Céline Dion was my wife’s favorite female singer. She listened to her CDs constantly. It wasn’t until I came across a live version of this song on YouTube that I realized how dynamic if not out-and-out physical her singing voice was:

ROSALIE KNECHT – Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery. Vera Kelly #2. Tin House Books, Trade paperback original, 2020.

   Truth be told, Vera Kelly was not a private eye in her first recorded adventure, that being Who Is Vera Kelly? (Tin House, 2018). In that one, which I haven’t read, so please forgive me if I have some details wrong, she was recruited by the CIA for her computer skills and shipped off to Argentina to do some undercover work there. That was in the mid-1960s, she was only a 20-something, and when a new political regime took over, she was abandoned and had to make her way back to the States on her own.

   When book Number Two begins, it is August 1967, and she is living in Brooklyn (Brighton Beach), and it is a very bad day. Her live-in girl friend has left her, and her boss (she is working as a film editor for a small TV station) overhears her talking to Jane and fires her. As I say, not a good day.

   She needs a new way to make a living, to start with, and this is when she puts ads in both the Post and the Times looking for clients who need the services of a private investigator. Things do not go swimmingly at first, but at last she hooks one. A man and wife are looking for a young boy, their nephew, who has gone missing. The boy’s parents are back in Dominica, and they may be in jail after Trujillo’s ouster. (When Balaguer took over, the country was in total chaos.) They had managed to get their son to the US, but when his foster parent in this country died, he disappeared. Vera’s job: find him.

   Her very first case, and it is quite a way to get her feet wet.  In the end, though, after some interesting side trails that perhaps she needn’t have taken, she prevails.

   This is not your traditional gritty PI novel. At times it as much a study of Vera Kelly’s life as it is a hunt for a missing boy, and in an unusual haunting, somewhat surreal fashion. In some ways she is finding herself as well as solving the case. Not really a guy’s book at all, but when it comes down to it, here’s the crucial question: would I read the next book in the series, if there is one? My answer: yes.

LEO BRUCE – Furious Old Women. Carolus Deene #7. Davies, UK, hardcover, 1960. Academy Chicago, paperback, 1st US printing, 1983.

   Carolus Deene teaches history at a boys’ public school in England. He has a private income and also enjoys solving baffling crimes. On this occasion, Deene is called into the small village of Gladhurst to discover who murdered Millicent Griggs. What Deene discovers is a village full of “angry old women,” any of whom had good reason to intensely dislike Millicent enough to murder her.

   There also prove to be several men who are likely suspects. As Deene probes, he discovers a tremendous rivalry between Millicent (Low church proponent) and Grazia Vaillant (High church promoter), with the Rector caught between both women and their money. Two more bodies will complicate Deene’s investigation, as well as the. pressure from his headmaster to take a more active role at school (which means curtailing his detective tasks).

   Clues abound, and Bruce is nothing but fair with the reader in providing all the necessary facts to solve the mystery. The solution is quite clever and carefully hidden! A delight for mystery fans with a bent for the British.

J. JEFFERSON FARJEON “Secrets in the Snow.: Short story. Included in Best Stories of the Underworld, edited by Peter Cheyney (Faber & Faber, hardcover, 1942; reprinted 1949). Original publication as yet unknown.   [UPDATE:  See comment #6: “…the story first appeared in the U.K. in the Christmas 1939 issue of Weldon’s Ladies Journal.”]

   When a Christmas Eve motor-coach gets stuck in a snowstorm, a young woman named Janet, anxious to get to her destination and the house party waiting for her, decides to tag along after her taciturn seat companion, who heads off in the storm in the direction she is going. He tries to dissuade her, telling her that he’s from Scotland Yard and that he’s on a job.

   She persists and begins to follow him anyway. Strangely, however, she discovers another set of footprints also on the trail she is following. Both are moving faster than she can, and she is all but lost when thankfully she comes to a small cottage with a fire going in the fireplace and a hot teapot set out on a small table.

   She is alone, she thinks, but no, a small wizened caretaker pops his head in. But why he is a carrying a shovel, which has been recently used? Then, as she is changing into a warm set of closing, he disappears into the snow, and she hears a small cry out in the darkness.

   Intrigued? If you’re not, you’re a much more a non-curious person than I. Also, if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, this story may remind you of a full-length novel, Mystery in White, which was also written by Farjeon and first published in 1937. A reprint edition came out in 2014, and I reviewed it here.

   The mystery in “Secrets in the Snow” is wrapped up neatly and efficiently. It’s a crime story, not a detective tale, so fairness to the reader does not come into play, but its lack of length also means it’s short enough to not wear out its welcome. This one was fun.

PERRY MASON “The Case of the Restless Redhead.” CBS, 21 September 1957 (Season 1, Episode 1). Raymond Burr, Barbara Hale, William Hopper, William Talman, Ray Collins. Guest Cast: Whitney Blake, Ralph Clanton, Gloria Henry, Vaughn Taylor. Teleplay: Russell S. Hughes. Based on the novel by Erle Stanley Gardner. Director: William D. Russell. Currently available on DVD and streaming on Paramount Plus.

   When a waitress comes home from work, she finds a gun in her cigarette case sitting on her coffee table. In her shoes, what would you do? I’m sure you would call Perry Mason’s office, the same as either you or I would, am I right? Even though it’s late at night, she heads out by car to meet him in his office.

   She’s followed by a car driven by a man with a pillow case over his head, with holes cut out for his eyes. When he tries to run her off the road, she uses the gun to fire two shots at him. She misses, but one shot hits the car, which seems to swerve off the road. Telling her story to Mason, he decides to drive out to the spot where all this took place.

   Would you be surprised if I told you the police are there first? You shouldn’t be. They are, and they’re trying to find a way to hoist a car up a steep embankment. The driver of the car, found inside, Mason is told, is dead. He has been fatally shot in the head.

   The Perry Mason novels always begin with extremely catchy openings, and this first episode of the Perry Mason TV show follows the pattern to perfection. Other familiar themes follow. Mason is not sure whether to believe the girl’s story or not, but when Lt. Tragg comes calling, he has no recourse but to take her on as a client. Della Street is there to comfort her and provide everyone with coffee. (It is now three o’clock in the morning.)

   As for the gun, Paul Drake soon discovers that is one of a pair, both bought by the same person at the same time. Mason maneuvers himself into the case personally by obtaining the other of two guns, putting a notch in the barrel with a small file, then shooting it a couple of times at the scene of the crime.

   This little trick comes in handy at the preliminary hearing, which ends up with D. A. Hamilton Burger completely befuddled. Now I posit this, if I may. Can you think of a better story line than this to demonstrate to TV audiences everywhere in the country what the rest of the series is going to be like, based on this very first episode? Nor can I.

   This synopsis so far does not include the following: Perry’s client was recently acquitted of stealing some jewelry from a movie star who just happens to be the fiancée of the man who bought the two guns, who is being blackmailed by the former husband of the movie star who claims the divorce never went through, and the husband and wife who run the motel where the theft of the aforementioned jewelry took place act very strangely when Mason comes asking questions.

   And do you know what? You can actually follow the plot, even with all of these players, and without a scorecard.
   

● ACTION IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC. Warner Brothers, 1943. Humphrey Bogart, Raymond Massey, Alan Hale, Julie Bishop, Ruth Gordon, Sam Levene, Dane Clark, Glenn Strange, and Ludwig Stossel. Written by John Howard Lawson, Guy Gilpatric, A.I. Bezzerides, and W.R. Burnett. Directed by Lloyd Bacon (and uncredited Raoul Walsh & Byron Haskin.)

● DAS BOOT (THE BOAT). German, 1981. Jurgen Prochnow, Herbert Gronemeyer, Klaus Wennemann, and Martin May. Written & directed by Wolfgang Petersen, based on the novel by Lothar Buccheim,

   A contemporary view and a weary look back from the other side.

   Action in the North Atlantic enlists Warners stock company into the Merchant Marine and pits them against ruthless Nazi U-Boat commanders as they ply the war-torn Atlantic (where else?) with much-needed supplies for the good guys.

   When it’s not bogged down by patriotic speeches and propaganda scenes, this is a dandy action flick with outstanding special effects: Massive convoys, ships blowing apart, U-Boats cruising the depths, and a freighter pulled to shore by hordes of cheering Russians, all done on studio sets, and done to mesh visually with the film as a whole — never quite convincing to my jaded eyes, but never jarringly unconvincing either.

   Unfortunately, when things aren’t blowing up there’s that script to get through. Bezzerides and Burnett, two authors I highly regard, are credited with “additional dialogue” and I sincerely hope they didn’t spew this hokum. Every time the action flags, someone has to raise an idiot question about the purpose of all this, and get patly put down by right-thinking Americans. Even when Bogey slugs some guy in a bar, it’s not just because he’s bothering the pretty chanteuse; the lout’s also blabbing about outgoing cargo boats in front of a “Loose Lips” sign.

   Almost forty years later, the Germans took a jaundiced but no less heroic look back at the same year in the same theater of operations. Das Boot opens with a celebratory orgy attended by outgoing naval officers drunk to walking-comatose state, the veterans trying to keep a straight face among the fiery youths shipping out for adventure and the glory of the Reich. Quite a contrast to Warners’ Action, but oddly moving in its own way.

   Once we get into the U-Boat, director Petersen and cinematographer Jost Vocano integrate smoothly into the cramped confines, with long tracking shots jostling through crowded passageways, tight close-ups and a camera that never seems more than elbow-length away from anything. Where Action in the North Atlantic goes for spectacle, Das Boot builds tension, with long stretches of fruitless patrolling, men getting on each other’s nerves, and a short burst of action that leads into even more tension as depth charges echo around the sub, and men bounce around like marbles in a tin can.

   The special effects here are on a smaller scale, but quite as effective as the showier stuff in Action. And in terms of character, the relatively unknown (to me) cast of Boot seemed more real than the actors I know and love from the earlier film. But this is not a put-down. Taken together, the two films make a fascinating and fun-to watch contrast as history seen then and seen now.

BLACK MOON. Columbia Pictures, 1934. Jack Holt, Fay Wray, Dorothy Burgess, Clarence Muse. Screenplay: Clement Ripley & Wells Root. Directed by Roy William Neill.

   Despite the attitudes of the time, this Columbia horror film is almost a companion piece to Val Lewton’s classic, I Walked With a Zombie, and an effective and suspenseful tale of horror and mystery.

   Jack Holt is well to do businessman Stephen Lane, married to the mysterious Juanita Perez (Dorothy Burgess) who is obsessed with the voodoo culture of the island where she grew up. As the film opens she is playing the voodoo drum for their young child Nancy (Cora Sue Collins), while downstairs a psychiatrist warns Stephen to let her obsession play out on its own, causing him to put off joining her on her planned return to visit her plantation owner Uncle Dr. Raymond Perez (Arnold Korff) who raised her after her parents were killed in a native uprising.

   The next day Stephen’s secretary Gail Hamilton (Fay Wray) presents him with the passports needed, adding that she would like to resign because of a romantic entanglement, not telling him that reason is that she is helplessly in love with him, but he persuades her she is needed by his wife and she reluctantly agrees to accompany her to the island.

   Meanwhile Juanita loses her temper when a friend of her Uncle tries to prevent her from going to the island. Things are bad there, and her presence can only make things worse. While a child there it seems that she became deeply involved in voodoo ceremony thanks to a black nursemaid Ruva (Madame Sul-Te-Wan) and the local voodoo priest Kala (Laurence Criner). Her Uncle fears for her safety and sanity.

   Turns out he is right.

   Once on the island things proceed to get worse. Gail is frightened for Nancy and Anna (Eleanor Wesslehoeft), Nancy’s nurse, clashes with Ruva. When Gail cables Stephen to hurry to the island the native who sent the cable is murdered.

   Stephen arrives on a schooner captained by an American, “Lunch” McClaren (Clarence Muse) who is going to marry a local girl and warns Stephen the locals are in a dangerous mood. Stephen’s arrival is joyful for his daughter and a relief for Gail, but only for a short time. Anna has died in an unlikely accident and now Ruva is Nancy’s new nurse.

   Meanwhile Juanita has gone completely native as the priestess of the voodoo religion.

   When Lunch asks Stephen’s help to try and rescue his girl friend who is the sacrifice for that nights ceremony he witnesses Juanita in her guise as priestess before shooting and wounding Kala. Having failed to kill the high priest they now face an uprising as Juanita wants Nancy and plans to sacrifice Stephen and Gail. Forced to barricade themselves in the house they are driven out by a fire. Dr. Perez and Lunch escape but Nancy, her father and Gail are taken.

   Perez and Lunch manage to rescue the adults, but Nancy is still with her mother, and now the high priest has chosen to sacrifice the child with Juanita wielding the blade.

   Stephen and Lunch return for the child, will they be in time, will Juanita sacrifice her own child in her maddened hypnotic state…

   With an intelligent screenplay by Clement Ripley and Wells Root, atmospheric direction by the always interesting Roy William Neill, and a good cast, the film builds fine suspense, a real sense of impending doom. True Holt is a bit too old and stout, but he’s always good as a stalwart hero. Fay Wray doesn’t have much to do but look scared and pretty, and she does that just fine. Dorothy Burgess is quite good as the increasingly mad and cruel Mrs. Lane.

   More interesting for a film of this time is Clarence Muse. Despite his nickname “Lunch,” he is far from the usual comedy relief. In fact, other than a few lines his role is absolutely straight and courageous. He doesn’t have a single scene when he shows any more fear or concern than anyone else in the film, in fact he is the hero’s greatest ally, far more competent and intelligent than the white sidekicks in most films, all of which is unusual for a film from this era and goes someways from the simple superstitious natives in revolt elements of the plot.

   In fact, Dr. Perez is hardly presented as a Colonial paragon, and the screenplay brings out that he and those who came before him have oppressed the locals and driven them to extremes, nor or Ruva or Kala punished for their roles in the revolt, something fairly remarkable considering the fate of most such characters even in films today (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom).

   Black Moon isn’t a perfect film. It meanders here and there, the screenplay could use tightening, it doesn’t always live up to Neill’s atmospherics and inventive camera work, but on the whole it is a terrific little movie that compares well to Lewton’s more masterful I Walked With a Zombie.

STEPHEN KING “Quitters, Inc.” Short story. First published in Night Shift (Doubleday, hardcover, 1978). Reprinted in Best Detective Stories of the Year: 1979, edited by Edward D. Hoch (Dutton, hardcover, 1979); and Prime Suspects, edited by Bill Pronzini & Martin H. Greenberg (Ivy, paperback original; 1st printing, June 1987). Film/TV adaptations: (1) Anthology film Cat’s Eye (1985) along with “The Ledge” and “General.” (See comment #1.) (2) Bollywood film No Smoking (2007) (3) “Bigalow’s Last Smoke” (1985) an episode of Tales from the Darkside, 09 June 1985 (Season 1, Episode 21). (King is not credited on either of these last two.)

   An agency man named Morrison meets an old friend from another agency in a bar, but while Morrison is in bad shape healthwise – he’s overweight, drinks too much, and more importantly, smokes too much – his friend is in great shape. How’d he do it, he asks. The friend gives him a business card. It says Quitters, Inc., Treatment by Appointment. Go here, he is told. They have a plan that’s guaranteed to get you to quit smoking. 100%.

   Morrison demurs but decides to give it a try.

   If you’ve ever read a Stephen King novel or story, you know you’re in for a gonzo over-the-top tale from here on out. 100%. No doubt about it. And so it is here. Nobody can match Stephen King when it comes to stories like this, but in that regard, this is only a normal Stephen King story.

   Normal, that is, until it comes to the last line. If you ever read this story, you won’t forget it. Never. 100% guaranteed. And not a bad way to lead off an anthology of crime and mystery stories, as Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg did with Prime Suspects, the first of several similar collections they put together in the late 80s. Other authors include P. D. James, Ed McBain, John D. MacDonald and Donald E. Westlake, just for beginners.

MARGARET MILLAR – Beast in View. Academy Chicago, paperback, 1983. First published by Random House, hardcover, 1955. Bantam, paperback, 1956. Avon, paperback, date? Penguin, paperback, 1978. Carrol & Graf, paperback, 1999. Included in Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1950s (Library of America #269, hardcover, 2015). TV adaptations: The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, 20 March 1964 (Season 2, Episode 21) and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 19 January 1986 (Season 1, Episode 13). Also of note: Voted #79 on “The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time,” issued by the MWA in 1995.

   In 1956 Beast in View was awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel of the year. [For this Academy Chicago edition] Mrs. Millar has prepared a new introduction and afterword in which she reveals the effect this book had on her own personality as she wrote it.

   Beast in View is a psychological suspense story that probes the innermost recesses of a murderer’s mind and that of his victims. To say much more would be unfair to potential readers. The story unravels like a sweater with a loose thread. The reader experiences a sense of being stalked, much as the victims do — leading to the solution of who Evelyn Merrick is and why she is persecuting a group of people who range from intimates to only casual acquaintances.

   A classic crime novel in every sense of the word.

Editorial Comment: I have discovered online a site that quotes the first few opening lines. Here they are:

   The voice was quiet, smiling. “Is that Miss Clarvoe?”

   â€œYes.”

   â€œYou know who this is?”

   â€œNo.”

   â€œA friend.”

   â€œI have a great many friends,” Miss Clarvoe lied.

RICHARD CONDON – Mile High. Dial Press, hardcover, 1969. Dell, paperback, 1970.

   In his strongest work — The Manchurian Candidate (1959), Winter Kills (1974) — Richard Condon has shown an unerring ability to find the hub throughout which the threads of American corruption, desire, insanity, politics, dread, and dreams pass, and to find that precise point of convergence which indicates that the history (and future) of the culture is as coherent and malevolent as death; in his weakest work, Condon has been a Boy Scout leader mumbling increasingly repellent horror stories around a fire to the wide-eyed troops, trying to give them a thrill at whatever cost.

   Mile High is somewhere in the middle. It is as paranoid as The Manchurian Candidate but lacks its purity; it runs out of plot two-thirds of the way through and has to make do with an imposed and inauthentic suspense melodrama. Condon believes his generalities here but cannot pay attention to the particulars.

   The premise is audacious, wholly workable, and possibly even correct (as correct as the brainwashed-and-programmed-human-time-bomb premise of The Manchurian Candidate, or the presidential-assassination premise of Winter Kills): American Prohibition was virtually the single-handed creation of one rich and brilliant businessman who knew that it would be great for the illegal liquor business and used his. modest inherited assets to build a network that, in its complexity, virtually overtook the country. When Prohibition finally collapses, Edward Courance West is worth many hundreds of billions of dollars (and it is his consolidation of widely held assets into hard cash that causes the depression).

   West, however, is an unstable personality; abandoned by his mother, a. dark Italian, in his childhood, he must replicate the abandonment by wreaking terrible vengeance upon his black mistresses. His psychosis leads to murder and to his. removal from American society to a mile-high palace in the central Adirondacks. Here, aging, monumentally rich, safe and mad, West raves to his lifelong manservant, Willie Tobin, of the Communist peril and the rise of “the terrible black hordes” that are his alone to combat. (There is not a cause of the lunatic right to which he will not subscribe millions of dollars.)

   Good enough to this point (or bad enough), and a serviceable, often terrifying roman à clef of several figures in mid-century American life; but there is an imposed and highly coincidental subplot dealing with the black artist wife of West’s second son (the point of view character of the unnecessary middle section of the novel) who reminds West of his mother and of the black women in whose image murder was committed.

   Having run out its exposition and its implication, Mile High turns into a somewhat clumsy (and clumsily transparent) novel of menace and oversimplifies ultimately; West’s “insanity” is the hole through which the book’s true implication and terror drain. West becomes merely a symbol, and unfortunately, the novel “symbolic” rather than the horrifying near-documentary that Winter Kills is.

   Still, Condon’s pacing, portentousness, and Clemens-like contempt for the human condition come  through and sustain the narrative. At half its 160,000-word length, Mile High might have been a tormented, glacial vision: a century of history compressed to nightmare.

     ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.