Finally, Michael Gilbert is getting the recognition he deserves. In 1987 he received a Grand Master Award from MWA, in 1988 publishers seem to be falling all over themselves to reprint him, and that is good news for American mystery readers.

   Incidentally, Gilbert, who only recently retired as an attorney, did virtually all his writing while commuting by train to London. Yet he had a very active practice and even was Raymond Chandler’s solicitor, writing his will. I am in awe of Gilbert since my own railroad-commuting days were much less productive, limited to reading the newspaper in the morning and napping, despite my best efforts to stay awake, in the evening.

   Penguin has reprinted Smallbone Deceased for $3.95, and there is no better possible introduction to Gilbert than this very early (1950) work. It contains many of the elements of the classic puzzle: the bizarre crime (a body is found in a large deed box at a law office), a diagram of the office, and clever chapter headings which fit in with the legal background of this mystery.

   Gilbert’s sophisticated writing and expert character development make this book very “modern” for its time, since it was written when most puzzle writers used large chunks of cardboard with which they created the people in their books.

   Gilbert is one of the finest short-story writers around, and Carroll and Graf has reprinted his wonderful collection of Calder and Behrens spy stories, Game Without Rules (1967), $3.95. This edition contains the original British titles, though many stories appeared in EQMM under different titles.

   By whatever name, most of the stories In this collection are a perfect antidote for readers who are tired of the cynicism and lack of action in John Le Carre. Gilbert’s adept plotting and wit make each story a joy to read and convince me the short story is the proper length for espionage fiction. Especially recommended are “The Cat Cracker,” “Trembling’s Tours,” and “Hellige Nacht,” three of the very best spy short stories ever.

   Carroll and Graf has also reprinted, for $3.95, Overdrive (1967), a novel which received considerable critical acclaim, though I found the protagonist, Oliver Nugent, too ruthless to permit me to identify with him.

   Allen J. Hubin’s highly favorable review of this book in a Minneapolis newspaper was brought to the attention of the editor of the New York Times Book Review and led to, from 1968 to 1971, his being the first (and far and away the best) replacement for Anthony Boucher.

   From Perennial Library comes The Country-House Burglar (1955), $4.95, and The Crack in the Teacup (1966), $3.95, two village mysteries which stress the charm of the British countryside but crackle with surprise and clever plotting. A bonus is the subtle way Gilbert works choral singing and cricket, respectively, into the stories.

● Smallbone Deceased. Hodder & Stoughton, UK. hardcover. 1950. Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1950.

● Game Without Rules. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1968. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1967.

● Overdrive. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1968. First published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton as The Dust and the Heat, hardcover, 1967.

● The Country-House Burglar. Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1955. First published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton as Sky High, hardcover, 1955.

● The Crack in the Teacup. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1966. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1966.

ROSEMARY KUTAK – I Am the Cat. Farrar Straus & Co., hardcover, 1948. Unicorn Mystery Book Club. hardcover, 4-in-1 edition, May 1948. Mercury Mysteries #130, digest-sized paperback, no date [1949]. Collier Books, paperback, 1964, 1966, with an introduction by Anthony Boucher.

   The Collier Books reprint is one in its series of Mystery Classics presumably chosen by Anthony Boucher. Momentarily stifling my bias against know-it-all psychiatrists, I concur with Boucher’s selection.

   Taking a break from treating veterans with war-induced traumas, psychiatrist Marc Castleman is spending his leave with his “Aunt” Emily and her houseguests, a fairly motley crew. One of the male guests apparently gets into Castleman’s medical bag and takes an overdose of morphia. When that falls to kill him, he brushes his teeth with a tooth powder made mostly of cyanide, which does the trick.

   Was he really trying to kill himself? His sister, as neurotic as he seems to have been, has doubts. The day of the inquest she is found at the foot of the stairs, with a broken neck.

   Was her death an accident, or is someone, involved with those two and other houseguests in a tontine, trying to increase his or her income? Will it get down to two, or maybe to one, if the murderer is cunning enough?

   Keen readers will spot the murderer the moment Castleman does, although all it is not what it seems.

BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHICAL DATA:   Dr. Marc Castleman appeared in one earlier mystery novel, Darkness of Slumber (Lippincott, 1944). For more on that book plus some biographical data about the author, whose only two crime novels these are, check out this earlier post on the blog.

THE SCARLET HOUR. Paramount Pictures, 1956. Carol Ohmart, Tom Tryon, Jody Lawrance, James Gregory, Elaine Stritch, E.G. Marshall, Edward Binns, Scott Marlowe, Billy Gray, David Lewis, Nat “King” Cole. Director: Michael Curtiz.

   Sometimes you have to sift through a lot of Fool’s Gold as you make your way through a stack of would-be Film Noir movies on DVD before you find a true nugget, the Real Thing, and this movie is it.

   Apparently it’s all but unknown. Right now there’s been only one person who’s left a comment about it on IMDB (and his opinion is the same as mine – “a small gem”), and no links to external reviews (until this one shows up there).

   The basic plot line sounds like The Postman Always Rings Twice, but (a) there are a lot of variations possible on that particular theme, and this film has them, and (b) as much as I’d like to say otherwise, it’s almost but not quite in that league.

   Carol Ohmart, for example, as the femme fatale, whom Tom Tryon’s character has fallen in love with, has nowhere near the screen presence of Lana Turner, even on the latter’s worse days and Miss Ohmart’s best.

   In The Scarlet Hour the latter’s role is a little too tough and hardbitten if you were to compare her to Miss Turner in Postman, but to her credit, she does manage to get the impossibly handsome Mr. Tryon to fall in love with her.

   Even if she already has a husband. Tom Tryon works for the man (James Gregory), a real estate kind of guy; Tryon’s his top salesman. And neither Ohmart and Tryon have murder on their mind; all they need is the money to run away together.

   Enter a gang of crooks they overhear casing a house. A third of a million dollars; worth of jewels sounds good to them, and hijacking the burglars’ loot after they’ve cracked the safe sounds easy and all but foolproof.

   We know better. Plans like this seldom work out as planned. The husband gets suspicious, for one thing, and suspicious husbands always put rocks in the crankcase.

   We (the viewer) easily find ourselves anticipating a couple of the more immediate outcomes, but probably not the third (speaking for myself, that is).

   There is a fourth important player in the game, which I almost forgot to tell you about, and that is Mr. Tryon’s secretary (Jody Lawrance), who is – but more I will not tell.

   The ending of The Scarlet Hour is also nowhere near as memorable as that of Postman, but it’s nearly as good, and it certainly is as inevitable. Beside my recommendation as spelled out so far, you also get a bonus of Nat “King” Cole singing a song in a nightclub. I’m not sure the plot required a singer in a nightclub, but singers in nightclubs appear in lots of noir films, and this he’s the one in this one. (It was also David Lewis’s film debut, for whatever that particular fact may be worth to you.)

Herewith some items of interest, I hope, from here and there on the World Wide Web:

● Coachwhip Publications, a “micropublisher” new to me, has already made enough early detective fiction available to keep me reading (and broke) for some time to come. Included in their mystery offerings are: Futrelle’s The Thinking Machine | A. J. Raffles, Gentleman Thief | Hamilton Cleek | Old Man in the Corner | Uncle Abner Mysteries | Thornley Colton, Blind Detective | Max Carrados | Thorpe Hazell Mysteries | The Legal Exploits of Randolph Mason | Addison Kent Mysteries | Complete Adventures of Romney Pringle | Flaxman Low | Luther Trant, Psychological Detective | Average Jones | and many many more.

● Bill Lengeman has added a monthly podcast to his Traditional Mysteries blog. The first one is a Round Table discussion between several bloggers taking on the subject:
“How Much Sherlock is Too Much?”

● Curt Evans and Patrick Ohl are having a multi-part discussion on the latter’s blog in which they discuss in detail the various characters in And Then There Were None, one of Agatha Christie’s best known novels. The most recent of these posts covers General Macarthur. (When I say in detail, I mean it.)

● As I’ve mentioned before, you can listen to every episode of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater online, a great way to spend part of your own evening, or any time of the day, for that matter. Even better, earlier this week Todd Mason provided links on his blog to a long list of other online archives of “Radio Drama from the 1960s to Now.” (Scroll down.) Some are familiar to me, others not.

ROMAN McDOUGALD – Lady Without Mercy. Simon & Schuster/Inner Sanctum Mystery, hardcover, 1948. No paperback edition.

   An obscure book by an obscure author. There are only five copies available on ABE, for example, but the most any one of them will set you back is $14, including postage, which means not only is the supply low, but so is the demand. Is it worth such a meager outlay? With some qualifications, I’d say yes.

   But first, let’s talk about the author. There are six books listed to his credit in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, all published between 1944 and 1950, with three of them having Philip Cabot as the leading character. I’ve not read any, but one source I found online called him a private detective, a fact that interests me, but it’s also one I can’t confirm.

   As for Lady Without Mercy, in many regards, it reads like a gothic romance, much like those that were all the rage in paperback through the 1960s and 70s, and truthfully I was all but ready to give up on it very early on, not knowing where the story was going and not having much of a reason to care.

   I didn’t make a special note of a particular passage to show you to demonstrate this, so here’s one I’ve just now chosen at random. The story is told largely from Linda Travers’ perspective, and she’s only just arrived at the home of Kirk Ormond, the man she loves. Unfortunately he’s married, to a woman whose long expected death from leukemia has not occurred in three years since it was diagnosed. From page 11:

   She is being taken up to a room which Rita, the ill woman, had chosen for her at the last minute. Alan is Dr. Wall, the husband of her half-sister, Isabel. Also in the house are Alan and Isabel’s 16-year-old twin daughters; Kirk’s sister; the housekeeper; and Alice Coulter, sort of a companion to Rita, and who has been encouraging her in an obsessive interest in the occult.

   Adding to the extremely atmospheric nature of the tale are some very strange facts. No one knows how Rita has managed to postpone death so long, and in so doing, has managed to keep Linda and Kirk apart. What’s more — and here’s where things begin to get interesting — after a recent attack of her illness that Alan did not believe Rita would survive, she managed to pull through, and at the exact moment when she began to recover, her favorite pet dog died.

   When Linda finds a bottle of poison in her room, after being wakened by an intruder during the night, she finds the idea of using it to rid herself of her rival irresistible. Each time she makes the attempt, however, Rita mysteriously survives, and even more ominously, another member of this extended household dies instead. Kirk, Linda’s lover, is of no help. He’s a mess, through and through, an utter weakling. What Linda sees in him, one can only wonder.

   As for Miss Coulter … well, perhaps I’ve said enough. You’ll have to read the book for yourself to learn more, and if you’re a fan of hard-boiled fiction, you probably quit reading this review long ago. Suffice it to say, though, this is one the more unique murder mysteries I’ve ever had the fortuitous opportunity to read, and I’m glad I did.

BOLD VENTURE. Syndicated; premiered March 26, 1951. Frederic W. Ziv Radio Production. Cast: Humphrey Bogart as Slate Shannon, Lauren Bacall as Sailor Duval, Jester Hairston as King Moses. Music: David Rose and his orchestra. Other credits (not given on air): Written by David Friedkin and Mort Fine. Directed by Henry Hayward.

   Some interesting production information about the series:

   The transcribed half-hour weekly was on over 400 stations by April 1951. It was first sold to local stations as a 52 weekly episodes package for $13 to $750 a week (depending on station size).

   Bogart and Bacall signed a five-year contract for the show, got royalties earning them $5000 a week in the first year. Writers Fine and Friedkin got $1000 per episode in first year.

   The first thirty-six episodes were done at once in early 1951 then Bogart and Bacall left on a European vacation. By the time the episodes aired Bogart was filming The African Queen. Reportedly there were 78 episodes done, but the number remains debated since most episodes had more than one title leading to some episodes getting counted twice. Today over fifty episodes survive. You can listen to many at Internet Archive here.

   Bold Venture was a mix of the relationship between Bogart’s Harry to Bacall’s Slim in To Have and Have Not, toss in Sam from Casablanca and add “adventure, mystery and intrigue” in the “mysterious” Caribbean islands.

   Slate Shannon was a former adventurer who had decided to settle in Havana Cuba and run a hotel called “Shannon’s Place.” He also rented out his services as Captain of his boat “The Bold Venture.”

   Sailor Duval was a young girl with a wild troubled past. When her father, an old friend of Slate, died he “willed” her to Slate to make sure she stayed safe.

   Shannon was helped at the hotel by long time friend King Moses, who, when the story needed it, would sing a calypso song (by David Rose) recapping the episode’s story.

   A popular source of stories was Slate’s “hobby” (as Sailor called it) of helping people, be it a neighbor who needed Slate to get his daughter away from a gangster or helping an old girlfriend who claimed she was going to be murdered by her stepmother.

   â€œShannon’s Place,” Slate’s hotel was a repeated cause to get Slate involved. Slate took it personally if anything happened at the hotel or to a guest, as when a beautiful female guest has her face ripped to shreds by killer gamecocks. In another episode Slate becomes a suspect when one of the hotel performers is killed. The script is available to read online here.

   The final cause to get Slate involved was his boat “Bold Venture.” Slate and his boat would often be hired by clients who would lie about the real purpose of his trip such as gun running revolutionaries or a college educated treasure hunter turn killer out to retrieve stolen gold.

   The stories were full of touches of crime fiction bordering on noir. Gunfire, fists, knifes, Slate getting beat up, Sailor in danger and countless dead bodies spiced up each week’s tale as our two heroes wisecracked and romanced through it all.

   Strange characters were common, such as two schoolteachers out for excitement and adventure and willing to kill for it.

   And what would this type of adventure mystery be without great dialog such as when Slate asks a man a question and the man replies toughly who’s asking, Sailor says “Him. I talk like this.”

   Then there was the final short scene (often called a “tag” or “epilog”) featuring Slate and Sailor and their relationship, usually ending with romance.

   While the writing and music were enough to make Bold Venture a radio show worth listening to, it was Bogart and Bacall that made Bold Venture special. Their chemistry together translated to radio as well as film and real life. Plus, Bogart and Bacall could do something not many movie stars could, they could act with just their voice.

   It would be the absence of Bogart and Bacall and that chemistry that would doom the Bold Venture TV series, but more about that next time.

      ADDITIONAL SOURCES:

Billboard magazine, 1/31/51

Broadcasting, 4/16/51

OTRR Wiki page.   (L. A. Times article by Walter Ames)

THE SMALL WORLD OF SAMMY LEE. British Lion Films, 1963. Anthony Newley, Julia Foster, Robert Stephens, Wilfrid Brambell, Warren Mitchell, Miriam Karlin, Kenneth J. Warren, Clive Colin Bowler, Toni Palmer, Harry Locke. Screenwriter: Ken Hughes, based on his BBC-TV play “Sammy.” Director: Ken Hughes.

   One of Anthony Newley’s first dramatic roles, and it’s a good one, at least if you were to ask me. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times thought it was a bore, and a reviewer for the Village Voice thought the tawdry portrayal of the Soho strip tease club where Sammy Lee works as the emcee between acts (or compère, to use the big word I just learned) was hypocritical and just plain wrong-headed. “…some of our most distinguished citizens have been devotees of this art form.”

   Without going into the merits of stripping as a fine art as it occurs on some stages, on others tawdry, crude and sleazy are the only words that apply. Not that we see any real nudity in Sammy’s place of employment, but just hanging around backstage through the unblinking eye of the camera is a real, well, eyeful.

   What makes Sammy run, though – this Sammy Lee, not the other one – is that he’s up to his neck in debt to a bookie who’s as tough as they come, and so are the hoodlums who work for him. If he can’t come up with £300 in five hours, his goose will be cooked, figuratively if not literally. To raise the money, he frantically scours his little black book in search of any kind of deal he can come up with: whiskey, bar glasses, watches, you name it.

   Dashing here and there between shows with a breathless kind of nervous energy that will either annoy you immensely (see above) or keep you watching with a kind of fascination not at all unlike watching a train wreck about to happen. Beautifully filmed on location in black and white to a jazzy background beat, with a bit of romance on the side (with Julia Foster as Patsy, a fresh young innocent from the north country), if only he could slow down long enough to know what he has, if only.

   You’ll have to watch for yourself to learn whether he comes up with the money or not. I might warn you that this a noir film from beginning to end, but sometimes reviewers do not tell you the entire truth, lest they give away too much, and this may be one of those times.

   To return to my first paragraph, I don’t know what it means if I were to point out that both reviewers I mentioned were from the US, and a few years back The Small World of Sammy Lee was one of the movies on The Guardian’s list of 1000 films to see before you die. It must mean something, though.

[UPDATE.]   It is now several days after I wrote the first draft of this review. In the version above, I gently chided the reviewer from the Village Voice about his opinion of this film, but he did point out several flaws, as he saw them, in the plot itself.

   I saw them, too, but I’ve been thinking them over, and at the moment I don’t see them as flaws. Sammy Lee may have been a two-bit hustler, if not an out-and-out grifter, but I think he had moral standards. They may not have been your moral standards, nor mine, but he lived his life by them, and I can’t see any reason why I should fault him for that.

THOMAS BLACK – Four Dead Mice. Rinehart & Company, hardcover, 1954. Bantam #1448, paperback, 1956, as Million Dollar Murder.

   I’m going to change things around from the way they usually occur here, not just a little, but from top to bottom. Instead of a complete list of Thomas [B.] Black’s private eye Al Delany character at the end of this review, here they are at the beginning:

      The 3-13 Murders. Reynal & Hitchcock, 1946.

      The Whitebird Murders. Reynal & Hitchcock, 1946.

      The Pinball Murders. Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947.

      Four Dead Mice. Rinehart & Co., 1954.

   There are are only the four of them, and why the gap, and why the abrupt end to the series, I do not know. I’d welcome any information that you might have. According to Al Hubin, Thomas Black was born in Kansas in 1910, with a possible death date of 1993, not confirmed. (Information on hand as of the current Revised Crime Fiction IV.)

   I’m sure I’ve read at least one of the first three, but it was so long ago, I’ll not rely on memory, and I’ll report on only this one. It takes place in Chancellor City, an small metropolis with more than its share of alleys, back streets, rundown housing and a wide-open red light district. I had the feeling that it might be St. Louis, in disguise, or Kansas City, perhaps, but that’s only a guess, and it’s probably not relevant anyway.

   Delany is asked by a bakery to find out who might have dropped some dead mice into a vat of bread dough, and the case escalates from there to include the death of a job applicant who flunked an employment check, and more.

   The dialogue is bright and chipper and slangy, and maybe some of the slang makes the book unreprintable today. For example, S.Q.Q. stands for? San Quentin Quail, if that helps any, and that’s what Delaney knows what Honey Ward is, a precocious young girl (in ways also probably unreprintable today) who grabs his attention early on and doesn’t let go.

   Here’s an early scene that doesn’t have anything to do with the plot, and Cora Collins doesn’t appear again, but I liked the flavor it provided:

   From a little later on, from page 37, this excerpt is getting closer to the plot:

   With other characters involved named Delight (a big nut-brown colored hairpin, handsome as sin and better proportioned), “Baggy Pants” Vance, Bam Carson, George Washington Hite, Little Phil Murio, and a hophead named Sleepy-Sleep, this reads like a cross between Damon Runyon and Harry Stephen Keeler, with triple the coherency of the latter, thanks to numerous recaps and timetables and lists of questions that haven’t have been answered yet.

   I’m not so sure about the ending. I wish Black had pumped up the descriptions of some of the characters earlier on, to give them the presence they needed to fit the roles they were designed to play — and I’m not (necessarily) referring to the killer(s). As it is, it’s solid detection on the run, winging it as it goes, and cramming it all in to fit (for the most part) until the number of pages runs out.

[UPDATE] 02-10-12.   I’m sorry to say that this is all I remember of this book. If I hadn’t written the review, I wouldn’t even be able to tell you where the four dead mice came in. I think this is a positive review, however. I’ve convinced myself I ought to read the book again, next time I get the chance.

RUSSELL THORNDIKE – The Slype. Dial Press, hardcover, 1928. First published in the UK: Holden, hardcover, 1927. Also: Jonathan Cape, UK, 1933.

   Forget about the plot in this thriller, which must have creaked even in the ’20s and which Thorndike does not energize or even, I must confide, make much sense of at the end.

   It has to do with a treasure hunt by a flagitious doctor of medicine who is featureless and a Chinese villain who in his brief appearance manifests great charm despite his lust for the heroine and despite his vile antecedents and even viler predilections.

   Most of the events take place in the fascinating Dullchester Cathedral. In the Precincts strange disappearances are occurring. A Minor Canon vanishes, followed shortly by a second Minor Canon. Then the spinster bee lady, complete with veil, is found missing, if that makes any sense. Soon the Dean, a speckled pig — the rest of the sty goes later — and a wind-up toy cannot be located.

   As I said, the plot is not the reason to read this novel; it should be read for Thorndike’s descriptive ability and his characters. Foremost among them are Sergeant Wurren of the Dullchester Constabulary as he goes about his bumbling investigations and ludicrous questioning, and Wurren’s nemesis, Boyce’s Boy — you know, the lad who delivers for the greengrocer — a most extraordinarily intelligent and amusing imp. These two, and some minor characters, are worthy of being compared to Dickens’s creations.

   First-class entertainment if you aren’t a plot person.

   By the way, a slype is a covered passage, especially one from the transept of a cathedral to the chapter house.

Editorial Comments:   Thank goodness, I thought when I read it, Bill added that last parenthetical paragraph. I had no idea what a “slype” was, and I still wonder what it has to do with the story. I will have to read the book. It sounds terrific.

   Bill also used the word “flagitious” in his review. Neither my spellchecker nor I remembered ever having seen the word before, so I had to look it up. It means “criminal” or “villainous.” I love learning new words, especially those I can now use in my own reviews.

   Of the author of this book, Russell Thorndike, I know nothing, except that he also wrote seven books of the adventures of smuggler-hero Dr. Syn, none of which I’ve read, nor I have I seen the Disney TV miniseries The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, based on the first of them.

NINE GIRLS. Columbia, 1944. Ann Harding, Evelyn Keyes, Jinx Falkenburg, Anita Louise, Leslie Brooks, Jeff Donnell, Nina Foch, Lynn Merrick, Shirley Mills, Marcia Mae Jones, Williard Robertston, William Demarest, Lester Matthews, Grady Sutton. Director: Leigh Jason. Shown at Cinecon 39, Hollywood CA, Aug-Sept 2003.

   This was the third of the Leigh Jason films that have become an eagerly awaited event at Cinecon. (The earlier films were Dangerous Blondes and Three Girls About Town.)

   A bevy of sorority sisters, chaperoned by Ann Harding (recovered from her tragic demise in East Lynne), drives to a mountain lodge where almost immediately Anita Louise, the most unpleasant member of the group, is murdered. Nina Foch and Evelyn Keyes are the prime suspects as the cops arrive and the entire crew is prevented from leaving by a convenient storm.

   The humor is somewhat broader (and less effective) than in the other two films, but this was still a delightful film. The screenwriters (Karen DeWolf and Connie Lee) also wrote for the Blondie series, one of my early affections (or rather, Penny Singleton was the affection).

Editorial Comments:   My own review of this film appeared earlier on this blog. Check it out here. Of the three lobby cards shown below, only the first two are (as I recall) from the movie itself. I have a feeling that the one at the bottom (with the girls in bathing suits) is only a promotional pose.