ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE. September 1967. Overall rating: ***

ELLERY QUEEN “Wedding Anniversary,” Ellery Queen’s final return to Wrightsville is marred by murder  and revenge striking after death. (3)

FRANK GRUBER “Eagle in His Mouth.” Process server Harry Ives finds a dead with a rare penny in his mouth, a la Black Mask. (3)

PATRICK QUENTIN “Mrs. B’s Black Sheep.” Short novel. Previously published in The American Magazine, March 1950, as “Passport for Murder.” Mrs. Black’s European Tour, conducted for wealthy debutantes, is threatened by murder. The clues point to someone closely connected with her group, and she fears the worst. Easy to read. (4)

STEVE APRIL “The Greatest Snatch in History.” A plan to kill the President fails. Ha. (2)

      [Note: Steve April was another pen name for Len Zinberg, aka Ed Lacy.]

ROBERT L. FISH “The Adventure of the Missing Three Quarters. Schlock Homes somehow helps invent the miniskirt, Good puns, but I really don’t understand. (3)

ARTHUR PORGES “Murder of a Friend.” Selby of the OSS is given a dirty job. Elementary topology. (2)

LARRY MADDOCK “The Death Wish.” Psychological bunk leads to a job as a hired killer. (1)

JAMES LEASOR “The Seventy-Sixth Face.” First published in Vogue, November 1 1965, as “Doctor Love Strikes Again.” Jason Love helps catch an international jewel thief. Full of trivia. (1)

REV. NORMAN E. DOUGLAS “The Washing Machine.” First story. An impoverished minister turns to crime. (5)

JOHN PICK “They Said It Couldn’t Be Done.” First story. And safecracker Tony Lepula couldn’t. Good atmosphere. (4)

YOUNGMAN CARTER “Alias Mr. Manchester.” A criminal is busted by a policeman’s anonymous letters. {3)

SUSAN SEARS “A Tale from the Chaucer.” The Chaucer is a village coffeehouse. Its owner has to take on a free-lance detective job to solve a folk singer’s murder, (3)

FRANK SISK “The Shadow of His Absence.” Richard thinks his twin brother Robert has disappeared, but he has no twin brother. (1)

WILLIAM BANKIER “Traffic Violation.” Policeman turns down $20,000 to help his prisoner escape, but $20 to a delivery boy does the job. (5)

NEDRA TYRE “In the Fiction Alcove.” Murder in the library is solved by a page. (3)

RICHARD FORREST – A Child’s Garden of Death. Lyon & Bea Wentworth #1. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1975. Pocket, paperback, 1977. Dell, paperback, 1982.

   Take one children’s-book writer who is also a hot-airballooning enthusiast; add his fictional creations, the Wobblies, and his politician wife, plus his best friend from Korean War days, now police chief in their small Connecticut town. These staple ingredients of Richard Forrest’s series about Lyon Wentworth add up to an intriguing mix-even before the element of murder enters.

   In this first entry in the series — whose titles are variations on well-known children’s books — Lyon is called in by buddy Rocco Herbert to help solve an unusual type of killing: a thirty-year-old murder of a man, woman, and child whose bodies are uncovered by a bulldozer at a construction site. Rocco often relies on his friend’s “unusual kind of mind,” but this case is particularly painful to the writer. His own daughter was killed by a hit-and-run driver some years ago, and he and his wife have yet to come to terms with their loss.

   Lyon’s investigation — which he frequently discusses with his imaginary friends, the Wobblies — takes him back to World War II and into a reconstruction of the life of a Jewish family who fled Hitler’s Germany only to find horrors in the new world. And the resolution of the case brings a measure of peace to the Wentworths. An excellent and sensitive novel whose serious theme is leavened by a wry good humor.

   Other titles featuring Lyon Wentworth: The Wizard of Death (1977), Death Through the Looking Glass (1978), The Death in the Willows (1979), The Death at Yew Corner (1980), and Death Under the Lilacs (1985).

     ———
   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.
   

NOTE: The series has continued on to include the following titles:

7. Death On the Mississippi (1989)
8. The Pied Piper of Death (1997)
9. Death in the Secret Garden (2004)
10. Death At King Arthur’s Court (2005)

SHOCK. 20th Century Fox, 1946. Vincent Price, Lynn Bari, Frank Latimore, Anabel Shaw, Michael Dunne, Reed Hadley. Director: Alfred L. Werker.

   Vincent Price plays a mad doctor in this one. But not a mad doctor as in a horror movie mad scientist. Rather, Dr. Cross (Price) is a seemingly mild mannered psychiatrist with a successful career. But he’s also having an affair with a nurse colleague (Lynn Bari) and has his share of anger issues.

   And when his wife threatens to spill the beans on him, he snaps and kills her with a silver candlestick holder. Little does he know that there was a witness to the crime, one Janet Stewart (Anabel Shaw), who was in the same hotel as Cross while awaiting her husband’s return from a POW camp after the end of the Second World War.

   When her military officer husband finds her, Janet is in a state of shock. Apparently witnessing Cross murder his wife was too much for her mental state. And guess who gets called in to help with her mental health woes? You guessed it. The very same Dr. Cross. Yes, the doctor tasked with tending to a psychiatric patient is a murderer, she’s a witness, and no one will believe her. That, in a nutshell, is the core of the film.

   Price is in true form as a smug, calculating, and devious physician who is so corrupted by his love for his nurse that he’s willing to breach every moral code to get his way. Fortunately, an intrepid police investigator (Reed Hadley) is not so enamoured of the doctor’s charms and has his own suspicions about how and why Cross’s wife was murdered.

   Shock is a relatively short film (some 69 or 70 minutes), but packs a lot into it. Even though the movie doesn’t touch upon politics, it feels very much like a post-war paranoid thriller. Recommended.

https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-26/the-one-hundred-pages-strategy.

   Some nagging medical issues will keep me from posting here for another few days. I’ll be back as soon as I can!

VALLEY OF THE ZOMBIES. Republic Pictures, 1946. Robert Livingston, Lorna Gray (as Adrian Booth), Ian Keith. Director: Philip Ford.

   By the title alone, you might think this was a horror movie set in Louisiana or Haiti with menacing zombies at every turn. In this case, however, you’d be wrong.

   In fact, I’m not even sure that there is a single legitimate zombie in this Republic Pictures programmer. Rather, there’s a criminally insane man named Ormand Murks (Ian Keith) who has come back from the dead to take revenge on those who have wronged him. He has a thirst for human blood, making him more a vampire than a zombie. I guess technical definitions weren’t that important to the filmmakers. Vampires? Zombies? Who cares? Just make the villain unexplainably spooky and hope the audience slops it up.

   But don’t less this oversight dissuade you. Valley of the Zombies is a fun, supernatural thriller with a romantic duo of doctor and nurse (Robert Livingston and Lorna Gray) playing sleuths. When their boss is killed by Murks, they begin to seek answers. Along for the ride are some bumbling (and not so bumbling) detectives and policemen who don’t believe for a minute that an undead man may be behind a recent spate of murders.

   There’s some humor in the film as well, including a giant cop named Tiny. It’s all dismally mediocre B-film material, but as I said before, it’s actually kind of silly fun.
   

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH – Strangers on a Train: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company, January 19, 2021. Introduction by Paula Hawkins. First edition: Harper & Brothers, hardcover, 1950.

   Guy Haines isn’t sure what will happen when he gets off the train to meet his estranged wife Miriam. Her track record of infidelities should make divorce simple, but if she’s pregnant, she may make things awkward for Guy and his soon-to-be fiancée.

   When he commiserates with Charles Bruno in the train dining car about his situation, he doesn’t pay much Bruno’s talk about having an insufferable father and how two people could “trade murders.” After police find Miriam’s strangled body in an amusement park, Bruno reappears, demanding that Guy “hold up his end of the deal.”

   Strangers on a Train is Highsmith’s first published novel, so there are moments where her style feels unvarnished compared to later works (Deep Water, the Tom Ripley novels). But she already knows how to create a vivid scene, especially the inner torments as her hero agonizes over how to escape Bruno’s game.

   While later books were more obviously literary (The Talented Mr. Ripley riffs on Henry James’ 1903 novel The Ambassadors), she already shows a clever ability to invert crime fiction into something stranger. Paula Hawkins’ introduction to this 2020 edition highlights how scarily Highsmith encourages readers to question what makes murder wrong, or if it is so bad after all.

   Hawkins also highlights how Highsmith uses a “pared-back, laconic style” to describe horrible crimes as well as everyday things (the sort of casual tone about murder contemporary readers associate with writers like Bret Easton Ellis or Chuck Palahniuk). Put these elements together, not to mention the fine line between hate and love Hawkins notices is very thin indeed in some Highsmith stories, and this book becomes far creepier than it appears.

   If Highsmith is important to noir, and it’s probably impossible to talk about the genre without mentioning her, it’s because she excels at handling this ambiguity. Where other novelists draw clear lines between stalker and victim, tempter and innocent, she quietly suggested that these characters may be more similar, more drawn to each other, than they want to admit.

   It may not feel transgressive as Ellis, Palahniuk, or later female virtuosos like Gillian Flynn, but Highsmith was a master at producing a thriller that slowly invites readers into something more genre-bending and perverse than they expect.

RAOUL WHITFIELD – Laughing Gas.  Steeger Books. paperback, 2021. Originally serialized in Black Mask,  February 1929 to October 1929.  Revised and reprinted in book form as Five, by Temple Field.

   In his introduction to the Steeger reprint, James Reasoner uses the term “word savagery” which was coined by Lester Dent to describe the quality Black Mask brought out in writers, and that certainly fits Raoul Whitfield though I prefer the Raymond Chandler’s term ‘the poetry of violence.” Anyway you put it, Raoul Whitfield was a master of the form, the third spoke of the wheel that included Hammett and Chandler as the best Black Mask has to offer.

   Laughing Gas was Whitfield’s first attempt at a novel length work, written as a series of tightly connected short stories and intended to be published as a fix-up novel. It ended up replaced by another Whitfield serial, Green Ice, that would become Whitfield’s first novel (and wisely, it is a better book) while Laughing Gas was rewritten and published as Five, under the by-line Temple Field. This trade paperback edition from Steeger Books Black Mask collection is the works first appearance in its original form since its publication in the 1929 pages of Black Mask.

   The book covers nine stories. Gary Greer, the two-fisted protagonist, sets out to avenge the murder of his Prosecutor father Stanford by gangsters who laughed while he died at their brutal hands. Greer, a pilot in charge of the local airport, sets out for revenge, and neither the law nor criminals are going to deter him in his singular minded pursuit.

   This is Mike Hammer country, a revenge story much like Whitfield’s similar Green Ice and savage is a fair description of what happens as Greer tracks down the five men who killed his father.

   Whitfield wrote as much or more aviation fiction as crime novels including several juvenile aviation novels. This one mixes the two genres, flying and hardboiled action and does so in a convincing tough guy voice that compels the narrative along like an express train.

   It is a far pulpier work than his best hardboiled novel, Death in a Bowl, a work that comes close to rivaling Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, but it reads surprisingly modern in style, another Mask attribute. The dark salon cars speeding down roads, vintage planes, and Tommy guns may be dated, but the writing is as contemporary as anything you’ll read today.

   
   In addition to revenge intrigue and murder there is a well handled romance that leads you to wonder how Hollywood missed this one. Of course they would have had to tone it down a bit because Greer is a fairly grim avenger adopting multiple identities, names, and faces as he takes his revenge on hoods with colorful names like Frenchy Lamotte, Doll Jacobs, Sal the Dude, and “Fifty Mile” Liseman.

   Whitfield just misses the quality that set Hammett and Chandler apart from the pack, and it is hard to define exactly what it is. It may be because he never quite finds that single voice protagonist (though Death in a Bowl comes close and Jo Gar is a fine creation) or spread himself too thin with his other pulp work. I can’t say exactly. I know at his best he writes as well as either Hammett or Chandler with that same word savagery Reasoner mentions, but he also writes with just the slightest bit less conviction and dedication.

   Granted there is a fairly contrived twist at the end that allows for a happy ending, but it’s the pulps and the kind of thing common in movies at the time, and I can’t bring myself to complain much. After all that an unconvincing path to a happy ending seems a small price to pay. You wouldn’t want Whitfield’s protagonist taking revenge on you because you messed with his happy ending, believe me.

   Just let him have it and lump it.

STEPHEN LEATHER “Inspector Zhang Gets His Wish.” Novelette. Inspector Zhang #1. First published in 2011, perhaps in ebook format. Collected in The Eight Curious Cases of Inspector Zhang (Monsoon Books, softcover, 2014).

   The problem with most (almost all) locked room short fiction is that the stories are to short to include any personal information about the characters. It is the facts of the case that are important, nothing more and nothing less. This is one of latter, but did I mind? Not at all.

   Inspector Zhang’s purview is Singapore, and such is the state of security there that there are practically no murders in the city, much less those of the “locked room” variety. Inspector Zhang’s long time ambition is to have one to solve. Which he does, most handily, quoting often from John Dickson Carr’s work in general and the novel The Hollow Man (1935) in particular.

   Dead in his hotel room, the door of which was watched at all of times by a security TV camera in the outside hallway, is a wealthy American tourist, killed by what appears to have been a knife, but which is not found in the room.

   The solution is a simple one, relatively speaking, but it will still take a careful reader to catch the crucial clue. A fact that does not include me, I am embarrassed to tell you, but truth, as the old saying goes, will always out.

   Nicely done.

THE ENFORCER. Warner Bros., 1951. Humphrey Bogart, Zero Mostel, Ted De Corsia, Everett Sloane. Directors: Bretaigne Windust, Raoul Walsh (the latter uncredited).

   I initially didn’t know exactly what to make of The Enforcer. It’s structured in such a way that a viewer could get lost in the proceedings. Not only are there flashbacks, but there are flashbacks within flashbacks and, if I am being honest, I found myself somewhat disappointed with the film by the halfway mark. But I am really glad I continued watching, because by the time this Humphrey Bogart movie wraps up, you realize that the intricate narrative structure does the story justice and then some.

   Directed by Bretaigne Windust (with the action sequences helmed by an uncredited Raoul Walsh), this picture stars Bogart as Ferguson, a crusading district attorney tasked with prosecuting Mendoza (Everett Sloane), the boss of a murder-for-hire syndicate. When his star witness, Rico (Ted De Corsia) falls to his death, he is forced to find another witness who could put Mendoza in the chair, and that’s where the aforementioned flashbacks come in.

   Ferguson begins to revisit the case and hopes to find some forgotten detail that could help him as the clock ticks down to the next day’s courtroom proceedings. As it turns out, there is one witness who can positively identify Mendoza for committing a years ago murder at an all night diner. Whether Ferguson can find and save her before the killers get to her provides the necessary suspense to keep the viewer engaged.

   One thing that irked me a little about the movie is how some of the toughest criminals in the murder-for-hire racket go completely soft as the first sign of trouble. Rico, the tough as nails ringleader of the outfit, becomes implausibly scared of Mendoza when he decides to testify against him.

The same goes for Zero Mostel’s character, Big Babe Lazick, who whimpers in police custody, and for hired killer Duke Malloy (Michael Tolan) whose teary confession to the cops is pivotal to how the investigation plays out.

   I get what the filmmakers were going for – namely, that Mendoza is such a ruthless man that even the hired killers who work for him are terrified of him – but it really doesn’t work to the film’s benefit.

   That said, I enjoyed the movie quite a bit. The Enforcer reminded me somewhat of The Killers (1946). It’s not quite at that level. But it’s solid movie-making and benefits immensely from Bogart’s presence. I’m not quite sure that anyone else would have been as good in the role. Final note: a lot of crime movies from this era are erroneously called film noir. For what it’s worth, this one I think fits that category well. Thumbs up.