PETE KELLY’S BLUES (Warners/Mark VII, 1955) with Jack Webb, Janet Leigh, Lee Marvin, Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Edmond O’Brien, Martin Milner, and Andy Devine. Screenplay by Richard L. Breen; based on the 1951 radio series of the same title. Directed by Jack Webb.
I knew Jack Webb could be funny — screamingly funny on the Tonight Show — and I knew he could be preachy and boring — like his late-60s revival of Dragnet — but I never thought he could be exciting till I saw this.
The year is 1927: Gangster Edmond O’Brien starts squeezing Kansas City jazz musicians for protection money. When they resist, he has one of them killed and the others knuckle under. He even pressures bandleader Webb into using his mistress in the act. At last, sickened by O’Brien’s brutality, Webb rebels in a violent shoot-out.
A plain tale, simply told, and kudos to writer Breen and director Webb for adding just enough depth to keep it real, and just enough action to keep it moving. Webb himself is effectively laconic, in the Dick Powell style, with one of the great lines in the Movies:
“Call the police and get someone to help bring Joey in.â€
“Joey? What’s wrong?â€
“It’s raining on him.â€
Watching this, I never figured out why Janet Leigh fell helplessly in love with Jack Webb. I mean, he’s not as dour as usual here, but he’s still no Errol Flynn. More like an Americanized Henry Daniell. But the other characters ring true: Peggy Lee’s lush chantoosie, Martin Milner’s hothead, and even Andy Devine, unrecognizable as a tough cop.
Best of all, there’s Lee Marvin as a laconic clarinetist. This character does almost nothing to advance the story, but he’s there anyway, with his droopy eyes and laid-back attitude, lending an authentic jazz-band tone to the proceedings. And he handles the licorice stick convincingly. The fact of his existence in this film — in a medium where every character is a bit of added time & expense — speaks volumes for Breen’s writing and Webb’s knowing production sense.
Add the lush WarnerColor and some real fine, down-home, goat-ropin’ music, and you have a film here well worth your time.
HAYFORD PEIRCE “Fire in the Islands.†Short story. Joe Caneili #2. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, April 1995. Collected in Trouble in Tahiti: P. I. Joe Caneili, Discretion Assuree. (Wildside, paperback, 2000).
Joe Caneili, a former farmboy from Bookbinder, Kansas, had spent twenty-three years in the French Foreign Legion before retiring and setting up shop in Tahiti as probably that island’s only licensed private investigator. There is not a lot of call for his services in that lightly populated economic and political center of French Polynesia, and in this, his second recorded case, it is personal as much as anything else.
For when the husband of the house next door burns down the house next door, Caneili’s home next door, which he rents from the couple, go up in flames with it, along with all of his possessions, as sparse as they are. His assignment, find the husband, who has disappeared. His client, the wife. It isn’t much of a case, and the husband, widely known as a practical joker, is not difficult to find. But the story is fun to read, largely because of the light, semi-humorous touch Peirce uses to tell the tale.
Hayford Peirce, the author, is better known as a SF writer, often using time travel in his work and having, according to one reviewer, a Jack Vance style of writing, which is not a bad style to be using at all. He has also written several stories about extra-sized Commissaire Alexandre Tama, also of Tahiti, whose cases sometimes overlap with Caneili, as it happens here. His adventures have also been collected in paperback form by Wildside Press.
The Joe Caneili series —
The Stolen Grandfather (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine July 1985
Fire in the Islands (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine April 1995
The Missing House (nv) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine July 1995
A Matter of Face (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine February 1998
The Girl in the Picture (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Sep/Oct 1999
Le Père Noël on Christmas Island (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Januay 2012
Crime Wave Batters Tahiti (ss) Trouble in Tahiti (Wildside Press, 2000)
The Lethal Leeteg (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine August 2013
The video below was filmed in 1956 and consists of several actors playing the roles of Perry Mason, Hamilton Burger, Della Street and Lt. Tragg while auditioning for the parts. I found it very interesting.
FIRST YOU READ, THEN YOU WRITE
by Francis M. Nevins
With this month’s column we return to an author I’ve been writing about since my teens and still find fascinating in my late seventies: that incomparable filbert Harry Stephen Keeler, who was born in 1890, died early in 1967, and pounded the typewriter from his early twenties until near the end of his life. During his long career he created many series but only a few series characters.
Usually the central element in a Keeler series was not a human being but something else: a house, a book, a circus, an industrial plant, a skull. On the rare occasions when he did create a continuing character, he usually got tired of the man in a year or so and dropped him. The single exception to this rule was Keeler’s first and clearly his favorite series character, that ancient bedraggled universal genius and patron of homeless cats whose name is Tuddleton T. (for Travelstead) Trotter.
Exactly when Trotter first saw the light of print remained unknown until recently. His earliest appearance between hard covers was in THE MATILDA HUNTER MURDER (Dutton, 1931). But that literary doorstop of 741 closely printed pages was an expansion of a 65,000-word tale, “The Michaux Z-Ray,†which Harry had completed in 1915 and sold for $100 the following year to the Chicago Ledger, where it was published in ten installments (8 April-10 June 1916), all but the first of which are now online thanks to Villanova University.
Which is why we now know that the detective of that serial is not Trotter but a gazabo by the name of Copelia Jarrick who does have quite a bit of similarity to his later counterpart. Trotter’s debut under the latter name was in the vastly longer book version, where he doesn’t come onstage till page 200, summoned by Chief of Detectives Callahan to solve the riddle of the Z-ray machine that is apparently responsible for the deaths of both Mrs. Hunter and her poodle and is also connected in some way with the year-old theft of a platinum brick from a bank in a one-horse town in rural Missouri. But before we see him up close and personal he gets quite a buildup in a conversation between Callahan and insurance magnate Carter Ellwood.
“[H]e’s my criminological scientist….a man who tackles crimes where science—or highly specialized knowledge—has been used….For Trotter, Ellwood, is a man who’s wise himself to chemistry, mathematics, astronomy, insanity, optics, medicine, X, Y, Z, P, D and Q rays as well as probably every other kind of rays there are, or might be supposed to exist. He knows the identity of every expert in the world on any given subject. And it’s he who works with us here at the detective bureau on all the cases of any nature that have to do with science and crime combined….He’s content to dabble in problems…for the pure love of solving the problem and nothing else….[T]he man’s got more information concerning crime and criminals packed away in his card index of a brain than our Bertillon cabinets….â€
In “Z-Ray†Callahan describes this genius in similar language, almost all of which is repeated in MATILDA HUNTER:
“….Cope’s our bearded savant—our grisly scientist who gets the bizarre problems of the police game to tackle.â€
“Why, the man’s got more information packed away in that card index of a brain than our Bertillon cabinet in yonder room….He knows something, I’ll warrant, of every crime that’s committed between Shanghai, China and Bird Center, New York, during the last ten years. And all the time he’s poring over the daily telegraphic reports that are wired in here, he’s figuring out the result of what happens to the eleventh integral of x plus y if you raise it to the nth power and immerse it in a solution of sulphuric acid….â€
Under either name the character is clearly Keeler’s take on Sherlock Holmes, who was still appearing in new adventures when Harry wrote â€Z-Ray†and whose creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died around the time the serial was being expanded into a literary gargantua. But when Callahan in MATILDA HUNTER tells Ellwood that Mr. TTT is the author of a brochure entitled “Crime—Always a Motived Social Reaction As Well As a Motivated One,†we realize that there’s at least as much of Harry himself in the character as there is of Holmes. The distinction between motivation and motiving comes straight out of Keeler’s off-the-wall treatise, THE MECHANICS (AND KINEMATICS) OF WEB-WORK PLOT CONSTRUCTION.
When Trotter steps into Callahan’s office he’s described, in language that comes word for word out of “The Michaux Z-Ray,†as â€a composite picture of a ruddy-faced English gentleman from one of Dickens’ books, and a caricature drawn by an artist on a comic valentine.†We also find in “Z-Ray†a detailed physical description:
The English appearance was borne out by the pink, even rubicund, cheeks, and the stolid, heavy face with the hair dropping below the temples in two sideburns tinged with gray. He possessed a well-defined paunch, which was covered by a tightly buttoned, dingy vest. Across the vest was a massive gold watch chain….His coat was a decidedly English cutaway, but it was soiled and spotted, and in one or two places actually burned thru as tho by acids.
The “thru†and “tho†spellings, which (as we know from his newsletters) Keeler despised and which he changed to their conventional forms in MATILDA HUNTER, were obviously mandated by the Chicago Ledger style sheet. The “Z-Ray†description continues:
….His slightly gray hair stuck up on his head in all directions, giving him to a great extent the appearance of a porcupine, or a cat, bristling with anger. And on his nose were a pair of old-fashioned, steel-bowed spectacles, tilted at such a grotesque angle that the left lens stood directly beneath his left eye, and the right one well above the right eye. His collar was of the batwing pattern, tied with a rusty, black bow tie, and peeping from his slightly frayed coat sleeves were a pair of very soiled cuffs, held together by brass cuff links sich as one can find in any city five-and-ten-cent store….Copelia Jarrick’s socks comprised a tan one and a giddy red one with green polka dots.
Keeler reproduced most of this description in MATILDA HUNTER, adding that Trotter is about 65 years old and changing that tan sock to “a yellow one with circular stripes of tan….†Had there been a movie about him, the perfect match for the part would have been W.C. Fields—provided the director could restrain him from muttering “Godfrey Daniel†and juggling with pool cues!
Between Trotter’s appearance on the scene and the resolution of the MATILDA HUNTER riddles come another 541 closely printed pages, full of the bizarre characters and character-names and dialects and wacky coincidences that only Harry dared dream up. Lots of invented “facts†too.Notice, for example, how the romantic problems of Matilda’s whitebread nephew Jerry Evans—which are more complex than those of his “Z-Ray†counterpart Billy McClintock—vanish in an instant on page 737 with the confident scientific assertion that (as somewhat loosely paraphrased by Keelerite Robert E. Briney) “if your mother had six fingers on one hand, you cannot distinguish between violet and black.†Yeah, right. For better or worse, that’s our Harry.
Between MATILDA HUNTER and the second Trotter novel, Keeler’s style had evolved from the Dickensian mode to the eccentric patois that cost him much of his readership over the years and drove him from the prestigious publishing house of E.P. Dutton to (if I may coin a Keelerism) the bottom rung of the literary barrel, a.k.a. Phoenix Press.
In THE CASE OF THE BARKING CLOCK (Phoenix, 1947), social outcast Joe Czeszcziczki (whom everyone mercifully agrees to call Zicky after a few pages) is about to be executed for the murder of State’s Attorney Umphrey Ibstone and appeals for help to Trotter, now long forgotten and living in a cubicle in Chicago’s Hotel of Nameless Men.
The woolly-headed old genius takes two-thirds of the book just to reach Zicky in the death house but proves Joe’s innocence in jig time and earns a comfortable retirement for himself and his beloved cat Sebastian Sixsmith. Harry’s London publisher Ward Lock came out with a longer and more involuted version of the novel in 1951.
Two years after issuing the U.S. version of BARKING CLOCK, Phoenix cut its ties to Keeler. Two years after issuing the English edition, Ward Lock did likewise, leaving Harry with no publisher in his own language. He continued to write direct for translation into Spanish and Portuguese, but even Instituto Editorial Reus of Madrid and Editorial Seculo of Lisbon passed on some of his submissions including the third and final Trotter adventure, THE TRAP, which was completed on July 11, 1956.
In this gem of daffiosity Trotter is well into his eighties and has been “dead socially†for decades (like Harry himself), and only a few ancients with long memories recall his great triumph in the 25-year-old “Locust Street Murder Case,†i.e. THE MATILDA HUNTER MURDER.
His wardrobe is still atrocious and his wits still keen as he probes the murder of a Chinese laundryman in Oklahoma and the theft of a unique privately printed book of laudatory anecdotes about Harry’s favorite race (all of them, as a note informs potential publishers, made up out of whole cloth by Harry himself).
Before Trotter triggers the titular trap and the murderer of Charley T’Seng is exposed—in the last paragraph, no sooner!—we get to wander in a webwork whose strands include a purple velour hat, a sleepwalking hillbilly, a vanishing glass of water, the Noodle King of Omaha, the cat Grimalky Stripedy-Pants and her five little kittens, a diamond implanted in a cancerous tumor, and so much more. Anyone whom I’ve turned on to this king of eccentrics is invited to hunt on Amazon or another Web-based bookseller for the trilogy celebrating him.
RICHARD LOCKRIDGE – The Old Die Young. Nathan Shapiro #12. Lippincott & Crowell, hardcover, 1980. No paperback edition.
In recent weeks a couple of old pros in the world of mystery fiction have shown their fans that they’re both alive and well, which is welcome news indeed. [The second book is by Ngaio Marsh, and it will come up for review in a few days.]
Each has added a creditable entry to the already sizable list of detective novels that have been produced under their names over the past forty years and more. Separately, I hasten to add, and distinctively.
Taking the male member of this pair of famous writers first – a small change of pace, and there’s nothing wrong with that, is there? – Richard Lockridge’s actual collaborator for most of his first fifty-five books was, of course, his first wife, Frances. Together, their most famous creation was the celebrated husband-and-wife sleuthing team, Mr. and Mrs. North. When Frances died in 1963, it meant the end of the Norths as a detective team, alas, but the adventures of some of their other characters have never ceased to appear. This is Richard Lockriddge’s twenty-fifth book as a solo act.
An aptly chosen word, I think. The Lockridge fictional milieu has always been that of Manhattan and the closer suburban environs, but I think that a closer look would show that very often forming the basis for the immediate story has been the Broadway theatre.
And so it is here. The mysterious death of a leading man a little too old for the part he’s playing draws Lieutenant (soon to be Captain) Nathan Shapiro into the world of bright lights and theatrical temperaments so synonymous with life along the Great White Way.
Shapiro I picture as a sad basset hound who, no matter what case he finds himself on, invariably thinks of himself as in over his head. There are no sudden flashes of brilliance that come in the solving of his cases. He does not believe in coincidence. A steady flow of evidence accumulates against the killer.
For all of its brightly crisp dialogue, always a standard Lockridge trademark, and a brief glimpse or two at modern morality, this is a mystery still very much old-fashioned in tone, with little or no action to speak of, but with a good many speaking parts.
Rating: B minus
–Very slightly revised from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 5, No. 1, January-February 1981.
Bibliographic Update: This was, alas, Richard Lockridge’s final book. He died in 1982.
A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME. Embassy Pictures, 1964. Shelly Winters, Robert Taylor, Cesar Romero, Ralph Taeger, Kaye Ballard, Broderick Crawford, Mickey Shaugnessy, Jessie White, Lisa Seagram, Benny Rubin, Mari Welles, Tom deAndrea, Edy Williams, Connie Gilchrist, J. Pat O’Malley, Hayden Rorke, Roger C. Carmel. Screenplay by Russell Rouse & Charles Greene, based on the autobiography of Polly Adler. Directed by Russell Rouse.
“We don’t know enough about life to be sad about this.â€
A House is Not a Home, and in this case it isn’t much of a movie either.
Supposed to be frank and shocking this is mostly tired and trite, unless you are deeply shocked by someone shouting the word “whore†on screen, or by the fact men pay for sex there is nothing much in this that wouldn’t be perfectly at home with the board of censors.
Better movies had been much racier and more frank in this same period without once having to scream the word “whore,†out loud or repeatedly (and in a tour de force of bad overacting).
Polish immigrant Polly Adler (Shelly Winters) is poor and innocent (and Winters at this point in the film is a parody of the kind of part she played so well in A Place in the Sun, actually painful to watch), narrating her fall and rise and moral fall in Adler’s own self serving “what’s a girl to do†style.
After getting in trouble with a guy she is rescued by good guy Bootlegger Frank Costigan (Robert Taylor) a mobster with ties in government and crime who aides Polly in her becoming a famous madam with rich clients and lady like prostitutes who dress well and behave, mostly.
Innocent Polly just wakes up a madam one day with absolutely no clue how it happened.
Meanwhile still nice Polly meets bandleader Casey (Ralph Taeger) who she falls tragically in love with much to her later regret.
No attempt is made to use period costume or clothes, and the sets are few and far between. It might as well be 1964 in most scenes, and this television instead of a movie.
Mickey Shaughnessy is a crooked cop “Backdoor Reardon†(and no, not one person involved in the film seems to have gotten just how hilarious that is in this context); Broderick Crawford a crooked cop; Cesar Romero Lucky Luciano; Lisa Seagram a prostitute with a drug problem; Roger C. Carmel a drug addicted horn player, Hayden Rorke a crooked lawyer becoming Luciano’s private judge; Kaye Ballard young Polly’s pal in a sweat shop; J. Pat O’Malley a police inspector; and so on.
In short a blend of old familiar faces and “and then I slept with†film bio.
“It seems that sex was a common denominator for all stratum of society.â€
Gee, that’s profound. I think most of us figured that out around puberty, but it is nice to know the world’s most famous madam picked up on it. The Happy Hooker, Polly ain’t. By this movie, save for being raped early on, you could draw the conclusion that Polly herself is a virgin, just a poor little golden-hearted darling picked on by all the mean gangsters, politicians, and policemen wanting a cut of the pound of flesh she carves out of her girls lives.
The screenplay is a paean to Dick and Jane level dialogue, so pretentious and self serving not a single word sounds as if it had ever passed the lips of an actual living human in the real world. Polly’s ghost writer sounds as if he read The Old Curiosity Shop and Fanny Hill over and over to get the tone he wanted.
Attractive Meri Welles suicide is a highlight/lowlight a moment of overacting by an an under-talent that could end any career. The writing, staging, and Winters hysterics will have you on the floor laughing. The proper reaction is “throw another one in the river and see if they float.â€
You have to show people as human before their fate means anything even in a movie this bad. Welles sudden New Year’s depression and leap from a balcony is staged like a high school production of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, without context and telegraphed so broadly Marconi could read it from his grave.
Bad movies come and go, this one mostly went, except it had one thing going for it, seems a couple of young songwriters tackled the title song, and when their names were Hal David and Burt Bacharach, the result was far better than anything in the film. “And a house is not a home, unless love is there..†may not be Cole Porter, but it blows anything in this film away.
No one really gets a career boost from this. Taylor sleepwalks, Winters keeps trying to act as if this was a real movie. Romero tries hard not to be noticed. Everyone else just does their schtick, though Shaugnessy could be prosecuted for mugging in the first degree.
“You’ve been a madam, you sold flesh. They haven’t made a soap that can wash that away,†Polly is told by Frank (Robert Taylor) who actually opens his eyes to deliver this gem.
Polly tries desperately to escape her fate when Casey proposes, but Frank’s words ring too true. What is a poor girl to do, but write a bestseller and have something to retire on.
“In my house full of people I pin my diamonds on loneliness and despair and I will never have a home.â€
Apparently Polly read one too many Cornell Woolrich novels without having learned the point about fate so she madly dances as gangster Frank looks on trapped like a poor canary in her life of sin … “she’s only a bird in a golden cage …â€
And though she would be good again, this is the exact point Winters career became a satire, a parody of what she was at her best.
As a general rule it should be noted something about the idea of whorehouses brings out the worst in everyone involved in a Hollywood drama. They work well enough in comedy, but get serious and you can wade knee deep in the angst and overacting.
Do yourself a favor, listen to the title song over the credits and then quickly turn to something else. It is only the only defense against this film.
BILL PRONZINI “One Night at Dolores Park.†Short story. Nameless PI. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, April 1995. Collected in Spadework (Crippen & Landru, 1996) and Dago Red: Tales of Dark Suspense (Ramble House, 2015). Reprinted in The Year’s 25 Finest Crime and Mystery Stories: Fifth Annual Edition, edited by the staff of Mystery Scene magazine (Carroll & Graf, 1996) and A Century of Noir: Thirty-two Classic Crime Stories, edited by Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins (Berkley, softcover, 2002).
When this story was written, the section of San Francisco dubbed Dolores Park was falling into urban decay, complete with drug dealers, burglaries and constant intimidation, with people moving out left and right. And in this short tale, that’s where Bill Pronzini’s Nameless PI has quite a night for himself. (Also noted, but only incidentally, one of the characters mistakenly calls him Orenzi.)
Nameless is there in the first place on a stakeout to serve some papers on a resident who’s a reluctant witness in case handled by the lawyer who hired him, then he himself is a witnesses to a would-be mugging of another resident, a woman who really ought to have known better.
But do muggers generally have guns? Nameless intervenes and takes the would-be victim safely home, only to find himself in the midst of a marriage that’s falling apart as decisively as the neighborhood in which the couple find themselves living. This is a powerfully done tale of parallel and contrast, and yes, of course, it’s a detective story, too.
ONE FOR THE MONEY. Lionsgate, 2012. Katherine Heigl (Stephanie Plum), Jason O’Mara (Joseph Morelli), Daniel Sunjata (Ranger), John Leguizamo, Sherri Shepherd, Debbie Reynolds. Based on the book by Janet Evanovich. Director: Julie Anne Robinson. Available on DVD and currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
As everybody may already know, romance writer Janet Evanovich hit literary gold when she created New Jersey girl bounty hunter Stephanie Plum. There are now 27 in the series, the most recent being Fortune and Glory (2020), which I believe is the first without its number in the title.
Besides the criminous side of the things, there is a continuing romantic triangle with both vice cop Joe Morelli and fellow bounty hunter Ranger striving for the hand, if not more, of the extremely fetching Stephanie – just the kind of thing that keeps the ladies coming back for more, and done in such a way that menfolk don’t find much to object to, either.
In One for the Money, one of Stephanie’s first bounty hunting jobs – she is broke and needs the money – is to bring in Joe Morelli, who is accused of deliberately shooting a suspect who had no gun while doing a bust. It’s a weak story, admittedly, or perhaps a story weakly told, but I at least found the characters a whole lot of fun to watch. Not hilarious, as advertised, but fun.
The movie was an absolute bust with both the critics and the box office, which has completely eliminated the possibility of any more Stephanie Plum movies being made. Other the other hand, I am not alone in liking this film. If she is to be believed, and quoting from Wikipedia, “author Janet Evanovich was delighted with how the film turned out and did some joint interviews with Heigl to promote the film. Evanovich stated that she would now envision Heigl as Stephanie when writing the character.†I’m delighted to be in such good company.
ROBERT L. FISH – The Gold of Troy. Doubleday, hardcover, 1980. Berkley, paperback, 1984.
Everyone loves a treasure hunt, and of course the bigger the prize the better. Except that what the prize consists of this time is a large chestful of cheap-looking trinkets, made of what looks like a poor grade of brass.
It’s not long, however, before we learn that this is in actuality the famous Schliemann treasure, a priceless collection of golden relics of the Trojan War, discovered by archaeologists over a hundred years ago.
The treasure was lost at the end of World War II in Nazi Germany, but it has suddenly reappeared. Someone has it, no one knows who, and it has been put up for bids in ·a mammoth worldwide auction. The CIA has always thought the Russians have had it. The KGB has been convinced that it was the Americans who stole it away during the confusion at the end of the war. Each is now sure that the other’s security has been breached.
A love affair is also involved, between two people ordinarily worlds apart. She is the newly appointed head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; he is Russia’s leading authority on matters archaeological. Together as they hunt down this small treasure of buttons and beads, their love is consummated, nearly lost, and then wrapped up neatly again in a wild whirlwind of a finish.
The machinations of the plot obviously come from the head of the author alone. The characters have little to say in how they’re manipulated. As great lasting literature, this would never do. As to why the book is so readable, why it is gulped down so easily and quickly, there is an equally easy explanation. To put it in simplest possible terms, Fish knows how to tell a story.
Rating: B plus.
–Very slightly revised from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 5, No. 1, January-February 1981.
Devoted to mystery and detective fiction — the books, the films, the authors, and those who read, watch, collect and make annotated lists of them. All uncredited posts are by me, Steve Lewis.
