KENNETH GAVRELL “Hurricane Force.” Carlos Bannon #10. Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, August 1991.

   Perhaps because that this is the 10th in the series of recorded cases for Puerto Rico-based PI Carlos Bannon, certain assumptions were made, and it takes a while for the first time reader (me) to realize who Raquel is, for example, (his girl friend) and even the fact that his is, in fact, a private eye. He doesn’t have a client in this one. He works on the case of the death of the wife of the couple living in the apartment next door only for his own curiosity.

   What’s also somewhat different about this one is that it takes place during a hurricane, with the woman’s death first attributed to a awning that had come loose during the high velocity winds during the storm, fracturing her skull. Carlos, however, thinks the dead woman’s husband is acting suspiciously, and he follows up on them. It is only that he is friends with the police that saves him from worse trouble himself.

   The story doesn’t have a lot of depth to it, I admit, but it reads very smoothly, and if I ever came across another of Carlos’s adventures, I’d be sure to read it. There were 15 of them altogether, all of them appearing in AHMM between 1980 and 1998.
  
       ___

UPDATE: Kevin Burton Smith, the man behind the Thrilling Detective website, has quite a bit more about Bannon. Since he quotes me on his site every once in a while, I don’t think he’ll mind if I quote him his time around. This will add to the information about Bannon that didn’t come up for me in this particular story:

   “He was born Carlos Bannon Santiago, sole offspring of a Puerto Rican mother and a gringo father. He divided his childhood between Salinas and New York. After a stint in Vietnam doing his duty for Uncle Sam, and a failed marriage, he headed back to San Juan, where he runs a small detective agency. He has a part-time secretary, Maria, who tries her best to keep Carlos honest, and a sometime assistant, Raul, a young guy who handles some of the scut work. And, occasionally, he calls in his girlfriend, Raquel Nieves, for backup. She’s a private detective herself, for the considerably larger Athena Detective Agency.”

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON – Kidnapped. First published in the magazine Young Folks from May to July 1886, and as a novel in the same year.

   
   Young David Balfour has left his home to go to Shaws where his uncle is to turn over the estate he has inherited. Most of you know the story. It is one of the most beloved classics, filmed numerous times since the silent era, adapted on radio, in comic books, and just about any media you can imagine.

   First published in a boy’s magazine Kidnapped turns out to be one of the most influential tales ever spun by one of the most popular writers of the 19th Century. Despite having first appeared in a boys’ magazine it is an important story that had wide ranging influence beyond its initial audience, the foundation of an entire genre of popular fiction.

   Young David Balfour travels to Shaw House where his scheming uncle plots to have him kidnapped and shipped off. On the ship he has been made cabin boy on, he meets and saves another passenger Alan Breck, a Scottish revolutionary fleeing Scotland after the rebellion.

   Though David is a Protestant loyalist and lowlander and Alan a Catholic traitor and Highlander the two form an alliance surviving ship wreck, a desperate journey, a colorful army of eccentrics, traitors, and soldiers, and eventually reclaim Shaws for David and save Alan from the hangman.

   Though Stevenson’s Treasure Island had set some of the tropes appearing in Kidnapped, it is in this novel that they all come together in the form that would be most often used in the coming century.

   In Kidnapped Stevenson’s avocation of the countryside creates an important character, the wilderness itself, that will come into play in countless imitations.

   
   Kidnapped is the model for a whole genre of British adventure stories that would dominate the thriller for much of the next century. Even Stevenson would revisit the basic form in novellas like “Pavilion on the Links”, The Black Arrow, and The Wrecker where John Buchan would take the form and run with it in his “shockers” that followed the model Stevenson set into the novel of international intrigue.

   With the popularity of Buchan’s The 39 Steps the model was established, and the British thriller was born variations on the theme of friendship, betrayal, duality, mystery, pursuit, and chase would dominate books by writers such as Dornford Yates, Geoffrey Household, Hammond Innes, Victor Canning, Gavin Lyall, and Mary Stewart.

   
   Stevenson knew a good thing when he saw it. Kidnapped is also influential in that it was popular enough it inspired a sequel, David Balfour, or Caltronia. I’m partial to the Scribner’s Illustrated edition illustrated by N. C. Wyeth of both the original and the sequel though the later Frank Godwin illustrated edition is a delight as well.

   But it is the original, swords and pistols, intrigue and adventure, fogs and chases through the night that gives the book its magic, that and the complex relationship between its two heroes, two very different people whose friendship is forged in danger and pursuit that makes the book a classic and explains the magic that made it one of the most influential stories ever written.

MAX ALLAN COLLINS – True Detective. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1983 Tor, paperback, 1986; ibooks, paperback, 2003. Thomas & Mercer, softcover, 2011.

   In True Detective, Collins has created a brilliantly evocative period novel set in depression year 1933, Chicago, His hero, Nate Heller, is a cop who refuses to succumb to prevailing corruption on the police force. (This is a tightly woven blend of fact and fiction.) When Nate becomes involved in the shooting of gangster Frank Nitti, the corruption closes in on him. His testimony as to what happened in Nitti’s office during the shoot-out is vital to several parties; and given the climate of time and place, they all assume that Nate is for sale.

   Nate isn’t, as he explains to his pal, boxer Barney Ross. With no alternative to dishonesty other than to quit the police department, Nate goes private, working out of an office, complete with a Murphy bed, above Ross’s saloon.

   Nate has trouble and he has enemies, among them Chicago’s corrupt Mayor Cermak, the mover and shaker of the 1933 World’s Fair, and former vice president General Charles Gates Dawes, not to mention the unnamed but sufficiently dangerous Al Capone. It’s a good thing that Nate also has allies like Eliot Ness, Franklin Roosevelt, and even young sportscaster Dutch Reagan.

   The writing style here is hard-boiled and literate, and the novel is illustrated with black-and-white photographs of the book’s true-life characters and of depression-era Chicago. So artfully are photographs matched with text that they add wonderfully to the painstakingly created atmosphere of that almost-lost time.

   This novel won the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award as 1983’s best private-eye novel, and deservedly so. A lovingly and often elegantly written novel, this is marvelous entertainment and a must read for every fan of private eye fiction.

   A second Nate Heller adventure, True Crime (1984), involves the detective with J. Edgar Hoover and an FBI plot against the infamous John Dillinger, and is every bit as evocative and entertaining as True Detective. More Heller novels are planned for the future.

     ———
   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.

Editorial Update: There are now 20 books in the series, the most recent being Do No Harm (2020), in which Heller finds himself involved in the Sam Shepard case, which in real life occurred in 1954. (I believe that all of Heller’s cases have appeared in chronological order, both his time and our time.)

GEORGE McDONALD FRASER – Flashman and the Tiger. Knopf, hardcover, 2000. Anchor, paperback, 2001.

   Flashman and the Tiger‘s a collection of three bits Fraser apparently hasn’t the energy to work up into full-blown Novels, but an entertaining collection nonetheless. “The Road to Charing Cross” revisits Bismarck and some of the players in Royal Flash, with Flashman unwillingly (of course) involved in thwarting an attempt on the life of Emperor Franz Joseph. The twists are pretty easy to see coming, and Fraser missed an opportunity for an interesting footnote about Valentine Baker, but it’s still fun.

   The second bit, “The Subtleties of Baccarat,” is a Henry-Jamesish thing, the story hinging on self-righteousness, public opinion and the subtle agendae so dear to James’ heart. Imagine The Ambassadors with sex and a sense of humor and you get the idea.

   Best of the lot, though, is “Flashman and the Tiger.” Holmes enthusiasts will see the resolution marching down Baker Street, but it’s an enjoyable thing, and Holmes’ cameo appearance is truly hilarious. Seek it out.

Today, March 7th —

   I tried to organize a game of hide-and-seek yesterday, but I had to give up. Good players are hard to find.

BARBADOS QUEST. RKO Pictures, UK/US, 1955. Released in the US as Murder on Approval. Tom Conway, Delphi Lawrence, Brian Worth, Michael Balfour, Campbell Cotts, John Horsley, Ronan O’Casey, Launce Maraschal. Writer: Kenneth R. Hayles. Director: Bernard Knowles. Currently available on YouTube.

   J. D. Everleigh (Launce Maraschal) a proud and wealthy American philatelist (stamp collector to you and me), purchases a rare stamp named the Barbados Overprint for $10,000 from Geoffrey Blake (Brian Worth), who claims to represent the respected expert Robert Coburn (Campbell Cotts). The stamp is the only one on the market and belonged to the late Lord Hawksley.

   A curious condition of the sale dictates that no buyer can reveal the purchase for six months. However, upon returning to America, Everleigh discovers that a friend seems also to have purchased the stamp and suspects that his own is a fake. He enlists the help of English, New York-based private detective Tom Martin (Tom Conway).

   Tom flies to England and reteams with old army friend and former petty thief Barney Wilson (Michael Balfour). They learn that Robert Coburn knows nothing about the sale or anyone named Blake. The real stamp apparently remains in the possession of Hawksley’s widow (Grace Arnold). Tom’s roving eye settles on her secretary, Jean Larson (Delphi Lawrence), who reveals that Hawksley’s nephew is Geoffrey Blake. It seems Blake arranged the sale himself without permission, sold the real one to Everleigh and left the fake with his aunt, who knows little of stamps and would not know the difference.

   This seems to be true when Everleigh’s stamp is authenticated. However, it does not explain how such a rare stamp has suddenly become so common. Tom discovers that an engraver at a printing firm named Stefan Gordoni (Ronan O’Casey) is part of what appears to be a counterfeiting ring but, before the police can be summoned, Gordoni is killed by an unseen assailant and his body later disappears. Detective Inspector Taylor (John Horsley) wades in after a burglary at Coburn’s office in which nothing is apparently stolen and distrusts Tom enough to threaten him with deportation if he doesn’t return to America at once. Tom is threatened by the bad guys too and, when he doesn’t obey, Jean is kidnapped.

      SPOILERS BEGIN —

   It turns out that Blake and Coburn were running a racket in which they could sell duplicates of rare stamps multiple times, demanding silence from their buyers while they went about enlisting more. However, when Gordini finds out why he was hired to make the counterfeits and the amount of money that was earned because of them, he robs Coburn’s office, steals the engraving plates from which he had duplicated the stamp and blackmails Coburn for $2,000.

   He is promptly killed by Blake, who then frames Coburn for the murder and kills him too, making it look like suicide. Gordoni, however, had suspected such countermeasures and arranged for the engraving plates to be sent to Coburn in return for the money. Tom intercepts the parcel and Jean is kidnapped to make him hand it over. However, it turns out that Everleigh’s stamp was indeed a fake. Jean is Blake’s lover and switched it for the real one in an effort to get Tom off the case. Before Blake can retrieve the incriminating plates, Tom captures him and the police arrive.

      SPOILERS END —

   This B-film from producers Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman is very much in the style of their later television success The Saint. Indeed, Tom Conway had played The Saint on American radio and was best known for The Falcon, an identical character, in a series of 1940s B-films he had inherited from his brother George Sanders, who had also donned the halo. Like those films, this British effort was distributed by RKO and sticks so closely to the formula that it is almost indistinguishable from a Falcon film, but with names changed and the setting switched to England.

   Conway is as good as ever, with his Errol Flynn-like good looks and suave, twinkly-eyed demeanour – though, at 51, was beginning to show his age. At this point in his career, the actor was suffering from alcoholism and looking to Britain for leading roles in B pictures. He had recently played Norman Conquest (of the long-running, but now forgotten, series of suspense novels) in Park Plaza 605 and a character curiously named Tom Conway in Blood Orange (both 1953).

   Here, he is Tom ‘Duke’ Martin. As with the Falcon series, he has a stout, former crook for a comical sidekick, now played by reliable B-film regular Michael Balfour. Elsewhere, Brian Worth as Blake is conceited, vaguely sinister and reminiscent of a young Dennis Price, while John Horsley is excellent in another of his many detective portrayals.

   However, while the counterfeit racket is a neat one and a car chase perks things up in the middle, the plot is somewhat convoluted and the viewer must keep track of which is the real stamp. The villain is more or less known from the outset and the interest comes from how Tom makes sense of it all, so there is little consistent suspense.

   I saw it twice before I understood everything, so can only imagine how cinema-goers felt on seeing it only once. The ‘Jean’ character, moreover, starts out well enough but quickly takes on a stoned look (even during the car chase!) and there’s an appearance from an oriental dancer which seems superfluous.

   These quibbles aside, this is a functional B-film and a must-see for fans of The Falcon. A sequel, Breakaway, was released the next year and confusingly featured Horsley and Worth in different roles while Conway and Balfour returned. Both films were a success, mostly due to the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedies they were paired with, and a television series was apparently even mooted, though did not materialise.

Rating: ***

SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION, February 1958. Cover: Kelly Freas. Overall rating: 2 stars.

JACK VANCE “Worlds of Origin.” Novelette. [Magnus Ridolph #10.] Magnus Ridolph uses cultural analysis to solve a murder in space. Maybe a good idea, but it turns out a bit ridiculous. (1)

ARTHUR ZIRUL “Secret Weapon.” A Trade Bureau agent discovers a planet inhabited by beings with telekinetic powers. Without a name author it must take more than length for novelette status. [The story is two pages longer than the one by Vance.] (2)

KELLER ERNST “The Red, Singing Sands.” A woman must choose which of two beings is her husband and which a Martian. (2)

ROBERT SILVERBERG “Prison Planet.” Novelette. After 500 years of isolation a planet once used for deporting criminals is discovered to be relearning the secret of space travel. Predictable. (3)

CALVIN M. KNOX “The Happy Sleepers.” The world’s population begins to fall into continuous sleep, but without affecting the brain’s activity. (2)     [NOTE: Calvin M. Knox was a pen name of Robert Silverberg.]

RICHARD R. SMITH “The Old Timer.” Two Earthmen learn too late the oldest Martian’s secret (2)

ROBERT F. YOUNG “Time Travel Inc.” An obvious story of two men’s journey through time to witness the Crucifixion. (3)

LEONARD MEARES – Feud at Greco Canyon. The Braddock Detective Agency #4. Robert Hale/Black Horse Western, UK, hardcover, 1994. No other edition known.

   The Braddock Detective Agency consists of a well-matched husband-and-wife pair, Rick and Hattie Braddock. He’s a jack of all trades, having grown up moving all over the west with a travelling repertory group and carnival show. He’s a master of disguise and an actor very much adept at improvised dialogue, a card sharp and a piano player. She’s beautiful and has a past that includes stints as a chorus girl who is skilled at both make-up and characterization, a magician’s assistant, and as a knifethrower’s target. Or in other words, what better pair can you imagine to tackle outlaws, owlhoots and other miscreants of the Old West?

   Well, they do at times have to take cases the Pinkertons would probably pass up, In Feud at Greco Canyon, for example, they’re hired by the well-to-do daughter of the sheriff there who is getting up in years and is doing his best trying to stop a huge feud between the two major landowners in the area. One is a rancher, the other a farmer.

   The Braddocks go in undercover, he as a card sharp, she as a saloon singer. (See above.) The key to stopping the feud turns out to be finding the man who shot and killed one of the riders for one of the two sides, with one on the other accused of the deed and awaiting trial.

   Meares does not take the case all that seriously, however. A light tone prevails. There is a lot more talk than action, and by that I mean a lot. The one shootout at the end takes less a page or two, and what is happening during it is not clearly defined. On the other hand, a subplot consisting of a incipient love affair between a deputy sheriff and the new schoolmarm takes up a couple of full chapters in comparison, which may (or may not) tell you all you need to know before you decide to seek this one out (or maybe not).

   In its own way, though, this one is fun to read, somewhat on the level of a Durango Kid B-western from the 40s. (I mean no disrespect here. The Durango Kid was my favorite cowboy in the movies when I was a kid.) Meares was an Australian writer of mostly westerns, with a few mysteries thrown in, but close to 750 books in all. Some of his westerns were published in the US by Bantam as by Marshall McCoy. These include books in both his “Larry & Stretch” and “Nevada Jim Gage” series, both of which became collectors’ items here for a while, perhaps more for their James Bama covers.
   

      The Rick & Hattie Braddock series —

Colorado Runaround, 1991.
The Major and the Miners, 1992.
Five Deadly Shadows, 1993.
Feud at Greco Canyon, 1994.

Today, March 5th —

   I went to the toy store and asked the assistant where the Schwarznegger dolls were, and he replied, “Aisle B, back.”

CONVICT’S CODE. Monogram Pictures, 1939. Robert Kent, Anne Nagel, Sidney Blackmer, Victor Kilian, Norman Willis, Maude Eburne, Ben Alexander. Director: Lambert Hillyer. Currently available for viewing here on YouTube.

   You’d have to be a real fan of old movies to recognize more than one or two of the names above with resorting to IMDb to look them up, but they were all professional performers with loads of credits. I imagine Ben Alexander’s name stands out the most, and his was only a small part. I recognized him by his voice before I saw who he was. He was very young, only 28 at the time, although he’d been making movies since he was five.

   Robert Kent was a complete unknown, but with 71 credits included on IMDb, obviously I haven’t been paying attention. In Convict’s Code, he plays the convict, obviously the leading role. He plays Dave Tyler, a former football star who’s been in prison for three years, locked up for a robbery he didn’t commit.

   Released on parole, he vows to prove his innocence, but the six eyewitnesses who testified against him seem all to have died or disappeared. This is not surprising, at least to the audience, who all knew this is what was going to happen as soon as he shook the warden’s hand goodbye.

   But here is where some suspension of disbelief comes in. After meeting with is parole officer, who goes through all of the things Dave can and cannot do (mostly cannot), Dave unknowingly goes to work for the very same man (Sidney Blackmer) who framed him. And this same guy has a sister (slim and very pretty Anne Nagel) whom he dotes on, and with whom Dave soon finds himself falling in love.

   There is more, and all of the players play their roles most enthusiastically, making what could have been a very dull affair not that much of a chore to watch. Turning off your mind and not asking questions helps, but sometimes that’s all you don’t mind doing on a cold winter night around midnight.