GUN MOLL. Million Dollar Productions, 1938. Also released as Gang Smashers. Nina Mae McKinney, Laurence Criner, Monte Hawley and Mantan Moreland. Written by Ralph Cooper and Hazel Barsworth. Produced by Harry M. Popkin. Directed by Leo C. Popkin.

   This one surprised me.

   Readers who hang on to my every word will know I’m a big fan of all sorts of strange movies, including those made decades ago with all-black casts for all-black audiences, back when segregation was more tangible than it is today. There’s a lot of raw talent in these films, showcasing performers like Mantan Moreland, Bill Robinson, Herb Jeffries, Ethel Waters, Clarence Muse… I could go on, but you get the idea.

   Unfortunately the fine talent is often obscured by poor production values and technical teams unfamiliar with technique: poor sound, bad lighting and amateurish acting are the order of the day for these films, shot on schedules and budgets that would have defeated even the lowest of low-budget Hollywood producers.

   Imagine my surprise then, when I discovered Gun Moll, a cheap but near-professional effort produced by none other than Harry M. Popkin, very early in his career. And again, those readers who weep with delight at my smile will recall immediately my review of Champagne for Caesar where I singled Producer Popkin out for praise: his other efforts include And Then There Were None, D.O.A. and The Thief, but he got his start out there on the ragged edge of film-making, doing films the establishment ignored or despised.

   And doing them well. Gun Moll crackles with the sort of pace one associates with the early Warners gangster pics. Beautiful Nina Mae McKinney stars as an investigator working undercover as a singer in the nightclub used by gang boss Monte Hawley as a front for his Protection Racket — which gives her an excuse to provide some fine musical interludes backed by a snappy jazz band, while sneaking about the place doing whatever undercover gals do in the movies.

   About this time Laurence Criner shows up in the George Raft part as a hired gun on loan from another gang, and if you can’t guess that he’s really another Under Cover Man, well you’re in good company because Ms. McKinney doesn’t tumble either.

   Years later this was used in a Claire Trevor / Fred MacMurray film, but that’s a review for another time. Suffice it to say that things fall into place just in time for a well-paced chase scene followed by a Cagney-esque slug fest, done with the kind of vigor and professionalism that normally graces much bigger-budgeted movies.

   In fact, Gun Moll is marked by assured handling and effects normally reserved for more respectable movies, tricked out with stylish montages, clever editing and a sense of pace all too rare in B movies. And of course it languished unnoticed as producer Popkin moved on to bigger and (frankly) better things.

   But I’ll always have a soft spot for this one.

D. B. OLSEN – The Cat Saw Murder. Rachel & Jennifer Murdock #1. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1939. Dell #35, paperback, mapback edition, no date stated.

   Although this is the second case for Lt. Mayhew, his first being The Clue in the Clay (Phoenix Press, 1938), this is the book that introduced Rachel Murdock (and only briefly in this one, her sister Jennifer) to the world of mystery fiction. And for someone who’s 70 years old, Rachel is active and agile, with a sharp, inquisitive mind.

   It’s her niece whom she’s come to visit, and her niece who is the victim of bloody murder, with a whole rooming house full of suspects. And of course there is a cat. The whole story is told with gaps and holes, however, and it’s all muddled up in grand old fashion.

[PLOT WARNING] And it’s the gaps and holes that I’ll be discussing from this point onward, and while I don’t intend to tell you whodunit, I am going to tell you more details of the plot than I would if this were a more ordinary review. Let’s go point by point:

   (1) I suppose one cat could be switched with another, and the owner would never be able to tell the difference right away, but it doesn’t seem likely to me that such a masquerade could be pulled off for very long. On page 126, at any rate, Miss Rachel expresses doubts to Lt. Mayhew that her cat Samantha is really the cat she’s always had. “No,” she told him slowly. “I’m not sure.” End of chapter.

   Whether or not she could be taken in by somebody else’s cat, when the next chapter begins, this small piece of the plot is totally ignored — no questions, no immediate followup, no anything — and it’s page 208 before it’s brought up again, when Rachel decides to test the possibility that the cat’s fur has been dyed.

   (2) The same kind of maneuver takes place at the end of Chapter 17. Miss Rachel is questioning Clara, a small girl who lives in the house, and Clara says she knows “Something happened the night the lady died.” She won’t tell Rachel, though, not until she’s promised a kitty of her own. End of chapter.

   The next chapter begins, nothing is mentioned, and it isn’t for another 20 pages that Miss Rachel decides to get serious about it. Then she promises Clara a kitty, and they all discover that the girl saw someone leaving the dead woman’s apartment that night with a bloody axe in her hand. This is not what I call terrific detective work.

   (3) Mayhew is not really a slouch as a detective, since he did get alibis from everyone in the house immediately after the murder — and it was pretty good work to establish that it was an inside job so quickly — but then why does it take him until page 235 to start cross-checking those alibis, and then until page 244 before he starts out on the footwork needed to verify them?

   (4) I don’t understand this one at all. On page 118 he sets up a trap for the killer with a girl he is starting to get sweet on. “I’ll be watching,” he tells her on the same page. On page 127, he’s woken up from his vigil to find Sara in the process of being strangled in the room across the hall. He taps gently on the door and asks, “Is everything all right” The girl’s half dead, and he’s tapping gently on the door.

   (5) In Chapter 16 the girl’s mother tries to commit suicide. Why? I don’t know. She’s rescued in the nick of time, and the matter’s never mentioned again.

   (6) The man across the hall from the murdered woman has disappears, but Mayhew finds a note with the word CAVES written on it hidden inside a shoe. Does he suspect that there are caves in the area where the man will eventually be dug up? Nope. Is that where he’s found? Yep.

   (7) You’re going to think I’m screwy, but I enjoyed the book anyway, and I’d read the next in the series any time at all. You figure it out.

Bibliographic Notes:   Lt. Stephen Mayhew appeared in seven of D. B. Olsen’s detective novels, five of them overlapping the mystery adventures of Rachel and Jennifer Murdock, who appeared together in 13 novels between 1939 and 1956, all of which featured cats in the title.

   As for D. B. Olsen, she may be better known today under her real name, Dolores Hitchens, which starting in 1952 she used as the byline for 20 later novels, sometimes in tandem with her husband Bert, that were not nearly as cozy as the Olsen books were.

EDWARD D. HOCH – All But Impossible: The Impossible Files of Dr. Sam Hawthorne. Crippen & Landru, hardcover/softcover, 2017. Story collection, with all 15 reprinted from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Edited by Douglas G. Greene, including a memoir by the latter.

   When it comes to stories with solid mystery plotting, you really can’t go wrong with those by the late Ed Hoch, the best and certainly the most prolific generator of impossible crime stories since John Dickson Carr. In his nifty memoir about Hoch, Douglas Greene tells us that over the course of his lifetime Hoch produced at least 960 stories. Was each one a superior production? Not having read them all, we couldn’t say; but if they were good enough for shrewd editors, then you can be assured that even Hoch’s lesser efforts were better than most of his contemporaries.

   All But Impossible is Crippen & Landru’s penultimate collection of Ed Hoch’s series of tales about Dr. Sam Hawthorne, little Northmont’s general practitioner, “amateur” (his word) detective, and in Doug Greene’s view “Hoch’s finest creation.” Hoch seems to have reserved most of his best impossible crime plots for Dr. Sam to unravel: one kidnapping case, one accidental death that looks like foul play, and fourteen outright murders.

   Here’s a brief rundown: A baby that disappears right out from under everyone’s nose, including the mother’s … a murder in a locked room, with the only other person present innocent … a vanishment, with Dr. Sam an eyewitness … Sam spending the entire day with a man, being seen by others with him, but only Sam remembering him … a body found in a room that keeps disappearing—not the body, the room … a grandstanding swimmer dying in the pool—of poisoning … a man getting run over in the parking lot of a place that never existed … homicide by book—explosive literature at its worst … a fresh body in an old coffin (shades of JDC) … a man murdered in an open field by, to all appearances, a giant owl … a classic homicide in a locked house surrounded by pristine, undisturbed snow … another vanishment, this time with two observers … a disappearance involving the mayor, with Sam not fifty feet away … a murder solved, at least partly, by Alexander Graham Bell … and a dead body materializing inside a scarecrow in a public park in broad daylight.

   With the Sam Hawthorne stories Ed Hoch also put some effort into creating continuing characters and situations against a real world backdrop of developing history; Northmont is recovering from the Depression, but the first tremors of the approaching cataclysm in Europe are beginning to be felt in the little New England town. The stories in All But Impossible span the period from November 1936 to July 1940; in a few of them deteriorating world conditions serve to activate plot developments.

   If you like the Sam Hawthorne stories and have a complete collection of EQMMs running from August 1991 to June 1999, then you won’t need to get All But Impossible; and if you have a complete EQMM collection from December 1974 to May 2008, then you won’t need any of the C&L collections at all. If your situation is otherwise, though, you’re missing out on tales that, as Doug Greene says, are “wonderful in their ingenuity and superb storytelling.” And rumor hath it that a fifth and final collection of fifteen Dr. Sam Hawthorne adventures is already in the works.

      PREVIOUS COLLECTIONS —

Diagnosis: Impossible (1996) (12 stories)
More Things Impossible (2006) (15 stories)
Nothing Is Impossible (2013) (15 stories)   (reviewed here )

WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER – Sulfur Springs. Cork O’Connor #16. Atria, hardcover, August 2017.

First Sentence:   In the balance of who we are and what we do, the weight of history is immeasurable.

   Cork O’Connor and his bride Rainy are about to celebrate the Fourth of July when Rainy receives a frantic and disturbing voice message from her son Peter, who is in Southern Arizona working at a drug rehab center. Being unable to reach him, Cork and Rainy fly to Arizona only to learn that Peter hasn’t worked at the center in months and no one knows where he is. On the message, Peter gave the name Rodriguez, head of a cartel. In what danger is Peter, and is he still alive?

   It is a well-done opening that provides a succinct, yet surprisingly emotional, summary of Cork and his history. This will be appreciated by both new and returning readers of the series.

   Krueger is one of the group of special writers who imparts small truths and wisdom that fits the story, but also make one take note wanting to remember them— “I understood that the past is never really past. We live our history over and over, the worst of our memories right there alongside us, step for step, our companions to the grave.”

   It is doubtful anyone has ever defined better the concept of trust—“Trust. An easy word to say. … But putting it into practice? … You hold a place inside that’s only for you and that you never let anyone else into. Hell, after she died, we found out even Mother Teresa had secrets too dark to share.”

   Krueger makes us think, too, of important issues of today such as bigotry. Yet the manner isn’t one of preaching or berating, but of opening our eyes and being educated. His use of language and imagery is always a joy to read— “The demons that plague you are patient horrors. …They are always with you. And why? Because they’re not things separate from you. They are you.”

   The way in which the author constructs his characters make them real to us. Although Cork and Rainy take center stage, there are several excellent supporting characters, particularly Jocko, the old miner. We feel their emotions. We have a real sense of who they are.

   As strong is the sense of place. Those who have been to the high desert will recognize it. Those who have not, will feel as though they’ve been there. Krueger’s description of monsoons in the desert is vivid and real. The threat is as if another character.

   Sulfur Springs has a beginning which seems fairly straightforward, and then builds the sense of danger and suspense layer upon layer, with twists and a bad guy you don’t see coming.

Rating:   Excellent.

THE WRATH OF GOD. MGM, 1972. Robert Mitchum, Frank Langella, Rita Hayworth, John Colicos, Victor Buono, Ken Hutchison, Paula Pritchett, Gregory Sierra. Screenplay by Jack Higgins, based on his book of the same title, but written as by James Graham. Director: Ralph Nelson.

   To tell you the truth, I liked this movie more than I thought I would, but if Robert Mitchum hadn’t been in it, and if it hadn’t been the last movie Rita Hayworth ever made, I wouldn’t have watched it at all. The story takes place in an unnamed Central American country (circa 1930?) currently plagued with generals, revolutionaries, gun runners and hordes of poor peasants whose only role is that of being raped, taken hostage or simply getting underfoot.

   What my problem is, though, is that I don’t care much about seeing priests with machine guns, whether they’re fake priests, excommunicated priests, or whatever. That’s Mitchum’s role, his task that of killing the leader of a band of renegades who have taken over a town, which he does, with a bloody vengeance.

   Rita Hayworth, who plays the mother of the outlaw leader, seems confused about her part; she certainly should be. On the other hand, Paula Pritchett is very pretty as the mute Indian girl. What other movies was she ever in?

   
UPDATE:   When I wrote this review, I did not know that when she made this movie Rita Hayworth was suffering from the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, so that line about her being “confused about her part” is now very unfortunate. It is not what I intended — only that her part as written and filmed was not well established.

   As for Paula Pritchett, in those pre-IMDb days, questions such as the one I ended this review with often went unanswered. Now all one has to do is to click here to discover that she made two movies before this one, and none afterward.

CRAIG McDONALD – One True Sentence. Minotaur Books, hardcover, February 2011. Betimes Books, softcover, revised edition, August 2014.

   The year is 1924 and expatriate Hector Lassiter, one of the “Lost Generation,” is in Paris writing when on a dark night he hears a scream as he walks in the snow on the Pont Neuf bridge.

   He doesn’t see anything that night, but soon enough, he and his friend Ernest Hemingway are up to their necks against a bizarre Nihilists cult called Nada, led by a mutilated man in a black mask calling himself Nobodaddy (from William Blake) who seem to be murdering off the editor publishers of impoverished little small press magazine of the type common in Paris at the time, and eventually playing at detectives under the direction of Gertrude Stein, a fact complicated when Lassiter is also drafted by Commissaire Aristide Simon as an agent of the police.

   One True Sentence is a historical thriller in the nine-book series by Edgar and Anthony award nominee Craig McDonald featuring Hector Lassiter, a crime writer who made his debut in 2007’s Head Games (set in 1957). Now the series has been reissued by Betimes Books in internal chronological order, beginning with One True Sentence. (See below.)

   Lassiter is an attractive protagonist (literally, he looks like William Holden), whose life covers much of American history in the 20th century. Here, amidst poseurs, literary icons, painters, poets, Dadaists, Surrealists, and a cold Paris winter he meets and falls in love with the dark mysterious Blinke Devlin, who also writes mystery novels of the locked room kind, under a male pseudonym, and has other mysteries to hide; Molly Wilder, a beautiful poet with a possibly fatal crush on him; Phillipe her painter boyfriend who involved her with the Nada movement; and the rather nasty Estelle Quartermain, an English mystery writer and expert on poisons.

   One theme running through the book is that almost no one is exactly who they claim to be, leaving Hector stumbling through a maze of aliases, lies, secrets, and puzzles, each arising as another has been seemingly solved.

   One True Sentence is a sexy, fast-paced mystery that generates more than a little suspense and includes appropriately bitchy portraits of actual figures of the era including Aleister Crowley, Ford Maddox Ford, William Carlos Williams, Sylvia Beach, and others.

   There is more going on here than just a fine evocation of Paris in that era, though. This is also a funny, tricky, horrifying, sexy, and ultimately involving mystery with enough twists and turns to delight any fan of the Golden Age puzzle school, and a protagonist of the two-fisted hard boiled type who even writes for Black Mask.

   Each book stands alone, but characters, both major and minor weave in and out of the rest of the series and the four books of McDonald’s Chris Lyon series which is also tied to the Lassiter books.

   The background is smartly sketched in, the characters witty and interesting, the action moves fast, the hero and various heroines aren’t eunuchs or virgins without the sex being overly graphic, and the more preposterous elements of the books are done with such sense of fun that only a grouch could really complain.

   I’m looking forward to exploring more of the century with Hector Lassiter. The books are literate without being literary, funny without being silly, and smart without shouting out loud at you how clever they are. Any one of those would be reason to read most books.

       The Hector Lassiter series —

1. One True Sentence (2011)
2. Forever’s Just Pretend (2014)

3. Toros & Torsos (2008)
4. The Great Pretender (2014)
5. Roll the Credits (2014)
6. The Running Kind (2014)

7. Head Games (2007)
8. Print the Legend (2010)
9. Death in the Face (2015)

10. Three Chords & The Truth (2016)

       The Chris Lyon series —

1. Parts Unknown (2012)
2. Carnival Noir (2013)
3. Cabal (2013)
4. Angels of Darkness (2013)

THE MAN FROM HONG KONG. British Empire Films, Australia, 1975. Released in the US as Dragon Flies. Jimmy Wang Yu, George Lazenby, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Roger Ward, Ros Spiers, Rebecca Gilling, Sammo Kam-Bo Hung. Director: Brian Trenchard-Smith.

   There’s no shortage of fisticuffs and fantastically choreographed martial arts fight scenes in The Man From Hong Kong. Directed by Ozploitation auteur Brian Trenchard-Smith, this entertaining, if deeply uneven, action movie features martial arts legend Jimmy Wang Wu as the titular character and one-time James Bond portrayer George Lazenby as his nemesis.

   Occasionally uneven in its pacing, this thrill ride of a movie nevertheless moves along at a steady clip, with bloody and brutal fight sequences interspaced with calm, romantic interludes that seem oddly out of place. But with some great car chases and a 1970s disco-inspired soundtrack, The Man from Hong Kong doesn’t stray from its mission of providing viewers with pure escapist entertainment for very long.

   The plot. Inspector Fang Sing Leng (Jimmy Wang Yu) of the Hong Kong Royal Police Force Special Branch heads to Sydney in order to extradite a drug runner (future Hong Kong director and producer Sammo Hung) held by the local authorities.

   But when a lone assassin murders Leng’s prisoner in broad daylight, Leng decides that he’s going to take down the entire international drug cartel run by an Australian businessman named Wilton (Lazenby).

   Leng fights his way through Sydney, leaving death and mayhem in his wake. But he’s determined to bring down Wilton, no matter what the cost. And when Wilton’s men murder Leng’s Australian love interest, all bets are off. Leng is set to wreak havoc. And wreak havoc he does. Look for the scene in which he stuffs a live grenade in Wilton’s mouth. It is pure grindhouse mayhem.

PATRICIA WENTWORTH – The Alington Inheritance. Maud Silver #31. Lippincott, US, hardcover, 1958. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1960. Reprinted several times, including Perennial, paperback, 1990 (shown).

   A Miss Silver mystery, even though she doesn’t appear until about halfway through, and even though who did it is known even before he’s decided to do it. No mystery at all, in other words. The background is what’s important here, and watching Miss Silver at work once again.

   At stake, not surprisingly, is ownership of the Alington estate. The family relationships that are involved are frustratingly vague at first, but once established, they are the key to solving the case. Wentworth in this book is especially good at portraying children and gossipy old women. In terms of the setting, the story could have easily taken place in 1928 as well as 1958, when it was published.

PostScript:   I don’t know how relevant this fact is, but it may interest you to know that this is the first book by Patricia Wentworth that I’ve ever been able to read. Since Miss Silver is always listed among the names of the great detectives of the so-called Golden Age, I’ve always felt I should at least have read one of the cases she was involved in. And yet, in spite of all my good intentions, I’ve always quit after a chapter or two.

   This time was different. I found myself reading on, almost in spite of myself, fusty old ladies and all. Will I read another, you ask? The truth is, you’ll know the answer to that almost as soon as I do.

Bibliographic Notes:   This was #31 of 32 Miss Silver novels, and it was written when the author was 80 years old. The first was Grey Mask (Hodder, 1928). It was quite a long career for the character. I do not know how old she was when she started.

THE PRAIRIE. Edward F. Finney Productions / Screen Guild, 1947. Lenore Aubert, Alan Baxter, Russ Vincent, Chief Thundercloud, Chief Yowlachi, Jay Silverheels. Screenplay by Arthur St. Claire, from the novel by James Fenimore Cooper. Directed by Frank Wisbar.

   Sometimes they do things in B-movies that seem avant-garde when they were probably merely necessary, but this time I’m not so sure. I mean, why would anyone try to make a movie about a wagon train headed West without enough money to even shoot it outdoors? Not unless they were plain-damn crazy — or, as the Indians in old Westerns put it: Touched by the Sun.

   I think this is the case with The Prairie. Director Frank Wisbar (or Wysbar) was one of those German filmmakers who fled the Reich and ended up making films in the U.S. though he never achieved the success of Fritz Lang or Billy Wilder, or even the cult status of Edgar Ulmer. He’s remembered (if at all) for making Fahrmann Maria in Germany, with striking imagery of Death on horseback dressed in SS regalia, then re-making it at PRC as Strangler of the Swamp.

   And then there’s The Prairie, and one can almost see Wisbar stepping up to the challenge of transforming Cooper’s sagebrush saga into a visual metaphor, evoking not the wide vistas of the West, but the cramped psyches of the emigrants with tight, claustrophobic compositions.

   Well it almost works. There’s a fine sense of sexual tension as Lenore Aubert is taken into the mostly-male wagon train after her family is wiped out in a buffalo stampede (done with silent-movie stock-footage superimposed over studio sets!) followed by jealousy, murder, and a grim comeuppance for the killer, but even the earnest playing of all concerned can’t make it quite convincing.

   What is convincing is Wisbar’s commitment to painting an allegory. After a while, the fakey sets take on a painterly quality, like stylized representations, almost lifting the film into a realm one seldom sees outside an art film. It doesn’t really work, but I marveled at Wisbar’s artistic daring in even trying it.

   And I’ll add as a post-script that Ms. Aubert is fondly remembered by her legions of fans as the femme fatale in Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein.