I’ve not seen a James Bond movie since Casino Royale, the first one in which Daniel Craig had the starring role. I don’t see anything in this one that appeals to me, either, but there’s plenty of time for me to change my mind about that.

TOMBSTONE TERRITORY “Gunslinger from Galeville.” ABC, 16 Oct 1957. 30 min. Cast: Pat Conway (Sheriff Clay Hollister), Richard Eastham (Harris Claibourne of the Tombstone Epitaph / Narrator), Thomas B. Henry, Gilman Rankin. Guest Cast: Robert Foulk, Brett King, Carol Kelly. Writer: Andy White. Director: Eddie Davis.

   The first two seasons of Tombstone Territory aired on ABC; the third and final season were shown in syndication only (ZIV). Each episode was supposedly based on a true story published in the Tombstone Epitaph in the 1880s. Only Richard Eastham, the publisher, and Pat Conway as Sheriff Clay Hollister were in all 91 episodes. No one else appeared more than a handful of times.

   Even though the story itself is a rather fanciful one, the first episode, “Gunslinger from Galeville,” is a good one. Determined to collect taxes from everyone in the county, Hollister co-opts the services of outlaw Curly Bill Brocius (Robert Foulk) to help persuade certain recalcitrants to pay up.

   It’s not easy, of course. The members of Curly Bill’s gang don’t know what’s come over their boss. One in particular holds a personal grudge against the sheriff, and lots of gunplay is the result. Curly Bill Brocius returned for a couple more episodes, but this was the only time that Carol Kelly appeared, as the owner of a small store in outlaw territory.

   Pat Conway had a decent career in TV, mostly in westerns, but this series was his only steady job. He’s both tough and steady in this one, and he displays a small sense of humor along with the other two attributes — that plus being a fine hand with a gun. Richard Eastham was solid enough as the editor/publisher/narrator, but mostly he acts a well-established witness who is otherwise only along for the ride.

THE BRIDE AND THE BEAST. Allied Artists, 1958). Charlotte Austin, Lance Fuller, Johnny Roth, William Justine, and Ray “Crash” Corrigan as “Spanky.” Written by Adrian Weiss and Ed Wood Jr. 2nd Unit/Assistant director: Harry Fraser. Photographed by Roland Price. Directed by Adrian Weiss.

   A classic in the annals of bad movies, with screen creds to go with it.

   Readers here recognize Ed Wood’s name at once, but how many can recall Roland C. Price “the Vagabond Cameraman” who made Lash of the Penitentes (1936) at some risk to his life? Likewise, Ray Corrigan made his name in B Westerns and Jungle movies, but Harry Fraser wrote, produced and/or directed scores of them – all terrible.(See my reference to both gentlemen here. And speaking of credits, I just wish I could name the old tiger-hunt movie that died so this film could live.

   Let’s get the plot out of the way first — which is more than the movie does. As the story opens, newlyweds Laura (Charlotte Austin) and Dan (Lance Fuller) indulge in some circular, pointless dialogue (a trademark of Ed Wood’s prose style.) en route to his castle/menagerie where the only animal seems to be a gorilla (Ray “Crash” Corrigan”) kept in a cage in a dungeon-like room — there’s a refrigerator, but it’s lit by torches; architecture for Ed Wood was more about mood than function.

   Anyway, Laura finds herself strangely attracted to the ape, and he to her. So much so that he breaks out of his cage, invades the nuptial chamber (with its twin beds) and is quickly shot dead by Dan.

   The next day, Dan calls in his Psychologist-buddy (named Dr Carl Reiner, and yes, her name is Laura, but the Dick Van Dyke show was still a few years away.) to see why his bride is so upset (!), and the Doc immediately suspects it has something to do with a past life. Before you can say “Bridey Murphy,” he hypnotizes Laura and regresses her to a past life where she was a gorilla running through scenes from old jungle movies.

   Next thing we know, Dan & Laura are on their Honeymoon, on safari in Africa (“Get some rest. Tomorrow we’ll be in Gorilla country.”) and….

   â€¦And then the Gorillas go on sabbatical or something so we can watch another movie. Producer Weiss, an old hand with stock footage, throws in a line about tigers escaping from a shipwreck, the extras start wearing turbans and saris, and we spend the next half hour with Dan hunting tigers and trying to look like the guy in the other movie. Getting back to this movie, the gorillas don’t return till the last ten minutes, when they abduct Laura and carry her off to Bronson Canyon, that elephant’s graveyard of cheap movies, where Dan catches up and….

   â€¦and I don’t want to spoil it for you. But I will say that Charlotte Austin is a much better actress than one should expect in a mess like this. There are times she even convinces me that she’s haunted by her inner ape, just like it says there in the script. I’m not saying she’s another Ethel Barrymore, but I will observe that it’s easier to be convincing amid the splendor at MGM than in the squalor of Bronson Canyon.

   Maybe Ms Austin’s to blame for it, but Bride/Beast just misses slipping easily into the so-bad-it’s-good bracket. Or perhaps I expected too much from a film with this pedigree. At any rate, Bride is firmly in the fun-if-you’re-in-the-mood rankings, and on that level I can recommend it highly.

FLETCHER FLORA “Loose Ends.” Novelette. Percival ‘Percy’ Hand. First published in Manhunt, August 1958. Reprinted in The Second Pulp Crime Megapack (Wildside Press, Kindle edition, 2016).

   Fletcher Flora had one only series character in a long career of crime fiction writing, a policeman by the name of Lt Joseph Marcus, who appeared in six stories for the digest mystery magazines of the 1950s. He missed a bet, though, in not writing another story about Percy Hand. “Loose Ends” is a good one.

   He’s hired In this one by Faith Salem, a very good looking woman, especially while tanning herself outside on her terrace. It seems as though he’s thinking of becoming wife number four to man with whom she presently has an understanding. She is wondering, though, why wife number three just suddenly disappeared without a trace. The police didn’t work very hard on the case, though, since the man she presumably was having an affair with disappeared at exactly the same time.

   What Faith Salem wants Percy Hand to do is the obvious. Find out what really happened. And so he does, with adeptness and efficiency. Roots in the past are involved, as is true for a good percentage of all good PI stories.

   And not only is Hand very good at his job, but author Fletcher Flora is also very impressive as a wordsmith whose words I ought to have reading all this time, and I’m sorry to say that I haven’t.

   Some examples:

   And:

   One more. Percy has gone to see the missing man’s brother, a high class gangster. In the room is Robin Robbins (not her real name):

THREE CAME TO KILL. United Artists, 1960. Cameron Mitchell, John Lupton, Steve Brodie, Lyn Thomas. Director: Edward L. Cahn.

   The benchmark for movies such as this — a family being held hostage by a gang of killers planning to assassinate some high government official — is probably Suddenly, the film released in 1954 in which Frank Sinatra’s target is the President of the US. [My review of that film can be found here.]

   Even though that earlier film is much more well-known, I found myself enjoying this one a whole lot more. The target is the head of some small (fictitious) Middle-Eastern country who is about to fly out of the US from the Los Angeles airport> The reason this film is a lot more believable and suspenseful (if those two qualities are not one and the same) is that Cameron Mitchell and Steve Brodie look exactly like the kind of guys who might be hired could carry out such an assignment. Tough and professional all the way.

   It goes without saying– doesn’t it? — that they do get tripped up, but their plan is a good one, and they do come awfully close to carrying it out. This is a low budget film, but it’s still an enjoyable one, with one caveat I can’t help but mention. Whoever had the final say on this film must have thought the viewership was going to consist of folks with movie IQ’s of less than 80. All the ever present voice-over narration managed to do is to repeat in detail what was plain as day to see on the screen.

Are you old enough to remember this one?

JESSE MILES – The Middle Sister. Jack Salvo #3 Robert Peoples, trade paperback, August 2019.

   Jack Salvo is yet another LA PI — not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with that! — whose third recorded case involves a daughter who’s been missing for a week. As the title suggests, she’s the middle sister of three (age-wise) in a wealthy family, and since she’s known for having lived in the fast lane, including drugs, it comes as no great surprise to anyone that Jack finds her dead, presumably of an overdose of heroin that was purer than usual.

   Jack senses that there’s more to the story, though, and decides to investigate her death a little longer, even if he’s no longer being paid for it. There’s a lot of scum in Hollywood: hangers-on, cheap grifters, wanna-be’s, never-will-be’s, out-and-out crooks, and so on, and it also comes as no great surprise that the trail Jack find himself following leads him through a subculture populated by all of the above.

   Even though this is the kind of private eye story that’s been told many times before, the good news for PI Fans is that it’s better written than a lot of them. Jack Salvo, who’s also an adjunct professor of philosophy and logic on the side, is an amiable sort of guy with all he right kind of contacts and connections that a good PI has to have.

   The less than good news is Jack Salvo doesn’t have the sort of quirks and/or sparks to his personality that might let him stand out more among the better known PI’s working the same beat. Nor does he have a philosophy of life that keeps the story from sloughing off in the middle of the case, as all PI stories= do, even the best of them.

   For fans of LA-based private eye stories only, and Hollywood in particular. It helps, though, that there’s a lot of us.

Bibliographic Note:   Jack Salvo’s previous cases are available on Kindle only: Dead Drop (2014) and Church of Spilled Blood (2016).

CHUKA. Paramount Pictures, 1967. Rod Taylor, Ernest Borgnine, John Mills, Luciana Paluzzi Luciana Paluzzi, James Whitmore, Victoria Vetri (as Angela Dorian), Louis Hayward, Michael Cole. Screenwriter: Richard Jessup, based on his own novel. Director: Gordon Douglas.

   No one has ever asked me about anything like this, even if I’d been handy at the time, but if they had asked me, I’d had told them flat out, ditch both the prologue and epilogue that open and close this movie. The prologue tells the viewer too much, and the epilogue way too little.

   It’s a shame. Without the prologue and epilogue. there’s a decent western movie in between, trying to work its way out.

   It doesn’t quite succeed, mind you, but it’s there. Almost all of the action takes place at one of those forts in the Old West that seem to attract all of the misfits and rejects, officers and soldiers alike, that no other outfit wants or can tolerate for very long. This includes its commanding officer, played by John Mills, and whose fear of being thought of as a coward again prevent him from doing the obvious: abandoning the fort in the face of an impending — and non-defendable — Indian attack.

   Ignoring the advice of another outcast, a wandering gunman called Chuka (Rod Taylor), who stays on hand only because of the presence of Luciana Paluzzi as Señora Veronica Kleitz. an aristocratic Mexican lady whom Chuka loved when he was younger, but whom he could not pursue because of the social gap between them.

   The weaknesses and character flaws of the others are revealed gradually, but while I won’t go into them all, trust me, all of their flaws are considerable. You may be thinking that you have seen this movie before, and I cannot lie to you. I’m sure you have.

   The story is capably told, however, cleanly and sharply, and Rod Taylor us, well, tailor-made, to play a big burly western frontier hero. And yet. And yet. If I were to be asked (and in this case, someone already has) what the movie adds to the overall panorama and lore of western movie-making, given that it was made in in 1967, I’d have to reply, in most definitive fashion, “Not much. Not very much at all.”

ARCHER MAYOR – Bomber’s Moon. Joe Gunther #30. Minotaur Books, hardcover, September 2019.

First Sentence:   It was cold, dark, and slightly breezy, causing a few dry snowflakes to scurry the length of Sally Kravitz’s windshield.

   PI Sally Kravitz works within the law, as opposed to her father, a thief known as “Tag Man.” Rachel Reiling is a reporter working at the Brattleboro Reformer, hoping for her first big story. Now, thanks to Joe Gunther, head of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation, the two women are working together to connect two murders to a prestigious prep school.

   While this is a new entry in the Vermont Bureau of Investigation/Joe Gunther series, Mayor provides a good sense of each of his characters beginning with a nicely done introduction of Joe, but also a strong sense of place as well. It’s refreshing to have two female characters take a significant role. Also enjoyable is that they are not members of the police, and that they are quite different from one another, yet find a way to work well together.

   One may find oneself smiling at how well it is done. Interesting 3D crime scene technology brings the story into today’s technology. There are times where the scene would change which reminded me of the classic two-note indicator on the old police show Dragnet and could make the story feel a bit disjointed.

   There are lighter moments— “Idle chat in Vermont was always punctuated by discussions of mud season, mosquito plagues, heat waves, dry spells, snowstorms, black ice, and countless other attributes of a muscular, quirky seasonal parade of weather-related iconography.” Mayor does treat one to a lovely use of language— “Biased as he was against other people’s learning curves, obdurateness, or rank stupidity, he distrusted his own predisposition to dismiss people prematurely.”

   The book is a delightfully intricate Venn diagram of circles neatly intersecting circles. It’s not manipulative, but one becomes more intrigued as the pattern emerges. The characters are interesting especially as not everyone is as they seem, and a new friendship evolves which one hopes to see continue.

   Bomber’s Moon is a very good book, brilliantly plotted. Even the ending was a perfect reflection of the characters.

Rating: Very Good.