WILLIAM FAULKNER – Knight’s Gambit. Random House, hardcover, 1949. Story collection. Reprinted many times since, including Signet #825, paperback, 1950.

   Nobel Prize-winner William Faulkner wrote six criminous short stories featuring Southern lawyer Gavin Stevens and narrated by Stevens’s nephew and youthful Watson, Chick Mallison. Set in legendary Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, these tales are in classic Faulkner style and are peopled with characters reminiscent of his other work:

   Southerners who are not stereotypical but representative of Mississippi at the middle of the twentieth century. Stevens, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard, is a quiet, contemplative man whose methods of detection are often highly unorthodox. But in spite of his erudition, he is no outsider in his native territory; he is equally at home within the confines of his study or out in the hills where moonshine is made. Chick, the nephew, is properly admiring for a Watson, but his more naive questions stem from his youth, rather than from the thick-headedness found in many a narrator of this type, thus making him all the more likable.

   The stories are as slow-moving and gentle on the surface as the country in which they take place; but as in much of Faulkner’s work, there is an undercurrent of raw emotion and violence held in check. In the title (and longest) story, Stevens deals with murderous jealousy within one of the county’s great plantation families (whose fortune was founded on bootleg liquor); “Monk” is the story of a retarded man who commits what at first seems an inexplicable crime. And “Smoke” is about one of those feuds between family members for which the South is famous; when the murder of a judge results from his validation of a will, Stevens uses a simple but artful device to literally smoke out the killer.

   In these and the three other stories–‘Hand upon the Waters,” “Tomorrow,” and “An Error in Chemistry”–  lawyer Stevens exhibits not only great deductive powers and resourcefulness but also great humanity. As he himself states, “I am more interested in justice and human beings than truth.” This concern, coupled with Faulkner’s deft characterization of the people he knew so well, make these stories first-rate tales of crime and detection.

   Although many critics have dismissed the Gavin Stevens stories as inferior to Faulkner’s other works, they are as inventive and finely crafted as the author’s mainstream fiction, and in no way should be considered a departure from his high literary standards. As Ellery Queen aptly puts it in Queen’s Quorum, “That a writer of Faulkner’s now international stature should unashamedly write detective stories proves once again – -if such proof is still needed by literary snobs — that the detective story has long since come of age.”

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   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.

JEAN-PATRICK MANCHETTE – Three to Kill. City Lights, paperback, 2002. Translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Also:  A French crime film released in 1980 as Trois hommes à abattre (Three Men to Kill), directed by Jacques Deray, starring Alain Delon with Dalila Di Lazzaro, based on the novel Le Petit Bleu de la côte ouest by Jean-Patrick Manchette.

   Georges Gerfaut is a middle sales manager for a tech firm. He’s doing pretty well, drives a Mercedes, has a pretty wife, nice kids.

   He’s driving home on the highway and comes upon single car accident. The man in the car is bleeding. Gerfaut makes a split second decision. Do I stop? Or do I mind my own business and keep going.

   He stops. He helps the injured driver into the back seat of the Mercedes and drops him off at the hospital.

   Then he goes home.

   What Gerfaut doesn’t know is that the man was not in a single car accident. Rather, the man was shot by hit men in a passing car.
Gerfaut takes his family on vacation at the beach. Once there, the assassins make an attempt on Gerfaut’s life, and try to drown him in the sea.

   Gerfault goes on the run and tries to figure out what the hell is going on.

   Once he gets his bearings and sees the score, there’s only three things to do. Kill the hitmen and the man who hired them. That makes three.

   A brisk, stylish, suave little thriller.

RAWHIDE. Fox, 1951. Tyrone Power, Susan Hayward, Hugh Marlowe, Dean Jagger, Edgar Buchanan, Jack Elam, and George Tobias. Written by Dudley Nichols. Directed by Henry Hathaway.

   Not to be confused with the Television series, though I suspect there will be plenty of comments about it anyway, and if anyone here feels compelled to talk about Clint Eastwood rather than Henry Hathaway, all I can say is, “Go ahead, spoil my day!”

   Westerns aren’t generally popular with women, but Kay watches them with me, and the other day we had a nice talk about “Town Westerns” and “Range Westerns.”

   In Town Westerns the action is generally confined to a modestly-built community, and may be more concerned with social interactions than physical conflict. The best-known Town Western is High Noon; more noteworthy examples include Fury at Showdown, Rio Bravo, Fury at Gunsight Pass, Star in the Dust and Day of Fury. —  does this suggest a certain pent-up hostility?

   Anyway, “Range (I use the term loosely, to include any wide-open space or spaces) Westerns” take place largely outdoors (Ride Lonesome has no interiors at all.) and though passions may be deep, and resolutions complex, they are generally expressed by physical action. Think Winchester 73, The Big Trail, Wagonmaster, The Naked Spur …

   There are hybrids, variations and freaks of cinema, of course: Day of the Outlaw starts as a Town Western and turns into a Range Western. The town of Terror in a Texas Town   barely exists; cattle drives and Conestoga caravans cross the studio sets of Showdown   and The Prairie …

   … which brings me to the “Room Western” and — at last! —  Rawhide.

   There are plenty of exteriors in Rawhide, evoking the endless wastes and the fragile isolation of a stagecoach swing-station, but all the important action takes place in two rooms of a single building: the main room/dining hall where the bad guys quarrel, plot mayhem, and gull the unwary; and a single bedroom where Tyrone Power and Susan Hayward quarrel, plot escape, and try to turn the tables on their captors.

   This is a film of masterful tension, ably framed by Dudley Nichols’ teetering screenplay and Henry Hathaway’s firm direction. I should also mention Milton Krasner’s stunning deep-focus photography, capably limning a distant horizon without missing a single snaggled tooth of Jack Elam’s maniacal grin in the foreground.

   Jack Elam is even more villainous than usual here, but he’s only part of a very effectively used cast. Tyrone Power and Susan Hayward convey fear, frustration and convincing strength quite well, and Dean Jagger is engagingly funny as an outlaw who’s only crooked because he’s not smart enough to go straight.

   But pride of place goes to a surprisingly intense Hugh Marlowe, best remembered for dull parts in exciting films like The Day The Earth Stood Still and Night and the City.  But here, as the head of a makeshift gang of inept and unreliable outlaws, coping with unwilling hostages, desperately trying to hold his plan of robbery and murder together, he’s… well you just can’t take your eyes off him, he has that kind of Screen Presence.

   I’ll end by saying this is sometimes considered an unofficial remake of a 1930s gangster movie, Let ’Em Have It. Well maybe, but the finished product resembles it no more than Stagecoach looks like Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif.”
 

ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE – August 1967. Overall rating: ***½.

HUGH PENTECOST “The False Face Murder,” A rejected suitor wearing a mask is killed, and everyone is ready to assume the guilt. Would seem to have Meaning, but it all ends as typical detective story. (4)

THE GORDONS “The Terror Racket.” Short novel. First published in The American Magazine, June 1953, as “Case File — F.B.I.: The Faceless Killer.” An anonymous caller threatens a widow’s daughter with violence unless he is paid $10,000. The FBI is called in for protection, and they work quickly to decide which of the mother’s acquaintances is the extortionist. Marred by sloppy writing: the roles of the characters are introduced without introduction, and with no real purpose; and by bad writing: the rookie agent who has to be explained everything, (3)

EDWARD D, HOCH “The Spy Who Worked for Peace.” Rand of Double-C discovers that a defector’s secretary is actually the spy, One of the better ones in the series. (4)

JOHN LUTZ “Quid Pro Quo.” A computer service arranges murders for a price. (3)

AMY. M. GRAINGERHALL (NORMA SCHIER) “Mr, Copable, Criminologist.” Anagram pastiche of Mr. Campion. Otherwise not bad. (1)

MARGERY ALINGHAM “The Chocolate Dog.” First appeared in The Daily Mail, 07 June 1939, as “The Dog Day,” Not a mystery story, but one of British charm. Mr. Campion. (2)

STEVEN PETERS “George Washington, Detective.” First story. Washington traps a spy just before crossing the Delaware, Interesting, (3)’

STEVEN PETERS “The Backyard Dig.” An amateur archaeologist’s discovery. Obvious with a clever twist, (4)

PATRICIA ANN HOLLISTER “The Woman Who Couldn’t Wear Red.” First story. At least her husband didn’t think so. (1)

JULIAN SYMONS “The Main Chance,” First US printing. A con-man gets caught up in a truly fantastic scheme for murder, (5)

BOB BRISTOW “No Margin for Error.” A woman has a secret way of knowing when her husband is out with other women. (4)

H. R. F. KEATING “The Justice Boy.” Novelette. A pet robin is killed at a British boys’ prep school, and an investigation is begun. The appeal is that of reading details of the background. (3)

JOHN McPARTLAND – I’ll See You in Hell. Gold Medal #571, paperback original, 1956. Cover art by Barye Phillips. Centipede Press, hardcover, 2020.

   Lee Farr and Pearl Dobson are partners. They met in the war. Now they co-own a crop duster.

   Then Pearl Dobson reads a story in the paper about the symptoms of uranium poisoning. And something rings a bell. Back where Pearl comes from, nowheresville Arkansas, there were deaths a long time ago that happened around Witch Cave. With the same symptoms! Maybe there’s uranium in them there hills! We’ll be rich, dagnabbit!

   So Pearl heads out to Arkansas to follow his million dollar uranium dreams. And he’ll call up Lee as soon as he knows something for sure.

   Lee finally gets a call — and sure enough, Pearl’s excited! He’s found the mother lode! Come on Lee! Stop what you’re doing and come hither to the Ozarks stat!

   So Lee heads over to the Ozarks and up to Pearl Dobson’s cabin. But when he gets there: “He found the bodies one by one. The dog first.” Inside the cabin he finds Pearl’s grandparents, executed, and Pearl sitting in a chair, ensnared by ropes, tortured to death.

   Lee reports the deaths to the sheriff’s deputy, who immediately decides that Lee is guilty of the murders. And the deputy, in this here town, is judge, jury and executioner.

   Lee escapes custody and now he’s on the run, with nary a friend in nowheresville. He’s gotta find the killer before he gets killed first.

   A fairly thrilling ride.

HENRY FARRELL – How Awful About Allan. Holt Rinehart & Winston, hardcover, 1963. Avon, paperback, date? Also a 1970 American made-for-television horror psychological thriller film directed by Curtis Harrington.

   Everyone in his neighborhood is saying it: “How awful about Allan!” Allan Colleigh, the rather dim bulb in an otherwise brilliant family, has had a shattering mental breakdown following his father’s death in a fire from which Alan could not save him. One of the symptoms is hysterical blindness, and now that Allan has been released from the mental hospital, his admirable sister, Katherine, must shoulder the burden of caring for and supporting him in the old half-burned house where their father died.

   Money is short, and when Katherine suggests they take in a boarder from the university where she works, Allan tries to cooperate. But there is something about the student that disturbs him — perhaps his whispery voice, caused by a childhood accident — and Allan suffers a relapse.

   At first he tries to control himself — after all, he’s made so much progress with Dr. Greenough. the psychiatrist who has taken him on for Katherine’s sake. But then he begins to feel he’s being watched, being spied on. His friend and neighbor Olive Dearborn has never seen the student, and since Allan can’t see him, he isn’t sure whom he is dealing with.

   When he hears that Katherine’s old boyfriend, Eric Walters, has returned to town, he’s sure Katherine has brought Eric into the house, disguised as the mild-mannered college student. And soon he begins to believe that Eric and Katherine are trying to kill him.

   The story is an exercise in mounting paranoia and terror, more frightening because Allan’s fears seem to be backed up by fact. And the resolution, while it is something he has repressed all along, is more frightening than any of his paranoid imaginings. The resolution, however, is not quite the end of the story, and the ultimate climax is sure to shock you more than what has gone before.

   Do read this — but don’t read it while alone!

   Farrell is an expert at inspiring terror in the hearts of his readers, as evidenced by his well-known Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1960), which was the basis for the chilling 1962 film starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. The author of numerous TV and film scripts, Farrell has also written the novels Death on the Sixth Day (1961) and Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me (1967).

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   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.

ROSS MACDONALD – The Wycherly Woman. Lew Archer #9. Knopf, hardcover, 1961. Published earlier in condensed form in Cosmopolitan, April 1961, under the title “Take My Daughter Home.” Bantam, paperback, 1963. Reprinted many times since.

   Lew Archer is hired by Homer Wycherly to find his daughter Phoebe, who has been missing from school for two months. The case is not as simple as it seems on the surface, however, Two murders occur along the trail that Archer follows back, searching for both Phoebe and her mother. Illicit love has led to divorce, now murder, and blackmail of Phoebe for her mother’s death, which in neurotic fashion she blames herself for.

   You know, it’s great to read a mystery with a complicated plot that doesn’t also need complicated explanation. Excellent writing, in spite of occasionally corny similes that Macdonald seems to feel are expected of him, with a perceptive view of all levels of life.

    All of the characters are realistically portrayed, and become personalities rather than cardboard. Archer;s own outlook on life is succinctly summed up on page 10: Mr. Wycherly doesn’t trust himself “to do all the right things.” Archer doesn’t “trust anyone else to do them.”

Rating:   *****

JOHN EVANS (Howard Browne) – Halo in Blood. Paul Pine #1. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1946. Reprints include: Bantam #74, paperback, 1946; Quill, paperback, 1984; No Exit Press, paperback, 1988. Also appeared in Mammoth Detective, May 1946, probably in shortened form.

   Rich dude hires PI Paul Pine to break up his daughter’s relationship with a scoundrel. Pine agrees to try to dig up some dirt. But no promises. She’s of age and can date who she wants.

   But it turns out the case isn’t really about breaking up the happy couple at all. Because they’re not a happy couple. Rather, the beau is playboy on the mob’s payroll. His job is to hook rich women and get them to gamble away their fortunes at mafia run gambling houses.

   Then the playboy gets killed and Pine may be next, with the mob and cops after him, and the girl too — but she a much more palatable manner.

   The story is incredibly convoluted, a la Chandler. But you’re too confused to question why, you just go along for the ride.

   And the ride is quite fun. Paul Pine’s a great companion. And you riding shotgun.

M. Columbia, 1951. David Wayne, Howard Da Silva, Martin Gabel, Luther Adler, Steve Brodie, Raymond Burr, Glenn Anders. Director: Joseph Losey.

   Speaking of re-makes, Joseph Losey’s version of M is not an easy film to see, and I’m not sure it was worth the effort. It’s from his “promising” period (before he went to Europe to make deliberately boring pictures) when he was doing movies like The Lawless, The Prowler, and other modestly stylish thrillers hinting he might someday approach the level of Sam Fuller or Joseph H. Lewis.

   M gives us a bit of fine photography, a few neat directorial effects (mostly swiped from Fritz Lang’s original) and some really effective acting: David Wayne as the child-killer; Howard Da Silva as the conscientious cop on his trail; and a team of gangsters (also out to get the killer) that includes Martin Gabel, Raymond Burr, Luther Adler and the inimitable Glenn Anders at his irritating best, as a crook who thinks having a child-murderer at large  may be good for business.

   Unfortunately, Losey can’t seem to think his way around the censorship of the times, which dictated that Law and Order must be seen to prevail at all times, and the result is a rather muddled ending which  is not exactly Losey’s fault, but which when you see how directors like John Huston and Robert Aldrich slipped subversive comments past the censors in things like Asphalt Jungle and Kiss Me Deadly, you can’t help wishing he’d been a bit more inventive.

   Worse, Losey can’t get past his own tendency to preach, and things get badly bogged down while various characters stop the action to explain his moral points to the movie-going masses.
   

BACKLASH. 20th Century Fox, 1947. Jean Rogers, Richard Travis, Larry Blake, John Eldredge, Robert Shayne, Douglas Fowley, Sara Berner. Screenwriter: Irving Elman. Director: Eugene Forde.

   Not a very promising list of players, I thought while researching this B-level crime film before I watched it, nor did they exceed expectations. And yet they all did the jobs they were assigned, and the photography was fine as well. The story, with one five minute exception, was what left everything down, and I’ll get to that a couple of paragraphs further down.

   Richard Travis is the actor who nominally has the leading male role, but as the district attorney who’s handling the case, he seems to have more interest in the wife (Jean Rogers) of the man who’s presumed dead in an automobile accident (John Eldredge), a noted defense attorney named John Morland who gotten Red Bailey, an even more noted bank robber and killer (Douglas Fowley), off on charges before.

   The movie opens with yet another opportunity for Morland to defend Bailey with the former picking up the latter on a back road and helping him avoid roadblocks and imminent capture. As a prologue, it fails rather badly, as it easily allows the viewer to think Morland’s death later to be a lot more suspicious than (I think) it should have been.

   No matter. The police, in the form of Det. Lt. Jerry McMullen (Larry Blake), seem to be equally suspicious of the death, or in particular, who it was who died soon enough on his own, even though the evidence is pointing directly to Morland’s wife (the lady who again seems to be in a very close relationship with the D.A. See above.)

   If all of this sounds rather complicated it is, but even so, it doesn’t make the story that connects all these people very interesting. It takes a lot of talking to all of these people (and quite a few others) on the part of the homicide detective in charge of the case to move the story along, and then in only fits and bits, and flashbacks, too.

   There is one strange interlude toward the end of the movie that seems to come out of nowhere, but once there becomes a small highlight of the film. John Morland, on the run at the time, tries to take over a hobo’s flop, and they have a short but scintillating conversation together in dim but oh so effective lighting as the hobo gradually realizes who it is he’s talking to. This is the part of the film that’s pure noir. The rest is no more than a less than ordinary crime film.
    

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   On the other hand, Arthur Lyons, reviewing this film in his book on B level films noir, Death on the Cheap, liked this more than I did. After a couple of paragraphs outlining the plot, he says “Told in a series of complicated flashbacks, this is not a bad little flick.”

   He may be right. I may have been harder on it than it deserves. I’ll think about it.

   Later: No, reading my review again, I don’t think so.