From Kenneth R. Johnson:

   I am hoping to repost my on-line reference book, The Digest Index, this year; to that end I am trying to tie up some loose ends. One minor quandary concerns a short-lived digest imprint called Pennant Mystery. I have one volume, The Six Iron Spiders by Phoebe Atwood Taylor. The back cover ad lists itself and three other titles:

      Death out of Thin Air by Stuart Towne
      So Much Blood by Bruno Fischer
      The Purple Parrot by Clyde B. Clason

   I have been absolutely unable to confirm the existence of these three other titles from any secondary sources. They are not listed in the World Catalog or the National Union Catalog. There are no known cover reproductions anywhere and I have not seen any of them offered for sale in the 14 years since I first posted The Digest Index. I am beginning to suspect that these are phantoms, advertised but never actually published.

   Does anyone out there actually have one of these, or at least have seen one on the hoof?

   Several months ago I wrote a column discussing some of the pre-World War II Inspector Schmidt novels written by Aaron Marc Stein under the byline of George Bagby. The last of these, which I don’t have and for that reason didn’t discuss, was MURDER CALLING “50″ (1942). Aaron spent the years after Pearl Harbor first in the Office of War Information, then in the Army where he served as a cryptographer. His military specialty plays a large role in the first postwar Bagby novel.

   DEAD ON ARRIVAL (1946) was published five or six months after the end of the war but is set and may have been written in its early years, with references to blackouts and the rubber shortage and all the male characters of military age waiting to be called into the service. For a novel the unities of time and place are extreme, with the action covering about twelve hours—between late on a Sunday afternoon in 1942 or ‘43 and before dawn the next morning—and mainly confined to a single building, an old brownstone worthy of Charles Addams in Manhattan’s East Fifties, occupied by a hyper-eccentric old cripple and his two all-but-deaf servants, who happen to be judo experts, with a female antique dealer and a young engineer living in the house next door.

   Schmitty and Bagby happen to be in Bellevue Hospital on business when a hysterical Western Union messenger boy is admitted, claiming he found a dead body in the house where he delivered a telegram. This makes Schmidt the first cop to arrive on the scene, and the crime quickly proves bizarre enough: a corpse with a broken neck and a pair of panties found inside his suit who is soon identified as the only living relative of the house’s owner, a wheelchair-bound old man with a long long beard in which he keeps various objects like chessmen.

   The panties prove to belong to the antique dealer next door, and both she and the young engineer living in the same building turn out to have a habit of visiting the house where the murder happened by climbing from the fire-escape balcony of the one brownstone onto that of the other. Before the end of the book’s twelve-hour time span there are three more murders.

   The synthetic rubber process that ultimately motivated the killings isn’t even mentioned till the seventh of the book’s ten chapters, and the cast is so small that the Least Likely Suspect is rather easy to spot even though Bagby can hardly be said to play fair with the reader. The long message in cipher which Schmidt discovers during the night leads to a fascinating lesson in cryptography even though it implausibly requires both Bagby and the guy who fashioned the message to be experts in that arcane science. Aaron’s addiction to super-lengthy sentences remains intact from the pre-war years, as witness this one example among many.

   
   These literary Dagwood sandwiches may not be to everyone’s taste but they’re okay by me and were also acceptable to Anthony Boucher, whose review for the San Francisco Chronicle (10 February 1946) simply capsulized the plot and welcomed Schmitty back into action “with a huzzah.” As who didn’t?

   Tony was especially fond of those whodunits that offered what he called a dividend, by which he meant a trove of reliable information on some off-trail subject. In DEAD ON ARRIVAL the subject was cryptography but the dividend had little to do with the plot. In the next Bagby novel the integration between those elements is near perfect. THE ORIGINAL CARCASE (1946) shares with its predecessor a very tight time frame, with events kicking off on the evening of Wednesday, September 4, about a year after the end of the war, and winding up less than 24 hours later.

   As in DEAD ON ARRIVAL, Schmitty is the first cop on the scene. He’s in Bagby’s apartment—a building with twin towers in whose upper stories are units with terraces—when the two men hear a horrible scream coming from the only terrace apartment in the tower opposite Bagby’s that is ablaze with light. In a few minutes they’ve discovered the cause of the scream: a young bride and her husband, returning from their honeymoon, were greeted by the bride’s friends and relatives (not the groom’s) with a surprise party which was cut short when the bride opened the cupboard doors of one of the wedding presents, a 7-foot-long Sheraton mahogany sideboard, and found a dead body inside.

   No one can identify the strangled corpse but Schmitty soon begins to wonder whether the murder has any connection with the social backgrounds of the newlyweds, the bride coming from an upper-crust family and her husband the younger brother of a notorious Prohibition-era gangster who, in a time of severe housing shortage, secured the apartment for them. During the small hours, after the police have left and the unit is deserted, someone manages to sneak in and throw the sideboard off the terrace into the street, smashing it to smithereens.

   Later in the night comes, as usual in Bagby, a second murder, the victim this time being a key employee of the antique dealer who provided the sideboard. Tony Boucher’s description of the novel in the Chronicle (20 October 1946) was nothing short of ecstatic. “To the average reader a delightfully told story; to the mystery technician a model of precisely how to integrate a love motif, an absorbing dividend and a perfectly plotted problem.”

   Just as THE ORIGINAL CARCASE shows us that Aaron must have spent a good deal of his spare time prowling around antique shops, the next Bagby novel indicates that he was equally fond of sports events. THE TWIN KILLING (1947) opens on a steamy summer night with Schmitty investigating the barber-shop murder of a big-time gambler with a habit of getting himself shaved and spruced up in that shop after it was closed to the public.

   According to the evidence the Inspector painstakingly accumulates in the first and most interesting chapters, the murderer might have come straight out of an Ellery Queen novel. First he broke into the gambler’s apartment and stole his .45 and a pair of his shoes, then he bought a ticket at a flea-pit theater which was showing a war flick with lots of shooting, changed into the stolen shoes, left the theater by the balcony fire door, crossed over to the roof of the adjacent barber shop, shot the gambler with the .45 through the shop’s open skylight during the movie’s loudest combat scene, crossed back to the theater, changed back into his own shoes and split.

   It’s only after this reconstruction that baseball enters the picture in the form of the dead man’s connections with four players, two old hands at the game and a pair of promising rookies. Aaron never mentions the name of the team nor what stadium they play in, but Schmidt and Bagby while on the case get to attend three games, the last of which provides the setting for what is all but inevitable in a Stein novel, a second murder, with all the suspects from the first murder conveniently in the ballpark.

   I wouldn’t call this one fair to the reader, but the baseball environment and players are vividly rendered—thanks perhaps to iconic sportscaster Red Barber, to whom the book is dedicated—and all in all Tony Boucher’s comment in the Chronicle (6 April 1947) can’t be improved on: “A trifle loose in solution but as fresh, lively and agreeable a sports whodunit as has turned up in years.”

HARRY CREWS – The Gospel Singer. William Morrow, hardcover, 1968. Dell, paperback, 1969. Reprinted many times since.

   The Gospel Singer’s about a gospel singer. We never learn his name. He’s just “The Gospel Singer.”

   Born to a family of pig farmers in Enigma, Georgia, he’s much prettier than the rest of the family (couldn’t be any uglier). He’s much prettier than the rest of the town.

   Then at the age of 11, as his voice chords mature, his gift is exposed.

   He has a transcendent, melodious, otherworldly, sonorous singing voice. And when he sings the gospels, all the ladies turn to jelly, and all the men fall to their knees begging forgiveness for their sins.

   The thing is, though, the Gospel Singer’s not particularly religious. He’s not against it or anything. It’s just not his bag.

   His bag? Gettin’ laid.

   And my golly, this gospel singin’ is the ticket, for God’s sakes.

   When he sings that old time gospel music, He sings that old time gospel music. All the sweet silken virgins slither at His feet. They succumb to His will. They will do as He pleases. And it pleases him (if not Him). Quite a bit.

   It’s all going well as long as no one finds out about it.

   But MaryBell screws up the whole works.

   MaryBell is his boyhood sweetheart. Everyone in town is in love with darling MaryBell. But she belongs to the Gospel Singer. Everybody knows it.

   MaryBell is as pure as satin sheets on a bed of fresh snow.

   But when she hears the Gospel Singer sing, her clothes fly off faster than white on rice.

   She naturally assumes that they’ll get married.

   But the Gospel Singer ain’t too interested in settling down at the moment.

   MaryBell gets pretty upset about losing her virginity without proper consideration.

   So she hatches vengeance for her scorn.

   She builds a church in the Black part of town. The Church of the Gospel Singer. And there’s no pictures of Christ anywhere. Just pictures of the Gospel Singer.

   And she organizes it and ordains a preacher, a reformed, born again, badass: Willalee Bookatee Hull.

   And then as soon as the Church of the Gospel Singer is up and running, she tries to seduce Willalee.

   When Willalee refuses to sin, “She say, you saved on a lie, the church a lie, the Gospel Singer a lie. She say, God is a man with his pants down, God is a unbuttoned fly. She say, the Gospel Singer …. and I git her with the ice pick. I taken her by the throat and hit her and hit her and hit her.”

   So now MaryBell’s dead, Willalee is gonna be lynched not for murdering MaryBell, but for raping her. For deflowering the flower of Enigma. A crime of which he is innocent.

   It’s up to the Gospel Singer to set things right.

   And if you believe that, then you’re confusing Harry Crews with Flannery O’Connor.

   Not only aren’t things put right.

   The whole thing is going straight to hell.

DAY KEENE – Passage to Samoa. Gold Medal #823, paperback original; 1st printing, November 1958. MacFadden Book #50-384, paperback reprint, 1967.

   A non-stop reading adventure taking place in the South Pacific, complete with beautiful women, a deep-sea diver with all of his equipment, a sleepy lagoon, a sunken ship with safe reportedly full of money, and bodies piling up a regular intervals throughout the book, starting from page three on. What more could you ask for?

   One wonders how Day Keene knew so much about diving, boats and islands in the South Pacific, because that’s all that this book is about. Well, besides the usual human emotions of greed, jealousy, and lust, which were what all of Day Keene’s books were about. Matt Kelly is the diver, and rich spoiled brat of a woman named Sylvia Ryan is the stepdaughter of the man who died on the small ship now sitting om the bottom of over a hundred feet of water.

   Is it any surprise that they are in bed together soon after the first murder occurs? This is the kind of stuff that was so enticing to teenagers sneaking peeks in Gold Medal paperbacks on every spinner rack in every drugstore in the country back in the late 1950s. What they learned from them is rather tame now, over sixty years later, even on network TV, and you can tell me if that’s a good thing or not.

   As for the story itself, I found Keene neatly finessing his way a couple of the weaker spots of the overall tale, but as for otherwise being a compulsive non-stop reading adventure, as I said at the top of this review, you’d better believe me. It is.

  THEY WERE SO YOUNG. First released in Germany as Mannequins fur Rio (Corona Filmproduktion, 1954). Lippert Pictures, US, 1955. Scott Brady, Raymond Burr, Johanna Matz, Ingrid Stenn, Gisela Fackedely, Eduard Linkers, Gert Frobe. Screenplay by Felix Lutzkendort and Kurt Neumann. Suggested by Interpol files compiled by Jacques Compandez. Additional screenplay uncredited by Dalton Trumbo, Michael Wilson, and Ernest Blass. Directed by Kurt Neumann.

   Their hearts were high in the sky … They never knew their feet were in the dirt.

   Sometimes mistakenly identified as film noir, this West German and American co -production is pure exploitation with only the presence of American stars Scott Brady and Raymond Burr anywhere near actual noir.

   It opens with the discovery of a dead half-nude young woman on the beach in Rio de Janeiro, with a quick stop at the Brazilian police who announce this is a case for Bureau 19 of Interpol.

   That noted, and despite the film allegedly being based on Interpol files and one later mention of the International Police (there is not and never was such a thing and Interpol has no enforcement abilities much less having any agents in 1954 television and movies to the contrary — I’ll save my rant about the infamous and phony Interpol for the comments section if anyone doesn’t know their troubled history) that aspect of the film ends with this single reference.

   Very quickly this switches from an investigation by Interpol to a straight up story of innocent girls caught up in a white slavery ring.

   “The Desperate Drama of Lost Women,” as the trailer claims.

   Eve (Johanna Matz) and Connie (Ingrid Stenn) arrive in Rio in the company of M. Albert (Eduard Linkers) who has brought them to Rio to work as fashion models living and working at the Villa Berganza under the direction of Mdme. Lansowa (Gisele Fackedely), “You’ll meet a good many rich and cultured people… I suggest you let me choose your friends at first.”

   Among the rich and cultured people they meet is Jaime Coltos (Raymond Burr) a local tycoon and his American engineer Richard Lanning (Scott Brady) just back from six months in the jungle. Burr is attracted to Connie, and Brady, a little worse for drink, gets a water bottle broken over his head by Eve.

   Eve has caught on what Villa Bergandza is a front for and she and Connie leave the next day seeking help, but they have no papers and the police show little sympathy. Gaslighted by Albert and Mdme. Lansowa they find themselves back at the Villa Bergandza with no authorities they can turn to, not even their own Consulates.

   But Eve, out on an arranged date, remembers Lanning is at the hotel where she is taken and goes to him for help. He agrees after spying the men who followed Eve and plans to let her stay in his room while he seeks help, but an emergency phone call from Coltos forces him to return to the jungle and Coltos’s villa there.

   Rather than leave Eve he decides to take her with him and perhaps persuade Coltos, an influential man, to help her. I won’t offer any Spoilers here, but it you haven’t figured out the twist coming you haven’t paid attention to any movie of this type you have ever seen, much less ever seen a movie from this period with Raymond Burr in it.

   Brady plays the usual somewhat lunk-headed gauche American abroad common to this era. At least here his blundering is blundering, not portrayed as somehow an advantage. At best you can say his character is determined to help the girl however ineptly.

   Eve ends up prostituted on a riverboat where Connie has been sent run by the murderous Captain Lobos (Gert Frobe) used as a pleasure boat for the local workers and Lanning, by now falling for her, slips on board with a party of workers with an ally hoping to help Eve escape.

   Another twist more or less out of left field awaits them, but Interpol still has nothing to do with it.

   Running a short hour and twenty minutes this is a fairly tight, well done little melodrama that skirts film noir and exploitation without ever being exactly one or the other. However exploitative the trailer and campaign for the film, it never comes anywhere near living up to that promise. Despite a few scenes this was mostly shot in Hamburg.

   Some film enthusiasts may get all excited by the uncredited appearance of Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson’s names related to this, and there are a few decent bits of dialogue here and there that they might have contributed, but honestly you could never tell watching this such distinguished company worked on it. Neither the story nor the dialogue suggests anything special here. At most they might have punched up the script for the American dubbing.

   Brady is fairly charming here as a mostly one-note hero, exactly what is called for, but nothing more. Matz is attractive and innocent enough if a little hard to believe as quite this naive despite a back story out of Dickens and Little Nell. The villainy is acceptably smarmy and Ingrid Stenn actually halfway good as the doomed Connie.

   I do question if Connie is really a common name for Belgian girls, but then I lived in France not Belgium.

   The exploitative American title sounds like some sort of teen drama or soap opera which probably kept this from getting to any audience it might have had on initial release.

   It’s currently available on YouTube. Nothing special here, but better done than you might expect with the American stars lending a bit of weight to it. It’s worth killing an hour or so if you have nothing better to do which is actually fairly high praise for this kind of film.

EDWARD D. HOCH “The Theft of the Brazen Letters.” Short story. Nick Velvet #4. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, November 1968 (their 300th issue). First collected in The Spy and the Thief (Davis, digest-sized paperback; 1st printing, December 1971).

   The reason I like Hoch’s Nick Velvet series so much is that there’s always a twofold mystery to be solved in them. Nick’s fee is $20,000 per each commissioned theft he agrees to take on, and each time it is always for some insignificant object that no one would ever think worth stealing. Mystery number one: How does he mange to steal that very insignificant object? Mystery number two: Nick is also a very inquisitive guy, and of course he’s always also interested as to why he was asked to steal the item he does.

   For example, from the introduction to this story in EQMM, previous thefts he’s taken as assignments include stealing a tiger from a zoo, water from a swimming pool and a toy mouse from the prop room of a movie studio. In “The Theft of the Brazen Letters,” he asked to steal three of seven neon letters from the outside of a commercial building. The seven letters are SATOMEX. I think you can deduce on your own which three letters Nick’s client wants stolen, but I don’t think you’ll have any more idea than I did as to why.

   As is usual for Ed Hoch’s stories, this is purely a puzzle tale. Nothing more nor anything less, and that’s super fine for me. There’s even a bonus in this one, as Nick has the local cops to contend with, and as a surprise to me, he’s one up on them as well. The zinger at the end is simple, but a zinger nonetheless.

THE FOREIGNER. STX Films, 2017. Jackie Chan, Pierce Brosnan, Michael McElhatton, Liu Tao, Charlie Murphy, Orla Brady, Katie Leung. Written by David Marconi, based on the 1992 novel The Chinaman by Stephen Leather. Directed by Martin Campbell. Currently streaming on Netflix.

   The Foreigner may not come with instant name recognition, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a well-crafted, solid thriller. Directed by Martin Campbell (Casino Royale), the movie benefits from the presence of two action stars: Pierce Brosnan, who Campbell directed as James Bond in GoldenEye (1995) and Hong Kong-turned-Hollywood martial arts star, Jackie Chan.

   This, however, is not your comedy/action hybrid 1990s Jackie Chan movie. Gone is the humor and the goofy, charming persona that he imbued with ease into nearly every character he portrayed. Here, Chan plays against type as a broken, lonely, and vengeful father determined to avenge the death of his daughter. It’s striking how Chan all but disappears into his character. Moving with a sullen gait and with notable bags under his eyes, Chan’s character – a man who has lost everything and has nothing to lose – is mourning personified.

   Chan portrays Ngoc Minh Quan, a London restaurant owner of Chinese-Vietnamese heritage. A dedicated father, Quan ends up witnessing his daughter die in a bombing perpetrated by a rogue IRA splinter group in London. From then on, his life will never be the same. Not only is his wife gone – she died giving birth to his daughter – but he is also suffering from the ongoing trauma of having lost two young daughters when fleeing the communist takeover of South Vietnam decades ago.

   Quan sets his sights on Liam Hennessy, a Sinn Féin politician now serving as Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland. The British have tasked Hennessy with finding out who the rogue IRA operatives in London were. Complicating matters is the fact that Hennessy has an IRA past, one that he swears is behind him. But is it? Quan, for one, certainly doesn’t think so.

   As the movie progresses, the film reveals itself to be driven by two narrative thrusts. One deals with Quan’s single-handed quest for revenge. As it turns out, the beaten down Quan has more than one trick up his sleeve. As a young man in South Vietnam, he had Special Forces training and served with the US Army with distinction. Those skills, while perhaps a little rusty, prove to be very useful to Quan as he takes out many of Hennessy’s men. It’s great to see that Chan has still has many of his martial arts acting chops (pun intended), even though there are moments when he gets a little too John Rambo – think First Blood (1982) – for believability’s sake.

   The other, more interesting, story line concerns Hennessy’s divided loyalties and vulnerability in the tinderbox of Belfast politics. Brosnan shines here as a former terrorist who has supposedly decided to break away from his violent past and advance his cause through the political system instead.

   Trying to please both the British and the young radicals in Catholic nationalist circles proves a heady job, one that seems to have strained his marriage beyond repair. Like any good movie about Northern Irish politics, there are betrayals and plots, schemes and broken dreams. In The Foreigner, it’s Chan’s character who enters this insular world and lights the matches that end up burning it all to the ground.

   Both entertaining and captivating, The Foreigner is one of the better thrillers that I’ve watched recently. It’s nothing I would go out of my way to watch a second time, but it kept me interested enough. One final thought: for whatever reason, I don’t remember any songs from the movie. There is a soundtrack, however and it blends seamlessly with the downbeat, claustrophobic atmosphere of the film.
   

CARROLL JOHN DALY – The Snarl of the Beast. Edward J. Clode, hardcover, 1927. Gregg Press, hardcover, 1981. Perennial, paperback, 1992. Lead story in The Snarl of the Beast: Race Williams, Volume 2 (Altus Press, 2016).

   Carroll John Daly was one of the fathers of the modern hard-boiled private eye, a primary influence on such later writers as Mickey Spillane. His style and plots seem dated today, but the presence of his name on the cover of Black Mask in the Twenties and Thirties could be counted on Lo raise sales of the magazine by fifteen percent.

   Daly’s major contribution was Race Williams, the narrator of Snarl of the Beast and the first fully realized tough-guy detective (his first appearance, in the June 1, 1923, issue of Black Mask, preceded the debut of Hammett’s Continental Op by four months). Williams was a thoroughly hard-boiled individual. As he says of one criminal he dispatches, “He got what was coming to him. If ever a lad needed one good killing, he was the boy.” Williams doesn’t hesitate to dole out two-gun, vigilante justice.

   The Snarl of the Beast has an uncomplicated plot: Williams is asked by the police to help track down a master criminal known as “the Beast” and reputed to be “the most feared, the cunningest and cruelest creature that stalks the city streets at night.” Williams is willing to take on the job and to give the police credit for ridding the city of this menace, just as long as he gets the reward.

   Along the way he meets a masked woman prowler, a “girl of the night,” and of course the Beast himself. Daly is not known for literary niceties — his style can best be described as crude but effective — yet there is a certain fascination in his novels and his vigilante/detective. Characterization is minimal and action is everything. “Race Williams — Private Investigator  — tells the whole story. Right! Let’s go.”

   Race Williams also appears in The Hidden Hand (1929) and Murder from the East (1935), among others. Daly created two other series characters, both of them rough-and-tumble types, although not in the same class with Williams: Vee Brown, hero of Murder Won’t Wait (1933) and Emperor of Evil (1937); and Satan Hall, who stars in The Mystery of the Smoking Gun (1936) and Ready to Burn (1951), the latter title having been published only in England.

     ———
   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.

DOUG SWANSON – House of Corrections. Jack Flippo #5. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 2000. Berkley, paperback, May 2001.

   Fifth in the series and unfortunately the last. Rather than repeat myself, for more about the author and some additional comments about the series and its leading character, you can do a lot worse than to see my review of Dreamboat, number two overall, posted here on this blog nearly fifteen years ago

   Some of which needs repeating, though. Before becoming a mostly unsuccessful PI,  Jack Flippo was an Assistant D.A. in Dallas. His boss back then is now retired but in trouble. He’s in jail, and he needs help. It seems he was driving a car belonging to his wife, was stopped for speeding, and the cops in a dump of town found a “smidgen” of heroin in the car.

   What he needs Jack to do is find his wife, who is off sailing somewhere in Galveston Bay. It sounds easy enough, and Jack owes the guy, and so he says yes, which as it turns out is a bad, bad mistake. Somehow the case is connected with the deaths of two drug dealers in the same small tank town as Luster, and guess what, the wife is proving harder to find than she should be.

   This is one of those books in which nobody, and I mean nobody, is telling the truth, sometimes two or times over. Flippo is also not the brightest bulb in the box, so it takes him a while to figure this out, and even then he always seems one step behind. What the author Doug Swanson is doing here is taking the most irreverent way of telling a PI story, shaking all the usual ingredients around, and seeing what comes out. Down and dirty is only half of it.

   It’s a rip-roaring of an ending, though. I wouldn’t mind seeing a movie made of this one. Maybe Robert Mitchum as Jack Flippo; Lance LeGault as Wesley; Cybill Shepherd as the wife; and Margot Kidder as the intrepid girl reporter anxious to make her mark in the world. It’s quite a mix, and it’s too bad the series ended with this one.

TENSPEED AND BROWN SHOE “The Robin Tucker’s Roseland Roof and Ballroom Murder.” ABC, 03 February 1980 (Season 1, Episode 3). Ben Vereen (E. L. “Tenspeed” Turner), Jeff Goldblum (Lionel Whitney). Guest Cast: Elayne Heilveil, John Pleshette, Leo Gordon. Created & written by Stephen J. Cannell. Director: Arnold Laven. Currently streaming  at the Shout Factory website

   As I recall, whenever I’ve found the series available, whether streaming online or on DVD, the first two episodes, comprising a two-part pilot, has not been included. And so, as a direct consequence, I’ve never been properly introduced to the two main characters in this quite enjoyable comedy slash mystery show – the main question being how these two quite opposite fellows got paired up in the first place. The second question I still have is how they got their nicknames, which are barely mentioned in this one, if at all.

   I could use a helping hand, in other words. And on this blog, that’s what the comments are for.

   Based only on this third episode then, Ben Vereen (Tenspeed) is a fast talking con man who ia apparently out on parole, while Jeff Goldblum (Brown Shoe) is a former accountant who has always dreamed of becoming a PI, and now here he is as one. He’s quite the opposite in personality to his new partner, being uptight and unwilling to be in any way shady in how he operates.

   This one begins with the latter receiving a thousand dollar bill by private courier, along with the halves of two others. He is promised the other two halves if the job he is offered is accomplished correctly: to find a young girl with only a photo and address to go on. As it so happens, she is a very naive dime-a-dance girl at a 1940s era dance hall, apparently with no adjustment for inflation, and the story goes on from there. Quite naturally as in stories such as this, bodies pile up more quickly than we the viewer even know who they are or were. It is equally obvious that more than one party wants to find the girl.

   It’s all done in solid tongue-in-cheek fashion, with full awareness of all the well-established tropes of the PI novel, with dialogue to match. One phrase that I remember was along the lines of “the fat man had more chins than the Hong Kong phone directory.” And the two stars appear to be having a good time with all the fun and games they are asked to play. I don’t know what reaction yours might be, but I had as much fun with this one as the two players seem to have had.