REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

SAN ANTONIO. Warner Brothers, 1945.Errol Flynn, Alexis Smith, “Cuddles” Sakall, Victor Franken, John Litel, Paul Kelly and Tom Tyler. Written by Alan Le May and W. R. Burnett. Music by Max Steiner. Directed by David Butler, Robert Florey (uncredited) and Raoul Walsh (uncredited).

   This generally gets compared unfavorably to Dodge City (1939) and dismissed as inferior, but I find a lot in San Antonio to enjoy. With three directors and two talented writers, it’s hard to say who might be the real auteur of the film, but my bet is Max Steiner.

   Flynn plays Clay Hardin, a South Texas rancher shot to pieces sometime before the movie started (Tom Tyler quips “They must be picking lead out of him yet!”) recovering from his wounds in Mexico and gathering evidence against Paul Kelly, who heads up a combine of organized rustlers preying on honest cattlemen. As the film opens, Flynn’s got hold of the vital Macguffin that will convict Kelly, and means to make his way to San Antonio (hence the title of the piece) through outlaw-infested territory to get his man — with a few time-outs to romance itinerant chanteuse Alexis Smith.

   It’s a plot that wouldn’t be out of place in a film noir. Kelly owns the nightclub saloon where Ms Smith performs and he has a suave and treacherous partner in Victor Franken. Unfortunately, somebody lets the pace slacken, throws in too much witless time-wasting bits with Cuddles Sakall, and generally prolongs things when they need speeded up. BUT we also get a death scene from Tom Tyler to match his memorable exit in Stagecoach and a dandy saloon-wrecking shoot-out where everyone who gets hit smashes into something, falls off of something, or just flies into the air — or as we kids used to say “He died neat!”

   There are also as couple of quieter moments that surprised me: Like Errol Flynn looking visibly shaken after killing Tom Tyler in the street. I’ve never seen such a haunted look from Flynn or any other movie cowboy coming out of a fight. And satanic Victor Franken, double-crossed and dying, smiling up at his killer and saying “I’ll be waiting for you!”

   Small things, but together with the bigger scenes, thy make San Antonio a fun movie, and one worth seeing.

REVIEWED BY RAY O’LEARY:

GEORGES SIMENON – Maigret and the Gangsters. Inspector Maigret #39. Harcourt, US, hardcover, 1986. First published in the UK by H. Hamilton, hardcover, 1952. Reprinted in the US by Harcourt, hardcover, 1954, as Inspector Maigret and the Killers. Translation of Maigret, Lognon et le Gangsters (Paris, 1952). Film: Comacico, France, 1963, as Maigret Veit Rouge (“Maigret Sees Red”).

   Madame Longon, the semi-invalid wife of a policeman nicknamed “the Old Grouch” asks Maigret to help when her home is visited twice in three days by American gangsters. She’s been in phone contact with her husband, but hasn’t actually seen him since the Bad Guys came calling.

   Maigret finally talks to Longan and learns that a few nights earlier, the Old Grouch saw a body dumped from a car. But as he was calling in to report it, the body was spirited away. With nothing to back up his story, Longon has been investigating on his own and learned the identity of the killers — who have, in turn, learned his.

   When Maigret takes over the investigation, he is warned off by a restauranteur, who knows the Americans, and even a friend in the FBI cautions he may be in over his head. Maigret takes the warnings as an insult to the French Police and determines not only to catch the killers, but also to learn who it was that retrieved the body.

   One of the many novels written during Simenon’s American sojourn, this is up to his usual standard, with believable characters and perhaps a little more detective work than usual.

RETURN OF THE BAD MEN. RKO Radio Pictures, 1948. Randolph Scott, Robert Ryan, Anne Jeffreys, George ‘Gabby’ Hayes, Jacqueline White, Robert Armstrong. Director: Ray Enright.

   It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Bring together all of the famous bad men of the west, or a good passel of them, whether or not they ever met each other in real life, or were active at the same time, and create a gang of outlaws even a figure as solid and stalwart as Randolph Scott could handle them. Audiences would simply flock in, or I’m sure that’s what was the expectation was.

   I haven’t researched the historical facts well enough to tell you whether anything in this movie is true, but I doubt it. In any case, the result is surprisingly sub-par. Not even the evil presence of Robert Ryan as the Sundance Kid, nor the alluring beauty of Anne Jeffreys as Cheyenne, the niece of Wild Bill Doolin, help a lot to make Return of the Bad Men more than a barely passable way to spend 90 minutes f your time.

   For the record, here’s a list of the outlaws that gangleader Bill Doolin (Robert Armstrong) puts together: The Youngers (Cole, Jim and John), the Daltons (Emmett, Bob and Grat), Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Yeager, and the Arkansas Kid. I hope I didn’t leave anyone out. I didn’t list any of their names as part of the cast because other than Robert Ryan, who’s as mean as they come, all of them are very minor roles.

   It turns out that Randolph Scott has a sweetheart that he plans to marry, but what Anne Jeffreys’ character, once reformed (or is she), thinks about that is that she will have something to say about it. Scott is quite oblivious. Unfortunately, the writers not knowing how to write themselves out of this romantic triangle they’ve written themselves into, take the weakest, lamest way out.

   George ‘Gabby’ Hayes, as a bank president, no less, adds comedy relief, but the story is overwhelmed by characters who are simply not very interesting. Not even the sight of the masses of men on horseback and in flimsy wagons at the beginning of the Oklahoma Land Rush adds any excitement to the proceedings.

   Passable entertainment, but barely. Only the sharp, clear black and white photography is worth a mention (J. Roy Hunt , cinematographer). Credit where credit is due.

MARGARET LAWRENCE “Winston and the Millennium Man.” Winston Marlowe Sherman. Short story. Published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 2006. Probably never collected or reprinted.

   This is a strange one. Winston Marlowe Sherman, English teacher and secretly the author of a long list of mystery novels, was the leading character in five mystery novels himself. Appearing in rapid succession between 1990 and 1993. (Since three of them appeared in 1990, the exact order of the three as given below is quite possibly not accurate.) The author of record of those novels was M. K. Lorens, but this sixth and final tale is under the byline of Margaret Lawrence, another of true author Margaret Keilstrup’s pen names.

   As Margaret Lawrence, she also wrote three well-regarded mysteries about Hannah Trevor, an 18th century midwife in Maine, the first of these being nominated for several awards. What I found strange, besides the change in bylines for this story, is that the introduction to it does not mention the five previous mysteries that the leading character was in.

   And this is important, or it should have been, for in this story Sherman has come to the end of both his careers: his book publisher has declines to extend his writing contract, and the story begins as he leaves campus for the last time, having been forced out at age 70 for having grading standards too high for modern student bodies. What’s more, it is Christmas time, 1999, just before the disaster that wasn’t, but no one was sure at the time.

   And whatever the equivalent to cyberbullying was before computers came along, Sherman being harassed by someone unknown, both by verbal heckling and crank telephone calls. All of the other characters in the books are in this story, too, including Sarah, his longtime living companion of some forty years. In this tale, two things are accomplished: the “Millennium Man” is caught, and Sarah finally says yes to Sherman’s proposal of marriage. It’s a comfortable and oddly satisfying story, a final coda of sorts, except for the fact that Sherman’s life is not ending, only marking a milestone and a change of direction.

   For fans of the five previous Sherman adventures, wouldn’t it have been nice to have let them know about this?  And wouldn’t the readers of this story have liked to have known about the previous five books, and not have read it in a vacuum?
   

   The Winston Marlowe Sherman series —

Deception Island. Bantam 1990.
Ropedancer’s Fall. Bantam 1990.
Sweet Narcissus. Bantam 1990.
Dreamland. Doubleday 1992.
Sorrowheart. Doubleday 1993.

NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT. Rank Film Distributors / Charlemagne Productions, UK, 1973. Christopher Lee (Colonel Bingham), Peter Cushing (Sir Mark Ashley), Diana Dors, Georgia Brown, Keith Barron, Gwyneth Strong. Based on the novel by John Blackburn. Director: Peter Sasdy.

   When Martin Edwards recently reviewed this movie on his blog, he praised it in part (“It’s fair to say that the whole is less than the sum of its considerable parts.”) but in part only. What caught my attention was how he did his best to talk around the actual plot of the movie without ever talking about exactly what kind of movie it is. Obviously he didn’t quite succeed because I tend to notice little things like that, and I wondered why.

   Well, now I know, and in my review in turn, I’m going to do the same exact thing. But if you know who John Blackburn, the author of the book the film was based on, and the kind of books he wrote, then you will know what it is that I’m going to do my best not to say.

   The story begins with a series of murders to various trustees of an orphanage located on a small island of the shore of Scotland. They all appear to be accidents or suicides, but we the viewer know better. But when a young girl who is also one of the orphans is involved in a bus accident later on begins to have unexplained nightmares and hallucinations, her doctor becomes suspicious. He calls upon his superior (Peter Cushing) for help, who in turn is abetted by a retired police officer (Christopher Lee) who has taken an interest in the case.

   Complicating matters is that the girl’s mother (a most floozy Diana Dors) wants back the custody of her child, and to that end, calls upon a lady journalist (Georgia Brown) for help. At which point a rather conventional murder story turns into … whatever it turns into, and in the most traditional way of telling such a story, and in the way the British seem to do it best.

   It’s a great cast, and the photography is excellent. The ending is suitably chilling, and it would be even more so if there were not so many holes in the plot. They can be ignored, but a tighter (and more realistic) hold on the story on the part of the screenwriter would have improved things immensely.

   It’s still a fun movie to watch, and I have Martin Edwards’ review of it to thank for having brought it to my attentions.

DAVID WALKER – Winter of Madness. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1964. Houghton Mifflin, US, hardcover, 1964. Pocket Cardinal 50176, US, paperback, 1965.

   So opens Tarquin Auchartt Duncatto, thirteenth Baron of Duncatto of Duncatto (“Tarquums darling”) from his Swiss hotel room as his beautiful not quite rich American wife Lois bathes nearby and he prepares to put to paper the recent events of the annual Christmas Party at his Scottish estate.

   And it is no weekend party with a nice polite murder or two à la Agatha Christie.

   All hell breaks loose, to be exact.

   Guests include: Harry Zanzibar Gilpin, American Ambassador to Chile; Baroness Duncatto’s best friend the oft married and widowed Grafin Gloria Von Wonne (an absolute humdinger of a little peach) and her homicidal child Theodore (plump and inscrutable); the mysterious and somewhat naive but nearly perfect Caesare Campari (great shot, great artist, and the nicest chap I ever knew); Bud Gravel and Mabel Boulding (the one in Microfission the other in Biotronics); the Duncatto’s oversexed daughter Tirene; possibly the Russians, the Mafia, a possible infernal machine, open warfare — some of it fought in armor on a private ski run — various servants like the outspoken gillie Hamish Geddes and Duncatto’s nearly perfect man Bray; and one other guest, big game hunter Colonel Tiger Clyde (“I’m Clyde. They call me Tiger. So do you.”), handsome, devastating to women — not the least Duncatto’s wife Lois and daughter Tirene — ruthless, and what you get when your friend, X of the Civil Service, decides you might have an infernal device in your backyard and James Bond is out of town.

   I was fifteen when I first ran across Winter of Madness in a Pocket Books edition, and I have to be honest that rereading it at seventy I get for more of the innuendo and double entendre now than I did then, but rediscovering it reminds more than ever why it is one of my favorite books of all time.

   Not many books read fifty-five years later can stand that test.

   Imagine, if you can, P. G. Wodehouse and Dornford Yates collaborating with Ian Fleming, Vladimir Nabokov, Leonard Wibberley, and Kingsley Amis and you get something of the idea of a book that is a delight from start to finish. Inventive, playful, darkly humorous, and all orchestrated like an Ealing Comedy crossed with a James Bond movie with a touch of Dr. Strangelove thrown into the mix.

   Only Richard Condon ever led me more happily down the garden path.

   David Walker was a Scottish writer best remembered for the beloved Wee Geordie, about a naive Scottish athlete who wanders down to London for the Olympics and takes home the gold. It was made into a hit movie with Bill Travers as Geordie. Then there was his altogether more serious novel Harry Black, the story of a hunt for a man-eating tiger in India that becomes a re-evaluation for the hunter, a man who has never faced anything greater than himself before. That one was filmed too as Harry Black and the Tiger with Stewart Granger.

   Over the years Black wrote a number of books from serious mainstream novels Where the North Wind Blows, to thrillers to more comedic books like this, Wee Geordie, and the Bond spoof Cab-Intersec. His short fiction regularly appeared in the Saturday Evening Post.

   Winter of Madness is well worth seeking out if you prize genuine humor, malice, and sheer fun in your escapist reading, though you may, like Tarquin, need a rest in the mountains after you finish.

   Bring tissue too, you will laugh until you cry.

LEE McGRAW – Hatchett. Madge Hatchett #1. Ballantine, paperback original; 1st printing, October 1976.

   Chicago, the city with the gangster past, is now the stomping ground of a new private eye, one by the name of Hatchett, and although female, no lady is she. She drinks and swears with the rest of the boys, but make no mistake, she has the curves of a Raquel or Sophia as well.

   The slit throat of her ex-convict doorman sets her off in a case that leads to the city’s most recent Mr. Big, a mysterious organizer who’s steadily been taking over the rackets. Also involved is closet pornography mogul, dope peddlers, assorted goons and cutthroats – all the minor riffraff.

   This is Black Mask fiction – if only that magazine were still alive today. It’s tough and full of action, but there are plenty of intertwined plot threads as well — all connected up in a terrific double maze of deceit just about the time you’re ready to say it can’t be done. Both Hatchett and McGraw could do with a bit more style,though, and the violence seems to be there more for its own sake, rather than for any intelligent effect it has on its survivors.

   Maybe I was expecting something different from a female dick.

Rating: B.

UPDATE: While as you can see I didn’t exactly go way overboard with my praise for this book, I did spend a lot of time looking and waiting for the next one to come out. It never did. This was Hatchett’s only appearance. (I am puzzled why I didn’t use her first name in this review; I found it by coming across another review of this book online. I am also glad that I am not the only one who has read it.)

   It also turns out that Lee McGraw, which is a name could easily be that of a female author, happens not to be his real one. He was instead Paul Zakaras, whose only work of crime fiction this was.

JUMP INTO HELL. Warner Brothers, 1955. Jacques Sernas (as Jack Sernas), Kurt Kasznar, Arnold Moss, Peter van Eyck, Norman Dupont, Lawrence Dobkin, Patricia Blair (as Pat Blake), Lisa Montell (as Irene Montwill). Writer: Irving Wallace. Director: David Butler.

   This somewhat obscure 1950s war film is a decidedly anti-communist, flag waving piece. And the flag being waved here is most assuredly the red, white, and blue. But not the one you might expect from Warner Brothers. No. Instead, it is the tricolor flag of the French Republic which is being proverbially hoisted here.

   Rather than taking us into an American unit in the Second World War or the Korean War, Jump Into Hell showcases the French military in its last stand against the Viet Minh communist revolutionaries at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. As an entry point into the story, the movie focuses primarily on four French soldiers who chose to volunteer for duty. The emphasis is on Captain Guy Bertrand (Jacques Sernas), who has never been in any real combat but was a German POW during the Second World War.

   Joining him are Captain Callaux (Kurt Kasznar), who seems to think that showcasing his bravery might help with his marital problems; Lieutenant Heldman (Peter van Eyck), who fought under Rommel, but is not a member of the Foreign Legion; and the youthful and decidedly innocent, Lieutenant Maupin (Norman Dupont).

   While there’s a subplot involving Bertrand’s illicit love affair with the wife of a soldier already based at Dien Bien Phu, most of the film is about how these four men adapt to life in a combat zone. As you might expect with a somewhat lesser war movie from the era, there’s a lot of stock footage in this one. Unfortunately, it’s exceedingly obvious and does serve to take the viewer out of the story.

   As far as direction and cinematography, it’s nothing special. Adequate, but not anything overly memorable one way or the other. There are some very good moments in Jump Into Hell such as when Callaux volunteers to get much-needed drinking water for his unit, but nothing that remotely compares to other combat films. All told, it’s a somewhat unique film because of its subject matter about the French in Indochina, but it’s not anything I’d recommend going out of your way to see.

DASHIELL HAMMETT “The Scorched Face.” The Continental Op #17. Novelette. First published in The Black Mask, March 1925. Collected in Nightmare Town (Mercury, paperback, 1948) and The Big Knockover (Random House, 1966). Reprinted in Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini & Jack Adrian (Oxford University Press, 1995) among others.

   You may certainly correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think this is one of Hammett’s better known stories, and do you know, I don’t remember reading it before last night (from the Pronzini/Ardian anthology). I know I read The Big Knockover from cover to cover when it came out in paperback, but last night? Nothing came back.

   Here’s something else you can correct me on if I’m wrong, and that’s that I think the story is based on one of Hammett’s own cases when he was a Pinkerton detective. He’s hired here by a distraught father whose two daughters have gone missing. There was a small disagreement about money, but nothing out of the ordinary. What convinces the Op that the girls may be in considerable danger is that one of their female friends commits suicide the same evening after he questions her about them.

   The first part of the tale is filled with plodding legwork — no, plodding is not quite right word. It’s the kind of work a private investigator always has to do before he gets any traction on a case, and yet Hammett’s flair for detail as well as the personalities involved keeps the story in at least second gear until things begin to fall into place. This is about halfway through, and this is when the story really starts to take off, punctuated by short one line paragraphs that the reader (me) simply can’t read fast enough.

   The crime involved is not a new one by today’s standards, but I’ll bet it raised a few eyebrows back in 1925. It didn’t do too badly last night, either.

   I am satisfied that Lawrence Block, who turns 82 this year, is the finest living writer of private-eye novels, and that his protagonist Matthew Scudder is the late 20th-early 21st century counterpart of Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer. In previous columns I’ve explored the earlier Scudder novels, going back to his debut in 1976. This month we take the character to near the end of the century which first saw him come to life on the page.

   If A TICKET TO THE BONEYARD (1990) and A DANCE AT THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE (1991) were the most powerful novels in the series to date, one of the main reasons was that they pitted Scudder against genuinely satanic adversaries. So does the next book in the series. A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES (1992) opens with a scene presented in third person, and for a few minutes we wonder if we’re reading about the unlicensed PI we’ve come to know so well. But Matt and first-person narration return after two pages, and the rest of Chapter 1 alternates between the two modes. It’s as if Block were determined to make the third-person scenes more vivid and, yes, more graphic than they could possibly have been in the form of dialogue between Scudder and others.

   The tale these scenes tell is of the kidnaping of 24-year-old Francine Khoury from the street outside the ethnic market in Brooklyn where she’d been shopping. Her husband Kenan, a prosperous narcotics trafficker, receives phone calls from the abductors demanding a million dollars for her return. They settle on $400,000. After the ransom is paid, Khoury gets another call, telling him his wife is in the trunk of a Ford Tempo parked illegally at a fire hydrant around the corner. He and his brother Peter check and find her: cut up into cutlets and wrapped in plastic bags.

   Peter, who isn’t in the drug trade but is a recovering junkie and alcoholic, recommends that Kenan hire Scudder. Once committed to the case, and thanks to his police contact Joe Durkin, Matt learns that Francine wasn’t the first woman to be mutilated and murdered by criminals using the same modus operandi. Eventually he finds one young woman who escaped alive, although only after the perps performed an obscene parody of the novel and movie SOPHIE’S CHOICE, making her decide which of her breasts they should cut off. With the help of two teen-age computer hackers brought to him by his young black buddy TJ, he obtains the numbers of the various pay phones on which the murderers called Kenan Khoury.

   Then comes another kidnaping, the victim this time being the adolescent daughter of a Russian drug dealer, and the inevitable race to save her from sexual violation, mutilation and death. The first part of the climax, packed with tension but without a moment of onstage violence, takes place near midnight in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, site of the exchange of the girl for a million dollars; the second, at the serial killers’ house.

   In A TICKET TO THE BONEYARD Scudder killed a psychopathic monster in cold blood but, unwilling to make a habit of the practice, declines to take part in Khoury’s vengeance, which is best described by one of the Latin phrases tossed around earlier in the novel by an attorney recalling the legalisms in that language that he learned in law school. The phrase: lex talionis. Later Khoury describes the scene for Scudder — so graphically it makes him vomit. As might many readers.

   Block apparently realized that if all subsequent Scudders involved combat against satanic adversaries they’d soon become indistinguishable. In the next book in the series he tried another experiment in minimalism. The basic story of THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD (1993) occupies at most 25% of the novel’s 316 pages, the murderer never appearing onstage for a moment and not even his name mentioned until page 292.

   Scudder and Elaine casually meet Glenn Holtzmann, a yuppie lawyer working at a large-print publishing house, and his pregnant wife Lisa. For some reason, or perhaps just on cop instinct, Scudder is turned off by the man. Lisa loses the baby, and one evening about two months later her husband is shot to death with four bullets, three in the body and the fourth in the back of the neck as a coup de grâce, while standing in front of a pay phone — not inside a booth, they don’t exist anymore — on Eleventh Avenue almost within sight of the high-rise condo on West 57th Street where he and Lisa lived.

   Within 24 hours a near-homeless street person and Vietnam veteran is arrested for the murder, the shell casings from the four bullets found inside his stinking Army jacket. He doesn’t remember whether he committed the crime or not. His younger brother, another recovering alcoholic, hires Scudder to make sure of the facts one way or the other. The job brings Matt in close contact with Lisa, who calls on him for help when she finds a strongbox containing several hundred thousand dollars on a closet shelf, and it soon becomes apparent that Glenn Holtzmann was obtaining huge amounts of cash from a mysterious source.

   In the course of the investigation Scudder and Lisa begin an affair. There’s not a moment of violence or menace in this novel except for a brief interlude when Scudder takes on another case, this one pitting him against a sadistic psycho whose ilk we’ve seen in other Block novels. Several interesting chapters follow Scudder as he methodically probes Holtzmann’s past, but in the end the truth is revealed to him by a transsexual hooker and Scudder and Elaine move in together while Matt seems poised to continue his affair with Lisa.

   This is one of those Block novels you read not so much for the story as for the extraneous incidents surrounding the story, my favorite being the one on page 97 where Scudder recounts a mob hit in which four innocent people sitting at a table on one side of a restaurant were blown away and the four intended targets on the other side were left untouched. “The shooter, it turned out, was dyslexic, and turned left when he should have turned right.” Moral? “Everybody makes miskates.” Or, as Hammett put it unforgettably, we live while blind chance spares us. This incident, like several but not all the others, is thematically related to the core story: I won’t say how.

   Like other Scudder novels, THE DEVIL KNOWS features guest appearances by the usual regulars: Mick Ballou, TJ, Matt’s former lover the sculptor Jan Keane, his AA sponsor Jim Faber, the cop Joe Durkin, the black albino Danny Boy Bell. One of these doesn’t make it to the last page, and though Block doesn’t intend the death to be a surprise, on general principles I won’t say who. I do get the impression that for a while Block seriously considered making Ballou the murderer and writing him out of the series, but if so, clearly he had second thoughts. I prefer the Scudders with a stronger story and a satanic adversary but, like millions of others, I can’t stop reading these books.

   If Block was bothered by the lack of sufficient core story in THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD, he solved the problem in the next Scudder, A LONG LINE OF DEAD MEN (1994), by pitting his protagonist against another serial killer, although this one is not a sadist but something of a philosopher. One of the current members of a 31-man club which may have been founded centuries ago, and whose only purpose is to meet for dinner every year on the first Thursday in May and and commemorate the members who have died since the birth of the club’s present incarnation in 1961, comes to Scudder when it dawns on him that there are only fourteen members still alive.

   To put it another way, there have been an unusual number of member deaths in the past 30-odd years: some unsuspicious, like that of the young man who was killed in Vietnam in 1966; some clearly from natural causes, others apparent accidents or suicides, four clearly murders. This premise requires that many of the characters, being dead, never appear onstage, but Block with superb skill makes them all but come back to life as Scudder investigates how they died—and whether a member of the club has been devoting years of his life to killing off his fellow members. (No, this is not a tontine, where the last man standing gains millions, nor is it a trust as in my novel BENEFICIARIES’ REQUIEM where every death in the family increases the share of the survivors. If there is a serial killer, he can’t be motivated by money.)

   Eventually, and largely by trial and error, Scudder identifies his adversary, with whom he’s had a most unusual relationship before this moment, and the game of cat and mouse takes a new turn. Some of the murders have been exceptionally brutal, particularly one whose details Scudder learns from his NYPD friend Joe Durkin: the wife of a murdered club member who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time “was garroted with a strip of wire. Her head turned purple and swelled up like a volleyball….She had a fireplace poker thrust up her vagina and well into the abdomen.”

   When one of the club members (a controversial criminal defense lawyer notorious for getting guilty monsters acquitted) assures Scudder that the legal system will never be able to bring the killer to justice, the only option left on the table is extra-legal vengeance. In this case vengeance takes a unique and not too plausible form, but at least it circumvents the Mike Hammer type of justice we found in novels like A TICKET TO THE BONEYARD.

   On the personal side, Scudder is still a sober alcoholic regularly attending AA meetings, living with Elaine and sleeping now and then with Lisa. The usual regulars make their expected appearances, not only Joe Durkin but Mick Ballou and TJ and Scudder’s AA sponsor Jim Faber. Also appearing, and in a major role, is one we have seen in Block novels many times before: Mister Death. Even before the first word of the book, we get to read William Dunbar’s poem “Lament for the Makaris” with its incessant refrain Timor mortis conturbat me (fear of death terrifies me). The theme is reinforced by the huge number and variety of deaths we encounter (although there’s hardly a moment of onstage violence in the entire book) and dialogue about death. “Cancer, heart attacks, all those little time bombs in your blood vessels. Those are the things that scare you.”

   The speaker will die violently a few chapters after he says this. Scudder: “[M]an is the only animal that knows he’ll die someday. He’s also the only animal that drinks.” Mick Ballou: “But do you think there’s a connection?” Scudder: “I know there is.” Like so many other novels in this powerful series, A LONG LINE OF DEAD MEN makes it understandable that so many are now calling all PI fiction noir.