HAROLD Q. MASUR “The Corpse Maker.” Short story. Scott Jordan. First published in Come Seven, Come Death, edited by Henry Morrison (Pocket, paperback original, 1965). Never collected or reprinted (unless advised otherwise).

   Attorney Scott Jordan’s client, a notorious fence, is guilty as charged, but when the D.A. offers to make a deal, he turns him down. It seems that the police forced their way into the man’s apartment and searched it without a warrant. So why then does the man not show up for his trial? Has he skipped bail just when he’s about to go free?

   Totally baffled, Jordan tracks him down and finds him at home almost beaten to death. He names his assailant and an (almost) dying message, which of course gives Jordan a lot to go on. And he needs it, as the case is (almost) as complicated as a full-length novel, complete with another killing and (of course) a beautiful girl.

   All to the good, but the story is badly marred by heavy coincidence – two, in fact, occurring on the very same page. Nor in the length of the tale (22 pages) is there time for any real detection. Jordan’s explanation fits all the facts, but how he managed to put them all together is not gone into. And in spite of the fact that I’ve enjoyed all of the Scott Jordan novels I’ve read, that was a long time ago, and I was disappointed with this one. In “The Corpse Maker,” he’s as straight and narrow as white bread, with not a ounce of grittiness to him.

   I’ll have to go back and read some of his early books again.

RICHARD NEELY – No Certain Life. Jove, paperback original, 1978.

   It begins as an idyllic Hollywood love affair. A handsome would-be screenwriter meets a promising young starlet, lonely and compulsively withdrawn, but a long weekend together seems to change all that. Then overnight their brief world of happiness crumbles to panic-stricken dust. She has a husband already, it turns out, a former prisoner of war not at all the same person since his release. An attempt at hospitalization fails, she flees, her new lover finds her, but back in Beverly Hills her mother-in-law is found, slashed to death.

   At this point one expects no more than a rather common chiller-thriller in the vein of Hitchcock or perhaps one of his bloodier imitators, but the pacing lags more than it seems it should, and the observant reader (aren’t we all?) will puzzle over certain inconsistencies in the behavior of some of the characters. Of course all is not what it seems, but the feeling begins to grow that Neely dashed this off on a bad day.

   Wrong! The ending is certain to make a shambles of all premature conclusions. Neely is not writing by the strict rules of classical deduction. and while the “locked room” aspect of the two lovers’ nightmare of terror is nearly lost to view, it can’t be missed the second time through.

   Beyond saying that this is indeed a book which has to be read a second time, I can’t give anything more away, but while this smashing knockout of a story was surely written with an eye for the movies, do read it now.

Rating: B plus.

     
   Novels:

Death to My Beloved (1969)
The Plastic Nightmare (1969) aka Shattered. Filmed under the latter title in 1991. Reprinted by Stark House Press.
While Love Lay Sleeping (1969) Reprinted by Stark House Press.
The Walter Syndrome (1970)
The Damned Innocents (1971) aka Dirty Hands. Filmed under the latter title in 1975.
The Sexton Women (1972)
The Smith Conspiracy (1972) Finalist 1973 Edgar Award for Best Paperback.
The Japanese Mistress (1972)
The Ridgway Women (1975)
A Madness of the Heart (1976) Finalist 1977 Edgar Award for Best Mystery
No Certain Life (1978)
Lies (1978)
The Obligation (1979)
An Accidental Woman (1981)
Shadows from the Past (1983)
   

ROBERT O. GREER – The Devil’s Hatband. CJ Floyd #1. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1996; paperback, 1997.

   This is a first novel by an author described as “doctor,  scientist, cattle rancher, and editor.” I make the maybe unwarranted assumption that he’s black.

   His protagonist, CJ Floyd, is, anyway. CJ is in his forties, a Viet Nam vet who is now a bail bondsman and part-time bounty hunter in Denver. Two black corporate types want him to find the daughter of a black judge who happens to be on the board of a big-time biotech corporation — the one they work for — and in the process retrieve some unspecified but important papers she stole.

   He finds her easily enough, but she’s already a corpse. His search for the missing papers lands him in the middle of an environmentalist terrorist plot aimed at the cattle industry, and in danger from unexpected sources.

   This wasn’t a bad first novel, though it wasn’t exceptionally good, either. Greer tells his story third-person primarily from Floyd’s standpoint, and does an adequate job of moving it along. I thought the Colorado ambiance was well done, too. The plot seemed to me to have a thread or two too many to it, and they didn’t quite come together believably at the end.

   Floyd had his moments, but    never did come fully to life for me. Greer put a fair amount of black rhetoris in the narrative, but  it had a distinctly  upper-middle-class ring to it; he doesn’t doesn’t know how to talk the talk.  BarbaraNeely probably wouldn’t give him the time of day.

   Blurb to the contrary, I don’t think he’s quite ready to “take his place beside Walter Mosley” — too many “buts.” Maybe later.

      The CJ Floyd series

1. The Devil’s Hatband (1996)
2. The Devil’s Red Nickel (1997)
3. The Devil’s Backbone (1998)
4. Resurrecting Langston Blue (2005)
5. The Fourth Perspective (2006)
6. The Mongoose Deception (2007)
7. Blackbird, Farewell (2008)
8. First of State (2010)

RICHARD S. PRATHER “The Guilty Party.” Short story. PI Shell Scott. First published in Come Seven, Come Death, edited by Henry Morrison (Pocket, paperback original, 1965). Collected in The Shell Scott Sampler (Pocket, paperback original, 1969).

   Shell doesn’t have anything close to a major crime to solve in this one, and a full page of its full thirteen is taken up in describing his newest client, from the top of her head to her toes. She’s quite an eyeful, and Shell doesn’t know whether to ogle, leer, or just outright stare:

   
   It also turns out that she is quite wealthy, in the multi-million dollar range,

   So why has she come to hire Shell Scott? It turns out that a small metal device fell out from under her bed when got up that morning. Shell quickly deduces that it was a listening device of some kind. A bedbug, if you will. Who could have put it there? The only person who’s been in Lydia’s apartment recently is her fiancé.

   If nothing else, Shell knows a cad when he sees him, or in this case, learns about him.

   Once in Lydia’s apartment, he puts on a show for her, bouncing up and down on her bed, yelling YOWZA! (I’m paraphrasing), while she’s yelling back, STOP! and WHAT ARE YOU DOING? And he replies, DARLING!!

   It’s one way to flush out a cad when you need to in a hurry.

   Obviously this is a very minor effort, but it’s also exactly what devout readers of Shell Scott’s wackier adventures had come to expect, and it’s also exactly what they got.

C. J. COOKE – The Nesting. HarperCollins, UK, hardcover, 2020. Berkley, US, paperback, 2020. Setting: Norway.

First Sentence: Aurelia sprints through the dark forest, her white nightdress billowing like a cloud, her strides long and swift across the carpet of bark and brambles.

   Lexi Ellis has a troubled past but grabs an opportunity. She becomes Sophie Hallerton, nanny to the daughters of architect Tom Faraday on an isolated property in Norway. Far from an idyllic situation, there are things that can’t be explained and the suspicion that Farraday’s late wife didn’t die by suicide after all.

   This is one of the rare times the prologue actually works. Cooke’s descriptions, metaphors, and inclusion of Norse folk tales add to the pleasure of the story. Tom is an annoying and perhaps inept architect, but his youngest daughter, Gaia is delightful. One appreciates how Lexi/Sophia grow through the story. She is strong; a survivor. When she commits an acts traditional thought of as “too stupid to live,” it makes sense and is in keeping with her personality.

   Cooke is very good at seeding doubt about the characters. I’m not at huge fan of unreliable characters, but it works perfectly here. The story alternates between two time periods but in a way that is clearly indicated and not at all confusing.

   For those who enjoy a bit of paranormal mixed with suspense, this is very well done. Norse folktales, elk, spectral figures are a few of the bump-in-the-night elements. The story sends shivers up the spine without crossing into horror. Best of all, it serves a purpose to the plot.

   There are inconsistencies and a questionable ending. There is quite a bit of foreshadowing, but it works. However, the twists, metaphors— “Grief is not a mere felling —it’s an isotropic space.”, pacing, characters, plot, concept and heart-pounding climax completely offset those issues. Her descriptions make both locations and emotions real.

   The Nesting is far from the typical Scandinavian noir. It’s a book one doesn’t put down, and an author to be read again.

Rating: Good Plus.

ERSKINE CALDWELL – The Bastard. Heron Press, hardcover, 1929. Novel Selections #51, paperback, 1953.

   In a review of Harold Q. Masur’s Bury Me Deep, the PaperbackWarrior blog criticized the protagonist’s supposed lack of virility, claiming “The problem is that American crime fiction really hadn’t grown a set of balls by 1947.” They go on to credit Mickey Spillane as the tonic.

   The claim is so false it makes me want to cry. But I won’t for fear they’d impugn my manhood or something.

   Anywho, no one reading The Bastard could accuse the protagonist of “lacking balls.”

   Gene, who I’ll refer to as “the bastard,” is a bastard. In all the senses.

   We’re introduced to him as he murders a patron of his whore (literally — I’d never use the word figuratively unless I was really really mad (which I am not at the moment)) of a mommy.

   Then, his mother either not knowing or not caring, the bastard decides to become a client.

   And that’s the light humor to begin the tale that only gets darker from there.

   It’s an episodic book that just goes from scene to scene of aimless, conscienceless rape and murder.

   Then, like Alex in Clockwork Orange’s final chapter (the one deleted from the film and American edition of the novel), he falls in love and decides to settle down.

   But karma’s a bitch. And his wife births a freak whose sheer hideousness destroys his wife, and sets the bastard once more adrift.

   If you like to rubberneck car wrecks, this one’s for you.

P.J. Universal, 1968. George Peppard, Raymond Burr, Gayle Hunnicutt, Brock Peters, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Jason Evers, Coleen Gray,Susan Saint James, Severn Darden, George Furth, Herb Edelman, John Qualen, Bert Freed, and Arte Johnson. Written by Philip Reisman and Edward Montagne. Directed by John Guillermin.

   Universal raised tastelessness to a high art in a B-movie I dearly love called P.J., with George Peppard surprisingly believable as a not-too-bright PI up against Raymond Burr as a nasty gazillionaire who hires him to protect his mistress (Gayle Hunnicutt) who’s been getting anonymous threats — or has she? The threats are understandable since Burr’s family (including Colleen Gray, Susan St James and George Furth, doing a Paul Lynde impression. Remember Paul Lynde?) don’t like the way Burr flaunts his girlfriend around.

   In fact, there isn’t much to like about him in this film; it’s one of his nastiest parts in a film career full of brutes, wife-killers and gorilla suits, leading Peppard to quip, “That’s what I like about you; you’re all arm-pit,” which is about the level of wit here.

   In fact, tackiness is the major charm of a film that loves to wallow in its own disrepute. PJ starts off in a seedy motel room and moves on to a run-down gym where worn-out pugs fight for a job. When it moves to the haunts of the very rich, we get garishly decorated apartments, sterile offices, and a nightclub where bikini-clad dancers swish their butts around in a giant martini. Real class.

   Later on, a studio jungle in a back-lot Caribbean island elevates the cheapness to something like epic scale, followed by a return to New York for some more engagingly crude violence, including a guy getting dragged to his death in a subway tunnel and a fight in a gay bar where our hero gets mauled.

   But like I say, these things are the backbone of a movie that returns the Private Eye to Chandler’s Mean Streets, updated to the 1960s and slashed with Technicolor, but meaner than ever, with an added layer of corporate greed that seems relevant today but may be merely timeless. Peppard stalks through it all like a once-promising leading man resigned to doing B-pictures, with added zing provided by John Guillermin’s punchy direction (he did Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure) and a script that tries for wit but settles for sarcasm.

   A few other points before I leave this charmer: I reviewed this movie about thirty years ago for DAPA-EM and at that time I reviewed it in the past tense because it didn’t exist anymore; when PJ was released to television (which was mainly where you saw old movies back then) they cut out all the sex and violence, toned down the unsavory elements and turned a crude movie into an insipid one. For decades, this was the only print available, but thanks to the internet and cheap DVD technology, the film has risen again, with all the ugly charm of a monster in an old movie.

   Secondly, I should caution prospective viewers that this film takes a very retro view of gays. The movies openly recognized homosexuals in the late 1960s, but they were almost invariably portrayed unsympathetically and even demeaningly. Like everything else in the movie, PJ turns this up a notch, with Severn Darden in a performance he should be heartily ashamed of as a lisping, mincing, quivering sissy. Add to this an extended fight in a gay bar that looks like one of the lesser circles of Hell, and you can see how gays — or those who believe they should be treated like human beings     — could get quite offended here.

   Finally, a word about Raymond Burr’s performance. In my youth I watched films like this in search of a role model. Well, Raymond Burr in this movie looks so eerily like a vice-president from earlier in this century that I wonder if someone else saw the film back in ’68 and fixated on him.

   The character enjoys nastiness for its own sake, relishing the humiliation and even torture he can inflict on others. He even goes to one of those clubs where birds with clipped wings are released on cue for “hunters” to blast away at. The similarities are positively unsettling, and I begin to wonder if the film was simply unavailable for so many years, or actually repressed by a previous administration.

ELIZABETH DALY – The Book of the Crime. Henry Gamadge #16. Rinehart & Co., hardcover, 1951. Berkley F-959, paperback, date? Bantam, paperback, 1983. Felony & Mayhem, trade paperback, 2016.

   Elizabeth Daly was sixty-two years old when she published her first novel, Unexpected Night, in 1940. She wrote sixteen more over the next dozen years, all but one of them featuring a low-key, informal (and somewhat improbable) amateur sleuth named Henry Gamadge; The Book of the Crime is the last of her novels, although she lived another sixteen years after it was published.

   Daly’s mysteries are fair-play whodunits concerned with murder among the upper classes, and therefore very much in the British Golden Age tradition: in fact, Agatha Christie once said that Daly was her favorite American detective-story writer.

   Many of her books have integral bibliographic elements; Gamadge is at his best in these, owing to his position as an author and consulting expert on old books, manuscripts, and disputed documents. A man “so well bred as to make Lord Peter Wimsey seem a trifle coarse” (Anthony Boucher), Gamadge works out of his fashionable home in New York’s East Sixties, which he shares with his wife Clara; his young son; an assistant named Harold; and a cat named Martin that prefers petting to being petted.

   In The Book of the Crime, Gamadge undertakes to help young Rena Austen, the bride of an odd, secretive war veteran. For a year she has been living-unhappily with her husband, Gray, and his relatives in a musty old New York house he inherited; and for almost that long she has known that she “made a fearful mistake.”

   That mistake turned to real fear when Gray caught her looking at two apparently harmless old books in a little-used sitting room and, in a reaction both violent and inexplicable, grabbed the books and locked her inside the room. Rena managed to escape and, with the help of a young man named Ordway, ran off to the Gamadge household, where she has been protectively installed in the guise of the family nursemaid.

   To find out the truth behind her husband’s strange actions, Gamadge investigates Gray and his relatives-and soon finds himself enmeshed in a tangled web of murder and larceny on a grand scale . The identity of the two old books plays an important part in the solution to the mystery, as do Gamadge’s many New York connections, both social and official. Along the way there is much bookish talk, homey scenes with the Gamadges, and a new romance for Rena.

   Like all of Daly’s novels, this is a sedate, erudite puzzle that should please fans of Christie and fans of bibliomysteries alike.

     ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

A LOVELY WAY TO DIE. Universal Pictures, 1968. Kirk Douglas, Sylvia Koscina, Eli Wallach, Kenneth Haigh, Sharon Farrell, Ralph Waite. Screenplay by A. J. Russell. Directed by David Lowell Rich. Currently available on YouTube.

   I confess I like this slightly smarmy, somewhat generic private eye tale more than it has any right to be liked.

   I hadn’t seen it since the mid-eighties, and then on television with commercials, so it was a pleasant surprise to find it on YouTube and discover it was pretty much the film I remembered, with all the caveats above including a few new ones about how quickly it veers from near comedy to melodrama like a leaf in the wind.

   Kirk Douglas is Jameson “Skye” Schuyler, a New York City cop who as the film opens resigns from the force after busting one too many heads. Schuyler is that staple of the movies, the tough cop whose methods are too direct for his own good.

   He’s no Dirty Harry or Popeye Doyle. He’s about as generic tough guy cop fed up with bureaucracy as you can imagine. That’s okay because it only takes up about three minutes of plot time anyway.

   He’s also a womanizer and a bit of a rat as the opening scene demonstrates, but this isn’t film noir by any stretch. His playboy lifestyle is played strictly for comedy up to the point he spots some made men in a bar and busts heads.

   To be honest I don’t think anyone involved with this other than Douglas or Wallach would know film noir if it bit them.

   No sooner is Douglas out of a job than he gets a call from Tennessee Fredericks (Eli Wallach), a smooth talking Southern Fried criminal defense lawyer who never lost a case and isn’t planning on doing so with his latest client, Rena Westabrook (Sylvia Koscina), whose husband took a bullet in their pool after they argued while she was out on the town with playboy Jonathan Fleming (Kenneth Haigh).

   Now Rena and Fleming are about to go on trial for murder and Fredericks wants Schuyler to baby sit her on her estate, keep Fleming away, and do a little private investigating into anything Fredericks can use, including the only witness he has, local tree trimmer Sean Maguire (Ralph Waite) who saw the couple outside a local bar when the murder happened.

   It’s pleasant work, pleasant wages, and pleasant scenery in the person of Rena and her maid (Sharon Farrell) who liked to wear her clothes and flirt with her husband. Farrell has nothing to do, but she fills out a maid’s uniform nicely.

   Rena is a bit of a kook, honest to a fault that she married her husband for his money and didn’t love him or even like him. Her nickname is Gypsy, and it fit her even if her in-laws meant it as an insult. She wears it as a badge of honor.

   And Fredericks is too slick by half: “Would you trust someone who hadn’t been south of Mason-Dixon since he was eight and talks with that accent?” Schuyler asks him.

   Things start going wrong almost as soon as Schuyler moves in. It’s hard to keep Fleming away and Rena doesn’t cooperate much. Then Maguire disappears, their only collaborating witness, and there is something going on at the neighboring mansion of a reclusive Englishman that has men with guns hanging around and a body in a freezer.

   Still, even with all that going on Schuyler and Rena start to flirt and play at the edges of things.

         Rena: You’re really a terrible man, did you know that?

         Schuyler: You’ve got some admirable qualities yourself.

   You know they are going to end up horizontal, and true to the somewhat bi polar nature of the film there is a funny morning after scene when Schuyler does the walk of shame back to his room barefoot past the staff.

   As the trial goes on there is an attempt to kill Schuyler, then a body shows up and the police want to question him, but slowly he starts to put the pieces together, and finds a tie other than Rena and Fleming between her husband and the tree trimmer. Meanwhile Rena is lying about Fleming and sneaking out to see him. Did she murder her husband after all?

   The film is pretty to look at. New York seldom looked prettier outside of one of those glamorous Doris Day pictures from a decade before, though the sets are pretty generic. Douglas seems to be having fun in a much lighter mode than usual, and Koscina in a series of bikinis, sleek outfits, and negligees is more than worth looking at in widescreen technicolor as well as good on screen.

   She seldom got to act in American films, but she was certainly worth watching.

   Basically this is the film equivalent of a Frank Kane Johnny Liddell book or a lesser Peter Chambers novel by Henry Kane. There’s nothing special, but the mystery isn’t bad, there’s some action, only one really big slap up the head moment I won’t give away, pretty girls in various states of undress, and big name stars like Douglas and Wallach having fun without phoning it in.

   In the years since I first saw this in the theater it still holds up for me. I will not be shocked if it doesn’t for you. It’s not any kind of a classic, not special in any way, not overly witty, or exceptionally well directed or photographed (some of it looks like it was made for television as too many films of that era do).

   I just happen to like it, smarmy as it may be. It does its job for its running time, doesn’t embarrass itself, and says goodnight politely without leaving a bad taste, but I admit freely I might not like it half as well if I had first seen it at thirty and not eighteen.

   You might want to keep that last thought in mind if you seek it out.

LAWRENCE BLOCK – The Canceled Czech. Evan Tanner #2. Gold Medal d1747, paperback original; 1st printing, 1966. Reprint editions include: Jove, paperback, 1984; Otto Penzler Books, hardcover, 1994; Berkley, paperback, 1999; Harper, paperback, 2007.

   The underlying gimmick in Lawrence Block’s “Evan Tanner” books is that he is also known as The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep, or the title of the first book in the series. I have misplaced my notes as to how he got the injury to his head that caused the problem, but the fact is that he cannot fall asleep. I don’t know if it’s possible in the real worlds, but he is up and awake 24 hours a day.

   Which as gimmicks go, it’s quite a good one, or it would be if it ever came into play as this particular book goes on, but it doesn’t. For reasons that were probably gone into a lot more thoroughly in the first book, the head of some very hush-hush organization thinks Tanner works for him. His assignment: help the last of the high echelon non-German Nazis escape from his prison in Czechoslovakia where he’s about to go on trial and be executed.

   Tanner wonders why. It seems that the US has been secretly monitoring all of Janos Kotacek’s communications with the outside world from his lair in Portugal, and they have decided it would be more useful to keep him alive than to have him dead. The job won’t be easy, but Tanner agrees to give it a try.

   When he gets to Czechoslovakia, however, he has no plan. He’s the kind of fellow who takes his opportunities wherever he can get them. And thus enter Greta, the daughter of the man, a devout follower of the imprisoned man, who agrees to help Tanner get Kotacek free. To that end, Greta, who is not as political as her father, is sent along with Tanner to aid and assist him as best she can.

   And what she really does best she does in bed. Both buxom and blonde, she is everything men in the 1960s dreamed of in a woman – a nymphomaniac. Sometimes, Tanner realizes, it is better not to have a plan. Greta’s proclivities in this regard, as it so happens, is exactly what he needs to pull off the most wild and woolly escape possible.

   The story is basically serious, but Block tells with such a light touch that the pages fly by. Once the escape has taken place, though, and Greta is no longer needed, she disappears from the story completely, never to return, and it’s quite a slog to get Kotacek back to his home is Lisbon. I’m deliberately leaving out all of the details of both the first and second halves of the story, but I would like to say the first half is by far the better one.