GORILLA AT LARGE. Panoramic Productions/Fox, 1954. Cameron Mitchell, Anne Bancroft, Lee J. Cobb, Raymond Burr, Lee Marvin, Charlotte Austin, Peter Whitney, Warren Stevens, John Kellogg, Billy Curtis, and John Tannen. Written by Leonard Praskins and Barney Slater. Directed by Harmon Jones.

   If you only see one movie in your entire life, it should be Gorilla at Large. Where else in the known universe will you get a chance to hear tough cop Lee J Cobb snarl, “We’ve got two gorillas around here, and one of them’s a murderer.” Where, I ask you?

   Cobb is only one feature of a surprisingly able cast for what is essentially an inflated B-movie. Raymond Burr radiates menace very nicely as the boss of an elaborate carnival, playing effectively off Anne Bancroft as his wife, who does a trapeze act above the cage of Goliath “the world’s largest Gorilla” who manages to narrowly miss grabbing her at each performance.

   Cameron Mitchell and Charlotte Austin walk through their bland parts as leading man and heroine, and Lee Marvin is wasted as a comic relief dumb cop, but Perter Whitney as a blackmailing carny and John Tannen as a publicity flack with his eye on the main chance ooze a very fitting sleaziness into their under-written roles.

   Come to that, maybe it’s the writing that puts Gorilla at Large. so firmly into B-movie class. The dialogue is flat and obvious when it isn’t memorably bad, the plot is predictable when it’s not implausible, and…

   Oh yeah, the Plot: Burr decides to put Cameron Mitchell in an ape suit to double for Goliath, but someone steals the hirsute suite and goes around killing blackmailing carnies and blaming it on Goliath. Yeah, who’s gonna notice an ape running around the lot? And the concept is not helped at all by the fact that the real ape and the phony are both played by guys in gorilla suits.

   Fortunately, all this arrant nonsense is handled with pace and precision by Harmon Jones, a director who had his moments, and in his sure hands, it’s all really quite enjoyable. And really, if you’re only going to see one movie in your whole life, well, whathehell, it might as well be Gorilla at Large.

What can I say. I think she’s wonderful, and he’s no slouch either:

JOANNA CANNAN – Death at the Dog. Inspector Guy Northeast #2. Victor Gollancz, UK, hardcover, 1940. Reynal & Hitchcock, US, hardcover, 1941. Rue Morgue, US, trade paperback, 1999.

   Six weeks after the beginning of World, War II, a rural squire is found dead in his local pub, The Dog.  Mathew Scaife was hated by just about everyone who knew him, so the consensus of public opinion was that it was good riddance and too bad.

   It couldn’t be put down  to natural causes. His son, Edward, and Edward’s wife, are unhappy because the squire won’t come up with the money to modernize the farm  on which they live with him; Crescy Hardwick is upset because he has given  her notice to vacate the cottage she has fixed up and loved.

   His other son gets along neither with him nor with the upper class villagers. Bert Saunders is also being  turned out of his home. Two: other local couples are  suspects mainly because they were in the lounge bar when  he was killed.

   Detective-Inspector Guy Northeast, C.I.D., is delegated the tasks of sorting out these and other motives and finding an intelligent murderer who must also have access to nicotine, a car sponge, and a horse. Northeast is himself an  interesting character who has had run-ins with the local police force in a previous case, and in this one is fascinated by an older woman.

   Carefully drawn characters,   good local  background, and a skillful   murder method give this mystery high marks. I shall  look around for others by Cannan.

Bibliographic Update: There was one earlier case for Inspector Northeast, that being They Rang Up the Police (Gollancz, 1939), that perhaps being the one Maryell refers to in this review. As for the author, she wrote a total of thirteen mysteries between 1929 and 1962; of these, five were cases solved by Inspector Ronald Price. 

RICHARD A. LUPOFF – The Cover Girl Killer. Hobart Lindsey #5. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1995. Apparently no contemporaneous paperback edition (!).

   I quit this series after the first, The Comic Book Killer, because I thought the lead was a wimp, but someone told me that I ought to read this one for reasons [you’ll see below], so I did.

   Ace insurance investigator Hobart Lindsey is searching for the model who was the subject of a cover painting for a rare and obscure paperback published in the late 1940s. A tycoon had died in a suspicious helicopter crash, leaving millions either to the unknown model (if she can be found) or to a foundation for indigent artists.

   Hobart finds himself plunged into the world of paperback collectors, while his lover, police Sergeant Marva Plum, struggles with the suspected murder. A personal nemesis from his first case reappears, adding danger and angst.

   Well, I think you may recognize a paperback collector even before his real-life inspiration is named in the afterword. He has something of a regal air about him. This still isn’t going to be one of my favorite series, but it has definitely improved, and I enjoyed it because of the background. Lindsey isn’t quite as much of a wimp as he was, at least. There’s a nice intro by Bill Pronzini, too.

   Required reading [for everyone reading this].

      The Lindsey and Plum series —

1. The Comic Book Killer (1988)
2. The Classic Car Killer (1992)
3. The Sepia Siren Killer (1994)
4. The Bessie Blue Killer (1994)
5. The Cover Girl Killer (1995)
6. The Silver Chariot Killer (1996)
7. The Radio Red Killer (1997)
8. The Tinpan Tiger Killer (1998)
9. One Murder At A Time (2001)
10. The Emerald Cat Killer (2010)

MARVIN ALBERT writing as NICK QUARRY – The Girl with No Place to Hide. PI Jake Barrow #3. Stark House/Black Gat Books #34; paperback, October 2021. Previously published as by Nick Quarry: Gold Medal #938, paperback original, 1959.

   The Girl with No Place to Hide is one of six Jake Barrow novels that author Marvin Albert wrote for Gold Medal as paperback originals back in the late 50s and early 60s, all as by Nick Quarry, one of his various and sundry pen names. Walking home from high school every day around this same time, I’m sure I bought my first copy from one the two spinner racks in the front of the supermarket along the way.

   I’m sure that its lurid cover had something to do with my spotting it and snatching it up right away. (The cover of the Black Gat reprint is perfectly fine, but forgive me, Greg, I still like the original, and it isn’t pure nostalgia that makes me think so.)

   Jake Barrow tells the story himself, so it isn’t exactly clear what he looks like, a PI whose home base is New York City, a town which he knows his way around in quite well, but if I were casting him in a TV series, say, Dane Clark would be my first choice. In this one, he doesn’t have a client for quite a while, but someone eventually volunteer himself as one, so Barrow not only has the satisfaction of solving the case, but he comes off satisfactorily in a financial sense as well.

   The tale begins with a girl – a good looking one, of course – who is obviously on the run from someone or something, but even though Barrow tries to help by inviting her up to his apartment for safekeeping, the sanctuary he offers is far from good enough, and the girl ends up dead there.

   What follows is what seems like an ordinary PI novel from the 50s, complete with sleazy characters, muscle guys, gamblers, boxers, shady gigolos, and more attractive women than you or I would probably meet all year, but Jake does it in less than a week.

   You have to take the bad with the good, though. Barrow gets clunked over the head more times than I could keep track of, which so far hasn’t happened to me yet this year, knocking on wood.

   Hidden amidst all of this action is, believe it or not, a better than average detective story, tangled in more threads than you might think, assuming that this is yet another ho-hum PI story, which while it’s not Hammett or Chandler level, it also most definitely is not as well.

   
   My brother asked me this question, and while I remembered the scene, I couldn’t tell him in what movie or TV show it appears in. (I may even have reviewed it, which would be embarrassing, but what can you do.)

   At least one of the murders in the movie, which is my recollection of where I saw it, is that a giant mirror is placed crosswise across a narrow, isolated stretch of road, so that the driver of an oncoming car would see his own headlights reflected back at him. Trying to avoid an accident, the driver of said car would swerve the only way he could, and straight down into a ravine, the bottom of which is hundreds of feet down.

   Remember that one?

TALES OF WELLS FARGO. “Vignette of a Sinner.” NBC, 02 June 1962, 60 min, color. (Season 6, episode 34.) Dale Robertson (Jim Hardie), William Demarest. Guest cast: Jeff Morrow, Joyce Taylor, James Craig, Edward Platt. Series creator: Frank Gruber. Screenwriter: Al C. Ward. Director: William Whitney. Currently steaming on Starz.

   Tales of Wells Fargo was on NBC for five seasons in black and white, with each episode running 30 minutes. For its sixth and final season, however, they expanded the episodes to 60 minutes and showed them in color. As opposed to my usual custom of reviewing the pilot episodes, “Vignette of a Sinner” is the last one of the program’s last season.

   And quite fittingly so. While riding on a stagecoach to meet Jim, his semi-comical sidekick Jeb Gaine (William Demarest, as a character also added for this final season) regales his traveling companion with tales about his good buddy Jim. And for good reason. His companion is a lady, and Jeb has hopes of being a matchmaker. They would be perfect together, he thinks.

   The good news is that the attraction is mutual. The bad news is that she has come west to marry her fiancé (Jeff Morrow). The even worse news, for her, is that her intended is also a crook, having just robbed a stage of a considerable amount of money.

   The rest of the story I leave to your imagination, but with director William Witney at the helm, there is plenty of shooting and fighting before the smoke clears. Dale Robertson was an excellent choice to play Well Fargo agent Jim Hardie. Not only was he good with his fists and guns, he was good-looking, unassuming, and a fine man on a horse.

   And suffice it to say that while the closing scene shows her riding a stage back to Kentucky, no viewer is left unaware that she fully intends to return. Good show that.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE – Put a Lid on It. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 2002. Warner, paperback, March 2003.

   I don’t know about any of you reading this, but this semi-comic heist novel by the author of the Parker and Dortmunder books simply slipped by me when it first came out. Its protagonist, one Francis Meehan, is in a federal prison with no hope of getting out any time soon when all of a sudden he’s given an offer he can’t refuse: do a small job of thievery for the President’s current campaign committee, and it’s a Get of Jail Free card that in his wildest dreams he never expected.

   Obviously after the flop that was the Watergate burglary, they want a professional, not a crew of amateurs.

   Nowhere near as violent as the Parker books, and not as out-and-out funny as the Dortmunder series, Put a Lid on It is somewhere in between, but closer to Dortmunder than Parker. The focus is on Meehan all the way through, so I never got a clear picture of what he looks like, but if I were to make a movie of this, I might go for George Clooney, except for the fact that maybe he’s tired of making movie like this.

   As for Meehan’s public defender lawyer, Elaine Goldfarb, she looks exactly like you would expect a Jewish public defender named Elaine Goldfarb would look like. I wish she had more of a role in this book than she does, but that’s intentional on her part. She wants no part of what Meehan has agreed to do, and that goes doubly for a little side project he has in mind.

   As far as heists go, I will tell you that getting a gang together on Meehan’s part takes up a lot more time and effort than it should have taken – way more than the middle third of the book – but what I won’t tell you if the heist goes off as planned or not. What Meehan is good at, though, is improvising, and it’s a skill he needs, in spades.

   This one was fun. It’s too bad Westlake never got around to coming up with a sequel.

SHEILA RADLEY – Death and the Maiden. H. Hamilton, UK, hardcover, 1978. US title: Death in the Morning, Scribner, hardcover, 1979; Dell (Murder Ink #1), paperback, 1980.

   Excellent debut novel set in East Anglia and featuring “up through the ranks” Chief Inspector Quantrill and newcomer “blue blood” Detective Sergeant Tait. The problem: death by drowning of a pretty teenage girl.

   The writing is top class, the atmosphere keenly evoked and the personal involvement of the two detectives, with their opposing views and methods, realistic and relevant.

   An author to watch out for.

      The Inspector Quantrill series —

1. Death in the Morning (1978)
aka Death and the Maiden
2. The Chief Inspector’s Daughter (1980)
3. A Talent for Destruction (1982)
4. The Quiet Road to Death (1983)
aka Blood on the Happy Highway
5. Fate Worse Than Death (1985)
6. Who Saw Him Die (1987)
7. This Way Out (1989)
8. Cross My Heart and Hope to Die (1992)
9. Fair Game (1994)

   There are some songs you know will be hits as soon as you hear them for the very first time. This one’s from 1979:

   From Wikipedia:

“Jones and her lover/fellow songwriter Tom Waits spent a lot of time hanging out with their friend Chuck E. Weiss at the seedy Tropicana Motel in Los Angeles. Eventually Weiss, affectionately referred to as “Chuck E.”, disappeared. Later Weiss called the apartment where Jones and Waits lived. When Waits took the call, Weiss explained that he was in Denver, and that he had moved there because he had fallen in love with a cousin there. When Waits hung up he announced to Jones, “Chuck E.’s in love”. Jones liked the sound of the sentence and wrote a song around it. Although toward the end of “Chuck E.’s in Love” the lyrics state, “Chuck E.’s in love with the little girl singing this song,” the twist ending is fictional; Jones was never the girl with whom Chuck E. was in love.”