GAVIN LYALL – Venus with Pistol. Charles Scribner’s Sons, US, hardcover, 1969. Berkley S1920, US, paperback, December 1970. First published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton, hardcover,1969. Reprinted many times in the UK in paperback.

   By reading this book, if ever you do, you will learn more about the dirty side of the world of fine art — the buyers, the experts, the hangers-on and wanna-be’s, the forgers, the smugglers — than you ever dreamed existed. This is the first of Gavin Lyall’s thrillers and suspense novels, fifteen in all, that I’ve ever found time to read, and I’m glad I finally did.

   This particular adventure is told by Bert Kemp, a low-key British antique firearms dealer who’s also known in certain circles as being quite adept at moving paintings across European borders without the niceties of paying duties — or even avoiding bans on such activity altogether.

   In Venus with Pistol (also the name of a painting that first in brought into the tale on page 203) he’s recruited by Dona Margarita Umberto, a lady with a lot of money after the death of her husband, but with no means of getting her hands on it, the money having been confiscated by the Nicaraguan government. But the lady has political ambitions, and what the officials in Managua will allow her to do, Bert is told, is to go to Europe and obtain works of art for a gallery for the people of her country. Her spending limit: two and a half million pounds.

   Well, sir. Bert is on board in less time than it takes to say where do I sign up twice, along with one head assistant named Carlos MacGrgeor and two local art experts, one male, one female. From here the entourage makes a grand tour of Europe, running into snags now and then as they go, but with Bert’s quick mind at work, mostly they work out of them — except for the knock on his noggin that costs him memory as to what happened, along with a missing painting, not to mention one murder, quickly covered up.

   What this reads largely like is a series of individual made-for-TV episodes, as they make their way from Paris to Vienna to Venice to Zurich and back to Vienna. But there is a continuing thread to them, as the plot zigs and zags and thickens along the way. Bert is a good man with a quip as well as having a solid knowledge of firearms, about which the reader also will find himself (me) learning perhaps even more about, the ins and outs of which being quite essential to the story, in more ways than one.

   The ending, though, is what brings all of the separate adventures together, as Bert works out some thoughts and deductions together that both he and I should have making all the time. There’s a bit of romance at the end as well, one that was highly anticipated (by me), nor I was disappointed.

The song “I’m Crying” first appeared in the US as a single in 1964 then on the LP The Animals on Tour (MGM, 1965), which I do not believe has ever been released on CD. Eric Burdon was the lead singer for The Animals, a British blues-rock group that was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.

MONSTER ON THE CAMPUS. Universal International Pictures, 1958. Arthur Franz, Joanna Moore, Judson Pratt, Nancy Walters, Troy Donahue, Whit Bissell. Director: Jack Arnold.

   Don’t let the exploitation title fool you, as Monster on the Campus is actually a surprisingly captivating 1950s science fiction/horror film. Indeed, it’s of a quality far higher than a lot of the forgettable dreck churned out during the same era. Directed by Jack Arnold, this Universal-International movie stars Arthur Franz as Professor Donald Blake, a university scholar who, while researching a prehistoric fish, discovers a serum that – stay with me, folks – reverses the evolutionary process.

   As you might have guessed from the title and the premise, Franz transforms into a hairy apelike monster. He – or his monster alter ego — roams around a California university campus wreaking all sorts of havoc and mayhem. There’s murder, mystery, and a little on campus romance thrown in for good measure.

   Call it a werewolf film without lycanthropes or King Kong without Skull Island, but Monster on the Campus is actually something of a minor, if at times unpolished, gem.

   Filmed in black and white, with a good some particularly effective atmospheric moments, it also benefits highly from Arthur Franz’s strong performance. Although he was primarily a character actor, the other movies I’ve seen in which he had starring roles (The Sniper and The Atomic Submarine) have been taut, suspenseful thrillers that I was certainly glad I watched. The same can definitely be said for Monster on the Campus, a highly evolved creature feature that’s worth a look.

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Frankie Laine sang the theme song in the movie, but British folksinger Sandy Denny does a considerably different version of it that I find hauntingly beautiful.

VOODOO WOMAN. American International Pictures, 1957. Marla English, Tom Conway, Mike “Touch” Connors, Paul Blaisdell. Written by Russ Bender and V. I. Voss. Directed by Edward L. Cahn

THE DISEMBODIED. Allied Artists, 1957. Paul Burke, Allison Hayes, John Wengraf. Written by Jack Townley. Directed by Walter Grauman

   Movie fans remember 1957 as the year that brought us Bridge on the River Kwai, Twelve Angry Men, Paths of Glory, and The Spirit of St. Louis, but I will always recall it fondly as the banner year that delivered not one but two ersatz jungle epics with schlocky monsters and witchy women portrayed by iconic starlets of that tawdry form.

   Voodoo Woman is a thing of shreds and patches, apparently thrown together by producer Alex Gordon in the wake of The She Creature — a remarkable film on its own — with bits and pieces of that film’s eponymous monster, director Edward L. Cahn and stars Marla English and Tom Conway, who sports the silliest headgear ever committed to film.

   Conway plays a Mad Doctor determined to combine “the white man’s science and the black’s voodoo” to create a monster that will do his bidding. Which may seem a bit redundant in these days of the Internet, but he finds the perfect subject for his experiments when Marla comes strutting into his Jungle Hell.

   Marla English had a rather brief and unheralded film career, but her appearances here and in The She Creature ensure her a place in the archives of tacky movies. In She Creature she projected a virginal impassivity that made her the perfect palimpsest for Chester Morris’s regressive enterprises. Here she gets to vamp it up as the most literal of femmes fatales, a woman literally consumed by greed who cheerfully drags her cast cohorts down with her.

   We first see Marla hanging out in some junglefront dive, plotting to track down hidden treasure in the tropical backwoods. Or what passes for the tropics here; mostly it’s the usual stock-footage long-shots intercut with a sound stage sparsely furnished with defeated-looking foliage and bespoke rubber undergrowth. There’s even a moment when Marla and her guide (Mike “Touch” Connors) cuddle around a campfire, and as the camera pans to take in their antics we see two stage hands jump out of the way!

   It all gets a bit hard to take seriously, particularly when Mad Doctor Conway decides amoral Mara is the perfect subject for his experiments in monster-making, and she agrees whole-heartedly, as a means to acquire the lucre stashed somewhere thereabouts. She is duly promoted to monster-in-chief (actually played by Paul Blaisdell, in parts of his She Creature costume, a plastic mask and mop-wig) and proceeds to wreak low-budget havoc about the place until we’ve reached a respectable running time and can end the suffering.

   Well it ain’t much, but director Cahn was a past master at moving things along quickly, hero Mike Connors shows plenty of the charm that led him to TV stardom, and Tom Conway does a splendid job of not dying of shame. With all this and Miss English too, Voodoo Woman ranks as a genuine Guilty Pleasure.

      

   Moving on to The Disembodied, I can praise it with faint damns by observing that it’s a bit less tacky-looking than Voodoo Woman. The fake jungle is a bit less threadbare, the costumes not so tacky, and star Allison Hayes makes a splendid entrance, trying to kill her husband with a voodoo curse.

   Allison Hayes was literally one of the giants of Really Bad Movies, with a starring bad-girl turn in Roger Corman’s Gunslinger, followed by Zombies of Mora Tau, The Undead, The Unearthly, The Hypnotic Eye, The Crawling Hand, and of course Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Her very presence in a starring part guarantees a certain sleazy splendor, and Disembodied offers one of her best(?) roles as a part-time voodoo queen, slinking about in silky dresses, high heels and/or animal skins as she falls for a passing wildlife photographer (Paul Burke) and decides he’d be perfectly cast in her road-show production of Double Indemnity when tribal magic proves ineffectual in killing her husband.

   It seems Allison moonlights (again, literally) as the local Voodoo Priestess, and when Burke shows up with a dying buddy in tow, she saves the man’s life by cutting the heart out of one of her worshippers—some religions are just harsher than others, I guess, but it makes me glad I was raised United Brethren.

   Anyway, the voodoo magic saves the man’s life but it has the deleterious side-effect of turning him into a zombie, possessed by the dead native’s spirit. And I’m afraid that’s all the Monster we get for this picture.

   Director Walter Grauman is no Edward L. Cahn, either. Where Cahn moves through Voodoo Woman with commendable speed, Grauman lets Disembodied bog itself down in long stretches of needless dialogue, courtesy of writer Jack Townley, who spent much of his career writing for Gene Autry and the Bowery Boys. In their hands, Ms Hayes’ alluringly repellant screen presence goes for very little, and the surprising thing is that she manages to radiate so much energy and still not be the least bit convincing.

   So on points, I’d have to award the Oscar in the fakey-jungle-monster-movies category to Voodoo Woman, but for lovers of awful movies, both films are required viewing.

Theme title: “Venice After Dark.” From the compilation CD Mission: Impossible … And More!

BRETT HALLIDAY – What Really Happened. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1952. Paperback reprints include: Dell #768, 1954; Dell D381, October 1960 (Robert McGinnis cover, seen to right). Dell 9458, July 1963.

   I don’t usually read two books by the same author back to back, but I’d just finished Marked for Murder (reviewed here ), I’d enjoyed it, this was stored in the same box, and I was about to take a plane trip to Michigan, so why not?

   This one was almost as good as as the earlier one (seven years earlier, from Mr. Halliday’s perspective) and in some ways better. In one way, a rather distinct one, I enjoyed Marked for Murder more.

   Better — by which I mean more complicated, in a good way! — was the plot, not a better by a huge margin, but the puzzle aspect was what found fascinating. Private eye Mike Shayne (back in Miami) gets a call from a woman named Wanda Weatherby who’s in near hysterics. She asks him to come over at midnight, that she had sent him a letter that he would receive in the morning, but she’s afraid someone is about to kill her, and she needs his help now.

   What’s interesting — you do know that when Shayne gets there, Wanda Weatherby is dead, don’t you? — is that one by one, Shayne meets several people who have been blackmailed by Wanda Weatherby have gotten letters telling them she is going to hire Shayne and that if she is murdered, Shayne should do his best to convict the recipient of the letter.

   Question is, which one did do the killing? I don’t know, maybe this description of the basic story line sounds silly, but Halliday does a great job convincing the reader that it all makes sense. Once again both the plotting and the telling remind me of Erle Stanley Gardner and both his Perry Mason and Bertha Cool-Donald Lam stories (the latter as by A. A. Fair) in terms of the way Shayne manipulates the evidence and manufactures his own, all in the interest of his client, a good friend of newspaper reporter Tim Rourke, fully recovered from his bullet injuries in Marked for Murder.

   That said, I’ve just realized that I can’t tell you what it was that I liked less about What Really Happened. In my review of Marked for Murder, I said “This one was fun to read, in a timeless sort of fashion…” and unfortunately this one’s definitely stuck in the 1950s. It isn’t a big deal, since I read many other books that are stuck in the 50s all the time. It’s only in comparison with Marked for Murder that I bring it up at all.

From Judy Collins’ CD Judith, the title taken by songwriter Jimmy Webb from the SF novel by Robert A. Heinlein:

BART SPICER – Blues for the Prince. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1950. Detective Book Club, hardcover reprint, 3-in-1 edition. Bantam #934, paperback, 1951.

   This is apparently the second case for private-eye Carney Wilde. When The Prince — Harold Morton Prince — jazz pianist, about sixth best in the country, and composer apparently without peer, is murdered, Wilde is called in to investigate the claim of The Prince’s accused murderer that he, not Prince, had composed most of the music Prince took credit for, particularly “Red Devil Blue,” and the folk operetta Sunset in Harlem.

   An admirer of The Prince and also a jazz enthusiast, Wilde takes a personal interest in the case since he doesn’t want The Prince’s reputation besmirched. Too much of an interest, it turns out, as he proves that the accused couldn’t have committed the murder.

   A good but not a particularly great case. Still, it has an interesting background. The Prince, his family, Wilde’s client, and other characters are black. Philadelphia in the late ’40s, as was true of most other places, was not a pleasant city if you were black. With music, though, there was no race barrier, nor apparently any race recognition.

       The Carney Wilde series —

The Dark Light. Dodd, 1949.
Blues for the Prince. Dodd, 1950.
Black Sheep, Run. Dodd, 1951.

The Golden Door. Dodd, 1951.
The Long Green. Dodd, 1952.
The Taming of Carney Wilde. Dodd, 1954.

Exit, Running. Dodd, 1959.