● W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM – The Narrow Corner. William Heinemann Ltd., UK, hardcover, 1932.

● THE NARROW CORNER. Warners, 1933. Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Patricia Ellis, Ralph Bellamy, Dudley Digges, Artur Hohl, Reginald Owen, Willie Fung, and Sidney Toler. Screenplay by Robert Presnell. Directed by Alfred E. Green.

● ISLE OF FURY. Warners, 1936. Humphrey Bogart, Margaret Lindsay, Donald Woods, E.E. Clive, Paul Graetz, George Regas, Tetsu Komai, Miki Morita, and Frank Lackteen. Screenplay by Robert Hardy Andrews and William Jacobs. Directed by Frank McDonald.

   The Narrow Corner finds Maugham striding confidently through Joseph Conrad territory, with a Marlow-like narrator recalling his encounter with a young wastrel out cruising the south seas to evade a murder rap in Australia. With the ship laid up for repairs on a remote island, the young man meets a family of simple, decent Dutch traders and finds love (or does he?) when it’s too late (or is it?)

   Maugham does a splendid job with the locations, the simple plot and the complex characterizations, but it sometimes seems he’s trying too hard to write a Serious Novel when he could be telling a Good Story. I should also add, in case you’re bothered by it, that this is the homosexiest straight novel I’ve seen in some time: the women are generally predatory or self-absorbed, and Maugham spends a lot of time contrasting the physical beauty and innocence of the young men with the saggy, baggy dissipation of their elders.

   Despite the subtext, The Narrow Corner was snapped up by Warners and filmed just a year after publication. In those heady, pre-code days, Hollywood could still exploit the steamy exoticism of the thing, and director Alfred E. Green and writer Robert Presnell did rather well by it, Presnell excising Maugham’s pretensions, and Green slapping the story on screen with pace and style.

   Corner offers one of the best storm-at-sea scenes ever in the Movies, plus a cast of able thespians (including Doug Fairbanks Jr. as the wastrel, Patricia Ellis as the love-starved island girl, Dudley Digges and Arthur Hohl as dope-addict doctor and crooked captain, and Sidney Toler as a tough “fixer.”) delivering some sharp lines. The film falls down only in the casting of Ralph Bellamy, the mere appearance of whom gives away the ending immediately.

   A few years later, Warners went to the well again, and to their credit, they made an enjoyable “B” picture out of the thing. True, they tossed out most of Maugham’s novel (He got screen credit anyway, which he may or may not have welcomed.) but they filled it up with crackerjack ideas of their own invention: shifty natives planning robbery and fomenting unrest; a larcenous skipper prone to murder; undersea mayhem, and even a hokey octopus!

   Humphrey Bogart, sporting an unflattering mustache, stars as a husband balanced precariously on the edge of cuckoldry when mysterious castaway Donald Woods turns up on his remote tropical island. Wise old Doctor E.E. Clive is quick to intuit the attraction between Woods and Bogey’s bride (lovely Margaret Lindsay, whose star burned steadily in Hollywood but somehow never caught fire) but writers Andrews and Jacobs cut away to the action scenes before things get too syrupy.

   They also do a good job of fleshing out the characters to more than B-movie dimensions. Director McDonald lets his actors expand to fit the parts, as his camera moves gracefully through the studio tropics. As for Bogart, well, this was the point in his career when Warners was still wondering what to do with him, the years he spent playing second-leads, vampires and Mexican bandits. He looks a bit as if at any moment the writers might decide to kill off his character, and the uncertainty works well in this context. It’s not Maugham’s novel, but it’s a dandy bit of entertainment in the Warners style.

PATRICIA WENTWORTH – The Blind Side. Inspector Ernest Lamb #1. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1939. Lippincott, US, hardcover, 1939. Popular Library #66, US, paperback, 1945. Warner, US, paperback, June 1991. More recent editions include Dean Street Press, trade paperback, 2016, which is probably still in print.

   Miss Silver is not in this one, but her two favorite policemen, Inspector Lamb and Detective Abbott, both are. (*) The dead man in Craddock House, made over into individual flats, is quite unlikable — he’s a man with a bad temper, and a womanizer, to boot — and there are lots of suspects, mostly relatives and disgruntled employees, but leading the list is a boy friend of a girl friend if you see what I mean.

   There are so many people in and out of the dead man’s apartment during the night, including at least one sleepwalker, somebody should have been selling tickets. It takes a while for the sequence of events to get straightened out, as you can imagine, but Wentworth manages to keep the puzzle alive and moving during the next few days to follow.

   One thing puzzled me, however, and that occurred immediately after p.150, when Lamb and Abbott believe they have the case all but solved. The only question they haven’t yet answered is how their suspect, who didn’t have a key, managed to get into the building. Nevertheless, two chapters later the inquest takes place, and the jury willingly accepts Scotland Yard’s version of the crime, even as to the guilty party, and with no questions asked.

   Then after the funeral, on p.168, the question of how the killer got in pops up again, with the discovery of a key that may have been stolen, and since apparently almost anyone could have taken it, it forces the case wide open again. It’s awkward story-telling, but that’s all it is. It doesn’t really detract from the mystery, which (in spite of the over-abundance of clues) is rather easily solved — though with surprisingly little help from the police.

   This is a pleasant story, but all in all, it’s not a very challenging one.

         ____

(*) At the time I wrote this review, it appears I knew of a prior meeting or other connection between Miss Silver and the two detectives of record in this book. Unfortunately I no longer remember what that relationship was, if any. (I assume there was.)

      Just for fun:

PATRICIA MOYES – Angel Death. Inspector Henry Tibbett #15. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1980. Holt, Rinehart &Winston, US, hardcover, 1981. Henry Holt & Co, US, paperback, 1982.

   Angel Death is a gripping suspense novel set in Moyes’s fictitious group of Caribbean islands. Inspector Henry Tibbett and wife Emmy are on vacation at the small hotel operated by their friends, the Colvilles; they plan a week’s sailing in a rented boat as well. At the Colvilles also is Miss Betsy Sprague, an interesting and lively old lady. On her first leg of the journey back to Britain she unaccountably disappears after making a phone call to tell the Colvilles that she has spotted the daughter of an old friend, a young woman who is supposed to have gone down with her boat.

   Convinced that Betsy has been murdered, the Tibbetts set out to find her killers. In the course of this Henry suddenly changes. His behavior becomes both manic and paranoid. He won’t let Emmy stay on the boat with him; he sends a telegram to Scotland Yard resigning; he takes off sailing with two young couples.

   Does he have a plan which depends on this weird behavior? Or has he been drugged? The Governor and police of the islands suspect him of being subverted by drug smugglers, and issue a warrant for his arrest. While this reader was breathlessly wondering how and when Henry would get back to normal, not one but two hurricanes strike the islands.

   Emmy has an unwonted opportunity to be a detective on her own. Henry turns up on a foundered boat after the first hurricane, his memory for the intervening time confused and mostly lost. The second hurricane brings it back, Together, he and Emmy foil a plot that is much grander than the smuggling of drugs. As usual Moyes brings her people to life and makes all of this wild action seem quite believable.

RED LIGHT. United Artists, 1949. George Raft, Virginia Mayo, Gene Lockhart, Raymond Burr, Henry (Harry) Morgan, Barton MacLane, Ken Murray, William Frawley. Directed by Roy Del Ruth.

   Watching old movies like this one, you begin to wonder all sorts of strange things, such as how some actors and actresses became well-known stars, and others didn’t. Take George Raft, for example. Take Virginia Mayo, for another , Neither one could act their way out of a dark room, not if you take this movie as a prime example of their work (and quite possibly you shouldn’t).

   Admittedly it’s a low budget crime drama, but that doesn’t stop all of the lower ranked players in the list of credits from showing them how it should be done, if they were paying attention. As the owner of a trucking company whose brother is killed in a bit of gangland revenge, George Raft is as dapper a dresser as ever, but he’s stiff as a board in any small matters such as facial expressions or simply walking across a room.

   As for Virginia Mayo, she had the looks and figure to be a star, I suppose, but her delivery here is as wooden as the board that Raft is as stiff as. The real star of this movie is Raymond Burr. In fact this was shown on TNT as part of a afternoon-long Salute to Raymond Burr, which shows that the people at TNT know what they are doing.

   Burr is the hoodlum who’s been sent up by Raft, and he’ s the one who hires Harry Morgan to wipe out Raft’s brother. Burr was a little overweight at this time of his career, but his dark, glowering eyes made him a perfect villain in any number of films of this same caliber. Morgan, before he began to make a name for himself in comedy roles, was also perfect as a series of dim-witted killers or former boxers who’d taken one too many on the chin.

   Whenever Burr is on screen, the story takes on life. Whenever he’s not, the temptation is to find the fast-forward button. Not a ”noir” film, except on occasion, but in reality an inspirational type of movie, a testament to the practice of leaving Gideon Bibles in every hotel room in the country. (*)

(*) And speaking of Gideon Bibles, it reminds me that the shooting (and a good deal of the subsequent investigation) takes place in the Carlton Hotel, San Francisco. Trivia question: what long-running radio/TV series was there that began almost every episode in the same hotel?

HARRINGTON HEXT (EDEN PHILLPOTTS) – Number 87. Thornton Butterworth, UK, hardcover, 1922. Macmillan, US, hardcover, 1922. Wildside Press, US, hardcover/trade paperback, 2008, as by Eden Phillpotts. Prologue Books, US, trade paperback, December 2012.

   
   The first sighting of the creature the world will come to know as the Bat in London is little but a curiosity, but soon it will become a world wide sensation of terror and horror, a monster striking from the sky and leaving death and destruction in its wake.

   Eden Phillpotts, who under the pseudonym Harrington Hext penned fantastic thrillers, was a considerable literary light in his day well respected by critics for his regional novels; a recognized master of the mystery novel whose The Red Remaynes (1922) stands with Trent’s Last Case by E. C. Bentley as one of the first novels to create the Golden Age of the Classic Detective Novel; the man who convinced a discouraged Agatha Christie to keep writing because he saw something in her work; who partnered with notable writer Arnold Bennett (Doubloons); wrote early Science Fiction (Saurus and others); lost worlds (The Golden Feitch); and had more literary honors than we can list here, was born in 1862 (and died in 1961).

   In the late Victorian Era he made his debut with a pamphlet for a railroad line that both pioneered and popularized an entire sub genre the railroad mystery with My Adventure on the Flying Scotsman, and one of his last novels (1951) featured a murder involving an experimental nuclear physicist . That would be a full career for any writer in any age.

   But back to the central question, what is the Bat, and what is the secret of its reign of terror?

   Alexander Skeat is the first victim, no mark on him but a tiny red spot. Yes, because this one is no fair play detective novel, a drug unknown to science is the culprit. Indeed in the tradition of the thriller mysterious drugs, monstrous bat winged flying creatures, and enough thrills, horrors, and mysterious doings for a dozen weird pulps fill the pages of this unrepentant extravaganza. Even Edgar Wallace could take a few notes from Phillpotts.

   Our narrator is Ernest Granger, the Secretary of the Club of Friends and agent of the Apollo Life Insurance Company, both of who are intimately involved in the history of the Bat. His fellow club members General Fordyce and his scientist brother Sir Bruce, Rev, Walter Blore, Leon Jacobs Stockbroker, and Jack Smith, a barrister all figure in the action.

   Drawn into the case by the death of Skeats, a scientific charlatan, the drama will take the men from London to New York, to Yugoslavia (Jugo-Slavia here), Russia, and China in a race to discover what the Bat is and who is behind it, and why it has targeted the relatively new Christian Science movement.

   Like many books of the Post WWI era, Number 87 is concerned with the future, the fear of another Great War, and how to avoid that fearful fate.

   
   That voice is key to the solution of the novel, a modern Prometheus (and no, the Mary Shelley reference is no accident) who reaches too far and through mere humanity becomes a monster rather than a hero of mankind is the culprit and the Miltonian figure at its center.

   Like much popular fiction of the era the villain is no Fu Manchu or Bond villain, but a flawed superman of sorts, a figure both ultimately admired and feared, and in the end both he and his creation Number 87, the Bat, suffer exile rather than destruction more on the model of Nemo or Robur than the less noble villains to come.

   Phillpotts is hardly hard-boiled or pared down as a prose stylist, but he can write and his works, while dated, are often still quite good reads. This brief scene when our narrator first spies the creature for himself is a good example.

   
   Revelations, horrors, and terrors are to come before Granger and his friends find the remarkable solution to what the Bat is and who lies behind it much less why. It is admittedly old fashioned, but not bad for that. Certainly not to everyone’s taste, but well worth taking the time to find (easy in e-book edition if not hard copy).

   
   Splendid blood and thunder that.

ROBERT J. RANDISI – Alone with the Dead. Joe Keough #1. St Martin’s, hardcover, 1995. Leisure Books, paperback, 1999. Perfect Crime, trade paperback, 2014.

   I think somebody told me this will be a series, but I’m not sure. I’ve been neither a booster nor a buster of Randisi’s books. I think he’s a pretty good writer, but I also think he gets a bit sloppy sometimes with his plots and background, and has yet to write the book he could write. Could this be it?

   Joe Keough is a NYC detective, banished to a Brooklyn precinct because he lost his temper at the wrong time. He catches a case involving a rape and murder of a young girl, similar to a series of killings by a killer nicknamed “The Lover”. Joe doesn’t think it’s the same killer, but his superiors do, and overrule him. Subsequent murders convince Joe he’s right, but no one wants to look for a second serial killer but him.

   Well, I still don’t think he’s written the best book he can write, but this one isn’t bad at all. Randisi is a thoroughly competent storyteller in terms of pacing and action, and he moves this one right along. It isn’t padded, and that’s a real plus – I’ve read a number of books this year with no more story that were 150 pages longer. And it’s a type of story I like, the one-good-man-against-the-system kind.

   So why am I not giving it a higher rating? Keeping in mind that the grade I gave it is better than average, it’s not higher yet because his prose is workmanlike but not exceptional, and there were no characters that I thought had any depth beyond the ordinary. It’s “just” an entertaining, well-told story.

   There should be more such.

Editorial Comment: Barry graded this one a “happy face smiley plus.” I’m not sure exactly what that means, but as he explains in the review, it’s somewhere above average.
   

      The Joe Keough series —

1. Alone With the Dead (1995)
2. In the Shadow of the Arch (1997)
3. Blood on the Arch (2000)
4. East of the Arch (2002)
5. Arch Angels (2004)

    … so yes, Barry was right. This book was the first in a series.

RAYMOND J. HEALY & J. FRANCIS McCOMAS, Editors – Famous Science-Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time And Space. The Modern Library G-31; hardcover, 1957, xvi + 997 pages. First published as Adventures in Time in Space, Random House, hardcover, 1946. Bantam F3102, paperback, 1966, as Adventures in Time and Space (contains only 8 stories). Ballantine, paperback, 1975, also as Adventures in Time and Space.

Part 6 can be found here.

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN “The Roads Must Roll.” Novelette. A “Future History” story. Heinlein foresaw the present automobile traffic problem and proposed moving cross-country strips as a solution. The actual plot suffers in comparison to the details of the economic and sociological consequences. (3)

Update: First published in Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1940. First collected in The Man Who Sold the Moon (Shasta, hardcover, 1950). Also collected in The Past Through Tomorrow (Putnam, hardcover, 1967). Reprinted many times. Awarded a Retro Hugo as best novelette in 2016 for works published in 1940.

A. E. van VOGT “Asylum.” Short novel. Earth is pictured as a sanctuary maintained for mankind by beings with much bigger IQ’s. Two aliens with a need for fresh blood land and involve reporter William Leigh in their conflict with Earth’s guardians. This preliminary involvement is interesting, but although van Vogt does have a great knack for telling a story, the ending degenerates rapidly into confusion on a galactic scale. (3½)

Update: First published in Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1942. First collected in Away and Beyond (Pellegrini & Cudahy, hardcover, 1952). Reprinted in The Great Science Fiction Stories Volume 4, 1942, edited by Isaac Asimov & Martin H. Greenberg (Daw #405, paperback original, October 1980), among others.

LEWIS PADGETT “The Twonky.” Short story. A strange invention disguised as a radio console destroys initiative then life if uncooperative. Better than Padgett’s more humorous stories in this volume. (4)

Update: First published in Astounding Science Fiction, September 1942. Lewis Padgett was a pen name used by the prolific husband-and-wife team Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. First collected in A Gnome There Was (Simon & Shuster, hardcover, 1950). Reprinted in The Great Science Fiction Stories Volume 4, 1942, edited by Isaac Asimov & Martin H. Greenberg (Daw #405, paperback original, October 1980), among others. When adapted to the film of the same name (United Artists, 1953, written and directed by Arch Oboler), the radio in the original story was updated to a television set.

TO BE CONTINUED.…

   
(Give Me That) OLD-TIME DETECTION. Autumn 2020/Winter 2021. Issue #55. Editor: Arthur Vidro. Old-Time Detection Special Interest Group of American Mensa, Ltd. 36 pages (including covers). Cover image: The Radfords’ Who Killed Dick Whittington?

   As is his usual wont, in this latest edition of Old-Time Detection Arthur Vidro has once again delivered a valuable compendium of information about classic detective fiction, resurrecting long-forgotten pieces as well as showcasing up-to-date commentary about the genre.

   When, in 1951, Howard Haycraft and Ellery Queen (the editor) got together to compile a list of what they considered to be a “Definitive Library of Detective-Crime-Mystery Fiction,” they probably had no idea that their compilation (commonly called the “Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones”) would still be worth consulting seventy years later. One of their choices for the list is Clayton Rawson’s locked room classic Death from a Top Hat (1938), which receives Les Blatt’s scrutiny. Another “cornerstone” is Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden (1928), which Michael Dirda, in contrast to the usual consensus opinion, does not regard as “the first modern espionage novel.”

   Two now largely forgotten detective fiction novelists worth spotlighting are the married writing team of E. and M. A. Radford; they receive their due attention in Nigel Moss’s essay, which sadly notes that despite a long writing career “the U.S. market eluded them.” Moss also highlights the play, that rare theatrical bird, an honest-to-goodness whodunnit, derived from the Radfords’ sixth novel, Who Killed Dick Whittington? (1947).

   While he was still living, impossible crime expert Edward D. Hoch turned his attention to Agatha Christie’s short fiction and found most of it praiseworthy: “If the short stories often are not the equal of the best of her novels, they still sparkle on occasion with her vitality and ingenuity, reminding us anew of the pleasure of a well-crafted tale.”

   Dr. John Curran, the world’s foremost expert on all things Christie, has nice things to say about Mark Aldridge’s Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World, in his opinion a “must-have book for the shelves of all fans of the little Belgian and his gifted creator.” Curran also includes little-known facts about Agatha, only a few of which yours truly was aware.

   Continuing with the Christie theme is a talk by Leslie Budewitz aptly entitled “The Continued Influence of Agatha Christie”; “she was,” says Budewitz, “first and foremost a tremendous storyteller.”

   Then come a couple of apposite reviews, both by Jay Strafford: Sophie Hannah’s The Killings at Kingfisher Hill (2020), starring Hercule Poirot; and Andrew Wilson’s I Saw Him Die (2020), the fourth in a series of novels making the most of that Queenian fictional trope of featuring a detective fiction writer as, well, an amateur detective.

   The center piece of this issue of OTD, both figuratively and literally, is Stuart Palmer’s entertaining story “Fingerprints Don’t Lie” (1947), in which Hildegarde Withers, sans Inspector Piper, solves a knotty murder in Las Vegas.

   Continuing with Charles Shibuk’s series of paperback reprints from the ’70s (at the time a noteworthy and welcome trend for classic mystery buffs), he highlights works by Nicholas Blake (Mystery*File here), Charity Blackstock (Mystery*File here), John Dickson Carr (of course!; Mystery*File here ), Agatha Christie (also of course!; Mystery*File here), Raymond Chandler (ditto; Mystery*File here), Henry Kane (Mystery*File here), Patricia Moyes (Mystery*File here), Ellery Queen (Mystery*File here), Dorothy L. Sayers (Mystery*File here), Julian Symons (Mystery*File here), Josephine Tey (Mystery*File here), and editor Francis M. Nevins’s (Mystery*File here) nonfictional The Mystery Writer’s Art, “obviously the logical successor to Howard Haycraft’s The Art of the Mystery Story (1946) . . .”

   Several pages of contemporary reviews of (mostly) classic mysteries follow: Jon L. Breen about Robert Barnard’s School for Murder (1983/4) and Evan Hunter’s “factional” Lizzie (1984); Harv Tudorri about Ed Hoch’s Challenge the Impossible (2018); Ruth Ordivar about Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Angry Mourner (1951); and two reviews from Arthur Vidro about Barbara D’Amato’s The Hands of Healing Murder (1980) and John Ball’s In the Heat of the Night (1965): “with maturer re-reading, I am dazzled . . .”

   The issue wraps up with letters from the readers and a befitting puzzle about Agatha Christie.

   All in all, Issue 55 is definitely worth adding to your collection.

   If you’d like to subscribe to Old-Time Detection:

Published three times a year: spring, summer, and autumn. – Sample copy: $6.00 in U.S.; $10.00 anywhere else. – One-year U.S.: $18.00 ($15.00 for Mensans). – One-year overseas: $40.00 (or 25 pounds sterling or 30 euros). – Payment: Checks payable to Arthur Vidro, or cash from any nation, or U.S. postage stamps or PayPal. – Mailing address: Arthur Vidro, editor, Old-Time Detection, 2 Ellery Street, Claremont, New Hampshire 03743.

Web address: vidro@myfairpoint.net

● CORNELL WOOLRICH “I Wouldn’t be in Your Shoes.” Novelette. First published in Detective Fiction Weekly, 12 March 1938. Collected in I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (Lippincott, hardcover, 1943), as by William Irish. Reprinted many times.

● I WOULDN’T BE IN YOUR SHOES. Monogram, 1948. Don Castle, Elyse Knox, Regis Toomey, and Robert Lowell. Screenplay by Steve Fisher. Produced by Walter Mirisch. Directed by William Nigh.

   At his worst, Woolrich could be wordy, verbose, prolix, repetitive, redundant, tiring and tedious. He could take a metaphor, strap it to the rack, and stretch it till the reader screamed for mercy. But at his best, he could wring poetry out of plot twists and make the pages sing with strange, melancholy music.

   This is Woolrich at his best.

   Tom Quinn starts out on a hot August night as a working stiff, married, and living on the ragged edge of poverty. By the story’s end, it will be Christmas, and he’ll sit on Death Row, framed by circumstances that could only occur in Woolrich’s dark Universe. It begins with him throwing his shoes out the window at noisy cats, builds as the shoes disappear and are mysteriously returned, then twists when he finds money on the street — money taken in a robbery-and-murder committed by someone wearing his shoes. Even his wife begins to doubt his innocence.

   Whereupon Woolrich picks up a familiar theme: The Cop who pinched him begins to doubt his guilt and sets out to find the real killer, a feat achieved with fast-moving prose and a bit of genuine pathos. So Tom is free again. But fate and Woolrich have one last surprise for him….

   In 1948, a producer named Walter Mirisch at Monogram foresaw the end of B-Movies as second-features and began the lengthy and sporadic process of transforming the runty little studio into the less-runty Allied Artists. Mirisch went on to things like West Side Story, Allied Artists gave us Cabaret, but in the meantime, there were still a lot of B’s to churn out, and I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes was one of them.

   The thing is, Shoes shows some of the extra care and attention of a producer and studio aiming just a little bit higher. Don Castle and Elyse Knox take the leads as married dancers whose careers have stalled out — not unlike the careers of Castle and Knox themselves — and when he finds the money, they react believably. Screenwriter Steve Fisher wisely keeps in as many of the characters and as much of the Woolrich dialogue as the budget will allow, and he even rings in a familiar twist of his own to skew things a bit more.

   What impressed me most about this, though, was the acting. Everyone involved, down to Second Detective, sounds convincing. And Robert Lowell (who he?) makes a lasting impression as the unlucky guy ultimately tracked down by gumshoe Regis Toomey.

   Don’t get me wrong. This is still a B-Movie programmer, with most of the faults attendant on that art form. But it’s interesting and entertaining to see everyone giving it so much.