Rhiannon Giddens is the lead singer of the Grammy-winning old-time country and blues band, the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Here is the title track of her first solo CD:

BRUCE HAMILTON – Hanging Judge. Harper & Brothers, hardcover, 1948. Hillman #15, paperback, 1949. First published in the UK as Let Him Have Judgment: The Cresset Press, hardcover, 1948. Also: Pocket B-29, UK, paperback, 1950. Stage play: “The Hanging Judge” (the only play ever written by actor Raymond Massey; produced and directed in the UK by film director Michael Powell). Radio play: “The Hanging Judge” on The Play of His Choice, UK, December 1953, starring Boris Karloff. TV adaptation: “The Hanging Judge,” a second season episode of Climax! (CBS, 12 January 1956; director: John Frankenheimer).

   One of the great pleasures of attending PulpFest is pawing through the cheap-o boxes and coming across something you never heard of that piques your interest; maybe it’s the cover or blurb or just the title, but you say, “Aww what the hell, why not?”

   Then when you get around to reading it, you discover something really fine ….

   Hanging Judge opens in England, sometime around 1936 with young Harry Gosling about to be hanged for a crime he didn’t commit. On the eve of his execution, Sir Francis Brittain, the judge whose damning summary to the jury ensured Gosling’s conviction, delivers a smug after-dinner speech to the effect that the British system of justice is perfectly infallible. And on the morning of Gosling’s execution, Brittain enjoys a good breakfast and goes back to the bench to spew out more self-righteous venom, a satisfied man

   But Harry has managed to smuggle a letter out of prison, and shortly thereafter a man calling himself Teal shows up in London looking for Judge Brittain — too late, it seems because Brittain has just left for a few weeks holiday in the quaint little sea coast village of Moxton.

   At this point Hanging Judge turns into a Cozy mystery, with a cast of colorful village folk and a redoubtable local constable. Teal shows up here, but instead of looking for Judge Brittain, he seems more interested in another visitor there named Willoughby. Willoughby has an unsavory reputation thereabouts, but he’s a frequent if irregular resident, apparently a man of some importance, and part of the local scene. So when Teal goes to visit him one evening and never returns, suspicions arise.

   Still in the Village Cozy mode, author Hamilton limns an engrossing tale of investigation and growing suspicion, as the local constabulary find their efforts blocked by class distinctions — a theme prominent in the works of Anne Perry — mainly Willoughby’s aristocratic equivalent of get-the-hell-off-my-lawn. Then Willoughby himself disappears, and it dawns on the townsfolk that no one knew anything about him — including where to find him when Teal’s body turns up in his well.

   Right about here Hanging Judge shifts gears and becomes something of a political thriller as the wanted man (who is not Willoughby!) and various interested parties use their considerable influence to see that he evades justice, first by a rigged inquest and then with an absorbing escape attempt.

   At which point we shift gears yet again, as the book becomes a tense courtroom drama, a sort of quickie equivalent of Anatomy of a Murder as arguments and rebuttals fly about the courtroom and the jury sways this was, then that, culminating in an ironic and highly satisfying conclusion.

   I have to say that shortly after I closed this book with a satisfied smile, it struck me that the whole thing hinged on a couple of coincidences that it seemed the author went a long way to fetch back. But he did such a fine job of papering over them that I barely noticed at the time, and even on reflection they didn’t dampen my enjoyment a bit.

Editorial Note:   There is a quote from Erle Stanley Gardner on the front cover of the Hillman paperback. In case it is too small to make out, he says: “This book is in my opinion a mystery masterpiece.”

Colleen Green is a “DIY grunge-popper” from Boston, whatever that means. “Taxi Driver” is a song from her CD Sock-It-to-Me.

DRUMS ACROSS THE RIVER. Universal International, 1954. Audie Murphy, Walter Brennan, Lyle Bettger, Lisa Gaye, Hugh O’Brian, Mara Corday, Jay Silverheels, Regis Toomey, Morris Ankrum, Bob Steele. Story & screenplay: John K. Butler. Director: Nathan Juran.

   If you’re looking for a Western of economical running time that nevertheless manages to squeeze in a many of the genre’s most durable tropes, look no further than the little known Drums Across the River. You’ve got a father-son conflict; scheming bad men, working at the behest of big city folks, trying to stir up a race war between Whites and Indians; a town filled with people eager for quick and swift justice; a man bitter at the Indians, blaming them for the death of his mother; and a plot to steal a safe.

   All in less than 80 minutes. But you know what, for the most part it works quite well.

   Directed by Nathan Juran, this surprisingly effective Universal-International movie stars war hero-turned-actor Audie Murphy as Gary Brannon, a man caught up in a scheme to illicitly access gold mines on Ute territory. Against the wishes of his father, Sam, portrayed effectively by character actor Walter Brennan, Gary (Murphy) sets out with Frank Walker (Lyle Bettger) and his gang to get the gold, as it were. Soon enough, he realizes that Walker may not be all that he seems.

   The rest of the film follows Gary as he tries to rebuild his relationship with his father, make peace with the Utes, and stop Walker’s men from inciting racial violence. Look for Hugh O’Brien as Morgan, a truly evil henchmen and killer that Walker hires to threaten Gary. With some beautiful cinematography and outdoor scenery, this one is worth seeking out.

40 GUNS TO APACHE PASS. Columbia Pictures, 1967. Audie Murphy, Michael Burns, Kenneth Tobey, Laraine Stephens, Robert Brubaker, Michael Blodgett, Michael Keep. Director: William Witney.

   Although he wasn’t nearly the screen presence as was Randolph Scott, war hero-turned-actor Audie Murphy, particularly in his later films, began to emerge as a more than capable actor to portray a flawed protagonist or an anti-hero.

   That’s certainly the case for 40 Guns to Apache Pass, Murphy’s final movie appearance. Directed by William Witney, this surprisingly effective and visually captivating Western has Murphy portraying U.S. Army Captain Bruce Coburn, a man with anger issues and an impossible mission: secure the shipment of 40 rifles before the Apaches attack and kill every last settler in southern Arizona.

   Filmed almost exclusively outdoors, this taut and gritty Western dispenses with many of the lighthearted moments that permeated many of Murphy’s 1950s films. It’s a bloody and dusty world out West, and Bruce Coburn is more than willing to beat and berate his men into submission. Not only does he make an enemy in one of his subordinates, a scheming Corporal Bodine (Kenneth Tobey), he also ends up driving a young man into the ranks of outlaws and traitors.

   It’s Coburn’s impetuousness and his inability to think through how his behavior affects his men that ends up causing him the greatest amount of distress. As such, 40 Guns to Apache Pass can well be categorized as a minor classic in the psychological Western genre, an otherwise little known film that is skillfully directed and, while not having the most original plot in the world, is nevertheless a pleasure to watch.

ANTHONY BERKELEY – Mr. Priestley’s Problem. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1930. Originally published as by A. B. Cox: Collins, UK, hardcover, 1927. Penguin, UK, paperback, 1948. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1928, as The Amateur Crime, as by A. B. Cox.

   Practical jokers are the bane of civilisation. Their only purpose seems to be to present a persuasive argument for retroactive abortion. Still, they are tolerable if confined in the pages of a novel, where no one real is likely to suffer from their untender ministrations. And in this novel it may be that the biter gets bit.

   Matthew Priestley, age 36 but seemingly a great deal older than that to his friends, is content with his Greek and Latin studies, his books, china and collection of snuffboxes. A friend argues that Priestley only thinks he’s happy, though if that is good enough for Priestley it should be good enough for anyone.

   In order to get Priestley out of his dull and stodgy ways, and also to do a psychological study of the reactions of a good man who inadvertently commits a murder, Priestley’s friend and some of the friend’s colleagues set up a drama in which Priestley seems to kill a man. Things, of course, go wrong for the plotters.

   The young lady who lures Priestley to the scene of the crime-to-be gets handcuffed to him by a constable who arrives quite unexpectedly after the fake murder. This young lady is the perfect example of the ‘modern girl’ of the 1920s. Everything is lots of fun as long as someone else is having problems; when she begins to be hoist by her own petard, she longs to return to the old standards.

   Meanwhile, the chaps who set up the fake murder find themselves confronted with a bit more than just the dim local constabulary. They appear to enjoy themselves as the situation becomes more complicated, but it is obvious that the strain is beginning to tell.

   The whole thing is, one hopes, totally preposterous, but it is also great fun, as long as one isn’t Priestley, and maybe even if one is. Suspend disbelief and enjoy Anthony Berkeley at his wildest, though arguably not at his best.

NOTE: Thanks to Geoff Bradley, editor and publisher of CADS magazine, for offering me the use of the reviews that Bill Deeck did for his magazine, an offer which I immediately accepted. This is the first of these. Along with Bill’s reviews from Janet Rudolph’s Mystery Readers’ Journal, you can expect to see his byline on this blog for some time to come. You can email Geoff for subscription information for CADS by clicking the link. (Tell him I sent you.)

From this country singer’s CD Welder, which ranked #23 on Rolling Stone‍‘​s list of the 30 Best Albums of 2010:

“The Monster of Peladon.” A serial of six episodes from Dr Who, BBC, UK, 23 March to 27 April 1974. (Season 11, Episodes 15-20). Jon Pertwee (Doctor Who), Elisabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith), Donald Gee, Nina Thomas, Frank, Rex Robinson, Alan Bennion. Writer: Brian Hayles. Script editor: Terrance Dicks. Director: Lennie Mayne.

   This six-episode sequel to “The Curse of Peladon” (Season Nine, 1972) takes place 50 years later, with the Doctor and Sarah Jane discovering that the planet Peladon’s decision to join the Galactic Federation is not going so well.

   The trisilicate miners are demanding better working conditions, but keeping them under their rulers’ thumb is a phantom replica of Aggedor, the royal beast, who starts appearing in the mines and using a heat ray to disintegrate rebellious miners. The politics of the situation are not only local. There are also intergalactic considerations at play as well, and the Doctor and Sarah Jane land the Tardis right in the middle of them.

   Not one of the better serials, I’m afraid. All of the action takes place in a underground rooms connected by dark torch-lit passageways, with a lot of fur-haired miners running back and forth (and probably in circles) to mostly no avail.

   Episodes two and three cover mostly the same ground and could easily have been combined into one. It isn’t until episode four, when Commander Azaxyr and a force of Ice Warriors come to take over the planet in the name of the Federation, that anything other the same old, same old happens.

   There is a surprise twist or two in the final two episodes that almost (but not quite) makes this serial stand out above the mediocre. There is a brief attempt by Sarah Jane to convince the Queen of Peladon that she should stand up more herself, but not too long afterward, the latter is dragged along as a hostage just as damsels in distress always did, long before women’s lib came along.

   It should be noted that Commander Azaxyr’s full-face helmeted and caped garb, along with his heavy breathing while talking, is unmistakably an early prototype of Darth Vader, well before the latter showed up in a totally different setting.

“Big Swing Face,” by the Buddy Rich Big Band, from the LP of the same name. Recorded live at the Chez Club, Hollywood, California, 1967. The CD released in 1996 has six additional tracks.

UPDATE: This new video, for as long as it stays up, should play directly, instead of diverting you to YouTube. It consists of the entire original LP, starting with “Norwegian Wood.”

  STEPHEN GREENLEAF – Death Bed. Dial Press, hardcover, 1980. Ballantine, paperback, 1982. Bantam Crimeline, paperback, 1991.

   If you’re a private eye fan and you haven’t yet discovered Stephen Greenleaf, then you’ve been missing one of the bright new names in the field. This is only his second book, and already, for all intents and purposes, he has the formula down to perfection.

   Greenleaf’s detective is an ex-lawyer named John Marshall Tanner. The scene is San Francisco, home of more private detectives per capita than any other city in the nation, Los Angeles notwithstanding. Tanner’s client is a rich man who is dying of cancer and who wants his alienated son found. Tanner is hired to find him.

   The son, however, is a leftover radical from the stormy Berkeley days of the sixties. He is also wanted by the police. The amount of money he would inherit is sizable, and naturally there are those who would also like their hands on it, which they would, were Tanner to fail.

   Tanner also has other irons in the fire. A crusading reporter who prefers to work incognito has come up missing, and the police are worried about an unknown underground organization rumored to be buying up all the guns and ammunition on the black market that they can. Tanner has to do some fancy footwork just to remember what case he’s working on at what time.

   I mentioned “formula” above. As any experienced PI enthusiast will immediately recognize, all these cases that Tanner finds himself working on are not separate, but one. As far as PI fans are concerned, however, the more complex the plot is, the happier they are, and Greenleaf has enough twists involved in this labyrinthine maze of conflicting emotions and desires to satisfy anyone’s cravings.

   The combination of mood and atmosphere is black: dark, ugly, and violent. The writing is solid — if anything, perhaps a little too solid. Take this passage from page 202, for example. It’s fairly typical:

   It’s a well-written, picturesque paragraph-sentence, but it’s not one entirely conducive to speed-reading. It runs — if you’ll forgive me — counter-commuter-wise to the flow of the story, if you see what I mean.

   All the ingredients of a successful private eye series are here. For my own part, I wish I didn’t have this underlying feeling that everything — what have you: the mood, the complex plot, the overly elaborate set of metaphors and similies — wasn’t just a trifle too calculated.

   Which is to say, if only I could get it into words, I continually felt as though I were being forced to admire all the great scenery going by — without ever being able to sit back and enjoy the ride.

Rating:   B plus.

NOTE:   This book was reviewed earlier on this blog by Marcia Muller. Check it out here.

CHAMBER OF HORRORS. Warners, 1966. Cesare Danova, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Laura Devon, Jeanette Nolan, Marie Windsor, Jose Rene Ruiz, Wayne Rogers, Patrick O’Neal. Written by Stephen Kandel and Ray Russell. Directed by Hy Averback.

   If you only watch one movie in your lifetime, it should be Chamber of Horrors.

   This gaudy comic-book of a film was originally conceived as the pilot for a projected TV series to be called House of Wax, with Cesare Danova and Wilfrid Hyde-White as co-owners of a Baltimore wax museum, circa 1900, who solve the grisly crimes on display in their emporium. When the result was judged a bit too intense for network TV, a few scenes were added and it was released as a feature film. Something similar happened in 1964 over at Universal with their updated version of The Killers, as the once-rigid line between big and small screen began to blur.

   The result in this case is hokey but fun, with an able cast and some dandy bits of business to delight the adolescent boy in all of us. Chamber offers splendid sets, lurid color and tricky camerawork to highlight the efforts of several perfectly-cast players: Cesare Danova fills his shirt neatly as the strapping hero, Wilfrid Hyde-White is his lovable old self as his partner-in-detection, Laura Devon (who would cap her brief career the next year in Blake Edwards’ Gunn) looks awfully good in a part with a bit of range, and Jose Rene Ruiz (billed here as Tun-Tun, his persona in several Mexican films) adds diversion as a diminutive helper. But the film really and truly belongs to Patrick O’Neal as a mad killer named Jason — think about it.

   Jason makes his entrance here forcing a preacher at gunpoint to marry him to a corpse, and from there on, things just get fruitier. Apprehended through the efforts of the Police (Wayne Rogers) and our team of amateur sleuths, he escapes from the train taking him to his execution by cutting off his own manacled hand and leaping from a bridge into a river where he is presumed drowned.

   But we know better, don’t we?

   We next see Jason with a leather apparatus attached to his arm in place of the missing extremity, being fitted by a sinister Oriental (Barry Kroeger, one of the slimiest bad guys of Hollywood’s noir days) with a variety of attachments to suit his sinister needs: hook, scalpel, cleaver, etc. and preparing to enact a baroque revenge on his erstwhile nemeses.

   Given a part like this, many actors would have been tempted to ham it up in the campy Batman style of the times, and O’Neal does give it a full-blooded (sorry) rendering in the classic Lugosi style, but he stops short of self-parody. When Jason has a victim in his clutches, O’Neal really seems to enjoy it:

         JUDGE: (Surprised) “But-but you’re dead!”

         JASON: “Yes. Won’t you join me?”

   … and when he celebrates his triumphs with a cigar, you can almost feel the nicotine rush. This is a movie villain in the classic style, one who enjoys evil for its own sake, and he approaches a fitting climax in a running battle through the wax museum as good-guy and bad-guy fight with prop spears, torches and battle axes, set against a background panoply of gruesome wax murders.

   In all, a film to savor, and I hope you do, but I should add that what they tacked on to turn this into a feature film is sort of absurd: the “Horror Horn” and the “Fear Flasher.”

   When Jason is just about to butcher another victim, a horn sounds and the screen flashes “So that the faint-hearted can look away or close your eyes” an announcer tells us in a prologue.

   Fine, except that there’s no gore and very little blood to be seen, and when the lights and noises come, it’s generally to presage a moment of almost tasteful metaphor: Jason swings his ax, the camera pans decorously away… and what was all the fuss about?

   Still and all it’s a harmless bit of fun in a film you shouldn’t miss.