SAMUEL R. DELANY – Babel-17. Ace F-288, paperback original, 1966. Reprinted many times, including: Bantam, paperback, 1982, with minor deletions restored. Nebula Award for Best Novel of the Year.

   Rydra Wong, a poet with a gift for languages, is given the task of deciphering Babel-17, a language apparently used by the invaders during their attack on Alliance installations. It is actually a weapon capable of taking over the thought processes of those who understand and use it.

   A brilliant display of strange characters and unusual science-fictional ideas, set in a realistic but mind-warping universe. Babel-17 itself enables one “to move through psychedelic perspective (page 108); is a “flexible matrix of analytic possibilities” (page 112).

   The night spent in Transport Town gathering a space crew is as effectively weird as any in horror fiction, with discorporate beings, including an active succubus, and cosmetically altered humans (the psychological implications of which are discussed on pages 51-52), combining to form a distinct world of their own.

   Later, the scene between Rydra and the Butcher as she teaches him the words “I” and “yes” is superb in both semantic and psychological interpretations. Delany includes himself in this universe, as Muels Araslyes, who once tripled with Rydra.

   An outstanding work, but his best is yet to come.

Rating: ****½

JOHN WELCOME – Run for Cover. Richard Graham #1. Faber and Faber, UK, hardcover, 1958. Knopf, US, hardcover, 1959. Perennial Library, US, paperback, 1983.

   A chance meeting with a publisher friend opens the door to the past for Richard Graham.

   Richard Graham, gentleman steeplechase jockey and one time commando, has good reason to think Rupert Rawle dead. Rupert Rawle betrayed his Commando Unit in the War on a mission, shot Graham and left him for dead, leaving him to eventually ending up in a POW camp. Rawle also stole a beautiful woman from him, one he might have been in love with.

   But here is someone named Rupert Rawle who has written a book called Waters of Strife.

   For Richard Graham its an invitation to a nightmare to relive those desperate days, find this man calling himself Rupert Rawle, and uncover secrets better left buried, secrets some will still kill for.

   For instance why are they so curt when Graham tries to check with old sources from his Commando days. Rawle is dead. Rawle is most certainly dead.

   But is he?

   Granted this was a favorite plot of the time period in the decades after WW II, what was heroism, who betrayed whom and when and why, even who is dead and who isn’t? It shows up in the works of dozens of British thriller writers and in films, but it is done really well here in Welcome and Graham’s debut.

   Held prisoner in a French farm house while tracking down Rawle, Graham exchanges a bit of banter with his captor.

   John Welcome was well placed to write about literary toughs. In addition to editing several books of the best racing stories he also edited two books of the best Secret Service adventures. A literary solicitor, he knew Dennis Wheatley and encouraged Dick Francis to take up thriller writing. On his own he wrote a number of Richard Graham adventures and stand alone titles between 1959 and the 1970’s and a few best sellers in England in the R. F. Delderfield vein (Bellary Bay).

   Hunting for Rupert Rawle, Graham uncovers an espionage plot, a beautiful and mysterious woman, and finds himself with a choice between his career as a gentleman rider and as a spy.

   Welcome keeps tongue ’n cheek without ever getting silly or precious. He doesn’t take himself or Graham too seriously. Trapped in second story bathroom Graham checks out the window as a means of escape and decides while Dornford Yates’ Richard William Chandos might try it, he would likely break his fool neck.

   Barzun and Taylor were appreciative of Welcome’s books, and with reason. They move fast, are well written, literate, and the kind of pleasant thriller perfect for an evening of armchair adventure and intrigue.

   There are several mentions of Dornford Yates in the book, and it is not without meaning. Welcome has captured something of the romance of Yates’ best books without the snobbery or attitudes. Graham is more attractive than Yates heroes (Rawle ironically sounds more than a bit like Jonah Mansel), far less certain of his British superiority, but Welcome has captured the same romance of expensive British cars rushing about on the Continent with dashing heroes involved in adventure and intrigue.

   Appropriately Run for Cover ends with an act of contrition and sacrifice as Graham has a reckoning with his past and his future, a good modern thriller with something of the charm of the past and few of its more annoying tropes.

   By all means this isn’t for everyone, but if you like this form of British thriller done well Welcome will be… welcome.
   

      The Richard Graham series —

Run for Cover. Faber 1958.
Hard to Handle. Faber 1964.
Wanted for Killing. Faber 1965.
Hell Is Where You Find It. Faber 1968.
On the Stretch. Faber 1969.
Go for Broke. Faber 1972.

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH -Edith’s Diary. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1977. Pocket Books, paperback, 1978. Reprinted several times since. Film: Germant, 1983, as Edith’s Tagebuch (Edith’s Diary).

   Edith has a diary. She got it from her beloved aunt. It’s a very nice diary.

   Edith has a life. A pretty ordinary life. A husband, a son. The kind of son that likes to tear the wings off flies. But hey, you can’t have everything.

   They move to the country from NYC. And that’s okay. Kinda boring. But okay.

   Then her hubbie’s dilapidated uncle moves in to an upper bedroom, needing care, and stingy. But hey. No biggy.

   Then her hubbie leaves her for a younger woman from the office.

   Meh. No big deal. I mean, it sucks, right? But hey. Shit happens.

   The kid grows up to be a nothingburger. A lush. A weakling. A beerbellied wanker.

   But, meh, what can you do.

   On the positive side, there’s Edith’s diary.

   Why put down all the boring stupid things. Who has time for that?

   Rather, put down the life you wish was happening. Similar. But with some perks.

   Say, like, why write about her kid that’s a do-nothing wanker?

   Rather, about her kid’s unrealized potential life: He goes to Princeton, he’s an engineer, he’s successful, he’s got a nice house, a nice wife, and two adorable little children.

   Her diary becomes an alternate life. A life where her hopes and dreams become real. A life much more tangible and fulfilling than her own.

   Becoming a sculptress, she even makes busts of her imaginary grandchildren, so they become real, out of clay.

   She’s beginning to plan for their visit. She’s beginning to speak with them.

   What could possibly go wrong?

JAMES M. CAIN “Pastorale.” Short story. First published in The American Mercury, March 1928. Reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1945. Collected in The Baby in the Icebox (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981). Also reprinted in Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy & Otto Penzler (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), as well as perhaps other anthologies.

   The introduction to this story in the Ellroy/Penzler edition claims it was Cain’s first published work of fiction, but that’s not so. The tale with that particular distinction seems to have been “Trial by Jury,” which appeared in January 1928 issue of The American Mercury.

   But no matter. It’s still a story of some great interest to noir fans. I’m sure that everyone reading this knows that one of Cain’s primary themes in the stories he told was that of a man falling for a woman who then persuades him to commit a crime for him. And how does that work out? Not well. Not usually. Not well.

   And guess what? That’s exactly the kind of story this is, even at this early date (1928). I won’t go into details. This is only a short story, after all. I did think the story ends on a flatter note than I expected, but it’s still a good one.

SUSAN HOLTZER – Curly Smoke. Anneke Haagen #2. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1995; paperback, 1996.

   I thought Susan Holtzer’s first book. Something to Kill For, was surprisingly good. I say “surprisingly” because most first novel’s aren’t, and because it was a good bit cozier in type than I usually read.

   Anneke Haagen is moving into a rental cottage in Ann Arbor after a fire destroyed her home and all her belongings. The cottage is in .a small residential grouping located in the middle of commercial territory, and it’s in immediate danger of being demolished to make way for another development. The small group living there — which includes the prospective developer — are very much at odds over it all, and Anneke wonders what kind of people she’s landed among. Then on the night of a heavy snow a man is killed, and she knows — murderous.

   [Holtzer] still hasn’t written the kind of book I usually like, and she still does a pretty damned good job of it. She has an easy prose style, and a very deft hand at characterization. I like [Anneke Haagen}, her computer consultant sleuth, and her ex-pro football player cop lover (yes, one of those; I told you I didn’t usually like this kind), and with an exception or two the cast of suspects is well done also.

   The plot is fairly mundane and seemed the slightest bit contrived to me. I guess that very readable prose and very likable characters overcome a multitude of sins (not that there were that many), and I really liked the fact that Holtzer didn’t have her heroine charge into unnecessary danger and end the story with a burst of needless violence.

   
      The Anneke Haagen series —

1. Something to Kill for (1994)
2. Curly Smoke (1995)
3. Bleeding Maize and Blue (1996)
4. Black Diamond (1997)
5. The Silly Season (1999)
6. The Wedding Game (2000)
7. Better Than Sex (2001)

MADELEINE SHARPS BUCHANAN – The Subway Murder. NYPD Homicide Lt. Ransom #1. Serialized in five parts in Detective Fiction Weekly, February 8 through March 8, 1930. Hardcover editions: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1930; Grosset & Dunlap, no date stated.

   If Lieutenant Ransom was given a first name in this better than average detective novel, first serialized in the pulp magazine Detective Fiction Weekly, I seem to have missed it. It’s also quite possible that this was not his first and only appearance in print, but I can’t find a reference to a later case he was involved in, or even an earlier one.

   I’ve not been able to research this, but The Subway Murder may actually be the first defective mystery in which the victim is killed in a subway, as Ransom briefly wonders to himself early on. Given that the Manhattan subway system opened in 1904, though, there’s a good chance that another author came up with the same idea before Mrs. Buchanan did.

   The dead girl is a young woman of no great beauty, and it takes Ransom and Jim Pensbury, his chief aide, some time to identify the body. What they discover astounds them. The woman had led two lives, married, in fact, to two different men. One is a lowly salesman for a hosiery firm; the other is a rich millionaire, who does not at first recognize the woman, she is so poorly dressed.

   It is quite a puzzle, then, that faces Ransom and Pensbury. It takes a lot of legwork on their part, and any number of interviews with people with whom they come in contact, all somehow connected with the case, which is a deliciously complicated one.

   There is also a matter of $70,000 worth of radium that has gone missing, so there’s plenty to plot to keep the reader interested all the way through, with only an ending that feels a little flat. No big twist at the end, in other words, just a matter of good police work that slowly but surely eliminates all of the possible solutions, one by one, until there is only one left.

   Madeleine Sharps Buchanan, the author, had only seven novels published in hardcover, but she wrote several dozen others that were serialized in pulp magazines such as DFW, Clues, and Detective Story Magazine. There’s probably little hope of putting together a set of consecutive issues of any of them to put a full novel together. On the other hand, you could hunt down the novels in book form, but for example, there are only two copies of the hardcover edition of this one now offered for sale online, the lowest asking price (on eBay) being just under $100. I’d like sample her work a little more, but it looks like it may be a bit of a challenge.

WILD WILD WEST. Warner Brothers, 1999. Will Smith (James West), Kevin Kline (Artemus Gordon), Kenneth Branagh (Dr. Arliss Loveless), Salma Hayek, M. Emmet Walsh, Ted Levine. Loosely adapted from The Wild Wild West, a 1960s television series created by Michael Garrison. Director: Barry Sonnenfeld.

   Soon after the American Civil War, impulsive Army Captain Jim West (Will Smith) sets out to find his parents’ killer: the bitterly ruthless ex-Confederate General ‘Bloodbath’ McGrath (Ted Levine). The trail leads to a West Virginia brothel where the blundering intervention of undercover U.S. Marshal Artemus Gordon (Kevin Kline) and an accidental nitroglycerin explosion causes McGrath to escape.

   The two Americans may be on the same side, but they dislike each other on sight, so neither are pleased when President Ulysses S. Grant orders them to join forces and continue the hunt for McGrath, who has kidnapped several of the country’s best scientists in a plot which could destabilise the government.

   Aboard Gordon’s gadget-laden train ‘The Wanderer’, the fiercely competitive pair follow a bloody clue to the New Orleans home of Dr. Arliss Loveless (Kenneth Branagh), a legless ex-Confederate officer and ingenious engineer in a steam-powered wheelchair and decorous goatee beard. Imprisoned there is singer Rita Escobar (Salma Hayek), who claims her father is one of the captured scientists. It seems that mysterious new weapons are being manufactured, one of which they discover to be an armoured vehicle – what we would now recognize as a tank – that has the power to kill dozens of soldiers in a single sweep.

   Yet something even bigger abounds in an eighty-foot mechanical spider stocked with two nitroglycerin cannons. Loveless uses this war-machine to kidnap the President before threatening to destroy the United States if they aren’t divided among other nations and himself. The ensuing struggle on the cliffs of Spider Canyon ends with West – and the fate of the country itself – at risk of falling into a yawning abyss…

   In the ’90s, making films of ’60s TV shows was a major trend. Baby boomers were buying tickets to see at the cinema what they had seen in their living rooms as kids. And so, after Batman, we got a cycle of remakes, mostly bad (Lost In Space, My Favourite Martian, The Saint) but some good (Mission Impossible, The Fugitive). Wild Wild West was yet another, based on the quirky action-adventure series made to weather the western genre’s declining popularity by having it capitalise on the James Bond craze – what you might call ‘spies-in-saddle’.

   This film version must have sounded great at the time. People who had enjoyed Will Smith and middle-aged straight man Tommy Lee Jones being government agents in sci-fi comedy adventure Men In Black would surely watch Will Smith and middle-aged straight man Kevin Kline being government agents in western comedy adventure Men In Chaps. Smith even chose it over The Matrix, believing it could result in another of his “big Willy weekends”.

   Instead, Wild Wild West was a disaster. The script was re-written, scenes were reshot, and the budget ballooned until it became one of the most expensive films of all time. On release, it lost money and “won” five Razzies, including Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay and Worst Director. Smith has repeatedly joked about its failure. It might now be bundled alongside those two other self-afflicting franchise films of the late ’90s, Batman and Robin and The Avengers.

   And yet, whereas I think such clunkers could be enjoyed as weird camp classics that just don’t care – the cinematic equivalent of streakers on a sports field – Wild Wild West is just bad.

   The pace is off from the start: Smith’s first fight, though shot continuously, is placed either side of a languid scene with Kline in drag, immediately killing any excitement. From there, the humour is ribald, with two different sequences showing scantily-clad prostitutes, and at one point both main characters suggestively fondle a pair of fake breasts. It’s a strange attempt at a running joke with a crude pay-off, much later, in which Smith’s character beats his hands against a woman’s bosom.

   The sexism becomes downright tasteless when Salma Hayek’s character unwittingly wears a buttock-exposing night-gown, much to the stunned pleasure of our heroes, who go on to mutter much innuendo built around the word “ass”. Apart from that, in fact, Hayek is barely in the movie at all. She tries to join them by slipping onto their train, yet Smith’s character doesn’t believe she can handle herself and insists she get off again. The actress herself felt underused in what is little more than an extended cameo. You know they only put a woman in it so they could splash her over the posters.

   Elsewhere, Ted Levine – playing yet another southerner – is dependable as always, though he gets dispatched halfway through with little consequence. Branagh is fun, and director Barry Sonnenfeld regularly has him wheel close to the camera to humorous effect. Thinking, though, of how Ken justified all this to his high-brow theatre friends in London is more entertaining than anything managed on set.

   The balance, throughout, between Smith and Kline is not quite set and neither appear to be the foil. (Maybe they’re not meant to be equal? Note how the title drops the definite article of the original version, subtly giving Smith the eponymous character – did Kline not notice?).

   Characterisation, too, is a bit ropey: at times, Kline gives us an amiably absent-minded scientist, proud of his gadgets and easily distracted by them, yet at others he seems cynical and condescending to his partner. And the decision to have him play the President too is just baffling. It made sense in Fierce Creatures when he was a father and son, but here it’s contrived, convenient and not at all cute.

   Meanwhile, Smith’s loud, smart-guy persona seems a little anachronistic in the Old West – and though some of the race jokes work in his favour, others are just clumsy and misconceived, especially a sequence in which he must appease a lynch mob, and another that sees him doing a harem dance (even the director hated it).

   Perhaps most importantly, the stakes in this thing are too fuzzily defined: why, for example, must Loveless be caught before the transcontinental railroad is inaugurated? And which is the super-weapon – tank or tarantula?

   A boisterous, preposterous romp, Wild Wild West does show occasional flashes of inspiration: the opening, in which a terrified man is decapitated by a flying buzz-saw, is vividly Avengers-esque, and there’s playful humour in all manner of steampunk gadgets. Yet the film never enjoys its western trappings as thoroughly and warm-heartedly as, say, Maverick or Back to the Future Part III, and neither does it do anything with the world of spying. This is an espionage-western which isn’t interested in either genres, focusing instead on infantile comedy, tired buddy-cop tropes and empty, if eccentric, spectacle.

   Had it been a light-hearted mystery-adventure with a sense of proportion, it could have been terrific. As a comedy, however, it’s a wild, wild mess.

Rating: **

TOD ROBBINS “Spurs.” First published in Munsey’s Magazine, February 1923. Collected in Who Wears a Green Bottle? And Other Uneasy Tales (Philip Allan, UK, 1926). Reprinted in Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy & Otto Penzler (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), as well as several other anthologies. Film: Freaks (1932; produced and directed by Tod Browning).

   There is no doubt that the Tod Browning’s notorious cult film Freaks is far more known than the short story it’s based on. The film takes the basic story and expands on it by a magnitude of three or four, if not more, but the story itself still manages to hold its own as a small gem of comeuppance and pure edginess.

   To wit: When a dwarf in a traveling sideshow inherits a small fortune from an uncle, he decides it is full time he declared his love for the star of the circus’s high wire act, a veritable Amazon of a woman. To perhaps the reader’s surprise, if not Jacque Corbeé’s, who in spite of his size, is superbly confidant that she will say yes, she does indeed. Say yes, that is.

   Of course it is his money she is after, but fate being what it is, things do not progress anywhere near what she envisions. The other members of the circus — freaks, if you will – play only a secondary role in the story, mostly during the dinner after the wedding, in which a small melee breaks out – each of the participants convinced that the success of the show depends largely to their presence in it.

JOHN D. MacDONALD – The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything. Gold Medal #s1259, paperback original, 1962. Reprinted many times.

   Kirby’s a clumsy doofus. Handsome. Winsome. But a doofus.

   Kirby’s got a rich uncle. Super-duper rich. And Kirby has a cushy job from his uncle going around giving oodles and oodles of money, anonymously, to charitable causes.

   Then his uncle dies, leaving him nothing, though Kirby was the sole surviving heir.

   Nothing, that is, except a gold pocket watch.

   In fact, the estate has nearly nothing — even though his uncle seemed to have millions and millions of buckaroos. What happened to the freaking money?

   Turns out that Kirby’s uncle got rich by screwing the Mafia and other nogoodnicks by sneaky and conniving means — means of which were so top-secret as to never having been divulged to anyone — much less poor Kirby.

   A couple of supervillains of the Boris and Natasha type try to kidnap Kirby to tell them his uncle’s business secrets and where hides the boodle.

   Kirby doesn’t know. They can’t figure out if he’s really an imbecile or if he’s just a great actor.

   Then one day Kirby is sleeping at a friend’s house, hiding from Boris and Natasha. A luscious, ravishing, blond bimbo leaps naked into his bed in the middle of the night, screwing his brains out, believing in the dark that Kirby is the guy Kirby is house-sitting for.

   At first, she’s mad — but she forgives Kirby and they fall deeply in love, discovering meanwhile that the secret to his uncle’s success was the pocket watch!

   Turns out, if you wiggle the watch just right, it freezes time!

   Of course, freezing time wouldn’t do much good if it froze for everyone. But the bearer is immune from the time freeze.

   So while time is frozen, you can engage in whatever high-jinks you like for up to an hour at a time: taking money from tills, changing the trajectory of bullets, sinking subs, altering evidence.

   It’s all quite fun and silly. And nobody loses an eye.

   Made into an even sillier made-for-TV movie starring Robert Hays (of “Airplane!” fame) in 1980.

ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE – February 1967. Overall rating: 3½ stars.

STANLEY ELLIN “The Twelfth Statue.” Short novel. A movie producer noted for his quickie productions and his weakness for young girls disappears from his closed-off Italian movie set. The location of his body seems to be obvious halfway through, but Ellin still has some twists left, in addition to masterful background. (5)

JANE SPEED “Fair’s Fair.” A child’s view of murder, that of a man who killed a cat. (4)

CHARLES B. CHILD “A Quality of Mercy. Reprinted from Collier’s, 11 March 1950. Inspector Chafik solves the murder of a blackmailer, but destroys the incriminating etter. Excellent background an characterization. (4)

ROBERT L. FISH “The Adventure of the Perforated Ulster.” Schlock Homes breaks up a plot by a trading stamp company to destroy confidence in British clubs. Hilarious. (5)

JUDITH O’NEILL “The Identification.” First story. Woman betrays rebel organizer. Awkward beginning. (2)

R. BRETNOR “Specimen of the Week.” Anthropological species turns on guardian.. (1)

S. K. SNEDEGAR “Charles H. Goren Solves a Bridge Murder.” Too bad I don’t know anything about bridge, but story was poor anyway. (0)

VINCENT McCONNOR “The Man Who Collected Obits.” Man who works in a newspaper morgue discovers weird coincidence in the daily obituaries. (3)

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH “Camera Fiend.” Reprinted from Cosmopolitan, September 1960, as “Camera Finish.” A not-so-bright murderer allows his picture to be taken with his victim. (3)

ARTHUR PORGES “The Scientist and the Multiple Murder.” Eight men are electrocuted in s rooftop pool. Seems contrived. (3)

MARGERY SHARP “Driving Home.” Reprinted from Good Housekeeping, August 1956. Man needs wife’s alibi and thus saves their marriage. Too much soppy writing. (2)

LAWRENCE TREAT “F As in Frame-Up.” A spendthrift husband is framed for murder involving theft of necklace. Lieutenant Decker’s hunch plays off. (4)