MICHAEL BRETT – Kill Him Quickly, It’s Raining. Pocket; paperback original; 1st printing, December 1966.

   First of all, what a great title for a private eye novel. This is the first recorded case for Manhattan based PI Pete McGrath, and most of his book titles are as good as this one, if not better. I’ll add a list of all ten at the end of this review, as usual.

   While Kill Him Quickly is the first of the McGrath books, Michael Brett was the author of two earlier books, both paperback originals from Ace, in which the leading character was someone called Sam Dakkers. The titles were The Guilty Bystander and Scream Street, both from 1959. If anyone recognizes either title and can tell me anything about Sam Dakkers, I’d be happy to know more about him.

   When I picked this one up to be read at bedtime, I had no idea that it was McGrath’s debut to the world. It was easy to assume that he’d had other adventures, it was just that I hadn’t read them yet. As it turned out, it didn’t matter. McGrath tells his own story, and with such confidence that you assume he’s been around for a while, that he hadn’t just hatched out of nowhere, which in effect he had.

   I didn’t get much of a picture of who he is, though, or even what he looks like. Just another tough PI with a bit of an attitude. Just how tough, that comes later, when he finds himself needing answers from someone, and he’s in a bit of a hurry as to how he gets it.

   The case, as it so happens, is twofold. He’s hired first by a woman recently widowed whose home has been entered and probably robbed, and she can tell that someone is following her. It turns out that her now deceased husband had some friends with whom he was involved in an unsavory venture together, and one of the friends is decidedly unfriendly.

   While still working on this case, McGrath is hired by a second client, a spy, he says, trying to come in from the cold, and he needs a bodyguard. It turns out that the spy is pretty good with a gun himself, and McGrath finds himself with a dead body on his hands and in a jam with the police

   This one’s a good one, with only a couple of caveats. There are a few too many people involved; after a while it becomes difficult to keep them all straight, and not all of them manage to survive. I also thought the ending was wrapped up too quickly, as if the book was beginning to run out of pages. Otherwise this debut venture for Pete McGrath makes me want to read more. I think I have all of them listed below, and it’s time to dig them out and have at them.

       The Pete McGrath series —

Kill Him Quickly, It’s Raining (1966)
An Ear For Murder (1967)
The Flight of the Stiff (1967)

Turn Blue, You Murderers (1967)

We, the Killers (1967)

Dead Upstairs in the Tub (1967)

Slit My Throat Gently (1968)

Lie a Little, Die a Little (1968)
Another Day, Another Stiff (1968)
Death of a Hippie (1968)

GIRL OF THE PORT. RKO Radio Pictures, 1930. Sally O’Neil, Reginald Sharland, Mitchell Lewis, Duke Kahanamoku, Donald MacKenzie. Based on the story “The Firewalker” by John Russell. Director: Bert Glennon.

   A rare film, this, with no synopsis on IMDb, not a single person leaving a comment nor an external review. What it is is an early talkie that’s better filmed than most, and other than Reginald Sharland, who plays the drunken ex-British soldier who’s stranded himself on one of the Fiji Islands, the acting performances are better by far than many movies made in 1930.

   It may not be his fault. His role is meant to be melodramatic. He is the only survivor of a regiment burned to death by German flamethrowers in the war, and any burst of fire causes him to react in overdramatized panic. (“The flames! The flames!”) Enter Sally O’Neil as Josie, a perky sort of showgirl from Coney Island, as well as other places, who also finds herself at loose ends on Suva, if not desperate straits.

   They make a good pair together, of course, but they soon find themselves menaced and tormented by a white supremacist (Mitchell Lewis) who for all intents and purposes runs the island, and once Josie catches his eyes, watch out.

   It is soon revealed that he’s the worst kind of white supremacist, a half-breed himself. What you might want to know next, I cannot tell you, but if you look at the title of the story this movie is based on, you may be able to work it out on your own.

   Not my usual fare, when it comes to watching old movies, but I surprised myself by enjoying this one.

KATHARINE HILL – Dear Dead Mother-in-Law. E. P. Dutton; hardcover; 1944. Books, Inc., hardcover reprint, 1944?

   This is the first half of a two-part series on Katharine Hill’s complete works of mystery fiction. Part two, covering her second novel, Case for Equity, also involving her series character detective, Lorna Donahue, will be reported on shortly.

   In Crime Fiction IV, Al Hubin provides us with no information on Katharine Hill, neither birth nor death date. She seems to have written the two books and vanished. But not quite, or at least not completely. The copyrights on both books were renewed in the early 1970s, so she was still alive then. I also have tracked down the name of a sister, and the sister’s daughter, but – all three have very common names, and the hunt has bogged down. [Bogged down totally, as a matter of fact. I have learned nothing since I first wrote this review, nor does Al Hubin shed any further light.]

   Lorna Donahue is a widow who lives in Connecticut, the town of Ridgemont, to be precise. Even though fictitious as far as Connecticut is concerned, it’s obviously a wealthy sort of town in the semi-rural Wilton-Weston-Ridgefield suburban part of the state. Or at least in 1943 or so, it would have been quite rural, and with a gasoline shortage a large problem of the day, walking was a common alternative to driving.

   Only gradually do we learn about Lorna’s prior life: several husbands, on the stage, the newspaper game and now the real estate business, for which she has a partner, thankfully, for it allows her both (a) to be snooping into homes while people are gone and (b) to have someone to run the business while she is busily doing the aforementioned snooping.

   These last two observations are my own. Found dead at a bridge party is a recent bride’s outspoken mother, emphasis on outspoken, and it is her husband (of the recent bride) who is accused of killing his mother-in-law. And clapped immediately into jail, with no provision for bail, and so he sits, as the daughter (and his wife) moves in with Lorna.

   Who of course does not believe for a moment that he did it. A much more likely is the snooty woman (my observation) whom the dead woman, not long before she died, accused of cheating at cards on the continent, in partnership with a younger man everyone assumes she was cheating on her husband with (now deceased). Or it could have a tramp. Britain never had a monopoly of tramps to be murder suspects.

   Without my being able to come up with a better word, the sleuthing that is done is charming, as long as you can ignore the fact that the police department on the job is not on the job, because if they were, Lorna would have hardly a role to play. The small town atmosphere is evoked through many small details, describable only by someone who lived through that small era in time, unreproducible by someone would attempt to write a story taking place in such a setting today.

   The humor is sneaky but not all subtle. From a brief passage, as Lorna takes in her new guest (Pamela, the daughter), page 39:

   Later on, Lorna is trying to envision what kind of defense that Walter (the son-in-law) might be able to raise. From page 166:

   You have probably decided long before now whether or not this is book you feel urged to seek out and purchase on the Internet, and I don’t blame you at all. The detective work is successful, however, no matter how improbable (and perhaps even naive) its basis in reality may be. Gritty hard-boiled fiction it’s not, but please don’t get me wrong. Following the clues and solving the mystery – that’s the edge that makes this old-fashioned suburban cozy work for me.

TOMBSTONE CANYON. Sono Art-World Wide Pictures, 1932. Ken Maynard, Cecelia Parker, Sheldon Lewis, Frank Brownlee, Jack Clifford. Director: Alan James.

   For a low-budget programmer, Tombstone Canyon isn’t that bad. As a matter of fact, this quirky, surprisingly violent Western starring Ken Maynard has a decent enough story. Maynard, who had a prolific career in Westerns, portrays “Ken,” a man in search of his true identity. Who was his father? Where did he come from? In order to get the answers he seeks, he travels to a town a stone’s throw away from Tombstone Canyon. There, he plans to meet a man who knows the secret to his past.

   But when the man who knows Ken’s secret past turns up dead and a grotesquely disfigured man in a black cape called The Phantom appears on the scene, things get weird. Not so much supernatural weird, but just a bit off kilter. Tombstone Canyon is surprisingly atypical; there’s no singing, almost no humor to speak of, and a level of brutality that wasn’t typical in films of this era.

   That’s not to say that the movie is some forgotten classic. It really isn’t. This is largely due to the fact that the movie’s means of telling a compelling story is altogether clunky and haphazard. Part of this, of course, is reflective of the time period in which the movie was made. So you end up seeing the texts of written letters on screen as a means of advancing the story and listening to dialogue that feels more like exposition than what would naturally flow from fully developed characters.

   Nevertheless, there’s something about Tombstone Canyon that makes it worth watching. It’s almost as if the filmmakers were wanting to do so much more than their financial and technical limitations would allow. This may be just another an average Western, but I’d very much consider giving it an “A” for effort.

JOYCE PORTER – Sour Cream With Everything. Jonathan Cape, UK, hardcover, 1966; Panther, UK, paperback, 1968. Charles Scribner’s Sons, US, hardcover, 1966.

   Unfortunately for Edmund (Eddie) Brown, named by his mother after Edmundo Ros, who Mrs Brown thought was Irish, he speaks fluent Russian, albeit of the prerevolutionary variety, and closely resembles a Russian that the British Board of Trade (and one wonders whether Tim Heald’s Simon Bognor is aware of this aspect of the Board of Trade) wants to smuggle out of the Soviet Union for 26 days. It is Eddie’s role, whether he likes it or not, and he emphatically doesn’t, being more than a bit of a coward, to replace the Russian during that time.

   Eddie is more than a bit of a failure, too, which he blames on the lack of an old school tie, and none too bright, except when it comes to survival — his own. After a period of training at a fake lunatic asylum, Eddie is sent into the Soviet Union in a pink Bentley in the company of an especially unpleasant virago.

   When Eddie thinks he has successfully completed his part of the mission, he finds that he has been known to be a British agent all along. His seeming willingness to commit murder saves him from arrest, however, since the real KGB agent wants Eddie to murder the agent’s wife.

   Joyce Porter has created two of the funniest characters in the mystery field in Chief Inspector Wilfrid Dover and the Hon. Constance Morrison-Burke. Eddie Brown, reluctant and inept spy, at least in this novel, is not in their class. But if you haven’t read Porter’s books featuring Dover and the Hon. Con, you may find how Eddie mucks things up quite amusing.

      The Eddie Brown series —

1. Sour Cream with Everything (1966)
2. The Chinks in the Curtain (1967)

3. Neither a Candle Nor a Pitchfork (1969)
4. Only with a Bargepole (1971)

THE HALLIDAY BRAND. United Artists, 1957). Joseph Cotten, Viveca Lindfors, Betsy Blair, Ward Bond (Big Dan Halliday), Bill Williams, Jay C. Flippen, Christopher Dark, Jeanette Nolan. Director: Joseph H. Lewis.

   For any number of reasons, Ward Bond didn’t get a chance to play leading roles in movies all that often, but even though he’s billed fourth, it is his performance in The Halliday Brand that takes the film out of the ordinary to something that lifts it above the limited budget it must have had.

   Joseph Cotten had the bigger name, but while his performance was otherwise spot on as usual, he was not really a cowboy. Ward Bond was, and as the bullheaded father who fights a losing battle with his three rebellious children in The Halliday Brand, bellowing all the way, he makes sure that everyone for miles around knows who owns the biggest ranch, built the town from the bottom up, and as sheriff, who ruled the range with no holds barred.

   But when he allows the half-breed suitor for his daughter’s hand to be lynched, then kills the boy’s father in an ill-advised attempt at a man-to-man reconciliation, he drives his older son away (Joseph Cotten), totally alienates his daughter (Betsy Blake) and leaves the third (Bill Williams) trying to be a good son but finding himself lied to in the old man’s plotting and scheming.

   Much of the story is told in flashback, which I believe is unusual in a western, but maybe I missed the others. This was the next-to-the-last movie that director Joseph H. Lewis made, and the movie is filmed with many interesting shots at various angles, and with lots of objects in the foreground. Overall, as a western, this may fall into the category of high melodrama for some, with some obviously outdoor scenes filmed on an indoor set, but as a melodrama, this is an very good one.

THE MUMMY LIVES. Global Pictures, 1993. Tony Curtis, Leslie Hardy, Greg Wrangler, Jack Cohen, Mohammed Bakri. Suggested by the story “Some Words with A Mummy” by Edgar Allan Poe. Director: Gerry O’Hara.

   To say that Tony Curtis was miscast in the schlocky, ridiculously plotted The Mummy Lives is to miss the point entirely. Indeed, without Curtis in this overall forgettable mummy film, there’d be no reason to watch it whatsoever.

   But with Curtis, it’s an entirely different story, for there’s nothing – and I mean nothing – quite like hearing a thick Bronx accent coming from the mouth of a character named Dr. Mohassid. The thing you really need to know about the good doctor is that he happens to be – you guessed it – the resurrection of an ancient Egyptian named Aziru, a guy who was sentenced to death and mummification for his illicit love affair with Kia (Leslie Hardy), a lovely, dark haired concubine.

   When he doesn’t look completely bored, Curtis plays it for laughs, almost winking at the audience as if he were Vincent Price. The Mummy Lives may not be a good movie, but it has its moments. At its worst, it’s a throwaway cheap horror film that doesn’t work. At its best, it is pure camp, a celebration of the ridiculousness of Hollywood’s mummy curse mythology.

   I wouldn’t recommend anyone going out of the way to see this one, but I’d love to see it programmed as a midnight movie somewhere.

ELAINE FLINN – Dealing in Murder. Avon, paperback original, 2003.

   After her cheating husband involved her successful (and very upscale) antiques store in a criminal scam, Elaine Flinn’s protagonist fled to Carmel, California. Cleared of complicity but with her reputation still tarnished, Porter has set up amodest business in a shop in Carmel that a long-time friend has made available to her and adopted the name “Molly Doyle.”

   She quickly demonstrates a a penchant for being present at murder scenes and has not only to work to keep her young business afloat but solve crimes for which she’s clearly a prime suspect. As an added inducement to another category of readers among whom I count myself, there’s an art connection involving a cache of rolled-up canvases in a style Flinn characterizes as “early California.”

   These are more appealing to Molly than some of the stock she’s peddling in reduced circumstances but they also turn out to make her situation more dangerous and put her in direct conflict with the relentless killer.

   She’s a high-end snob but compensates for this with a sharp intelligence and impressive body of knowledge about the antiques business that makes her very likable and interesting. This is a first novel by a long-time San Francisco antiques dealer. I would recommend it to any reader of mysteries with the slightest interest in collecting.

      The Molly Doyle series —

1. Dealing in Murder (2003).   Nominated for an Agatha, Gumshoe, Barry and Anthony.
2. Tagged for Murder (2004).   Barry Award: Best Paperback Original. (2005).

3. Deadly Collection (2005).
4. Deadly Vintage (2007).

Editorial Note: Sad to say, Elaine Flinn died of pneumonia and cancer in September 2008.

   You can be well versed in the saga of Simon Templar, the Saint, Leslie Charteris’s creation, have read all the books and short stories by Charteris and others, seen all the movies and television episodes, have followed his adventures on radio, in the long running comic strip written by Charteris and drawn by Mike Roy, and later John Spanger and Doug Wildey, and his own comic book featuring newspaper reprints and original material by Charteris, and still not know the story of the Saint and the Five Kings. That is because the Five Kings never appeared between the covers of an actual book, but only in the Saint stories appearing in the British pulp magazine The Thriller, commencing with issue number 13 dated May 4, 1929.

   The Five Kings make their auspicious debut with this line:

   If that sounds familiar, it is because when is saw print in hard covers from Hodder and Stroughton a year later in 1930 as Enter the Saint, a key change had been made. The title of the story had been changed from “The Five Kings” to “The Man Who Was Clever” and the “organization known as the Five Kings,” now read “the organization led by the man known as the Saint.”

   You would not know what the Saint was to mean to The Thriller and its success in this early issue. There is no stick figure with a halo on the cover or inside the magazine, and while the Saint is identified as the Saint in the story no mention of him as an individual is made anywhere in the promotion, nor is that rectified for the rest of the year despite the appearance of the rest of the stories that comprise Enter the Saint and the two Saint novels that follow, The Last Hero, aka The Saint Closes the Case, and The Avenging Saint. The closest the Saint gets to headlining is in a story entitled “The Return of the Joker,” as the Saint is the fifth king, or Joker.

   Earlier that year two J. G. Reeder stories comprising Edgar Wallace’s Red Aces had appeared, and at that point it was Edgar Wallace that was the backbone of The Thriller, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see that Charteris’s Five Kings is very much a variation of Wallace’s Four Just Men, with each man hidden by a King in the deck of cards and the Saint behind the Joker.

   Patricia Holm is even along as the Queen to these five kings and Claude Eustace Teal and even the Saint’s man ’Orace, and in every other way the Saint is the Saint, you just wouldn’t know it based on the copy on the cover or inside the covers. Even the previews don’t mention the Saint, only the Five Kings.

   I’ve found few changes between the story as they appear in The Thriller and the stories in book form, save for that emphasis on the Five Kings by the magazine and by Charteris, and it is clear the selling point, though never stated, is “here is another series along the lines of the Four Just Men.”

   Of course the stories are nothing like Wallace’s Four Just men stories, and other than the Five Kings themselves the Saint is closer to Charteris’s other model, Bulldog Drummond, than Edgar Wallace in most matters. However much Wallace influenced Charteris’s subject matter, he is much closer to Raffles, Arsene Lupin, Sexton Blake, Oppenheim’s Peter Ruff, Drummond, Dornford Yates, John Buchan, and Anthony Hope than even Wallace’s Edwardian gentleman adventurers like the Brigand.

   Early on the Saint even encounters a mad scientist with a gas that dissolves a live goat that more than resembles the fate of Robin Bishop’s small dog in Sapper’s The Final Count, but even then the Five Kings are still getting better press than the Saint however much he dominates the story.

   Knowing how long it takes for reader reaction to be gauged by a magazine in terms of sales and letters, it is possible that it isn’t until Enter the Saint, the first collection of stories after the Saint’s debut in Meet — the Tiger that Simon Templar and his little stick figure avatar began to appear on the cover and in the interior of The Thriller.

   Since none of the stories in the magazine appear in book form under the same title and have those minor variations, and the Saint himself is not mentioned in any of the advertising in 1929, it would be entirely possible to miss him, especially since two other Charteris’s heroes appear in the magazine the same year only to fade into obscurity, while receiving equal weight in terms of promotion by the magazine. however.

   I’m trying to think of another series where a character so successful took that long to be recognized, but other than the 19th century French newspaper serial character Rocambole by Ponson du Terrail, and Nick Carter who started as the boy detective companion to Old Seth Carter, I’m coming up blank.

   Certainly other characters changed notably as their series went on. Good examples of this are Allingham’s Albert Campion and Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey. But as clear as it is reading the stories that they are about the Saint and always meant to be about the Saint and no one else, but reading the copy surrounding them you would be hard put to guess that.

   Still, you have to wonder what would have happened if that first book after Meet — the Tiger had been titled Enter the Five Kings? Would a saintly career have been cut short?

CARTER DICKSON – A Graveyard to Let. Berkley X1502; reprint paperback, January 1968. First published in the US by William Morrow, hardcover, 1949; first published in the UK by William Heinemann, hardcover, 1950. Other paperback reprints include: Dell #543, 1951; Belmont-Tower, 1973; Zebra, 1988.

   When I was younger I used to gobble up anything John Dickson wrote as if they were candy going out of style, whether under his own name or as (in this case) Carter Dickson. I don’t remember reading this one, though, but some 60 years later (almost), I hope I might be forgiven if I did, and I forgot.

   No matter. Either way, the book was new to me this time, or the same as, and unfortunately while it has its strong points, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I expected to, and I’ll get to that in a moment.

   The irrepressible Sir Henry Merrivale is in the United States in A Graveyard to Let, which was written relatively late in his crime-solving career. It was the 19th of 23 novels he appeared in, and he makes the the initial part of his stay in this country a spectacular one. When finished, he must make haste to Washington DC, it is revealed, but for what reason, HM refuses to say.

   There are a couple of comic (and almost silly) routines that take up more time than they should, to my way of thinking, the first as he demonstrates to a subway cop in vivid bombastic fashion how to go through the turnstiles free of charge. After reading how he did it, I went back to the original passage, and while while happened at the time isn’t very clear, I don’t think HM’s explanation holds up.

   There is another passage toward the middle of the book in which HM unaccountably shows his prowess at American baseball, the only purpose in the story being, as far as I can tell, is for HM to clout a fastball over the fence into an almost deserted graveyard, where a body, seriously wounded but not dead, is found.

   The man is also the same person who disappeared into thin air by jumping into a swimming pool under the watch of a small but significant crowd of people, and never coming out. Only his clothes come to the surface.

   And that’s the crux of the case. HM has half the solution right away, or so he claims, but does he reveal his deductions? Not a chance – but that’s of course the game we’re playing, so I don’t hold that against anybody.

   There are a couple of possible solutions, the other expounded upon by the aforementioned subway cop, which in many ways makes more sense than the real one, which takes all of Chapter 19, more than 20 pages long to work out in detail.

   While intrinsically fascinating, that’s too much work, in my mind, but Carr/Dickson nearly pulls it off. Until, that is, you close the book and start to wonder, why on earth did the man who jumped into the pool need to put such a dramatic — and complicated — plan into action?

   The reader of today isn’t interested in this kind of story any more, but you who are readers who are still interested in detective puzzles, this is one in which you have to watch the author’s every word. Every word. And as I said up above, at the risk of repeating myself, Carr/Dickson nearly makes it work.