GUN FEVER. United Artists, 1958. Mark Stevens, John Lupton, Larry Storch, Jana Davi, Russell Thorson, Iron Eyes Cody. Director & co-screenwriter: Mark Stevens.

   Back in 1958 “adult” TV westerns were all the rage — Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel and many others. And in many ways, that’s what I think Mark Stevens had in mind when he put so much effort into this movie: an “A” (for adult) western movie; what he also had was a “B” (for budget) expense account, and it shows.

   From the opening scenes on, however, this is one of the grimmer westerns I’ve seen in a while. The interior backgrounds, the homesteaders’ shacks and so on, all are stark and barren; outdoors it seems as though the wind in always blowing: with the incessant tumbleweeds and eternal sand in everyone’s faces, it makes you grit your teeth even to watch.

   Storywise, there’s not much to it. A young lad splits from his father’s gang when he decides the bloodletting has gotten too much for him. Six years later, he goes on a trail of revenge with his mining partner when the other man’s parents are brutally murdered — instigated by the outlaw he knows is his father. Confrontation is inevitable.

   Several other deaths occur along the way, most with guns, some with knives, some at the hands of Indians. Jana Davi, whom I don’t remember ever seeing before, plays an Indian married to a white man, a sympathetic role, but as a Native American Indian, I don’t think so. (And it did surprise me a but when I discovered that Larry Storch was the man behind the serapes of the Mexican bandit, Amigo.)

   Overall, though, no more than moderately interesting. The highlight for me was seeing at last (as far as I know) the man behind Russell Thorson’s voice. I’ve heard him many times on the radio, but while in 1958 he was quite a bit older than when he played the capable, easy-going Jack Packard on the old I Love a Mystery radio series, he still looked much as I’d pictured him.

[UPDATE] 01-14-14. From IMDb: “Maureen Hingert [aka Jana Davi] was born on 9th of January 1937 in Columbo, Ceylon, of Dutch ancestry, the daughter of Lionel Hingert and Lorna Mabel del Run.”

WARREN MURPHY – Dying Space. Pinnacle, paperback original, January 1982.

   Here is the forty-seventh in the continuing adventures of Remo Williams, aka “The Destroyer.” And right there this probably tells you all that you want to know about this book. Either you’ve bought and read it already, or you have absolutely no intention of doing either one. Go on to the next review.

   As for me, well, I’m somewhere in the middle. I think I have them all, but I also think I’ve read something like every seventeenth one. And only somebody who’s read them all could say for sure, but there must be hills and valleys, noticeable ups and downs within the series itself. So I don’t know, but I think this is a valley.

   For openers, this one has a lady astrophysicist with a yen for booze and Italian soccer teams. It has a mysterious, advanced computer of her own design, and somebody (something?) named Mr. Gordons, who is a deadly robot and an implacable enemy of Remo and his Korean mentor, Chiun. There is also, almost incidentally, a Russian plot to poison the moon.

   Apparently Mr. Gordons has been around before. He will also most assuredly be around again, as once again (WARNING: you may not want to know this ahead of time) he manages to escape total dismantlement and/or destruction.

   Otherwise, nothing much seems to happen.

   I laughed a lot, though. (To put that statement into proper perspective, I was supposed to.)

Rating:   C minus

PAT McGERR – Pick Your Victim. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1946. Dell #307, mapback, no date [1949]. Macfadden, paperback, 1970.

   An unusual mystery in that the murderer is known but the victim is not. Pete Robbins is in the Marines, stationed in the Aleutian Islands. In a package received by one of his friends is a partial clipping from a newspaper stating that Paul Stetson, managing director of SUDS — Society for the Uplift of Domestic Service — had strangled an executive of the company and had confessed to the murder.

   The clipping does not provide the victim’s identity. Robbins, who worked for SUDS before his induction in the service, relates the happenings at the company for his Marine friends so that they can have a lottery on which executive was murdered.

   The potential victims number ten. Each, from the history that Robbins relates, has given Stetson reason to kill him or her, even his best buddy from childhood.

   McGerr has done a fine job portraying the denizens of SUDS, some of whom are competent but all of whom have their own views of and goals for the organization. The characters’ flaws, the internecine battles, and the Washington politics are handled superbly. The mystery is a good one and well worth seeking out.

NOTE:   This book was previously reviewed on this blog by Marv Lachman. Check out his comments here. My own review of Follow As the Night includes a career perspective of the author, Pat McGerr.

VERNON HINKLE – Music to Murder By. Belmont Tower, paperback original, 1978. Leisure, paperback, later printing.

   A good friend sent me this mouldering paperback mystery, knowing of my fondness for mysteries with a classical music connection. And it begins with a discussion between two old friends of the performance of Ravel’s “Bolero” at a Boston Symphony concert they have just attended.

   I won’t pretend that this is a work for the ages, and the style is, at times, leaden, but the plot is neatly developed, concluding with a classical gathering together of all the suspects by the amateur detective who proceeds to pull the numerous threads together and reveal the murderer’s identity.

   The protagonist is a music librarian, a rather fussy bachelor who has a gift for puzzle solving and quickly succeeds in persuading the homicide detectives that he will be able to solve their case for them. This takes something of a stretch of the imagination, since it involves detective squads in both Boston and New York, and the librarian, one Martin Webb, conveniently is the first to arrive at both murder scenes, creating some question about his own involvement in the crimes.

   The characters include a somewhat comical Boston patrolman, a would-be novelist and his ex-wife and current girl friend, a YMCA desk clerk, and a gaggle of porn movie performers.

   Hinkle also published Murder After a Fashion (Leisure, 1986) and, writing as H. V. Elkin, a Western series. In an interview recorded in Contemporary Authors, Hinkle comments he regards “most fiction as mystery … in the sense that each piece … is a puzzle or a quest for unknown answers.”

   And that’s my Visit to the Dusty Archives for this session.

SOMEWHERE IN THE NIGHT. 20th Century Fox, 1946. John Hodiak, Nancy Guild, Lloyd Nolan, Richard Conte, Josephine Hutchinson, Fritz Kortner, Sheldon Leonard, Lou Nova, with Jeff Corey, Henry Morgan, Whit Bissell, and John Russell. Screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz & Howard Dimsdale; adapted by Lee Strasberg, based on a story by Marvin Borowsky. Directed by Joseph Mankiewicz.

   The Red Scare of the post war era kept this terrific noir film from 20th Century Fox off television and forgotten for years thanks to the blacklist, and even today it is one of the harder major noir outings to find and one better known by genre historians than film fans.

   That’s despite the fact this one has everything, including a private eye, a sympathetic cop, a nightclub chanteuse with a husky voice, an amoral fat man, his brutal henchman, a haunted woman with a failing mind, a sanitarium where a madman holds the clue to the mystery, and a hero with amnesia.

   Perhaps because none of the iconic noir actors (other than Conte and to a lesser extent Nolan) are in it, and because Mankiewicz is better known for films like Gentlemans’ Agreement and Letter to Three Wives than this one, it is less appreciated. It often seems to be a forgotten noir despite the fact it is an A production with an A cast. It also has a smart script with more twists than Agatha Christie and direction by one of Hollywood’s best (Joseph L. Mankiewicz).

   George Taylor (John Hodiak) fell on a grenade to save his buddies in the South Pacific and now he has amnesia, a new face, and more than a little paranoia about it, enough so he doesn’t let the Marines know he doesn’t know who he is. Back in the states and about to be released by the service he finds a letter to a man named Larry Cravat from an angry woman that leads him to Los Angeles to find Cravat, who may know who he is.

   Following Cravat’s trail isn’t as easy as he thinks though. No one seems to know Cravat or George Taylor, and when he discovers Cravat left him a bag in unclaimed luggage he finds a gun and shoulder holster and a note that Larry Cravat left $5,000 in a bank account for him.

   The trail leads to a club called the Cellar where a pair of thugs get on his trail and he meets chanteuse Chris (Nancy Guild) whose girl friend was the woman who wrote the letter to Cravat. When he is hijacked by the mysterious Anselmo (Fritz Kortner), who has him worked over trying to learn where Cravat is, he gets dumped on Chris doorstep because her address was in his pocket.

   Chris is a sucker for a sob story (“You’re tough as a love song.”), and calls in her charming boss Max Phillips (Richard Conte) who suggests Taylor talk to cop Lt. Kendall (Lloyd Nolan), a sympathetic homicide detective who hates the movie cliche of cops always having their hats on.

   From Kendall they learn Cravat was a small time private eye who somehow got involved in a scheme to launder two million dollars in Nazi loot. The loot and Cravat both disappeared three years earlier leaving a dead body, the Nazi trying to launder the money.

   There was another man with Cravat that night, and Taylor begins to suspect it was him — but which of them killed the mysterious Steel?

   Taylor finds there was a witness to the shooting, Conway, but he was the victim of a hit and run and went insane, and is now in a sanitarium where no one is allowed to see him. Taylor gets to him, but not before Conway is stabbed by a small bespectacled man who has been following Taylor.

   The twists and surprises are too good to ruin with even a spoiler warning, so I won’t go any farther with the plot. I will say there are fewer holes in the plot than most noir films, and the twists my well surprise you the first time you see it. Certainly there are at least two good red herrings that don’t pay off the way you expect, but they do pay off. You may well be suspecting a Third Man payoff and get something much different.

   One thing to note is that most of the characters are well developed, and far from the cliches you expect. Fritz Kortner’s Anselmo is a former big time crook making a last desperate bid for the big time, and resigned to the fact he probably won’t get the brass ring. He’s almost sympathetic, and his last line is delivered with a sort of sad irony and a resigned shrug (“The jig is up.”).

   Josephine Hutchinson has a good role as the witness sister who has wasted her youth and beauty on her sick father and seems to know Taylor when no one else does. Hodiak plays well in this scene, at once hopeful and compassionate.

   Conte proves a tough good-hearted sort, a far cry from his usual bad guys, and it’s only at the end you may recognize the Conte you know. Finally there’s Lloyd Nolan as Lt. Kendall, a cop with a brain and a heart, who lets the players act out the drama while he waits to sort out the survivors, but can’t help having his favorites. He has little screen time, but makes the most of it, and the running gag about his lack of a hat is all the funnier if you recall his Michael Shayne almost never shed his chapeau. Henry Morgan, Whit Bissell, Jeff Corey, and John Russell all have bits.

   Hodiak is very good as the haunted man who can trust no one, not even himself. He is much more victim than tough guy, paranoid with good reason, and not certain he really wants to know the truth even if it has $2 million tied to it.

   It’s a role that could easily be played over the top or as a cliche, but Hodiak is believable and sympathetic as a man uncertain if he wants to know the truth.

   Nancy Guild is doing a road-show Lauren Bacall, down to the hairdo, but she does it well, and makes a satisfying substitute for Bacall or Lisbeth Scott, well worth looking at, and playing a woman who is leading with her chin going to bat for a man who may not be as nice as he seems.

   It’s not a particularly good part and probably the least well written in the film, but she makes up for that by managing to embody her character with strength and intelligence, and a kind of understated teasing sexuality.

   Somewhere in the Night is a slick well done studio noir and well worth seeing if you have missed it.

   The film’s last line is Lt. Kendall’s and a good one:

JUDGE JOHN DEED. BBC, Series Three; 4 90 minute episodes: 27 November through 18 December 2003. Martin Shaw (Judge John Deed), Jenny Seagrove (Jo Mills), Barbara Thorn (Rita ‘Coop’ Cooper).

   You may remember (but if you live in the US, probably don’t) that Deed is a pompous and arrogant judge who is a thorn in the side of the establishment because he refuses to bow to pressure from anyone, especially the government advisers who attempt to get him to toe the line on government policy. (The writer, G. F. Newman, is known for his antiestablishment views.)

   I endured rather than enjoyed the previous series, but I have to confess that I quite enjoyed this one. Typically Deed gets to the bottom of the case in front of him by asking more questions than either of the two competing barristers, to their extreme annoyance.

   One of the barristers in his cases always seems to be Jo Mills, his long time lover to whom he is always proposing. Sge sets the condition that he consults a therapist to confront his womanizing ways. He agrees and then rather predictably sleeps with the therapist.

   This is another of those series not to be taken seriously for a moment but at times is quite fun, although I suspect the writer would want us to take it rather more seriously.

PHILIP MacDONALD – The Rasp. British hardcover: Collins, 1924. US hardcover: Dial Press, 1925. Hardcover reprints (US): Scribner’s (S.S.Van Dine Detective Library), 1929; Mason Publishing Co., 1936. Paperback reprints (US): Penguin #586, 1946; Avon G1257, 1965; Avon (Classic Crime Collection) PN268, 1970; Dover, 1979; Vintage, June 1984; Carroll & Graf, 1984.

   Philip MacDonald’s 1924 mystery, The Rasp, was the first appearance of his series sleuth Anthony Gethryn. I read and enjoyed this quintessential English Country Manor Mystery and figured out whodunit by page 70, by which time

one character had left tracks to the scene of the crime at the time it was committed, so she couldn’t be guilty; another character was fund clutching the murder weapon, so he couldn’t have done it; another was seen rifling through the murdered man’s desk, a fourth had his alibi exploded as a tissue of deliberate lies, and a fifth confessed to the crime – -so they must have been innocent as well.

   There was, however, one character who did nothing incriminating, merely stood around expressing polite interest and helping when he could, and he … you guessed it.

Editorial Comment:   As it so happens, my review of this same book is much longer. You may find it here. But is longer better? You tell me.

SHANNON OCORK – End of the Line. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1981. No paperback edition.

   This reads very much as it’s supposed to, which is to say like a story told by a liberated young lady working with some caution and care in a world dominated by men. T.T. (Teresa Tracy) Baldwin is an aspiring sports photographer for the New York Graphic. She also solves mysteries.

   A murder occurs at a shark-hunting tournament, and it goes without saying that [from an author’s point of view] the lesson learned from the popularity of Jaws is not lost on Shannon OCork before the case is closed. There are also some missing diamonds and an antagonistic small-town cop who is solidly in a rich man’s pocket.

   As a mystery, the story is sometimes a puzzler in more ways than one. Obvious questions (to the reader, at least) arc never asked, apparently never even thought of, until at length T.T. reveals she already knew the answers, far earlier than she ever let on.

   From another point of view, the broken style T.T. persists in using in telling her own story adds immediacy to the first part of the narrative, and a considerable amount of fast, page-turning excitement to the finale. In between, it simply becomes hard to read.

   Other than T.T., who is bright, smart-alecky, and certain to get ahead, most of the remaining characters are straight from summer stock. The ending is worth waiting for, however.

Rating:   B minus

Bibliographic Notes: T.T.Baldwin had a three book career. End of the Line was preceded by Sports Freak (St. Martin’s, 1980) and followed by Hell Bent for Heaven (St. Martin’s, 1983), neither of which do I remember ever seeing. As for the author herself, she was married for twelve years to mystery writer Hillary Waugh and in 1989 wrote a book for would-be mystery writers, appropriately titled How to Write Mysteries.

  GEOFFREY HOMES – Forty Whacks. William Morrow & Co., hardcover, 1941. Reprinted in paperback as Stiffs Don’t Vote, Bantam #117, 1947. Film: Warner Brothers, 1944, as Crime by Night.

   Private detectives Humphrey Campbell, milk drinker and accordion player, and his boss, Oscar Morgan, who likes much stronger stuff, have left Los Angeles under some pressure and have relocated in Joaquin, California, to the distress of some people.

   With the exception of threats from the city’s district attorney, business starts out well, with a request to locate Joseph Borden, pianist. Campbell, the leg man and the brain man of the agency, at least in this novel, finds Borden, who is minus one hand, which hand was chopped off by his mother-in-law, Mrs. Gertrude Peck, the publisher of the city’s only newspaper. When the mother-in-law is found, first by Borden, considerably chopped up, the police believe Borden did it in revenge.

   There were, however, many other people who had no love for Mrs. Peck. In the midst of a political campaign, she had endorsed first one candidate for mayor and then another, both of them corrupt. One of the rewrite men on the newspaper said that all the employees were suspects. Her lodge, where she was killed, was as busy as an airline terminal what with people who feared or loathed her visiting just prior to her murder.

   Campbell solves the case, to my complete dissatisfaction. Not one of the better investigations of Morgan and Campbell, who can be compared to Frank Gruber’s Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg but are not nearly as amusing.

   (The title change by the paperback publisher indicates that even in 1947 the memory of Lizzie Borden had waned. Forty Whacks had that title because one of the character was named Borden and an ax was the murder weapon. The rhyme “Joseph Borden took an ax,/ Gave his mother-in-law forty whacks” keeps running through Campbell’s head. For those who may not know about the fascinating Lizzie Borden case, I highly recommend Victoria Lincoln’s A Private Disgrace: Lizzie Borden by Daylight, reprinted by International Polygonics in 1986.)

BERNIE LEE – Murder at Musket Beach. Donald A. Fine, hardcover, 1990. Worldwide Library, paperback, November 1991.

   Here is an example, if one is desired, of a book that I cannot imagine will interest any fan of the old-fashioned detective story one iota. It is the first mystery adventure of a husband-and-wife sleuthing duo named Tony and Pat Pratt, and even though there is a second promised, I can promise you that I will not be reading another.

   Tony Pratt is a mystery writer, Pat Pratt is a financial consultant, and together they find a body on the beach. This is the interesting part. It goes downhill from here.

   There are two suspects (three if you count the mysterious behavior of the policeman investigating the case, behavior never satisfactorily explained except there does have to be some mystery in a detective story, one supposes, doesn’t there?). There is one clue, and the culprit can’t imagine how or why he managed to drop it right there next to the body.

   The victim was in real estate, it is learned, a guru is trying to buy some local land upon which to build his commune, and over and over again it is carefully explained to us that this might be the reason for the murder. [WARNING: Plot Alert.] It is.

   In other words, this is a mystery for the feeble-minded. It’s not the writing that is so bad; it’s the complete absence of a plot.

Bibliographic Update:   There were, in fact, two more books in the series: Murder Without Reservation (1991) and Murder Takes Two (1992).