Sandy Owens is one of my favorite pianists, capable of handling any style of music. If you want to listen to a noir style song that will put you in the mood for a PI walking down the mean streets, “Reflections Of A Detective, 3:00 A.M.” is a good choice. It’s available on his album Themes In Search Of A Movie. You can buy this or any of the artist’s other work from his website http://sandyowen.com
MYSTERY SHIP. Columbia Pictures, 1941. Paul Kelly, Lola Lane, Larry Parks, Trevor Bardette, Cy Kendall, Roger Imhof, Byron Foulger, Dwight Frye. Director: Lew Landers.
Mystery Ship is a movie about two federal agents, Allan Harper (Paul Kelly) and Tommy Baker (Larry Parks) tasked with a secret mission of escorting a ship filled with criminals and political agitators back to Europe. It’s a strange little film. And I don’t mean that in the avant-garde or experimental sense. It’s strangeness lies in the fact that it is a bizarre amalgam of several film genres: the crime film, the spy film, the screwball comedy, and the silent film, at least in terms of how the fight sequences are directed.
This could have been a gritty action film set on the high seas or it could have been a screwball comedy featuring a motley crew of criminals and political subversives. Instead, it is really neither. It remains a lightly entertaining, if completely forgettable movie that is neither particularly good nor particularly awful. Film fans might appreciate the unmistakable Cy Kendall as one of the thugs.
I thought that Bootlegger’s Daughter was one of the finest series debuts I’d read, and looked forward to the second with both anticipation and apprehension. Would it live up to the first? You bet.
Deborah Knott is a judge now, having been appointed to fill the term of an incumbent who died of a heart attack. The book opens as she is sworn in, and we follow her through the first few days of her judgeship. She and a niece, the daughter of her electrician brother, are helping in building a house for an organization called WomenAid.
The project, and Deborah’s life, take a turn for the worse when, she discovers her niece unconscious at the site, the victim of attempted rape, and her assailant is later found there with his head bashed in. Even worse, her brother suffers a heart attack the same night; but did he have time to kill his daughter’s assailant first? And did he?
This is an excellent book in all respects, from start to finish. While it’s difficult to say what Maron’s greatest strength is as a writer, certainly one of her strongest points is characterization. Not only Deborah, but each person of significance is sharply delineated, and made to come alive on the page. As I remarked on reading the first Knott story, I have never lived in North Carolina, but I know the rural south, and so does Maron. These are people I have known. They speak as people of the south speak, and they act as people of the south act.
The story is told first person, in an extremely attractive voice. If you don’t like Deborah Knott, you’re at least a misogynist, and probably a misanthropist. The plot is designed to keep her at the center of the story without contrivance, and is brought to a believable end.
The prose is straightforward when moving the story along, and strongly evocative where appropriate. As was the first in the series, it is not only a fine mystery, but a fine book. Maron has emerged as one of the best.
— Reprinted from Ah Sweet Mysteries #6, March 1993
UPDATE:Southern Comfort was nominated for both the Agatha and Anthony awards. There are now 20 books in Margaret Maron’s Deborah Knott series, and nine in the Lt. Sigrid Harald series mostly written at the beginning of her career. Note, though, that the ninth (and final one) is scheduled to be published in June, after a gap of some 22 years. The two characters turn out to have family connections in common, and they met in the book Three-Day Town.
LOREN D. ESTLEMAN – Sweet Women Lie. Amos Walker #10. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1990. Fawcett Crest, paperback; 1st printing, February 1992.
Amos Walker, a private eye based in Detroit, has been around for a long time. His first adventure appeared in 1981, and as of later this month, there will be 26 novels and one two short story collection[s] under his belt. I’d put him on the Chandler side of Chandler-Hammett divide, with lots of similes and other eye-catching literary devices, each one a semi-polished gem, if not out and out brilliant.
Now admittedly too much of the latter can also slow the storytelling down to a crawl, but once you’re on Estleman’s wavelength, you’ll find yourself cruising along in high gear with a grin on your face popping up at least once a page, many times more.
For example, picking a page totally at random, Chapter 9 begins thusly: “One of the advantages of following someone in your building is knowing which boards squeak and which steps wobble because the super hasn’t held a hammer since Eisenhower.”
Walker’s first client in Sweet Women Lie is a former B-movie queen who now uses her former fame to run a nightclub show in downtown Detroit. “The Club Canaveral’s rainbow front died short of the alley that ran alongside the building.” She gives Walker a briefcase containing $750,000. She wants him, she tells him, to use the money to buy her freedom from her former gangster boy friend.
Turns out that the story isn’t at all true. It’s a ploy she’s been forced to play a part in by a CIA counterassassin who wants to close up his career with no hitches, but who senses that he’s being followed. It gets complicated from here, but I’ll just add that Walker’s former wife is now married to said CIA man. Other than that, without a scorecard, which I admit I neglected to use, you’ll soon lose track of who’s following who.
I also admit that I found the story itself not very compelling, except for the nebbish private eye who also gets sucked up into the plot. Him I liked, and I’m sorry he wasn’t able to hang around longer. Other than Amos Walker, who tells the story himself, the rest of players have only their roles to play. My advice? Read this for the telling and let the plot take care of itself.
Renaissance was a British progressive rock band most active in the 1970s and 80s, although various members of the group have re-formed several times since, up through 2014. Says Wikipedia: “They developed a unique sound, combining a female lead vocal with a fusion of classical, folk, rock, and jazz influences. Characteristic elements of the Renaissance sound are Annie Haslam’s wide vocal range, prominent piano accompaniment, orchestral arrangements, vocal harmonies, acoustic guitar, bass guitar, synthesiser, and versatile drum work.” Turn of the Cards, their fifth studio album, was released in 1974.
WHO? Allied Artists, 1975. Released on video as Roboman. Elliott Gould, Trevor Howard, Joseph Bova, James Noble. Based on the book by Algis Budrys. Director: Jack Gold.
Part cold war thriller, part science fiction, Who? is an enjoyably complex movie that defies conventional expectations and aesthetic norms. Filmed in an almost semi-documentary style, the story not only unfolds in a nonlinear manner, but it also leaves the viewer guessing until the very end as to what the movie’s message or artistic statement, was really all about. Although the movie has its noticeable flaws, it is overall the result of a type of bold experimental film-making that’s sadly all too absent today.
Elliott Gould portrays FBI Agent Sean Rogers. He’s quirky with a hairstyle a little too wild for a counterespionage agent, but an impassioned national servant nonetheless, a true skeptic always doubting and asking questions. He faces what appears to be the challenge of his career in the face of Lucas Martino (Joseph Bova), an American scientist recently released from captivity in East Berlin. The problem facing Rogers is that he’s not sure Martino is who he claims to be. The reason why, as viewers will soon learn, is that Martino has apparently been in a horrific car accident. Eastern bloc scientists reconstructed as a robotic man, one with a silver metal skull and mechanical body parts.
But just who is this robotic man? Is he really Martino or is he a Soviet spy? Rogers simply can’t accept that this silver coated remnant of a man is truly Martino. He’s sure that his Soviet nemesis, Colonel Azarin (Trevor Howard) has somehow managed to either brainwash Martino into being a Soviet agent or that the man under the mask isn’t Martino at all. Complicating matters for Rogers is the fact that Martino seems to be who he says he is. He’s got Martino’s memories and personality traits.
In order to build up to the big reveal as to the actual identity of the man released from Soviet captivity, the story unfolds on two parallel tracks, shifting the viewer’s perspective in terms of both time and space. The present dynamic between Rogers and Martino is contrasted with the past dynamic between Azarin and Martino when the scientist was captive in East Berlin.
As it turns out, there’s not a whole world of difference between Rogers and Azarin. Both are committed patriots who care far more of what Martino could do for them than about Martino himself. Ultimately, however, it is Martino — or whoever it is under the mask — that will decide what his role in this world is going to be. In that sense, the film is very much part of the humanistic science fiction tradition, one that utilizes the tropes of speculative fiction in order to say something about what it means to be an individual.
MICHAEL AVALLONE – Little Miss Murder. Signet T4616, paperback original; 1st printing, May 1971.
For a while in his long career, Mike Avallone’s favorite PI, Ed Noon, did double duty as “the only private investigator in captivity who works for the Man” — the Man in the White House, that is, the President of the United States. Spy biz, that is. And this particular episode in Noon’s career was prompted (apparently) by Michael Avallone’s being so entirely captivated by the Mets’ Miracle Year of 1969 that he wrote the whole story around it.
Microfilm inside a baseball, that is. With Noon a courier who is to pick it up from British(?) Intelligence(?) and pass it on to the CIA. All goes well, except that a nun is stabbed (and turns out to be a man), Noon is followed home on the expressway by a 70-year-old lady who drives like A. J .Foyt, and is kidnapped (along with lady friend Felicia Carr) by a gent with a face like a reassembled pudding.
It all turns out well, of course, with the usual wheels within wheels that all good spy fiction is supposed to have, all of which could have been eliminated if someone had simply said, “This is dumb, why don’t we just do this instead.”
No story, that’s why. Other than that, this is the story of a man who loves (and is loved by) two beautiful women at the same time, the other being Melissa Mercer, Noon’s long-time secretary (who is black), and wouldn’t you know it, when the two ladies finally meet, they become friends as well. Strictly a male fantasy, and if you happen to be female, you’re welcome to observe, but you’re not invited in.
— This review has been shortened from its first appearance in Deadly Pleasures, Vol. 1, No. 4, Winter 1993 .
FIRST YOU READ, THEN YOU WRITE
by Francis M. Nevins
If you looked for a January column and couldn’t find one, the reason is very simple. There wasn’t any.
Early in the morning of the day before Christmas I went into the hospital for something relatively minor and was told that I had suffered a silent heart attack and needed bypass surgery. As you can imagine, the news hit me like a ton of bricks. The operation was performed on January 3. I was told afterwards that I came very close to death. I was discharged from the hospital on the 16th of the month and since then have been recuperating at home. I’m getting stronger by the day but am still nowhere near 100%.
Before my medical adventures began I had written much of what I thought would be my January column. A month later, here it is.
***
It was more than half a century ago, either 1962 or 1963, an early Sunday morning around 1:00 or 1:30 A.M. I returned home from a date with the first love of my life to find my brothers still up and the TV tuned to the Late Show, or maybe the Late Late Show. The movie looked interesting so I sat down to watch the last 20 minutes. It was about a Nazi spy ring based in a Manhattan skyscraper.
The spies are holding a young woman prisoner but she manages to get a message out. Feds raid the building. A couple of spies escape into a nearby movie theater. The gun battle with the Feds coincides with a gun battle on the screen. An unlucky moviegoer falls over dead. One spy gets out and into a cab and heads for the Battery, followed by the hero whom I recognized as Robert Cummings.
They both wind up at the Statue of Liberty. The spy tries to escape again, crawls out onto one of the statue’s arms. Cummings reaches for him, grabs his coat sleeve. The spy starts to fall as Cummings tries to haul him in to safety. Then we get a close-up of the stitches at the shoulder of the spy’s jacket starting to give way. An unearthly scream. The End.
Recognize the picture? It’s Hitchcock’s Saboteur, made in 1942, back when I was busy being a fetus, roughly twenty years before I caught the end of it on the small screen. Remember the name of the man who played the spy? It was a Broadway actor 27 or 28 years old named Norman Lloyd.
Now let’s time-travel in both directions at once, forward ten years or so from when Hitchcock made that movie, back a decade or so from when I watched its climax. The year was 1952, or maybe ’53. My parents had recently bought their first TV set and already I was an addict. One Sunday afternoon I happened to be watching the cultural program Omnibus, which was running a made-for-TV movie in five (I think) weekly installments.
The title was Mr. Lincoln. The voice of the actor playing young Abe was one of the most distinctive I’ve heard in my life: biblical, prophetic, patriarchal. At the end credits I learned his name: Royal Dano. An unusual name, easy to remember. (Trivia question: Anyone know who played Ann Rutledge? It was Joanne Woodward.) I don’t remember noticing who directed the film and the name wouldn’t have meant anything to me at age 9 but, as if you haven’t guessed, it was Norman Lloyd. A cut version is now available on DVD.
Lloyd was born in 1914, when my parents were small children. His career began in the early 1930s with the left-wing Group Theater. Later he joined Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater and went to Hollywood with the company but returned to New York when the movie Welles was planning got cancelled. Had he stayed awhile longer, he would have had a part in Citizen Kane. As it was, his film debut was in Saboteur, and later he appeared in Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and Chaplin’s Limelight(1952).
His first television role was in one of the earliest TV dramas ever broadcast, an experimental program that dates back to 1939. In the late Fifties and early Sixties he served as associate producer on Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-62) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-65). He also directed several episodes, usually based on short stories by John Collier, Ray Bradbury, Stanley Ellin, or literary figures like John Cheever and Philip Roth. But he never stopped being an actor, and among today’s audiences he’s perhaps best known for his role as Dr. Auschlander in St. Elsewhere (1982-88) and for playing opposite Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society (1989).
I bet you thought I’d next give you the year of his death. I can’t. He’s still alive today. At age 102 he’s the oldest working actor in the U.S. and probably in the world. For 75 years he was married to the same woman, who died in 2011, the same year my own wife died. Until recently he played tennis, the game which was his passion for generations. In the 1950s he played regularly with Charlie Chaplin and usually beat him, mainly because Chaplin was too vain to wear his glasses and often lost sight of the ball. His memory remains sharp as ever, and the Internet is full of reminiscences of him by himself and others. If ever there was a person with an awesomely long life and creative career, it’s Norman Lloyd. In the first months of this new year, let’s celebrate him.
***
I can’t guarantee a March column but my health is improving so nicely that it’s far more likely than not that there will be one. They may never see the column you’re now reading, but my deepest thanks to all the people — doctors, nurses, family, friends – who helped me through this crisis.
KEN KUHLKEN – The Loud Adios. St. Martin’s, hardcover, August 1991. Poisoned Pen Press, trade paperback, 2006.
This was the winner of the 1990 PWA/St.Martin’s “Best First Private Eye Contest,” and let me tell you right away that at the price they’re asking [$16.95], it’s a bargain.
Not many authors these days write hard, tough Black Mask fiction anymore — short, terse sentences that never pull a punch, and characters who never give an inch — and it’s always a pleasure to find one who does. This is it, guys, the real stuff.
PI Tom Hickey is doing double duty for the Army as an MP watching the border between San Diego and Tijuana. The year is 1943, the war is on, and refugees and politics are on everyone’s minds. Then Hickey takes on a job for a solider about to ship overseas — to rescue a girl doing nude shows in a rundown bar south of the border. The guy claims she is his sister; to Hickey she looks like an angel on earth.
What neither Hickey nor his client knows is that the stakes are much higher than this — there may or may not be a plot by Germans in Mexico to take over all of Baja California, there may or may not be a fortune in gold available for the taking.
Unfortunately, the girl, Wendy Rose, is either all or in part mentally retarded, or she has been so badly traumatized that she does not know reality from fantasy, either of which makes a tougher job even worse.
The title sounds like Chandler, on the back jacket is the inevitable quote from someone comparing Kuhlken to Chandler, and as usual, the Santa Ana winds are prominently mentioned, but to my mind, most of the book reminded me more of Dashiell Hammett, with a bit of Paul Cain thrown in. (Kuhlken, by the way, has written one other book, Midheaven, which according to the flap on the back of dust jacket, was nominated for a Hemingway Prize. He’s obviously got the right technique.)
Unfortunately, there is a down side to all of this. I wouldn’t call the plot line as straight as a string, but in many ways it’s like a one-note samba, one that simply goes on too long. Until Wendy Rose is finally rescued, Hickey and her brother simply make one sortie across the border after the other, each time getting a bit more daring, bringing along additional reinforcements with each trip, and continuing on until the job is done.
This takes over half the book. The remainder consists of gathering weaponry, forces and (most importantly) nerve, and then (but not till then) finally going back to finish the job — either making themselves rich, or saving America from a growing evil to the south. Or both, or neither — and that is something I simply shouldn’t tell you.
This is more than mere quibbles, but even without my seeing the rest of the entries in the contest, I think the judges made the right choice. Even though he hasn’t made much of bis life so far, Tom Hickey is no loser in my book.
— This review first appeared in Deadly Pleasures, Vol. 1, No. 4, Winter 1993 .
The Tom Hickey series —
1. The Loud Adios (1991)
2. The Venus Deal (1993)
3. The Angel Gang (1994)
4. The Do-Re-Mi (2006)
5. The Vagabond Virgins (2008)
6. The Biggest Liar in Los Angeles (2010)
7. The Good Know Nothing (2014)
Devoted to mystery and detective fiction — the books, the films, the authors, and those who read, watch, collect and make annotated lists of them. All uncredited posts are by me, Steve Lewis.
