WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT – The Chicano War. Walker, hardcover, 1986. No paperback edition.

   Brock Callahan, retired pro football star and private eye, takes in eleven year old Juan Chavez, who has run away from St. Mary’s foundling home. What Brock doesn’t guess is that he is also taking in a big piece of the gang/race war that is a hidden river of evil running under the peaceful streets of San Valdesto, a sun-warmed affluent “somewhat” north of Los Angeles.

   Juan has a brother named Pete who is a skilled auto mechanic and who has disappeared. Chris Andropolus, the hoodlum who is trying to make San Valdes his private turf, opens a firebombing and shooting battle against the Brotherhood, who are a group of respectable Chicanos.

   This battle culminates in the death of Andropolus and the arrest of Ricardo Cortez, a leader of the Brotherhood. The missing brother Pete is embroiled in an auto chopping operation run by one of Andropolus’s hired guns in the unincorporated and largely Chicano suburb north of San Valdesto.

   Hatred grows and family ties are strained. The redneck Police Sergeant Karl Kranski’s niece is Mrs. Andropolus, and his wife is the former Lois Woolrick of local old and respectable money. By this time Callahan is playing touch-and-go with a three-sided war: the police, the gang, and the Chicanos. It’s an absolutely no-win affair.

   Callahan is his usual bluff and charming self and welcome for various reasons in each of the three war camps. He is ably aided and abetted by a lovely friend Jan, an interior decorator, his housekeeper Mrs. Casey, and an old pro football buddy Orlando Davis, who is two hundred and seventy pounds of black wit.

   The story abounds with ethnic names, ethnic slurs and vintage cars. As ever, Mr. Gault is a master of characterization by dialogue, revealing the undercurrents below the surface of a conversation. Like the eleven previous Brock Callahan books this is a highly readable caper featuring a really “laid back” all around good guy.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – The Emperor’s Snuff-Box (Carroll & Graf, paperback reprint, 1986. Harper & Brothers, hardcover, 1942. Many other editions, both hardcover & paperback. Film: That Woman Opposite (UK, 1957) aka City After Midnight (US).

   This book is best described by quoting Carr, himself, regarding the murder in it: “This is a domestic crime. A cozy, comfortable, hearth-rug murder.”

   Though not the author at his best, this is typical Carr. There is love at first sight, and the setting is France, though most of the characters are British. There is less atmosphere than usual, and the puzzle is a bit less complicated, and therefore more guessable than most Carr’s.

   None of Carr’s usual series characters are present; the murder is investigated by a French policeman and a vacationing British psychiatrist. The time is the summer of 1939 and the delight of a simpler time and an intriguing puzzle make this worthwhile, even if it is not Carr at his peak.

MICHAEL INNES – The Daffodil Affair. Penguin, paperback reprint, 1984. Several other paperback editions. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1942.

   — The Weight of the Evidence. Perennial Library, paperback reprint, 1983. Several other paperback editions. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1943.

   These books, original1y published in 1942 and 1943 respectively, come from the most imaginative period in the career of this writer who has been publishing mysteries for fifty years.

   Daffodil is probably too wild and improbable for its own good, as we are asked to believe, on the basis of flimsy evidence, that Appleby and another Scotland Yard inspector would be sent out of war-time London into the jungles of South America.

   The story begins attractively with the stolen titular horse and is heavy on human and animal psychology, accurately using the famous “Hans Legacy” about teaching horses tricks.

   Finally, there is too little action and too unlikely an ending to justify what is otherwise an unusual and sophisticated book.

   The Weight of the Evidence is relatively conventional for Innes, with its British university setting immediately before World War II, but it opens with an unpopular professor found crushed to death by a meteor.

   It’s all very clever, but sometimes the literary allusions and sheer number of eccentric characters is a bit overdone. There’s a lot of good detection, though it is weakened by too much coincidence and a fortuitous confession at the end.

   As prolific as Edward D. Hoch was — with over 900 short stories to his credit — the movie and TV media have made virtually no use of his output. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) lists just 9 films derived from his works (9/900 = 1 percent). No more eloquent testimony against the obtuseness of Hollywood can be adduced.

1. “Off Season.” The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, May 10, 1965. With John Gavin, Richard Jaeckel, and Tom Drake. Based on Hoch’s story “Winter Run,” this is a nice little crime drama with a nasty twist. This show was the final one of the Hitchcock series.

2. It Takes All Kinds. Film, 1969, based on the story “A Girl Like Cathy.” With Robert Lansing, Vera Miles, and Barry Sullivan. Film critic Leonard Maltin describes it this way: “Fair double cross drama about Miles’ shielding of Lansing when he accidentally kills sailor in a brawl in Australia. Nothing special.”

3. “The Ring with the Red Velvet Ropes.” Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, November 5, 1972. With Gary Lockwood, Joan Van Ark, and Chuck Connors. I’m sure I saw this one but don’t remember a thing about it.

    The TV series McMillan & Wife (1971-77) made good use of Hoch’s stories:

4. “Cop of the Year.” November 19, 1972. With Rock Hudson, Susan Saint James, John Schuck, Nancy Walker, and Edmond O’Brien. Based on “The Leopold Locked Room,” with John Schuck’s character doubling for Captain Leopold. Neat little impossible crime plot, with Schuck accused of murdering his ex-wife.

5. “Free Fall to Terror.” November 11, 1973. Guest stars: Edward Andrews, Tom Bosley, Barbara Feldon, John Fiedler, Dick Haymes, James Olson, and Barbara Rhoades. Based on one of Hoch’s best stories (“The Long Way Down”), a businessman evidently crashes through a plate glass window, disappears in mid-air, and hits the ground — three hours later.

6. “The Man without a Face.” January 6, 1974. Guest stars: Dana Wynter, Nehemiah Persoff, Stephen McNally, Donna Douglas, and Steve Forrest. Cold War espionage with a mystery slant.

    The French produced a mini-series in the mid-’70s:

7. Nick Verlaine ou Comment voler la Tour Eiffel. Five episodes, France, July-August 1976. If anybody knows anything about this production, please inform us.

   The British horror/fantasy series Tales of the Unexpected used a couple of Hoch’s stories as inspiration:

8. “The Man at the Top.” June 14, 1980. Introducer: Roald Dahl. With Peter Firth, Rachel Davies, and Dallas Cavell.

9. “The Vorpal Blade.” May 28, 1983. With Peter Cushing, Anthony Higgins, John Bailey, and Andrew Bicknell.

    — and, unless the IMDb list is woefully incomplete, that’s the extent of the film industry’s use of Edward D. Hoch’s stories.

Hi Steve,

   Some friends and I just got wind of this virtually unknown CBS-TV series a couple of months ago accidentally, via an odd old Google News result from Billboard magazine about notable composer Alex North’s jazz theme.

   There’s no mention of the 1959 series in John McAleer’s humongous Stout biography, although a pilot plus a few episodes were actually filmed and it came within an eyelash of being Nero Wolfe’s TV debut — contradicts the conventional wisdom that Stout had vetoed any further screen adaptations during his lifetime due to his disappointment with the 1930s movies.

   Here it is, complete with the lone screenshot evidence we found — Shatner’s Archie with Kurt Kasnar’s Wolfe — on Wikipedia’s entries for Nero Wolfe and Shatner:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero_Wolfe#Nero_Wolfe_.28CBS.29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shatner#Early_stage.2C_film.2C_and_television_work

   Alerting you because I remember Mystery*File and its followers expressing interest in early “NW” adaptations that were or might have been, and this one’s quite a revelation.

IAN RANKIN – Dead Souls. St. Martin’s Minotaur, hardcover, 1999; paperback, August 2000. Reprinted several times since.

   Rebus is not in good shape in this above-average entry in the Edinburgh series. He’s drinking again, his daughter is still recovering from a hit and run accident and is in a wheelchair. His friend Joe Morton has died, and the entire unit is reeling from the apparent suicide of DI Jim Margolies, bright and talented, on the fast track toward the top.

   The plot includes two missing persons, an eight-year-old boy and the 19-year-old son of childhood friends of Rebus; a surveillance of a convicted murderer, released from a US prison in the wake of an appeal of trial irregularities and returned to Edinburgh; and the relocation of a recently released pedophile that leads to Rebus’s being suspected of conducting a personal crusade against him.

   The convicted murderer has matured from an impulsive, opportunistic criminal to a calculating, clever game-player who threatens not only Rebus but everyone he cares about. Even as you tell yourself that the conjunction of difficult, challenging problems is the stuff of improbable fictions, you find yourself admiring Rankin’s ability to manage intricately connected plot lines.

   A superior, disturbing police procedural and thriller.

NOTE:   St. Martin’s has also published a section of the novel in hardcover as an $11.95 “novella” entitled Death Is Not The End. If I had read the front jacket flap material more closely, I wouldn’t have gotten suckered into buying this.

DENNIS LEHANE – Moonlight Mile. William Morrow, hardcover, November 2010. Harper, premium-sized paperback, July 2011.

Genre:   Private Investigator. Leading characters:  Patrick Kenzie & Angie Gennaro; 6th in series. Setting:   Massachusetts.

First Sentence:   On a bright, unseasonably warm afternoon in early December, Brandon Trescott walked out of the spa at the Chatham Bars Inn on Cape Cod and got into a taxi.

   Eleven years ago, as told in Gone, Baby, Gone (1999), Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro found kidnapped Amanda McCredy and, following the law, returned her to her neglectful mother.

   Now, at 16, Amanda has disappeared again and her aunt re-hires Kenzie and Gennaro to find her. A missing-person case quickly escalates to one involving identity theft, drugs, a priceless cross, Russian gangsters and a threat on Patrick’s family.

   It is very nice to have back the characters that brought Lehane to forefront of mystery writing. It is also nice that their lives have evolved and that they are parents of a quite realistic, four-year old daughter.

   I also enjoyed having back Bubba, one of the best psychotic sidekicks ever, but his role felt a bit as though it was playing homage to Robert B. Parker’s characters of Hawk to Susan; protector but not participant. While Amanda had dimension and strength, others seemed flat and bordering on stereotypical.

   Lehane has a great voice which carries over to a natural ear for dialogue and his evocative descriptions set the mood and sense of place… “The trees were bare […], and cold air off the ocean hunted the gaps in my clothes.”

   The plot was page-turning with some very well-done, unexpected twists, the climax felt over the top, and I did like the ending. Lehane again addresses the struggle between doing what is legally correct versus morally correct and who has the right to make that decision.

   Reading this book was interesting. When I read A Drink Before the War, the first book in the series, it was coup de foudre; that lightning strike you may experience when meeting someone wonderful for the first time. Eleven years on, the lightning bolt is gone, but there is still enough of a tingle to say I did enjoy the book.

Rating:   Good.

  THE VICIOUS CIRCLE. Romulus Films, 1957. Also released as The Circle. John Mills, Derek Farr, Noelle Middleton, Wilfrid Hyde White, Roland Culver, Mervyn Johns, Rene Ray, Lionel Jeffries. Screenplay: Francis Durbridge, based on his BBC-TV serial, My Friend Charles. [See comment #1.] Director: Gerald Thomas.

   This is one of those movies in which the hero, in this case Dr. Howard Latimer (John Miles), finds himself trapped in a series of strange events that culminate in his being the number one suspect in a case of murder. This time around, the dead girl is an actress from Germany that a producer friend (just in from the US) asks him to pick up at the airport.

   Accompanying him to the airport is a newspaper reporter who (as it turns out) the paper never heard of, nor is the producer even in the country. The dead girl is in Latimer’s apartment when he returns later.

   How and why? He has no idea. Not helping either is the patient who’s been referred to him by another doctor (who has never seen her), but who complains not only of migraines but also of dreams involving a body and a brass candlestick.

   Two guesses what the blunt instrument was that caused the death of the woman in his apartment? Or in whose car it is found?

   This is also one of those movies that is too complicated for its own good. There is an attempt to explain all this, and it’s a pretty good attempt too, until the movie’s over and you wonder what on earth were you thinking?

   One large problem is that it is clear that the detective from Scotland Yard, Detective Inspector Dane (Roland Culver), does not take the case against Dr. Latimer all that seriously, alleviating most of the suspense. Either Cornell Woolrich (author) or Alfred Hitchcock (director) or the combination thereof, could have taken the first 20 minutes and run for a mile with it.

   Since neither of the two were on hand, all we have is a mildly amusing puzzle to undo, nothing more, but nothing less, either. All the players are professionals, even if relatively unknown in this country, then or now.

PATRICK BUCHANAN – A Murder of Crows. Stein & Day, hardcover, 1970; reprint paperback, 1985. Also: Pyramid N2743, paperback, 1972.

   An intriguing title and a riveting first chapter entice the reader who stands hesitating at the paperback book rack. Unfortunately for the buyer, the rest of the book does not live up to the beginning.

   Ben Shock and Charity Tucker, private investigators without credentials, are asked by an old friend of Charity’s, Subrinea Brown, to look into the sudden local hostility to her father’s small racetrack in the making. The antagonism has gone so far as to frighten Colonel Brown into a heart attack.

   Subrinea’s fiance, Loyal Boone, is also trying to find out what changed public support into active hostility. Could it be the Unknown Tongues, a mountain sect with a spellbinding blind preacher? Might the crooked local politicians have a more profitable scheme in mind? Do Loyal’s father and his Mexican wife, with their money-making snake farm, have any connection with the continuing and determined efforts to get Subrinea and her father out?

   People die, their bodies burned, their clothes not even singed. Are the Unknown Tongues invoking back-country magic? Does Uncle Uglybird, the “yarb doctor” know any of the answers? Uncle Uglybird is a 14-carat-gold character, but he’s not worth the price of admission.

   The book is stiff, the people don’t come alive, mayhem accumulates, and at the end the two detectives ride off to the next case scarcely touched emotionally by the devastation they left behind.

Bio-Bibliographic Data:   “Patrick Buchanan” was the joint pen name of Edwin Corley & Jack Murphy. Corley’s Wikipedia page describes Charity Tucker as “a tall, blonde, intelligent television reporter, who teamed with private investigator Ben Shock to investigate various murders.”

       The Ben Shock & Charity Tucker series —

A Murder of Crows. Stein & Day, 1970.
A Parliament of Owls. Stein & Day, 1971.

A Requiem of Sharks. Dodd Mead, 1973.
A Sounder of Swine. Dodd Mead, 1974.

ANNE NASH – Said with Flowers. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1943. Bart House #19, paperback, 1945.

    ’Twas the week before Christmas when the general factotum and chief roustabout of the flower shop owned and operated by Doris (Dodo) Trent and Nell Witter fell and broke his leg. Fortuitously, but perhaps not fortunately, a new young man in town visits the shop and appears qualified to fill in during the busiest time of the year.

    A day later a friend of Dodo’s and Nell’s is found stabbed to death, with one of the knives used for dethorning roses, outside the flower shop. On her body is the emblem of a fish, the trademark of Killer Karp — named thus, God help us, by the newspapers because of his habit of leaving the drawing of a fish with each murder victim — a serial murderer who had been working his way west from Boston and murdering lovely, young, and unmarried females in his travels.

    If the woman killed outside the flower shop is one of Karp’s victims, the serial killer had deviated almost totally from his previous pattern. If she had not been murdered by Karp, who in the small town of Pinecrest would murder a woman seemingly loved by all? Is the new flower shop assistant Killer Karp?

    Dodo and Nell join forces, when they can take the time from their hectic Christmas business, with detective Mark Tudor and his dog Svea to try to find the killer. There is excellent atmosphere, Dodo and Nell are real people, and the novel is well written if you don’t mind a colloquial style. The killer was evident fairly early on to this reader, but it didn’t spoil the enjoyment.

Bibliographic Data:   Anne Nash was the author of three detective novels starring Dodo and Nell between 1943 and 1945, then one stand-alone in 1946. All four published were under Doubleday’s Crime Club imprint, with Said with Flowers being the first.

● CHARLES WILLIAMS – All the Way. Dell First Edition A165, paperback original, 1958. UK title: The Concrete Flamingo. Cassell, hardcover, 1960.

● THE 3RD VOICE. Columbia, 1960. Edmond O’Brien, Julie London, Laraine Day. Based on the novel All the Way, by Charles Williams. Director: Hubert Cornfield.

   This speculation began in a roundabout way while watching Deadlier Than the Male (reviewed here ); I noticed that one of the credited screenwriters was listed as “Liz Charles-Williams.”

   Hmmm. Seems to me the oughta-be legendary writer Charles Williams was doing things at Universal about that time: The Wrong Venus was being filmed as Don’t Just Stand There!, and wasn’t The Pink Jungle some of his work? So could “Liz Charles-Williams” have some connection with the author of Dead Calm and The Big Bite?

   Well, after several minutes of painstaking research, I still couldn’t say, but I was prompted to pull out my video of The Third Voice and my copy of the Charles Williams book it was based on, All the Way, and revisit both.

   Williams’ novel is a compact, neatly built thing based around an intriguing premise: in order to commit the perfect crime, Jerry Forbes has to spend a week impersonating a man he doesn’t resemble… whom he helped murder.

   The hook is that the victim is a neurotic Midwestern businessman on vacation in Florida, and Forbes’ voice sounds exactly like his, so the plot — hatched by the dead man’s jilted mistress — is to kill the businessman, then drain his accounts by phone calls to his underlings back home, all this with her help.

   It takes talent to hold a complicated thing like this together in a novel, much less put it across in 160 pages, but Williams was at the top of his form here, with well-wrought characters and nicely judged situations that build suspense beautifully.

   Hence All the Way emerges as a deft little book that deserves to be better known. I particularly liked the little character quirks that lead up to an emotional double-cross that you won’t see coming, even now that I’ve told you it’s on its way.

   In 1960 Columbia filmed this as The Third Voice which may make it the first paperback original made into a movie; I don’t know. At any rate, while not quite up to the level of the book, Voice is a nice, sick little item which falls well short of Classic Status but still repays watching.

   Voice was written and directed by Hubert Cornfield, who put some interesting things on film (Plunder Road, Pressure Point) before the experience of trying to direct Brando in Night of the Following Day crippled his talent.

   Or maybe there wasn’t much talent to begin with: Cornfield’s films all look like the work of a promising new talent, but somehow he just never followed through. At any rate, The Third Voice is still nasty and promising.

   It’s set in a swanky Mexican resort, but there are no sun-drenched views of lovely beaches; just lots of sweaty close-ups of Edmond O’Brien moving through rooms of cloying chintziness as he bullies strangers over the phone and plots his own little turnabout, leading to a typical noir ending. The effect is claustrophobic, but tellingly so, and I like this movie perhaps more than it deserves.