CAST A CROOKED SHADOW. Associated British-Pathé, UK, 1958; Warner Brothers, US, 1958. Richard Todd, Anne Baxter, Herbert Lom, Alexander Knox. Director: Michael Anderson. Available on DVD.

   Kimberly Prescott (Anne Baxter) is a young South African heiress of a diamond company living in a Spanish villa. She has had a trying year: her father had committed suicide while her brother, Ward, is believed to have died in a car accident. One night, there arrives a man (Richard Todd) who claims to be her late brother. Kimberly is angry with what she considers to be a distasteful joke.

   The man is insistent, however, and can back up his claims with photographs and a detailed knowledge of their shared childhood. He swiftly installs himself in Kimberley’s villa and into her life, while local inspector Vargas (Herbert Lom) remains confused and concerned. Everyone considers Kimberley to be mad and even she begins to doubt herself. And then she realises her life is in danger.

   This 1958 thriller riffs on one of the most intriguing of old chestnuts – the long-lost relative who may be an imposter, which was also the premise to Golden Age writer Josephine Fey’s 1949 novel Brat Farrar. Director Michael Anderson gives us a suspenseful, gothic melodrama which keeps the viewers wondering just how it will end. Richard Todd, who had just appeared in Yangtse Incident for Anderson, makes his character casual, creepy and occasionally even considerate, while Anne Baxter remains on the right side of hysterical. She does much of the heavy lifting here, appearing in most scenes, and maintains a difficult balance between anxiety and determination, while never appearing weak.

   Of particular mention is Herbert Lom, surely one of the most underrated actors of his generation, who remains sympathetic as Vargas. He is intrigued and suspicious, but stymied by Ward’s plausible explanations. There’s also a quite excellent twist in the tale, which should not be considered too much beforehand.

   This was another I saw on the Talking Pictures TV channel, on Christmas Day, and it was better than many current TV offerings. Anyone wanting a cosily creepy evening viewing, in the Daphne du Maurier tradition of clifftop terror, will do well to check this out.

Rating: *****
   

MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI, Editor – The Mammoth Book of Pulp Action. Carroll & Graf, trade paperback, December 2001.

   There was only one story, Fredric Brown’s classic “Don’t Look Behind You,” that I’d read before in this solid anthology of what the editor calls Pulp Fiction though not all the stories were published in the pulps. Since there are too many to go through one by one, I will just comment on some of them.

   The volume opens with Erle Stanley Gardner’s “The Kid Clips a Coupon,” which features The Patent Leather Kid (a sort of Simon Templar/Raffles type character), who manages to steal $70,000 while clearing an innocent man of murder. Though Gardner wasn’t much of a prose stylist, I find his stories featuring minor series characters like the Kid or Lester Leith compulsively readable.

   “Motel” by Evan Hunter seems to be added for the author’s name value since the only action in it is the pounding on the motel room’s walls by the guy in the next room. It’s three chapters depicting the beginning, middle and end of an adulterous relationship, and should be in The Mammoth Book of Adultery if/when that’s published (or maybe Carroll & Graf already has in the five years since this one came out). Judging by the long list of other Mammoth Books listed in the beginning, it’s only a matter of time.

   “Burn, Corpse, Burn” by Bruno Fischer, despite its lurid title, is a sad, sentimental supernatural tale about a lonely man who sees the body of a young woman floating in the water while ice fishing. “The Pulp Connection” by Bill Pronzini has his Nameless sleuth solve the murder of a man killed in the locked room containing his pulps. Not only is this a homage to John Dickson Carr but also to Ellery Queen since the victim leaves a “dying message” clue.

   “Caravan to Tarim'” by David Goodis is a pretty good Arabian adventure story rather than a crime tale per se. “The First Five in Line” is the opening twenty pages of an unfinished novel by Charles Willeford. Intriguing is the word. “Where There’s a Will, There’s a Slay” by Frederick C. Davis has a man returning to his home town to open a factory, trying to solve the murder of a lawyer friend and. confronting a nest of vipers.

   “Dog Life” by Mark Timlin is the only story written for volume. A man avenges the murder of a petty crook/informant though his motive and identity isn’t revealed. Finally, “The Pit” by Joe R. Lansdale is about a small town of redneck types who kidnap any strange men of a certain age who pass through, hold them prisoner while training them and pit them against each other in an unarmed fight to the death.

   There are quite a few more stories that are well worth reading in the 630 pages of this fat paperback.

PAUL RUSE – The Alumni Murders. Tower, paperback original, 1980.

   This is a page-turner. While obviously as exploitative as horror movies such as Prom Night, which just played here on network television, here is a book that in its own way, you may find equally difficult to let loose of.

   And the story is very nearly the same. To revenge a hurt inflicted years in the past, someone is hunting down and killing those judged responsible. This time the story takes place at a high school reunion party, somewhere by a small lake in Kansas.

   The killer is unknown, but once the deaths begin, easily spotted. What I found most remarkable was that the characters, while sometimes crudely and pulpishly drawn, were actually strong enough to command my attention all the long while before the first killing takes place, fully seventy percent of the way into the book.

Rating: C plus

HIS KIND OF WOMAN. RKO, 1952. Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, Vincent Price, Tim Holt, Raymond Burr, and Jim Backus. Written by Frank Fenton and Jack Leonard. Directed by John Farrow and Richard Fleischer (uncredited.) Available on DVD and for rent from Vudu and Amazon Prime, among others.

RICHARD FLEISCHER – Just Tell Me When to Cry. Carroll & Graf, hardcover, 1993.

   I always thought of HIS KIND OF WOMAN as a lop-sided little movie, no great shakes, but modestly enjoyable. I went out with a girl like that once. Then I read Fleischer’s memoir, and now I see it in a whole different light. A good book can do that for you.

   Briefly, WOMAN deals with the travails of Dan Milner (Robert Mitchum) a down-on-his-luck gambler lured to a Mexican resort where everyone seems to be playing a part, except for the one genuine actor, Mark Cardigan (Vincent Price.)

   Turns out the whole thing has been engineered by deported gangster Raymond Burr, who means to kill Mitchum and enter the country under his name. Yeah, it sounds over-complicated to me, too. I mean how hard can it be to get a slightly irregular passport? But that’s the story, and Bob ends up on Ray’s yacht, tied, tortured, running, fighting, running, shooting, running, ducking, and generally making mayhem in some remarkably grim moments, fraught with tension—

   –Or they would be, except that the movie keeps cutting back to Vincent Price and his genuinely funny attempts at rescue. The comedy works, the grim stuff works, but side by side, they keep undercutting each other. I kind of like it myself, but I have to say on any objective level it just doesn’t work.

   So like I say, I always thought of this as a fun little misfire, till I read Richard Fleischer’s engaging memoir, JUST TELL ME WHEN TO CRY, which devotes a whole chapter to WOMAN and reveals that the damn thing cost almost a million dollars.

   It seems director John Farrow finished this film, and like all RKO movies at the time, it went to studio owner Howard Hughes to be screened before release. Hughes thought the ending could be punched up a little, so he called Fleischer in, and Fleischer agreed, maybe it could. So Hughes made some suggestions, Fleischer fleshed them out, producer Robert Fellows added on to the yacht set, Hughes came up with more ideas, Fleischer did his thing, Fellows added on to the yacht, more ideas, more yacht, more funny business with Vincent Price, more shooting, more ideas….

   By the time they finished (they thought) the make-believe yacht filled the biggest soundstage at RKO, Vincent Price held a mock birthday party to celebrate his first year on the picture, Bob Mitchum went on a set-smashing rampage, Lee Van Cleef was judged unsuitable as the main heavy (Remember, the film was finished when this was decided.) an exhaustive search turned up Robert J Wilke as a replacement but after a few days work, Raymond Burr was hired on a whim from Hughes to re-shoot all the original footage done by Wilke and Van Cleef.

   But at length Fleischer and Fellows screened the new ending, with the extensive and expensive yacht scenes, for their Boss – who wanted it all redone because the boarding ladder was on the wrong side!

   Now I never take any memoir as gospel — the form just allows too many temptations to promote oneself and settle old scores — but JUST TELL ME WHEN TO CRY can be read for sheer outrageous entertainment. Fleischer’s accounts of working with Walt Disney, Kirk Douglas, Rex Harrison and Howard Hughes (to name just a few) are laugh-out-loud funny, and he pauses now and then for pithy observations like:

      â€œHope deceives more people than cunning ever could.”

      â€œDirecting is a democratic process in which everyone does just as I tell them to do.”

   And

      â€œIt’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.”

   That last one seems particularly apt these days. And it’s just a sample from a book (and movie) I highly recommend.
   

FRONT PAGE DETECTIVE. “Murder Rides the Night Train.” DuMont, 1951 (Season 1 Episode 14). Edmund Lowe (David Chase). Guest Cast: Lyle Talbot, John Sebastian, John Harmon, Pamela Blake (as Pam MaGuire), Angelo Rossitto. Screenplay: Herbert Moulton, Robert Leslie Bellem. Director: Arnold Wester.

   As the star of Front Page Detective, Edmund Lowe was 61, but to me he looked older. The series lasted only a year and on a minor network, so it isn’t one even fans of old TV shows bring up to talk about amongst themselves. Several individual episodes do exist, probably because it series went into syndication after its initial showing.

   Lowe played David Chase, a newspaper columnist who always ended up helping the police catch criminals and other members of the underworld. There were (I believe) other members of the recurring cast, but none of them appear in this episode, almost all of it taking place on a train taking a former gangster to Washington to tell all to a congressional committee. The problem is, others still in the mob are not interested in having him do any of the talking he intends to do.

   Although he is warned off, Chase chooses to take the same train, and in spite of a bodyguard close at hand, the subpoenaed gangster is shot and killed. The problem is, the dead man was alone in his train compartment with Chase right outside the door.

   With only 30 minutes to tell the story, the “locked room” aspect of the story gets short shrift. It’s not set up properly for the viewer to have a chance to solve it, for one thing, and the fun of doing so is the only reason why killers do their work in such silly, complicated ways. I won’t tell you how it was done, but I will give you a hint. If you recognize the right name in the cast above, you will know all.

   The rest of the cast consists of some semi-familiar character actors playing crooks of one kind or another, save for the welcome addition of Pamela Blake (under an assumed name) as a purported gun moll who is there only so the show doesn’t consist solely of a bunch of guys playing with guns. The locked room aspect was a nice surprise as well, even if it was mostly a dud.

JOHN K. BUTLER “No Rest for Soldiers.” Novelette. Published in Black Mask, October 1936. Not known to have been collected or reprinted.

   It was one of John K. Butler’s Steve Midnight stories in Ron Goulart’s Hard Boiled Dicks (1965/67) that was one of the first pulp detective tales that I ever read. Midnight was a Los Angeles-based cab driver who kept running into dead bodies, and the name of the story was “The Saint in Silver.” I don’t know why, but while the rest of the stories in Goulart’s groundbreaking anthology have faded into memory, on an individual basis, the Steve Midnight story has stayed with me ever since.

   Even though Butler’s name has been long forgotten by everybody else, he wrote well over a hundred stories for the pulps before going on to the movies and TV, with (according to IMDb) 69 credits. What this tells me, more than anything else, is that he could produce vivid, well-constructed storylines meant to keep his audiences reading or watching, and “No Rest for Soldiers” is a prime example.

   I don’t know the full history behind it, but the basis for the story is that in 1936  or thereabouts, disabled US soldiers in World War I were given a bonus in cash to help them get along now that they’re back home. Ernie Chappell is once such, now living in a National Military Home. Across the street, though, is a strip of cheap cafés, shady beer joints and honkytonks, all there to take money from the pockets of the vets living in the home, legally or otherwise, with a wink and a nod on the part of the law.

   Ernie, it seems, has been accused of killing of the silent owners of one such establishment. What’s worse is that he woke up in the same room as the dead man, not knowing whether he did it or not. Luckily for him, he has a good friend from the war, now a used car salesman, who decides to investigate on Ernie’s behalf.

   It’s a good hard-driving tale that as the old cliché says, keeps the pages turning – and of course, there’s a woman involved – as well as a head of detectives who decides that going along with City Hall is something he’d rather not do any longer.

   If I were doing an anthology of old detective stories, I’d do my best to include this one.

   
ANTHEA COHEN – Angel Without Mercy. Nurse Agnes Carmichael #1. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1984. Published earlier in the UK by Quartet, hardcover, 1982.

   There have been many stories about lovable rogues and mastermind criminals in suspense fiction over its long history, but a group of novels in which a troubled murderer is the heroine is an unusual event. That is what Anthea Cohen has created in her new “Angel” series. Cohen, a nurse and writer on medical topics for twenty-five years, uses her knowledge of hospital locale and atmosphere to enrich her series.

   In Angel Without Mercy, Cohen seems to be setting up a classic whodunit – and taking her time about it. She shows us a hateful nurse supervisor named Hughes, and shows us ample evidence of why practically the entire staff of St. Jude’s Hospital wants her dead. The reader may become impatient for the murder and the discovery of the body about three-quarters of the way through the book, but Cohen will not be rushed. She is concerned more with the emotional and psychological mystery of human conduct than with a tidy murder puzzle.

   Although Cohen allows the reader the chance to reason out the identity of her murderer, she does not feel the need to have the police do the same. Her murderer gets away with it, and lives to return for other deadly adventures in Angel of Vengeance (1984) and Angel of Death (1985). It is essential to read these novels in order. And it will be interesting to see how Cohen proceeds with her intriguing series.

     ———
   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: Given the premise as I read it in Kathi’s review (and perhaps I have it all wrong), I saw little opportunity for any expansion of the the three book series she refers to. I was mistaken. There were 18 in all, with the last published in 2005. Nurse Carmichael may have branched out in other directions (??).

RUTH RENDELL – Means of Evil: Five Mystery Stor1es by an Edgar-Winning Writer. Doubleday & Company, UK hardcover, 1980. Bantam, US, paperback, 1981; Mysterious Press, US, paperback, 1991. Published earlier in the UK by Hutchinson, hardcover, 1979.

   Of the British detective-story writers who have appeared on the scene since about 1960, only Ruth Rendell has a volume of short stories to her credit. In fact she has two volumes of short pieces, for her Fallen Curtain preceded Means of Evil by two of three years. The former book, however, is made up of crime rather than detective stories, though people who like that sort of thing (a number which does not include me) tell me that Fallen Curtain is a fine book.

   Means of Evil features Chief Inspector Wexford and Inspector Burden of the Kingsmarkham police in five stories that approach the novelette length, On the whole, this is a satisfying volume, but not of the quality of Rendell’s novels. Only two of the stories, “Achilles Heel” and “Ginger and the Kingsmarkham Chalk Circle,” hold up as detective stories. They are well-told, with good problems and generally fair solutions. The other three stories are dependent on specialized knowledge; if the reader does not know the poisonous qualities of certain mushrooms or physical reactions to aspirin or niceties of the calendar, he will not have a fair chance to foresee Wexford’s solutions.

   The strength of Means of Evil, as in Rendell’s novels, is primarily in her sympathetic descriptions of character. The insights contained in the title story and “Ginger” are particularly acute. And one of the stories – I won’t mention which – actually has a motive based on monetary gain, something extremely rare in Rendell. For those following the Kingsmarkham saga, Means of Evil includes the story in which Burden is married. In short, the first (but, let’s hope, not the only) collection about Wexford and Burden is an important book, though without the strength of plot which Rendell is capable of.

HARD EIGHT. The Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1996. Philip Baker Hall (Sydney), John C. Reilly (John Finnegan), Gwyneth Paltrow (Clementine), Samuel L. Jackson (Jimmy), Philip Seymour Hoffman. Screenwriter-director: Paul Thomas Anderson. Currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

   I watched this one late last year, and if I actually rated movies and kept lists of such rankings, this one would have come out close to the top. (Please note that if I were to put together such non-existent lists, they would be for the year that I watched them, not the year they were released.)

   It was directed by Paul Thomas Anderson in his feature film debut, and cinematically speaking it’s a dazzler. Or it is if you like movies set in casinos (in Reno), with lots and lots of neon lights, cheap diners and even cheaper hotels and drab apartment buildings. Anderson also wrote the screenplay, and it’s a dazzler, too, wordwise. Not in a David Mamet sense, but in the sense that the words the characters in this movie are exactly the words the characters would say, if they were in the real world.

   Plotwise? That’s something of another matter. It is thin, I admit, and it seems thinner than it really is since it is so slow to develop. An elderly man named Sidney whose face looks like it’s seen all of the woes of the world (Philip Baker Hall) takes a young man named John (John C. Reilly) whom he finds slumped outside the door of a diner, the money he needs to bury his mother all gambled away, under his wing.

   The young man, not the most sophisticated young man in any part of the world, but especially not in Reno, becomes the older man’s protégé, the latter obviously knowing his way around a gambling hall very well. Why he does so we do not know, but we are forced by the script (I do not know how) to assume (hope) it is for a good reason. And do we keep watching, although nothing really is happening? Indeed we do.

   There are two more players: Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow) as a casino waitress who moonlights as a hooker and if anything is less sophisticated than John. What we do know is that he is attracted to her. Then there is Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson), whose brashness Sidney dislikes immediately but whom John considers his new best friend. At this point we still do not know what is really happening, but this is also the point at which the plot finally does kick in.

   And it is also the point at which I ironically will stop talking about the plot of this movie. Suffice it to say that from this point on, some of players will do some stupid things, and we are not surprised because these are some of the stupid things people like this would do.

   We also learn a good many things that we did not know before, and although we did not know them before, everything all of sudden falls into place exactly as they would have all along, if we had known what they were.

   I’d call this neo-noir, even though it ends on what I consider a good note, but shakily so, as people such as those in this movie are not exempt from the realization on the part of the viewer that it is not guaranteed that people such as these will only do one stupid thing in each of their lives.
   

RAOUL WHITFIELD “A Woman Can Kill.” Novelette. Dion Davies #1. Published in Black Mask, September 1933. Reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 1953.

   
   That is one heck of a tricky plot, but there is more, because this story has more people not quite who or what you think they are than you can imagine.

   First there is our hero Dion Davies, a successful private detective, part of Davies and Dancer Ltd., a private detective agency. Davies is the face of the operation and his partner Stephen Dancer, a lawyer who financed the partnership and went into business with him and his attractive secretary Julie Ryan.

   Seems simple enough, but this one veers off into Remington Steele country pretty fast. There is no Stephen Dancer, and there is no Julie Ryan, instead there is Julie Hazard, who is the senior partner and created the mysterious Dancer to attract customers and posed as Julie Ryan Davies secretary to keep close. She put up the front money and is the silent partner as handy with a gun or her wits as Dion.

   Tay is a crooked club owner who tricked nice old philanthropic Mrs. Greenaway into selling her non-profit theater and then set about turning it into a swank beer joint. Mrs. Greenaway has always been dead set against beer so she feels doubly upset that Tay tricked her.

   Her revenge is to buy up the property across the street and open up an even bigger joint, put Tay out of business and then close down both places, so Tay sends his man McQuirter to hire Davies and Dancer to get something on Mrs. Greenaway’s wild society granddaughter Nancy Gale who is engaged to a no good society type.

   When Tay tries to set Davies up with a phony Gale he quits and gets a warning from Tay not to hire on with Mrs. Greenaway if she shows up — and a speeding sedan opens up on him from the street with a machine gun to emphasize the fact.

   Then Mrs. Greenaway shows up at his office to hire him — not to protect her from Tay, but from her granddaughter.

   Still with me?

   On top of everything else the Old Lady is lying about why she fears her granddaughter. It’s not the girl doesn’t have a motive, but killing Mrs. Greenaway would do her no good, the Old Lady fixed it so she would never inherit, so why is the Old Lady afraid of Nancy Gale?

   Then they find Nancy Gale murdered, and the police think her grandmother tricked her, trapped her, and murdered her out of fear.

   And the twists keep coming until the final shootout when everything gets more or less sorted out.

   This isn’t prime Whitfield. The set-up is too cute, the plot too complex for its length, and there isn’t much character development. Davies and Dancer/Hazard/Ryan are interesting and the byplay between them good, but we never get enough insight into why she does what she does and why he bought into it in the first place.

   Everyone else is strictly from hard-boiled Central Casting.

   Of course this is Whitfield, and even minor Whitfield is well written, observed, snappy, and written with that famous word savagery the Black Mask school of writers were famed for.

   Whitfield was only just below Hammett and Chandler, and light as this fare is, it also shows why. It is fast, clever, and I read it at a sitting compelled to keep going.

   Reading this, it is hard not to imagine it as a slick B movie full of snappy lines and moving at a decided clip for the fade to black, and that’s a compliment and not a knock.

Bibliographic Note: There was to be only one more Dion Davies story, that being “Money Talk,” Black Mask, October 1933.