Craig Rice (1908-1957) is something of an acquired taste. She was immensely popular in her heyday, so much so that Time magazine made her the subject of a cover story back in 1946, and her reputation was still high enough more than forty years after her death that a book-length biography was written about her (Jeffrey Marks’ Who Was That Lady?).

   Thanks to publishers like Rue Morgue Press, at least a few of her novels are still available today, but no one would call her a posthumous bestseller. What made her stand out among her contemporaries was the way she blended traditional whodunit elements with the kind of wacky humor one associates with Hollywood screwball comedies. In an earlier column I discussed her debut whodunit, 8 Faces at 3 (1939). This time I tackle her second.

   The Marks biography doesn’t tell us whether Rice worked directly in radio before turning to novels. But she did serve for brief periods in the late Thirties as radio critic for a small midwest magazine, so it’s no surprise that the background of The Corpse Steps Out (1940) is a Chicago station. Its sensational singing star Nelle Brown, married to an ex-millionaire more than twice her age but (although Rice treats the subject discreetly) rarely without at least one lover in her own age bracket or younger, is being blackmailed by a former paramour on the basis of some, shall we say, erotic letters she wrote him.

   Between the regular broadcast of her musical variety show and the re-broadcast for the west coast, she sneaks off to the man’s apartment and finds him shot to death and the letters gone. She goes back to the station and tells her press agent, Jake Justus, whom we first met in 8 Faces at 3.

   Jake pays his own visit to the apartment and finds the corpse has vanished. Pretty soon Jake’s girlfriend and soon-to-be wife Helene Brand and the rumpled liquor-sodden attorney John J. Malone, both also familiar from Rice’s earlier novel, are running around with Jake to find the body, save Nelle Brown’s radio career, expose the murderer, and drain Chicago of its liquor supply.

   No one ranks The Corpse Steps Out among Rice’s greatest hits but it’s often bracketed with her mystery-as-screwball-comedy titles. Not by me. The body of the first of three murderees is moved around Chicago twice and that of the second once, but there’s nothing wildly humorous about these developments. I’d call the book a fairly straightforward whodunit, impossible for any reader to solve ahead of the protagonists and pockmarked by one huge coincidence: Jake and Helene are driving past a certain old warehouse when they notice it’s on fire and Jake for no good reason breaks into the building and finds the corpse he’s been looking for.

   True, the proceedings are punctuated here and there by screwball dialogue. In Chapter 10 Jake settles down in the apartment he’s temporarily sharing with Helene. “I love our little home, dear….Where shall we hang up the goldfish?” In Chapter 28, as the end comes near, Malone assures Jake that “we’re leaving no turn unstoned.” To which Helene replies: “That’s wrong….[W]e’re leaving no worm unturned.”

   Genuine Hollywood screwball comedies tended to dwell on sexual innuendo but Rice keeps it to — dare I say it? — a bare minimum. About to take off on a nuptial trip with Jake, a somewhat casually attired Helene says: “I’d better get dressed, unless you don’t mind my being married in pink pajamas.” To which Jake replies: “It would save time….”

   He’s much more of an acquired taste than Rice, but my favorite among wacky mystery writers based in Chicago (or anywhere else) is Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967), whom I’ve loved since my teens. Besides having the Windy City in common, Keeler and Rice shared the experience of having been institutionalized, he early in life, she later. When he was about 20, Harry’s mother for unknown reasons had him involuntarily committed for more than a year.

   That period had a lasting effect on his novels. In The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro (1926) Jerry Middleton, heir to a Chicago patent-medicine fortune, is replaced by an impostor and railroaded into the state mental hospital where he’s befriended by the genuine madpersons, sweet souls one and all, and nearly killed by an assassin who‘s been hired to get admitted to the asylum and slice him up. The scene where Jerry is analyzed by that world-renowned shrink Herr Doktor Meister-Professor von Zero is probably the most hilarious lampoon of Freud ever committed to print.

   About a dozen years later Keeler revisited the nuthouse theme in the novel published in two volumes as The Mysterious Mr. I (1938) and The Chameleon (1939). The nameless narrator is on a mission to collect $100,000 by returning an escaped millionaire to the loonybin before midnight. On his quest he trips blithely through close to a hundred identities, posing in turn as a tycoon, a safecracker, a locomotive engineer, a gambler, several different detectives, several authors, a couple of actors and a philosophy professor — just to name a few! — before this forerunner of The Great Impostor returns to the asylum where, as he assures us, he’ll spend the rest of his days reading British magazines and sipping Ch teau d’Yquem with his keeper.

   At the end of The Corpse Steps Out, which appeared about a year after The Chameleon, Rice offers a similarly benign take on asylums:

   Severe alcoholism and several manic-depressive and suicidal episodes led to Rice herself spending part of her last years in California’s Camarillo State Hospital and other institutions. I doubt that she found them the pleasant places she and Keeler had once conjured up. As critic William Ruehlmann has said, she wrote the binge and lived the hangover. Poor woman.

Born in Greece, Nancy Goudinaki now lives and performs in the greater New York City area. “I’ll Be Seeing You” appears on her debut album, I Wanna Be Your Star (2014).

Nancy Goudinaki: vocals & classical guitar, Orrin Evans: piano & arrangements, Dwayne Burno bass, JD Allen tenor saxophone, Rudy Royston drums.

“Sunken Treasure.” An episode of Miami Undercover, Ziv, syndicated, 24 April 1961 (Season 1, Episode 14). Lee Bowman (Jeff Thompson), Rocky Graziano (Rocky). Guest cast: George N. Neise, Adrienne Bourbeau, Gene Damian, Nora Hayden. Music: Johnny Green. Writer: Gerald Drayson Adams. Director: Howard W. Koch.

   The gimmick here is that posing as a man-about-town playboy, detective Jeff Thompson is actually working undercover for a Miami Beach hotel association. Rocky Graziano is his live-in assistant who also prepares his breakfast.

   There are a couple of other episodes still in existence out of run of 38 — and if you go searching, you may find them online. It’s not likely, but even if someone came up with a complete set on DVD, I wouldn’t pay a lot of money for copies. Based on my sample of size one, I’d say the series was competently done, but where it counts, it was little more than mediocre.

   A couple of Jeff’s friends, a young married couple who run a small boating operation, are taken in by a pair of con-artists who want some stolen diamonds to be brought up from the ocean as salvage from a sunken Spanish galleon. (I may have the details wrong — there’s a lot of plot that’s stuffed into a mere 25 minute episode — but it’s close enough.)

   Lee Bowman’s was 47 when he made this series, his movie career far in the past, and while still spry, he looks older. Rocky Graziano’s only contribution is to be enthusiastic, which he does just fine. Adrienne Bourbeau is not the Adrienne Barbeau, but the statuesque Nora Hayden makes a very fine substitute for Jane Russell, who probably was not available.

   Nothing is made of Jeff’s undercover status. Perhaps the married couple know him only as a playboy (an aging one), but the two con-artists know who he is from the get-go. There is a bomb involved toward the end of this episode, but it’s easily disposed of, and the whole affair is laughed off as a lark, just another day at the beach. Miami Beach, that is.

EDWARD S. AARONS – Girl on the Run. Gold Medal #424, paperback original, August 1954. Reprinted several times, including Gold Medal R2142; paperback, 1969.

   Edward S. Aarons is best known, of course, for his long-running “Assignment” series, featuring the intrepid Cajun CIA operative Sam Durell. The first of these was Assignment to Disaster (Gold Medal, 1955), so Girl on the Run, being published a year earlier, might be considered a dry run for the series, without being a series novel itself, with no other books coming between.

   The hero of Girl on the Run, Harry Bannock, is a structural engineer between jobs and at loose ends in France before heading back to the states, does not happen to work for any espionage organization, however. He’s just a guy, who because of a girl, Lorette O’Bae, whom he earlier loved and lost to a friendly rival, finds himself at her service, and soon thereafter, not surprisingly, involved way over his head in non-stop action and nail-biting adventure.

   What the bad guys are after – and this includes his not-now-so-friendly former rival – is either (a) an enormously valuable medieval treasure, or (b) a secret, hidden lode of uranium, either of which will have a great influence on France’s political role in the postwar world.

   Honed by working in the pulps, one imagines, Aarons’ prose is clear, clipped, crisp and clean. From page 19:

   From pages 33-34:

   Here’s an action scene, from page 53:

   On page 93, he becomes philosophical, the following thoughts going through his mind:

   There is much to this story that would also be considered hard-boiled, and I would recommend at least the first 75% of the book to you, including the parts I quoted from. It is also true that the tale seems to get away from Aarons from that point on, out of control and misfiring at precisely the wrong time and the wrong place. He is beat up and left for dead at one point, for example, but he is not dead. With the use of not a single bullet, Bannock lives somehow, he recovers, and he prevails.

   We knew he would, but all in all, I think (just maybe) it could have been made a teensy bit more of a challenge for him. Not that Bannock — if you were to ask him, given all that he goes through — would agree!

THE WANDERER. Fingertip Film Production for Yorkshire Television, ZDF, and Antena 3, UK, 1994. Thirteen 60m episodes. Cast: Bryan Brown as Adam/Zachary, Tony Haygarth as Godbold, Kim Thomson as Princess Beatrice, Otto Tausig as Mathias and Deborah Moore as Clare. Created by Roy Clarke from an idea by Tom Gabbay. Executive Producers: Keith Richardson and Tom Gabby.

   This obscure fantasy with supernatural elements clothed in a road drama format lasted thirteen episodes. It was a European production (Yorkshire TV – British, ZDF – German, and Antena 3 – French) that was offered in U.S. syndication at least twice (according to Broadcasting & Cable) in 1995, but it may never have sold.

   The series starred Bryan Brown as twin brothers – good Adam and evil Zachary. The two brothers lived in the 10th Century during the first Millennium where they were locked in a battle between good and evil. Adam won the battle and killed Zachary.

   As the second millennium approaches, the brothers are back for a rematch. Adam’s memory of his past life is incomplete while Zachary remembers everything and demands Adam takes him to his grave. Adam can’t remember where the grave is so he wanders around searching for it, stopping to help others and frustrating the impatient Zachary.

   Each brother has allies. Adam’s most important ally is former 10th century Monk turn modern-day plumber Godbold. Mathis is rich Adam’s personal assistant who has no connection to Adam’s past. Along the way Adam saves Claire who is really his true love from the 10th century. Fearing for her life Adam continues to push her away, ordering her to leave him and live her new life without him. A modern day woman, she refuses to listen.

   Zachary also has an ally the magically gifted Princess Beatrice who a thousand years later remains upset that Adam had rejected her. The cliché over-the-top medieval Princess/witch spends much of her time keeping Zachary focused on the plan to kill Adam and take over the World.

   The Wanderer is flawed but watchable in a fun stupid TV sort of way. The acting is not a plus. Brown plays Adam as dull and clueless and Zachary as if he was comedy relief. The writing was at times lazy (sudden visions often guided our travelers). Nor did anyone seem to take the story seriously (Zachary is distracted from taking over the World by his desire to write and star in a musical for the stage). Writer Roy Clarke is best know for his comedy writing in such British series as Open All Hours and Keeping Up Appearance.

   YouTube currently has all thirteen episodes except for episode 1 and 6. Below are two examples: Episode 2 “Mind Games” and the series last episode “Knight Time.”

“Mind Games.” Witten by Roy Clarke. Directed by Terry Marcel. GUEST CAST: Alexander Strobele, Ann Kathrin Kramer, and August Schmolzer. *** As Adam wanders searching for where he buried Zachary, he helps a young woman accused of murder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDFW7GofScw

“Knight Time.” Written by Roy Clarke. Directed by Alan Grint. GUEST CAST: Big Mick, Kenny Baker, and David J. Nicholls. *** The brothers fight at the site of Zachary’s grave. An incredibly annoying stupid ending that disappoints even those with the lowest expectations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6lAEG5z_Xs

   The series has never been and unlikely ever to be released on DVD.

Guided by Voices was an American indie rock band based in Dayton, Ohio. “The Official Ironmen Rally Song” appeared on the album Under the Bushes Under the Stars (1996), their ninth overall. It featured what is considered their “classic” lineup, including Tobin Sprout, Mitch Mitchell, and Kevin Fennell in addition to principal songwriter and leader Robert Pollard. The group officially disbanded last year.

   I was informed by his son that Victor Berch died on Friday, October 30, 2015. He was 91. Victor is well known to many people in the collecting community and he will be sorely missed.

   Victor had a massive collection that filled his house from top to bottom.

   He collected dime novels and was well known among those collectors, being close personal friends with Edward Le Blanc and Ed Levy, of Charlton Publications.

   He collected paperbacks of every kind, including much early porn, having amassed large quantities of Greenleaf, Brandon House and Olympia Press pbs, as well as many obscure soft-core pbs from the early 60s. One of his specialties was Lancer Books and he had a massive collection of Lancer and all its companion imprints.

   He collected pulps. I first met him through pulp fan Will Murray. Victor had initiated a correspondence with Will and eventually, realizing that they both lived in eastern Massachusetts, they decided to meet for lunch. Will called me afterwards and told me what a fascinating person Victor was, so I expressed an interest in meeting him, too. When Will mentioned my name to him, Victor said “Is that the Ken Johnson who did the SF Pornography index?” and expressed a desire to meet me. Will brought him to my place and after admiring my somewhat modest collection and chatting about obscure bibliographic matters, Victor sat back and asked “So, what can I do to help you with your research?”

   This, I learned, was typical of Victor. He loved helping other people with their research and was always generous with his time and expertise. A few years back, some people researching Louisa May Alcott made a breakthrough in identifying the potboiler stories she had written at the beginning of her career. Eventually several books were compiled from these stories; it is my understanding that the final volume consisted entirely of stories located by Victor Berch.

   Victor was born in 1924. He served in the Merchant Marine in World War II. He graduated from Brandeis University with a Master’s Degree in Mediterranean Studies. In his course of study he learned to read and/or speak Spanish, French, Latin, Greek (ancient and modern), Russian, Arabic and Hebrew. I believe he could also read Egyptian Hieroglyphics. None of this prepared him for his professional career, however. In his wayward youth, Victor had been a book scout for George Gloss of the Brattle Book Store. It was that expertise that got him the job of Rare Book Librarian at Brandeis in 1966.

   Victor was married and had two sons. His wife Sarah died several years ago, of Huntington’s Disease.

   Victor had a health scare in 2007 and decided to begin disposing of his collection. A collector from New York bought all his dime novels and pulp magazines and wrote him a five-figure check. I got first crack at his paperbacks. He sold me his sleazy digest PBs at far below what he could have gotten for them on eBay, but he knew that I would put them to good use in my research. Bruce Black flew out from Illinois and bought 8 or 10 boxes of paperbacks, mostly porn. Even after that there was still a ton of stuff there and it took several more visits before I finally reached bottom. There was still so much stuff left that it hardly looked like anything was gone.

   Unfortunately, Victor fell down the stairs in 2008 and broke his hip. He was in rehab for a couple of months, then moved into an assisted living facility in Brookline. He never fully recovered and became less mobile over time. He never lost his enthusiasm for research, however, and continued feeding information to Al Hubin for his Crime Fiction updates.

   About 20 years ago Victor discovered that the Library of Congress had microfilmed a large amount of old magazines, including many early pulps. Through inter-library loan he had Brandeis borrow a huge amount of them and printed out the contents pages. He compiled a few indexes of short-run titles and published them in the Pulp APA but the bulk of them remained untapped. He passed them on to me when he started dumping his collection. For the last 6 years I’ve been slowly borrowing the same microfilms, annotating those contents pages, and sending the info to FictionMags. So in many ways Victor’s research efforts will continue to bear fruit for years to come.

   This hastily written tribute can barely express how much his friendship meant to me. I have gratefully acknowledged his help in all of my paperback indexes. I have become a better bibliographer from his example but my expertise still pales in comparison. He has inspired many of us to do better work, dig deeper, and leave no stone unturned in the pursuit of knowledge. He will be missed.

Editorial Comment:   I learned the sad news from Al Hubin in an email from him waiting for me when I got up this morning. I knew Victor was slowing down, but I heard from him several times over the summer, always cheerful and asking how I was doing. While his death wasn’t surprising news, it was still a shock, as it always is when someone you have called a friend for over 20 years passes away.

   Here’s a list of the projects and articles Victor did for Mystery*File over the years, some his own projects, some in collaboration with others, including myself. Some have needed some updating for a while now. The fault is mine, not Victor’s.

Pulp Author CHARLES W. TYLER, by Victor A. Berch.

MASTERPIECES OF MYSTERY: A Bibliographical Account, Presented by Victor A. Berch.

THE STORY OF ALLEN HYMSON, by Victor A. Berch & Allen J. Hubin.

INTERNATIONAL POLYGONICS, LIMITED (IPL): A Checklist of Publications
compiled by Victor A. Berch.

Victor Berch on ROBERT EDMOND ALTER.

More on Phyllis Gordon Demarest, from Victor Berch.

A NOTE ON THE WORD “DETECTIVE” by Victor A. Berch.

WHO WAS ARTHUR MALLORY? – A 76-Year Old Pseudonym Revealed, by Victor A. Berch.

MURDER CLINIC: Radio’s Golden Age of Detection, by Victor A. Berch, Karl Schadow & Steve Lewis.

A COMPLETE SET OF FINGERPRINTS: An Annotated Checklist of the Fingerprint Mystery Series published by Ziff-Davis, by Bill Pronzini, Victor Berch & Steve Lewis.

A Checklist of HARPER’S SEALED MYSTERY SERIES – Compiled by Victor A. Berch.

A Checklist of Aldine’s Tip Top Detective Tales, by Victor A. Berch.

JAMES DARK – Hong Kong Incident. Signet D2935, paperback original; 1st US printing, August 1966. First published in Australia as Assignment: Hong Kong by Horwitz Publications Inc., Australia, paperback, 1966.

   There were in all 16 recorded adventures of undercover spy Mark Hood, of which this is one of the earliest. The author of all but one of the Hood books, ostensibly James Dark, was J. E. Macdonell, who according to his Wikipedia page, “wrote over 200 novels, in at least 7 different series under several versions of his own name and several pseudonyms.” In Australia, where Horwitz was based, the Mark Hood books were published under Macdonnell’s own name.

   The gimmick for Mark Hood was that he worked undercover as an international playboy, as as such, according to the Spy Guys and Gals website, he was an expert in “Auto racing at Le Mans, karate competitions in Tokyo, sail fishing in the Bahamas, and, most famously of all, one of the greatest living cricket players in England.”

   This was the first one I’ve read, and in Hong Kong Incident, of the skills above, he shows off only auto racing (in Chapter One), plus karate or some other Asiatic fighting ability. I’ll have to take the other website’s word for it about any of the other talents.

   The reason he’s in Hong Kong is to be there where a Chinese dissident crosses the border and get him safely to Geneva. The first he does; the mission goes wrong when it comes to the second. Otherwise, of course, there wouldn’t be a story, which when it finally gets around to it, is about keeping a Chinese submarine from blowing up part of the American fleet. Before that the story takes place in a rice paddy, an ancient Chinese cemetery and a couple of exotic bars, with ladies in them to match.

   Dark is OK with short action scenes and quick descriptions of local countrysides. He’s not so good in placing the action in a grander scale: Dark seems to know Macao, Hong Kong, and Kowloon in particular, with China looming somewhere across the border, but to me, the setting was all one big jumble. His characters? One-dimensional at best.

   On the other hand, Dark’s other books, many written under Macdonnell’s real name, are naval adventures, and here he really seems to know what he’s talking about. The last third of this book would be grand stuff, I think, for fans of naval fiction, naval personnel, naval armament and the like. I don’t happen to be one, but I got by. Overall, I’m glad this one was only 128 pages long. I don’t imagine I’ll read another.

      The Mark Hood series —

Spy from the Grave, 1964. [No US edition; written by R. Wilkes-Hunter]
The Bamboo Bomb, 1965.

Come Die with Me. 1965.
Hong Kong Incident. 1966.
Assignment Tokyo. 1966.
Spy from the Deep. 1966, No US edition.

The Throne of Satan. 1967.
Operation Scuba. 1967.
Operation Jackal. 1967. No US edition.
Spying Blind. 1968.
The Sword of Genghis Khan. 1967.

The Invisibles. 1969.

Operation Ice Cap. 1969.
Operation Octopus. 1968
The Reluctant Assassin. 1970. No US edition.
Sea Scrape. 1971.

   Except where there was no US edition, all were published by Signet as paperback originals in this country. Dates are those of the US editions. (In some cases the US edition came before the Australian one.) Books published the same year are listed alphabetically, so this list may not be completely correct chronologically.

THE SPIDER WOMAN STRIKES BACK Universal, 1946. Gale Sondergaard, Benda Joyce, Kirby Grant, Rondo Hatton. Written by Eric Taylor. Directed by Arthur Lubin.

   A relic from the declining days of Universal’s Horror cycle, when they seemed to be making monster movies more from force of habit than anything else, this combines elements from their Sherlock Holmes series to little effect.

   The Spider Woman first appeared, fittingly enough, in The Spider Woman (Universal, 1944), pitted against Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes in a rather convoluted scheme whereby she gets men to sign over insurance policies to her cohorts, then drives them to suicide by having a pygmy (Angelo Rossito in blackface!) plant a poisonous spider in their bedrooms, and if that sounds a bit byzantine to you, just wait and see what she hatched for Strikes Back.

   Her minion here is played by Rondo Hatton, the legendary non-actor who first came to prominence in another Holmes film from ’44, The Pearl of Death, and in those days when Universal was crowding its monsters into things like House of Frankenstein/Dracula, it probably seemed like a sure bet to team him up with Sondergaard; too bad they couldn’t come up with some suitable deviltry for them to get into.

   Okay, so the story here is that Sondergaard lives in a creepy old house outside a farming community and she pretends to be blind so she can hire young girls as nurse/companions (the latest being Brenda Joyce, as the film opens) and slowly drain the blood out of them to feed to a poisonous plant, then have Rondo sneak out at night and feed some of the deadly vegetable to the livestock on nearby farms — you with me so far? Well the idea is that when the cattle die, the farmers will abandon their farms and then she can buy up the land at bargain prices.

   Oh, how the mighty are fallen. I mean back in the old days, Im-Ho-Tep was trying to revive his centuries-old beloved; Victor Frankenstein strove to create life, and the Invisible Man dreamed of World Domination. But all the Spider Woman can come up with is a Real Estate deal. The discerning critic can only say “Big Whoop,” and weep by the waters of Babylon.

   It doesn’t help either that this picayune plot unfolds at a near-imperceptible pace in a film remarkable only for the fact that no one really dies in it except (SPOILER ALERT!) the bad guys. The only casualties are cattle, leading me to wonder if this was in fact intended as a scary movie for cows.

   It certainly won’t do much for humans.