Back in 1974, if you’d asked me what I thought of this song, I’d probably have said, “Not much.” Neither did anyone else, at the time. I’m glad I’m still around, to have changed my mind.

   From their Wikipedia entry: “The New York Dolls were an American hard rock band formed in New York City in 1971. Along with the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, they were one of the first bands of the early punk rock scenes. Although their original line-up fell apart quickly, the band’s first two albums—New York Dolls (1973) and Too Much Too Soon (1974)—became among the most popular cult records in rock.”

THE NINA B. AFFAIR. Bavaria-Filmkunst Verleih, France-Germany, 1961. Originally released as Affäre Nina B and L’affaire Nina B. Nadjia Tiller, Pierre Brasseur, Walter Giller. Screenplay by Roger Nimier, Jacques Roberts and Robert Siodmak, who also directed. Based on the novel by Johannes Maria Simmel.

   The irony about the work of Johannes Maria Simmel, an international bestselling Austrian author, chemical engineer, and English translator, is that virtually no one in the United States ever heard of him until writers such as Robert Ludlum and Frederick Forsyth came to the fore of popular spy fiction in the seventies and eighties and his work began to appear here in mass market paperbacks published only as by Simmel (much less foreign sounding than Johannes Maria) and proclaimed to be in the tradition of Ludlum and Forsyth, when he was in reality a contemporary of Helen MacInnes (who his Cold War novels resemble more than Ludlum or Forsyth), Sarah Gainham, Paul Hyde Bonner, and Martha Albrand.

   Truth was, Simmell had been writing this sort of thing since 1949 over two decades before Ludlum or Forsyth stuck their hands in, and was far less a thriller writer than a novelist whose work deals with crime and espionage and his personal belief in pacifism, particularly in the aftermath of WW II and the Cold War with often autobiographical references (the antagonist in Nina B. has the same middle name as Simmel) in books like I Confess, Double Agent — Triple Cross, The Caesar Code, and Cain ’67, and who had sixteen books filmed beginning in 1960 as well as penning numerous original screenplays and adaptations. His career and success outside of the American publishing world was quite extensive with twenty-nine books published between 1949 and 1999.

   In addition his devotion to pacifism led to numerous awards over his career, including those from his native country and the UN, as well as his being one of the bestselling authors in the world.

   Among those works was The Nina B. Affair, which was filmed in Germany in 1961, pre-Bond, directed by noted film noir director Robert Siodmak (who previously filmed Simmel’s Mein Schulfreund in 1960), brother of screenwriter Curt “Donovan’s Brain” Siodmak, Robert returning to Germany and reinventing himself as a director of spectacles, Westerns, and dramas when his American career faltered.

   The plot of the 1958 novel borrows pretty freely from both Citizen Kane and Orson Welles’ novel and film Mr. Arkadan, which both owed something to Eric Ambler’s Coffin for Dimitrios, if truth be told, and a Tracy and Hepburn picture Keeper of the Flame based on an I.A.R. Wylie novel, in that it opens at the funeral of the mysterious financier Michel Maria Berrera (Pierre Brasseur), one of those able criminal types beloved by Eric Ambler, in Wiesbaden, West Germany.

   The story is told in flashback by Antoine Holden (Walter Giller), a young man just out of prison whose taciturn attitude Berrera admired and who becomes involved with him, and slowly unwinds the twisty tale of a high stakes blackmailer and corrupt businessman, who it is suggested is much darker than we ever see.

   Shot in black and white and using many noir touches from the camera angles, wet night streets, isolated shots of the protagonist, and such it’s difficult not to see this as Euro-noir what with the flashback story structure and the dubious nature of most of the characters including the hero and heroine.

   Holden first arrives at Berrera’s house as the ambulance has just taken away Berrera’s wife, Nina (Nadjia Tiller) who has just attempted suicide. Berrera hires Holden on the spot and from the beginning he is involved in his intrigues including an urgent trip into East Germany for a briefcase full of papers Berrera is desperate to get so he can blackmail a trio of Nazi war criminals now well to do West German businessmen out of a deal they are making with an emerging African nation.

   Berrera ends up in jail with everyone after the papers and Holden faced with violence and bribes and Berrera’s too smooth lawyer, as well as falling for Nina, once Berrera’s secretary, who wants to escape his casual cruelty and overbearing manner.

   True to the book, there are no easy answers in the film. Holden and Nina’s brief affair is doomed by her hatred and fear of Berrera, with everything tumbling out of control when Berrera gets out of jail and makes his last big gamble to win the biggest prize of all, control of the African contracts.

   Some may find the finale a bit stark, but it is a great last shot and a perfect way to end the dark tale about people who are no more innocent than they have to be, caught in the web of a spider whose morals are as dubious as his weak heart, and ends on a perfect ironic note

   Despite a few touches, this is more drama than thriller or suspense, but it clearly benefits from Sidomak’s own American forays into noir storytelling. Acting honors primarily go to Brasseur, who plays Berrera as a fat spider at once threatening and cajoling, generous and ruthless, who plays god with the emotions and feelings of everyone around him, a more subtle James Bond villain, both attractive and evil, and more than deserving of his ironic fate.

JERRY KENNEALY – Polo Solo. Nick Polo #1. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1987; paperback, February 1988.

   After posting an old review by Barry Gardner of Beggar’s Choice, the ninth in Jerry Kennealy’s Nick Polo series, I decided I had to read one for myself. There are eleven in total, and for whatever reason, I’d missed them all.

   This is the one I found, and I’m glad I did. Read it, that is. This was a good one. I don’t why the Nick Polo books have never been any better known than they have, which is as far as I know, is not at all.

   This one begins with Polo being freed from the prison he’s been in — there’s obviously a small story there — and his license restored by a political operative who has the clout to do so. Why? The mayor of San Francisco, female, has been photographed doing a porno movie, and she’s being blackmailed.

   It was a rigged up job, of course, but the publicity? Devastating. There are some mean streets in San Francisco, and with an opening like this one, you just know that Polo is going to go down some of them, and he does. He also runs across the path of one of the toughest and meanest villains in PI history, and as they say, Polo is lucky to get out of this one alive.

   He’s tough enough, though, and street savvy enough, that his coming out on top is totally believable. I enjoyed this one, and I’ll be looking out for more.

DEPORTED. Universal Pictures, 1950. Marta Toren, Jeff Chandler, Claude Dauphin, Marina Berti, Richard Rober. Director: Robert Siodmak.

   Deported is far from a cinematic masterpiece, but with director Robert Siodmak at the helm, fans of crime films of the late forties and early fifties nay find several points of interest along the way. Filmed largely on location in Italy, the film’s travelogue aspects may not be of much interest today, but any film based on the life of Lucky Luciano has to have at least the headline factor going for it.

   Jeff Chandler plays Luciano’s counterpart in this film, a small time American gangster by the name of Vittorio Mario Sparducci, or as he was known in the US, Vic Smith. Shipped out of the country and back to his home town in Italy, Smith’s primary goal is to find a way to get his hands on the $100,000 in stolen money he was unable to bring with him (and for which he has spent five years in prison).

   To that end he romances the widowed Countess di Lorenzi (Marta Toren), whose primary preoccupation in life is raising money to help feed the people of her small, impoverished post-war town. Under the watchful eye of his parole officer (Claude Dauphin), Smith manages to keep his plans a secret, until…

   I needn’t tell you the whole story, need I? The pace is slow, but not terminally so, and the ending is well worth waiting for, especially to dedicated connoisseurs of noir films. The biggest flaw, as far as I was concerned, was the casting. They’re all fine actors, but Toren was Swedish, not Italian, while Dauphin was French. And of course, Jeff Chandler was born in Brooklyn, which allows him to portray a tough American gangster to perfection, but Italian? No. He stands a foot and a half taller than his relatives back in Italy, with no family resemblance at all.

   All in all, this rather pedestrian crime film is far from essential, but it’s solidly produced, with some good work done by both the cast and Oscar-winning cinematographer William Daniels. A bit more than average, but no more than that.

KEOMA. Far International Films, Italy, 1976. Also released as Django Rides Again and The Violent Breed. Franco Nero, William Berger, Olga Karlatos, Gabriela Giacobbe, and Woody Strode. Written & directed by Enzo Castellari.

   One of the Great Westerns.

   And I don’t mean just Spaghetti Westerns; KEOMA can stand right alongside STAGECOACH, RIDE LONSOME, THE NAKED SPUR or any other superb western you care to name, and for once I’m not kidding.

   I’ll say at the start (or close to the start, anyway) that KEOMA lacks the warmth of RIO BRAVO, the intimacy of MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, and the drama of MAN OF THE WEST. But what it lacks in Heart, it shellacs with Pizzazz. KEOMA’s visual sweep and choreographed camerawork boggle the eyes and dizzy the imagination.

   Also, Woody Strode gets one of the best death scenes ever in the movies.

   The plot here is a timeworn thing about the lethal drifter coming up against a ruthless small-town despot. It’s also just a launching pad for writer Castellari’s mysticism and director Castellari’s rich visuals, both of which get shown off in the very first scene as Keoma (the name means “far away.”) rides into a ghost town and talks with a witch about Destiny. The witch recalls a time when she saved Keoma as an infant, the camera pans across the ghost town, and suddenly, without apparent cutting, it has become a burned-out Indian village.

   Wowsa.

   I should also throw a bouquet here to Carlo Simi, who designed a Western Town that looks like the Gotham City of Tim Burton’s BATMAN: an Escher-style thing of twisting streets, half-built structures, and stairways rising to vertiginous nowheres.

   And another bouquet to stunt coordinator Rocco Lerro, who populates the despot’s army with hyperkinetic stuntmen and – more important – gives them lots of neat stuff to do. There’s one manic moment when a bad guy chasing Keoma rides pell-mell down the street, grabs one of those wooden posts that holds up the awning over the sidewalk, flies off his horse, spins around the post holding on one-handed, lands on a stairway and runs up just in time to get mowed down by Woody Strode’s shotgun and go flying back down the stairs, all in a single take.

   Wowsa.

   In the lead role, blue-eyed Franco Nero looks a bit like Jeffrey Hunter in KING OF KINGS, all the more so when Castellari’s script gets him crucified with a nod to Shakespear’s JULIUS CAESAR. Aside from that, Nero plays to his strengths: impassivity and silence. I can’t speak with authority on the other actors except to say that everyone is adequately dubbed in the voices familiar to those of us who watched the cheap foreign films that flooded the market in those days.

   Mostly though, this is a film of visuals and mystery. And as such it’s a thing of wonder and one not to be missed.

           MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!

A live performance, August 2006, with the Danish National Concert Orchestra and Choir at Ledreborg Castle, Denmark. There are songs that will stick with you forever and you know it as soon as you hear it for the first time. This is one of them for me.

  JAMES GRADY – Six Days of the Condor. Ronald Malcolm #1. W. W. Norton, hardcover, 1974. Dell, paperback, 1975. Also published as Three Days of the Condor (Dell, 1975). Film: Paramount, 1975, as Three Days of the Condor.

   It’s safe to say that more people have seen Three Days of the Condor starring Robert Redford (reviewed here on this blog) than have read the novel the film was based on. James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor is a taut, suspenseful read from beginning to end. It’s hardly a flawless work, however. There are far too many information dumps, scattered bits of information about the internal workings of the intelligence community that are awkwardly inserted into the text. This interrupts the flow of the narrative and gives the work an occasionally encyclopedic feeling. Overall, though, it’s an enjoyable, quick read and one that is highly visual. It’s no surprise that Hollywood came calling.

   The story follows Ronald Malcolm, a CIA analyst, as he descends into a Kafkaesque nightmare when his station gets hit. Unlike other thrillers which are set at CIA stations in such exotic places as Beirut and sub-Saharan Africa, Six Days of the Condor is set at the most quotidian of locales: Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. (In the movie, the location is shifted to Manhattan). Malcolm works at a small subdivision of the Company called the American Literary Historical Society, a CIA front where analysts pore over literary works and study their plots to see if any information could be useful for the higher ups at the Agency. In other words, Malcolm is the bookish type. A reader, not a fighter.

   All that changes, however, when his workplace is hit. When he finds his co-workers dead, Malcolm calls into the Panic Section and identifies himself using his code name. Condor. But he soon learns he can hardly trust the CIA. It would seem as if there’s a double inside the Agency. When Malcolm learns the assassins that targeted his workplace were hired by someone inside the Company, he begins a hero’s quest to find out who did this and why.

   This is where the book loses me for a while. It’s not that I mind whirlwind romances. It’s just that Malcolm’s quick romantic connection with a woman he kidnaps in order to secure a place to hide out seems remarkably forced. I thought the same thing watching Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway in the cinematic adaptation.

   Where the novel works best is in its description of how various factions in the intelligence community each seek to find Malcolm and to investigate what really happened at the American Literary Historical Society. Grady is at his best when he’s putting Malcolm in perilous situations. He’s less successful in divulging the reason why Malcolm’s workplace was targeted. It has to do with a drug smuggling operation run by rogue CIA operatives, something the film wisely changed into a far more nebulous conspiracy involving geopolitics.

Bibliographic Note:   James Grady wrote a followup novel, Shadow of the Condor (Putnam, 1975), with Ronald Malcolm again as the primary protagonist. [Added later: Two more in the series are Last Days of the Condor and Next Day of the Condor were published in 2014 and 2015 respectively.]

RICHARD HILL – Kill the Hundredth Monkey. Randall Gatsby Sierra #3. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1995. No paperback edition.

   I don’t know anything about Hill, other than that he is described as a prize-winning author, and lives in Gainesville, Florida.

   Old three-names isn’t really looking for work right now, but some things a man’s just gotta do. One of the nation’s sports icons, a young white basketball player who was also a Rhodes scholar, has just been gunned down in Atlanta in an apparent random act of violence. Sierra is called down off his North Carolina mountaintop by n ex-movie star who lives not too far away in the mountains, where she presides over a group dedicated to stopping the destruction of personal liberty, civility, and various other Good Parts of American Life.

   The dead youth had come from their community, and she wants Sierra to investigate his death. It’s not his thing — he specializes in finding people — but he was one of the youth’s admirers himself, and can’t resist her entreaties. It’s a cold and dark trail, but he puts his nose to the ground and starts.

   I wish Hill weren’t quite as good a writer as he is, so I could just unload in this and be done with it. It’s filled with the Crumley/Parker macho, Brotherhood of Real Men bullshit that annoys me so much, and has pages and pages of commentary (in a not too lengthy book) on the ills of our society and how we have lost our way.

   I hate being preached to at the expense of the story, and particularly so by writers who get off on and glorify violence. I mean, hey, if we’ll all just do a little bonding and then kick some righteous ass, everything will be fine. You bet,

   But he is a good writer prose-wise, a very good one when he remembers to tell his story. His men and women are just a little too good, staunch, and caring to be true, but they’re the kind you want to root for. The plot really wasn’t all that bad, which is surprising: kick-ass books are usually more than a little silly when you look at them closely.

   Decidedly mixed feelings, that’s what I’ve got about this one.

Bio-Bibliographic Notes:   I have discovered little more abut the author than Barry knew at the time he wrote this review. He is listed in Ak Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV as RICHARD (Fontaine) HILL (1941-1999?), along with the three books in his leading character’s series given below. Hill has escaped notice from both the Fantastic Fiction and Thrilling Detective websites, but both his second and third books were reviewed by Publishers Weekly.

      The Randall Gatsby Sierra series —

What Rough Beast, Foul Play, 1992
Shoot the Piper. St. Martin’s, 1994

Kill the Hundredth Monkey, St. Martin’s, 1995

JOHN D. MacDONALD – The Deep Blue Good-By. Trevis McGee #1. Gold Medal k1405, paperback original, 1964. Reprinted many times. J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, 1975.

   I don’t think there’s any reason why we can’t think of Travis McGee as a private eye, is there? Of course he’s not a PI in the traditional sense. He doesn’t have an office with a secretary — rather a 52-foot house boat called the Busted Flush— not does he even have a license. He calls himself a “salvage consultant,” and asks for (and gets) expense money plus 50% of the proceeds accruing from whatever he is able to find that has been lost.

   In this case the daughter of a war vet who never quite made it home wants the money or whatever it was that her father brought home from the war. She assumes that Junior Allen, the man who was her dad’s cell mate at Leavenworth, an out and out villain if ever there was one, came looking for it, loved her for a while until he found it, then left her and took up with another woman.

   Which is where the other part of Travis McGee’s personality and mystique come into play: his self-appointed role as God’s gift to shattered women. This particular aspect of the McGee stories has become more controversial in today’s world than it was in the mid-60s, which is when they began.

   When it comes down to it, even though the trail takes McGee from Miami to New Your City to a small town in Texas, the first adventure a simple one. It all comes to a head back in Miami and a direct confrontation with the aforementioned Mr. Allen, the end of which is twist upon the McGee mystique above [PLOT ALERT!], as he is the one who needs the time and TLC for a full recovery.

   Here are some inner thoughts that Travis McGee has about himself:

   Here is a view he has of one aspect of Miami social life, and the role of some of the women in it.

   Here some thoughts that McGee has about his adversary in this book:

   Here is a rant — I cannot think of a better word to describe it — McGee has about life in modern America, a feature readers came to expect in each and every follow-up novel. There were 20 more to come: