MICHAEL INNES – The Case of Sonia Wayward. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1960. Published in the UK as The New Sonia Wayward by Victor Gollancz, hardcover, 1960. Paperback reprints include: Collier AS450V, US, 1962; Penguin, US, 1989.

   One of the best mysteries of Michael Innes’s middle period, The Case of Sonia Wayward, has recently been reprinted by Penguin in paperback. (Innes has been writing so long that his “middle” period was thirty years ago.)

   It starts as the titular Sonia, a best-selling author of romances, dies at sea of natural causes. Her husband, Colonel Petticate, tries to keep her death a secret so he can continue to write under her name, without having to establish his own reputation.

   The complications of his ruse are many, and Innes provides many twists and surprises, with fewer literary allusions to slow things down than usual.

GIRLS IN CHAINS. PRC, 1943. Arline Judge, Roger Clark, Robin Raymond, Barbara Pepper, Clancy Cooper, Allan Byron, Sidney Melton, Emmett Lynn, Richard Clarke. Director: Edgar G. Ulmer.

   The title, first of all is a misnomer. The girls in the reform facility in this rather limp feature film, from one of Hollywood’s legendary bottom-of-the barrel movie studios, are all in their late 20s if not rather obvious 30s, and there are no chains. (I accept the title either as a metaphor, or if not that, then as obvious over-the-top hyperbole.)

   Second of all, however, is that when Sid Melton (Ichabod Mudd in the Captain Midnight TV series) is the only name you spot right off the bat when you start running down through the credits, then you know that Girls in Chains is not going to be a big-budget extravaganza. It is not even a low-budget extravaganza. (I accept the fact that it may be my fault for not recognizing the names of the two leading stars, but I am always willing to learn, and next time I will.)

   There is a lot of story in this movie’s 75 minutes of running time (which I am told it took only five days to shoot), and every once in a while there are some good scenes. Viewers on IMDB have taken a great dislike to this film, but using a sledgehammer to demolish it from one end of the room to the other seems like overkill to me. I have seen worse.

   The story? Well, it’s complicated, and nicely so. When Helen Martin (Arline Judge, she of the magnificent upsweep bird’s nest hairdo)) is fired from her teaching job because her sister is married to low-life criminal boss Johnny Moon (Allan Byron, who has the whole town wrapped up in his left side back pocket), a friendly police officer (Roger Clark, bland beyond belief) gets her another teaching job, this one at the local girls’ reformatory, where the warden is on Moon’s payroll, but scamming the books on him. More? Johnny Moon’s latest girl friend on the side (Robin Raymond) is about to land in the very same slammer on a shoplifting charge.

   Life behind bars is tough enough, with a handful of prison cells for the worst of the offenders, but mostly it’s the laundry room and the barest of dorm rooms for the rest. After discovering early on what she’s up against, Helen is persuaded to work undercover to get the goods on the warden and Johnny Moon, and I suppose that this is all you need to know about the plot.

   Overall, Girls in Chains is a strange mixture of funny moments with, let us say, strange takes on courtroom scenes plus puzzling mobster mistakes, with at least one tense situation for the undercover Helen Martin going absolutely nowhere.

LAW & ORDER: UK. ITV. Series Three: 09 September through 21 October 2010. Bradley Walsh, Jamie Bamber, Harriet Walter, Ben Daniels, Freema Agyeman, Bill Paterson.

   Another seven episodes (making a total so far of 20) of original Law & Order stories adapted to a London setting.

   Somehow it doesn’t quite work, partly, perhaps, because the stories were designed to operate in a slightly different culture. Maybe it would have been better to commission new stories and fit them within a more recognisable British setting.

   An exception might have been “Masquerade,” based on the US episode “Good Girl,” which seemed, to me at least, to be rather stronger than the others. I’m not convinced, however, that prosecutors in England would investigate in the way they do here.

Of course when I’m watching the original I have no idea how the legal system works in New York (except from watching similar programmes — although as I’ve said before the difference in procedures between L&O, NYPD Blue and CSI:NY leaves this viewer rather confused) and accept it all without a quibble.

CHARLES L. LEONARD – Deadline for Destruction. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1942. Reprint paperback: Thriller Novel Classic #24, no date [1944].

   Despite the misgivings of military intelligence, private detective Paul Kilgerrin is removed from a hospital where he is recovering from a gunshot wound and blackmailed into tracking down an espionage and sabotage ring unconnected with any foreign power. Government agents keep getting killed in their efforts to penetrate the ring, and Kilgerrin’s life is apparently of no value to anyone but him.

   Kilgerrin has no problem with flouting the law and obstructing justice or killing when he feels called upon to do it. He also does not suffer fools or anyone else gladly. Still, he gets the job done despite many obstacles and being shot and tortured.

   While it might be a bit much to pity criminal masterminds, feeling a trifle sorry for them is a temptation. Plot they ever so cunningly, they always seem to come a cropper through the incompetence or stupidity of their minions.

   The CM’s scheme to use Kilgerrin would have been a foolproof one if a fool hadn’t tested it. Additionally, the CM should have remembered that revenge is a dish best eaten cold, but then the US might have lost World War II and Kilgerrin.

   A thriller far superior to Heberden’s Desmond Shannon novels.

Bibliographic Notes:   Between 1942 and 1951 eleven Kilgerrin adventures were published, all written by M. V. Heberden under this Charles L. Leonard byline.

   The “Desmond Shannon” books referred to by Bill appeared under her own name, but using only her initials, disguising the fact that her full name was M(ary) V(iolet), the latter nomenclature presumably deemed unsuitable for buyers of tough PI fiction. There were 17 of these, appearing as they did between 1939 and 1953.

   My review of Sinister Shelter, a later Kilgerrin novel (1949), appears here on this blog, along with a list of all eleven of his adventures. Preceding that is a post containing (believe it or not) a glamour shot of the author from Vogue Magazine.

FRITZ LEIBER – Conjure Wife. Twayne, US, hardcover, 1953. Penguin, UK, paperback, 1969. First published in Unknown Worlds, April 1943. Reprinted several times, in both hardcover and soft, including: Lion 179, pb, 1953, cover art by Robert Maguire; Award A341X, 1968, and AN1143, 1974 (cover art by Jeff Jones on the latter).

      ● Filmed as Weird Woman Universal Pictures, 1944. Lon Chaney Jr., Anne Gwynne, Evelyn Ankers, Ralph Morgan. Director: Reginald Le Borg

      ● Filmed as Night of the Eagle (aka Burn, Witch, Burn!. Independent Artists, American International, 1962. Peter Wyngarde, Janet Blair, Margaret Johnston, Anthony Nicholls. Screenplay by Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson & George Baxt. Director: Sidney Hayers.

      ● Filmed as Witches’ Brew. Embassy/United Artists, 1980. Teri Garr, Richard Benjamin, Lana Turner, James Winkler. Conjure Wife uncredited as the source. Directors: Richard Shorr & Herbert L. Strock.

   Last October I was also in the right mood for Conjure Wife (1943) Fritz Leiber’s classic tale of Black Magic and Campus Politics. It starts off rather predictably, as Professor Norman Saylor, successful sociologist and author of a popular book on primitive superstitions and modern behavior, discovers a trove of charms, voodoo tokens and sundry magic-spell components in his wife’s drawers (a rather fetishistic scene in itself) and learns that while he’s been relegating such things to unimportance, his wife has taken them seriously.

   Naturally, he convinces her to destroy them, and naturally, all hell (literally!) proceeds to break loose.

   I saw it all coming, but Leiber manages to invest the early scenes with atmosphere and a certain prosaic realism that kept me reading. Then he proceeds to give things a neat twist that generates considerable suspense and leads to one line that absolutely chilled me. I won’t reveal anything further, but I will say that Conjure Wife is a classic worth visiting.

   The book was filmed three times: once very respectably in England as Night of the Eagle in 1962, and previously as a dotty “Inner Sanctum” movie from Universal, Weird Woman (1944.) Written and directed by studio hacks (including Brenda Weisberg, one of the few women in the creative end of horror films, whose career, alas, is notable only for being unremarkable) Weird Woman is mostly beneath contempt, but it does offer a kind of silly charm if you can get past the notion of Lon Chaney Jr. as a scholarly academic irresistible to women.

   His solemn voice-over soliloquies add another layer of risibility, which fits in perfectly with the over-playing of over-heated dialogue from the rest of the cast. Looking back, Weird Woman is largely devoid of any artistic merit, but I have to say it’s done with an aesthetic consistency that held my unbelieving attention.

CHRISTOPHER FOWLER – Bryant & May Off the Rails. Bantam, hardcover, November 2009; trade paperback, September 2010. First UK edition: Transworld/Doubleday, hardcover 2010.

   The Peculiar Crimes Unit are still moving into the empty warehouse that will be their headquarters when they capture the serial killer known as the King’s Cross Executioner. Unfortunately for the Unit, Mr. Fox, as he is known to them, manages to kill one of the team and escape from their headquarters.

   So once again, unless they can recapture Mr. Fox by the end of the week, the Unit, headed by the elderly detective team of Arthur Bryant and John May is in danger of being disbanded.

   All they know about Mr. Fox is that his murders have been committed in the area of the King’s Cross Underground Station. Bryant is convinced that he will not leave the area because he is somehow psychologically tied to the locality around King’s Cross.

   Then they are called in by the Unit’s former medical examiner when a young, single mother is killed by a fall down a flight of stairs in the subway. The reader knows it was murder, but was it committed by Mr. Fox? On the back of the woman’s coat was a sticker which the Unit eventually traces to a group of University students sharing a house. Then one of those students goes missing.

   This seemed to me somewhat less satisfying than the previous cases of the Peculiar Crimes Unit. It strikes me that the author was consciously trying to make John May less eccentric than in previous books, although Bryant is still the same. It does have a pretty good final 50 pages or so and plenty of information about the London Underground system for those interested.

       The Bryant and May series —

1. Full Dark House (2003)

2. The Water Room (2004)
3. Seventy-Seven Clocks (2005)
4. Ten Second Staircase (2006)

5. White Corridor (2007)
6. The Victoria Vanishes (2008)
7. Bryant & May on the Loose (2009)

8. Bryant & May Off the Rails (2010)

LOUISE PENNY – A Rule Against Murder. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, January 2009; reprint paperback: September 2009. Published in the UK and Canada as The Murder Stone.

    In the fourth of Penny’s fine Canadian crime series, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his wife Reine-Marie are spending their wedding anniversary at the palatial Manoir Bellechasse lodge, within driving distance of Three Pines, the idyllic isolated town where the three earlier titles were set.

    The lodge is also the site of an annual reunion of the Morrow/Finney family, a dysfunctional group that harbors resentments and hatreds that go back decades. At first a bystander to the family’s in-fighting, Gamache becomes a major factor in their internal drama when the oldest daughter is crushed to dead by the newly installed statue of her father, a bizarre crime that borders on the impossible.

    The novel is littered with red herrings and other misdirection ploys that culminate in a hairbreadth encounter on the roof of the lodge that threatens the innocent as well as the guilty.

    The strong suit of this series is the portrayal of Gamache and of the setting, which, as in the Three Pines novels, is as significant a factor as the characters. In 1957, I spent a summer working at a lodge in Glacier Park, in a setting that rivaled that of the novel for its natural beauty. Manoir Bellechasse is extraordinarily well run, with a stuff that functions almost like the mechanism of a fine watch, a characteristic also of the lodge where I worked.

    I will add that there were undercurrents of hostility in the Glacier staff, but nothing that reached the level of venom that festers throughout Penny’s novel.

      Previously on this blog:

Still Life   (reviewed by Walter Albert)
A Fatal Grace   (reviewed by Tina Karelson)

ESCAPE. 20th Century Fox, UK, 1947. Rex Harrison, Peggy Cummins, William Hartnell, Norman Wooland, Jill Esmond, Betty Ann Davies. Based on a play by John Galsworthy. Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

   I don’t know about you – and there’s absolutely no reason I should – but when I think of Rex Harrison, I think of My Fair Lady. I’ve seen him in other films, I know, and so have you, I’m sure, but to me, Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins was such a defining role, it dwarfs anything else he ever did in comparison.

   There are scenes in Escape, however, in which Mr. Harrison is nearly 180 degrees the polar opposite of the impeccably dressed Henry Higgins, and which (perhaps) I will remember for an equally long time.

   Playing an escaped prisoner named Matt Denant, his headlong flight across the rough rural English countryside means watching him splash his way through numerous small rivers and streams, snatching food up from wherever and whenever he can, and ending up thoroughly covered with as much dirt and mud as you can possibly imagine.

   Convicted of manslaughter – having accidentally caused the death of an overly officious bobby accusing a young woman in a public park of being a prostitute (this aspect of the film portrayed discreetly – it is up to audience to come to their own conclusion that that is what she is), Matt Denant is (was) a well-to-do former fighter pilot in World War II. That he was unjustly imprisoned he is utterly convinced — and so, for that matter, is the audience, foursquare and solidly.

   And audiences ought to be trusted. They recognize and know the rigid, inflexible hand of justice when they see it. But one man fleeing a pack of bloodhounds on his trail needs assistance. Denant cannot do it alone, and coming to his aid (somewhat mystifyingly, even to herself) is a young socialite girl named Dora Winton (Peggy Cummins), who is engaged to be married, but who also sees in Denant a fox at the fox’s end of a fox hunt.

   William Hartnell, later of Dr. Who fame, plays the plodding Inspector Harris, intelligently and fairly but also unwaveringly, in the solid English tradition.

   Escape is most definitely belongs to the film noir category, one that’s nicely done, British style, but also one that’s slightly undone by the uplifting scene that takes place in the church that becomes a temporary place of refuge for Denant toward the end of the film.

   I happen not to think that the finale is as upliftingly optimistic as the audience is led to believe – and perhaps the audience at the time was wise to this as well – but also perhaps I am wrong. I like happy endings as much as next fellow. Even relatively happy ones.

EARL DERR BIGGERS – The Chinese Parrot. Paperback reprint: Pocket #168, 1942. Reprinted many times since, in both hardcover and soft. Silent film: Jewel, 1927; Charlie Chan: Sojin. Sound film: TCF, 1934, as Charlie Chan’s Courage; Charlie Chan: Warner Oland.

   All right let’s get the racist thing out of the way right now. The Chan books are not racist. (The books! I’m talking about, the books!) They are, in fact, ANTI-racist and anyone who reads The Chinese Parrot will clearly see that Biggers has no tolerance for the bigoted treatment of Chinese and the stereotyped depictions of pidgin speaking characters in fiction. Let me give you two examples:

    1. When confronted by the ignorance of Captain Bliss, a police officer who wants to charge Chan (in his disguise as Ah Kim, a servant) with a stabbing murder, Chan quickly turns the interrogation around and asks the Captain to produce a motive, fingerprints and the murder weapon, in fact any real evidence, before even thinking about continuing his bullying questions.

    2. In one of their many secret meetings Bob Eden asks Chan to deliver a message to Madden, Ah Kim’s boss. Knowing that he will have to use his comic servant pidgin speech Chan replies: “With your kind permission, I will alter that message slightly, losing the word very. In memory of old times, there remains little I would not do […] , but by the bones of my honorable ancestors I will not say ‘velly.’ ”

   OK? Enough said. Let’s move on, class.

   If Dell’s mapback series had started up much earlier than 1943 or so the editors might have chosen Earl Derr Biggers’ books as some of the first mysteries to release in paperback. The inside blurb page for The Chinese Parrot, the second Charlie Chan novel, might read something like this:

    What this book is about…

   A $300,000 string of pearls, a parrot that speaks Chinese, a murder without a corpse, a missing antique Colt .45 revolver, an abandoned trolley car with a mysterious occupant, several buried cans, a ghost town in the hills.

   This is a vastly entertaining, tightly plotted, and well written book. Instead of Hawaii, the action moves to the mainland. It opens in San Francisco then moves on to a Southern California desert town called El Dorado. Biggers has created some very American characters here and his gift for snappy dialogue makes the book all the more enjoyable.

   Chan has a much larger role here and as mentioned above is undercover in the role of a Chinese “boy of all work” called Ah Kim who cooks, tends to fireplaces and even acts as chauffeur. He teams up with the son of a jeweler, Bob Eden, to uncover some obvious criminal doings at the home of P. J. Madden, a millionaire intent on buying the valuable pearl necklace.

   The most baffling of the events is an apparent murder without a body. Tony, the African gray parrot of the title, is quite a mimic and in addition to spouting forth Chinese phrases he also squawks out, “Help! Help! Murder! Put down that gun!” Chan is convinced the bird was a witness to a murder.

   Discovery of a missing antique gun with two chambers empty, and an attempt to hide a bullet hole in a wall by covering it with a painting, both support the theory of a murder having taken place in Madden’s home. But just who was killed and where did the body go?

   Chan may have two white men as his aides in detection in this book, but it is he alone who will unmask the killer in a great finale where we see “his eyes blaze in anger” while covering the villains of the piece with two guns, one in each hand.. Truly, here is an excellent book not only in the series, but in all of early American detective fiction.

   Even more striking is that this particular book seems to have been written only a few years ago. There is no sign of that quaint style that often makes a 1920s book unbearable to me. With the exception of only a few topical references tied to the period (the mention of United Cigar Stores, radio as a form of “miracle technology,” a scene where movie actors start dancing the Charleston like maniacs on speed, for example) the story seems to be occurring in the not too distant past rather than the late 1920s.

   There is a movie location scout who talks about the motion picture industry as if it were now and not part of the silent era. There is a real estate agent trying his darndest to sell building lots in a developmental desert community called Date City. He spends his time tending to a feebly spurting fountain outside the gates hoping to lure “easy marks, uh rather, good prospects” into believing they’ll have a lovely new home and a rich life in what is now nothing but barren wasteland.

   And there is Biggers’ masterful handling of lively dialogue only occasionally peppered with period slang that makes this a thoroughly engaging and surprisingly modern read for something written 85 years ago.

   I read The House without a Key, the very first Chan book, last year and was also struck but its modern feel and its compassionate treatment of minority characters. I am now determined to read the remaining four books in the series.

   I’ve repeatedly found the Charlie Chan books in my book hunting and buying binges and have owned at least one copy of each title over time. Because I found them to be great sellers in the past I began buying them with the express purpose of making a little cash by reselling them on-line.

   Now with relatively affordable reprint editions from Academy Chicago at $14.95 a pop (with nifty period style cover art) I guess no one will want the older editions unless they come with the rare dust jackets. I’m glad to hang on to the four old Charlie Chan Grosset & Dunlap reprints and the one battered first edition I own of The House without a Key. I’m a new Chan fan for life and I’ll treasure the copies I was lucky enough to find.

           SIDE NOTE:

   For a fascinating read, find a copy of the recently published non-fiction work Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective & His Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang.

   It’s a combination of a biography, critical essay, and sociological study of the Asian American in popular fiction and movies. Primarily a biography of Chang Apana — a Honolulu policeman who served as the inspiration for Charlie Chan — the book also gives insights into the life of Biggers, all of the Chan books and many of the Chan movies.

   The similarities to Chan in the early books and Apana’s real life prior to his being a police officer are uncanny considering that Biggers had only heard mention of Apana and had never met or talked to him until 1930 or so.

       Previously on this blog —

The Keeper of the Keys (reviewed by Marv Lachman).

Castle in the Desert (a film review by Dan Stumpf).

ACROSS THE BRIDGE. J. Arthur Rank, UK, 1957. Rod Steiger, David Knight, Marla Landi, Noel Willman, Bernard Lee, Bill Nagy, “Dolores.” Based on a story by Graham Greene. Director: Ken Annakin.

   I do not believe I have ever seen a movie in which Rod Steiger had an important if not starring role that I did not find fascinating in one way or another, and that fascination has almost always meant considerable enjoyment.

   I cannot tell you why I had never heard of this movie until last month, nor do I remember who pointed it out to me then, but I owe that person or website a huge, great big thank you. I was fascinated with Mr. Steiger’s performance all the way through, and I enjoyed every minute of it tremendously.

   Steiger plays a German financier named Carl Schaffner in Across the Bridge, an arrogant fellow (as arrogant as having lots of money, mostly questionably gained, will allow, if not cause) who gets into trouble with Scotland Yard while he’s in Manhattan scheming away at his next plan.

   Trouble that’s serious enough that he makes his way headlong out of the country by train – no passenger lists, you see – but not fast enough for the news of his escape to make the newspapers while he’s still riding the rails.

   Thinking fast, he drugs a fellow passenger who looks like him, a gentleman traveling with Mexican papers, which he steals after dropping him off the end of the train. Fate has fickle fingers. The man who identity Schaffner has assumed is even more wanted than he is – an assassin with 100,000 pesos on his head, dead or alive.

   Ending up – after considerable travail, which I will restrain myself from going into – in a small town in northern Mexico, Schaffner finds himself with an unfriendly police chief watching his every move; a man from Scotland Yard breathing down his neck (but unable to touch him as long as he does not cross the bridge back to the US); no friends; and a dwindling supply of money. He is a victim of his own making, a desperate man trapped by his own avarice and greed.

   What Across the Bridge is, in my not-so-humble opinion, is a true noir film, as noir as noir can get. In this case, and I invite you to see this for yourself, the ultimate irony is that the worse his problems become, the more we (the audience) begin to empathize with him, with the plot taking some very surprising (if not bizarre) twists and turns (plus a good old-fashioned handful of healthy coincidence as well) along the way.

   There is one note I have to add, and it’s an important one. I said he had no friends in the paragraph above. I was incorrect in saying that, quite wrong.

   You cannot watch this movie and ignore the role played by mongrel dog (part cocker spaniel?) who belonged to the man whose identity he stole. A dog who steals nearly every scene she’s in. Remarkably, and totally in spite of himself, Schaffner does has one friend, one with the saddest eyes you will ever see.

   I don’t know whether Dolores was a method actor or not, but it is one of the characteristics of Steiger’s performances that he is known for. During the making of this film this put him at odds, so we are told, with Bernard Lee, for example, who plays Schaffner’s not totally ethical adversary from Scotland Yard, but the technique gives Steiger an edge up in every film I’ve seen him in. Across the Bridge, a movie that’s unfairly all but unknown today, is no exception.