BRAM STOKER & VLADIMAR ASMUNDSON – Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula. The Overlook Press, hardcover, February 2017. Translated by Hans Corneel de Roos.

   It was 1901 when Icelandic writer Vladimar Asmundsson, collaborating with his friend Bram Stoker, began his translation of the Irishman’s novel Dracula for serialization as Makt Myrkranna for the newspaper Fjakkkonan (Lady of the Mountains). It wasn’t until 2014 that Stoker scholar Hans Corneel de Roos recognized something was up, for Powers of Darkness is not only a translation of the Stoker novel, it is a completely different book.

   In Makt Myrkranna, Thomas Harker, a young solicitor travels to Transylvania in the Carpathian Mountains to close a real estate deal for Count Dracula — which is about the last moment the Icelandic translation of the novel looks or reads anything like the original.

   Harker’s adventure at castle Dracula is considerably different from the original Stoker versions, yet there is evidence Stoker himself approved of the book’s approach.

   Dracula here is a far different character than the little seen repugnant presence of the original novel. In the Icelandic translation he is a dirty old man much closer to a James Bond villain, replete with an international organization up to economic skullduggery. In the second half of the book, it draws the attention of Barrington of the Yard and the Secret Service.

   Most startling to the reader is the open sexuality and eroticism of this version. Where Dracula as we know it has a heavily suggested eroticism, claustrophobic and brought to the surface by only a handful of moments. Powers of Darkness has seductive young women, bared bosoms, naked bodies, orgiastic human sacrifices, half human beast-men, and a femme fatale that overcomes young Harker’s Victorian prudery quite easily.

   Gone is all the artifice used by Stoker to lend his fantastic tale its own reality. There are no typewriters, Dictaphones, or other modern methods of storytelling and the epistolary nature of the original is replaced by a flat God-like narrator. Even the race across Europe by train to destroy Dracula in the shadow of his castle is gone, replaced by a too short scene reminiscent of the play and the 1931 Tod Browning film.

   Many characters are changed: Dracula’s brides are replaced by a single bride, the Countess; Mina becomes Wilma and never falls to Dracula’s powers; Lucy’s death is dealt with perfunctorily and without the atmospheric scenes of the “Boo’fer Lady”; Dr. Seward goes mad and dies off page, his madhouse burns, but there is no Renfield, and we are assured Van Helsing is the nom de guerre for a famous doctor.

   We are given glimpses of an elite of decadent European aristocrats drawn to London as if in the forefront of an invasion, and Dracula is portrayed as a lewd old man obsessed with women as sexual conquests, using Social Darwinism to explain the theories he plans to put into place as he conquers English society and England as a new Napoleon. At times, he seems more Carl Peterson than Dracula (shades of some of Hammer’s later Lee and Cushing films or Dennis Wheatley).

   Some of that is suggested by Stoker in the original, but never as blatantly as it is presented here, where Dracula is more the head of a vast criminal conspiracy than lord of the underworld or prince of Satan.

   Vampirism fits into the novel, but little supernatural is shown, and the famous scene of Dracula defying gravity scaling the walls of his castle is explained away with hidden hand and footholds. The entire sub-strata of vampirism as a metaphor for venereal disease is hidden and even the fetid breath and redolent smell of the vampire goes unmarked.

   The first half of the novel, Harker’s journal, is the best part, a more contemporary voice than the original, at times reading like it was taken from the weird menace or spicy pulps of the thirties and early forties. The second half feels tossed off, as if the writer lost interest and hurried to the conclusion, though the changes to the novel may make it better suited to this blog than the original.

   It is an interesting read, for lovers and haters of the famous novel. I can’t say it is any kind of classic on its own, it is not, but as is pointed out by translator de Roos, you do have to wonder how different other translations of the novel are, and where they take the Count and his adventures.

LESLIE T. WHITE “Tough Guy.” Reprinted in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, September-October 2017. This issue’s Mystery Classic, selected and introduced by Jim Doherty. First published in Liberty, 21 June 1941. Reprinted in Liberty Quarterly: 19 Tales of Intrigue, Mystery & Adventure (Vol. 1, No. 1, ca. 1950).

    In his introduction to this story, Jim Doherty makes a solid case for Leslie White as one of the very first practitioners of the police procedural novel. Up for discussion in particular are Me, Detective (1936), a biographical account of White’s own career, Harness Bull (1937), and Homicide (1937).

    Most of White’s work was done for the pulp magazines, producing as he did well over 100 short stories for that market, beginning with “Phoney Evidence” in The Dragnet Magazine, January 1930. To substantiate his case, Doherty describes some of White’s career in police work, and how he used it to give all of his crime fiction a solid, believable setting.

    “Tough Guy” was written toward the end of his pulp fiction days, and that’s even a stretch, as Liberty magazine was not really a pulp. It’s the story of a tough cop named Gahagan who lives for nothing other than his job, a primary part of which is nailing a notorious killer and crime boss by the name of Danny Trumbull.

    Things go awry in his life when the trail leads him to Trumbull’s eight-year-old daughter Penny, who lives alone with her father but who has no idea how totally bad he is. This one starts out in full tilt pulp mode, but by the end, it’s become, as you might have expected, a long way from being a hard-boiled tale of a tough guy cop. Quite the opposite.

    Which does not make it a bad story, by any means. In fact, I enjoyed this one more than any of the other twelve stories in this latest issue of AHMM, many of them (to my mind) rather weak efforts and/or not interesting to me. It’s starting to get difficult to justify spending $7.99 an issue for a magazine that I can’t get excited about any more.

A. A. MILNE – The Red House Mystery. Methuen, UK, hardcover, 1922. E. P. Dutton, US, hardcover, 1922. Reprinted many times, including: Pocket #81, US, 1940; Dell, US, paperback, Murder Ink #7, 1980; Dover, US, trade paperback, 2000.

   Winnie the Pooh.

   There. Got that out of the way!

   This was A. A. Milne’s only detective novel, and it’s a good one. I don’t know how rich and famous he might have become as a mystery writer if he’d decided to continue on in that fashion, but at the end of this one, the detective of record, a fellow by the name of Antony Gillingham, sure sounds ready to tackle another one. Alas, he seems to have never gotten the chance.

   From the title, you might guess that The Red House Mystery is one of those oh so many country manor murder mysteries that took place in England between the wars. And you’d be correct, kind of. All of the guests, who were out golfing at the time of the murder, are hustled out of the house and back to London as soon as they get back.

   All but one, that is, a chap named Bill Beverley, the friend that Antony is stopping by to see and who is needed to testify at the inquest. And at a more propitious time Antony could not have chosen, right as Matthew Cayley, the live-in cousin of Mark Abbett, owner of the manor, is pounding at the door of the room where the latter has just received his scoundrel brother Robert from Australia.

   Together, after running around the house and coming in through a window, they find Robert dead, and Mark nowhere to be found. Having pleasantly already worked his way through several occupations, but now at loose ends, Antony decides to add amateur detective to his overflowing resume. Luckily he has a very willing Watson at hand, in the person of Bill, who thinks solving the mystery will be great fun, as indeed it is.

   The reference to the tales of Sherlock Holmes is a recurring one. Along the way they also come across lots of keys, locked cupboards and of all things, a secret passage, watch the police drag a pond, then spy on Cayley as he drops something into it that same night, something the two of them must later retrieve without being seen doing so, and more.

   What’s interesting is that until the very end, Antony is very willing to share his thoughts on the mystery with Bill as they are working on it, rather than being inscrutable and mysterious about it, as so many other fictional detectives do. Until, that is, just before the end. As the author, you can’t let the reader in on everything all too soon — can you? — nor Bill, either, for that matter.

   He’s a good sport about it, though, and so was I.

   Milne’s witty and essentially informal writing style helps this one go down awfully easily. The scheme behind the murder plot is a complicated one, but Gillingham makes good sense of it all in the end, and his explanation of how he worked the solution out holds all the water it needs to, which is always the icing on the cake for me.

   Which makes is all the more sad to read, when he says in the very last line, about the chances of doing it again, “I’m just getting the swing of it,” and know that there will never be another.

MAURICIO de GIOVANNI – By My Hand. Commisarrio Ricciadi #5. Europa Editions, World Noir series, softcover, August 2014. First published as Per mano mia. Il Natale del commissario Ricciardi, 2011.

First Sentence:   The murderous hands work unhurriedly in the dim light.

   Christmas is coming to Naples, a city in 1931 under a fascist regime and where people live in tremendous poverty in contrast to the luxurious apartment in which the bodies of a militia officer and his wife have been found. While searching out the killer, or killers, Commisaario Ricciardi is concerned for his elderly former nurse and torn between two women, while Brigadier Maione is dealing with a crisis of his own.

   One does not enter gently into this story. Instead, one is nearly overwhelmed by the visual and narrative contrasts that attract and repel us. However, the one thing one does not do is stop reading.

   The two principal characters of Ricciardi and Maione are such wonderful contrasts to one another, yet they balance each other perfectly. Maione provides a bit of light, whereas Ricciardi believes himself to be the dark due to his ability? curse? gift? of the Deed, which causes him to see the final seconds of those who’ve died by violence. What’s nice is that these final seconds don’t help Ricciardi solve the crimes, as the words only make sense in the end.

   Supporting them is the always delightful Dr. Moto and his newly adopted dog; Bambinelle, Maione’s informant; Rosa, who has been with Ricciardi since his childhood; and Erica, the object of unrequited (so far) love on both parts. It is the balance between being a police procedural, and being a book about people and their relationships, that help make this book so compelling.

   The thoughts of the killer are chilling. While this is a device that can be intrusive, it works here and provides a frightening look at the dichotomy of the killer’s mind. In complete contrast Livia, the wealthy widow in love with Ricciardi, provides us a sense of place and a view of the people of Naples, “Waking up to the calls of the strolling vendors, the noise rising from the streets, the songs. And the smells, the thousands of pots bubbling busily away, the thousands of frying pans sizzling, the pastry shops competing to present their masterpieces. Everyone had dreamed up a calling, a profession; every one of them was trying to eke out a living.”

   There are two principal grounding elements to the story; the crashing of the waves representing conflict, and Christmas with all the emotions surrounding it, which provides wonderful segues to increasingly more serious aspects of the story— “Christmas is an emotion. It’s a strong as a pounding heart, as light as a fluttering eyelash. But it can be swept away by a gust of wind and never come at all.”

   de Giovanni does a wonderful job of linking traditions of the present to those of the distant past, and of teaching us that about which we may not have known, such as the symbolism of, and meaning behind each figural element of the nativity.

   And, of course, being set in Italy, there is food— “boiling posts of the maccaronari, or macaroni vendors, and the posts of oil for the fried-pizza man, who also fried piping-hot panzarotti turnovers and potato croquettes…” Yet, there is also a wonderful definition of faith— “Our faith wasn’t made to erect barriers, walls, or iron bars between us and love; it was made to increase the presence of love in our lives, so that we can give of ourselves and live in a state of communion…”

   By My Hand is a more serious book than its predecessors as it relates to the politics of the time: one senses the changes and coming threat with each book. It is also a very good murder mystery/police procedural. However, at its heart it is a book about people and relationships, and motives. The motive here is a sad one, yet the resolutions of the conflicts related to the principal characters will warm your heart, and make you anxious to read the next book.

   It is Christmas, after all.

Rating:   Very Good Plus.

ESCAPE TO ATHENA. ITC Films, UK, 1979. Roger Moore, Telly Savalas, David Niven, Stefanie Powers, Claudia Cardinale, Richard Roundtree, Sonny Bono, Elliott Gould. Director: George P. Cosmatos.

   In the past several years of writing movie reviews, I’m more than certain I’ve used the word “uneven” to describe a movie. In fact, I’m sure I’ve used it fairly often, because let’s face it: a lot of movies are uneven. Some are even “highly uneven.” But nothing prepared me for the unevenness exhibited in the comedy/war film/adventure film mash-up that is Escape to Athena.

   Take the first half hour of this movie, for example. It’s a cross between a gritty WW2 thriller and a lighthearted imitation of Hogan’s Heroes.

   A bunch of Americans, as well as an Italian cook and British scholar, are being held captive in a German prison camp on a Greek island. The stalag commandant, Major Otto Hecht (Roger Moore) utilizes his prisoners’ free labor to dig up ancient Greek artifacts. Soon enough, he’s got two more prisoners on his hands: two recently captured USO performers, the wisecracking Charlie (Elliott Gould) and his traveling companion Dottie (Stefanie Powers). Gould plays it for laughs, more than once speaking in Yiddish. Mel Brooks was able to pull this type of balancing act off. It simply doesn’t work here.

   As far as the gritty thriller aspect, that’s also a focal point of the film’s first half-hour. Those scenes feel as if they were set in a different cinematic universe entirely. In the local town on the same Greek island, local resistance leader Zeno (Telly Savalas) is hoping to prevent the SS from executing more civilians. The contrast between these rather downbeat sequences and the lighthearted humorous (although decidedly not funny) moments in the stalag could not be greater.

   But somehow, despite all expectations on my part, the two distinctly different films eventually mesh into one somewhat enjoyable action film, following Zeno as he begins to work with the escapees from the prison camp to stop the Nazis from repelling an Allied invasion. Unfortunately, it takes about an hour until there’s a consistent tone to the movie. At that point, Escape to Athena becomes a standard action film, albeit one with an extraordinarily well-filmed motorcycle chase through the narrow alleyways of Rhodes.

   A couple of final thoughts. (1) Roger Moore, while always a delight to see on the screen, is not well cast in his role as a German officer. His faux accent isn’t convincing anyone and (2) Lalo Schifrin’s score, which includes Greek influenced renditions of American patriotic tunes, works quite well. It is one of the things that is consistently good in this otherwise extremely uneven film.

NICK PETRIE – Burning Bright. Peter Ash #2. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, January 2017; trade paperback, May 2017; premium-sized paperback, July 2017.

   L. J. Roberts reviewed the first in the Peter Ash series, The Drifter, on this blog not too long ago, and she liked it well enough that I remembered it when I spotted this, the second in the series, very soon thereafter. A short excerpt of the third, Light It Up, is included at the end of the premium-sized paperback edition of the second, the one I’ve just finished reading.

   It took me well over a week of short snippets of nighttime just-before-turning-put-the-light reading to finish it. It’s over 450 pages of small print, and for most of the time it took, I enjoyed it.

   Peter Ash, sufferer of PTSD from his career in the Iran and Afghanistan wars, cannot bear to be indoors, among other problems, and that was the primary focus of the first book, as I understand it. Luckily a good deal of the second book takes place outdoors, starting with an escape from some bad guys hunting a feisty young woman named June who is hiding out in the top of a redwood forest.

   Those particular bad guys end up dead, but there are of course many more where they came from. Their goal is to get their hands on an Artificial Intelligence program June’s mother was working on before he death in what was at first called a hit-and-run accident.

   Peter is also very much attracted to June, the lady Tarzan of the redwood forest, and their adventures together run smoothly for quite a while. The ending, though, is disappointing. It’s muddled, wraps itself up far too quickly, and seriously, the bad guys never stood a chance.

   The book is otherwise well-written, and there were long stretches where the pages simply fly by. The series ought to do well, but I see only limited potential for any growth for Peter Ash as a character. There is no mystery left in him, in other words, and while I’d be more than happy to be surprised, I think the one book is all I will need.

JOHN BUCHAN – The 39 Steps. William Blackwood & Sons, UK, hardcover, 1915. Serialized in in Blackwood’s Magazine, UK, July-December 1915, under the pseudonym “H de V.” Previously serialized in All-Story Weekly, US, June 5 & 12, 1915. George H. Doran Co., US, hardcover, 1916. Houghton Mifflin, US, hardcover, 1919. Pocket #69, US, paperback, 1940. Reprinted many times since, and still in print today.

   One of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films was The 39 Steps, which he took from John Buchan’s excellent adventure/spy novel. While Hitchcock’s 1935 film differs in many details and mechanisms from the book, both artists mined the same vein, and it’s easy to see what made Hitchcock want to work his transformations on this tale.

   The romantic figure of the hero, Richard Hannay, is the perfect early example of the soldier of fortune. He’s sound of wind and limb, he’s courageous and slightly bored, and he is catapulted by treachery into facing a vast conspiracy that can determine the fate of the world. The writing doesn’t contain too much character to clutter up the plot, and there are no female roles in this adventure. (Hitchcock injected character into the story, partly by including female players in the game.)

   Hannay sets out on the chase, first to hide out from the police, who want him for murder, and also from the German villains who want to stop the secret from getting out. By ruse and disguise, he traverses the well-described wilds of Scotland to stay undercover until the fatal hour. Falling in and out of the clutches of his facile fate, he enlists help as he runs, is chased by airplane, and is captured by his adversaries. This is where James Bond came from.

   The Scottish author John Buchan, Baron Tweedsmuir, was also a political official and governor-general of Canada. He wrote many books of history and biography, as well as other adventures, which he called “shockers.” The best of the other Hannay books is Greenmantle (1916). Another hero, Leithen, is featured in other stories, and Buchan is powerfully descriptive of southern Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.

         ———
   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.

MURDER ON THE WATERFRONT. Warner Brothers, 1943. Warren Douglas, Joan Winfield, John Loder, Ruth Ford, Bill Crago, Bill Kennedy. Director: B. Reeves Eason.

   A no-name cast, and it matches the script. An inventor of a new type of thermostat for the Navy is murdered, and a mysterious “rajah,” one of a group of entertainers brought down to the shipyard, is suspected. It turns out that he was court-martialed years earlier, and Mr. Lewis (that’s the inventor’s name) was one of those who testified against him.

   Several hand grenades, stabbings, shootings and general high jinks later, the case is solved, but which one of the many navy personnel is was, I couldn’t say. They all looked alike to me. (Obviously it wasn’t the rajah, mostly because that would be too obvious.) It may be a cliché, but it’s true. They certainly don’t make movies like this any more.

BLACKMAIL. Republic Pictures, 1947. William Marshall, Adele Mara, Ricardo Cortez, Grant Withers, Stephanie Bachelor, Richard Fraser, Roy Barcroft, George J. Lewis, Tristam Coffin, Eva Novak. Screenplay: Royal K. Cole & Albert deMond, based on the story “Stock Shot” by Robert Leslie Bellem in the July 1944 issue of Speed Detective. (Added later; see comments.) Director: Lesley Selander.

   So, the folks over at Republic, acquire this story by Robert Leslie Bellem about none other than our pal Dan Turner, the Hollywood Detective, he of the colorful patter and the dames falling at his feet and mostly out of what clothes they are barely wearing, inspiring some of the most outrageous euphemisms for the female anatomy in the history of the English language.

   Assuming it is the English language. With Dan Turner you can’t be sure.

   Anyway, here is our Dan (William Marshall) sporting the moniker Daniel J. Turner, a New York Eye imported to Hollywood to work for big time playboy Ziggy Cranston (Ricardo Cortez, and no relation to Lamont) who owns among other assets a radio network.

   Seems Ziggy has been playing with some rough types, and he is so scared he even pulls a gun on Dan. Lucky for Ziggy, Dan is playing nice and doesn’t slug him the way he did Ziggy’s chauffeur who tried to crease Dan’s pork pie with a wrench by way of greeting.

   Everybody is on edge but Dan, and you don’t want to get Dan on edge.

   Turns out Ziggy is a playboy first class, and somebody is blackmailing him claiming to have evidence he murdered a singer of the very female type. Ziggy swears the chanteuse wasn’t killed by him, but he wants the blackmailer off his back and can’t afford the bad publicity.

   Even though Dan has traveled across the country, he’s not so sure he wants to get involved. Too bad for him, the blackmailers already figure he is involved and would like to do something permanent about that.

   Like six feet under permanent.

   As you might expect, Dan is soon up to his eyebrows in wise cracks, fists, and dames like classy Sylvia Duane (Adele Mara) plus hoods with names like Spice Kellaway, Blue Chip Winslow, and Pinky (Roy Barcroft, George J. Lewis, and Tristam Coffin), a Pepe Le Peu named Antoine le Blanc (Richard Fraser) and a tough cop named Donaldson who would like Dan to quit shooting up the local hoodlums and go back to New York.

   Not our Dan though. Not when Ziggy is arrested for yet another murder, and only Dan has the grey matter needed to untwist the tangled web of who murdered whom and why, and drive Donaldson batty too.

   It’s a pretty fast paced affair you might enjoy if you take off your size twelves and sit back with a bourbon and chaser to ease you over the bumpy parts. The screenplay at least tries to capture something of Dan’s colorful badinage, and if the dames aren’t quite as pneumatic as those in Mr. Bellem’s stories, well, those models didn’t come along until a few years later with the likes of MM, Jayne, Diana D, and Mamie.

   The Marshall guy tries hard, and at times almost succeeds though he’s plenty vanilla for a guy as colorful as Dan Turner. And it is a Republic picture so the fights are first class. Nobody can fault a Republic stuntman when it comes to action.

   But I have to admit I sure wish the censor had shut his sensitive little ears and let Dan riff on some of his favorite anatomical assets. That Bellem music is unique like Krupa on the drums or Harry James on the horn, and this little cinema masterpiece could sure use it, hard as it tries.

LAWRENCE BLOCK – The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams. Bernie Rhodenbarr #6. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1994. Onyx, paperback; 1st printing, June 1995.

   It’d been a long time since I’d read a “Bernie,” and a long time since Block had written one. Bernie, the bookloving burglar and bookstore owner, has been all books and no burgle for a while now. He’s even acquired a cat for his Greenwich Village store.

   His dormant flagitious proclivities are re-awakened, however, when a new landlord proposes to raise his rent to stratospheric heights. Before you know it, Bernie has burgled and bumped into a body in a bathroom. He evades detection for this one, but through a series of events too tortuous to detail here, is arrested for another heist, one involving a valuable set of baseball trading cards. And he didn’t do it.

   Block is one of the very few authors (the master is of course Donald Westlake) who can switch voices convincingly. From Matthew Scudder to Bernie Rhodenbarr is a mighty leap, but Block makes it with ease. I’m not familiar enough with earlier “Bernie” books to make comparisons, but I can tell you that the old cast of characters is here — his lesbian friend, his larceny-minded police nemesis, and his jogging lawyer.

   This really isn’t my type of book, but one would have to be illiterate not to realize that Block does it very very well. Not as well as Westlake at his best, I think; there are stretches where Bock seems to get carried away with his own cleverness and takes several pages for scenes that could have been accomplished admirably in one.

   It’s filled with puns and clever writing, though, and has a zanily convoluted plot that will keep you guessing until the end. I enjoyed it, and if I did, those of you who like this sort of romp to begin with are going to absolutely love it.