THERE WAS A YOUNG LADY. Nettlefold Films, 1953. Michael Denison, Dulcie Gray, Sydney Tafler, Bill Owen, Charles Farrell, Robert Adair, Geraldine McEwen, Kenneth Connor, Bill Shire. Screenplay: Lawrence Huntington. Story by Vernon Harris & John Jowett. Director: Lawrence Huntington. Currently available on YouTube.

David Walsh (Michael Denison) is one of those rather hapless English public school types common to British comedy in the Post-War era, a nice chap, but not really suited to anything practical like the jewelry business he has inherited from his uncle and knows nothing about—though he certainly has an eye for great watches, which adds a touch of charm to his otherwise impractical nature. He’s especially fond of dressing them up with CNS Watch Bands, adding a bit of stylish flair to his otherwise outdated sensibilities. See the collection of vintage Omega watches available here. Interested in clone watches? Then check out these beautiful superclone watches. You may also check out this Rolex Superclone here. These classic timepieces, with their timeless elegance, are just the sort of treasure that might tempt a dreamer like David. Luckily for David, his fiancée Elizabeth (Dulcie Gray) not only knows jewelry, but business.

In fact she has a bright idea to buy the family jewels of a titled old school chum (Bill Shire) of David’s who is in a money bind, and sell them at a tidy profit if she can get past David’s stubborn refusal to use his old chum for business.

Pushed to the brink by David’s recalcitrance and more than a little annoyed by the obvious crush the sexy receptionist (Geraldine McEwan — yes, Miss Marple) has on him Elizabeth walks out …

And right into a smash and grab hold up at a nearby jewelry store. When the frightened criminal (Bill Owen) grabs her and drags her to the getaway car she finds herself in the company of a hopeless crew of wanna be mastermind Sydney Tafler, muscle man Charles Farrell who would rather garden, Owen, and none to bright Robert Adair who wants to be a chef.

Truth is, these boys are so poorly organized Elizabeth takes pity on them and masterminds their escape just to get her ordeal over more quickly, but now they are holding her hostage at a manor house outside London that Farrell’s uncle watches for the owners.

Luckily Elizabeth is able to slip a note to David on a tip she gives a local (Kenneth Connor) who gives them a lift on his hay cart after they dump the getaway car. Unluckily he doesn’t notice.

While Elizabeth gradually takes over the gang because she is so much smarter than the rest in the way of this kind of comic crime caper David decides her plan isn’t so bad after all and arranges to buy the collection from his friend putting it in their office safe — the old one because he refused delivery on the new one Elizabeth bought while he was still mad at her — and forgets to call the insurance company when Connor shows up with Elizabeth’s note.

Meanwhile the efficient Elizabeth, having befriended one of crooks, convinces them to make a killing by holding up the jewelry exchange where she and David have their offices with a promise to free her if the plan works. And wouldn’t you know it they hit the wrong office — hers.

Other than a really annoying theme song this is a cute minor British comedy of the era, hardly a rival to Ealing Studios or any classics of the form from that time, but enjoyable on a British Damon Runyon note with comic crooks, a hapless hero, and a heroine frustrated by not being taken seriously despite being smarter than everyone around her.

It’s clever, the characters well developed, and the actors fine. Denison was successful minor lead, Gray a competent actress, and the faces like Tafler, Owen (Compo on the long running British comedy Last of the Summer Wine), Adair, McEwen, and Connor — all familiar faces even if you don’t know the names.

There is a particularly nice bit as a snide Gray reads a cheap thriller in bed out loud while outside, unknown to her, Denison is doing the exact same things she is narrating. There’s also a nice attempted hold up by the boys in the city that goes awry in exactly the way Elizabeth predicted ironically because of Denison and his titled friend who keep getting in the way while shopping for an engagement ring for the friend.

There are no big laughs here and only the most minor of physical comedy bits, but it is an entertaining time killer that performs well above its class, and has a nice ironic and charming ending, charm being the operative word for the entire film.

DAY KEENE “Nothing to Worry About.” Short story. First published in Detective Tales, August 1945. Collected in League of the Grateful Dead and Other Stories (Ramble House, 2010). Reprinted in Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy & Otto Penzler (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).

   There is a long tradition of stories such as this one. It is a prime example of tales in which one half of a married couple plans to kill the other one, but even though the planning is perfect, things do not work out as well as the guilty person had in mind.

   In this one – and far from the very first one in its subgenre – an Assistant State’s Attorney named Sorrell, and someone who should know better but who’s arrogant enough to think he can get away with it, decides to kill his wife, a woman he now hates and who, he is convinced, is holding his career back. But even more, he has another woman in mind already to replace her.

   It doesn’t work out, of course, but in addition to than the well-timed twist in the end, author Day Keene fleshes out the other characters, too, ones that other writers might even have omitted, or at best glossed over. And yet I demur. There’s nothing really new in this one. It’s a good story, but why (I wonder) was it recently selected as one of the “Best American Noir of the Century”?

BRUNO FISCHER – The Hornets’ Nest. Rick Train #1. Dell #79, mapback edition, [date?]. Cover by Gerald Gregg. Previously published in hardcover by Morrow, 1944. Originally appeared in Mammoth Detective, May 1944, as “Murder Wears a Skirt.”

   While this was newspaper reporter Rick Train’s first appearance in print, he could have just as well have been a private eye with one last case before he’s called up by the army as part of the war effort. Not only is he fairly known as a guy who’s broken or solved several big cases, he’s also noted as a collector of all kinds of guns as well as being a crack shot with all of them.

   With only a week before he reports for duty, he finds himself up to his ears in yet another case of double homicide, beginning with a somewhat forlorn young girl with a story she’d like the Train’s paper to buy. Turning her down because he’s already cleared out his desk, he soon learns that she’s been shot and killed soon after leaving him. He doesn’t have a client, but he is of course committed to finding her killer.

   The case, as it turns out, involves an estate that’s up for grabs, with no less than three claimants for the money. All three have good credentials. The question is which one wants the money more than the others? And all the while Train is trying to answer that particular question, he soon becomes the target of the killer himself, presumably – a woman who seems to be as good with a gun as he is.

   The story is competently told without being anything close to exceptional, with characterization next to nil. As a pulp writer, though, with lots of tales well under his belt, Fischer’s prose is smooth enough to keep this one moving. Until that is, when it comes to the final solution and explanation. Without the reader even noticing, the story turns out to have been more complicated than he or she probably realized: it takes eleven full pages to get through Train’s explanation of everything that had just happened in the previous 180.

   Never mind that. As a detective Train is good enough that I had to wonder why his second and final appearance was only in Kill to Fit, a digest-sized paperback original published by a third-rate company called Five Star Mysteries (1946). (Whether that one also first appeared in pulp magazine under a different name, I do not know.)

FREDRIC BROWN “Before She Kills.” Novelette. Ed & Am Hunter. First published in Ed McBain’s Mystery Book #3, 1961. Collected in Before She Kills (Dennis McMillan, 1984).
Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg (Carrol & Graf, 1988).

   Ed and Am Hunter are a rather unique uncle-nephew private eye team based in Chicago. “Am” is short for Ambrose, who is the uncle. Ed is the one who tells their stories; at least he is for this one. According to the cover of the magazine where this one first appears, this is their first case that appeared in novelette form. There were six novels before this one, then followed by another novelette and one final novel.

   In “Before She Kills” they’re hired by a man who suspects that his wife plans to kill him. To that end Ed poses as the man’s semi-estranged half brother whom his wife has never met. The woman is a former strip-tease dancer who once married has decided that sex is something she never wants to do again. To that particular end, their client has found another woman to love and to love him. Secretly they have a young son together.

   There’s nothing here that’s terribly exciting. There’s certainly no mean streets to go down. What there are, though, are a lot of ways the story could go from here, and Fred Brown does with it what he always seems to do: find yet another way for the story to end – one that’s not quite expected but one that’s quietly quite pleasing all  around. As mentioned earlier, there’s nothing really outstanding about this particular tale, but it’s a good one.

   Ron Goulart died this morning, the day after his 89th birthday. As I understand it, he’d been in an assisted living facility for the last month or so. Although he’d been in poor health and we hadn’t gotten together in several years, I’m happy to say that he was a friend of mine.

   Back in the 1970s through the early 90s (I’m guessing) I used to meet him every month or so at the local comic book show, where we discovered early on that we had a lot of interests in common: mysteries, science fiction, comic books and above all, pulp magazines.

   It was, in fact, his book The Hardboiled Dicks, a collection of stories from the detective pulps, that changed my life around, and for the better. What’s more I know I’m not the only one. Many other collectors of those old magazine have told me the very same thing.

   I’ve taken the list below from Wikipedia, and it’s not complete, but it’s a huge part of what I’ll remember him by. But the funny thing is most what I remember him by right now is the day I helped him use a metal hanger to help him get into his car he’d locked himself out of.

   Goodbye, Ron. I miss you.

Non-fiction

The Hardboiled Dicks: An Anthology and Study of Pulp Detective Fiction (1967)
Assault on Childhood (1970)
Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of the Pulp Magazines (1972)
The Adventurous Decade: Comic Strips In the Thirties (Crown Publishers, 1975) ISBN 9780870002526
Comic Book Culture: An Illustrated History (1980)
The Dime Detectives (1982)
The Great Comic Book Artists (St. Martin’s Press, 1986) ISBN 978-0312345570
Focus on Jack Cole (1986)
Ron Goulart’s Great History of Comic Books: the Definitive Illustrated History from the 1890s to the 1980s (Contemporary Books, 1986) ISBN 978-0809250455
(editor) The Encyclopedia of American Comics: From 1897 to the Present (Facts on File, 1991) ISBN 978-0816018529
The Comic Book Reader’s Companion: an A-Z Guide to Everyone’s Favorite Art Form (Harper Perennial, 1993) ISBN 9780062731173
Masked Marvels and Jungle Queens: Great Comic Book Covers of the ’40s (1993)
The Funnies: 100 Years of American Comic Strips (Adams Media Corp, 1995) ISBN 9781558505391
Comic Book Encyclopedia: The Ultimate Guide to Characters, Graphic Novels, Writers, and Artists in the Comic Book Universe (Harper Collins, 2004) ISBN 978-0060538163
Good Girl Art (2006)
Good Girl Art Around the World (2008)
Alex Raymond: An Artistic Journey: Adventure, Intrigue, and Romance (2016

Non-series novels

Clockwork Pirates (1971)
Ghost Breaker (1971)
Wildsmith (1972)
The Tin Angel (1973)
The Hellhound Project (1975)
When the Waker Sleeps (1975)
The Enormous Hourglass (1976)
The Emperor of the Last Days (1977)
Nemo (1977)
Challengers of the Unknown (1977)
The Island of Dr Moreau (1977) (writing as Joseph Silva)
Capricorn One (1978)
Cowboy Heaven (1979)
Holocaust for Hire (1979) (writing as Joseph Silva)
Skyrocket Steele (1980)
The Robot in the Closet (1981)
The Tremendous Adventures of Bernie Wine (1981)
Upside Downside (1981)
The Great British Detective (1982)
Hellquad (1984)
Suicide, Inc. (1985)
A Graveyard of My Own (1985)
The Tijuana Bible (1989)
Even the Butler Was Poor (1990)
Now He Thinks He’s Dead (1992)
Murder on the Aisle (1996)

Novel series

Flash Gordon (Alex Raymond’s original story)

The Lion Men of Mongo (1974)(‘adapted by’ Con Steffanson)
The Space Circus (1974)(‘adapted by’ Con Steffanson)
The Plague of Sound (1974)(‘adapted by’ Con Steffanson)
The Time Trap of Ming XIII (1974)(‘adapted by’ Con Steffanson)
The Witch Queen of Mongo (1974)(‘adapted by’ Carson Bingham)
The War of the Cybernauts (1975)(‘adapted by’ Carson Bingham)

The Phantom (writing as Frank S Shawn)

The Golden Circle (1973)
The Hydra Monster (1973)
The Mystery of the Sea Horse (1973)
The Veiled Lady (1973)
The Swamp Rats (1974)
The Goggle-Eyed Pirates (1974)

Vampirella

Bloodstalk (1975)
On Alien Wings (1975)
Deadwalk (1976)
Blood Wedding (1976)
Deathgame (1976)
Snakegod (1976)
Vampirella (1976)

Avenger

The Man from Atlantis (1974) (as Kenneth Robeson)
Red Moon (1974) (as Kenneth Robeson)
The Purple Zombie (1974) (as Kenneth Robeson)
Dr. Time (1974) (as Kenneth Robeson)
The Nightwitch Devil (1974) (as Kenneth Robeson)
Black Chariots (1974) (as Kenneth Robeson)
The Cartoon Crimes (1974) (as Kenneth Robeson)
The Death Machine (1975) (as Kenneth Robeson)
The Blood Countess (1975) (as Kenneth Robeson)
The Glass Man (1975) (as Kenneth Robeson)
The Iron Skull (1975) (as Kenneth Robeson)
Demon Island (1975) (as Kenneth Robeson)

Barnum System

The Fire-Eater (1970)
Clockwork Pirates (1971)
Shaggy Planet (1973)
Spacehawk, Inc. (1974)
The Wicked Cyborg (1978)
Dr. Scofflaw (1979)

Barnum System – Jack Summer

Death Cell (1971)
Plunder (1972)
A Whiff of Madness (1976)
Galaxy Jane (1986)

Barnum System – Ben Jolson

The Sword Swallower (1968)
Flux (1974)

Barnum System – Star Hawks

Empire 99 (1980)
The Cyborg King (1981)

Barnum System – The Exchameleon

Daredevils, LTD. (1987)
Starpirate’s Brain (1987)
Everybody Comes to Cosmo’s (1988)

Jack Conger

A Talent for the Invisible (1973)
The Panchronicon Plot (1977)
Hello, Lemuria, Hello (1979)

Odd Jobs, Inc.

Calling Dr. Patchwork (1978)
Hail Hibbler (1980)
Big Bang (1982)
Brainz, Inc. (1985)

Fragmented America

After Things Fell Apart (1970)
Gadget Man (1971)
Hawkshaw (1972)
When the Waker Sleeps (1975)
Crackpot (1977)
Brinkman (1981)

Gypsy

Quest of the Gypsy (1976)
Eye of the Vulture (1977)

Marvel Novel Series (as Joseph Silva; with Len Wein and Marv Wolfman)

Incredible Hulk: Stalker from the Stars (1977)
Captain America: Holocaust for Hire (1979)

Harry Challenge

The Prisoner of Blackwood Castle (1984)
The Curse of the Obelisk (1987)

Groucho Marx

Groucho Marx, Master Detective (1998)
Groucho Marx, Private Eye (1999)
Elementary, My Dear Groucho (1999)
Groucho Marx and the Broadway Murders (2001)
Groucho Marx, Secret Agent (2002)
Groucho Marx, King of the Jungle (2005)

Short fiction

Collections

Broke Down Engine: And Other Troubles with Machines (1971)
The Chameleon Corps: And Other Shape Changers (1972)
What’s Become of Screwloose?: And Other Inquiries (1972)
Odd Job 101: And Other Future Crimes And Intrigues (1974)
Nutzenbolts: And More Troubles with Machines (1975)
Skyrocket Steele Conquers the Universe: And Other Media Tales (1990)
Adam and Eve On a Raft: Mystery Stories (Crippen & Landru, 2001)[11]

Stories

“Ella Speed”, Fantastic, April 1960
“Subject to Change” Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1960
Harry Challenge Series
The Secret of the Black Chateau – Espionage Magazine, February 1985
Monster of the Maze – Espionage Magazine, February 1986
The Phantom Highwayman – The Ultimate Halloween, edited by Marvin Kaye (2001)
The Woman in the Mist – The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December, 2002
The Incredible Steam Man – The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May, 2003
The Secret of the Scarab – The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April, 2005
The Problem of the Missing Werewolf – H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror #4, (Spring / Summer 2007)
The Mystery of the Missing Automaton – Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #1, (Winter 2008)
The Mystery of the Flying Man – Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #2, (Spring 2009)
The Secret of the City of Gold – The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January / February 2012
The Somerset Wonder –

ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION February 1967. Cover by Kelly Freas. Editor: John W. Campbell. Overall rating: 3 stars.

JOE POYER “Pioneer Trip.” The completion of the first manned flight to Mars must be weighed against a man’s life. Interesting problem, but conventional ending. (3)

JACK WODHAMS “There Is a Crooked Man.” Short novel. We are rapidly approaching the point where science and engineering can easily enable the criminal mind to outwit the law, if the particular law does indeed exist. Law enforcement becomes a hilarious problem, as Thorne Smith becomes SF, not fantasy. Not Analog’s usual stuff. (4)

J. B. MITCHEL “The Returning.” Alien takes over experimental US rocket to return home. (2)    [His only published SF story.]

MACK REYNOLDS “Amazon Planet.” Serial, part 3 of 3. Separate report forthcoming.

WINSTON P. SANDERS [POUL ANDERSON] “Elementary Mistake.” Crew sent to establish mattereaster [?] on a distant planet discovers they haven’t the necessary elements available. Too technical to make sense. (1)

A CANTERBURY TALE. Archer, UK, 1944. Eric Portman, Sheila Sim, Dennis Price, John Sweet, Esmond Knight, H.F. Maltry, and Eliot Makeham. Written & directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger.

   I watched this twice, back to back, just to see if I’d missed something. When I was through, I told the leggy red-head next to me on the couch that I still wasn’t sure how A Canterbury Tale felt about itself.

   â€œDo movies think about themselves?” she asked.

   Well, every movie has an attitude, even if it’s just give-a-damn, and Canterbury’s attitude is mostly one of a cherished England, rich in heritage and humanity. But there’s also a disturbing sub-text that moves the film, like many another Powell/Pressberger work, from the realm of simple propaganda into the rare class of Weird Movies.

   Made in the fifth year of a World War, confused, diffuse, and at times quite powerful, Canterbury concerns itself with conditions on England’s home front, bizarre crime, and the problems of three ordinary people caught up in it all.

   Price and Sweet play Sergeants — British and American, respectively — and Sim is a Land Girl detailed to work for local JP Thomas Colpepper (Eric Portman) in a village just outside Canterbury. But as the sergeants escort her from the train station to the town hall (It’s night and the village is under Blackout orders.) a shadowy figure darts out of the darkness and… and…. and…..

   Pours glue on the lady’s head. Yeah. Well, I told you there was bizarre crime here. Someone’s been making rather a habit of this sort of thing (Wait till you hear the motive!) picking on young ladies out after dark with soldiers, and Ms Sim is only the latest victim.

   But not a passive one. She and the sergeants pursue the miscreant into the Town Hall, where the local police (“The Glue Man’s at it again!”) search the building and, in a moment worthy of Caligari, discover only Colpepper, the all-powerful JP, seated magisterially in his inner sanctum.

   Of course the locals refuse to believe that a man of Colpepper’s stature could possibly be the Glue Man, so it falls to our intrepid trio to uncover evidence of his guilt and take it to the authorities in Canterbury.

   The ensuing story moves far too slowly, with way too many digressions, but the amateur sleuths carry it along by dint of their sheer charm and inefficiency. And they get their act together just in time for a tense and surprising confrontation in a railway carriage compartment on a train bound for Canterbury.

   And then they reach Canterbury, and all my notions about this movie got blown to pieces.

   It’s a powerful and moving finale, and one that left me considerably upset. Perhaps I shouldn’t look at it from a contemporary perspective, but to my mind pouring glue on ladies’ hair and running off into the night are acts of misogyny and cowardice. I’ll just say A Canterbury Tale doesn’t share my point of view, and leave it at that.

   A final note: this was to all intents and purposes the only film appearance of John Sweet, an amateur actor chosen for his total freshness in the part of the American Sergeant. It was a good choice.

RICHARD STARK – The Black Ice Score. Parker #11. Gold Medal #D1949; paperback original, 1968. Cover by Robert McGinnis. Berkley, paperback, 1973; Avon, paperback, 1985. University of Chicago Press, trade paperback, 2010.

   Professional thief non-pereil Parker is caught up in a three-way tangle in The Black Ice Score. The head of a small African country is trying to escape from that country with a good portion of that country’s treasury before he is caught and hanged from the nearest tree, and in that regard he has sent the funds ahead encapsulated in a fortune in diamonds. Faction two wants the diamonds to help maintain the country’s legal government, while faction three wants the jewels to help overthrow the country’s legal government.

   Then there is a scavenger trying to horn in on his own, hoping to enrich himself with some of the leftover spoils. Parker is persuaded to work with faction number two, hiring himself out as advisor only regarding as to how the well-guarded jewels may be stolen from faction number one.

   This is a heist novel, in other words.

   There is, unfortunately, to my mind, little here that deviates from most heist novels. There is the planning, the carrying out of the plan, dealing with what goes wrong with the planning – no plan in a heist novel ever goes off according to plan – and the tidying up at the end.

   Mitigating against the fact that the framework of the overall story line is almost completely etched in stone, is that Stark (aka Donald Westlake) was very nearly the most hard-boiled writers of his era, and Parker is very nearly most hard-boiled of characters. Not a word is wasted throughout the story, including in any of the dialogue.

   A steady diet of Richard Stark stories is not for me, but as spaced out timewise as I read them, they always go down extremely well.

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. – Saving the Queen. Blackford Oakes #1. Doubleday, hardcover, 1976. Warner, paperback, 1977. Avon, paperback, 1981. Cumberland House, softcover, 2005.

   It is almost impossible to write about William F. Buckley and not mention politics, one of the leading Conservative voices of the Twentieth Century, political commentator, gadfly, and droll defender of his point of view. He was closely identified with Conservatism, founding two of it’s most important voices, the magazine National Review and the series Firing Line, but I would argue he found his true gift as a writer of fiction, droll, witty, fanciful, and playful fiction that took advantage of his sophistication and famous vocabulary.

   It can be argued today that his novels, both those about Blackford Oakes and the more mainstream ones, are more relevant than any of his political stances or achievements to the modern world, his brand of Conservatism largely dead and forgotten by all but a few, certainly no longer the mainstream voice of the movement it once was.

   For my tastes the highlight of his gift lay in his series of delightful spy novels featuring handsome Patrician Ivy League spy master Blackford “Blackie” Oakes, whose adventures filled eleven volumes, following the adventures of the CIA agent from 1950 until 1987 and Blackie’s final confrontation with British traitor Kim Philby (Last Call for Blackford Oakes).

   Granted it can be pointed out that the Oakes novels play fast and loose with history rewriting many of the most embarassing failures of the CIA as secret triumphs, thanks to Blackie’s untold version, but taken as the fun they are intended as rather than history it’s cheeky entertainment watching Buckley try to re cast the reality of Sputnik (Who’s On First?), the Hungarian Revolution (The Story of Henri Tod), Cuba (High Jinx), or Kim Philby (Last Call for Blackford Oakes), which he does with unflagging tongue in cheek humor while an endless parade of Presidents, spy masters, and diplomatic figures out of history glide through Buckley’s re=imagining of the Cold War, Allen Dulles, Dean Acheson, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, the Kennedy’s, and Ronald Reagan among them.

   That he personally knew most of those figures and had himself served in the CIA informs the books with something like the spirit of the far less political Ian Fleming, the British spy novelist he resembles in terms of storytelling gifts and audacity far more than a more sober Le Carre or cynical Deighton. For their obvious differences the Oakes books are very much the true American answer to Fleming and Bond.

   Saving the Queen opens in the wake of Watergate with the very real Rockefeller Commission looking more closely into the past activities of the CIA and Blackie Oakes due to testify. Over dinner with his friend Anthony Trust, a recurring character in the series, Blackie muses on just how much truth he dare tell the Committee about his first major assignment. To take the Fifth Amendment would mean the end of his career in the CIA.

   There was no comment. Harman, for one, knew nothing about the first assignment. Anthony knew more than he let on, but he didn’t know it all, by any means. And it would greatly have surprised Singer Callaway to discover that not even he, who had been intimately involved in the operation, knew exactly how far the young man had got in, in the course of saving the Queen.

   It is the Post War era and a young Blackford Oakes has been sent to London ostensibly to study the Post War British economy, and for Oakes a painful it’s a reminder of youthful encounter with the British Public School system that left him cynical and bitter. Much of the first third of the book is taken up with his being readied for the mission, briefed, and with flashbacks to his childhood experience.

   If there is a flaw in the book, it is these flashbacks to Oakes’ humiliation in the British Public School system. I can’t help thinking Harry Flashman would of given him the Tom Brown treatment and James Bond, who got kicked out of Eton, would have laughed in his face. I’m not sure Charles Dickens is really the best model for spy fiction.

   Of course there is more to his mission than that. CIA suspects the Russians have high level agents in the United Kingdom maybe even at Buckingham Palace in the court of the beautiful new Queen Caroline I.

   Saving the Queen is the most playful of the Oakes series with Buckley more relaxed here where he isn’t trying to rewrite actual history. In later books Blackie will find his conscience tested by his profession (Stained Glass) and his neck in much tighter nooses (The Story of Henri Tod), but here the adventure is spiced with just a hint of spy spoofery dressed up with Buckley’s considerable wit.

   His friendly enemy Economist John Kenneth Gailbraith was only partially ribbing him when he noted that in fiction Buckley had found his true place.

   Oakes and the beautiful English Queen, more Grace Kelly than Elizabeth, are physically attracted as Blackie begins to sort out the question of the possible Soviet agent at the heart of British royalty, and get his own back a bit over his unpleasant childhood experiences, all coming to a head in a duel at 10,000 feet between a Hunter-Hawker piloted by the Soviet agent and Blackie in an F86 Sabre.

   For all the spirit of Ian Fleming, Buckley is far less hedonistic than his British forerunner. Blackie can be a bit of a prude and it is hard at times to believe in him. Unlike Bond he has a steady girl friend he is usually faithful too and something of a life as an engineer. You can’t imagine him letting down his hair in Romany encampment or a Japanese bath like Bond or enjoying the sexy sound of his car’s exhaust, much less Bond’s exploits with women. Even when Blackie gets his hands dirty there is a sense hand sanitizer is nearby. Blackie is very much a paragon of Yale and Patrician birth, not an “elegant thug” like Bond kicked out of Eton for an unspecified scandal with a serving girl.

   Buckley has removed the Sex and Sadism from the Bond formula, retained the Snobbery, and added Wit and the sting of the political gadfly to create his own formula, Snobbery, Re Written History, and Satire.

   But he is charming company to spend an evening with delving in the backrooms and shadowy corners of the Cold War, imagining oneself an armchair insider in the back corridors of power, and when a relieved Blackie escapes testifying before Congress only to walk away whistling “God Save the Queen,” I think many of you will agree the trip was worth taking, and with varying results he managed to keep it up for eleven more books, with his best after this one probably Who’s On First?.

MacKINLEY KANTOR “Gun Crazy.” Short story. First published in The Saturday Evening Post, February 3, 1940. Collected in Author’s Choice (Coward McCann, 1944). Reprinted in Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy & Otto Penzler (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). Film: United Artists, 1950, with Peggy Cummins & John Dall; directed by Joseph H. Lewis.

   Every fan of film noir, even if they’ve haven’t managed to see the movie based on this short story by Pulitzer Prize winning novelist MacKinley Kantor, is certainly well aware of it. Not many films of its genre have, after all, been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. The short story itself? Not so many have even heard of it.

   The story follows its main protagonist, Nelson Tare, from the time he and his family move into the small town of Elm City. He was very young at the time, still talking baby talk. When the narrator of the story, about the same age as Nelly at the time, asks him if he wants to play, his answer is “Dot any duns?”

   Translation: “Have you got any guns?”

   The young kid is obsessed with guns, all through life. The story veers from the movie — or maybe that should be the other way around — in that in the movie both he and his female partner in robbing banks and other crimes (sharpshooting Antoinette McReady, aka Ruth Riley in the story) are the primary focus of the film, while in MacKinley Kantor’s version, her role is restricted to just over a couple of pages.

   That doesn’t stop the story from being one of the darker tales I can imagine ever published in the family-oriented Saturday Evening Post. You can’t read this one without sitting on the edge of your seat the entire time it takes to read it. I always thought that was an overused cliché, but this is one time I found it to be true.