RICHARD SALE – Death at Sea. Popular Library #163; paperback original; 1st US printing, 1948. First published in the UK as Destination Unknown: World’s Work, hardcover, 1940.

   That there were eight years between when this book was published in England and when it finally came out in the US is an interesting fact, and there may even be a story behind it. Or perhaps not. Even more likely, we may never know, but the passage of time certainly affected the immediate relevance of the story, which takes place in 1940 on a Dutch freighter in the Caribbean, a ship that also takes on passengers.

   What’s significant here is the year, 1940, and Nazi agents are everywhere – and something they may have their eyes on is the S. S. Apeldoorn. On board is a passenger named Gabriel Adams, an ichthyologist by trade, and as a brief side trip on his way to a conference in Brazil, he stops to pick up a rarity, a modern-day specimen of a fish long since believed to be extinct.

   Getting back to the ship, though, all of the other passengers have cancelled, and two members of the ship’s crew were replaced at the last minute before the voyage by two others, neither of who are known to the captain. Signs of dangerous waters on the horizon?

   There are, not too surprisingly, a couple of good-looking women involved. Richard Sale didn’t spend most of the 1930 writing thrillers like this for the pulp magazines for nothing. Adams proves himself to be more than an expert on fish when he sees through the first one’s wiles almost immediately, but he’s saved in the nick of time by the second when she claims to be his wife when the first follows up by attempting to pull a version of the old badger game on him. (Perhaps I ought to start taking Caribbean cruises. Such things have never happened to me by staying on dry land.)

   The first half of this sea-going adventure is far better than the second. Once the mystery of what is going on is resolved, about half way through, everything falls into place rather sedately, figuratively speaking.

   But here is a portion of the story as it appears on page 125. I could hear the voices of two rather famous movie stars in the roles, and perhaps you can, too. (Merrill is the second of the two ladies mentioned above. Setting: The pirates have just taken over the ship.)

   It’s official, gang. I’ve just signed a contract with Perfect Crime Books for the publication of — how shall I describe it? It may not be quite as hefty as my book on Cornell Woolrich, whose title I adapted for the titles of these columns, but it will certainly qualify as a literary doorstop.

   Back in the 1980s I wanted my Woolrich book to answer almost any imaginable question about the haunted recluse I’ve called the Hitchcock of the written word. Now as I slipslide into senility I want my new book to be just as comprehensive about the two first cousins from Brooklyn who wrote some of the most complex and involuted detective novels of the genre’s golden age.

   Are you familiar with everything bagels? This tome will be, I hope, the Everything Book on Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. Its tentative title is Ellery Queen: The Art of Detection.

   I think I heard a question from cyberspace. “Hey, didn’t you do that book already, back in the Watergate era?” Well, sort of. But as I got older I became convinced that I hadn’t done all that good a job.

   Fred Dannay was the public face of Ellery Queen, and in the years after we met he became the closest to a grandfather I’ve ever known, but I never really got to know the much more private Manny Lee. He and I had exchanged a few letters, and we met briefly at the Edgars dinner in 1970, but he died before we could meet again.

   Because of his untimely death Royal Bloodline inadvertently gave the impression that “Ellery Queen” meant 90% Fred Dannay. One of the most important items on my personal bucket list was to do justice to Manny.

   Thanks largely to the memoirs published by his son Rand Lee, and to the Dannay-Lee correspondence (in Blood Relations, published early this year by the same Perfect Crime Books that will issue The Art of Detection), and to the correspondence between Manny and Anthony Boucher, which is archived at Indiana University’s Lilly Library, I’ve come to a much clearer understanding of Manny, of who he was and how he lived and worked and thought.

   The Art of Detection improves on Royal Bloodline in all sorts of ways but for me this one is the most important. In addition it provides much more detail on subjects like the EQ radio series (1939-48) and the decades-long interaction between the cousins and Boucher.

   And of course it covers all sorts of subjects that postdate the early 1970s, like the EQ TV series with Jim Hutton, and Fred’s third marriage and last years and death. And there will be a number of photographs never seen before.

   When I first discovered the Ellery Queen novels, that byline was a household name. It still was when I first met Fred Dannay. I can’t believe that in my lifetime the Queen name has (except in Japan) been so completely forgotten. Maybe, just maybe, with the publication of Blood Relations this year, and of my book next year, and of Jeffrey Marks’ biography-in-progress two or three years from now, I’ll live to see the return of Ellery Queen to the public eye.

   On June 5, at age 91, Ray Bradbury died. In his own field he was and will remain a giant. As far as I can determine, among the hundreds of authors whose work Anthony Boucher reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle during and for a while after World War II, he was the last one standing.

   Reviewing Bradbury’s Dark Carnival collection in his Chronicle column for June 22, 1947, Boucher called the author “the most fascinating and individual talent to appear in the fantasy field for a long time….[T]here’s no telling what may come of this still very young man.”

   During his early and middle twenties Bradbury also wrote stories for crime pulps like New Detective, Dime Mystery and Detective Tales. Was Boucher familiar with them?

   â€œFor years,” he wrote in his Dark Carnival review, “I have been prowling newsstands and buying any magazine with a Ray Bradbury story.” Observe that that sentence isn’t limited to fantasy-horror magazines.

   In any event Boucher was long dead by the time Bradbury’s earliest crime tales were collected in the paperback original A Memory of Murder (Dell, 1984). We know that Bradbury was a great admirer of Cornell Woolrich, and he may well have been the first writer for whose short crime fiction Woolrich was the model and polestar.

   Woolrich never once used a series character. After two tales about a character called the Douser — for my money the weakest of the fifteen in the collection — Bradbury followed that lead. He never approached Woolrich’s mastery of pure edge-of-the-chair suspense but, for a kid in his middle twenties, did a noble job creating noir atmosphere Woolrich style.

   The more you’re at home in Woolrich, the more you feel a sense of deja vu when you read Bradbury’s stories. “Yesterday I Lived!” (Flynn’s Detective Fiction, August 1944) echoes Woolrich’s “Preview of Death” (Dime Detective, November 15, 1934; collected in Darkness at Dawn, 1985) in the sense that both are about a Hollywood plainclothesman of low rank investigating the death of a lovely actress while she’s filming a scene:

   In that paragraph and countless others in these stories, it’s obvious whom Bradbury is channeling.

   Sometimes Bradbury offers his own take on a Woolrich springboard situation, for example in “It Burns Me Up!” (Dime Mystery, November 1944), which tracks Woolrich’s “If the Dead Could Talk” (Black Mask, February 1943; collected in Dead Man’s Blues, 1947) in that each is narrated in first person by a corpse.

   Sometimes there’s an echo even in the titles, for example “Wake for the Living” (Dime Mystery, September 1947), which evokes Woolrich’s classic “Graves for the Living” (Dime Mystery, June 1937; collected in Nightwebs, 1971).

   Bradbury’s prose tends to be more shrill and lurid than Woolrich’s, and pockmarked with exclamation points — even in the titles! — as Woolrich’s never was, but the influence is crystal clear.

   In his introduction to A Memory of Murder, Bradbury was quite modest about his contribution to our genre:

   This old jurist has done just that, and urges others who reread these stories to bang their gavels softly.

   No one seems to have guessed who wrote those ludicrous lines, supposedly from the viewpoint of an educated woman, that I quoted in my last column.

   Maybe that’s because in a sense I was trying to mislead. The malapropisms from Keeler, Avallone, John Ball, William Ard and myself were false clues in the Carr-Christie-Queen manner, playing completely fair with the reader but designed to give the impression that the sixth quotation was by a sixth person.

   In fact it wasn’t. The perp, as at least one reader should have figured out, was the ineffable Avallone. Here’s another from the same inexhaustible cornucopia:

   Ah yes, who can forget the climax of Stagecoach, with those damn red savages chasing the coach across the salt flats, blowing their poison darts at the Duke and Claire Trevor and all the other passengers?

FALLON EVANS – Pistols and Pedagogues. Sheed & Ward, hardcover, 1963.

   A placid town, at least on the surface, is Stratford, home of Saint Felicitas, a small Catholic college for girls. About the biggest thing that has happened there is the recent ostensible elopement of a professor with one of the students, the daughter of a Chicago gangster.

   Into this placidity comes Red Withers, professional student and sponger. Withers has been invited to temporarily give up racking balls in a billiard parlor and lecture on James Whitcomb Riley at the college.

   The invitation has come about through the good offices of a friend, who should have known better. The lecture doesn’t go well, though the reader will enjoy it, Withers is mistaken for the eloping professor by the gangster and for a flasher by the police, finds himself under attack by all sides, discovers a murder, and has to clean up the town’s drug element.

   Withers is five foot three in his elevator shoes, when he has them. He also has a scraggly red beard, without which he looks like a wizened juvenile. People think that he is trying to conceal something with the beard, and he is: all that wizen.

   This is an amusing picaresque novel, with a rogue who does not laugh in the face of death but who can joke about it afterwards. [Hubin says the setting is Chicago, but Stratford is half a day’s journey from Chicago by train.]

Bibliographic Data:   This is my nominee (so far) for the most obscure detective novel to be reviewed on this blog this month. It was the author’s only work of detective fiction. Evans’ other novel, The Trouble with Turlow (Doubleday, 1961), is described by one online bookseller as “A light-hearted spoof on life and the education system.”

   If this might lead you to believe that Evans real-llife profession was in the realm of academia, you would in all likelihood be correct. A “Fallon Evans” was the editor of the Twentieth Century Literature: a Scholarly and Critical Journal in the late 1960s and early 70s. Although the online WhitePages site finds 13 Fallon Evans in the US, the name is still relatively uncommon, and one can easily assume the two to be one and the same. [Perhaps the Fallon Evans described on one website as being “a professor of English at Loyola Marymount University” in the mid-1980s.]

   Also note that Hubin’s current edition of Crime Fiction IV has updated the setting of the novel to Illinois.

NO MAN OF HER OWN. Paramount Pictures, 1932. Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Dorothy Mackaill, Grant Mitchell, Elizabeth Patterson, J. Farrell MacDonald, Paul Ellis. Director: Wesley Ruggles.

   One big reason this pre-Code movie is worthy of note is that this was the first and only onscreen pairing of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, later one of the most famous of married couples in Hollywood. A good second reason, though — if that’s possible — is that No Man of Her Own a pre-Code movie; in fact, it may have been one of the tipping points that caused the Code to go into effect.

   Clark Gable, sans mustache, plays a card shark and con man who fairly obviously makes a good living at it. But when the heat is on, he heads out of Manhattan in a hurry. Picking a destination at random, he ends up in the small upstate town of Glendale, NY. Being the ladies’ man that he is, and is he ever, Babe Stewart’s eyes falls almost immediately upon Connie Randall, Carol Lombard’s character, one of the town’s librarians.

   It is lust at first sight. Connie is about to burst from boredom. Glendale is far too small for her. But she knows better than to be too easy, although Babe is awfully hard to resist.

The scene that takes place in the stacks in the back of the library is one of the more famous ones in early cinematic history.

   But a later scene that takes place in a cabin up at the lake, in which Connie is seen clad only in bra and panties, is also well worth a second look. Add in a couple of shower scenes, albeit separately, and (in another vein) the scene following the one which ends with Babe saying, “See you in church,” and you have the beginning of a humdoozer of a movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J733OtRwgw

   Alas and alack, once the two are married, all there’s left to do is for Babe to reform, if Connie can accomplish it, and the last third of the movie limps to one dull thud of an ending. “Is that all there is?” you may ask yourself. But it’s the getting there that’s the attraction, and it’s why this movie is lot less likely to be forgotten than most of the others made in 1932.

  RICHARD & FRANCES LOCKRIDGE – Murder Comes First. Pocket, paperback reprint, July 1982. Originally published by J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, 1951. Also: Avon #434, paperback, 1952.

   There is simply no mistaking a Mr. & Mrs. North mystery novel, and it is great to have [some of] them back in print again. Why hasn’t anybody thought of it sooner? The warm, comfortable sounds of their adventures together have been sorely missed.

   In this one of two just reprinted by Pocket, three of Pam’s maiden aunts from Cleveland have come to the big city for a visit. Disaster strikes when another friend they are calling on mysteriously dies of poison. While Pam’s Aunt Thelma may be as unlikely a murder suspect as you can imagine, that doesn’t stop Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley from thinking he can wrap it up quickly.

   The inspector, Bill Wiegand admits to Pam, likes things simple. Sergeant Mullins, of course, knows better. “I should have known,” he says. “It’s begun to go screwy.”

   Part of the screwiness is that the FBI eventually gets involved, for reasons somewhat pertinent to the date of the story. (It was first published in 1951.) Even so, in spite of this worn-out bit of misbehavior at the core, this is still as bright and irresistible a work of entertainment as it ever was. More!

Rating:    B

[UPDATE] 07-11-12.   According to my records, which are, I’m afraid, woefully incomplete, Pocket published at least eight of the North’s adventures between 1982 and 1983. There were in total something like 26 of them in all, so they fell way short of doing the complete series. I don’t think many of them, if any, have been in print ever since.

JULIE. MGM, 1956. Doris Day, Louis Jourdan, Barry Sullivan, Frank Lovejoy, Jack Kelly, Ann Robinson, Barney Phillips, Jack Kruschen, John Gallaudet, Carleton Young. Screenwriter-director: Andrew L. Stone.

   I must admit that I have never been fond of those damsel-in-distress films in which an anxious heroine (her brow is usually creased), married to a homicidal maniac, is so enamoured of her prospective murderer that she can’t bear to take the most elementary precautions to protect herself.

   A typical example of this genus horribilis is Julie, starring Doris Day, Louis Jourdan, and Barry Sullivan. Day plays an airline stewardess who loses her bearings when she’s on the ground and marries handsome psycho Jourdan after her first husband dies under circumstances which are only mysterious to her.

   Barry Sullivan plays the attentive other man hovering protectively around Julie with little success in persuading her that her husband is up to no good, again. Eventually, Julie is alone in an apartment to which Jourdan has traced her and when I unexpectedly had to leave the room, she was pacing nervously while the camera cut frequently to shots of Jourdan closing in.

   When I returned, to my surprise I found that Julie, with grim but plucky determination, was attempting to land a very large plane. The pilot was nowhere to be seen, the co-pilot kept lapsing into a coma from which an attentive man (not Barry Sullivan) kept reviving him, and a phalanx of air controllers was giving landing directions from the flight tower of an airport which she was probably in imminent danger of demolishing.

   In line with my policy of not revealing endings. I will draw a discreet curtain over the remaining action.

THE CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS. Galassia Cinematografica, Italian, 1972. Original title: Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer? (or What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood Doing on Jennifer’s Body?). Edwige Fenech, George Hilton, Annabella Incontrera, Paola Quattrini, Giampiero Albertini, Franco Agostini, Carla Brait. Director: Giuliano Carnimeo.

   First impression: Beautifully photographed in sharp, colorful detail from many clever and unusual angles – a visual delight, smashingly so.

   The story: a unknown and unseen killer is stalking the tenants of an upscale apartment house, with many of the victims being terrifically good-looking women with large expressive eyes. It passes enough muster to keep your mind entertained, but you can’t help be aware of all the cliches of the crime thriller genre that went into putting this film together, even as you’re watching.

   The police act sincerely but they talk better than they perform, having a largely carefree attitude toward the deaths. Giampiero Albertini as Commissioner Enci spends as much time on adding to his stamp collection, while his hapless assistant (Franco Agostini) fumbles his way around while doing the actual legwork.

   Two of the good-looking women, Edwige Fenech and Paola Quattrini, roommates who move into the apartment of the second women to be killed, pay only lip service to the idea that maybe that’s not such a good idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1Foq9SfAyM

   There are a lot of suspects – it’s a tall apartment complex, complete with subcellar with lots of spooky (and deadly) machinery to be trapped in – and hints at motive, but when the killer is a madman (or woman), motive is the last thing that matters.

   A small masterpiece of its type (a genre called “Giallo,” as if you hadn’t deduced that on your own by now), humorous and chilling in turn, atmospheric and colorful, and entertaining from beginning to end. Bloody but not gory, and almost tastefully so. (But if Philo Vance is your idea of the ultimate in detective work, this may not be to your taste at all. In fact, I almost guarantee it.)

NOTE:   I wrote this review back in December, but I lost track of it until I was reminded of it last week when I read Sergio Angelini’s review of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) on his blog. I’m far from an expert on Giallo films, so I found his detailed comments on the film to be very informative.

   The movie is available on DVD either by itself or in a box set with three films of the same vintage.

EARL W. EMERSON – Deviant Behavior. William Morrow & Co., hardcover, 1988. Ballantine, paperback, 1991.

   The latest case for Thomas Black, Seattle private eye, is Deviant Behavior by Earl W. Emerson. This is an impressive tale, with emphatic characterizations and a sinewy plot.

   The wealthy Steebs, Dudley and Faith, hire Black to find their missing adopted son Elmore, age seventeen. Thomas traces Elmore to an abandoned hotel, the building from which Elmore’s uncle (and Dudley’s business partner) leaped to his death six years earlier.

   Elmore is carrying unaccountably large sums of money, has given his girlfriend an expensive ring. The trail also leads to a retired film director, now a sort of guru to the local young, and his actress wife. But then the trail goes dead, very dead….

    The Thomas Black series —

1. The Rainy City (1984)

2. Poverty Bay (1985)
3. Nervous Laughter (1985)
4. Fat Tuesday (1987)

5. Deviant Behavior (1988)
6. Yellow Dog Party (1991)

7. The Portland Laugher (1994)
8. The Vanishing Smile (1995)     Shamus Award Best Novel nominee (1996).
9. The Million-Dollar Tattoo (1996)
10. Deception Pass (1997)     Shamus and Anthony Awards Best novel nominee (1998).

11. Catfish Cafe (1998)
12. Cape Disappointment (2009)

  JOHN CREASEY – The Toff on the Farm. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1958. Walker, US, hardcover, 1964; Popular Library, paperback, 1972. Also published as Terror for the Toff, Pyramid, paperback, 1965.

   The Toff, aka Richard Rollison, is a character I’ve never really become attracted to, but I read one of his adventures every once in a while. He’s a combination/imitation in many way of the Saint and an American-style pulp hero. The British do this kind of derring-do adventure hero best, though, and if you don’t have one of Leslie Charteris’s Simon Templar novels handy, the Toff will do as second best.

   In this particular case Rollison is asked by a friend to intercede on the behalf of two friends of his, a man and his sister who are trying to sell their farm, but are unable to, due to an old tenant farmer who refuses to give up rights to his home.

   Before the Toff can reach the scene, the girl is suddenly deluged with offers, up to three times what the farm is worth, and before the story is over, two men are dead, and Rollison is forced to wonder how badly he could have misjudged a man whom Scotland Yard considers to be a notorious American gangster.

   As with any good pulp fiction, this reads very quickly, pulling you into a tales with so many crooked angles you are puzzled how any sense can ever be made of it. And as usual, the ending is not up to the end of the story. Discovering how simple the plot actually was is part of it, but learning that it was mostly jiggery-pokery on the part of the author is another.

   And the more I think about it, trying to see if there is any way I could tell you more about what I mean than that, the more I am convinced that “jiggery-pokery” is exactly the right word, and we can leave it at that.

[UPDATE] 07-08-12.   My opinion of the Toff books has varied considerably over the years, being not much interested in them when I first encountered them, but gradually warming to them to the point of actually enjoying them. I still think the Saint books are better, but so do a lot of people.

   Earlier reviews on this blog:

The Toff Among the Millions.
Double for the Toff.
A Rocket for the Toff.

IT HAPPENED IN FLATBUSH. 20th Century-Fox, 1942. Lloyd Nolan, Carole Landis, Sara Allgood, William Frawley, Robert Armstrong, Jane Darwell, George Holmes, Scotty Beckett, with Vivian Blaine in her uncredited debut. Director: Ray McCarey.

   From Wikipedia: “Flatbush Avenue is the main thoroughfare through the Borough of Brooklyn.” And if you’re of a certain age, what do you think of first when someone mentions Brooklyn? Baseball, of course, and the Brooklyn Dodgers.

   They apparently didn’t get the rights to use the team’s name in this movie, since the team that Lloyd Nolan’s character is the manager of is called only the “Brooklyn team,” or simply “Brooklyn” for short, but the team is the Dodgers, all right, no doubt about it. Nolan plays Frank “Butterfingers” Maguire to perfection. He fits the uniform as if he born to do so.

   But how did he get the nickname Butterfingers? It turns out he was run out of town as a shortstop several years ago, having committed an crucial error in the field that cost the team the pennant. Against all the advice she’s been given, including that of the general manager (played by William Frawley, who looks exactly the same here as he did in the 1950s playing Lucy’s landlord and neighbor, Fred Mertz), the elderly lady owner (Sara Allgood) brings him back to manage the team.

   Upon which point the lady owner ups and dies, leaving the ownership of the team in the hands of relatives, including society dish Kathryn Baker, played of course by pretty dark-haired Carole Landis. None of the new owners know anything about baseball, nor do they care to know, so it’s up to Nolan not only to guide the team, but to persuade Kate to spring real money for some real players.

   Persuasion turns to romance, and new players mean a run for the pennant. Can Nolan escape his history of buckling under pressure to be successful at doing both? Well, if Real Life baseball manager Leo Durocher could marry movie star Laraine Day, also back in the 1940s, anything’s possible in Category 1, and as for Category 2, nothing that happens in a sports-oriented comedy could be more surprising than what happens in Real Life.

   A fun if slightly fanciful movie, and of course I could watch the always charming Carole Landis in anything, even as the owner of a baseball team who ends up watching the final game of the season in the dugout.

Note: Two more short clips from this movie can be found here.