MURDER ON THE BLACKPOOL EXPRESS. Gold, UK, 11 November 2017. Johnny Vegas (Terry), Sian Gibson (Gemma), Sheila Reid, Katy Cavanagh, Una Stubbs (her final performance), Nina Wadia, Kimberley Nixon , Matthew Cottle, Nigel Havers, Javone Prince, Susie Blake, Mark Heap, Griff Rhys Jones, Kevin Eldon. Written by Jason Cook. Directed by Simon Delaney. Currently streaming on BritBox.

   As I’ve always firmly maintained, humor is a funny thing. The viewers’ comments on IMDb about this recent comedy mystery from England are all over the place. What this is, in a way, is a takeoff on Murder on the Orient Express, except that the train is a British tour bus, taking its passengers to each of the murder scenes in the list of a famous mystery writer’s novels. He, David (Griff Rhys Jones) is of course along to squeeze every last shilling from their wallets and purses, what with gifts and souvenirs at each stop.

   It is also a takeoff from those “old dark house” movies that were all the rage in the 30s and 40s, without losing track of the fact that every so often they’re still popular today. Except that the passengers are trapped in a bus, and every time it stops, someone gets killed, and in a fashion very reminiscent of the murder in David’s books.

   In charge of this disaster on wheels are driver Terry (Johnny Vegas) and tour guide Genna (Sian Gibson), whose joint venture this is is about to go bust if the tour is not a success. The passengers are a motley lot. Many are elderly and/or suffer from dementia, secrets, or other mental failings. Dotty, you might say. All of them. Some more than others.

   Gradually, though, as the ranks thin out — either having become victims or having decided that staying on this wholly unexpected mystery tour is a whole lot more than they signed up for, bail out early – each of them unexpectedly begin to flesh out. Not in any Dostoevsky sense, mind you, but more than the caricatures of living, breathing people merely taking up seats they began as.

   The mystery is not bad, either, with a killer whose motive makes sense, even though there may not quite be enough clues to allow the viewer to solve the case ahead of time. (Red herrings, though? by the bucketful.)

   I enjoyed this, even as over the top as it often is. It was successful enough on its first showing to produce not only two sequels, Death on the Tyne (2018) and Dial M for Middlesbrough (2019), but a three-part miniseries, Murder, They Hope (2021), in which Gemma and Terry have given up the tour business and set up shop as private investigators. I see no reason why not.

ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION March 1967. Editor: John W. Campbell. Cover art: John Schoenherr. Overall rating: 2½ stars.

HARRY HARRISON “The Time-Machined Saga.” Serial, part 1 of 3. [Reprinted in book form as The Technicolor® Time Machine (Doubleday, 1967).] Review of full novel to be posted later.

MACK REYNOLDS “Radical Center.” Novelette. A Pulitzer Prize winning reporter discovers that the flood of anti-heroism, anti-patriotism, and cynicism, the symptoms of which are present today, is part of a plot to take over the US by apathy. Again, SF is the platform for sounding off; some entertainment value. (3)

MICHAEL KARAGEORGE “In the Shadow.” Novelette. A physics story about a shadow world entering the solar system, giving investigating scientists a chance for freedom Mostly unreadable or incomprehensible. (0)

[UPDATE: I have just discovered that Michael Karageorge is one of several pen names used by Poul Anderson.]

CHRISTOPHER ANVIL “The Uninvited Guest.” Rrichard Verner, heuristician, feeds an alien onions. (2)

R. C. FitzPATRICK “The Compleat All-American.” Two federal investigators discover a truly indestructible football player. The loose prose intrudes a bit too often. (3)

   So the question is, why am I so into the hardboiled detective novels of the 20’s-70’s?

   Nobody asked. So I asked myself.

   And what it is kinda first dawned on me on an art exhibit I saw in Montreal about “Streamlining” as American culture.

   Streamlining in American culture, the sleek aerodynamic look of toasters, Airstream campers, vacuum cleaners, radios, cars, planes, became ubiquitous sometime after the end of World War I. The design dominated American design throughout the 30’s and 40’s.

   It dawned on me that at the same time that American design was being streamlined, so was American prose, by such folks as Hemingway, Hammett and Jim Tully. Each of Tully, Hammett and Hemingway got their hardboiled everyman voice honestly. Hemingway as a war correspondent and army medic, Hammett as a soldier and Pinkerton, and Tully as a bindlestiff. Cheap pulp magazines and paperbacks made reading affordable for the masses. And they didn’t want to read the long-winded labyrinthian pages of Henry James. They wanted everyday language, terse and to the point.

   At this zenith of American culture, folks were confident that they knew who they were, knew right and wrong, and knew what they were saying and how to say it. There was very little existential angst. And I have to say, I envy them.

         —-

   So, the point?

   I’m not sure. But it may be helpful to illustrate what I’m talking about with some quotes and examples:

1. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner

2. “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Albert Einstein

3. In the 80’s made for TV movie, Somewhere in Time, Christopher Reeve is staying at a B&B when he falls madly in love with a woman in an old 1800’s photo. He obsessively finds out everything he can about her, and then surrounds himself with period clothes, coins and culture. After passing some threshold of obsession, he is able to traverse the space/time continuum, meet his fair lady and consummate his love.

4. In “Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote” by Jorge Luis Borges, a contemporary man decides he wants to spontaneously write Don Quixote, word for word. So he moves to the same area that Cervantes lived, builds himself a similar hovel, eats the same foods, drinks the same drinks, reads the same medieval chivalric romances, dresses the same, buys an old suit of armor, and, after passing some threshold of obsession, he is able to traverse the space/time continuum and spontaneously write Don Quixote, word for word.

5. “What you yourself can suffer is the utmost that can be suffered on earth. If you starve to death you experience all the starvation that ever has been or ever can be. If ten thousand other women starve to death with you, their suffering is not increased by a single pang: their share in your fate does not make you ten thousand times as angry, nor prolong your suffering ten thousand times. Therefore do not be oppressed by “the frightful sum of human suffering”: there is no sum: two lean women are not twice as lean as one nor two fat women twice as fat as one. Poverty and pain are not cumulative: you must not let your spirit be crushed by the fancy that it is. If you can stand the suffering of one person you can fortify yourself with the reflection that the suffering of a million is no worse: nobody has more than one stomach to fill nor one frame to be stretched on the rack.” George Bernard Shaw

6. In “A New Refutation of Time” by Borges, he argues that all that exists are experiences. The experiences exist regardless of ‘time’. You watch a cardinal as it sits on a fence. The experience of seeing the cardinal on the fence is all that there is. There’s no ‘you’. There’s no ‘time’. There’s just the experience of watching a cardinal on a fence. This experience has occurred millions of times, over millions of years. The experience is neither past nor future, neither true nor false. It simply is. All that we hope and all that we fear will never come to pass, because hope and fear always happen in a future that never comes. Rather, we are in an eternal present. An eternal flow of experiences, repeated eternally regardless of whether a single individuals may cease to be.

   So, the idea seems to be that the main thing is ‘time’. The main thing is the experience. What makes us grieve our loss is the unbreachable breach between present and past.

   But is it unbreachable? I beseech you: it is not.

   So how do I time travel? I read the books of the hardboiled era. I read Hammett, Cain and Chandler. I read Hemingway and Tully. I read the Macdonalds, I read the Bart Spicers, the Deweys, the Steinbecks, the Howard Brownes, the Tom Kromers, the Jack Blacks, the Norbert Davises, the Raoul Whitfields, the Harry Whittingtons, the hardboiled peeps. I read them and become an experience. An experience where I know who I am, I know right from wrong, I know what to say and how to say it. All is clear. There is no angst.

JACK DONAHUE – The Lady Loved Too Well. Harlan Cole #2. McGraw-Hill, hardcover, 1978. No paperback edition.

   Those of us who mourn the fact that there can be no more Perry Mason stories now have reason to rejoice once again! Here’s the second of a new series starring Houston attorney Harlan Cole, who, believe it or not, comes complete with an utterly devoted secretary and his own personal private detective.

   And of course there’s a flashy final courtroom solution climaxing the trial of his client, a famous woman’s lib author accused of killing her lover. As in all of Erle Stanley Gardner’s writing, the prose is purely functional, but with the added plus of modern bluntness and sexual candor. While it may be true that the murderer is guessable, that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?

Rating: B

   
TECH DAVIS – Full Fare for a Corpse.  Aubrey Nash #2. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1937. No paperback edition.

   The central premise of Full Fare for a Corpse is irresistible: Four days after Christmas, a transcontinental Union Pacific passenger train runs into a blizzard on the Wyoming Great Divide and comes up snowbound at a whistle-stop station in the middle of nowhere. Snowbound with it is a freight full of supplies, and nearby is a sheep ranch, so the 130 passengers and crew on board the ten-car train don’t need to worry about provisions.

   What they do need to worry about is that one of their number is a murderer. (If this premise sounds familiar, it may be because you — and Tech Davis — happened to read Agatha Christie’s  Murder on the Orient Express, which is about murder on a snowbound train in Yugoslavia and was published three years earlier than Full Fare for a Corpse.)

   Victim number one is an unidentified stranger who isn’t even on the passenger list, but is found in his robe and slippers in one of the compartments, shot to death under very unusual circumstances. Victim number two turns up not quite dead in the baggage car, laid out next to the remains of number one. There is also a victim number three. The task of unraveling all these events falls to suave, “semiprofessional” New York sleuth Aubrey Nash, with the help of an ex-Wyoming sheriff named Sargent. And unravel them they do, but not before the murderer strikes again at an impromptu New Year’s Eve celebration put on by the passengers to “ease the tension.”

   The handling of all this isn’t bad, although the novel does have its drawbacks: Davis’s prose is somewhat overblown, full of words like parturition and expatiated; Nash owes his origins (and methods) not to Hercule Poirot but to Philo Vance, though without Vance’s more obnoxious qualities; and more could have been done with the howling blizzard outside the train.

   On the plus side, the plot is tricky enough to keep one reading and guessing, and Nash’s piecing together of the puzzle is logical and well clued. There are also some good characters, some witty dialogue, and more action than you might expect in this type of whodunit. The whole thing is reminiscent of the better of those delightfully campy B-movie melodramas of the same period .. A good evening’s entertainment.

   Davis published two other novels featuring the exploits of Aubrey Nash: Terror at Compass Lake (1935), which has an upstate New York setting; and Murder on Alternate Tuesdays (1938), set in New York City.

———
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.

BART SPICER – Black Sheep, Run. Carney Wilde #4. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1951. Bantam #1049, paperback, 1952.

   Carney Wilde is one of the top private eyes in Philadelphia. He just opened his brand new office that he can’t afford and a cop he knows busts in on the office-warming party and urgently needs to talk to him.

   The police superintendent committed suicide a week back, but he left a note confessing to graft and naming names. New Jersey gamblers had been paying off cops to look the other way when shuttle services shipped Philadelphians to and fro from Jersey to enjoy an evening of debauchery. The list included the name of a mutual friend, the most honorable homicide detective on the force. The cop hires Carney Wilde to clear his name.

   Wilde heads to Jersey to try to figure out the payoff structure. He ends up getting tailed by another P.I. hired by a reform group of mugwumps aiming to clean up corruption in the City of Brotherly Love. But before Wilde knows it, he’s been framed for the murder of the mugwumps’ P.I., and now the law is after him too. Now Wilde not only has to vindicate the cop, but vindicate himself whilst uncovering the deep dark twisted conspiracy behind the framing of the innocent by the grifters themselves. Who’s behind the conspiracy? And why are the mugwumps so embedded in the swamp?

   Hopefully I’m not giving too much away by saying that the story’s a bit reminiscent of One Lonely Night and The Manchurian Candidate.

   Carney Wilde is a believable, likeable, very human detective, with all the frailties and passions of an everyday guy. He’s no hero. He’s just trying his best. Which is generally good enough.

   I enjoyed the book, as I did the only other in the series I’ve tried (The Long Green). I think he deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as Ross Macdonald and Thomas Dewey and William Campbell Gault. Which is to say that, to apply Somerset Maugham’s self-denigrating quote: “in the very top rank of the second rate.”
   

      The Carney Wilde series —

The Dark Light. Dodd 1949.
Blues for the Prince. Dodd 1950.
The Golden Door. Dodd 1951.
Black Sheep, Run. Dodd 1951.
The Long Green. Dodd 1952.
The Taming of Carney Wilde. Dodd 1954.
Exit, Running. Dodd 1959.

   I’ve been in the hospital the last few days, totally unexpectedly. Seems as though I misdiagnosed what I thought was heartburn for far too long. Turns out it wasn’t. One stent later the guys in the operating room proved it to me. All numbers back to normal now, and I feel good, but if I’d delayed any later, maybe not.

JAMES E. MARTIN – The Flip Side. Gil Disbro #2. Putnam, hardcover, 1990. Avon, paperback, 1991.

   While Cleveland-based PI Gil Disbro had a respectable four-book run in the early 1990s from a couple of major publishers, he doesn’t seem to have made much of an impression on the mystery reading public. Reviews of his books on the Internet are relatively few, and as is the case with several other PI’s of the same era, he’s generally forgotten now.

   In The Flip Side, his second outing, the case builds from almost nothing to a complicated tale of kidnapping and two murders. He’s hired by the shy tutor (female) for the young son of a college professor, both of whom have disappeared. Just another missing persons case, he thinks, more suitable for the police to handle, he thinks, if even there is a case.

   It doesn’t take him long, though, to learn how wrong he is. Luckily, though, Disbro is one of those guys whom the people he questions start telling their entire life stories to. If he wasn’t, I don’t think he’d have much of a career as a private investigator. But he’s also persistent, in the well-established Lew Archer sense, if not out and out doggedness, and closes out the case in fine fashion.

   Since he tells his story in first person, it takes a while to tell what kind of person he is, inside and out. He’s young, dressed casually, and while a heavy smoker, doesn’t drink a lot. He lives with a college professor (female) who is a few years older than he is, but he (unfortunately) can be seduced by one of his suspects (also female) for no good reason.

   Overall, though, a better than average outing. I’d read another, if one comes along, but without the urgency of needing to hunt down another, if that makes sense.

LEE THAYER – Guilt Edged. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1951.  Unicorn Mystery Book Club, hardcover, four-in-one edition. No paperback edition.

   Here’s a book that has everything – old N’Orleans atmosphere, poor but grand old Southern. families., Creole legends, faithful family retainers (“colored” servants), an inexplicable stabbing, a lovely girl — but why go on? The detective is Peter Clancy, with his English “man” Wiggar. They work along with good-natured, but not too swift Chief of Detectives Burns.

   The trouble is that Peter Clancy is not too swift either. His reason for being in New Orleans is a mysterious letter – anonymous and made up of cut-out printed words, of  course — with an enclosure, a gold certificate for $1000. For those of us who don’t remember, gold certificates are yellow on one side. “Guilt edged,” get it?

   Despite the scattering of clues wholesale in front of Clancy’s  eyes, he sleuths away on other tracks until light finally dawns. Long after it dawned on me. Sorry, folks, good detect1ng it ain’t; if you like atmosphere laid on with a trowel, it may be for you.

PAUL STANTON – Village of Stars. M. S. Mill/William MOrrow, hardcover, 1960; Permabooks M4230, paperback, 1962.

   Nothing so defined the 1950’s and the early 1960’s as the novel of nuclear terror. Some were science fictional post apocalyptic novels like Philip Wylie’s Triumph and Pat Frank’s Alas Babylon, while others were strictly thrillers like Ian Fleming’s Thunderball and Wylie’s (again) The Smuggled Atom Bomb. There were tense warnings of the dangers of nuclear brinksmanship like Eugene Burdick’s Fail Safe and Peter George’s Red Alert (which became the black humor of Dr. Strangelove) and frightening tales of that brinksmanship gone too far like Nevil Shute’s On The Beach.

   Village of Stars was probably the first one of these book I ever read at age twelve. The man behind the pseudonym Paul Stanton was David Beaty, a fine British aviation novelist in the Nevil Shute/Elleston Trevor tradition who was best known for Cone of Silence.

   The set up for the novel is fairly simple, and riveting.

   There is a crisis in the Middle East, it is getting hotter by the hour. Russian troops are on the move and the West is taking note. Sabers are rattling.

   Helen Durrant is the personal assistant to Air Marshal Chatterton when she meets Squadron Leader John Falkner. The chemistry is almost immediate, and like people living on the edge in any place in the world things move pretty quickly. At the same time things are moving quickly in the Middle East.

   Our main characters set and the milieu of impending nuclear war there to ratchet up tension it is inevitable that Falkner will be sent on a mission to the hot spot, that while he is on patrol the tension comes to the boiling point. So much so that Falkner has to take a step he has never taken before.

   One of his nukes, F6, is armed. F6 is capable of destroying a 40,000 square mile area. And for a few tense moments the world sits on the edge of the razor. Then the order comes.

   The Russians have withdrawn. They are pulling back.

   Falkner and crew can breathe a sigh or relief.

   The fuse can be disarmed. But you can’t always put the djinn back in the bottle.

   K6, the nuke, will not defuse. There is no way for Falkner and his crew to defuse the bomb.

   They are near the limit of their flight path, fuel is getting low. There is no place on Earth they can reach and safely dump the nuke, and if the ship drops beneath 5,500 feet the nuke will detonate. If they crash into a mountain above 5,500 feet the nuke will detonate.

   There is one chance in the Arctic Sea, but when they reach that spot there are ships from the Russian fleet there. Dropping K6 or even ditching would trigger WWIII.

   What now? As they fly over Greenland Falkner wonders what if he just dumped the nuke in the ocean, saved the life of his crew and took the consequences. Who could really blame him?

   There is one last chance if they have enough fuel, a landing field at Nairobi at 5,700 feet. Awfully close, but still, a chance, with two hundred feet to spare…

   The hero chooses not to think about it, but Stanton is perfectly happy to let us sweat it out. There is a streak of sadism in good suspense writers that has never been sufficiently explored.

   Village of Stars is a heavy breather, a well written two-fists on the wheel read, that builds up, in its relatively short length, considerable suspense. It is tightly written, and would not work half as well as a bloated best seller. Stanton/Beaty keeps the story moving, switching between characters and settings, avoiding the tiresome soap opera of most bigger books to focus on the immediate problem and danger, which in this case is more than enough.

   By the time you reach the end, even if it is all a little dated today, you may want a hug and a drink like John Falkner. It’s still a hell of a ride.