LAWRENCE G. BLOCHMAN “Dr. Coffee and the Pardell Case.” First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 1972. Probably never collected or reprinted.

   Lawrence Blochman had a long illustrious career as a mystery writer, starting as an author of thrillers in the 1930s and 40s before converting to more traditional detective fiction after the war. His best known series character in the latter end of his career was Dr. Webster Coffee, chief pathologist at Pasteur Hospital in Northbank, Ohio. He was also the personal medical examiner for Lt. Max Ritter, of the local police department. They appeared together in one novel and two hardcover story collections, plus a few later stories such as this one that have never appeared in book form.

   I called this a locked room story, for indeed it is, for about a day in the story or less. When the victim calls Ritter in a panic, the latter rushes to the scene and finds the dead man shot to death in a locked room with no possible access to it. This particular aspect of the mystery is soon cleared up by Coffee’s colleague Dr. Mookerji, who determines that the dead man could have survived the shot long enough for him to enter the room and lock the door behind him before dying. Not a lot of mystery there!

   Neither Ritter nor Coffee are given much personality in this one. Two full pages are spent on showing what a miserable person the victim was, however, a man who pulled himself up from his bootstraps as a child to become a rich and powerful man – whom everyone hated. From a mystery reader’s point of view, this provides for a whole list of suspects, each one with a motive. It is the opportunity that each of them may have had that Ritter has to look into. Dr. Coffee, when it comes down to it, does not have a whole lot to do in this one.

   Good old-fashioned police work, that’s all that’s needed in this one.

JON L. BREEN “The Babe Ruth Murder Case.” Ed Gorgon #4. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 1972. Collected in Kill the Umpire: The Calls of Ed Gorgon (Crippen & Landru, hardcover/paperback, 2003).

   Ed Gorgan is a baseball umpire who somehow seems to keep stumbling across unusual cases of murders. My my count there have been fourteen of such instances (see below), but there may have one or two that I’ve missed, hopefully not more. In “The Babe Ruth Murder Case,” what requires his attention is the shooting of the owner of a sports bar where he and police lieutenant Steve Appleman just happen to be hanging out.

   The fact the victim was well known for his criminal activity, including blackmail, means that there any number of suspects, and many of them who had the opportunity are strong possibilities are connected to his death by the clue on the dead man’s desk: the name “Babe Ruth” in his appointment book for that evening.

   This case is a textbook example, only six pages long, of taking each of the suspects in turn and eliminating them one by one by the application of sheer reason, reminiscent in many ways of many an Ellery Queen story, both long and short. More praise than that I cannot give.

      The Ed Gorgon series —

Diamond Dick (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Oct 1971
Horsehide Sleuth (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Nov 1971
The Body in the Bullpen (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine May 1972 *
The Babe Ruth Murder Case (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jun 1972 *
Fall of a Hero (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Nov 1972 *
Old-Timers’ Game (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Apr 1973
Malice at the Mike (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Oct 1973
Designated Murderer (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jul 1974 *
The Number 12 Jinx (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine May 1978 *
Instant Replay (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine May 1984
Streak to Death (ss) The Second Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction, 1987 *
Throw Out the First Ax (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Apr 1992 *
Kill the Umpire (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Nov 2002
Insider Trading (ss) ??, 2003 *

* = Included in the Crippen & Landru collection.

RAYMOND CHANDLER – The Long Goodbye. Philip Marlowe #6. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1954. Pocket #1044, paperback, 1955. Reprinted many time, both in paperback and hardcover. TV adaptation: “The Long Goodbye” on Climax, 07 Oct 1954. with Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe. Film: United Artists, 1973, with Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe.

   The title of this novel is apt. It is a long book and a complex one, and its detractors say they wish Chandler had said goodbye two-thirds of the way through. What these critics fail to understand is that the novel is one of the most realistic looks into the day-to-day life of a private investigator, and the central plot element, that of Philip Marlowe’s friendship for the mostly undeserving Terry Lennox, is a compelling unifying element. In it we also see a different side of Marlowe than in Chandler’s other novels: the man who is as honorable in his personal relationships as he is in his professional ones.

   The story begins when Marlowe first sees Terry Lennox, dissolute man-about-town: he is “drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of the Dancers,” a ritzy L.A. nightspot, with a redheaded girl beside him whose blue mink “almost made the Rolls Royce look like just another automobile.” The girl leaves Terry, Good Samaritan Marlowe takes over, and a friendship begins.

   It is a friendship that Marlowe himself questions, but it persists nonetheless. Marlowe tells Lennox he has a feeling Terry will end up in worse trouble than Marlowe will be able to extricate him from. and in due course this proves true. The redhead, Terry’s ex-wife, whom he admittedly married for her money, is murdered in the guesthouse at their Encino spread and the trouble that Marlowe sensed begins.

   Lennox runs to Mexico, and it is reported that he made a written confession and shot himself in his hotel room. But something feels wrong: The Lennox case is being hushed up, and Marlowe begins to wonder if his friend really did kill his ex-wife. A letter that arrives with a “portrait of Madison” – a $5000 bill that Terry had once promised Marlowe – convinces him his suspicions are justified.

   He tells himself it is over and done with, but he isn’t able to forget. The matter plagues him while he is working a case involving an alcoholic writer of best sellers in wealthy Idle Valley (where, he says, “I belonged … like a pearl onion on a banana split”). It begins to plague him even more when Sylvia Lennox’s sister, Linda Loring, appears and plants additional suspicions in his mind. The suspicions spur him onward, and finally his current case and the Lennox case come together in a shattering climax.

   At the end Chandler neatly ties off all the strands of this complicated story, and provides more than a few surprises. An excellent novel with a moving ending.

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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.

COLIN DEXTER – The Daughters of Cain. Inspector Morse #11. Crown, US, hardcover, 1995. Ivy, US, paperback, 1996. Published earlier in the UK by Macmillan, hardcover, 1994. TV movie: ITV, UK, 27 Nov 1996 (Season 9, Episode 1) with John Thaw as Chief Inspector Morse and Kevin Whately as Detective Sergeant Lewis.

   I have not heretofore been a Morse fan. There, I’ve said it. Everyone else seems to be, though, so I thought I’d try another one, as I haven’t read that many.

   Dr. Felix McClure, late of Woolsy College, Oxford, is dead. Butchered. Morse and Sergeant Lewis think they know who did it, but they can’t find the weapon, and the man’s wife alibis him. And then there’s the couple’s daughter, a runaway and prostitute strangely attractive to both McClure and Morse.

   While the case meanders on, Morse must deal with both his deteriorating health and a potential reduction in rank due to an efficiency study. The former, it seems, is demanding payment for all the years of Scotch, cigarettes, and general neglect.

   There’s no question but that Morse is one of the major figures in modern crime fiction, my own lukewarm attitude notwithstanding. Though the amount contributed to this popularity by television is an open question. In fairness, not only did I like this book better than any others I’ve read if his, but there’s no doubt that his characterization is superb.

   Dexter writes a particular kind of story: leisurely, convoluted, and told much in the way Morse’s mind works – in fits and starts, and darting this way and that. The prose is excellent, and none of the characterizations are less than very, very good. This seemed to me a bit different in tone than the previous ones I’d read, a bit mellower, even more sentimental.

   Bur perhaps I was just in a mood more conducive to enjoyment of it. Whatever. I did enjoy it considerably, and am even tempted to go back and try some of the earlier ones.

DOWN THREE DARK STREETS. United Artists, 1954. Broderick Crawford, Ruth Roman, Martha Hyer, Marisa Pavan, Max Showalter, Casey Adams, Kenneth Tobey, Jay Adler, Claude Akins. Screenplay by Gordon Gordon & Mildred Gordon (as The Gordons) and Bernard C. Schoenfeld, based on the novel Case File: FBI by The Gordons. Director: Arnold Laven.

   Told in semi-documentary fashion, Down Three Dark Streets tells the story of how FBI Agent John ‘Rip’ Ripley (Broderick Crawford) finishes up the three cases that fellow agent Zach Stewart (Kenneth Tobey) was working on when he was gunned down and killed. He assumes that the killer was involved in one of the three cases, but which one and who.

   The cases: (1) A killer on the loose. A possible contact: his girl friend (Martha Hyer). (2) A car theft gang. Possible contact: the blind wife of one of the members (Marisa Pavan). (3) An extortion threat to a recent widow (Ruth Roman) involving her young child.

   The kidnapping threat is the major one, the one Ripley spends most of his time on. There are several suspects, but if you don’t mind my saying so, while you could easily pick any one of them, the obvious one is the one. Of special note is that the semi-suspenseful finale takes place at the base of the Hollywood sign high up in the LA hills.

   Broderick Crawford is his usual gruff down-to-business self. Ruth Roman was always a fine actress, as she is in this above average crime thriller, but her career never developed as much in my mind as it should have. On the other hand, Martha Hyer’s career went into high gear soon after this, in which she quite effectively plays the gunman’s moll, outwardly tough and brassy, but ultimately fragile and insecure on the inside.

ROBERT SILVERMAN – The Cumberland Decision. Manor, paperback original, 1977.

   You may have noticed that from time to time I take up valuable space by delving into the publishing phenomenon in the field of mysteries that produced the flood of paperback originals from Gold Medal/Fawcett Publications all during the 1950s. I’m firmly convinced that these novels, all easy to find for the most part, and mostly in the hard-boiled genre as linear descendants o the pulp magazines, are unjustly neglected.

   You may tire of me telling you so, but for characters involved in down-to-earth situations and for sheer story-telling ability, the authors in the Gold Medal group are not easily surpassed. (Outstripped?)

   Even in their heyday, however, these novels were all too easily panned by snobbish reviewers, if not totally ignored. There were the indiscriminate pitchforks dispensed by the anonymous reviewer for The Saint Magazine, for example, but there also was Anthony Boucher, in the New York Times, as one reviewer who did not automatically subscribe to the “paperback equals junk” theory.

   It occurs to me that 20 years from now, retrospective reviewers may find that today’s Manor paperbacks are also exceptional examples of neglected writing, and in reality saying a great deal about American society and culture of [the 1970s].

   It’s possible, but I found ex-cop-turned-mystery-writer Johnny Otto crude and semi-literate, a macho chauvinist who seems utterly incapable of writing a coherent sentence, let along a best-selling novel, or having an intelligent lady friend as a girl friend. His method of ending an argument is slipping his hand inside her blouse and leading her to bad. “Yeah, baby.”

   As I say, it’s possible that Johnny Otto describes a definitive figure in American life, but he is most definitely a flop as a detective. The true villain behind the death of his former partner on the police force and the huge shipment of heroin about to be smuggled into San Francisco is obvious at first meeting, and I think I found comical overtones in the climactic rescue and capture that were not wholly intended.

   Redeeming social value? Ask me in 20 years.

Rating: D

Note: Robert M. Silverman has one other entry in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, that being The Colombian Connection, also a paperback original from Manor, also in 1977.

EDWARD D. HOCH “The Theft of the Double Elephant.” Nick Velvet. First published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, February 2004. Not yet collected.

   The particular task that Nick Velvet agrees to take on in this tale is the robbery he knows his friendly adversary Sandra Paris has committed, but what he does not know is how she managed to steal the ordinary Audubon print he is hired to retrieve. It was taken from an apartment on the top of a five story brownstone in New York City. Three different keys are needed to enter the apartment, and at night alarms are always set at the doors and windows.

   Unlike the Porges story (recently reviewed here) in the same issue of EQMM, Hoch takes his time (fourteen pages rather than only four), to describe the layout fully as well as the personal interest Velvet takes in his duel task: I think he took greater pleasure in outwitting Ms. Paris than he did in actually returning the print to its owner.

   As it so happens, this is the Nick Velvet story I asked Mr Hoch about when I interviewed him for the print version of Mystery*File back in August of 2004. You can find it online here. It is not, however, included in the recently published Locked Room Murders Supplement by Brian Skupin. I hope it’s not because there is no murder in it. It’s well constructed and well worthy of inclusion, and I hope to see it in Supplement Two.

THE WIDOW “Mr. Tequila.” Amazon Prime Video. 01 March 2019 (Season 1, Episode 1). Kate Beckinsale and a large ensemble cast. Created and written by Harry Williams & Jack Williams. Director: Samuel Donovan.

   As the pilot of this one season, eight-episode series, it does its job in one solid way: it sets the course for the season with a strikingly visual presentation consisting of at least three different story lines. What it does not do, and by no means is this a problem, it only tangentially brings any of them together, nor obviously are any of them concluded. This is the only episode I’ve seen.

   Kate Beckinsale plays the title character, a widow who lost her husband, a medical aid worker in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who he died when his plane went down in wide swatch of jungle while on his way home. Watching a televison news report of civil unrest in that country three years later, she’s sure she sees her husband, either fighting or taking cover from the action.

   She immediately hops a plane to the Congo to investigate, where she’s met by one of two men with whom she bonded as a small survivors’ group in the airport after the crash. There appears there is more to be known about the third, known locally as “Mr. Tequila,” which is about as far as this story line goes.

   I plan to keep watching. I always enjoy watching Kate Beckinsale in action, and this is obviously a star vehicle built especially for her. She always lights up the screen whenever she appears. I don’t know exactly how she does, but she does.

RAYMOND CHANDLER – The Lady in the Lake. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1943. Pocket #389, paperback; 1st printing, September 1946.  Film: MGM, 1946, as Lady in the Lake (with Robert Montgomery as Philip Marlowe).

   Even though The Lady in the Lake is not Chandler’s best novel. it is this reviewer’s favorite. It too was “cannibalized” from three pulp novelettes: “Bay City Blues·” (Dime Detective, November 1937), “The Lady in the Lake” (Dime Detective, January 1939), “No Crime in the Mountains” (Detective Story, September 1941), but it is not as seamless as The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely, nor as wholly credible. Nevertheless. there is an intangible quality about it, a kind of terrible and perfect inevitability that combines with such tangibles as Chandler’s usual fascinating assortment of characters and some unforgettable moments to make it extra satisfying.

   The novel opens with Marlowe hired by Derace Kjngsley, a foppish perfume company executive, to find his missing wife. Crystal (who he admits he hates and who may or may not have run off with one of his “friends,” Chris Lavery). Marlowe follows a tortuous and deadly trail that leads him from L.A. to the beach community of Bay City, to Little Fawn Lake high in the San Bernardino Mountains, to the towns of Puma Point and San Bernardino, and back to to L.A. and Bay City. And it involves him with a doctor named Almore, a tough cop named Degarmo, a half-crippled mountain caretaker, Bill Chess, whose wife is also missing, Kingsley’s secretary, Miss Adrienne Fromsett and the lady in the lake, among other victims.

   As the dust jacket or the original edition puts it, it is “a most extraordinary case, because … Marlowe understands that what is important is not a clue – not the neatly stacked dishes, not the strange telegram … but rather the character of [Crystal Kingsley]. When he began to find out what she was like, he took his initial steps into a world of evil, and only then did the idea of what she might have done and what might have been done to her take shape. So it was that not one crime but several were revealed, and a whole series of doors that hid cruel things were suddenly opened.

   “Again Chandler proves that he is one of the most brilliant craftsmen in the field, and that his Marlowe is one of the great detectives in fiction.”

   Amen.

   The Lady in the Lake was filmed in 1946. with Robert Montgomery (who also directed) as Marlowe. For its time, it was a radical experiment in film-making, in that it is entirely photographed as if through the eyes of Marlowe — a sort of cinematic version of the first-person narrator, with Montgomery himself never seen except in an occasional mirror reflection. The technique doesn’t quite work – it, not the story, becomes the focus of attention – but the film is an oddity worth seeing.

         ———
   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.

ANOTHER MAN’S POISON. Eros Films, UK, 1951. United Artists, US, 1952. Bette Davis, Gary Merrill, Emlyn Williams, Anthony, Barbara Murray. Screenplay by Val Guest, based on the play “Deadlock” by Leslie Sands. Director: Irving Rapper.

   There is a funny story I’d like to tell you about regarding this movie. Well, it’s funny to me, not laugh-out-loud funny, but just a little bizarre kind of funny. The first time I tried to watch this movie, it was on a videotape I’d made fro TCM, and about ten minutes from the end, either the movie had run long, or the tape had run short. What can be worse than missing the last ten minutes of a rattling good murder mystery movie?

   Then a couple of nights ago, I spotted the movie again on Amazon Prime Video, a freebie, no less. Finally, I thought, here’s my chance to see the ending. And of course I decided to watch it all the way through from the beginning. It had been too long. I’d forgotten most of the story line.

   So I settled in for the evening. Ha! You guessed it. Ten minutes before the ending, the picture froze. I had to shut everything down and work my way back to where I’d left off. Took me fifteen minutes. Twice now.

   Three times is the charm.

   I might not have done this for just any old movie, but to my mind, this one’s a good one, and well worth the trouble. Bette Davis can do little wrong, as far as I’m concerned, and she’s at her bitchy best in this one. .(There’s no other word I can use.)

   I don’t recall if the story begins on a dark rainy night or not – but for sure that comes later. She’s a mystery writer who lives almost alone in an well-isolated manor house with a deep dark tarn in the back and facing an empty stretch of moor on the other. She has two visitors. The first is her estranged husband, then after she disposes of him, another man shows up – her husband’s partner in a bank robbery, looking for shelter.

   When I said disposed of, I meant it. The man is dead. Poisoned. Her second arrival grabs the chance when he can get it. He dumps the body in the tarn, and forces the newly minted widow to let him pose as her husband.

   It’s an audacious plot, and they might have gotten away with it, if not for a live-in secretary, her fiancé (who the lady in charge has Bette Davis eyes) for, and an extremely nosy veterinarian who lives in the estate next door.

   I apologize for running on like this, but this is just the setup. You’ll have to use your imagination for what goes on in the remaining hour or so, but with a setup like this, the possibilities are many, and it all comes off like clockwork. Well worth the long intermission(s) for me.