Dawn, finds evidence of murder. The eventual discovery of the role of the taxi only deepens the mystery.

   Moreover, Stagge may be playing with jaded experts in detective fiction, for he introduces identical twins and we assume (or at least I did) that confusion of identity is involved. It’s not, and the final solution is convincing and well-clued.

ANTHONY GILBERT – The Woman in Red. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1941. Smith & Durrell, US, hardcover, 1943. Digest-sized paperback: Mercury Mystery #91. Also published as The Mystery of the Woman in Red: Handi-Books #29, paperback, 1944. Film: Columbia, 1945, as My Name Is Julia Ross. Film: MGM, 1987, as Dead of Winter.

MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS. Columbia, 1945. Nina Foch, Dame May Whitty, George Macready. Based on the novel The Woman in Red, by Anthony Gilbert. Director: Joseph H. Lewis.

   I almost gave up on Anthony Gilbert’s The Woman in Red after the first few pages because it seemed like every other paragraph conveyed some form of Had-she-but-known, often more than once. F’rinstance: She was wondering why she should be so convinced that nothing but harm, of danger even, could come of this venture…her whole being shaken by a protest that was instinctive and illogical In her brain, a voice rang like a chiming bell, “Don’t go,” it pealed, “Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go!”

   At which point I damnear went. But I stayed with it and I’m glad I did. Woman in Red isn’t completely successful, but when the characters talk, they slip the surly bonds of Gilbert’s prose and come alive, with entertaining results. This was my introduction to series sleuth Anthony Crook, a delightfully irreverent character and light counterbalance to the turgid and often ridiculous story around him.

   Well, maybe not ridiculous; the tale of Julia Ross, a working girl who takes a position as an old dowager’s secretary, only to find herself whisked off to a remote house in the country where everyone calls her by another name and treats her like she’s crazy has some effective moments and even generates a good deal of suspense.

   But it’s hard to take a story seriously when the would-be killer tricks our heroine into wearing a red dress so as to rouse the deadly ire of a passing bull. And when the basis of the plot turns out to be a nest of foreign spies being coincidentally pursued by Julia’s beau…. Well I’m just glad there were enough bright characters and tricky bits of business to make it all worthwhile and even entertaining.

   Woman in Red was turned into a film called My Name Is Julia Ross (Columbia,1945) and it had the artistic fortune to be adapted by Muriel Roy Bolton and directed by Joseph H. Lewis, a filmmaker who brought artistry to just about everything he touched. Shot in 18 days (as delightfully detailed in Mike Nevin’s Joseph H. Lewis [Scarecrow, 1998]) on a budget that wouldn’t buy catering on most “A” pictures, this emerges as a riveting, atmospheric film, and one to look out for.

   Nina Foch is excellent as the imperiled heroine, set neatly against Dame May Whitty as the dotty-looking but sinister master- (or should it be mistress?) -mind. Even better, there’s George Macready as Whitty’s not-quite-right son. Bolton re-structures the basis of the plot, replacing spies with a background story that George married a wealthy heiress for her money, then inconveniently killed her. Now he and Mom need a replacement who can be passed off as the wife and meet a more acceptable end so he can inherit her fortune and avoid the gallows.

   It’s fine work from writer Bolton, who also did an intelligent job on something called The Amazing Mr. X, which I must get around to reviewing someday.

   Director Lewis does an outstanding job with all this. His off-beat angles and compositions are never just showy, but always work to establish character or atmosphere. And he creates a nifty tension between the murderous mother and son, with Whitty always trying to take knives and other sharp objects away, and Macready always on the point of rebelling — a nasty prospect from the look of him, and one he would relish. Macready’s career ran the gamut from the preposterous The Monster and the Ape to the prestigious Paths of Glory, but he was never better than right here, playing off Dame May Whitty like an incestuous Lorre and Greenstreet.

PostScript:   Mike Grost has a lot to say about this film on his website. Check out his long insightful article here. The movie was also reviewed by J. F. Norris on his blog. Here’s the link.