EDNA BUCHANAN – Contents Under Pressure. Britt Montero #1. Hyperion, hardcover, 1992. Avon, paperback, 1994.

   Buchanan is a Pulitzer-winning Miami Herald re-porter, and her novel has the immediacy of a newspaper story. It begins with a Rodney King-like episode, different in that the victim is a respected community leader, and he dies.

   The police attempt a cover-up, but Britt, a blonde, green-eyed Cuban American, exposes it. One thing leads to another until the town explodes in a series of riots. Britt believes that the whole truth hasn’t come out, and keeps digging; eventually she uncovers a murderer and puts her life at risk.

   Pro: the pace is breathtaking at times, and Britt is an engaging character. Con: the narrative occasionally loses its focus, and the murderer’s actions and motivations are the silliest and least believable I’ve encountered in a long while. A good friend of mine liked this considerably, but the ending ruined it for me.

      The Britt Montero series —

1. Contents Under Pressure (1992)
2. Miami, It’s Murder (1994)

3. Suitable for Framing (1995)
4. Act of Betrayal (1996)
5. Margin of Error (1997)
6. Garden of Evil (1999)

7. You Only Die Twice (2001)
8. The Ice Maiden (2002)
9. Love Kills (2007)

   As I was beginning to think about how to open this month’s column, I opened the morning paper and found the answer handed to me. Ed Gorman had died. The date was Friday, October 14, a few weeks short of his 75th birthday. The cause was cancer, with which he’d first been diagnosed 14 years ago.

   He was something of a recluse among writers, leaving his home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa almost never, once reportedly turning down an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe, but managed to stay in touch with countless colleagues thanks to email and the telephone.

   Ed Gorman was one of the most prolific and compelling crime fiction writers of our generation, the author of dozens of novels and short stories under his own name and several others, plus Westerns and horror novels, plus anthologies, plus material for the Web on other writers, the list goes on and on. He was also one of the founders of Mystery Scene magazine, in whose latest issue there’s a moving tribute to him by editor Kate Stine. In so many ways, including his enthusiasm for everything he was involved in and the generosity with which he advised, mentored and supported writers younger than himself, he was the Anthony Boucher of our generation.

   Of course he never wrote science fiction as Boucher did, but then Boucher never wrote Westerns. I wish I were one of the tiny handful of writers who knew him well.

   Ever heard of The Digest Enthusiast? I hadn’t either, until one of its contributors, a man named Steve Carper, recently sent me a copy of the third issue (January 2016). It’s digest sized — what else would you expect? — and deals with all sorts of digest sized publications like magazines and paperback books and you-name-it.

   The subject of Carper’s contribution is the collections of short fiction by Dashiell Hammett that were assembled and edited by Ellery Queen — that is, by the Fred Dannay half of the Queen duo — mainly in the 1940s, and were published as digest-sized paperback originals under the Mercury, Bestseller and Jonathan Press imprints of Lawrence E. Spivak, the original publisher of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

   As veteran readers of this column are aware, now and then I’ve compared a few of Hammett’s stories as they originally appeared in Black Mask and other pulps with the versions published twenty or more years later in EQMM and those digest-sized collections. Fred told me many times that every story ever written was too long. True to that belief, he had a habit of changing — usually in the form of cutting — the stories he reprinted. Even Hammett’s.

   Now I learn from Carper’s article that a man named Terry Zobeck has been systematically comparing the Hammett stories as reprinted in EQMM with the versions published in Black Mask and elsewhere decades earlier. The article offers a few examples from Zobeck’s research. One sentence in the Continental Op tale “Who Killed Bob Teal?” (True Detective Stories, November 1924) reads: “Finally she shrugged, her face cleared, and she looked up at us.” Reprinting the story in EQMM (July 1947) and in the collection Dead Yellow Women (1947), Fred put a period after “cleared” and dropped the last six words.

   Another sentence as originally published reads: “Dean and I rode down in the elevator in silence, and walked out into Gough Street.” Under Fred’s editorial blue pencil the sentence ends with “elevator”. Anyone who wants to explore this subject in exhaustive detail needs to read the long series of Zobeck’s posts on Don Herron’s “Up and Down These Mean Streets” blog .

   â€œWho Killed Bob Teal?” is one of the lesser exploits of Hammett’s nameless Continental Op, but it’s of considerable historical interest, for reasons I can’t explain without [Warning] giving away the plot. Teal, a youthful detective for the Continental agency, had appeared in a few earlier tales in the series and in “Slippery Fingers” (Black Mask, 15 October 1923) was described by the Op as “a youngster who will be a world-beater some day.”

   According to the Op in the present story, he “had come to the agency fresh from college two years before; and if ever a man had the makings of a crack detective in him, this slender, broad-shouldered lad had….[W]ith his quick eye, cool nerve, balanced head, and whole-hearted interest in the work, [he] was already well along the way to expertness.” As the head of the San Francisco branch of the agency describes Teal’s murder to the Op:

   â€œHe was shot with a .32, twice, through the heart. He was shot behind a row of signboards on the vacant lot on the northwest corner of Hyde and Eddy Streets, at about ten last night….I would say that there was no struggle, and that he was shot where he was found….He was lying behind the signboards, about thirty feet from the sidewalk, and his hands were empty. The gun was held close enough to him to singe the breast of his coat….”

   The case he’d been working on for the past few days had been brought to the agency by a farm-development engineer named Ogburn, who suspected that his business partner, Herbert Whitacre, had been embezzling money from the firm and was about to disappear. “I sent Teal out to shadow Whitacre,” the agency head tells the Op. It doesn’t take our sleuth long to conclude that the murderer of Bob Teal was Ogburn.

   Why this story is of historical importance should be clear to anyone who remembers how Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon immediately knew who had killed his partner Archer.

   There’s just one thing arguably wrong with the way Hammett handled the situation in the Bob Teal story. The plot requires that Teal must know and trust the client Ogburn, but little if anything in the story tells us that they even knew each other!

   This means that the two had met and had at least one conversation. It would have been easy for Hammett to be more specific about this matter, for example by having the Old Man tell the Op that he had introduced Teal to Ogburn and that the two had had lunch or a drink together, but for some reason he chose not to. The result, whether Hammett intended it or not, may well be one of the most subtly clued fair-play stories in the annals of short detective fiction.

   The fact that no one ranks “Who Killed Bob Teal?” among Hammett’s better tales probably explains why it wasn’t included in the Library of America volume of Hammett’s Crime Stories and Other Writings (2001). If we confine ourselves to material that has appeared in print, then we can read this and the other stories omitted from that volume only as Fred Dannay edited them for EQMM seventy or more years ago.

   Fortunately we live in the age of the Web, and thanks to Terry Zobeck’s Herculean labors we can read or at least reconstruct the original versions of most if not all of Hammett’s lesser stories. Thank you Mr. Zobeck!

RICHARD SALE – Benefit Performance. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1946. Detective Book Club, hardcover reprint, 3-in-1 edition. Dell #252, paperback, mapback edition.

   Having finished his most recent motion picture, movie star Kerry Garth just wants to get away from everything. But someone shoots and kills his stand-in, Joshua Barnes, who attended the movie premiere as Garth. Since no one except Garth’s trusted public-relations man knew of the substitution, the killer had to be after Garth, not Barnes.

   With the advice of his PR man, Garth assumes Barnes’s identity. Unfortunately, Garth discovers that Barnes is a despicable character who is also in danger of his life, assuming he still had it. From the frying pan, as it were.

   Any author who invents — I hope he was the one responsible and the only one to use it — the portmanteau abomination “sluefoot” for detective cannot be highly praised by the reader. Still, I did enjoy the novel more than its quality warranted. Garth’s impersonation of Barnes makes for good reading.

THE DUNWICH HORROR. American International Pictures, 1970. Based on the story by H. P. Lovecraft. Music by Les Baxter. Director: Daniel Haller.

   I watched this movie with what you might call a severe handicap. I’ve never read the story it’s based on, and what’s more I think the whole Chluthu Mythos is bunkum, to speak frankly, and to sum it up quickly, this movie did nothing to change my mind.

   The first half, though, I have to tell you is stylishly done, with some good performances by the players, especially by Dean Stockwell in a standout performance as a last living member of the Whateley family, shunned by the townsfolk of Dunwich for years, and by Ed Begley as Dr. Henry Armitage, who as the movie begins has just finished a lecture at Miskatonic University in nearly Arkham.

   It turns out that the charismatic and soft-spoken Wilbur Whateley needs the famed and very rare book called the Necronomicon for his own purposes, and to that end he captivates a very pretty student named Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee) into driving him home from the University library, and what’s more, into staying the night in his very antique and picturesque family mansion.

   And in that mansion, guarded over by Wilbur’s aged, wild-eyed grandfather (Sam Jaffee) is a room, locked and barred with a secret inhabitant inside. All is deliciously filmed, with loads of anticipatory suspense until, alas, the secrets begin to be revealed, and the film goes into all kinds of psychedelic contortions to avoid showing us who or what has been hidden away for so long in that room.

   But where this affair really goes off the rails is the point where the story stops making sense. A female friend of Nancy’s goes to the mansion alone to rescue her, without Professor Armitage, and does she open the door? Need you ask?

   This occurs right around the halfway point, and for me it was downhill the rest of the way. Lovecraft fans seem to be only so-so on this film, so if you’re one also, you need not take only my opinion on it, even though their reasons may not be the same as mine. A big plus is the very effective musical score by Les Baxter, a portion of which you can listen to here, and in one of his final roles, Ed Begley is as always a joy to see on the screen.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – The Case of the Constant Suicides. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1941. H. Hamilton, UK, hardcover, 1941. Paperback reprints include: Dell #91, mapback, n.d. [1945]; Berkley #G-60, 1957; Collier, 1963; Perennial, 1989.

   Both author John Dickson Carr and leading character Dr. Gideon Fell are in fine form in this one, what with two locked room deaths and very nearly a third. As it turns out the first is a suicide that masquerades as a murder (a disputed fact that is of utmost importance to both the dead man’s attorney and his insurance agent, as well as the surviving relatives). In a second instance, a repeat of the first, the victim survives but barely, and the third is a case of murder very cleverly disguised at a suicide.

   The scene is Scotland, a location (and language) that Carr has a lot of fun with, as well as with two distant cousins who are feuding academics who tumble across each other in a blacked-out train on the trip northward to the dead man’s small fortress of a castle. He had earlier been found dead after falling out of his bedroom located in a high turret, with the room itself solidly bolted on the inside.

   Carr’s penchant for broad humor is on full display throughout, and of course one fair lass is referred to as a “wench,” but I guarantee you that there’s no way he ignores the puzzle aspect of the case, one which seems to have Dr. Fell perplexed a little more than usual — and if he doesn’t seem to have the answers right away, then pity the poor reader.

   Between you and me, though, while all the clues are there, the solution to the matter seems a little more forced than the best of Carr’s works. But as any fan of the author knows full well, a little less than his best is better than 98% of what the competition has to offer.

STEPHEN BECKER – The Chinese Bandit. Random House, hardcover, 1975. Berkley, paperback, 1977.

   Stephen Becker is one of the few Americans who can write the novel of suspense and high adventure as well as, if not better than, his counterparts in Great Britain. The Chinese Bandit is the first of an outstanding trilogy about the postwar years in the Far East (the other two titles are The Last Mandarin, 1979, and The Blue-Eyed Shan, 1982, and is so good that it earned Becker accolades as “a modern Dumas.”

   The bandit of the title is Jake Dodds, a brawling, wenching, semi-alcoholic marine sergeant, wartime hero, and peacetime bum who finds himself in Peking in 1947 and becomes involved with a wily Chinese black-marketeer named Kao. After Jake nearly kills an American brigadier general in a whorehouse fight, it is Kao who saves him from imprisonment by arranging to smuggle him out of Peking with a camel caravan. Working as a guard and camel-puller, Jake soon finds himself dealing with progression of traders, nomads, guerrillas, warlords, Japanese deserters, Chinese Communists, Chinese Nationalists, and women good and bad. Not to mention the Gobi Desert, the great snow-capped mountains of Central Asia, and even the legendary yeti or Abominable Snowman.

   Byzantine plot twists, well-drawn characters, and one of the most graphically detailed of all fictional portraits of postwar China, Mongolia, and Turkestan make this escapist entertainment of the finest sort. But it is even more than that, for Becker writes beautifully and incisively from firsthand knowledge of time and place, giving us keen social and political observations and a work of genuine literary distinction. This is a novel to be read slowly, to be savored, and then to be read again — as are the other two tities in his trilogy.

   Becker has also written two contemporary tales suspense and adventure: A Covenant with Death (1964) and Season of the Stranger (1966). Under the pseudonym of Steve Dodge, he produced a paperback original with a China setting, Shanghai Incident (1955), which was later reissued under his own name. All of these are good, but none is as rich or as memorable as the three later works.

———
   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.

HORROR HOTEL. Trans-Lux, US, 1962. First released by Vulcan Films, UK, 1960, as The City of the Dead. Christopher Lee, Patricia Jessel, Betta St. John, Venetia Stevenson, Dennis Lotis, Valentine Dyall. Written by George Baxt and Milton Subotsky. Directed by John Moxey.

   You really need to see this.

   Expertly done on a small budget, Horror Hotel opens in the 1600s colonial village of Whitewood, Massachusetts, with a witch (Patricia Jessel) being burned at the stake, calling down a curse on the place as her lover (Valentine Dyall) looks on. Jump cut about 300 years and we’re in a college classroom where Professor Driscoll (Christopher Lee) passionately relates the episode to a room of rather superannuated students. Some scoff, but pretty coed Nan Barlow (Venetia Stevenson) asks to do further research, and the eager-to-help pedagogue suggests with a sly look in his eye that she try poking around in an out-of-the way village… called Whitewood.

   Nan’s boyfriend (Tom Naylor) and brother (Dennis Lotis) pooh-pooh the idea, but in no time she’s driving through dense, forbidding fog to the remote hamlet, pausing only to pick up a mysterious hitchhiker (Valentine Dyall again) before she arrives at the blighted hamlet, finds a rather dank and forbidding Inn, meets the landlady (Patricia Jessel again!) and sinister things start happening, slowly at first, but quickly building up to a grand and nasty finale.

   Cinematographer Desmond Dickenson, whose credits include Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet and Michael Gough’s Konga, fills the screen with memorable creepiness; low-lying mist covers the ground and obscures the buildings, hiding the cheap sets wonderfully, and the camera shifts to odd angles at times, never arty but constantly surprising.

   The players put earnest effort into their parts, even the stock types. Ms. Jessel evokes the spirit of Judith Anderson effectively, with maybe a touch of Barbara Stanwyck. Christopher Lee is a shade too patently fanatic as the sinister professor, but I saw a lot worse back in my college days. And Betta St. John does a wonderful horror-movie heroine, perky and terrified in equal measure.

   The plot unspools quickly, with a few clever twists, and if Horror Hotel never hits the Classic mark, it doesn’t miss it by much. In all, a pleasantly terrifying way to spend an October evening.

   In the final part of my three part look at horror entertainment, I look at television.

         Part One: Horror Cartoons

         Part Two: Horror Radio.

   Television is a visual medium, something that can limit the horror story. Too much visual horror can offend the viewer and not enough can disappoint the viewer. In the early days of television the amount of graphic violence and gore was limited for TV’s large mass audience. But as times and culture has changed the horror genre has reflected those changes.

   In the ROUTE 66 episode “Lizard’s Leg & Owlet’s Wings” Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr. wonder if there is a future for the old style monsters.

ROUTE 66 (CBS, 1960-64): Created by Stirling Silliphant and Herbert B. Leonard. CAST: George Maharis as Buz and Martin Milner as Tod.

   The series followed the adventures of two men in a Chevrolet as they traveled across country.

   â€œLizard’s Leg and Owlet’s Wing” (October 26, 1962) Written by Stirling Silliphant. Directed by Robert Gist. GUEST CAST: Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney. Buz and Tod get jobs at the Chicago O’Hare Inn where they help groups set up their conventions or meetings. Buz’s first assignment is to take care of fifty young beautiful secretaries while Tod gets stuck with Karloff, Lorre and Chaney who are planning to start a film production company. The three famous horror actors argue over whether to produced movies with new monsters or stay with the classics.

   Silliphant’s script examined the power of fear and love, but suffers from dated characters. Silliphant does have one of the women in charge complaining about men getting better pay than women, but he also had the women faint at the sight of Lon Chaney in a werewolf costume.

   A popular form of horror on television has always been the supernatural story, not only in America but in England as well. Englishman M. R. James (August 1, 1862 – June 12, 1936) is considered one of the greatest writers of ghost stories.

OMNIBUS (BBC, 1967-2003) was a popular documentary series that included occasional fiction.

   â€œWhistle And I’ll Come To You” (May 7,1968). Produced and directed by Jonathan Miller; story by M.R. James (“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”). CAST: Michael Hordern as Professor, Ambrose Coghill as Colonel, and George Woodbridge as Hotel Proprietor. *** A Professor on holiday finds an ancient whistle next to a grave. The inscription reads whistle and I’ll come to you. The Professor blows the whistle and his life is changed forever.

   I am not a fan of ghost stories so I have not read any of M. R. James’ work. This adaption by Jonathan Miller is regarded as the best of James’ work.

   This ghost story was not what I expected. There was no action or conflict or screams. Instead the drama relies on the characters. Michael Hordern captures the Professor, a man used to living alone with his books. The pace is slow and the background soundtrack has natural sounds rather than music. It all gives the story a feeling of reality.

DARK SHADOWS (ABC, 1966-1971): Created and Executive Produced by Dan Curtis. CAST: Joan Bennett as Elizabeth Collins Soddard, Alexandra Moltke as Victoria Winters, Louis Edmonds as Roger Collins and Mitchell Ryan as Burke Devlin.

   DARK SHADOWS is one of my favorite TV series from my childhood that happily holds up today. It is a gothic horror soap opera where every character has a mystery. The low production values and black and white video adds to the uneasy mood. This is a perfect example of why restoring every television series into high definition blu-ray quality is a mistake.

   â€œSeason One Episode One” (June 27,1966): Story Created and Written by Art Wallace. Directed by Lela Swift. CAST: Elizabeth Wilson, Kathryn Leigh Scott and Conrad Bain.

   Young Victoria leaves the only home she has ever known – a founding hospital – to take a governess job for the wealthy eccentric Collins family. Meanwhile the Collins family has their own secrets.

   How can anyone do a list of any genre of TV shows without including a TV detective series? The horror genre has offered many to chose from, I picked SPECIAL UNIT 2.

SPECIAL UNIT 2 (SYFY, 2001-2002) Created and Executive Produced by Evan Katz. CAST: Michael Landes as Detective Nicholas O’Malley, Alexondra Lee as Detective Kate Benson, Richard Gant as Captain Page and Danny Woodburn as Carl the Gnome.

   The Special Unit 2 is a little mentioned part of Chicago police department. The Unit’s duty is to enforce the law among the supernatural community known as links.

“The Eve” (October 31, 2001) Written by Josh Lobis and Darin Moiselle, Directed by Oscar Costo. CAST: John de Lancie, Stefan Arngrim and Christine Caux. *** It is Halloween, the least favorite day for Special Unit 2. Humans are dressing up as links (monsters and demons) making it impossible to tell the good guys from the bad. A powerful link is willing to kill for a key that Special Unit 2 had taken from him years ago.

   Comedies in the horror genre are not uncommon. There is ADDAMS FAMILY, REAPER, STRUCK BY LIGHTNING and TOPPER. One of the better examples is EERIE, INDIANA.

EERIE, INDIANA (NBC 1991-92, 18 episodes; Disney Channel, 1993, 1 original episode and the original 18) Created by Karl Schaefer & Jose Rivera CAST: Omri Katz as Marshall and Justin Shenkarow as Simon – Creative Consultant: Joe Dante (GREMLINS)

   This cult favorite features two boys exploring their hometown of Eerie Indiana. By all appearances Eerie is your typical small American town but it is really the center of all the weirdness in the Universe.

“The Hole In The Head Gang”(March 1. 1992) Written by Karl Schaefer. Directed by Joe Dante. CAST: John Astin, Justin Whalin and Claude Akins. *** Marshall and Simon meet the ghost of Grungy Bill, the worst bank robber in all history. Grungy had failed to rob the bank of Eerie thirteen times – the last attempt he forgot his gun. Now despite being dead he wants to make another attempt to rob the bank.

   Horror shows are getting better and more graphic. Networks such as FX (AMERICAN HORROR STORY), AMC (WALKING DEAD), SHOWTIME (PENNY DREADFUL), USA (FALLING WATER) and SYFY (CHANNEL ZERO) are producing great horror series.

WYNONNA EARP (SYFY, 2016) Created and Executive Produced by Emily Andras. Based on a graphic novel series created and written by Beau Smith. CAST: Melanie Scrofano as Wynonna, Shamier Anderson as Dolls, Tim Rozon as Doc Holliday and Dominique Provost- Chalkley as Waverly Earp.

   WYNONNA EARP is a western horror series about a demon-fighting descendant of the great Wyatt Earp. This kick-ass series was one of my favorites last season and will return for a second season sometime in 2017.

“Purgatory” (April 1, 2016) Written by Emily Andras Directed by Paolo Barzman. CAST: Michael Eklund, Katherine Barrell and Greg Lawson*** Wynonna reluctantly returns to her hometown and resumes her family responsibly to keep the demons Wyatt Earp had killed from escaping Hell.

   It is unlikely this episode will remain on YouTube for long so here is the SYFY official video explaining the series premise.

   Note the comment from Beau Smith that he created the comic book premise due to his love of Westerns and the old Universal Movie monsters. This brings us full circle from ROUTE 66’s belief the Universal Monsters would live forever.

   The supernatural horror genre may be more graphic today but it maintains the same goals it has had from the beginning – to explore the emotion of fear.

BONUS VIDEO: Temporarily available to watch is the first episode of the new entertaining SYFY horror series VAN HELSING. It is a Van Helsing you have never seen before.

DONALD HAMILTON – The Threateners. Matt Helm #26. Fawcett Gold Medal, paperback origina1, 1992.

   It’s become fashionable to curl the lip at series like Matt Helm, and speak of “formula,” and “predictable.” Well, okay; so what? Sausage and eggs haven’t changed a hell of a lot over the last 25 years either, but it’s still my favorite breakfast, and a Helm book is still pretty tasty, too.

   An old flame of Helm’s pops up out of nowhere and is killed, along with Helm’s dog and the in-hiding author of a drug exposé book. Helm shepherds the widow to South America to retrieve material for another book, dodging both members of a rival government agency (Hamilton has used this device a lot; maybe a little too much) and the drug lord di tutti drug lords.

   Ihere’s a few more killings, a couple of seductions, and a torture scene or two — Helm must be solid scar tissue by now. Sound familiar? Well, it is. If you’re looking for something new and different, look elsewhere. Me, I still like ’em just fine.

Bibliographical Note:   There proved to be only one more Matt Helm adventure, that being The Damagers (Gold Medal, 1993).