To a new hosting system, that is. If all goes well, everything on this blog will show up on the new site just as it is right now with (fingers crossed) nothing lost.

   I don’t know whether the blog will be visible while the transition is taking place, or if everything will disappear for a while until we’re back again. I suspect the latter, so if that happens, please don’t panic. I’m not sure how long it will take, but everything should reappear as soon as the transfer’s done.

GARY DISHER – Peace. Paul Hirschhausen #2. Text Publishing, paperback, 2019. Setting: Contemporary Australia.

First Sentence: This close to Christmas, the mid-north sun had some heft to it, house bricks, roofing iron, asphalt and the red-dirt plains giving back all the heat of all the days.

   It has been a year since Constable Paul Hirschhausen was branded a whistleblower and transferred to a rural territory covering hundreds of square kilometers. Except for his lover Wendy, and her daughter Katie, he still doesn’t feel welcome in Tiverton. However, between Brenda Flann driving into the front of the local bar, a stolen ute containing stolen metal, a ranch tragedy, a woman clearly hiding from someone, and a discovery which brings in way too many outside cops, and results in Hirsch forming an unexpected alliance.

   Disher has a real skill for descriptions– “He liked to walk every morning, the dawn a time to cherish with only the birds busy, the air quite still and everything sharply etched. …by 9 a.m. the mid-north would be lying limp and stunned beneath a molten sun and the overnight reports of villainy, idiocy and shitty luck would have landed on his desk.”

   Even his style reflects the location as the story begins more as a series of vignettes rather than one straight-line mystery. These are interesting and give a real sense of the types of things with which Hirsch has to deal, but one finds oneself waiting. It’s interesting because it’s so real.

   Never fear, when the pieces start coming together, one realizes things aren’t as tranquil as seemed and the level of involvement turns to high. “Peace inside. That’s all a cop wants at Christmas, he thought. Not a heavenly peace, just a general absence of mayhem.”

   Hirsch is such a well-done character. Although assigned to this one-man territory, he has the instincts of a city cop— “…the house felt unoccupied rather than touched by junkie-offspring violence, so he left it at that. It was a sense all cops developed, knowing when a situation behind closed doors was right or wrong.” –but the compassion of a community policeman. There is a nice balance between his former colleagues who dislike or dismiss him and those who know and respect his capabilities. This establishes a basis for future relationship development.

   The story has its share of dark elements, suspense, and unexpected twists, all of which are perfectly executed. Peace is the second book in this series, with Bitter Wash Road (2013) having been the first. One need not have read that book to enjoy this one, but Disher is such a good writer, why not?

    Peace is a thoroughly engrossing story shattering one’s perceptions of a peaceful small town and of knowing whom one can trust. It builds slowly with a number of seemingly unrelated incidents, only to have the pieces coalesce to a well-done ending.

Rating: Good Plus.

THE GOOD WIFE “Pilot.” 22 September 2009. Julianna Margulies, Chris Noth, Christine Baranski, Archie Panjabi, Matt Czuchry. Guest Cast: Katie Walder. Created and written by Robert King) & Michelle King. Director: Charles McDougall.

   I remember when the series started and I thought it sounded interesting — but not interesting enough for it to last more than the usual three months or so that new shows are almost always gone by. Why invest any time in it, when it will history by Christmas?

   It was on for seven years.

   You were probably way ahead of me. You also probably know the premise of the show. Just in case not, however, it begins with a scene seen all too often in this country. A man, a former State’s Attorney in Illinois, has been forced to resign because of corruption and a sex scandal. His wife, Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) is forced to stand on the stage next to hm as he apologizes but promises to keep fighting the charges.

   Six months later, Alicia, forced to go out and work for a living, is the new lady hiree at a prestigious law firm. Her first case is a pro bono one: a young woman is accused of shooting and killing her ex-husband in a parking garage. She claims that it was done by someone in a drive-by pickup truck, but neither the security guard nor a surveillance camera saw or shows such a truck anywhere in the vicinity.

   An impossible crime, in a way, except that the ex-wife was there, and the police have no interest in pursuing their investigation any further.

   Truthfully I liked the mystery more than I did the background story, and apparently (from looking at the plot lines on Wikipedia) the background story goes on and on through the whole run, almost soap opera style, except that it was done with a lot more production values and style.

   Which is not to put down soap operas. The people who work on them do yeoman work, under tough conditions, lower budgets and awfully tight time constraints.

   As for The Good Wife, I’m enough intrigued that I’ll watch another episode or so, but I can’t imagine, now that I’m so far behind, that I’ll ever find the time to go the whole seven yards. How far I go, I think will depend on whether the next few episodes have completed stories or not, as well as the ongoing drama.

QUICKSAND. Overseas FilmGroup, 2003. Michael Keaton , Michael Caine, Judith Godreche, Rade Serbedzija. Director; John Mackenzie.

   Even though I’m a big Michael Caine fan, I’d not heard of this movie until I spotted it on Amazon Prime Video this past weekend. That’s what having only a direct-to-video release will do to a movie, no matter who’s in it.

   Not that Michael Caine has much of a role in it, but even so, it’s quite an enjoyable one, mixing the world of high finance with, what else, money laundering, this time through a film company that’s supposedly making a movie in the south of France. Michael Caine plays an on-the-skids movie star who’s there only as figure head to keep legitimate money coming in.

   Michael Keaton plays the hard-nosed by-the-book head accountant back in the States when flags come up, suggesting something has gone wrong. Ad indeed it has. Once on the ground and investigating, he’s finds himself the victim of a frame-up, that of killing the head of the Nice police force.

   Assisting him is the company’s CFO, played by Judith Godreche, whom I’ve never seen in a movie before, but who reminded me of a young French Julia Roberts. If I can I’ll see if I can’t watch her some of the other moviees she’s made.

   Michael Keaton does OK in his role of our hero on the run, and if pressed, I’d say better than OK. His character seems to have resources you would not think a nerdish business-orieted kind of guy would have, given that he started the movie being portrayed as exactly that. Sometimes, though, characters are forced to grow in ability and what they can do when they have to, right before our eyes, and we the viewers fall for the gambit every time.

   It is difficult to make such a movie as this and not make it fun to watch, and that is precisely what happens here. They don’t make a lot of movies like this any more, or if and when they do, how does one ever find out about them?

NOTE: This review from the past was first posted on this blog on August 11, 2009. I’ve been prompted to reprint it because the previous review, also a repost, was of the movie Murder on the Campus, which was based on another book by Whitman Chambers, also a locked room mystery.

       —

WHITMAN CHAMBERS – Dead Men Leave No Fingerprints. Stanton Lake #1 (and only appearance). Doubleday, hardcover, 1935. Hardcover reprint: Caxton House, 1939. Paperback reprint: Detective Novel Classic #28, circa 1943.

   Late last year I made a major purchase of over 200 of old mystery digest paperbacks like this, most of them being published in the 1940s. Most of them also are abridged, cut “to speed the story,” and if so they’re not very desirable from a reading standpoint, but the often lurid covers can still make them very much collectible. This one, with no indication otherwise, is the full, uncondensed version.

   And it provides a relatively inexpensive way to read a mystery writer about whom I know nothing more than a list of the books he wrote. With no characters ever appearing more than one book, Chambers never made a name for himself the easy way. His first mystery appeared in 1928, and he seemed to hit his stride with nine books from Doubleday (not all under the Crime Club imprint, as I recall) between 1934 and 1941.

   A few more novels appeared through the war years, then one paperback original from Pyramid after the war ended, followed by two more paperback originals from the relatively schlocky Monarch line in 1959 and 1960.

   I mentioned the lack of a continuing series character. If Chambers would have decided to go with one, you’d think it would have to be the leading player in this book, a private detective named Stanton Lake. Most of the action takes place at a beach hideaway near Dipsea, 16 miles north of San Francisco, as Lake tries to help a beautiful Danish movie star stay out of trouble with the moral-turpitude clause of her contract.

   Hilda Haan — that’s her name — had a stand-in leave the country under her name while she went for a quiet sojourn in the country with one Theodore Raybourne. It was intended to be a love nest for two, but now that she wants out, Theodore’s family has moved in, and she needs Lake’s help.

   In he goes as well, and soon after, murder follows, in a house with all of the entrances locked from the inside. It was not a fool-proof job of locking, but it is still almost assuredly an inside job.

   The biggest obstacle to cracking the case is not the locked room aspect, however. It’s the fact that the only fingerprints on the murder weapon are those of a dead man, a convict who died in prison without ever being released.

   A second murder is even more puzzling, occurring in a totally sealed room. An immediate solution presents itself, but to add to the growing bewilderment, it also does not hold up to close inspection. Chambers had fun with this one, I think, even though this is not a major entry in the list of Locked Room Mysteries:

   Here’s a quote to show you what I mean about the fun part. From page 89:

   While the murder method may be a bit far-fetched (and Chambers makes it sound as though it just might work, maybe), the motive(s) is/are — well, let’s just say “interesting” is the key word, without saying how likely it (or they) may be.

   I apologize for deliberately trying to be vague here. Lake sweats this one out, doggedly serving his client’s interests all the way through, and being rewarded mightily in the end for his efforts.

   Is this one worth reprinting? It’s a minor find, not a major one, pulpishly told, a little bit goofy, in all honesty, and flawed no doubt by investigative practices no longer found acceptable today (page 91) and by the stereotypical representation of a Chinese servant who not so incidentally has an important role to play in the tale.

   Is it worth reading, though? Assuming that you’ve read (and understood and/or let pass by) all of the qualifying statements made in the preceding paragraph, a definite “yes” to this one.

NOTE: This review from the past was first posted on this blog on August 24, 2012. The video link had gone black, so in the process of replacing it, I decided to allow everyone the chance to read it again.

      —

MURDER ON THE CAMPUS. Chesterfield Pictures, 1933. Shirley Grey, Charles Starrett, J. Farrell MacDonald, Ruth Hall, Dewey Robinson, Maurice Black, Edward Van Sloan, Richard Catlett. Based on the novel The Campanile Murders, by Whitman Chambers (Appleton, 1933). Director: Richard Thorpe.

   Obviously a change in title from the book to the film was in order, since I’m sure that not one person in a thousand knows what a “campanile” is, then or now. Though you could look it up on your own, what it is, is a bell tower, such as commonly found on college and university campuses. And the significance of that is, is that is where the body of a student is found, shot to death in the temple with the wrong hand.

   What makes this otherwise ho-hum of a mystery interesting is that he was the only one at the top of the building. He was playing the carillon when the music suddenly stopped, and a shot rang out. No one is seen leaving the tower. The only door at the base was watched by a throng of students. No one is found in the tower, either. The building is too high and too far out of range for a bullet to have killed him from outside. It is definitely murder, though. There is no gun in the building, and there are no powder marks on the body.

   The detective in charge of the case, Police Captain Kyne (J. Farrell MacDonald), a grizzled veteran of the force who doesn’t seem to mind brash young reporter Bill Bartlett (Charles Starrett, boyishly handsome and long before he became the Durango Kid) tagging along as he randomly interrogates suspects and hunts for clues.

   Bartlett has his own reasons for keeping an close eye on him. Besides getting the scoop for his paper, he’s in love with one of the chief suspects, Lillian Voyne (Shirley Grey). The latter is not only a student at the school (unnamed, unless I missed it) but she’s also a singer at a local night club. Strangely enough, she’s seen studying for a chem exam for all of two minutes in the movie and not singing once at all, not for an instant. I don’t know why, but I found myself disappointed.

   The school does have a chem lab where professor C. Edson Hawley (Edward Van Sloan) hangs out, but as for classrooms, I don’t remember seeing a one. The dead student, it seems, was not doing well in his course work, failed to meet expectations as a member of the track team he was recruited for, and according to head of the fraternity house where he lived, “he lacked the cultural background a college man should have.”

   Which is an attitude beside the point, I suppose, or it is? But I have not forgotten about the locked room aspect of the murder, along with the mysterious fact that the gun that used to commit the crime was somewhere else at the time.

   The gimmick, as I would readily agree to call it, is a good one, and it would be even better if the investigation conducted by both of the separate parties (police and reporter) made more sense.

   What I really like to do is to read the book and say that the original author did a much better job with it. I have a strong feeling that he did, but the fact is I don’t own a copy, nor is there one offered for sale right now by anyone on the Internet.

UPDATE [03-05-20]: In conjunction with his Comment #8. Bill Pronzini sent me a cover image of The Campanile Murders, by Whitman Chambers. And here it is:

PATRICIA WALLACE – Deadly Grounds. Sydney Bryant #2. Zebra, paperback original; 1st printing, May 1989.

   I don’t remember the title of the first one, but this is [San Diego-based] PI Sydney Bryant’s second recorded adventure. She’s hired here by a neighbor, a 15-year-old schoolgirl who finds the body of a friend along a pathway of the private girls’ academy they both attended.

   Complicating the story is Sydney’s potentially torrid love affair with the policeman in charge. While Wallace’s easy writing style often seems to explain too much, as if telling the story to someone reading a mystery for the first time, she does know teenage girls.

PostScript: Well, she convinced me, at least. It’s really too badthat both the title and packaging make th book look to much like a run-of-the-mill horror novel, at least at first glance — and how much chance does a book get to find its proper audience, anyway?

      The Sydney Bryant series —

Small Favors. Zebra 1988

Deadly Grounds. Zebra 1989
Blood Lies. Zebra 1991

Deadly Devotion. Zebra 1994

August Nights. Five Star, hardcover, 2002

WILLIAM J. REYNOLDS “The Lost Boys.” PI Nebraska (*). First published in The Mysterious West, edited by Tony Hillerman (HarperCollins, 1994). Reprinted in The Fifth Grave (Great American Murder Mysteries), edited by Martin Greenberg and Billie Sue Mosiman (Rutledge Hill, paperback, 1998).

   The asterisk in the first line above is there because the name of the PI in this case of two missing boys is never revealed. But he’s based in Omaha, and so is the PI in Reynolds’ six novels and two or three other short stories. It’s been a while since I read any of the novels (over 30 years), so I don’t remember if withholding the leading character’s name was a feature of those or not.

   The mother of the missing boys is our man’s client. She is divorced from their father, a big man back in Monument, South Dakota, and she is sure that he is the one who has taken them. The only industry in Monument is that of extracting granite from a local quarry, and our hero is forced to make his inquiries of the local townspeople under a huge handicap: he does not want to make the reason why he’s asking questions known.

   If I were to make any kind of criticism as to how Nebraska (I’ve gone ahead and said it) handles his investigation, I’d be guilty of Monday morning quaterbacking, as the story’s a good one, strongly told. What I enjoyed even more than the case itself, though, was the descriptive way Reynolds brings to life a one horse town in the middle of nowhere, and a very isolated nowhere to boot.

        The Nebraska novels —

The Nebraska Quotient (1984)
Moving Targets (1986)
Money Trouble (1988)
Things Invisible (1989)
The Naked Eye (1991)
Drive-By (1995)

THOMAS W. BLACKBURN – Short Grass. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1947. Bantam #207, paperback, 1948; #1164, paperback 1953. Other editions include Dell, paperback, 1973.

SHORT GRASS. Allied Artists, 1950. Rod Cameron, Johnny Mack Brown, Cathy Downs, Morris Ankrum, Alan Hale Jr. Raymond Walburn, Harry Woods, Stanley Andrews, Riley Hill, Jeff York, Tristam Coffin and Lee Tung Foo. Screenplay by Thomas W. Blackburn. Directed by Lesley Selander.

   An excellent book turned into a superior B Western.

   I started watching Short Grass last month and was immediately struck by something rare in B Westerns: Depth. Early on, wandering gunfighter Steve Lewellen (Rod Cameron) gets dry-gulched by Myron Healey, who is in the employ of big rancher Hal Fenton (Morris Ankrum.) He survives (Healey doesn’t) and is nursed back to health by small rancher Pete Lynch (Stanley Andrews) and his daughter Sharon (Cathy Downs — whom you may remember in the title role of My Darling Clementine.)

   The whole episode serves as a plot device to put Rod on the side of the small ranchers, but the film takes a few minutes to tell us a bit about Myron Healey’s character, and how he comes up against Rod Cameron. The two even have a bit of edgy interaction before getting on with the story, and I wondered why a B-Western would take such pains with a throwaway character like Healey’s. Then I saw that the screenplay was by the author of the book, who would naturally try to get as much of his story on screen as he could.

   Then I started wondering about the book itself. So I dug out a copy to compare and contrast with the film, and it was a revelation.

   Don’t get me wrong. Short Grass is not a great novel. But it’s a damn fine one, and it made a superior B Western. But where was I?

   Oh Yeah: In the book, Steve Lewellen uses his prowess to keep Pete Lynch from being crowded off his range. But when he kills Fenton’s hot-head brother he realizes the odds are too great, and if he stays it will bring worse trouble. So he advises his friend to sell out and rides away from the woman he has grown to love.

   That’s book one of a two hundred page novel. Book two finds Lassiter three years later, farming on the outskirts of a small town called Brokenbow, which threatens to become a wide-open town since the railroad arrived and drew in the cattle drives—headed by Fenton.

   And this is where Blackburn turns a standard western into something a bit better, sketching out vivid portraits of the townsfolk: a town-taming sheriff, a Swede farmer, crusty old doctor, shopkeeper… and even a Chinese Cook. They all come to life here and join in the action, of which there is plenty.

   Ah yes, the action. You couldn’t ask for anything better. In one scene Lewellen takes on four opponents and Blackburn makes it read real, not like some pulp-book superman. And he wraps things up with a running gun battle through the streets: Townsfolk vs drovers, and never lets the reader lose track of who’s where and what hit whom—a neat trick, and he does it well.

           ***

   When Allied Artists made this into a movie they were still sloughing off the Monogram persona, like a caterpillar turning hopefully moth-ward, and they fashioned Short Grass firmly in the B+ mode, with sturdy sets, good stunting, lots of extras, and names familiar to Western fans.

   Blackburn cut out the unnecessary characters, put the bit parts in deep focus (as in the opening cited above) and changed what needed changing; in the book, the virile, town-taming sheriff is fooling around with the wife of the Newspaper Editor. In the movie he’s tough, paunchy Johnny Mack Brown, loving her pure & chaste from afar.

   Allied Artists picked Lesley Selander to direct, and no one could have made a better job of it. Selander was a dab hand with action, and he visualizes Blackburn’s fights and shoot-outs just as he wrote them. But more than this, Selander — who brought Hopalong Casssidy and The Lone Ranger to the scree — had a feel for the mythic qualities of the men and their story. When, after many minutes of furious battle, the battered gunman and the wounded lawman lock arms and march across the street into a saloon full of bad guys, it carries all the feeling of a similar moment in Ride the High Country. Peckinpah did it better, but Selander did it first.

   You can enjoy Short Grass equally as book or movie, but I recommend you try both. And before I wrap this up, I should add that Tom W Blackburn was also a songwriter of sorts with one solid gold record to his credit.

   Can you name it?

TIME TABLE. United Artists / Mark Stevens Productions, 1956. Mark Stevens, King Calder, Felicia Farr, Marianne Stewart, Wesley Addy, Alan Reed, Jack Klugman, John Marley. Director: Mark Stevens.

   The first third of this small-time heist film is all very much routine. A train is robbed of a large payroll in cash, and assigned to the case are a insurance investigator (Mark Stevens) and a railroad detective (King Calder). They have worked well together before, and except for one thing, this one shows no sign of being different. This case and except for the stilted language this one does not have, the way they approach could have just as well have been dramatized on Dragnet.

   That one thing, though, has them stumped. The theft was carried out is such meticulous detail, they can find nothing to get hold. In terms of cracking the case, they soon discover they have completely run out of leads. But as both you and I know, no heist in either a book or a movie can be carried out without something that goes wrong. And when that crack first occurs, then everything else starts to fall into place — for the pursuers, I mean.

   There is also one big surprise along the way, and if you ever plan to see this film, I may have said too much already. Since I do not wish to give too much away, suffice it to say that the last two-thirds of the movie play out in s much more noirish vein, with plenty of dark streets, dingy Mexican cafes and gunfire.

   Surprisingly, though, while the performance of rest of the cast is a solid notch better than just OK, actor-director Mark Stevens is almost as stiff as Jack Webb ever was in all those TV shows he was on. (The key word, though, and saving grace, is “almost.”)