W. ADOLPHE ROBERTS – The Haunting Hand. Macaulay, hardcover, 1926.

   Somewhat to her surprise, Margaret Anstruther has gotten a role in A Toreador’s Love, a silent picture produced by Superfilm Company. Her luck may be the result of the director’s lust for her physically, although he seems even more concerned about where she lives. And where she lives is interesting, since one night when she drops a match on the floor, a hand, with arm attached, comes out from under her bed and extinguishes the match.

   Later investigation proves that there could have been no one under the bed, but there is physical evidence that someone or something put out the flame. A policeman also sees the hand, but he’s Irish and you know about them.

   Our heroine investigates — she’s a science major, in addition to being a budding actress — and solves the problem with the help of another movie, The Masque of Life, directed by the same man who is in charge of A Toreador’s Love. Movies usually put Anstruther to sleep, but this one contains the clue that explains not all but a lot.

   W. Adolphe Roberts may have been the first black mystery writer. That I would contend, would be the only reason for reading this novel. The explanation for the hand doesn’t satisfy, and the writing is, to be kindly, second rate.

Bio-Bibliographical Notes:   For more on the author, who had quite an interesting life, check out this website, where he is said to have been a Jamaican journalist, novelist and travel writer. As the editor of Ainslee’s magazine, he published many of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s early poetry and not only that, fell in love with her. He wrote two other detective novels under his own name, plus two as Stephen Endicott, one listed as marginally criminous in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV.

From this jazz singer’s 2005 CD, Dreaming Wide Awake, which reached number one on the Billboard Top Contemporary Jazz chart. The song “Hit the Ground” was featured in an episode of the third season of House MD.

BRAINIAC. Mexico, 1962. Original title: El barón del terror. Abel Salazar, German Robles. Written by Federico Curiel and Adolfo Lopez Portillo. Directed by Chano Urueta.

   Not merely a bad movie, but a true alternative classic. In Bizarro World, this would be Gone with the Wind.

   But you have to admire their cheek. The makers of Brainiac took a hackneyed story, low budget and laughable special effects and just ran with it: A devil-worshipping aristocrat executed by the Mexican Inquisition in 1661 returns 300 years later (apparently on a comet… you can see the string on it when it “drops” to Earth!) to take revenge on the descendants of the judges who condemned him. It appears though that the centuries have taken their toll on his personal appearance, and he is now one of the silliest looking monsters in the movies, complete with clunky pincer-hands and a rubber head that pulsates in times of passion.

   In practically no time sat all we’re into the whole revenge thing, and we see where he got the name Brainiac, as the monster hypnotizes victims with his unworldly eyes (we know this because someone shines a flashlight on his face at odd moments) and they are rendered immobile as he shuffles forward, grabs them with his pincers and sucks their brains out with his two-foot forked tongue…. Ewwww!

   For purposes of plot the Baron can still assume his mortal appearance, and he has lots of money so he can dress well, get around and host lavish parties, where he sneaks a bite of Brain now and then as he pursues his diabolical revenge. The police, meanwhile, follow along and look suitably puzzled as they pick up light-headed corpses (“Another one with the brain sucked out!” “What a coincidence!”) and a handsome young Astronomer puzzles over the missing comet (“I would have sworn it landed near here!”)

   Okay, so it ain’t exactly subtle. But Brainiac is fast-moving and generally weird enough (one reviewer called it “low-budget surrealism done up as a horror film.”) to keep you watching, especially at the (WARNING! SPOILER ALERT!!) gripping finale, when the Brainiac advances on his last victim (who happens to be the young Astronomer’s lovely fiancée… what are the odds?) and the police finally figure the whole thing out and charge to the rescue.

   But first they have to stop off at the Police Station, so we get a lot of supposedly suspense-building cross-cutting of the Brainiac stalking the heroine, close-ups of her screaming, close-ups of his tongue sticking out, close-ups of the hero yelling “Stop! Stop it!” and then the two trench-coated cops plod in… wielding flame-throwers!

   Okay, so they didn’t stop at the station to get reinforcements. They didn’t put on any special gear or ask for technical advice, they just grabbed a couple flame-throwers from wherever they keep them at a Mexican Police Station and plodded to the rescue. But somehow that image of two dumpy guys in suits melting down a guy in a rubber mask seemed to encapsulate the charming absurdity of the whole piece.

   Brainiac may not be what you’d call a good movie, but I daresay you’ll never forget it.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Sulky Girl. William Morrow, hardcover, 1933. Pocket #90, paperback, 1941. Reprinted by Pocket many times. Ballantine, paperback, February 1992. TV episode: Perry Mason, 19 October 1957 (Season 1, Episode 5).

   This is the second of the Perry Mason novels, the first being The Case of the Velvet Claws, and one of the first I read soon after I was allowed into the grown-up section of the local library, right behind the main desk, when (I’m guesstimating) I was all of either 12 or 13.

   Do I remember it? No, not at all. I’ve read too many Mason novels over the years, all written to pretty much the same formula, and who could keep them all straight, even they wanted to? Even the episodes of the long-running TV series were scripted to clockwork. At 8:05 on the dot the courtroom proceedings were adjourned so Perry and crew could go out and get more evidence, after the break for commercials.

   The girl is not so much sulky in this early novel, as she is hot-tempered, which makes her difficult for Mason to handle when she’s first suspected of killing her uncle, then as she becomes the defendant in the courtroom battle that follows. It seems that according to her father’s will, she doesn’t get the money in his estate until she is 25, and if she marries before then, she may not get any at all, depending on what her uncle decides.

   She doesn’t tell Mason everything, of course — do any of his clients? There is a lot of money,, at stake, there’s no getting around it, and a lot of people want to get their hands on some of it, and they don’t care how they do it.

   I have read online that Sulky Girl was the first of Mason novels in which most of the second half of the book takes place in a courtroom. Whether this is so or not, the trial in this one is a good one. It had me flipping pages as fast as I could read them. It is no wonder that the Mason novels became so popular so quickly.

   Other than clothing and automobiles of the era, there is little to suggest how old this book is. Mason is described as talking in disinterested monotones quite often, with little facial expression. Della Street has only a small role, and Paul Drake even less. You will note that I am not even telling you who these characters are. If you are reading this blog, I am sure I am safe in assuming that you already know.

   The plot is good one, even if a bit unfair to would-be detectives at home, I thought. Mason doesn’t mess around with the physical evidence very much, as was his habit later on, but he certainly makes a spectacle of the courtroom drama. This one was a lot of fun to read.

DONALD MacKENZIE – Raven and the Kamikaze. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1977. No US paperback edition. First published in the UK by Macmillan, hardcover, 1977.

   When Raven’s roguish friend Count Zaleski drunkenly denounces a fellow exile as a member of the KGB, he unwittingly disrupts the man’s delicate plans for a final act of revenge aimed at the Russians, setting off a race against time to find the desperate man before he destroys his unknown target.

   Since retiring from Scotland Yard as a detective inspector, Raven has had several exciting adventures worthy of print, but while this affair has all the right ingredients — spies, counterspies, and a beautiful woman in love with the hunted man — it seems to rush headlong and downhill into an ending which comes as a total letdown.

Rating:   C plus.

Bibliographic Note:   In all, there were 16 books in MacKenzie’s John Raven series, published between 1974 and 1993.

FREDERICK IRVING ANDERSON – The Purple Flame and Other Stories. Edited by Benjamin F. Fisher. Crippen & Landru Publishers, 2016. Lost Classics Series No. 38. Hardcover/trade paperback. Short story collection (15 stories).

   During his writing career, Frederick Irving Anderson produced dozens of stories, the majority being mysteries, that proved very popular with readers, especially those of The Saturday Evening Post, where most of them appeared over a period of nearly twenty years.

   In accordance with the era, some of Anderson’s characters fit comfortably into the Rogue School of likeable criminals who more often than not work on the side of right, if only sometimes to avoid worse situations; with their help, the cause of justice, and not just the legal system, is served. Two such rogues created by Anderson were the “Infallible” Godahl and Sophie Lang, with only the latter actually making it to the silver screen.

   Equally memorable are his creations Oliver Armiston (“the extinct author”), who fits the Armchair Detective model very nicely, and his constant partner in crime solving, Deputy Inspector Parr (“the famous man hunter”). Their modus operandi ordinarily goes along these lines:

   Which brings us to the present book; in it Doug Greene at Crippen & Landru has collected fifteen highly entertaining adventures in crime busting, eleven of them featuring the Armiston-Parr duo, with the first one (“The Purple Flame”), using different characters, presumably being the prototype for the series; one with Parr only; and two showcasing the short-lived character Judge Alan Ebbs.

   With Anderson, readers get what you might call a “three-fer”: a capable mystery author, a local colorist, and a sly social critic. The preface by Poe scholar Benjamin F. Fisher is a fine introduction to both Anderson and his series characters. In Fisher’s estimation Anderson possessed that rarest of authorial attributes, originality, and that without following the trend in American crime fiction towards the new hardboiled school which was gaining ascendancy at the beginning of the 20th century, the same period in which Anderson’s popularity soared.

   His ability to add dimension to his characters and their environments and his carefully modulated diction (“Anderson leavens his fiction with abundant colloquial language”) all combined to make Frederick Irving Anderson not only a good detective fiction writer but also an important local color author and a chronicler of the American scene as it existed in the first third of the 20th century.

             —

   You can find The Purple Flame and Other Detective Stories on the Crippen & Landru website here.

From Susannah McCorkle’s 1985 album How Do You Keep the Music Playing?

PARNELL HALL – Blackmail. Stanley Hastings #9. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 19994; paperback reprint, March 1995.

   There are now twenty books in Parnell Hall’s series of crime novels featuring New York City private eye Stanley Hastings, the most recent being A Fool for a Client, published just last year. I keep telling myself I ought to read more of them, since I enjoyed this one very much, but so far, by a very rough count, I’m only up to three or four

   Hastings may have changed jobs over the years, but in Blackmail at least he’s still doing accident injury reports for a high-powered liability lawyer, not the most glamorous job in the world, but it does pay the bills. And once in a while he finds a real-to-life client waiting for him in his office.

   What’s more, she both beautiful and blonde. Not surprisingly, given the title of the book, she’s being blackmailed and she wants Hastings to act as the intermediary between the blackmailer and herself. The reason Hastings hesitates is she is unwilling to give him any more information than that. Since he can use the money. five hundred dollars worth, he takes the job.

   And finds himself up to his neck in first, smutty photos (no surprise there) and then secondly, two cases of murder — both the blackmailee then the blackmailer. Hastings, having no particular friends on the police force, could find himself the number one suspect if (1) he had a motive, and (2) there were any evidence against him, besides being the first on the scene in both deaths.

   The case is complicated, enough so that Hastings is forced to let his wife Alice do some of the detecting along with him. Hall’s witty style goes a long way in negating the fact that the most obvious connection between the two victims is quietly ignored, giving any would-be armchair detective reader at home plenty of opportunity to solve the case before Hastings does.

   Quite enjoyable, as I say, with one tiny caveat. If this were a movie, it would be rated R for a sprinkling of four-letter words throughout. Since this otherwise is not a hard-boiled PI yarn, far from it, I found this clashing with the overall ambience and mood. Not in a major way, but just off-putting enough to bring it up, that’s all.

THE HYPERBOLOID OF ENGINEER GARIN. Russia, 1965. Original title: Giperboloid inzhenera Garina. Evgeniy Evstigeev, Iosif Manovich, Mikhail Astangov, Natalya Kilimova. Screenplay by Iosif Manovich, based on the novel The Garin Death Ray by Aleksei Tolstoy. Directed by Alexander Gintsberg.

   A modicum of propaganda, a cunning visual recreation of German Expressionist cinema, and a sense of fun and the absurd inform this 1965 science fiction film from the former Soviet Union set in France in 1925.

   It opens moodily as two men, one Safonov (Isoif Manovich), explore a deserted house on a lonely island on a lake. It is there they find Engineer Petrovich Garin (Evigniy Evstegeev) and his invention, the hyperboloid, a deadly heat ray.

   From that point on, the film seems as if it will devolve into a game of hide-and-seek, with Garin pursued by all sides wanting the weapon, but instead it changes mood and, while keeping the look and feel of a German serial of the silent era, replete with stylized sets and costumes, it instead becomes a fairly subtle debate about the rights of one man to sell such a deadly weapon to the highest bidder, while never forgetting the action, comedy, and mad scientist elements of the story.

   You can guess where a Soviet era films comes down on the film’s philosophical question, but it does so with a soft, not iron, heel. The result is such that the viewer can sit back and enjoy the wonderful look of the film that makes as many nods to Fritz Lang, Joe May, Murnau, or French serial director Louis Feuillade as to Sergei Eisenstein or early Soviet science fiction like Aleita.

   Shot in atmospheric monochrome, the film features gorgeous sets and science fictional set pieces, action, comedy, and a playful sense of fun. Alas the only version I know of is in Russian without subtitles, but it is still worth a look. Hopefully there is a subtitled version available. It is surprising just how well the look of a big production science fiction film from an earlier era is captured. You have to keep reminding yourself this was released in 1965.

   The ironic comedic finale, similar to the fate of Lex Luthor in Superman Returns, is just an added bonus after scene after scene that are a visual feast. While it is different in look and style, it compares favorably with films like Dinner with Adele (aka Nick Carter in Prague) or Karel Zeman’s The Fantastic World of Jules Verne that it shares a similar anachronistic nostalgia with.

UNION DEPOT. First National PIctures/Warner Brothers, 1932. Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Joan Blondell, Guy Kibbee, Alan Hale. Director: Alfred E. Green.

   What makes Union Depot particularly worth watching is the commanding screen presence of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Joan Blondell as a would-be romantic couple. “Would-be” being the operative phrase here, as the movie takes place in one eventful day, both in and around a train station where numerous passengers come and go in the urban hustle and bustle. (The film’s British title, Gentleman for a Day, does the movie more justice.)

   Although there’s simply not enough time between the two leading characters to end up as lovebirds, the characters they portray — flawed and all-too-human sorts doing the best they can during the Great Depression — are well constructed enough to keep you engaged with the proceedings.

   â€œChick” Miller (Fairbanks) is a low-rent criminal with a heart of gold. One day, while hanging around with his perpetually drunk pal, “Scrap Iron” (Guy Kibbee), he manages to steal a uniform belonging to an Information Desk worker at the local train station. Chick thinks that the suit, along with some cold hard cash he acquired along the way, will be enough to get himself a good, hot breakfast at the diner inside the station.

   All well and good, until he both meets up with Ruth (Blondell), a chorus girl who is neither as innocent nor sinful as she appears, and haphazardly comes into possession of some counterfeit greenbacks belonging to one Bushy Sloan (Alan Hale, Sr.) From then on, it’s a romantic comedy/melodrama/crime film all in one and, while the film occasionally begins to feel considerably dated, it’s overall a rather enjoyable pre-Code feature.

   For those looking for something a little extra, Union Depot also benefits tremendously from having a surprisingly action-packed and violent nighttime chase scene. It takes place in the rail yards just outside the station, and it looks as though it was taken straight out of a film noir from the late 1940s. Talk about ahead of its time!