CHARLES WILLIAMS – The Hot Spot. Vintage/Black Lizard, softcover, 1990. Originally published as Hell Hath No Fury: Gold Medal #286, paperback original, February 1953. Film: Orion, 1990 (starring Don Johnson, Virginia Madsen and Jennifer Connelly).

   If asked to pick an archetypal roman noir from the 1950’s you could probably do a lot worse than The Hot Spot. Average-ish guy moves into average-ish small town, where an opportunity for a bank heist proves too tempting to resist.

   Charles Williams makes a case for being a storyteller on par with the best of his era (Willeford, Thompson, or my benchmark John D. MacDonald): the novel is fast and lean, and filled with noir nuggets such as “When you break the law you can forget about playing the averages because you have to win all the time.”

   Of course The Hot Spot also features a good good-girl and a very bad bad-girl — the latter maybe one of the better femmes in pulp fiction: “I thought of a full and slightly bruised peach beginning to spoil a little. She was somewhere between luscious and full-bloom and in another year or so of getting all her exercise lying down and lifting the bottle she’d probably be blowzy.”

   Dolly Harshaw is a deadly piece of work who lives up to this novel’s original (and much better) title Hell Hath No Fury. Williams is a great writer, and I look forward to reading more of his work.

WILLIAM H. FIELDING – Take Me As I Am. Gold Medal #272, paperback original; 1st printing, November 1952.

   One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2015 is to read (or re-read) as many of my collection of old Gold Medal paperbacks as I can, primarily if not solely the crime and mystery ones. GM also printed westerns and general fiction, often with noirish themes and overtones, but I’ll concentrate on the crime novels that made their reputation, then (back in the 1950s) as well as now as the best source of true noir fiction on the planet.

   And obviously I’ll be reporting back here as I go. I think it will be one of my first-of-2015 promises to myself that I’ll keep.

   And Take Me As I Am is as tough and noirish as they come, and I’ll get to the story line in just a minute. But first I’d like to point out that William H. Fielding was the pen-name for Darwin L. Teilhet, who under his own name and often in collaboration with his wife Hildegarde wrote (among others) a series of Golden Age of Detection mysteries featuring a character called Baron von Kaz.

   I don’t know very much about their early books, but Doug Greene has this to say about them, in part: “…fair play detective novels of the 1930’s, sometimes with impossible crimes (The Ticking Terror Murders, Death Flies High, Murder In the Air) and generally with a Liberal social attitude — The Talking Sparrow Murders is strongly anti-Nazi at a time when too many people thought of the Nazis as merely German nationalists. Also noteworthy are four novels featuring the Baron Von Kaz.”

   Teilhet then turned to spy thrillers in the 1940s, and when the Gold Medal paperback revolution came along in the early 1950s, he apparently saw an opportunity there too and jumped on board. The other Fielding books in Hubin is The Unpossessed (GM #202, 1951), which I hope to get to sooner, if I can, rather than later. Not in Hubin is Beautiful Humbug (GM #430, 1954), which is about a notorious female swindler. It takes place in 1860s San Francisco, with one source describing it as historical fiction, but I have a feeling that it is true crime instead.

   Take Me As I Am starts out slowly, with a strong sense of déjà vu, one of those books that if you’ve read widely in the field of early noir fiction, you’re sure you’ve read before. Alma, a young blonde girl in her early 20s, is the getaway driver for a gang of mobsters in an armored car robbery that goes bad. Suddenly she finds herself on her own, driving a car with a suitcase in the back full of money, $100,000 worth, in fact.

   In desperation, looking for a way to drive through the roadblocks that have been set up in the area, she picks up a young hitchhiker named Bill Owens, four years younger than she and making his way to Sacramento for a job that he hopes is waiting for him there.

   It doesn’t happen immediately, but there is an attraction between the two that begins to grow. Standing between them, though, although he doesn’t know it, is the money. Alma is torn between the two: young Bill, whose wholesome naiveté is so appealing, or the $100,000 in cash.

   There are also plenty of twists ahead. I somehow lost track along the way, but there is more than a double-cross on the part of someone involved. It is instead a triple-cross and (gangsters being what they are) perhaps one beyond that. It takes a lot of coincidences to occur for all of the pieces together, but as in the best of Cornell Woolrich, Fielding makes us believe them at the time.

   Picking up momentum as it goes, the last 30 pages of Take Me As I Am can be read in one 15 minute gulp. The ending will please any fan of noir fiction, I guarantee it.

TUAREG: THE DESERT WARRIOR. Aspa Producciones Cinematográficas, Italy, 1984. Original title: Tuareg – Il guerriero del deserto. Mark Harmon, Luis Prendes, Ritza Brown, Paolo Malco, Aldo Sambrell, Ennio Girolami, Antonio Sabato. Based on the novel Tuareg by Alberto Vázquez Figueroa. Director: Enzo G. Castellari.

   Tuareg: The Desert Warrior is a movie about lines, literal and metaphorical, in the sand. Directed by Enzo G. Castellari (Keoma), the action-adventure film stars Mark Harmon (NCIS) as Gacel Sayah. He’s a North African nomadic tribesman steadfastly clinging to a pre-modern code of honor in the modern age. The viewer is expected to empathize with Sayah, all the while cognizant of the disastrous results that inevitably follow from his stubbornness and refusal to bow to the conventions of the post-colonial era.

   The movie benefits from good pacing and a quite good performance by Harmon, who seems to be taking the role seriously. Tuareg: The Desert Warrior doesn’t play it light; in many ways, it’s a quite bleak, often times graphically violent film. And if you can get over the fact that the future Jethro Gibbs is portraying an Arab tribesman, it’s a pretty darn good action flic with some seriously great “Rambo moments,” if you know what I mean.

   The action begins when two bedraggled men stumble into Sayah’s desert encampment. Sayah doesn’t much care who they are or where they came from. Believing deeply that hospitality is a cardinal virtue in the scorching hot desert, he considers these men to be his guests and hence, under his protection. So it’s not surprising that he refuses to turn these men over to the Arab soldiers when they show up in his camp.

   Sayah is, in his heart and mind, beholden to the law of the desert, where hospitality demands certain actions be taken by a host to protect his guests. When the soldiers kill one of the men and haul away another as a prisoner, Sayah is determined to uphold the law of hospitality, no matter the tragic consequences to him and to his family.

   As it turns out, his former guest, the man who he seeks to free from imprisonment in a desert fortress, is no ordinary man. He is the deposed president of the newly independent North African nation in which Sayah lives. Of course, desert nomad that he is, Sayah doesn’t really believe in those types of lines in the sand.

   An Italian-Spanish (and Israeli?) co-production, Tuareg: The Desert Warrior is replete with political subtexts. The issues of national unification, colonialism and independence, and political corruption are very much present. Sayah tells one of the Arab soldiers sent to capture him: “I do not understand a government that breaks the law, and then wants to punish me for it. It is stupid!” Contemporary Italian audiences may have appreciated that line quite a bit, but I have a feeling that a lot of people might appreciate it even more today.

   There’s something quite anarchic, even subversive, about Harmon’s character. Sayah is a man truly apart, often completely ignorant about the ways of the world. And as the stunning – shocking, really – ending demonstrates, sometimes being true to one’s code of honor has a way of backfiring.

   I didn’t see the ending coming. Which is perhaps one reason why I’d recommend you take a look at this movie. It’s not the greatest 1980s action film. Not by a long shot, but for what it is, it is pretty good celluloid escapism. But you’re going to have to get used to seeing Mark Harmon dressed as a desert nomad.

UMBERTO ECO – The Prague Cemetery. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, US, hardcover, November 2011. First published: October 2010. Translated by Richard Dixon.

   â€œIf I have become French, it is only because I couldn’t bear being Italian.”

   I warn you this is not an easy book and when you know its subject, many of you may choose not to read it. If you appreciate literate, witty, and brilliant writing though, you should. It is one of the best books I’ve read in years once I recognized where Eco was going. That he pulls off the tightwire act that this book is will be reason enough to read it.

   The quote above is the voice of the narrator of Umberto Eco’s novel The Prague Cemetery, Captain Simone Simoini, the grandson of the actual historical figure Captain Simonini. Simone is our narrator, or one of them, and a worse human being is hard to imagine. Racist, jingoist, police spy, terrorist (19th Century style), propagandist, plagiarist …. keep that last in mind, because that last little skill will define Simone Simonini as one of the worst men whoever lived.

   The Prague Cemetery sweeps across 19th Century Europe from the revolutionary period of the late 1840‘s (1848 the key year) to 1895 with the turn of the century in view. Through it we follow Simone into every back corner, byway, narrow alley, and cordite-smelling conspiracy of that conspiratorial age, with a small army of historical figures such as his grandfather, Garibaldi, Leo Taxil, Serge Nilus, an alienist he insists on calling Froide who convinces him to reveal his story…

   Some of those names may not be familiar, but they would be if you knew the history of conspiracy in that era. All the while he is shadowed and haunted by the mysterious young Jesuit priest Abbe Dalla Picola, who shares the narration of the story and the author’s prejudices including his hatred and fear of women.

   It is a world of violence and lies. Italian freedom fighters allegedly strangle priests with their own intestines, the Freemasons plot against everyone and the Jesuits plot against them (“Jesuits are Mason’s dressed like women”), French anarchists plant bombs and celebrate blasphemous Black Mass while the turbulent history of Italian unification, the Paris Commune, and the Dreyfuss affair play their role.

   All through this the paranoid, backstabbing Simone wiggles like a serpent his sting along a trail of lies, half truths, and sheer hatred of everyone and every thing. He is a maestro of invective, hatred, vitriol , and paranoia and everything is clouded by the secret services of myriad European countries all conspiring and coming to believe their own lies.

   Eco, a leading semiotician, philosopher, and medievalist among other things, burst on the best seller scene with The Name of the Rose and has visited often since. His books are always literate and often informed by his considerable sense of humor. That wit and humor are the saving grace of this book.

   This is a very funny book — black humor, but funny. At some point the narrator’s invective takes on an almost Marxian (Groucho, not Karl) air as he lies, cheats, spies, betrays, murders, and schemes his way through a conspiratorial whirl that makes modern talk radio sound tame. The book would be surreal at times if it wasn’t all unfortunately based on facts.

   And at the heart of this novel is one of the greatest lies ever fostered on humanity, one that is still believed by prejudiced fools all over the world today, appropriately a scene plagiarized from socialist feuillitonist Eugene Sue’s massive Mysteries of the People (Sue is identified as the narrator’s favorite writer.)

   In Sue’s novel the scene describes a meeting in a cemetery of Jesuit conspirators (Sue distrusted and loathed the Jesuits) in the hands of our plagiarist narrator the cemetery is the one in Prague and the conspiracy nothing less than The Protocols of Zion, and it is not a chapter in a novel, but presented as an actual event witnessed by the author (Serge Nilus who first published the Protocols claimed to have been given them by a friend who witnessed the event, the basis for Eco to spin his tale).

   Simone Simonini for the purposes of this book is no one less than the author of one of the most influential lies ever told, one with an almost direct link to one of the greatest crimes ever committed. A more unlikely protagonist is hard to imagine, but he and his story compel you to turn the page.

   Eco brings this world to life with almost magical skill, exploring all those dark byways of the soul with what one review in the Chicago Tribune rightly called “voluptuous abandon.” It is a cautionary tale for our world of undigested news, rumor, and innuendo, a reminder that information age or not the world has always embraced the great lie with the same zeal it does today. That Eco at times manages to also thrill, horrify, and be laugh out loud funny while revealing those lies is a wonder in itself.

   â€œA German produces on the average twice the feces of a Frenchman.”

   â€œWith Germans, as with women, one never gets to the point.”

   â€œNo one is as rude as a French innkeeper.”

   â€œThe Frenchman doesn’t know what he wants, he only knows he doesn’t want what he has.”

   â€œThe Italian is an untrustworthy, lying, contemptible traitor, himself more at ease with dagger than a sword, better with poison than medicine, a slippery bargainer, consistent only with changing sides in the wind…”

   I should point out Eco is Italian.

   On the Masons: “They are like the Jesuits only more confused.”

   â€œI hate women, what little I know of them.”

   On the brasseries of Paris and their patrons: “They are inverts looking for perverts of either sex…”

   â€œCivilization will never reach perfection until the last stone of the last church has fallen …”

   Priests: “They are idle and belong to a class as dangerous as thieves and vagrants …”

   â€œI would say religion is also the cocaine of the people…”

   â€œWe do not know whether animal spirit and genital fluid are the same thing …”

   â€œSomeone said that women are just a substitute for the solitary vice, only you need more imagination.”

   That all literally from Chapter 1.

   As Eco points out in a brief afterward, Simone is a collection of different people, a convenience for the writer, and as he concludes, “still among us.” There is also a mystery or two and a revelation that may catch you completely off guard that Simone never quite manages to put together. At times you can almost hear the real author of the Protocols chuckling as he spins his murderous lies, even to himself.

   This is a powerful work for all the smiles at its excess. It is impossible to read without the images we are all familiar with of where The Protocols lead, not alone, but with its words scribbled in venom and blood. That this novel can be read as entertainment and at the same time a serious statement about hate and lies is one of the reasons to admire and praise Eco’s talents.

   As an added bonus the books is filled with illustrations from the age though not as colorful as those from Eco’s earlier novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Lorna.

   I warn you, this is not for everyone, and I understand why anyone might choose not to read it (it is also nearly 500 pages of small type), but if you do, if you take it as it was written, why it was written, what it has to say to us now and about us then I think you too will find it a remarkable novel despite the difficult subject and the protagonist.

   It’s a very funny book about what may be the bloodiest lie ever told, a deadly serious study in paranoia and hateful speech that will have you smiling, and a fascinating journey through the very heart of the conspiratorial urge in man.

GRAND JURY. Syndicated, 1959-60. Desilu Productions in association with National Telefilm Associates, Inc. / NTA Release. Cast: Lyle Bettger as Harry Driscoll, Harold J. Stone as John Kennedy, Douglas Dumbrille as Thomas Grant and Richard Travis as Bill Thompson. Created and produced by Mort Briskin.

   With Grand Juries in the news I thought it might be interesting to check out the forgotten TV series Grand Jury. A full-page ad for the syndicated series in Broadcasting (November 9,1959), Grand Jury was described as “…the new, exciting television, half-hour series…” and “This big-budget show offers the added prestige of “Public Service” program identification…” (Yes, the entire ad was that badly written.)

   The series featured two investigators for the Grand Jury. This allowed Harry Driscoll and John Kennedy to deal with all forms of crime. Other regulars featured the head of the Grand Jury, Thomas Grant and the Grand Jury lawyer, Bill Thompson. This was a typical syndicated crime drama of the era with simple plots, characters with little to no depth, humorless dialog, and stilted acting. While Desilu spent the money on sets and larger than usual guest cast, it never overcame the usual dull no surprises dramatic story problems of fifties TV half-hour crime dramas.

“Condemned.” (Title according to IMdb.) (1960) Written by Don Martin. Directed by Lee Sholem. Guest Cast: Wendell Holmes, Jack Orrison and Cindy Robbins. *** Investigators Driscoll and Kennedy hunt for the cause of a recent tenement fire that took twenty innocent lives.

   The sets are impressive and more interesting than many of the characters or actors. Together our heroes, bland and interchangeable Driscoll and Kennedy use standard police procedures and the villain’s stupidity to uncover the truth so the Grand Jury could bring those responsible for the fire to justice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtkuuM466oY

   The history of Grand Jury is not a simple one. According to Broadcasting (December 8, 1958) Desilu Productions had completed the pilot for Grand Jury six months before and it had nearly sold. But the buyer insisted on airing the series opposite of Desilu Theatre on CBS so Desilu turned the buyer down. The project was now back filming, but for only four episodes with hopes of selling it to a network as a January replacement series.

   March 31, 1959 issue of Broadcasting reported Grand Jury theme written by Ray Ellis would be released by MGM as a recording. This indicates the series was on the air, so January 1959 is the series most likely premiere date. It is also likely there was no interest from the networks for Grand Jury, as the series ended up syndicated through National Telefilm Associates.

   When Desilu announced its TV series lineup for the fall 1960-61 Season it included eighteen series one of which was Grand Jury (Broadcasting, May 23 1960). But soon Desilu would begin to have problems with NTA.

   The February 13, 1961 issue of Broadcasting reported that SAG (Screen Actors Guild) was pressuring Desilu to do something about the late residual payments from NTA for six series, Grand Jury, U. S. Marshall, Sheriff of Cochise, This Is Alice, Walter Winchell File and Official Detective.

   Broadcasting (May 1, 1961) reported the two companies had settled their differences. Distributor NTA agreed to buy the six Desilu produced series that had SAG residual problems. Grand Jury would end with 39 episodes completed and part of NTA syndication library.

   Several episodes are on YouTube at the moment. Two warnings – many of the episodes show up under more than one title (the episode above can be found as both “Episode 10” and “Episode 22”), and someone has copied the episodes and added them to its YouTube Channel. Those copies were done at the wrong speed so the voices are at a comically high pitch.

RAOUL WHITFIELD – The Virgin Kills. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1932. Quill, paperback, 1985. Apparently did not appear first in a pulp magazine. Currently available in ebook form.

   If you’ve never read the book, right now you probably have the same wrong-headed idea of what the title means as I did when I picked it up, not long ago. The Virgin is a boat; a yacht, to be precise. A murder is committed on board. The victim is the owner, a gambler named Vennell.

   And even before that another murder has taken place. The leading oarsman of the California shell is somehow poisoned, and he collapses just before the finish of the big Hudson River collegiate regatta. That California loses as a direct result has obviously a great deal to do with the plot.

   Vennell had just as obviously been expecting trouble, however. Along with the many society guests he has on board, he also has a newly-acquired bodyguard, a hard-boiled hoodlum by the name of O’Rourke. As a not-always-successful interface between the slick set and the underworld from which he clearly comes, Nick O’Rourke is the object of some amusement and conjecture. He is probably the best developed character in the book.

   The repartee is dated and, mired in subtleties no longer operative, it no longer has the bite it might once have had. The pace picks up considerably after the murders occur, and we have a full-fledged detective novel on our hands. Even though the story is complexly motivated, I might warn you that the obvious person did it.

   Note that that doesn’t mean that you’ll catch on at all, any more than I did!

Rating: B

   In the latter part of what is now last year, three women died, all of them in their nineties. Two were well-known mystery writers, the third was married to one of the best-known mystery writers of all time. Her name had been Rose Koppel, and she had been widowed for less than a year when she was invited to attend a New Year’s Eve party in Larchmont, New York and introduced to the only unattached man at the gathering, a man in his late sixties named Frederic Dannay whose spouse had also died recently.

   Something clicked between them and they began dating immediately. It was only somewhat later in their courtship that he told her that he was better known under the pen name of Ellery Queen. They were married in November 1975 at New York’s Plaza Hotel, although the marriage almost had to be postponed when the rabbi scheduled to perform the ceremony suddenly died of a heart attack.

   It’s not going too far to say that Rose saved Fred’s life. Fred and his cousin and collaborator Manfred B. Lee (1905-1971) had been fabulously successful writing as and about Ellery Queen, but Fred’s life had been far from a happy one. In 1940 he had been driving to Long Island to visit his mother when a car without lights and driven by a drunk, who turned out to be an AWOL serviceman without a license or insurance, hit his Buick head-on, leaving it unrecognizable.

   Fred had been so seriously injured that Walter Winchell on his national news program actually announced him as dead, and he had to spent months in the hospital recovering. That was a picnic compared to what happened next. In 1945 Fred’s first wife died of cancer, leaving him with two small children to raise. He married again a few years later and he and his second wife had a son who was born with brain damage and died at age six. In the early 1970s that wife also died of cancer. Fred began dating a woman he had known for a long time, and she too was diagnosed with cancer.

   Look at the photograph of him, taken around this time, that you’ll find on page 162 of my book Ellery Queen: The Art of Detection. Doesn’t he look like a character created by Cornell Woolrich, like a man without hope, waiting for the merciful release of death? Is it any wonder that when he and Rose met she found him so depressing and humorless? “I had never imagined such devastating loneliness,” she said. That is what Rose saved him from. Their marriage endured until his death, over the Labor Day weekend of 1982, at age 76.

   After they were married Fred and Rose seemed to be always together, and it was a rare occasion when I saw him without her at his side. She had been living in an apartment on 72nd Street in New York City since the early 1950s and insisted on keeping it after marrying Fred, a wise decision since it gave them a place to stay when they came into town for dinner or an MWA function or a show.

   She returned there after Fred’s death. On December 6 of 2014 she joined him. “Her death was quick and as painless as possible,” her daughter told me, “and my brother was there when she died… I was so lucky to have had a mother who could still recognize me and communicate with me and tell me she loved me every time we talked on the phone or saw each other.”

   Her memories of Fred did not die with her. Her account of My Life with a Man of Mystery (2010) includes a great deal of fascinating material on their meeting and courtship, their married life, their trips to California and Japan and Israel and Sweden, and his last days and death.

   I was there for a few of the events she describes, like the banquet at New York’s Lotos Club celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first Ellery Queen novel (The Roman Hat Mystery; 1929), and the occasion when Fred was awarded an honorary Ph.D., but for many of them her account is the only one we’re going to have.

   Clearly she misunderstood or misremembered a few things Fred told her, giving his best-known mystery anthology the title 101 Years of Entertainment, conflating a landmark EQMM story set in the black ghetto (Hughes Allison’s “Corollary,” July 1948) with another landmark story about all but openly gay characters (Philip MacDonald’s “Love Lies Bleeding,” November 1950) and telling us that the tale was published in 1943.

   But to most of what she describes Rose was a witness, and no one who loves Ellery Queen will want to miss her testimony. Her book doesn’t seem to be available on Amazon.com, but anyone interested in purchasing a copy should get in touch with Rose’s daughter, Dale Koppel. I’d prefer not to post her email address here, but leave a comment or contact Steve directly, and he’ll send it on to you.

   Of the two women mystery writers whose deaths occurred in the second half of last year, the one who died more recently was P.D. James, to whom I said goodbye in my December column. I didn’t find out until too late for that column that another of the great women of the genre, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, had died back in August at age 97.

   I didn’t know Dorothy well but had read her novels and stories with great pleasure, and both of us were among the speakers at the centenary symposium honoring the births of Fred Dannay and Manny Lee that was held at Columbia University in 2005. The last time I saw her was on a boat in the Hudson River, the site of an elegant MWA cocktail party which, in her late eighties or early nineties, she had driven from her home in Sneden’s Landing on the Palisades to attend. She and I and Ed Hoch and his wife sat together.

   Her most successful and perhaps finest novel was her third, A Gentle Murderer (1951). Late in life she told an interviewer that the idea for the book came to her when she noticed a man on the New York subway:

   A few months later A Gentle Murderer was finished. Interspersed with her novels were 20-odd short stories, most of them first published in EQMM and collected in Tales for a Stormy Night (1984). Apparently her last work of fiction was the 2007 short story “Dies Irae.”

   She had had to move to an assisted living facility about three years before her death but even after falling and breaking her hip she seemed to be doing reasonably well considering that she wasn’t that far from her own centenary.

   The lights go out, the lives go out. A new year begins. How many more?

BILL S. BALLINGER – The Chinese Mask. Signet D2715, paperback original; 1st printing, June 1965.

   Bill S. Ballinger wrote some thirty mystery, suspense, and espionage novels (as well as two films and over 150 teleplays) during his thirty-year career, many with unusual plots and construction. His first two novels feature private eye Barr Breed; his only other series character, hero of five paperback originals published during 1965 and 1966, is CIA agent Joaquin Hawks — multilingual, half Spanish and half Nez Perce Indian, and virile as they come.

   All five of the Hawks novels are set in the exotic Far East, in such locales as Communist China, Bangkok, Saigon, Angkor Wat, Laos, and Indonesia. They are as much spirited adventure stories as espionage novels, with graphically depicted backgrounds and plenty of harrowing jungle chases and narrow escapes.

   In The Chinese Mask, the first of the series, Hawks is assigned to rescue three Western scientists, all of whom have been working on a “psycho-gas that can paralyze the will and nerve of entire armies” and all of whom have been kidnapped from Berlin by the Red Chinese. Hawks crosses the Bamboo Curtain disguised as a member of a traveling Russian circus troop, infiltrates the headquarters of the Red Chinese Army in Peking, and eventually plucks the scientists out of an ” impenetrable” prison fortress and leads them to safety — all in clever and exciting fashion.

   This and the other four Hawks novels — The Spy in Bangkok (1965), The Spy in the Jungle (1965), The Spy at Angkor Wat (1966), and The Spy in the Java Sea (1966) are enjoyable escapist reading and, in the bargain, offer accurate political, sociologic, and geographic portraits of their various locales in the mid-1960s.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE DIVORCE. 20th Century Fox, 1942. Lynn Bari, Mary Beth Hughes, Joseph Allen Jr., Nils Asther, Truman Bradley, Kay Linaker, Lyle Latell. Director: Robert Siodmak.

   There are some funny moments in this not-so-funny film, it is true, but not too many. What makes the movie worth watching, though, is any moment that Lynn Bari is on the screen. At least in my opinion, and since she is the leading lady, she is on the screen quite often, a stunning brunette with lots of close-ups.

   Mary Beth Hughes, a blonde bombshell whose whispery come-hither voice will remind you of Marilyn Monroe, even before the latter ever dreamed of making a movie, is second-billed, but if Lynn Bari never became a star, not of the household name variety, so alas did not Mary Beth Hughes.

   The idea behind this film is that in many a marriage (1940s style) the man of the house would resent it if the woman of the family is more competent than he in almost everything. To George Nordyke (Joseph Allen) the final straw comes when his wife Lynn (Bari) has a lower golf score than he has ever manged to have, and she has only started to learn the game, while he has been playing for years.

   Trying to nab him on the rebound, even before the divorce is final, is Lola May (guess who?), who is more than willing to play weak and dependent. To tie this in more solidy with the purported purpose of this blog, Lynn’s new would-be boy friend is bumped off, and to get George back (though I’m not exactly sure why), she takes the blame and lets George help her out of the jam.

   Not exactly the funniest premise in the world, but perhaps it fared better back in the early 40s. Even back then, though, I’m willing to wager that this movie came and went without making much of a fuss.

DOROTHY SIMPSON – The Night She Died. Scribner’s, hardcover, 1981. Bantam, paperback, 1985. Poisoned Pen Press, trade paperback, 1998, First published in the UK by Michael Joseph, hardcover, 1981.

   In the world of crime fiction, there seems to be an unwritten law that a new private eye has to have a gimmick, a little quirk of behavior, perhaps, that will help him (or her) stand out from all the others. There is a similar theory for policemen, and it holds that because of the nature of their job, they need humanizing: a loving family, perhaps. Teething babies. Bad backs.

   Inspector Thanet is lucky. He has all three.

   His current case involves a murdered woman. Who killed her? Her husband, with whom she was seeing a marriage counselor? Her thwarted, amorous boss? The determined ex-suitor?

   Thanet’s investigation also takes him back into the past, over his sergeant’s objections, to dig up an unsolved murder the victim may have witnessed as a child. The problem is that looking into this old case is as dry and uninteresting as poking around in a pile of dusty bones, and it’d be awfully easy to give the story up as routine right here.

   And this you shouldn’t do, as Simpson has a terrific surprise in store for the persevering reader who sticks it out to the end. I suspect there’ll be a good many people who’ll never reach it. Exquisitely plotted, and ploddingly told — a sad combination.

   
      The Inspector Thanet series —

1. The Night She Died (1981)
2. Six Feet Under (1982)
3. Puppet for a Corpse (1983)
4. Close Her Eyes (1984)
5. Last Seen Alive (1985)
6. Dead On Arrival (1986)

   
7. Element of Doubt (1987)
8. Suspicious Death (1988)
9. Dead By Morning (1989)
10. Doomed to Die (1991)

   
11. Wake the Dead (1992)
12. No Laughing Matter (1993)
13. A Day for Dying (1995)

   
14. Once Too Often (1998)
15. Dead and Gone (1999)