CARTER BROWN – The Coffin Bird. Signet P4394, paperback original; 1st printing, October 1970. Cover by Robert McGinnis.

   Private eye Danny Boyd is in Hawaii when this 27th of some 39 recorded case files begins. In the hotel room next door is a drop dead red-haired would-be Australian heiress (see the front cover) who hires him to pose as her third fiancé. The problem she needs to have solved? The first two ended up dead before they made it to the altar.

   Were their deaths accidents, or is something else going on? The two of them, Danny Boyd and Marcia Burgess, head off to Australia to find out.

   Boyd manages to get beat up once quite severely after he begins to poke his inquisitive nose around, but he’s the kind of guy who gives as well as he gets. He also has his usual way with women in this one, not that the women have any dimension to them beyond that of a Playboy centerfold. They are described largely by the clothing they wear, and then in even more detail by the parts of their anatomy that are not covered by their clothing.

   Not that Brown doesn’t try to do more in terms of making at least one of his female characters interesting. It seems that the delectable Marcia needs to be spanked with a leather belt before they go to bed, and there never was any doubt that they would, but this seems rather more unwholesome than I’d prefer to read about.

   It’s not much of a case, when it comes down to it, and I suspect that it may be a long while before I tackle another of Danny Boyd’s capers. It ends with a bit of dime store pop-psychology that may impress others more than it did me, or perhaps even myself if the rest of the book before this wasn’t so immodestly uninteresting.

One of my wife Judy’s favorite songs:

BANG BANG! Fox STAR Studios, India, 2014. Hrithik Roshan, Katrina Kaif, Pavan Malhotra, Danny Denzongpa. Directed by Siddharth Anand.

   This 153 minute action comedy/musical is nothing less than a remake/ripoff of Knight and Day with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, save this one is actually funny, the leads attractive, the action cartoonish but dazzling, and the plot halfway fun.

   Indian Super Criminal Omar Zafar (Danny Denzonpa) escapes from a super prison, murdering Colonel Nanda, who captured him, and announcing he wants an Indian national criminal to steal the Kohinoor diamond, the centerpiece of the British Crown in the Tower of London.

   That is no more said than it is done. Meanwhile in Simla province in the mountains, Harleen Sahani works at her boring job as a receptionist and the Bank of Shimla (their spelling) and lives with her grandmother who would like her life to be more exciting, like meeting the dashing thief who stole the Kohinoor from the British.

   Meanwhile, also in Simla, Rajveer (Hrithik Roshan) is meeting with Zafar’s men to sell them the diamond. Of course they plan to double cross him, but then he was going to double cross them as well.

   There’s a fight, a chase, Rajveer meets Harleen cute, there is another fight, meanwhile the Internal Security Service gets onto Rajveer’s presence in Simla and shows up, and Harleen is suddenly sought by both sides for being involved with him.

   The first big musical production number, a staple of Bollywood films of all genres, takes place after Rajveer and Harleen meet cute and before the second big fight/shootout. And we are off, he drugs her and then saves her from the ISS, they end up on the run, she’s a handicap, then a help, they fall in love, she believes he lied to her, she double crosses him, she goes back home, Omar Zafar kidnaps her, Rajveer shows up to rescue her and we find out what has really been going on all along …

   But along the way it is nice to see the beautiful winter scenery in Simla, and Abu Dhabi and Prague are lovely to look at… It’s that kind of film. It doesn’t have a serious bone in its head. But it is noisy, silly, handsome, funny, goofy in a likable way, and not half as annoying as I found Cruise or Diaz’s smug self-satisfied screen personas in the basic same story.

   Truth is, save for the musical numbers, this works much better than Knight and Day as both a love story and an action film. In fact some of the action scenes are actually exciting and there is a little suspense, which is more than I could say for Cruise and Diaz.

   Yes, it goes on too long, and you will most likely take a snack or bathroom break or fast forward through those endless musical numbers, but the last half of the film is an action fan’s delight, and the cartoonish violence much more fun than anything in Knight and Day.

MACUMBA LOVE. United Artists, 1960. Walter Reed, Ziva Rodann, William Wellman Jr. and June Wilkinson. Written by Norman Graham. Produced and directed by Douglas Fowley.

   Persons of a certain age will remember Douglas Fowley as Doc Holliday in the “Wyatt Earp” teleseries. Going back a little further, others may recall his turn as the harried director in Singin’ in the Rain. To me, he’ll always be the snaky bad guy of countless B-westerns, but it’s a safe bet that damn few will think of him as the auteur of Macumba Love, and I suspect his ghost will walk a little easier for it.

   Sad to think that a film with such a promising title proves a waste of time but the sad fact is that Macumba Love takes all the elements of a good trashy film— bad script, bad acting, low budget, sex, torture and voodoo—only to squander them.

   The story has potential: Walter Reed plays an investigative writer looking into the local folkways (this was filmed in Brazil, as was Love Slaves of the Amazons) up against a hostile voodoo queen, diffident authorities, and a strange moodiness on the part of his Latino girlfriend (Ziva Rodann, appropriately named “Venus de Viasa” here.)

   When Reed’s newlywed daughter (June Wilkinson) arrives with her husband (William Wellman Jr.) in tow, Ziva starts putting the moves on the young man, an enterprise helped along considerably by her dresses, none of which seem to cover her quite adequately. Meanwhile, the natives stay up late pounding drums and dancing around a fire, zombie-corpses wash up on shore, veiled threats are tossed about, Voodoo trinkets passed around like re-gifted Christmas presents, and Ziva gets less and less subtle about her campaign of seduction.

   Unfortunately, that’s about it. Instead of a plot developing, tension rising or anyone actually doing anything, we just get more drums, dancing, threats, trinkets and teasing. And then a little more drums, threats, teasing, etc. And then a little more…. you get the idea? The discerning viewer, having seen and appreciated films like Voodoo Woman or The Disembodied has come to expect the drums-and-dancing scenes; indeed, they’re practically the sine qua non of the genre. But one can only sit through a certain amount of it before a certain familiarity begins to creep in, and in this film it doesn’t so much creep as gallop.

   Or take the scene where the vamp lures the newlywed hubby to her boudoir: She invites him with a palpably fake pretext, he agrees and… and we get interminable shots of them riding along the beach in a carriage! By the time they reach her den of iniquity we’ve pretty much lost interest.

   Macumba Love has B-Movie street creds aplenty: Walter Reed, starred in Flying Disc Man from Mars and was a featured player in Superman and the Mole Men. Ziva Rodann worked in Pharaoh’s Curse and Forty Guns, and whoever designed her outfits seems to have enjoyed his work. Likewise June Wilkinson, who appeared (in the best sense of the word) in that classic The Immoral Mr. Teas And William Wellman Jr. … well he gets a scene staked out bare-chested for torture, if your tastes run to that sort of thing.

   With all this going for it, Macumba Love should have set a bad-movie standard all its own, but alas, it’s just too damn slow and repetitious, smothering its tawdry promise in tedium, doubly disappointing because an actor of Douglas Fowley’s sleazy expertise should have known how to do it right.

A GUNMAN HAS ESCAPED. Monarch Films, UK, 1948. John Harvey, John Fitzgerald, Robert Cartland, Ernest Brightmore, Maria Charles, Jane Arden, Frank Hawkins. Scenario: John Gilling. Director: Richard M. Grey.

   Sometimes films have more to offer in terms of historical interest than any entertainment value they may or may not have. In all honesty, if anyone could call this late 40s low budget crime drama from England anything more than mediocre, I’d have to consider their critical judgment something between low and none.

   But consider the date. For most of the players in this movie, the war was barely over and this was the beginning of long careers for them, mostly in TV when that came along, but movies as well. In fact one of them, Maria Charles, who plays a gun moll named Goldie and whose first movie this was, is still alive at the age of 86 and was on TV as recently as 2009.

   The director (and producer) of A Gunman Has Escaped, Richard M. Grey, made one or two other films then disappeared, and so did his production company. Perhaps the most well known of the actors was Jane Arden, whose second film this was, later became a noted film director, actress, screenwriter, playwright, songwriter, and poet. (You can follow the link to a long Wikipedia entry on her.)

   In this movie, though, she plays an unmarried and very naive farmer’s daughter who falls in love with one of three gunmen who botched a jewelry robbery, killing a bystander in the process, and who are now on the lam, and who take refuge on her father’s farm.

   This is a very short film, well under an hour in running time, and although almost all the violence is offstage, quite a brutal one. The actors all know their lines, though, and although the story is nothing more than perfunctory — I’ve told you all there is to know — I never had the urge to turn it off while I was watching.

REGINALD HILL – Recalled to Life. Dalziel & Pascoe #13. Delacorte Press, hardcover, 1992. Dell, paperback, 1993. First pubished in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1992. TV-Movie: BBC/A&E, UK/US, 19 June 1999 (Season 4, Episode 2 of Dalziel and Pascoe). Warren Clarke as Det. Supt. Andy Dalziel and Colin Buchanan as Det. Insp. Peter Pascoe.

   In my opinion, Reginald Hill is one of the three or four best British crime writers practicing today. There are none, I think whose latest book I pick up with any more pleasurable anticipation, and none who disappoint me less often.

   One of the strengths of his Dalziel-Pascoe books is that although featuring the same characters they are never the same book; a distinction missing, for better or worse, from many series.

   The latest featuring the unlikely pair is even more of a departure than usual. It begins almost 30 years ago, just after the time of the Ward-Profumo scandals that rocked the government. A woman is murdered at an aristocrat’s house, during a weekend in which several notables were present, including a successful businessman, a distant relation of the Queen, a young American agent, and the father of a modem-day member of the British government.

   The owner of the house is arrested and convicted, mainly by virtue of the confession of his accomplice, the nanny of one of the guest’s children. He is hanged, while her own death sentence is commuted to life imprisonment. As the story proper opens, she is paroled because of new evidence uncovered which casts doubts on the probity of the police official who made the case — Dalziel’s mentor and protector, who is now deceased. Dalziel himself had been present and played a major part.

   An investigation is opened which threatens to blacken his mentor’s name, and Dalziel begins his own to counter. The plot eventually involves secret agencies of both British and American governments, and results in Dalziel traveling to the United States. Neither are quite the same afterwards. Dalziel, when asked for his impression of the country, re-plies that “it’ll be right lovely when they finish it.”

   Hill is a superb storyteller. The viewpoint switches back and forth between Dalziel and Pascoe, and occasionally to others as well, briefly but clearly illuminating them in passage. The tale is an exploration of guilt, and of expiation, but not of innocence. There is little of that, except of course for Pascoe, who has somehow retained his, along with the sense of outrage he feels when it is violated.

   Hill has disturbing things to say about the people who govern us and their methods, and I would not call it a comfortable book at all. It is, however, one you should read.

FIRST MAN INTO SPACE. MGM, UK/US, 1959. Marshall Thompson, Marla Landi, Bill Edwards, Robert Ayres, Bill Nagy, Carl Jaffe, Roger Delgado. Director: Robert Day.

   Watching First Man into Space, one cannot help but be reminded of The Quatermass Experiment, in which a rocket ship returns to Earth with an extraterrestrial menace in its midst. The same is essentially true for this surprisingly effective low-budget science fiction flic about a hubristic Air Force pilot who, in his obsessive quest to become the titular first man in space, ends up a victim of cosmic rays or such.

   And by “victim,” I mean that his endeavor in the stars transforms into a genuinely creepy looking bloodsucking monster that needs to kill and to feed in order to survive. Although First Man into Space is, at times, exceedingly talky (much like similar science fiction films from the era), it nevertheless has enough chills and thrills to keep the viewer engaged for the relatively scant running time.

   The crisp black and white cinematography, while nothing spectacular, is nevertheless much better than in many of the cheapie creature films from the same era. I can’t promise that you’ll love this movie, but I think that you’ll find that it’s a bit better than its title and premise suggest.

CREATURE FROM BLACK LAKE. Howco International Pictures, 1976. Jack Elam, Dub Taylor, Dennis Fimple, John David Carson, Bill Thurman. Director: Joy N. Houck Jr.

   For a horror movie, Creature from Black Lake honestly isn’t all that good. For a spunky low-budget thriller, however, this mid-1970s creature feature really isn’t all that bad.

   While it’s hardly a classic, the movie simply exudes passion and spirit. Combining both shaky handheld camera effects with creepy music, Creature from Black Lake has campy humor, chills and thrills, and some interesting things to say about the counterculture and the place of Southern whites in American society. Ultimately, however, it’s a buddy film – the story of two University of Chicago classmates who travel down South to investigate the sighting of an apparent Bigfoot type creature in the Louisiana swamps.

   Although many of the actors aren’t particularly well known, one of them is certainly well known, especially by Western genre fans. That would be Jack Elam who, in this film, portrays a bearded and often drunk Bayou wild man who has a run in with the mysterious swamp creature.

   Elam’s presence in this film, while hardly a highlight of his career, lends the film both comic relief (Elam can be really funny!) and a sense of campy fun. Sometimes a film doesn’t need to be all that good – in a technical sense – to be enjoyable.

YOU’LL NEVER SEE ME AGAIN. An episode of Armchair Theatre, ABC/ITV, UK, 16 August 1959 (Season 3, Episode 49). Ben Gazzara, Leo Genn, Brenda de Banzie, James Hayter, Derek Aylward, Jacqueline Ellis. Based on the story by Cornell Woolrich (Detective Story Magazine, November 1939; reprinted as by William Irish, Dell 10 Cent series #26, paperback, 1951). Director: Ted Post.

   A real oddity turned up on Cable in the middle of the night last week: You’ll Never See Me Again was made for Britain’s Armchair Theatre back in 1959, and to my knowledge has never aired before on American Television. At least Mike Nevins hadn’t seen it as of 1988, when he wrote his exhaustive Woolrich bio-bibliography, First You Dream, Then You Die.

   And it’s not bad at all. Somewhat on the level of a really good episode of The Avengers or Secret Agent. Ben Gazzara stars, playing the lead as a rather cold, unlikable sort, in the Laurence Harvey mode. He’s had a spat with his wife, it seems, and she ran home to Mother. Only she never got there. And no one saw her go.

   So when days pass, and she doesn’t show up (she is, in fact, never seen in the hour-long film) Ben finds himself haunted by a lackadaisical but persistent Police Inspector, intelligently played by Leo Genn. Their escalating cat-and-mouse game builds up very nicely to heights of Woolrichian paranoia (he imagined the Police to be literally everywhere) as the bereft husband tries with increasing desperation to find some shred of proof that he didn’t kill his wife, and at the same time come to terms with his feelings about her.

   And all the while, Genn keeps turning up in the oddest places, generally supine on a sofa, asking languidly if he’d care to confess to something.

   It’s all directed very competently by Ted Post, a filmmaker I’ve never cared much for, and despite the truncated late-night presentation, I enjoyed it quite a lot. Look for it.

BLUE VELVET. De Laurentiis Entertainment Group / 20th Century Fox, 1986. Isabella Rossellini, Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern, Hope Lange, Dean Stockwell. Screenwriter-director: David Lynch.

   I have never listened to much popular music — other than show music — and for all I know Bobby Vinton’s recording of “Blue Velvet” may be a period piece that captures the feeling of a year or even of a decade. Whatever its importance as a popular icon, David Lynch has used it effectively in his film Blue Velvet where the plushy, languorous singing, returning insistently like a haunting~ refrain, provides an erotic, languorous counterpoint to the often brutal events of a film that, like Lynch’s first movie, Eraserhead, shows some promise of becoming a cult classic.

   Kyle MacLachlan, the apple-cheeked hero of Lynch’s film of Frank Herbert’s science-fiction epic novel, Dune, plays a seemingly innocent hero who, like the heroine of many an insufferable Gothic romance, blunders against all good sense into a situation in which his life and even his virtue are at peril.

   Lynch’s intention is, in part, satiric — as it was in the memorable Eraserhead — and, against the background of an idealized all-American city captured in colors that have the intensity of pop art painting, Kyle/Jeffrey, obsessed with the masochistic needs of a sexually tormented singer — played by Isabella Rossellini- attempts to unravel the intricate psycho-sexual empire presided over by a demented Dennis Hopper.

   MacLachlan is aided by a somewhat mature Nancy Drew, splendidly portrayed by blond Laura Bern, the “good” woman in his life (as sultry, raven-haired Rossellini is his “dark” mistress), who, in some perplexity, asks him if he is a “pervert” or a detective. Summoning up as much of a leer as his somewhat limited acting skill will allow, Maclachlan replies that it is for “me to know and you to find out.”

   This gauntlet is, of course, also thrown down to the sometimes bemused viewer, and this Chinese-box film, with its blue velvet song and fabric serving as an opening and closing frame, will not find a disinterested audience.

   If some equivalent of the League for Moral Decency is still functioning, an extended sequence in which Rossellini seduces a fascinated but somewhat reluctant hero into a sado-masochistic tumble should have its adherents taking to the streets in self-righteous outrage.

   MacLachlan keeps protesting that he only wants to help while Rossellini pleads with him to hurt her, and it is this psychological ambivalence that lies at the heart (and it is an amused and perverse intelligence which controls it) of this brilliantly directed film.

   Blue Velvet is impeccably cast and often memorably played. Rossellini and Hopper are an unforgettable apparently mismatched pair, while former MGM child star Dean Stockwell plays the stoned proprietor of a peculiarly staffed whorehouse with deadly, pointillist accuracy. Once again, Lynch has shown a particular genius for undermining the American family. Machlachlan’s father, mother, and aunt are Grant Wood figures in a Charles Burchfield darkling wood. Not to be missed are the quick shots of the family’s prime-time TV viewing and the robin-with-beetle episode that closes the film.

   Whatever your view of small-town America may be, it is not likely to be the same after seeing this absorbing movie. Do not expect to be moved or to care about the characters’ fates. Some viewers will feel the film is an assault on basic virtues and common decency, and it is.

   Others will revel in the photography, delight in the often witty script, and find in themselves unsuspected depths of playful decadence in their response to Blue Velvet. The viewer is invited to become a detective but also to participate vicariously in the complex games Lynch plays.

   And it is up to you, dear reader, should you see this film, to answer that provocative question posed by Laura/“Nancy” to Kyle/Jeffrey. But you may not want to share your answer with your best friend, your lover … or yourself.

   If this column doesn’t appeal to you, don’t blame me. Steve Lewis thought some readers might be interested in my latest book, even though it has nothing to do with our genre. So I’ll start off this month recycling the book’s introduction, which I believe conveys what it’s about, and reveals an aspect of your columnist that may surprise many who think of me as just a mystery wonk.

   If you leave out the accident of my birth, the origin of They Called the Shots dates back to 1952. The Korean war was raging overseas, HUAC and Senator Joe McCarthy were raging on the home front, the blacklist was on full tilt, and I was nine years young, living in Roselle Park, New Jersey.

   One night my parents, taking me along, went out to an appliance store to buy their first television set. It was, if memory serves, an Admiral with a 12 -inch screen. The price was around $225 or $250. For the next several years that set drew me to it like a magnet.

   In the early Fifties the major movie studios considered TV the enemy, offering for nothing the same product that theaters charged admission for. They wouldn’t allow their old films to be shown on the small screen, and in their current pictures they often wouldn’t allow a set amid the furniture of a living-room scene.

   Growing up in the New York City area, I had access to seven channels: the CBS, NBC and ABC flagship stations (Channels 2,4 and 7 respectively), the short-lived DuMont network, plus three local independents. With the majors boycotting the medium and the number of made-for-TV series rather small, TV programmers starved for material on film had to fall back on the smaller fry among movie-making companies, mainly Republic, Monogram and PRC.

   During the Thirties and Forties those companies had put out an endless stream of B pictures, primarily but not exclusively Westerns, and Republic had also offered dozens of cliffhanger serials. This was the product, interspersed with Hopalong Cassidy movies (out of which William Boyd, the only actor to play Hoppy, made megamillions by buying the rights to those flicks and licensing them to stations across the country) and early made-for-TV series like The Lone Ranger and The Cisco Kid, that kept me glued in front of the set for hours every evening. I became a certified telefreak.

   On that tiny screen I watched movies featuring the exploits of various Western stars of previous decades over and over. Some were trio pictures with groups like The Three Mesquiteers and The Range Busters and The Rough Riders. Most starred a single hero: Gene Autry, Eddie Dean, Buck Jones, Ken Maynard, Kermit Maynard (Ken s less successful but perhaps more talented brother), Tim McCoy, Jack Randall, Tex Ritter, Roy Rogers and of course the young John Wayne.

   I got to the point where I could identify at sight dozens of the actors in B Westerns who usually fell to the heroes bullets or fists — Roy Barcroft, Tristram Coffin, Kenne Duncan, I. Stanford Jolley, Charles King, John Merton, Marshall Reed, Hal Taliaferro, Harry Woods, just to name a few at random. Eventually I caught on that the person usually named in a picture s final credit must be important, but what a director did and how he did it I hadn’t the foggiest.

   As I grew older I lost interest in shoot-em-ups and cliffhangers, considering them beneath the notice of a young intellectual such as I fancied myself to be.

   Years slid by. I completed college and law school, passed the bar, and eventually uprooted myself from the east coast to St. Louis where I was invited to become a law professor. And then, slowly but surely, a strange thing happened. I became interested in those old movies again. I had the pleasure of meeting in their golden years some of the actors whose younger incarnations I had watched for hours on end, magnetized by that 12 -inch screen.

   Most important of all, I began to meet and become friends with some of the men whose names were familiar to me from the final credits of those pictures. The ones who called the shots. The directors. I got to watch their films again, sometimes sitting beside them. I got to listen to their stories. Eventually I began to write about them.

   This book is the culmination of that process. It s taken me thousands of hours of viewing time and hundreds of hours of writing time but in my twilight years I still consider the time well spent. I hope I ve communicated what I’ve gotten from all those films, and from the people who made them, in the following pages.

   But perhaps I can spell out here what I’ve looked for, and often found, in pictures of this sort. Reduced to two words, what the first-rate films contain and what the first-rate directors infuse into their films is visual imagination or, in two more words, visual excitement. This quality is the alpha and omega of the kind of movies discussed here.

   Each chapter is self-contained and can be read separately. But many also throw light on other chapters, and to help readers navigate among them, the first time in any chapter the name of a director is mentioned who is the subject of an earlier or later chapter, that name is highlighted.

   For example, in the chapter on William Witney you can see highlighted names like John English or Alan James or Ray Taylor from Bill s point of view, and later you can turn to the chapters on those men and see Bill from their perspective.

   The directors I knew best tend to get the longest and most quote-filled chapters but, because they contributed so much to this book, I want to single them out for mention: in the order of their births, Spencer Gordon Bennet (1893-1987), Joseph H. Lewis (1907-2000), Thomas Carr (1907-1997), and my closest Hollywood friend, Bill Witney (1915-2002). A few others covered here, like Oliver Drake (1903-1991) and R.G. Springsteen (1904-1989), I knew but not all that well. Others, who died too soon, I never had the pleasure of meeting.

   Every director covered here is dead, and most of them died before the beginning of this century. In a sense this book is an assortment of flowers on their graves. In another sense it brings them back, I hope, to life.

   While we’re on the subject of shoot-em-ups, a reader of my last month’s column asked if any of John Creasey’s contributions to that branch of literature got published in the USofA. The answer is Yes. War on the Lazy-K, as by William K. Reilly — one of three bylines under which Creasey turned out (if I’ve counted right) 29 smokeroos for low-on-the-totem-pole English houses like Wright & Brown and Stanley Paul — first appeared in London in 1941, amid the carnage of World War II, and came out over here five years later under the imprint of Phoenix Press.

   Yes, the same Phoenix Press that at the same time was presenting to an indifferent world the novels of that incomparable wackadoodle Harry Stephen Keeler. I am the proud owner of a copy of the Reilly opus, picked up for 50 cents at a YMCA book fair in St. Louis twenty or more years ago. Another copy wound up in the hands of Bill Pronzini, who devotes a couple of pages to it in his tribute to badly written Westerns, Six-Gun in Cheek (1997).

   When I was in Wales back in pre-euro days I pungled up 50 pence apiece for each of several Creasey cactus epics published only in England, but that’s another story. Let’s stick to the one that made it across the pond.

   This one actually has a plot of sorts, but what I find most amazing is that a writer who had never yet visited the U.S. and knew next to nothing about the old West could hammer out so many books of this type in a few days apiece. The narrative passages of Lazy-K are readable enough, although pockmarked with exclamation points and lacking the urgency of the Inspector West and Dr. Palfrey novels Creasey wrote during the same war years.

   But Gad, the dialogue! Just about every one of the horde of characters in this book speaks in dialect—the same wacky dialect for the whole passel of ‘em! “Why’n hell can’t yuh old-timers stop arguin’ among yourselves?” “C’n yuh use a drink?” “Yuh ain’t got a touch of whiskey with yuh, by any chance?” “Yuh’ve heerd me.” The only characters who are spared this form of discourse are the Mexicans. “Thees ees a surprise, Kennedy. I was told that you wair dead.”

   â€œHe wanted to be kept hidden until after Deegby was gone. But undair cover he negotiated with the other outfits.” There’s also one character who’s a Kiowa — or, as Creasey spells it, Kiawa — but him no speakum much. Can you imagine having to remember to misspell so often while pumping out ten or fifteen thousand words a day? What a delight to encounter the occasional rare moment when Creasey blinks and actually spells you y-o-u!

   At least one other among Creasey’s posse of pistol-smokers was published over here, but not in book form. Hidden Range (1946), published in England as by Tex Riley, takes up virtually the entire February 1950 issue of Real Western Stories, one of the Columbia chain of ultra-low-budget pulps edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes. I tripped over a copy of this one in a secondhand bookstore somewhere in Ohio and snagged it for another 50 cents.

   A quick look at the invaluable FictionMags Index website revealed a curious fact I hadn’t been aware of before. A year after Lowndes used Hidden Range in Real Western Stories, he used the exact same novel, this time retitled Forgotten Range, in the February 1951 issue of Western Action, another Columbia pulp. He must have been desperate for material that month!

   But could the Index be wrong here? According to other Creasey bibliographies in print and online, Forgotten Range is a different book, published in England as by Tex Riley in 1947. It strikes me as more credible that this is the title Lowndes ran early in 1951. In any event, he had earlier run another Creasey shoot-em-up, this time under the William K. Reilly byline, Brand Him for Boothill! (Western Action, July 1949), but what title and pen name this one sported in England remains a mystery.

   A word which brings us back to what this column is supposed to be about.

   Hundreds of Creasey’s crime novels were published in the U.S. from the early 1950s until well after his death in 1973, but only nine appeared here before he became a top name in the genre. Eight of these, chronicling the earliest exploits of Raffles-like John Mannering, a.k.a. The Baron, appeared under Creasey’s Anthony Morton byline between 1937 and 1940, although for some obscure reason the character’s nom de thief on this side of the pond was Blue Mask.

   The ninth, and the only book to bear Creasey’s own name on its spine until he became established over here years later, was Legion of the Lost (1944), one of the early espionage adventures of Dr. Palfrey and his colleagues, offered by a publishing house called Stephen Daye, Inc., which seems to have vanished into the mists a few seconds after it was born.

   At a time when I had little or no idea who Creasey was, I found a nice copy of this rarity in an old used bookstore in Elizabeth, N.J. that was a favorite hangout of mine in my formative years. What did the book set me back? One quarter. A wise investment, yes?