JOHN DICKSON CARR’S “THE THREE COFFINS”: A HOLLOW VICTORY? by J. Morris. CADS Supplement 13, 2011. 54 pages; illustrated with diagrams, maps, and photographs. Appendix I: Floor Plan of the Crime Scene. Appendix II: “The London of THE THREE COFFINS” by Tony Medawar.

   Previously on ONTOS, there was a posting about John Dickson Carr’s immensely popular THE THREE COFFINS (a.k.a. THE HOLLOW MAN) editorially wondering out loud whether it might be his best novel.

   If you’re in the same crowd with Edward D. Hoch and Julian Symons who thought it was, after reading J. Morris’s CADS monograph, you might change your mind.

   In his introduction, Morris tells us:

   Essentially, by a close reading of the text, Morris has identified over two dozen mistakes which Carr and his supposedly punctilious editors somehow overlooked when the book went to press. Typically these errors are of a factual or logical nature, given what has been established in Carr’s narrative, thus threatening to unravel the author’s own carefully wrought construction:

   As Morris notes, Carr occasionally trips himself up due to a tendency—not always indulged in—towards what Morris terms Unnecessary Webwork, imposing thematic resonances that could easily have been dispensed with.

   Among the twenty-five “problems” Morris discovers in THE THREE COFFINS, he pinpoints six of them as being major flaws:

      – “The Problem of the Unnoticed Haze”
      – “The Problem of the Dying Man’s Lie”
      – “The Problem of the Bamboozled Detective”
      – “The Problem of the Panicked Murderer”
      – “The Famous Time Problem”
      – “The Problem of Twenty Minutes”

   To be fair to Carr, Morris also gives six good reasons why THE THREE COFFINS should not be scorned, even with all its defects.

   And be forewarned: Morris tells us that A HOLLOW VICTORY? is “one huge spoiler, for obvious reasons. Those unfamiliar with THE THREE COFFINS should leave the premises.”

   All in all, A HOLLOW VICTORY? is a fine addition to Golden Age of Detection scholarship.

Editorial Comment:   This review first appeared on Mike’s own new blog:

         http://carrdickson.blogspot.com/. Check it out.

THE POPPY IS ALSO A FLOWER (aka The Opium Connection). Made-for-TV movie, ABC, 22 April 1966. Expanded theatrical release, 1967 [?]. Yul Brynner, Stephen Boyd, Angie Dickinson, Rita Hayworth, Trevor Howard, E.G. Marshall, Omar Sharif, Eli Wallach, Jack Hawkins, Gilbert Roland, Hugh Griffith, Marcello Mastroianni, Trini Lopez, Senta Berger, Barry Sullivan, Nadja Tiller, Harold Sakata, Anthony Quayle, George Geret, Howard Vernon. Narrator: Grace Kelly. Screenplay by Jo Eisinger, based on a story by Ian Fleming. Directed by Terence Young.

   The amount of tripe written about this big budget made for television film done for the United Nations as an anti-drug project, and originally shown on ABC television in this country is amazing. For some reason it seems to drive some critics and viewers to extremes of near insanity far beyond any problems it has.

   In reality it is a fair action adventure film with a point that deals with the efforts of the UN and the then Iranian secret police to deal with the trade in illegal opium.

   I say any film that features Gilbert Roland as the villain, Rita Hayworth as a junkie, and E. G. Marshall in hand to hand combat with Harold (Oddjob) Sakata can’t be all bad. That’s not to mention wry Hugh Griffith as a opium selling bandit chief, Eli Wallach as a former Mafioso deported from the US, and Angie Dickinson as a mysterious woman getting ready for a shower with E. G. Marshall hiding under her bed is at least worth watching.

   Did I mention the two girls in bikinis wrestling in the nightclub?

   In 1966 that wasn’t something you saw often on television.

   Trini Lopez even sings “La Bamba” and “Lemon Tree.”

   Okay, that may not be entirely in its favor.

   When UN agent Benson (Stephen Boyd) buys up the opium crop before drug king Serge Marko’s (Gilbert Roland) people can he promptly gets killed but not before destroying the opium. Now Marko is under pressure to secure the next supply or be out $10 million dollars.

   Arriving in Iran to assist in the hunt for the opium connection is UN agent Sam Lincoln (Trevor Howard) and US Treasury Agent Coley Johns (E.G Marshall) No sooner have UN operative Omar Sharif and Iranian soldier Yul Brynner briefed them on their plan to irradiate the opium* so it can be tracked than Angie Dickinson shows up as Benson’s widow. But Benson wasn’t married.

   Marshall and Howard make a good team with a nice playful attitude and give and take:

   Considering everyone was working for nothing the performances are better than they had to be.

   It’s not Oscar material, but it is nothing like the nonsense written about it.

   The dubbing isn’t too good, but that’s hardly reason to have a hissy fit.

   Leonard Maltin rates it a BOMB.

   Leonard Maltin gives three stars to Roger Corman’s The Undead.

   I’m just saying …

   Sam distracts Angie while Coley searches her room which is how he ends up under her bed while she prepares to take a shower.

   Mrs. Benson eludes them but they move on to Yul Brynner’s plan to raid the opium supply held by bandit chief Hugh Griffith and irradiate it, leading to a colorful raid on horseback in the mountains. It’s well staged and exciting shot on location among some spectacular scenery.

   With the opium irradiated its now up to Lincoln and Johns to follow its trail back to the man behind the distribution, and the trail leads to Naples and deported gangster Happy Lucarno (Eli Wallach) who agrees to help to clear himself of suspicion.

   Senta Berger has a nice bit as a drug addicted nightclub performer, and Rita Hayworth one of her last roles as the addicted wife of Marko the drug kingpin. Anthony Quayle is a South African ship’s captain who is a key part of Marko’s smuggling operation.

   The plot builds to an exciting showdown with Johns and Mrs. Benson trapped by Marko on the Blue Train out of Marseilles to Lyon as they get the evidence from Mrs. Marko that will destroy him. There is a well staged battle between Marshall and Sakata in the baggage car and an exciting chase through the train yard with a final bitter triumphant line for Johns.

   The Poppy Is Also a Flower moves quickly, generates some suspense, features good location work, and unfolds logically to an exciting finale, pausing long enough to develop the characters of the two protagonists and well done vignettes by Brynner, Griffith, Quayle, Mastroianni. Berger, Wallach, and Hayworth. Considering it could have been preachy, stiff, and self important it is not only better than we might expect, but an exciting international chase.

   You’ve seen better, but you’ve certainly seen much worse.

   I’ve said it before. No film was ever worse for the presence of Gilbert Roland.

   But I would like to know what it is about this film that gives some people such an irrational dose of dyspepsia. It’s not dull, it’s not stupid, and it’s not badly written or directed. But it rubs some people the wrong way to a surprising degree.

   I can understand not liking it, but the reaction it provokes is all out of proportion to any of its failings.

   Maybe that irradiated opium is more dangerous than I realized.

   Or maybe the idea of E G. Marshall as James Bond causes some people to froth at the mouth.

   *  Perhaps the single silliest critique of this one are the countless reviews I’ve read worrying about what would have happened to the poor addicts if they got hold of the irradiated opium. Aside from being so ignorant as to not understand the nature of radiation or that opium is not sold in bulk , but cut and sold as cocaine, heroin, or morphine in doses so small as to make radiation poisoning impossible, the critics seem totally incapable of recognizing this is fiction.

   If a drug addict got hold of a kilo of uncut opium chances are he would have died of something else long before radiation poisoning.

   When did people get so politically correct they worry about non existent irradiated opium poisoning non existent drug addicts?

    No fictional drug addicts were harmed in the making of this picture.

CHARLOTTE MacLEOD – Wrack and Rune. Doubleday/Crime Club, hardcover, 1982. Avon, reprint paperback, 1982.

   Charlotte MacLeod is a relative newcomer to the field of mystery writing, but in the past two or three years she has certainly shown all the signs of becoming a name to reckon with.

   Agatha Christie is no longer with us, but even if she were, she’d have no cause for fear. What makes these adventures of Peter Shandy so highly anticipated, at least in some circles, is hardly the detection involved, though never fear: there is that, too.

   But it’s rather the pure laugh-out-loud sort of humor that pervades MacLeod’s stories; that, plus the fact that the large proportion of her characters, many of them old friends to us now, actually like each other. Shandy is a professor of agrology at Balaclava College, up somewhere in nearby Massachusetts, but his fame at becoming involved in cases of murder has spread from the campus clear across Balaclava County, clearly the wildest piece of country this side of Appalachia.

   A runestone found in an ancient farmstead may be the harbinger of buried Viking treasure to come. The prospect brings out the worst in some people, and before you can say Thorkjeld Svenson, more than the college experts have quickly overrun the site.

   Death by quicklime also results, as well as a few other assorted attempts at murder. There’s never been such excitement in Lumpkin Corners as this.

   This particular outing, Shandy’s third appearance now, may be too long by about a third for a constant level of such inspired insanity to be properly maintained, but I doubt you’ll have as much fun with a detective novel as you will with this one.

   That is, until the next one.

Rating: C plus.

CAPTAIN A. E. DINGLE – Gold Out of Celebes. Little Brown and Co, US, hardcover, 1920. Previously serialized in The Argosy, October 5 through November 2, 1918. Several POD editions are currently available, as well as a free download from Project Gutenberg.

   Jack Barry, a seaman stranded in Batavia, and Tom Little, an enthusiastic salesman lusting for adventure, join forces in the employment of one Cornelius Houton, the owner of various interests in the island of Celebes. Thither the two men journey in a boat provided by Houten and commanded by Barry to investigate an agent of whose honesty Houten has become suspicious.

   On their arrival the two quickly proceed to concern themselves with an effort to save a fair young missionary from the evil intentions of another agent. Things happen quickly to the two young men, not always pleasantly, and Little’s thirst for action is fully gratified, while the perplexing attitude of the charming missionary, who apparently does not wish to be saved, reduces Barry to desperation.

   Bewilderment succeeds bewilderment in their minds as they pass from one puzzling circumstance to another, but doggedly they hold to their purpose. Not until the very close of the story do the incidents link up and the mystery unfold itself to the two adventurous spirits.

LEO BRUCE – Case with No Conclusion. Academy Chicago, paperback, 1984. First published in the UK by Bles, 1939.

   William Beef, former sergeant in the police force, has retired and taken up private investigation from quarters near Baker Street. Lionel Townsend, who recorded Beef’s previous two investigations, asserts that any claim that Beef “should be able to earn a living as a private investigator was beyond all human credulity.”

   Nonetheless, a client reasonably prompt!y appears, one Peter Ferrers, whose brother has been arrested for murdering a doctor. The doctor’s body was found in Stewart Ferrers’ library, with Stewart’s knife in the corpse’s throat and only Stewart’s fingerprints on the knife. There had, as is usual in such cases, been a violent quarrel between the two men only hours before. But what means the whiskey in the library that had been adulterated with arsenic?

   Beef does an excellent job of investigating in his own inimitable manner and concludes that Stewart Ferrers is indeed not guilty. Beef is, however, unable to prove that Ferrers didn’t do it or to apprehend the someone else who did do it.

   There is consternation, of course, among mystery writers and amateur detectives. As one publisher put it, “If novelists’ investigators cannot solve the problems created, who in the world can?” Monsieur Amer Picon, who appeared in Beef’s first major investigation, Case for Three Detectives, and who bears a distinct resemblance to Hercule Poirot, reacted this way: “Helas! Mon Dieu. Je ne sais quoi.”

   Such a failure by an amateur investigator is certainly unprecedented, and this may have been why Case with No Conclusion was not published in the US until 1984, whereas the next book in the series, Case with Four Clowns, a considerably lesser mystery, did find a publisher here in 1939.

   Suffice it to say that there is more here than meets the eye, but reviewers rules do not permit that additional information to be disclosed. Read and enjoy.

LEO BRUCE – Case with Four Clowns. Frederick A. Stokes, US, hardcover, 1940. Academy Chicago, US, paperback, 2010. First published in the UK by Davies, hardcover, 1939.

   Sergeant William Beef, formerly of the police force, is now in unwilling retirement as a private investigator because of his last investigation, Case with No Conclusion. Beef was unable to prove that the man charged with a murder had not done it, although Beef was certain that the man had not committed the crime.

   No one will hire Beef, but he gets a note from his nephew, who is traveling with a circus. The nephew says he has been told by a gypsy fortune teller that there will be a murder at the circus.

   Beef manages to talk Lionel Townsend, the doubting chronicler of his investigations, into joining him in a tour with the circus. There Beef uncovers lots of enmities and jealousies, what might be an attempt at murder, and several “accidents” that could have been efforts at homicide.

   Despite a great deal of confusion and conflict, Beef, using his vast common sense, manages to make sense of the case. A murder does occur, but it’s not Beef’s fault.

   Circus fans should enjoy this one, and so should Beef admirers. I found it a bit slow, but Beef’s comments about mystery writers and amateur detectives kept me entertained. Townsend as chronicler is always amusing, as when he seriously tells Beef:

    “… Before we started on this business I had my eye on a young lady school-teacher in Murston who, I have been told, solves every interesting crime by an algebraic process which she works out during her scripture classes. She would, I believe, have made an excellent investigator for me to chronicle, instead of wasting my time running in and out of public-houses after you.”

   Why Beef puts up with Townsend and vice versa is as big a mystery as any that Beef has investigated.

JOHN R. RIGGS – Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. Dembner Books, hardcover, 1989. Jove, paperback reprint, 1993.

   Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing is the first of John R. Riggs’ five novels about Garth Ryland I’ve read, and on this evidence I’ve missed four previous treats.

   Ryland publishes a weekly newspaper in the small Wisconsin town of Oakalla. Here he’s concerned about Diana, whom he loved and lost to English professor Devin LeMay. She and LeMay went to a cabin somewhere in northern Minnesota and both are overdue to return.

   His anxiety mounting, Garth checks out LeMay’s home (vacant, but with one most peculiar room, and watched over by a lovesick neighbor) and the one-time local resident who owns that Minnesota cabin. These trails lead to fearsome territories.

   Solid suspense, atmosphere thick enough to cut and package, vivid characters. Memorable stuff.

       The Garth Ryland series —

1. The Last Laugh (1984)
2. Let Sleeping Dogs Lie (1986)
3. The Glory Hound (1987)
4. Haunt of the Nightingale (1988)
5. Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing (1989)
6. One Man’s Poison (1991)
7. Dead Letter (1992)
8. A Dragon Lives Forever (1992)
9. Cold Hearts and Gentle People (1994)
10. Killing Frost (1995)
11. Snow on the Roses (1996)
12. He Who Waits (1997)
13. The Lost Scout (1998)
14. Nothin’ Short of Dyin’ (2011)
15. After the Petals Go (2012)

Editorial Comment:   For a local newspaper story on John R. Riggs and his resumption of the Garth Ryland series after a lapse of 12 years, go here.

THE GIRL HUNTERS. Colorama Features, 1963. Mickey Spillane (Mike Hammer), Shirley Eaton, Scott Peters, Guy Kingsley Poynter, James Dyrenforth, Charles Farrell, Kim Tracy, Hy Gardner, Lloyd Nolan. Based on the novel by Mickey Spillane. Director: Roy Rowland.

   A film with credentials is The Girl Hunters, directed by Roy Rowland and co-written by Mickey Spillane who also portrays his own creation, Mike Hammer.

   Casting-wise, this is just about plu-perfect. The ideal actor in a part that was (subconsciously, at least) written just for him, even by him. It’s like Onan Meets Pygmalion, and the fact that the rest of the film is somewhat routine cannot dim the brilliance of this concept.

   For the record, The Girl Hunters deals with Mickey/Mike’s search for his missing-presumed-dead Girl Friday Velma, who disappeared years ago, turning the once-tough PI into a gutter-drunk . Which is where the story opens.

   Two minutes later, M/M gets a clue that Velma may still be alive and he’s the Old Hammer once more. Clean and sober now (if still a little reminiscent of Thomas Hobbes’ description of Life — nasty, brutish and short), M/M becomes a trenchcoated juggernaut, mowing through the legions of cheap punks, commie spies and panting dames who beset his path.

   Like I say, this is all fairly routine stuff for anyone familiar with Spillane: there’s a helpful but handcuffed-by-the-law G-Man (played by Lloyd Nolan, still smooth and professional 20 years after his days as a B-movie PI but looking a bit bored), a helpful but nerdy plot-device newsman Hy Gardner, always there with information to move the story along, and helpful but slightly-suspect Black Widow Shirley Eaton, whose crusading anti-communist husband was killed by a burglar who didn’t set off the alarm while riffling the safe with the Government Secrets, and if you can`t pick the Killer out of this lineup you just don’t know your Spillane.

   In terms of execution, it’s all a little bland, but the acting is surprisingly not-awful. Surrounded by consummate professionals, Spillane lives up to the thesping around him, looking very relaxed and convincing, and while I wouldn’t care to see him play King Lear, I have to say that he delivers his lines well … which, since he wrote them, may be less surprising than I thought.

　

   It is common on this blog for myself, and others, to bemoan why so many of the great (and admittedly not so great) writers of the past are not represented in today’s book market. The lament usually goes something like this:

   They don’t write them like they used to, and all the great old books are lost, forgotten. You can’t find (choose the name of your choice) in print. The only books out there are dull and badly written in comparison. The new generation doesn’t know what it is missing …

   In the immortal words of Seinfeld: ‘Yada yada yada…’

   Well, I sorry to deny my fellow curmudgeonly collectors and readers one of our pet hobby horses, but our favorite lament is no longer true, and so untrue that the solution to the problem is not in some dusty musty smelling used bookstore, crowded book fair or busy convention where you have to cram a year’s worth of book hunting and buying into a few cramped hours, but no farther away than a fingers touch away and under $10 in cost.

   In the last 24 hours I have recreated some major elements of my lost collection, and the most it has cost me for a single volume has been $4, in many cases less than $1. Understand I’m not just talking about obscure or once famous writers from another age, though I’ve recovered my complete Charlie Chan, Philo Vance, Mr. Moto, Bulldog Drummond, Dr. Thorndyke, Father Brown, Sherlock Holmes, Raffles, and Tarzan collections — all for a grand total of $1.99 (the Tarzan); those have been around almost from the beginning, in public domain.

   No, I’m talking about a second paperback and pulp revolution equal to the first, and, like the first, in cheap readily accessible attractive and easily transportable editions. Oh, and I might add so far I haven’t spent a dime for the devices to read them, though I certainly plan to buy an inexpensive Kindle soon. Carrying a thousand books in a device smaller than a trade paperback gives a new meaning to the word ‘pocketbook.’

   More importantly, some of these writers haven’t been available at these prices since the 1980‘s.

   Who am I talking about?

   John D. MacDonald, Dan J. Marlowe, William Campbell Gault, Ross McDonald, Peter Rabe, Wade Miller (the complete Max Thursday for .99 each), Frank Kane, Brett Halliday, Mickey Spillane, Donald Hamilton, Stephen Marlowe, Ed Lacy, Henry Kane: and from the pulps, Nebel, Chandler, Hammett, Paul Cain (for free), Carroll John Daly, Robert Leslie Bellem, not to mention Doc Savage, the Spider, the Avenger, the Black Bat, even Nick Carter, Frank Merriwell, and the Rover Boys …

   Almost all those books are under $10, most under $5 and many under $1. Some are even free.

   Granted, you don’t have the pleasure of an actual book in your hands, and it takes a bit of time to adjust to reading in this format (arguably the Kindle, Nook, etc are closer to actually reading a book), but many of the complaints I’ve heard lodged against e-books here echo what was said of the pulps and paperbacks as well. E-books will never replace the feel of a book, certainly not a leather bound or quatro buckram edition with its scent and heft, but frankly I had less than 100 such books in my extensive collection and few of them were worth what I paid for them. E-books won’t appreciate in value either, but they are here, available, and no doubt will develop their own following.

   To quote James Joyce, I’m not trying to convert you or pervert myself, but I am trying to point out that this is far and away the most important revolution in books since the paperback was born. When I began collecting it took me years to accumulate books by John Buchan, Sapper, Dornford Yates, Louis Joseph Vance, Maurice Leblanc, Talbot Mundy, Edgar Wallace, Rohmer, Van Dine, and others. Now all it takes is a few keystrokes and a WiFi or DSL connection. I could, with a little effort, and under $500 dollars, download my entire collection of over forty years worth close to $100,000, in less than eighteen hours — and that only because of sheer volume.

   I don’t ask that you adapt to the e-book, or even read one, but don’t complain about expensive limited reprint editions or the scarcity of this material. Everyday more volumes are being added and new generations of readers are discovering these writers, people, I might add, who would not have purchased them from a paperback kiosk and certainly not in limited overpriced editions. Most of these books have reviews by people who read and enjoyed them and don’t know there ever was a paperback revolution.

   I currently reside in a small town, a small and spectacularly illiterate community, where the only source of books are a high school library and the Dollar General, and neither updates its stacks often or carries much more than women’s soft core porn, vampire and ‘romantic suspense’ novels. A treasure is a remaindered Preston and Childs or Cussler. Once a month, if I’m lucky, I get to a Hastings. For now that’s it. But, at my fingertips I have access to books from around the world in countless languages and libraries as important as Oxford’s Boedelian and Harvard.

   Like the first paperback revolution this includes an entire new world of original e-books, many better than you could hope, or no worse than what you find on the mass market book stands at Wal-Mart, and numerous sources of free books. I can also, for far less than the near $30 they cost on the stands, purchase the latest bestseller. You can even purchase an e-book “safe” for $20 to protect your collection — more than I can say for actual books.

   Then too, those of us who have been married should welcome the end of those long forbearing stares when our collection threatens to over run the house having already driven the cat and both cars out of the garage and threatening to cause the ceiling to collapse by their sheer weight in the attic…

   Books and collecting have always evolved. Don’t be the guy complaining because some German named Gutenberg put all those monks copying books out of business. This is not a fad, it’s a revolution, and standing in the way of one has never been a good idea.

   How could any of us complain about our favorite writers being in print and finding new and enthusiastic readers? Because digital editions take up no actual physical space (a Kindle can hold 10,000 books and will only get more powerful), and cost virtually nothing to reprint, the possibilities are endless.

   Most of us converted without pain from 16 mm to VHS to DVD, to Blu-Ray. This is the same thing, only here when a format goes kaput you don’t have to replace everything you own in Beta, you download a free converter and soon it’s all back. Granted Kindle won’t play on Nook and so on, but you can get a free app to read any format or get a free Calibre converter for extinct formats like Microsoft Readers LIT that take up little space on your PC and require no tech savvy to use.

   For those of us born in the shadow of the first paperback revolution this one is even bigger, and likely more fundamental culturally. You don’t have to embrace it, but recognize what it means. Book collecting will never be the same again. This is the most important thing to happen to books since Gutenberg, I have no idea where it is going, but if it keeps my favorites from the past available I say it’s going in the right direction.

   Somehow I don’t think Erle Stanley Gardner or Mickey Spillane would be the least bothered by having their work bring in money in another format — I can promise you Alexandre Dumas, the most business savvy author who ever lived (despite losing everything numerous times) wouldn’t mind at all.

   Collectors, and I include myself, need to dismount our high horses before we fall off of them.

   Oh brave new world that has such formats in it.

   Feeling tired and lazy in these dog days of early autumn, I began asking myself whether I could cobble together a respectable column from the mystery reviews I wrote for my eyes only back in the Sixties and Seventies. To provide a soupcon of unity I decided early on to limit myself to U.S. writers and to novels I wasn’t terribly happy with. Shall we see how the experiment came out?

   Baynard Kendrick’s Blind Allies (Morrow, 1954) begins promisingly as a seedy character who claims to be but obviously is not the son of an oil tycoon retains blind detective Captain Duncan Maclain to go to his dad’s mansion at 3:00 A.M. and open a safe whose combination is in Braille.

   May I jump to the first murder? The lights go out in the old dark house, all the suspects run around like buffoons, the lights go on and voila! a body. Back in 1968 I couldn’t find a single kind word for this disaster of a book, which struck me as wretchedly organized and plotted and written, stuffed with implausibilities and contradictions, padded beyond endurance, and resolved by blatant guesswork.

   My reaction would probably be the same were I to re-read it today, but if you’ve tackled this or any other book discussed here more recently than I and think I was too harsh, please say so.

   In recent decades dozens of female private eye novelists have flourished, most if not all of them writing about female private eyes. But back when Chandler ruled the genre the only woman in the field was M. V. (Mary Violet) Heberden (1906-1965). She seems to have been heavily influenced by Brett Halliday, and her PI Desmond Shannon is best described as Mike Shayne seen through a woman’s eyes.

   His problem in The Lobster Pick Murder (Doubleday, 1941) is to find out who stuck the pick into the sadistic plastic surgeon’s medulla oblongata. Nothing about this exercise — plot, prose, characterizations, upper-crust Long Island setting, theatrical milie — rises above the drearily competent, and most readers will identify the perp about 200 pages before Shannon. Some of the later Heberdens I’ve read are much better but they’re not on the table this month.

   The writer who was born Milton Lesser (1908-2008) and is best known as Stephen Marlowe, creator of globe-trotting PI Chester Drum, also used other bylines. Roughly 90% of his Find Eileen Hardin — Alive! (Avon #T-343, PBO, 1959), signed as by Andrew Frazer, is the mixture as before.

   Private dick and former football hero Duncan Pride returns to his alma mater when his old girlfriend, now married to his old coach, begs him to help find the coach’s missing teen-age daughter, who’s rumored to have become a call girl. The search brings him up against criminal enterprises like prostitution, abortion (remember this was a dozen years before Roe v. Wade), the enticing of innocent virgins into a life of sin and the fixing of college athletic events, not to mention murder.

   Frazer does give us a few reasonably vivid scenes at a deserted oyster cannery and the old Idlewild air terminal, but the book is too long and full of cliches, much of the motivation would not be out of place in a soap opera, and the sniggering attitude towards sex is a turn-off.

   The success of Mary Roberts Rinehart, Agatha Christie and countless others disproves the thesis that sexism forced all or most women mystery writers of the pre-feminist era to adopt male bylines. But it was common practice for women writing the sorts of mysteries generally associated with men, like M.V. Heberden with her PI series, and also like DeLoris Stanton Forbes (1923- ), whose novels about police detectives Knute Severson and Lawrence Benedict appeared under the name Tobias Wells.

   Dead by the Light of the Moon (Doubleday, 1967) is a readable but uncompelling semi-procedural about the murder and de-breasting of an old woman in a Boston apartment building during the great East Coast blackout of 1965. Wells has just finished spreading suspicion evenly among various fellow tenants of the victim when suddenly and arbitrarily the guilty party confesses. Sure, real-life crimes often end this way, but a fiction writer must do better.

   The novels of Robert Portner Koehler (1905-1988) were published almost without exception by a house at the absolute bottom of the literary food chain, although it does hold the distinction of having been the last U.S. publisher of that great wack of American literature, Harry Stephen Keeler.

   Koehler’s The Hooded Vulture Murders (Phoenix Press, 1947) deals with two hapless California PIs who stumble upon the murder of a blackmailing journalist while driving through southern Mexico on the uncompleted Pan American Highway. Naturally the bumbling native officials welcome with open arms the intrusion of these brilliant Anglo sleuths, although readers may wish the boys had stayed home.

   Koehler paints local color vividly enough but the book is ineptly plotted, woefully written, pathetically characterized, laughably clued, and all in all a pretty lame excuse for a whodunit.

   Enough for one month. It took more time and work than I expected to unstiffen the language of these ancient jottings without changing anything substantive. But it’s good to know that I have enough material in the archives for a few more columns if I get to feeling tired and lazy again.

THE WRONG BOX. Salamander Film Corp., UK, 1966. Michael Caine, Nanette Newman, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Ralph Richardson, John Mills, Peter Sellers, Wilfred Lawson, Tony Hancock. Director-producer: Brian Forbes. Based on the book by Robert Louis Stevenson & Lloyd Osbourne. [Osbourne was Stevenson’s stepson.]

   This 1966 version of The Wrong Box is a movie graced by the beetle-like humor of Dudley Moore and a perfect caricature of a fact-spouting pedant, played by Ralph Richardson.

   The film is not as good as the sum of its parts, and is not particularly enhanced by a romantic subplot involving Michael Caine and a forgettable British actress, but the manic attempts of two members of the inimitable “Beyond the Fringe” company, Moore and Peter Cook, to make certain that their uncle, played by Richardson, is the last surviving member of a “tontine” and, thus, inheritor of a fortune of some one hundred thousand pounds, are often very funny.

   Cook is the fast-talking “brains” of the team, constantly maneuvering around the sweet-talking bumbling of overactive Lothario Moore, but Moore gets the best line. After it is pointed out that Cook has altered a death dertificate but inadvertently put on the next day’s date, Moore comments, “here today, gone tomorrow,” a perfectly logical statement in the context of this zany Victorian comedy.

   It is one of the few films I have seen in which the line “the butler did it” is uttered to truly comic effect, and the final scene is a triumph of comic miscalculations that somehow seem inevitable and right.

   A funny take-off on caper-and-chase films, The Wrong Box did not find much of an audience in this country in its original release and is sometimes hampered by a too-obvious and arch adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson original story by the America scriptwriters, but the talented cast surmounts most of the weaknesses, and the film is worth watching for.

Editorial Comment:   My own review of this film, posted here on this blog almost six years ago (!) agrees with Walter in all but one important aspect.