MAN AT LARGE. Fox, 1941. Marjorie Weaver, George Reeves, Richard Derr, Steve Geray, Milton Parsons, Spencer Charters, Lucien Littlefield, Elisha Cook Jr., Minerva Urecal. Director: Eugene Forde.

   An un-sung little B-movie that seems at times like an episode of the old Superman TV show, starting off at a great metropolitan newspaper with a grouchy editor, a plucky girl reporter (Marjorie Weaver) and even a visit from George Reeves!

   What follows is a tricky, fast-moving and mostly-fun farrago about the search for a fugitive German escapee from a Canadian POW camp (this was made before Pearl Harbor, but the movie doesn’t hesitate to peg the bad guys as Germans) on the run in the US.

   Then a surprise as it quickly pivots into a game of cat-und-mouse between the FBI and a nest of spies preying on American cargo ships, who relay their secret messages in pulp-magazine stories written by a Master Spy.

   Said spymaster is played by Steven Geray, an actor normally typed as milquetoasts, who seems to have a lot of fun here playing it sinister. And since he’s a writer for the pulps, Geray’s character is naturally a cultured tea-drinking man of affluence, living in a luxury apartment surrounded by servants—like all pulp writers of his day.

   Obviously none of this can be taken seriously, and to their credit, Writer John Larkin and director Eugene Forde (both veterans of Fox’s Charlie Chan series) don’t try. Forde directs with an eye for pace, helped out by the photography of Virgil Miller, who heaped atmosphere into Universal’s Sherlock Holmes series and Larkin fills his script with twists and jokes, both surprising and funny.

   He also “borrows” heavily from Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, with our hero suspected of murder after hearing a vital clue gasped out by the victim, a search for a clandestine group known as “The 21 Whistlers” a bit in a noisy music hall, and even some by-play with handcuffs on the hero and heroine.

   To Larkin and Forde’s credit though, there’s also a dandy and highly original climax with Reeves and Weaver stalked through a locked apartment by a sharp-shooting blind man.

   The result is a film that’s easy to like, and over-and-done-with before you notice it’s gone, considerably enlivened by the playing of Reeves, who looks here like an actor on the verge of stardom, and Ms Weaver, Fox’s all-purpose perky B-movie queen, whose lively thesping never quite lifted her from the low-budget rut — with the astonishing exception of her role as Mary Todd in John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln.

   During the late Sixties and early Seventies I seem to have developed the habit of reading, and writing up for my eyes only, a number of first mystery novels (either for an author or a byline) that for the most part I admired. Restricting myself to books by dead Americans that were first published under pseudonyms never seen before, I venture to cobble together my end-of-year column out of this ancient raw material.

   The year before Davis Dresser (1904-1977) began using the name of Brett Halliday for his endlessly running Michael Shayne private eye series, he created a byline all but unknown today to chronicle the cases — all two of them — of Jerry Burke, an El Paso police administrator who favors brainwork over PI tactics.

   In MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER, as by Asa Baker (Stokes, 1938), his adversary is a serial-killer who advertises in the local paper, daring Burke to stop him. After three apparently unconnected murders our hero comes up with a neat solution which is also found in at least three later crime novels much more familiar to readers than this one. (I’d be a toad if I revealed their titles or authors.)

   Occasional realistic insights into poverty, anti-Mexican racism and literary amateurs make up for the ill-informed excursions into law and psychoanalysis. That the book Burke’s Watson is trying to write turns out to be the book we’re reading adds a Pirandelloesque fillip to a fine fast-moving unpretentious novel, which of course was reprinted as by Brett Halliday after that name had become a staple item in the genre.

   Aaron Marc Stein (1906-1985) had been writing whodunits since 1935, first as George Bagby and then also under his own name. After wartime service as an Army cryptographer he launched a second pseudonym and a third series. THE CORPSE IN THE CORNER SALOON, as by Hampton Stone (Simon & Schuster, 1948), introduces Gibson and Mac, two investigators from the New York District Attorney’s office who get assigned to a case of apparent murder and suicide with grotesque sexual overtones.

   Along with a raft of suspects and some deftly juggled criminal possibilities we are offered knowing evocations of the postwar clothing business, the old-style saloon milieu, and the postwar apartment shortage. The solution is so nobly complicated that I shrugged off the few loose strands of plot and the sniggering tone of the sex passages as minor annoyances.

   Elizabeth Linington (1921-1988) wrote whodunits under her own name and several pseudonyms, each book being written in about two weeks. In CASE PENDING, as by Dell Shannon (Harper, 1960), she introduced Lt. Luis Mendoza, an arrogant, amorous, brilliantly intuitive LAPD Homicide detective who senses, and almost succeeds in tracking down, the link between two unconnected female corpses each with one eye mutilated.

   Shannon interweaves the murder case with counterplots involving illegal adoption, the planned disposal of a blackmailer, a narcotics drop, and Mendoza’s pursuit of a bemused charm school instructor, but in every part of the book she irritates us by recording characters’ thoughts in the same monotonous ungrammatical shorthand they use when they speak.

   On the plus side she has a gift for probing agonized minds (a 13-year-old boy who knows too much, a petty civil servant plotting the perfect murder), for adopting at least some of the values of the strict detective novel, and for presenting an explicit atheistic viewpoint without pretentiousness or propagandizing.

   Emma Lathen, the joint pseudonym of Mary Jane Latsis (1927-1997) and Martha Henissart (1929- ), first appeared on the spine of BANKING ON DEATH (Macmillan, 1961), in which John Putnam Thatcher, vice-president of a prestigious Wall Street bank, has to elucidate a murder problem with ramifications in New York City, Buffalo, Boston and Washington.

   The bank’s search for a missing trust fund beneficiary ends with the discovery that he’s been bludgeoned to death in the middle of a blizzard, and its duties as trustee require Thatcher to take a hand in the investigation.

   The characters and writing are nothing special but there are fine evocations of Wall Street, Brahmin elitism, and the curious behavior of airports during snowstorms, and the deductive puzzle is neatly constructed.

   It certainly wasn’t his first novel, but KINDS OF LOVE, KINDS OF DEATH, as by Tucker Coe (Random House, 1966), introduced a new byline and a new series character for prolific Donald E. Westlake (1933-2008).

   A Syndicate boss who for obvious reasons can’t go to the police hires disgraced ex-cop Mitch Tobin to take a break from building a high wall around his house and find out who inside the “corporation” first seduced his lover and then murdered her.

   The trail to the truth is basically psychological and unmarked by incidents of violence. Tobin guesses right far too often and the killer turns out to be a walk-on part, but Coe deals skillfully with a variety of failed relationships and unsentimentally with the insight that professional criminals are no different from other successful American businessmen.

   A DARK POWER, as by William Arden (Dodd Mead, 1968), was also not a debut novel except in the sense that, like KINDS OF LOVE, KINDS OF DEATH, it introduced a new byline and a new series character for its author, the equally prolific Dennis Lynds (1924-2005).

   Industrial spy Kane Jackson, who seems to have been modeled on Lee Marvin’s screen persona, is hired by a New Jersey pharmaceutical combine to recover a missing sample of a drug potentially worth millions. The trail leads through mazes of inter-office love affairs and power struggles and several bodies, some naked and others dead, come into view along the way.

   Arden meshes his counterplots with precision, draws several vivid characters trapped by their own ambitions in the jungle of high-level capitalism, and caps the story with a double surprise climax. The plot is resolved by clever guesswork but that’s the only weakness in this admirably tough-minded whodunit.

   I’ve just discovered on the Web that half of Emma Lathen seems to be still alive, which means that I haven’t completely restricted myself to the dead. But I also discovered, while combing through comments I first typed up on my trusty Olympia Portable almost half a century ago, that I have enough material for January 2014 if the seasonal blahs continue to get me down.

   Next time the subject will be American debut novels published under their authors’ own names. Meanwhile, until I cobble together my first column of the new year, happy holidays to all who may see this one.

BRIAN WYNNE – The Night It Rained Bullets. Ace Double M-128, paperback original, 1965 (packaged back-to-back with Nemesis of Circle A, by Reese Sullivan).

   The author is, of course, better known as Brian Garfield. (Wynne is his middle name.) I didn’t do a lot of research on Mr. Garfield – what I’m about to pass on to you is only what Ace told his readers inside the front cover. In 1965 he was only 26, for example, and he was already the author of 10 other western novels for Ace, and of course who knows how many others from other publishers?

   And many (if not most) of the others from Ace were, like this one, short but intense tales of Jeremy Six, long-time marshal of Spanish Flat, Arizona, confirmed by a quick excursion to Google, without which we can obviously no longer live as a successful civilization. Of the westerns that Garfield did for Ace, eight of them were about Jeremy Six.

   Even more, when Garfield stopped writing them, they were evidently so popular that Ace hired a ringer to write a ninth one, called Gunslick Territory, in 1973. They even went so far as to use the Brian Wynne byline until Brian Garfield said nothing doing, and that was the end of that. (I am paraphrasing Mr. Garfield’s email to me in April 2006. The actual author of Gunslick Territory was Dudley Dean [Owen] McGaughey.)

   Here, from page 18, is a long quote that will tell you something about Mr. Six:

   Not only do Lime and his men come to town, but they kidnap Jeremy’s lady friend Clarissa, who is the owner of a saloon on the wrong side of town, during the worst blizzard Spanish Flat has ever seen. This is not all. There is more. A gambler and a notorious gunman is in town, as well as many other drifters and ne’er-do-well’s, along with the naive young (and hot-headed) owner of a local mine, who resists (and resents) being watched over by his sister, and a confrontation between some or all of these elements is pretty much a foregone conclusion.

   This was written when television westerns like Gunsmoke had become more and more popular, and the B-western heroes had all but hung up their spurs. (Now, I don’t imagine anyone has ever used that metaphor before, have they?)

   And there’s little that happens here that could not also have happened in Matt Dillon’s Dodge City. The scope is narrow, and yet, when all of the various small crises are over, it is not with any immediate sense of closure. The ending is off-beat and subdued, and if you expect the book to fade out with a clinch and a kiss, you’re reading the wrong author, I suspect, and almost definitely the wrong book.

   And once you realize that, ah, yes, that’s when the impact finally hits. It’s like a delayed reaction, and a heftier punch is seldom packed. At only 130 pages, the book is short, but it’s as long as it needs to be, and if you’re like me, you’ll find many scenes still playing their way through your head several days later.

   I don’t know the technical name for this effect. Maybe it’s just called heavy duty staying power.

BIG JIM McLAIN. Warner Brothers, 1952. John Wayne, Nancy Olson, James Arness, Alan Napier, Veda Ann Borg, Hans Conreid. Screenplay: James Edward Grant, Richard English, Eric Taylor, James Atlee Phillips (uncredited), William Wheeler (story); quotes from “The Devil and Daniel Webster” by Stephen Vincent Benet. Director: Edward Lustig.

   It’s 1952 and all that stands between us and ruin is Joe McCarthy, Big Jim McLain, and Mal Baxter …

   Things were never blacker — or is that redder?

   Sadly only two of those are fictional characters, though Tailgunner Joe was at least ninety percent a product of his own vivid alcohol mist of a mind. I suppose we should be grateful no actual communists were harmed in the making of this movie — come to think of no actual communists were harmed by Joe McCarthy either… It was a strange era.

   You can’t separate the Red-baiting hysterical witch-hunts of the era from this badly written, acted, directed, and intended film. The Duke would have been better served to get his buddy Mickey Spillane to write the script, at least that might be watchable. I warn you this one isn’t. Even location filming in Hawaii doesn’t help, since the scenes there are mostly interiors probably shot back in the states, and the few outdoor scenes in the tackiest parts of the island. It’s a half-assed attempt at the docu-noir style so popular then, and handled with no subtlety whatsoever.

   So, now to our plot — such as it is. Jim McLain (John Wayne) and Mal Baxter (James Arness, who was pretty much owned by Wayne at that point of time, acting-wise) are investigators for the House Committee on Un-American Activities — the beloved HUAC of every crackpot right-winger’s dreams (“Were you prematurely anti-fascist? Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party …”) sent to investigate the hold the party seems to have gained in our then territory. Apparently our vital supply of pineapple was under extra-ordinary threat by Communist labor organizers (those radicals who believed in revolutionary ideas like minimum wage).

   Have a sense of humor guys, I know Hawaii was a vital military and shipping asset, I remember Pearl Harbor, that and a trip to the island are why they chose it in the first place to associate communist with the sneak attack by the Japanese. Clever these occidentals.

   I’m sorry, but it is hard to take this clunker seriously, and it stands an insult to those who fought the actual cold war against the Soviets and not the headline war against drunken screenwriters, labor organizers, and actors. Red’s weren’t only in your community, they were in our entertainment — and — gasp — thanks to the garment union, our underwear.

   Meanwhile Jim and Mal are tracking down Mr. Big with stops along the way for a suspicious Nancy Olsen (Nancy Olsen femme fatale), Veda Ann Borg (she’s virtually a Wayne regular from this period on), and Hans Conreid (say it ain’t so Uncle Tunoose). Conried was also in John Wayne’s much more entertaining Red-baiting Jet Fighter — which thanks to producer Howard Hughes had sex appeal to spare from Janet Leigh as a Russian fighter pilot — a film that at least knows it is stupid and enjoys itself. I guess Conreid struck the Duke as more frightening than he did me. Maybe The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T scared him. In Jet Fighter he’s a Russian officer, here he’s only a traitor.

   Of course from scene one you know Arness isn’t leaving this one alive, and since he’s the only person in the film even pretending to try, you will miss him. So now it’s personal for Big Jim against those dastardly Reds. At least this promised to be good for a rousing Spillane style bloodbath finale, but if anyone could kill a good payoff it seems to have been director Edward Lustig, who seems to think he’s making a serious and important film and so develops no thrills and no surprises when Big Jim almost casually catches up with with Struac, the dirty Commie ring leader — played by Brit accented Alan Napier (Alfred to Adam West’s Batman), because to be a Commie you had to have an accent or a foreign sounding name. No red-blooded American with the right amount of vowels in in his name could ever be a Red. For instance no red blooded name like Hammett …

   I wish I was being unfair to this film in the name of a few laughs, but sad to say I’m not. This has all the drama and suspense of cottage cheese (less if you leave the latter out too long).

   Now before you start, I’m a huge John Wayne fan. The High and the Mighty, The Searchers, and The Quiet Man are among my all time favorite films, and I admit unashamedly I held back a few tears when he died in The Shootist. But that’s no excuse for this lunk-headed thud-ear piece of propaganda disguised as a movie. It doesn’t even flag-wave well, being so dull as to negate any patriotic fervor — the only fervor this movie generates is how fast you can reach the remote and cut it off. It needs much more than a few quotes from Stephen Vincent Benet’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” If you want to hear that masterpiece quoted watch the delightful film Anything For Money with Walter Huston’s Mr. Scratch and Edward Arnold’s Dan’l Webster.

   You might well emerge from this film thinking, that if that’s the best the Communists could do maybe they weren’t such bad guys after all — it is literally such a bad film it achieves the opposite of it’s intent. It diffuses the communist menace with its comic book plot — no. I take that back the anti-commie comics were better written.

   He’s a Go-Get-‘Em Guy for the U.S.A. on a Treason Trail that leads Half-a-World Away!

   That tagline is the most exciting thing about this snoozer.

   You can watch this full movie at Amazon. Do yourself a favor and don’t.

   Incidentally in this film both HUAC and the Duke don’t seem to know it wasn’t illegal to be a Communist in 1952, so Congress hasn’t changed all that much over the decades.

   If you would like to see this done right check out I Was a Communist for the F.B.I., My Son John, Woman on Pier 13, Walk East on Beacon Street, A Bullet for Joey, or Walk a Crooked Mile. They all surpass this film by miles, with genuine suspense and menace even when they are silly or over the top. Even The Whip Hand with rough tough all American Eliot Reed battling commie Raymond Burr is better, and that’s saying a lot.

   Wayne did a little better in contemporary dress in McQ and Brannigan, not a lot, but a little, and the latter has one of the funniest scenes ever filmed with the Duke doing that famous walk across the floor of a London disco replete with mirrored ball and strobe lights. Take that John Travolta.

   Alas Big Jim McLain has nothing going for it despite the screenwriters who have done much better, and the stars who were do doubt sincere. Truth be told a lot less sincerity and more melodrama would have helped. A better movie than this could have been made about the threat of tooth decay and gingivitis. Talk about a red menace …

ROBERT GEORGE DEAN – On Ice. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1942. Superior Reprint M654, paperback, 1945.

   Bill Griffith, private eye, had been tailing a man who had some diamonds to sell for a refugee. Now he is tailing the same man, who is picking up the money for the diamonds. Unfortunately, the man with the money is found sitting at his desk with no money and no life, his throat having been slit.

   Fearing that he might be suspected of involvement in the murder, since he is broke and is working for an almost bankrupt agency, Griffith asks his friend and former co-worker at the Imperator Schmidt Agency, Tony Hunter — one of Robert George Dean’s continuing characters — to he!p him out of this jam.

   A great deal happens in a short time. Hunter’s dog thinks she is going to have puppies; the dead man’s fiancee, for whom everyone is searching for various reasons, turns out to have predeceased her betrothed, and by the same murder method; the refugee who owns the diamonds acts strangely, and Hunter finds various females attractive.

   The detection here is good, the clues fair, the characters fairly interesting. I thought I knew who did it, but I was wrong. Not a great or a memorable mystery, but one that ought not be passed up if you fortuitously come across it at a reasonable price.

    The Tony Hunter series —

Murder Makes a Merry Widow (n.) Doubleday 1938.
A Murder of Convenience (n.) Doubleday 1938.
A Murder by Marriage (n.) Scribner 1940.
Murder Through the Looking Glass (n.) Doubleday 1940.
Murder in Mink (n.) Scribner 1941.
Layoff (n.) Scribner 1942.
On Ice (n.) Scribner 1942.
The Body Was Quite Cold (n.) Dutton 1951.
The Case of Joshua Locke (n.) Dutton 1951.
Affair at Lover’s Leap (n.) Doubleday 1953.

   Author Robert George Dean also wrote four mysteries under his own name featuring series character Pat Thompson, about whom I know nothing, and one stand-alone. As “George Griswold” he wrote four early 1950s espionage novels (I believe) with a mysterious Mr. Groode appearing or mentioned in all four, but the leading characters (with two appearances each) in reality being Jim Furlong and William Pepper.

GILLIAN ROBERTS – Philly Stakes. Scribners, hardcover, 1989. Fawcett, paperback, 1990.

    Philly Stakes is the second (after Caught Dead in Philadelphia) novel about Philadelphia private schoolteacher Amanda Pepper by Gillian Roberts (the criminous pseudonym of mainstream novelist Judith Greber).

    Amanda teaches a particularly challenging array of early teen-agers, and, in groping for a way to make Dickens real, conceives of a Christmas party. Her notion is that the children will feed the poor, but the father of one child, a wealthy businessman, turns it to his own ends. At first.

    It begins as a publicity-laden event with said businessman playing Santa Claus. It ends with his playing unmourned corpse, and three people confessing to the act. The case really isn’t assigned to detective C. K. Mackenzie, Amanda’s rather good friend, but it seems to be his anyway. It certainly isn’t assigned to Amanda, but there she is, squarely in the muddle of it.

    Quite pleasant, this tale, smoothly narrated and with an extremely well-hidden killer.

        The Amanda Pepper series —

1. Caught Dead in Philadelphia (1987)
2. Philly Stakes (1989)
3. I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia (1992)
4. With Friends Like These… (1993)
5. How I Spent My Summer Vacation (1994)
6. In The Dead of Summer (1995)
7. The Mummers’ Curse (1996)
8. The Bluest Blood (1998)
9. Adam and Evil (1999)
10. Helen Hath No Fury (2000)
11. Claire and Present Danger (2003)
12. Till the End of Tom (2004)
13. A Hole in Juan (2006)
14. All’s Well That Ends (2007)

S. CARLETON – The La Chance Mine Mystery. Little Brown & Co, hardcover, 1920. Currently available in various Print-on-Demand editions and as a free download from Project Gutenberg.

   Nick Stretton kills time while managing his gold mine up in the Canadian woods by conjuring up a mental picture of his ideal dream girl. Under pressure of unusual weariness and ennui, one cold and dreary night, he decides to “chuck his job,” return to civilization where his dream girl must be waiting somewhere, and live a normal life.

   When lo! beside the fire of the mine-house living-room, when he enters, sits his dream girl. The “how” of her coming is easily explained, but the “why” leads into a maze of mystery.

Editorial Comment: If you are as suspicious as I am whenever I see an older book like this with the author’s first name appearing only as an initial or two, you will not be surprised to learn that her full name was Susan Carleton Jones, 1864-1926. This is her only entry in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV. There is a short bio-bibliography online for her here.

AARON MARC STEIN – Hangman’s Row. Doubleday/Crime Club, hardcover, 1982. $10.95.

LESLEY EGAN – Random Death. Doubleday/Crime Club, hardcover, 1982. $10.95.

BERNARD ST. JAMES – The Seven Dreamers. Doubleday/Crime Club, hardcover, 1982. $10.95.

   One of the best days of the month, as far as I’m concerned, is the day that the latest selection of review copies from Doubleday’s Crime Club comes in. Now, as most of you already probably know, this is no book club in the ordinary sense of the term. The Crime Club has no dues (save the ever-increasing price of the books), no membership rolls or requirements of any kind, no free enticement offers — only books. Since 1928 or so, they’ve been publishing mysteries and detective stories,at the rate of three or four a month — and there’s no let-up in sight.

   Generally speaking, the books published by the Crime Club are prime examples of what’s called “category publishing,” aimed at a pre-set market. Most of them are gobbled up directly by libraries. Few show up anywhere else but the specialized mystery bookshop. There are few that reach the heights of ever being considered for an award of any kind, but there are few that are out-and-out losers, either.

   I’m writing this in March, and last month’s selections would have to be considered as pretty typical of what the Crime Club is producing today. There are two books by authors who have become long-time favorites, and one by a relative newcomer.

   Aaron Marc Stein, for example, has been writing books, under three different names, for over forty-five years. He never seems to get much notice for his labors, but he can always be depended upon to tell a good, solid story. As Stein, writing about free-lance engineering expert Matt Erridge, his books tend more toward adventure than detection. As rumor has it, this is the way the publishers like it. Book after book, Erridge stumbles across mystery after mystery, and without half trying.

   In Hangman’s Row Erridge is in Amsterdam, helping a girl he first meets in the Van Gogh museum. Her boyfriend, it seems, is a decent artist himself. He is also a vociferous spokesman for various liberal causes, and he is in trouble with the police. An artistic array of protest effigies has been spoiled by the addition of a real body to the collection.

   Although no more than a minor work at best, the story is enhanced considerably by the expertise Stein displays in local geography and customs. This is like a visit with an old friend — totally relaxed and comfortable leisure-time reading.

Rating: C plus

   Leslie Egan, on the other hand, usually has a lot more axes to grind in her books. Like Stein, she has been writing for many years now, and under several different pseudonyms. Her severest critics make much of her open support for various right-wing causes, and in one way or another her mystery novels, most of them police procedurals, usually reflect that same conservative point of view.

   Random Death is one of her stories of the Glendale police force. All of the detectives are featured, but the cases of Vic Varallo and Delia Riordan are the ones followed most closely. The use of a policewoman as a main protagonist does not imply any feeling or support for ERA on Egan’s part, however. Ms. Riordan deeply regrets her choice of career as it’s worked out — no husband, no family, none of the things it is “most important for a woman to have.”

   Whether you agree or disagree, what makes Egan’s books so alive is the strength of her convictions. As a suburb of Los Angeles, Glendale now seems to be under constant siege by criminal elements. Egan is simply unmatchable in terms of providing a voice of sympathy for the victims. Are the courts listening?

Rating: B plus

   As for the third book of the month, its author, Bernard St. James, has written one earlier novel featuring Chief Inspector Blanc of the Paris police. As yet, however, I’d be surprised if either author or character were other than a brand new name to anyone but the most fervent mystery fancier.

   The time is sometime in the early to mid-1800’s, making The Seven Dreamers almost as much a historical novel as it is a detective story. Someone — a mesmerist, Blanc quickly deduces — has slit the throats of everyone attending a small dinner party, while they were all sound asleep. Blanc’s problem is not so much to discover who the guilty party is as it is to uncover the link between the victims which gives the culprit his motive.

   And here’s where the history lesson comes in. As a mystery novel, The Seven Dreamers seems badly paced and badly padded. As historical fiction, it ends with a note of lofty idealism, viewed with a necessary bit of perspective. The success of the book, it would follow, would depend greatly on how strongly you are in agreement.

Rating: B minus

“MEET McGRAW” – An episode of Four Star Playhouse. CBS, 25 February 1954. Four Star Productions. Cast: Frank Lovejoy, Audrey Totter, Ellen Corby, Paul Picerni, Percy Helton, Peter Whitney, and Steve Darrell. Original Story and Screenplay by John and Gwen Bagni. Executive Producer: Don W. Sharpe. Produced by George Haight. Director of Photography: George E. Diskant. Directed by Frank McDonald.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNnCSW6l-98

   The episode is also available to watch at Archive.org.

   McGraw (no first name was ever given) was the typical hardboiled PI of the fifties, a tough guy with a soft spot for dames. The story made full use of the tropes of the fifties PI, complete with the less than handsome PI wearing a fedora and cheap suit as he smokes a cigarette while walking down dark streets to visit a bar to meet the femme fatale. McGraw was different in one way he was a traveling trouble-shooter as opposed to a PI with a set location.

   The writing was better than most from that the era, overcoming the limited budget and primitive filming conditions with the proper banter and a strong complicated plot. Writers John and Gwen Bagni were a married couple. He would die in 1954 and she would go on to write for many TV series including ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS. Gwen Bagni (with Paul Dubov) would later develop HONEY WEST for TV.

   Director Frank McDonald was a successful director of low budget films in the thirties and forties and moved over to television in the fifties where he continued into the sixties. His direction on MEET McGRAW was professional but nothing special.

   The cast fit perfectly in their roles. Frank Lovejoy looked and sounded the part of hardboiled trouble-shooter McGraw. Audrey Totter was well casted as she had a history of playing the hard tough dame in films such as POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, LADY IN THE LAKE and THE SET UP. The supporting cast featured wonderful character actors such as Ellen Corby, Peter Whitney and Percy Helton.

   According to TVTango.com, the episode aired opposite THE RAY BOLGER SHOW on ABC, BROADWAY TO HOLLYWOOD: HEADLINE CLUES on Dumont and TREASURY MEN IN ACTION on NBC.

   Three years later and with the growing popularity of the TV detective, MEET McGRAW would become a weekly series on NBC. The series would air Tuesday at 9pm from July 2, 1957 to April 22, 1958.

   â€œBroadcasting” review (July 8, 1957) of the first NBC episode was favorable, especially for Blake Edwards’ script. It also listed some other information. Production cost was $36,000. The series was sponsored by Proctor & Gamble through Benton and Bowles. Frank Lovejoy repeated his role as McGraw. The series writers alternated among Blake Edwards, Frederic Brady, E. Jack Newman, and Lowell Barrington. Directors alternated between John Peyser, Harold Schuster and Anton Leader. Producer was Warren Lewis. The series was filmed and each episode was a half-hour long.

   Forty-one episodes were produced for MEET McGRAW on NBC. Adding the FOUR STAR PLAYHOUSE episode made forty-two half-hour episodes available for syndication. But before it went into syndication, ABC would air the reruns starting November 23, 1958 on Sunday (it had three different time slots during its run – 10pm, 9:30pm and 10:30pm). It would remain on the ABC network schedule until September 20, 1959. ABC Films released it into syndication for local markets on October 1, 1959.

   Despite claims by Wikipedia and IMDb, I can find no record of the series being called ADVENTURES OF McGRAW. “Broadcasting” always referred to it as MEET McGRAW, from its beginnings to its days in syndication (as late as March 25, 1963). I suspect (but can’t prove) the title ADVENTURES OF MCGRAW might have been used when Official Films took over the syndication rights from ABC Films (whenever that was).

JAMES CORBETT – Gallows Wait. Herbert Jenkins, UK, hardcover, 1947. No US edition.

   Detective-Inspector Cranston has recently finished testifying at the trial of a man accused of murdering his girlfriend. Cranston has told the court that the woman was strangled and that there were no fingerprints on the body. He deduces that the murderer used gloves. Not a great deduction, or a good deduction, or even a quick deduction, but it’s the most sensible deduction he makes in this novel.

   Of course, later on he says the murderer had strangled the girl … with his bare hands,” but neither Corbett nor his characters let blatant contradictions bother them.

   As the judge in the trial is about to place upon his head the black cloth and pass sentence, he dies, having apparently ingested poison a few minutes before. Luckily, at !east in the author’s view, Cranston is still in the courtroom, for no particular reason but then many things happen in Corbett’s novels for no particular reason.

   Cranston investigates and finds a blackmail letter, unopened, in the judge’s overcoat pocket. With the letter is a miniature dagger. Since he finds another miniature dagger in the judge’s chambers, Cranston deduces that there was a previous letter. Good thinking? Well, the letter Cranston discovers refers to a previous letter, so perhaps Cranston was cheating a bit.

   This is not one of Corbett’s wonderfully awful novels, bad as it is, but it does have some of the patented Corbett touches. For example, Cranston lights a cigarette with a match and stands twisting the spent match. Then he puts his lighter back in his pocket.

   Cranston suspects one man may be the major villain. There’s no reason for this except the man is the only character who could be the bad guy. Cranston arranges for his sergeant to interview an old lady who may have some information about a hit-and-run victim and makes sure that the suspected villain is aware of this forthcoming questioning.

   Cranston’s theory is that the villain will waylay the sergeant, and he, Cranston, will come “in the good old nick of time” and effect a rescue. Not having Cranston’s devious mind, the villain and his henchmen simply kidnap the woman.

   One more example of Corbett’s thrillers that don’t but that do amuse, albeit unintentionally.

Editorial Note: Previous Corbett thrillers reviewed by Bill on this blog are Vampires of the Skies and Murder While You Wait. (Follow the links also for much more commentary on Corbett.)