West Coast big band jazz from 1961:

JANE. BBC 2, 1982-84. Glynis Barbera as Jane Gay, Robin Bailey as Colonel Henry, Max Wall as Tombs, Dean Allen as Georgie Porgie, and Suzanne Danielle as Lola Pagola. Written by Mervyn Haisman; based on the long-running British The Daily Mirror comic strip “Jane” by Norman Pett. Title song written and performed by Neil Innes. Graphic Design Director: Graham McCallum. Illustrations: Paul Birkbeck. Producer Ian Keill. Directed by Andrew Gosling.

   JANE was an odd and dated series even when it first aired in 1982. Jane Gay was a cheerful innocent blonde beauty whose love for adventure always resulted with Jane trying to save the day while wearing nothing but her underwear. Her loyal companion was her dog Fritz, a dachshund (aka wiener-dog).

   JANE was based on a popular British comic strip created by Norman Pett, the comic strip JANE (aka JANE’S JOURNAL, OR THE DIARY OF A BRIGHT YOUNG THING) ran exclusive in The Daily Mirror from December 5, 1932 to October 10, 1959.

   Jane has been adapted to other forms. Chrystabel Leighton-Porter played Jane in a burlesque stage play in the 1940s that traveled Britain entertaining the troops and town people during WWII. Leighton-Porter also played Jane in a 1949 film, THE ADVENTURES OF JANE directed by Edward G. Whiting. A 1987 movie JANE AND THE LOST CITY starred Kirsten Hughes and was directed by Terry Marcel.

   The humor was juvenile, sexist and full of double entendres. The most unique aspect of the TV series was the settings. The actors performed in front of a green screen. Later a drawn background to resemble a comic strip background was added. The result featured an unusual look of the real actors performing within comic strip-like panels.

   The TV adaptation was an hour long made up of five ten minute long episodes. The YouTube video of JANE has merged all five episodes together. There would be a second series two years later in 1984 called JANE IN THE DESERT.

   Popular British actress Glynis Barber starred as Jane. Barber is better known for playing the strong independent roles of Soolin in Series Four of cult science fiction BLAKE’S 7 (1981) and Police Sgt. Harriet Makepeace in successful cop show DEMPSEY AND MAKEPEACE (1985-86). Jane was certainly a different type of woman for Barber to play, much to her credit Barber excelled in all three roles.

   Set during WWII the story begins when Colonel Henry ask Jane to join him on a secret mission. The two are to meet a Professor in a haunted mansion. Before they can find the Professor they learn there is a Nazi spy in the area. Luckily for England, even stripped to her underwear does not stop Jane from fighting off Nazis and the Colonel’s advances.

   JANE is a good example of a form of entertainment rarely seen today. That is a shame in a way. Jane was a determined woman who refused to let the limits she faced in that era’s culture stop her from experiencing a life of adventure. The men were all idiots for never seeing Jane as more than an object. Wisely, Jane willingly sacrificed her modesty for good of the entire free world — a job jolly well done.

JOHN & EMERY BONETT – Dead Lion. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1949. Pocket #738, paperback, 1950. Perennial Library, paperback, 1982.

   John and Felicity Carter Coulson (who write under the names John and Emery Bonett) have collaborated in a fruitful mystery career as well as a marriage. Their official joint debut came with the publication of Dead Lion, a fine example of the post-World War II British mystery.

   Simon Crane comes to Britain to meet his famous uncle — critic, author, and BBC intellectual Cyprian Druse — for the first time. Instead, he finds Druse’s body, his head stuck out a window and his neck bloody and broken. It soon becomes clear that many people wished to break Druse’s neck: the many authors he destroyed with his vitriolic criticism, and the many women he seduced, humiliated, and abandoned.

   When Simon finds himself in love with one of his uncle’s embittered conquests, he no longer wishes to play sleuth. Unfortunately, Professor Mandrake does. Mandrake, an anthropologist by trade, had been a BBC colleague of Druse’s. More important, he is a natural-born busybody and student of humanity just waiting for a chance to try his hand at detecting. While Simon tries to shield the woman he loves, Mandrake continues to happily meddle, eventually triggering the novel’s tragic conclusion.

   Dead Lion is an exquisitely crafted classical mystery. But besides providing a satisfying puzzle, like its many Golden Age predecessors, this novel also features three-dimensional, modern characters with psychological quirks and motivations. With small touches, the authors also manage to convey what life was like in England after the war. Theirs is a classic puzzle with new depth and Professor Mandrake as a lovable series sleuth.

   The fat, homely professor appears in two other books — A Banner for Pegasus (1951) and No Grave for a Lady (1959). Later Bonett novels with a Spanish sleuth and Costa Brava locale are well constructed but lack the charm of the Mandrake mysteries.

         ———
   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.

The Roaring 420s is a current band from Germany about whom one online source says:

“Sounding like a weird marriage between the Beach Boys and The Velvet Underground, this five-piece combo delivers surf and psych pop as catchy as a fever.”

NILES N. PEEBLES – Blood Brother, Blood Brother. Pyramid X-2042, paperback original, 1969.

   There’s not much known about the author. It does appear to be his real name; Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV lists possible birth and death dates for him as 1928 and 1980, respectively. The first adventure of private eye Ross McKellar was entitled See the Red Blood Run, published a year earlier than this one, also by Pyramid. This is the second, and this was it. There are no others.

   McKellar describes himself as underemployed, and as definitely not the independent type. He’ll do any kind of job that pays money. He is as admitted admirer of Hammett and Chandler, but in this case at least there are no mean streets to go down. An old buddy now a big name in the pubic relations business needs big help. A profitable blackmailing scheme seems to be backfiring. McKellar’s investigations are conducted in the world of high finance, and not at all in the deep dark shadows of the underworld.

   When it comes time to cuddle the old buddy’s widow after he’s gone, a woman he’s loved in silence all these years, McKellar suddenly becomes shy. Hands-offish. That’s the kind of guy he is.

   Some envelopes are missing and have to be chased around. Interesting, but not intriguing. Catching the murdering blackmailee is not the work of brilliant deduction, but is the result of a gimmick instead…

   For what it’s worth, the book is easy to get through, and it has a pretty good twist at the end. It should also be noted that whoever wrote the synopsis on the back cover pretty obviously never read any of the story at all.

STEVE HARRAGAN – Three Bad Girls. Unibooks #57, paperback, US, 1952; Stallion Books #203, US, paperback, 1953. Unidentified prior British publication.

      visceral:

1 : felt in or as if in the internal organs of the body : deep a visceral conviction
2 : not intellectual : instinctive, unreasoning visceral drives
3 : dealing with crude or elemental emotions : earthy a visceral novel
4 : of, relating to, or located on or among the viscera : splanchnic visceral organs

   It’s a word I learned in college, one that has stood by me in times of trial, and perfectly suited to this demented little trifle.

   But first a bit of background: Steve Harragan is the name of both the author and the hero of this story (à la Ellery Queen) but being naturally suspicious, I wondered at the outset about such a coincidence. A little bit of research came up with one William Maconachie, a British post-war pulpster who also wrote under the names Bart Carson, Larry Ellis and Ray Stahl. A few of Maconachie’s Bart Carson books perambulated west to the U.S. and along the way the author and hero got their names changed to Steve Harragan.

   So much for that. The only other niggling detail is that although Harragan-the-hero is depicted as wearing an eye patch, Harragan-the-author occasionally drops a two-eyed reference, like “I turned my eyes on him,” and even “I closed one eye,” making one wonder just where the eye patch came from and whether anyone took it seriously.

   Getting on to the book itself, well I have to say it’s pretty amazing: a story that never stops moving from first page to last. The writing may be pedestrian, but the drama takes the corners on two wheels as it careens from our hero waking (in the uniform of a deserter from the French Foreign Legion!) to capture, escape, recapture, prison, escape again, and a perilous journey back to the U.S. where he catches up with the guy who stole his identity and gets in the middle of a kidnapping which…..

   You get the idea. Scarcely a page goes by without a fight, chase, explosion or all three, as our hero gets his violent revenge. Good writing? It is to laugh — but Three Bad Girls will amaze the reader with its sheer unparalleled pace.

      References:

William Maconachie bibliography at Bear Alley
Steve Harragan page on Thrilling Detective

   Considering that I was an inch from death last month, perhaps a March column is asking too much of myself. We shall see. I suspect this one is going to be a bit skimpy.

   On the 6th of February, at age 91, Alec McCowen died. He was one of the most revered English actors, having appeared in several Shakespeare productions, including ROMEO AND JULIET and KING LEAR, and a number of 20th-century classics like PYGMALION and EQUUS.

   He also had roles in 30-odd movies, of which the best known is probably FRENZY (1972). Who can forget his performance in that last of Hitchcock’s great films? As the harried Scotland Yard inspector, a bangers-and-mash man if ever there was one, who comes home after a hard day trying to track down a serial rapist and killer only to find his wife (Vivien Merchant) getting ready to serve him a tasty dinner of sautéed lovebirds’ wings or something of the sort, he’s unforgettable.

   The last time I saw FRENZY was when it came out 45 years ago, but it’s still green in my memory. Shot in London, it tells the story of down-and-out ex-RAF pilot Richard Blaney (Jon Finch), who becomes the prime suspect in a series of brutal rape-murders and goes on the run. The real criminal is Robert Rusk (Barry Foster), a Covent Garden fruit-and-vegetable merchant as was Hitchcock’s father, and much of the location shooting takes place in the neighborhood the director knew as a boy.

   For a time the fugitive Blaney is protected by fellow RAF veterans — which would have made more sense if the picture’s events had taken place immediately after World War II, when the surviving Battle of Britain pilots were national heroes — but eventually he’s caught by Inspector Oxford (our man McCowen) and locked up. Knowing by then that Rusk is the real murderer, Blaney escapes and sets out for revenge.

   I’d be a toad if I gave away more of the plot, which is summarized on several websites devoted to the picture. Among all the Hitchcock films after PSYCHO (1960), FRENZY stands out as by far the most suspenseful.

   So far this is indeed a mini-column, but a recent phone conversation with a friend who teaches literature and film allows me to extend it. For a forthcoming book on film noir, my friend has agreed to write a chapter on the French contributions to the genre during the Nazi occupation. This is a subject on which I’m woefully ignorant but I do know that one of the titles that falls within this category is LES INCONNUS DANS LA MAISON (1941), which was based on Georges Simenon’s 1940 novel of the same name, translated into English after the war as STRANGERS IN THE HOUSE (1954).

   In both novel and film the main character is Hector Loursat, a gross and unkempt lawyer — his bearishness signaled, at least for those who know a little French, by his name — who has retreated into an alcoholic shell after his wife left him. When a small-time gangster is discovered murdered in the huge Loursat house, our protagonist finds himself forced to defend his daughter’s lover, who’s accused of the crime.

   Unusually for Simenon, a good bit of the novel takes place in court, and the legal procedure will cause readers familiar with the English or American systems to throw up their hands more than once. (For example, the defense counsel cannot question witnesses directly but must ask the judge to repeat each question to whoever is on the stand.) Anyone who expects the kind of forensic fireworks associated with Perry Mason novels is likely to find the book frustrating, but on its own terms it’s widely considered one of the best of Simenon’s stand-alone crime novels and I would have to agree with this verdict.

   How close the Occupation-era movie came to its source is unclear, although from what I’ve found on the Web there seem to be considerable differences. The film climaxes with a passionate speech by Loursat (Raimu), indicting the older generation for the peccadilloes of the young, which has no counterpart in Simenon. (This speech can be accessed on YouTube, but it’s in French.) To discover any other differences I’ll have to wait for my friend’s essay.

   To complete my account of Simenon’s novel [WARNING] I have no choice but to reveal the real killer. It turns out to be a young delinquent called Justin Luska, whose motivation for the crime is clear as mud. He’s described as the “son of a tradesman,…[who] because of his red hair, his name, his real first name, Ephraim, the Eastern origin of his father, was the object of ridicule of his schoolmates….People said that he smelled, like his father’s shop….”

   When the father enters the courtroom late in the proceedings, Simenon tells us that he looked like “a man belonging to that race of humans you find sleeping in the corridors of night trains, sitting patiently in police stations, trying desperately to explain themselves in an impossible language, the sort that is always questioned at frontiers….[D]idn’t the fact that his coat smelled bad cause others to step aside?….He was dark and oily, almost flabby….”

   The word Jew is never mentioned, at least not in the English translation that postdates WWII and the Holocaust, but the Luskas père et fils remind us irresistibly of those scruffy East European Jews who to Simenon’s discredit pockmark his novels of the 1930s.

   If they are clearly identified as Jews in the original French, this wouldn’t be the first time a translator refused to be true to Simenon’s text. As I discussed in an earlier column, Anthony Boucher did precisely the same thing when during the war years he translated a Simenon short story with a Jewish villain for EQMM. Sometimes it’s better to be unfaithful. Indeed, when the 1941 movie was re-released after the war, the soundtrack was tinkered with so that Luska’s first name morphs from Ephraim to the clearly un-Jewish Amédée. In the France of the immediate postwar years, even the appearance of anti-Semitism was taboo.

   Ah! Now we have a column of respectable dimensions. Perhaps I’ll do better, or at least longer, next month.

MICHAEL CONNELLY – The Black Ice. Hieronymous (Harry) Bosch #2. Little Brown & Co, hardcover, 1993. St. Martin’s Press, paperback, 1994. Reprinted many times since.

   The first novel about LAPD Detective and ex-Nam tunnel rat, Harry Bosch, The Black Echo, got a rousing reception, and is up for a First Novel Edgar. I won’t be surprised if it wins, and among the final nominees it probably should.

   Harry has been booted out of homicide and sent to the pits, i.e., Hollywood, because of his last case. As the book opens he is on call Christmas night, and overhears a scrap of conversation on his scanner that something’s going down he should have been called on.

   Turns out that the something is the apparent suicide of an officer who has been under a cloud of suspicioun, and the Department intends to cover it up quickly and thoroughly. Well, of course this pisses Harry off to no end, and when a couple of other cases seem to be connected, he begins to loft garbage lids and make himself even more unpopular than usual.

   As I said about the first Bosch, this really isn’t a cop novel. It’s a lone wolf hero book, and has much more the flavor of a hardboiled private eye story than a police novel. Connelly is an excellent writer, and anyone ẁho likes Clint Eastwood has got to love Harry Bosch.

   Characterization is very good throughout,and the prose is outstanding. As with Connelly’s first, I’m not sure I thought the ending was completely credible; but as also with the first, it didn’t keep me from enjoying it. Connelly’s got another winner.

UPDATE:  Barry was correct. The Black Echo did win the Edgar, just as he predicted. Number 22 in the Harry Bosch series, Two Kinds of Truth, will be published in 2017.

JOHN SLADEK – Black Aura. Walker, US, hardcover, 1979; paperback, 1983. First edition: Jonathan Cape, UK, hardcover, 1974.

   Thackeray Phin, two years an Englishman and bemoaning his lack of a career as an amateur detective, decides to undertake an investigation on his own into the psychic medium business. His ensuing encounter with the Aetheric Mandala Society also, but not unexpectedly, brings him into another murder case at last.

   A sense of humor is both a requirement and the redeeming virtue here. Several deft jabs at the conventional murder mystery land none too gently. Several disappearances from locked rooms and one faulty attempt at levitation enter into the spirit of the occasion.

   The closing explanations are obviously written by an expert choreographer of such matters — the master, John Dickson Carr himself, would be well pleased — but do be warned that the characters are otherwise strictly of the stick figure variety.

Bibliographic Notes: A second and final case (**) for Thackeray Phin was Invisible Green, published in this country by Walker, also in 1979. John Sladek himself was primarily known as a science fiction writer.

(**) Not quite so. See the comments for information about two cases that Phin solved in short story form.

T-BIRD GANG. The Filmgroup, 1959. John Brinkley, Ed(win) Nelson, Tony Miller, Pat George, Coleman Francis, Nola Thorp. Music: Shelly Manne. Director: Richard Harbinger.

   You know the old adage about going to see a fight and having a hockey game break out? That’s what I thought of when watching T-Bird Gang, a Roger Corman-produced programmer that is significantly better, in both style and substance, than it has any natural right to be.

   The reason for this is that the movie occasionally makes you feel as if you’re at a jazz concert and somehow a crime film broke out. I joke. But the movie’s at times overwhelming score by West Coast jazz drummer Shelly Manne lends the proceedings a frantic, hip energy that makes what would have been an ordinary crime film into something a bit more memorable. It definitely kept me watching and tapping along.

   The plot isn’t all that inventive. Nor is it particularly difficult to follow. Future television star Ed Nelson (billed here as Edwin Nelson) portrays Alex Hendricks, the son of a warehouse night watchman gunned down in the line of duty. Alex takes it upon himself to avenge his father’s death and ingratiates himself into the good graces of the local criminal gang responsible for the crime. After Alex lands in police custody, he is given a choice. Give up his vigilantism and help the police to bring down the gang or go to jail.

   Alex chooses the former option and assists Captain Prell (Coleman Francis) in the police department’s efforts to nab the unsavory criminal element plaguing the local community. Did I mention that the head honcho in the outfit drives a white T-Bird? But don’t let the car or the lobby cards fool you, this really is more a gritty crime film than it is a juvenile delinquent film.