GUERRILLAS IN PINK LACE. Mont Productions, 1964. George Montgomery, Valerie Varda, Joan Shawnlee. Screenplay by Fred Grofe Jr. Directed by George Montgomery. Currently available on YouTube (see below).

   The movie is bad.

   Bad doesn’t begin to describe it.

   The color photography is washed out. The acting is uniformly bad. The direction is ham-handed. The plot is ludicrous, bordering on racist tropes from twenty years earlier. Sexist doesn’t begin to describe it; there isn’t a woman in it credited with so much as a single brain cell. Sue Ann Langdon or Sherry North could have played every important female in the cast in different wigs, and probably should have.

   Nothing works from the goofy score, to the slightly less sexy for wear guerrillas in pink lace from the title, and there’s not really nudity in it considering it’s only possible reason for existing is sexploitation. There is one broadly slapstick swimming scene for Joan Shawnlee as a brainless brunette nude in the water trying to snatch her bra hooked on a Japanese water can while Murphy and the girls watch helpless, but that’s all the tease this film as to offer.

   And you know what?

   The stupid mess is fun.

   Stupid fun, but fun.

   You see, conman and unlucky gambler Murphy (George Montgomery) is in the Philippines after Pearl Harbor and down on his luck replete with a hangover and black eye, when Father Osgood (not Jim Montgomery, as IMDb insists, but Torn Thatcher) shows up. Father Osgood has a pass to be flown out that day, but he wants to stay behind and help his parishioners face the hardships of Japanese occupation.

   Murphy, of course, agrees to help him.

   He steals a cassock, a pair of glasses, and the Pass and manages to catch a ride to the airport with a bus load of exotic dancers whose boss has talked an officer into a pass. For Murphy it’s a fairly delightful farewell to Manila until the Japanese shoot down the plane.

   Only Murphy and the girls survive and end up on the small island of San Miguel where Murphy, who the girls still believe to be the courageous and Godly Father Osgood, all fine and well and rather cozy until it turns out there are Japanese on the island.

   Two Japanese specifically, an officer and a soldier keeping a radio observation outpost, a fat stupid officer and a cross-dressing (as a geisha girl to sing to the officer while Murphy steals from them and uses their radio to contact the Navy) idiot much put on soldier.

   Laurel and Hardy, Japanese soldiers.

   So while the ladies bathe and exercise and bemoan, Murphy is a man of God and not available, and surprisingly show less skin than the Japanese soldiers, and Murphy steals the Japanese blind and plots to get close to the radio to get a second message out after his initial raid, there is no real threat.

   And then of course the Japanese army shows up and all bets are off.

   Montgomery was a reliable and fairly popular leading man through the Forties into the early Sixties where he moved briefly to the small screen (Cimmaron) and then made several low budget adventure film in the Philippines (this was the third after Huk and The Iron Claw). He was one of the men suspected to be the Masked Rider of the Plains in the Republic serial The Lone Ranger, and again in The Masked Marvel, he was soon co-starring as a poor man’s John Payne opposite the likes of Ginger Rogers (Roxie Hart), cast as Philip Marlowe in The Brasher Doubloon, and in numerous adventure, comedy, and other films.

   In the Fifties he moved primarily into Westerns with some success (Cripple Creek, The Texas Rangers) and was married to singer Diana Shore. He continued to act until 1988, but had long since become popular and respected as a maker of fine furniture.

   Back on San Miguel, the small island, Murphy and the women decided to go out like heroes rather than run from the Japanese. They strip Japanese uniforms off soldiers they knock unconscious, sneak into the base, steal dynamite, and light up the night with an attack that consists of nothing but tossing sticks of dynamite into the camp in the dark among the panicking troops.

   And when they wake up the next morning they find the Japanese of decamped in the night even leaving the radio behind.

   The guerrillas in pink lace have won the battle of San Miguel.

   Murphy finds himself a Major in charge of special operations of San Miguel with his “army” commended for their skills and bravery, but the girls have just found out Murphy is no priest and…

   Well, they’ve been on the island for a while…

   If I’ve spoiled this for you, believe me, the plot is telegraphed in the title. This is no Westward the Women or Guns of Fort Petticoat. None of the cast so much as lose a nail despite the plane crash and living in the jungle.

   Well, one woman gets her hair twisted in a bush. I guess that was traumatic, but as a dramatic high point, it’s fairly lame.

   And there it stands, stupid, badly written, sexist, racist (though no one is much smarter than the Japanese), inexpertly directed by Montgomery (who did better on television and elsewhere), mostly badly acted (Montgomery does manage a kind of goofy charm as Murphy — at least to me) never delivering on the sex, or the comedy, much less the adventure, just an awful movie.

   But, like some shaggy, hair knotted, smelly, overly friendly dogs, I feel a certain good will towards it. Give it a scratch behind the ears — just be sure you wash your hands afterward.

   You wouldn’t want this dog to give you fleas.

   It probably would, and frankly I wouldn’t bet against an STD or two.

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS. Universal, 1971. George C Scott, Joanne Woodward, Jack Gilford, Lester Rawlins, Al Lewis, Rue McClanahan, Oliver Clark, F. Murray Abraham, Paul Benedict and M. Emmet Walsh. Written by James Goldman. Directed by Anthony Harvey. Currently streaming on YouTube (see below).

   A promising misfire.

   I use the word “promising” advisedly. Well, that is to say, no one actually advised me to call it “promising, “ but I couldn’t help thinking how aptly it applied to a film with an intriguing premise and a story-line strewn with clues that seem to be leading up to something that turns out to…..

   For starters, Giants centers around George C Scott as a paranoid psychotic who believes he is Sherlock Holmes, and sees the hand of Moriarty at work in everything that happens his way. He is also a man of considerable personal charm — distressingly rare in actual paranoids — and persuasiveness — distressingly common in paranoids who run nations, but I digress.

   As the film opens, Scott’s brother is trying to get him committed for venal reasons of his own, and Psychiatrist Mildred Watson (Joanne Woodward) is called in to evaluate him and sign the papers. When her boss at the Mental Hospital pressures Dr Watson (get it?) to skip over the evaluation, she digs her heels in and takes time to really get to know a clearly delusional man who refuses to act like a patient. And as the film progresses, she gets drawn further into his fantasy… or is it fantasy?

   Okay I better post a (WARNING!!) because I’m gonna hint at some plot developments here. And the problem is, there are plenty of developments, but they only lead to other developments. The story seems to be going somewhere, but it never actually gets there — or much of anywhere. Every clue leads to another clue instead of a solution, every action runs to a dead end, and every climax turns to anticlimax, leaving the film meandering and irresolute.

   Perhaps it’s all the more frustrating because there are some clever ideas and good lines here: a pithy comment on Westerns, “There are no masses in Dodge City, only individuals taking responsibility for their own actions.” Scott’s assessment of Woodward’s usefulness, “Just keep saying to yourself, ‘I’m adequate. ‘ “ or “I think if God is dead he laughed himself to death.”

   I could go on. The movie itself sure does. But basically all that cleverness is just elegant gift-wrapping on an empty package.

RAOUL WHITFIELD – Laughing Death. Steeger Books, softcover, July 2021; introduction by James Reasoner. Originally published serially in nine parts in Black Mask magazine from February to October 1929. Previously published in hardcover as Five, as by Temple Field (Farrar & Rinehart, 1931).

   DA Sanford Greer is trying to clean up Center City. Picture Atticus Finch. Precaution’s for the birds. Greer will take death when it comes. Courageously. Bring it on.

   His reward is murder by the mob. The mob has six factions. All six come together with a trigger man from each, a show of unity riddling Greer’s body with bullets from six different guns. The shooters shoot him down, cackling cacophonous laughter. Hence the Laughing Death.

   The body is missing bullets from a .38. One of the six was loyal to Greer and missed his shots. For that, he missed his shot. Snuffed. But not before spilling five names to the DA’s progeny and protege: Gary Greer.

   These five names form the original title for this novel of vengeance: Five. If Gary had it his way, there would only be more five chapters. Each one ending with death. But complications ensue, and it gets tougher and tougher to hunt his prey once his prey get hip to the game.

   Gary is a veteran fighter pilot of the war to end all wars. He runs an airfield near Center City. His plan is to fake his own death in a fiery plane crash, then return, incognito, a ghastly ghost, smirking a deathly grin as he guns these killers down.

   The first two kills are fairly smooth and easy. But then Gary’s cover gets blown, and the hunter becomes the hunted.

   Things are real tough because the head of the mob and the chief of police is the same guy. It’s not just the mob trying to rub out Gary. It’s the cops too. And there’s very little difference. No one’s honest, and besides Gary’s girl and his best buddy, there’s nobody he can trust.

   There’s a bunch of fancy air-flying action, machine guns a-blazing, bombs dropping on buildings, narrow escapes, and poisoned cocktails. Gary Greer, about half-way thru the story, reveals that he’s been deputized by the Feds and has a license to kill. And he does so with impunity. With immunity.

   What starts off as a fairly plausible hardboiled vengeance tale becomes more and more cartoonish, Gary Greer turning proto-James Bond as played by Errol Flynn, impossible escape after impossible escape, all by the skin of his teeth. Of course, when the bad guys have Gary in their sights, they can’t simply plug him. They’ve got to have sneaky surreptitious plans, each more complicated than the last. He must be killed with proper flourish and poetry. You can probably guess who gets the last laugh.

   It’s enjoyable as a B-Movie about a son, a heroic fighter pilot, a veteran of the War, avenging his father’s death and fading out with his beautiful black-haired woman in tow, in love, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Whitfield himself was a fighter-pilot and actor with a nice hardboiled chin and a well-groomed moustache. Perhaps he dreamed of starring in the movie version of Laughing Death / Five.

   If you read it for the B-Movie fighter-pilot revenge tale it is, in black and white, the bad guys in black, the good guys in white, it’s an enjoyable yarn. If you’ve already read Jo Gar and Green Ice and Death in the Bowl and you’re hankering for more Whitfield, it’s a nice light desert. Whipped cream with a cherry on top.

   Also reviewed here.

NEIL ALBERT – Appointment in May.  Dave Garrett #5, hardcover, Walker, 1996.  No paperback edition.

   Well, I see Albert has moved back down Publisher’s Row to his point of origin (see list below), another PI writer having a rough time of it. In all honesty, I wasn’t impressed that much with his first two, and quit the third without finishing it, and didn’t try the fourth. Pickings are slim right now, though, so once more into the breach. Or maybe breech.

   Dave Garrett is hired to follow a woman who has left her husband, to find out why. He does, and does, but the husband wants him to keep shadowing her for reasons that are unclear. The money’s solid though, so he does again. But then someone dies, and he wishes he hadn’t.

   The problem with Albert’s books is that I haven’t believed any of them. Many times in each I’ve found myself stopping to think, “Would this person really do this?” or “Could it really happen this way?”

   Some of ’em are big things and some of ’em are small, and sometimes the answer’s “maybe” and sometimes it’s “hell, no.” The point is, there are always lots of them, and they occur time after time, book after book. Albert and I just seem to have very different ideas about how people are and how they act, and about what’s credible and what’s not. I won’t read another of these.

      The Dave Garrett series—

The January Corpse. Walker 1991.
The February Trouble. Walker 1992.
Burning March. Dutton 1994.
Cruel April. Dutton 1995.
Appointment in May. Walker 1996.
Tangled June. Walker 1997.

STEPHEN MARLOWE – Francesca. Chester Drum #15. Gold Medal k1285, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1963.

   If my count is correct, there were in all twenty cases for Washington DC-based PI Chester Drum, but somewhere along the way, through his many contacts in the higher levels of government, he became more and more involved in overseas adventures. Francesca, the novel, is one of these, taking place in Switzerland and France and the skiing areas up in the mountains of each.

   Offered employment by a Geneva-based and wealthy consultant to international criminals – nice work, if you can get it – Drum at first turns him down, but of course you noticed my use of the phrase “at first,” and soon enough, yes, he is up to his neck in danger and adventure once again. The man who hires him is named Axel Spade – and I’ll wager you caught that as soon as I did. His problem is that his daughter’s fiancé has absconded with three million dollars of his, and he wants it back.

   He also would like his daughter back, too, and safely, but apparently she has disappeared with him, willingly.

   The daughter is not the Francesca of the book’s title. Francesca is the beautiful movie star who is engaged to Mr. Axel Spade, and of course sparks are created as soon as she and Drum meet. There is also another villain involved, a man as ugly as sin, and as evil. Thus ends the list of major characters, a list not including the usual assortment of policemen, monks (with guns), and innocent bystanders.

   Enough to make a short book, only 144 pages, go by very quickly and pleasantly, however. The Drum books were always a lot of fun to read when I bought them new from the supermarket spinner rack on my way home from school, and so was this one today. I probably didn’t notice back then how smooth and confident Marlowe writing was, describing as he did people and places and adventures I could only dream of meeting and visiting and having.

   And I still haven’t. But one can still dream, can’t one?

A. BERTRAM CHANDLER – The Road to the Rim. Ace Double H-29, paperback original, 1967 (**). Cover art by Jerome Podwil. Previously serialized in If Science Fiction, April-May, 1967. Collected in To the Galactic Rim (Baen, trade paperback, 2011; mass market paperback, 2012).

   Chronologically, the first “Rim Worlds” story, or at least the first featuring John Grimes. Here he is Ensign Grimes of the Space Survey Service, newly commissioned and incredibly naive. While on passage to his assigned base, he joins a merchant ship captain on an illegal mission of revenge.

   The purser, Jane Pentecost, likely influences his decision, but piracy, after all, cannot be condoned. Afterward, the captain and Jane must leave for the Rim, but Grimes is partially exonerated by their success in destroying the attackers. Since it had already been written, we know there is more to come.

   Not a complete novel as far as development is concerned. An episode, though an important one, in the life of Grimes. Characterization is flat and unreal, changing too much, too abruptly. Grimes worries about his motivations but lets the action and events carry him on.

Rating: **½

NOTE: The version serialized in If SF is identical except for the partial deletion of a scene with Jane in a detention cell.

(**) The novel on the reverse side of the Ace Double paperback, The Lost Millennium, by Walt and Leigh Richmond will be reviewed here soon.

CHARLES HIGSON – On His Majesty’s Secret Service. James Bond. Ian Fleming Publications for the National Literacy Trust, hardcover, 2023.

   After James Bond (Daniel Craig) gathered Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham, boarded a helicopter, and sky dived into the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, you just had to know this was coming.

   It is May 4th, 2023, with two days before the Coronation of Charles III as King of England, and James Bond is handed a job. 009 is dead, 009 who had won Miss Moneypenny’s heart, and though he despised the man, it is 007’s job to do something about it, and that something is as M explains: “We both know what the Double O Prefix means. Don’t make me spell it out, James. There’s a mad dog that needs to be quietly put down and buried before it bites too many people.”

   The “mad dog” is Æthelston of Wessex, who believes himself the uncrowned King of England, a descendant of Alfred the Great, and mad, Æthelston has plans to do something about it. A terrorist he has retreated to Hungary and Szalkai Castle, know locally as ÖrdÅ‘g Széke, the Devil’s seat where the Hungarian government protects him from extradition or rendition and he is up to no good.

   Bond’s job is simple, eliminate him as he eliminated 009 sent to Hungary to check on him.

   Nothing is ever that easy.

   Because there is also the beautiful and deadly Ragenheiõur Ragnarsdótter, of Iceland, a “slightly elfin woman” he sees as a “shape shifting Viking sea serpent.” She is involved with Æthelston, but how? Ragenheiõur is a delight. And Æthelston a superb Bond villain.

And then Bond, in enemy hands discovers a threat to Charles. On Coronation Day at 8:48 am the balloon goes up. But which balloon? And how? And can Bond in the enemies grasp in a castle in Hungary solve the mystery and reach England in time to prevent it?

   Charles Higson has been writing the Young James Bond books (he dropped the series recently) and got the nod for this job more or less at the last minute. The National Literacy Trust saw a way to raise funds for one of the soon to be crowned Charles III charities, and what could raise more money than 007 already tied to the late Queen by his nationality and the famous Olympic Opening stunt.

   Of course you couldn’t write a book where he jumps out of a plane with Charles, but the idea was there.

   Around 50,000 words and a mere 156 pages long the book comes in hardcover in an attractive royal blue laminated cover, and for Bond lovers (myself) and completists, it’s a worthwhile effort. It moves quickly, is often witty, sometimes funny, and suspenseful. I was not a fan of the first couple of Young Bond books by Higson, but he quickly got the idea.

   He may lack Fleming’s turn of phrase and literary pretensions, not a good thing in my opinion, but he does a fine job in this adventure that finds Bond confronting his conscience in ways that mirror his first outing in Casino Royale in 1953, and makes a dash for a suspenseful down to the wire ending at the Coronation at 8:48 am.

   This isn’t a great Bond novel. It’s not unlike the Sherlock Holmes story Conan Doyle wrote for Queen Victoria’s doll house library, really only longer, but it is entertaining, a swift enjoyable read, and a must for James Bond fans.

   I’m not sure it is available here yet, but I can’t imagine it will only be available from Ian Fleming Publications for long or only in the UK.

   And for once the heroine gets the last line.

   I know Charles won’t, but Bond has already reigned almost as long as Elizabeth.

DOROTHY BAKER – Young Man with a Horn.  Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1938.  Reprinted many times. Basis for the 1950 film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and Doris Day.

   Fictionalized biography of jazz trumpet player Bix Beiderbecke (named Rick Martin in the novel).

   Rick Martin was an orphan who spent his teens and the teens of the 20th century at a black jazz club in Los Angeles.

   There he learned the two styles of jazz: “Memphis style and New Orleans style. The difference between the two is something like the difference between the two styles of chow mein: in one you get the noodles and the sauce served separately, and in the other sauce and noodles are mixed before they are served.”

   He snuck into a church to practice on their piano and “pecked at those keys like a chicken going for corn….making music was on him like a leech……You don’t learn it, you make it…..his eyes were as hard and bright as copper in the sun.”

   He got really good at the horn. A player just starting out has to fit in with the rest of the players. “There are various ways of showing off, and one of them is not to show off.” But “when that thin blond boy stood up in his place and tore off sixteen bars in his own free style, filling in the blank that was allotted to him on the score, it was surprise forever, like seeing an airplane take off from the deck of a good solid ship. To hell, please, with the law of gravity.”

   â€œAt one they quit for the night, and he was always just hitting his stride, so he went somewhere else. He lived his life after hours. After his good work was done he did better work.”

   And then he met a girl. “She looked like an English girl about to go out for a day’s shooting, but she was American, and I don’t think it was very clear to her then what she was out to do……The earth was turning well off center, so that time was forever and not made of minutes. The real world (the street lights, the flask, Rick’s trumpet case) was as vague as the sound of tires whirling through water beneath them, but even then it seemed that the mind could slice like a knife through all the knots of syntax to make anything…..You can’t know anything unless you’ve got the kind of hands that can feel it, unless you’ve got the kind of eyes that never see the outside of anything, just cut straight down under…..He’d never known a really complicated woman, the kind who knows how to strip the nerves and kick the will around, the kind whose voice can say anything. he couldn’t let himself look at her; the sight of her twisted him…..She was born cagey. And yet she signed the marriage license legibly and with a steady hand, and when, under oath, she said ‘I do,’ almost anyone would have thought she did. They were crazy about each other, and crazy.”

   He kept playing and drinking and sleeping as little as possible so he could stay up all night playing the clubs. It “burns a man to tear music out of himself for a long time; it dries him out, leaves salt in his mouth, dust in his throat.”

   He hears a note in his mind that he tries to hit on a record. But he missed it and ruined the record. The first time he’d ever failed. “I don’t know what the hell that boy thinks a trumpet will do. That note he was going for, that thing he was trying for — there isn’t any such thing. Not on a horn.”

   After that, he quit his band. “He stayed in the joints with his own kind, the incurables, the boys who felt the itch to discover something…..[booze] gave him a way out, a means of pushing out beyond the actual, banal here-and-now, …stretched tight to play the way he wanted to.“

   And he pushed his frail body til his “eyes flicked…They…burned like lighted rum.”

   And he burnt himself out.

   But maybe it’s not a tragedy. “The good thing, finally, is to lead a devoted life, even if it swings around and strikes you in the face.”

         ——

   The writing is impressionistic, vague, syncopated and smudged. There’s no judgment. Just a life of a jazz trumpet player. Neither comic nor tragic. It just is. Like a jazz trumpet. If there’s tragedy, it’s the tragedy of Icarus, wings melted by the sun. I’m with Baker on this one: “To hell, please, with the law of gravity.”

   I liked it. But I would’ve liked it more had I not just started reading Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues — which reads like mainlined Bix Beiderbecke to the brain. Young Man with a Horn is more Seurat, dotting the landscape with seemingly abstract colors from up close, forming images into view from a distance. It’s subtle and tasty. But it ain’t Bix. It ain’t dangerous. It won’t explode in your hands and die on the vine. Which is fine. They can’t all do that.

   Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe collection Curtains for Three (1951) contains the now-standard three novellas published in The American Magazine: “The Gun with Wings” (December 1949), “Bullet for One” (July 1948), and “Disguise for Murder” (as “The Twisted Scarf,” September 1950).

   â€œThe Gun with Wings” was not near the body of opera singer Alberto Mion — or so say his wife, Peggy, and would-be successor, Fred Weppler, who didn’t tell the police it only appeared later beside the supposed suicide. They want Wolfe to dispel the shadow of murder over their intended union; Archie has “occasionally let Lily Rowan share her pair of opera seats with me” so he recognizes a suspect, baritone Gifford James.

   Continuing the ballistics theme, the “Bullet for One” knocks industrial designer Sigmund Keyes out of his saddle in Central Park; five of the suspects collectively hire Wolfe, some of them hoping he’ll nail the sixth, yet before long, all but one of the sextet is arrested for one reason or another.

   In “Disguise for Murder,” the brownstone hosts “no such throng as that within [Archie’s] memory”: at the suggestion of Bill McNab, garden editor of the Gazette, Wolfe has invited the Manhattan Flower Club to see his orchids. Fritz and Saul are manning the door while Archie — who regrets having agreed to help mingle — is taking a breather in the office, where he is joined by a panicked young woman, Cynthia Brown.

   Con artists Cynthia and her “brother,” Col. Percy Brown, were brought by Mimi Orwin, their prospective mark, a wealthy widow hooked in Florida and accompanied by her son, Eugene. Cynthia was terrified when upstairs she recognized, and was recognized by, the unidentified man she’d seen entering Doris Hatten’s apartment, whom she believed was “keeping” her friend there — and strangled her with her own scarf immediately afterward, a crime that has baffled Cramer for five months.

   Promising to bring Wolfe down to hear her out, Archie returns to the plant rooms to keep a special eye on the men, including one who grabs a flower pot in an oddly menacing way, revealed as an actor, Malcolm Vedder.

   The crowd has thinned to a trickle when the wife of Homer N. Carlisle, executive VP of the North American Foods Co., peeks into the office for a look at Wolfe’s famous three-foot-wide globe and finds Cynthia, strangled with, per Doc Vollmer, something like…a scarf.

   Cramer grills the remaining visitors, held there by Fritz and Saul, but both he and Wolfe decline psychiatrist Nicholson Morley’s offer to question all men among the 219 guests, dutifully recorded by Saul, and try to identify the killer. In a spiteful, ill-advised move, Cramer insists on sealing the office as a crime scene; otherwise “Wolfe might have called his attention to a certain fact as soon as [he] saw it himself,” saving a lot of trouble.

   Gleaned from Archie’s report but overlooked by him and Cramer, that fact leads Wolfe to a dangerous test of his theory: he sends a blackmail note to one suspect, who calls with an unfamiliar voice to make an appointment with Archie via an elaborate runaround and two cut-outs. Tied to a chair by those he dubs W-J (wrestler-jockey, for his mismatched torso and legs) and Skinny, he is at the mercy of the killer, at first unrecognizable.

   But bribery turns the flunkies, and “he” is revealed as the cross-dressing wife of Doris’s sugar daddy, Carlisle; in the plant rooms, the men had all doffed their hats, yet Cynthia recognized the killer specifically because of the hat, assuming it to be a man, as she had at the apartment.

   A first-season episode of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, “Disguise for Murder” (6/17/01) was one of four collaborations between director John L’Ecuyer and writer Sharon Elizabeth Doyle. As with the following consecutive pair, “Door to Death” (6/4/01) and “Christmas Party” (7/1/01), this and “Eeny, Meeny, Murder, Moe” (6/3/01), while based on widely spaced novellas, were linked by Doyle with original material for international broadcast and DVD as the respective faux telefilms Wolfe Goes Out and Wolfe Stays In. Here, her connective tissue is the often-invoked Thursday-night poker game played by Lon (Saul Rubinek), Orrie (Trent McMullen), Saul (Conrad Dunn), and Archie (Timothy Hutton).

   When Archie relates a postscript to “Eeny, Meeny, Murder, Moe,” Fritz (Colin Fox) asks them to quit early to prepare for the onslaught, during which Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) and Archie struggle to keep smiling. The body of Doris (Tramara Burford) is seen briefly in flashback, and after Archie encounters Percy (Nicholas Campbell), Mimi (Nancy Beatty), Eugene (Phillip [sic] Craig), and Vedder (Beau Starr), that of Cynthia (Kathryn Zenna) is found by Mrs. Carlisle (Debra Monk). Repertory player Ken Kramer makes a second and final appearance as Vollmer — later played by Joe Flaherty in “The Silent Speaker” (7/14 & 21/02) — summoned as Homer (Aron Tager) blusters at the indignity of being detained.

   As usual, the regulars are superb, e.g, Fritz bringing down Percy as he attempts to leave; Wolfe bellowing, “The police shall receive no sandwiches!”; Saul coolly standing by his legendary memory; Cramer’s (Bill Smitrovich) glee as he has Lt. Rowcliff (an uncredited Bill MacDonald) seal Wolfe’s office.

   The interrogations are intercut into a montage à la “Over My Dead Body” (7/8 & 15/01). A burgundy jacket and long hair visualize the odd persona of Morley (Richard Waugh), while the need for viewers to see and hear what had been simply described on the page causes the phone call to telegraph the killer’s gender a little more clearly before Skinny (Boyd Banks) and W.J. (James Tolkan) confront Archie.

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: Murder by the Book

Edition cited —

      Curtains for Three: Bantam (1970)

Online source —

GEORGE V. HIGGINS – Sandra Nichols Found Dead. Jerry Kennedy #4. Henry Holt, hardcover, 1996; paperback, 1997.

   I had quit reading Higgins some time ago, prior to receiving this one. It seemed the books were all dialogue — his trademark, of course — and it didn’t enthrall me enough to wade through it trying to piece together a story. Talk, talk, talk, bore, bore, bore. This one looked like it might have a plot, so I thought I’d give old George another try.

   Well-known criminal attorney Jerry Kennedy is in an uncomfortable position. He’s forced into handling a civil case by a judge who’s supposed to be his friend, and not only that, but acting as a prosecutor. A woman has been found dead, murdered, and though there isn’t enough evidence for the DA to indict anyone, there may be enough for the woman’s children to file a Wrongful Death suit, and reap huge financial gains therefrom. Kennedy’s not too keen on the whole thing, but he really doesn’t have a lot of choice.

   I don’t want to use the space or the time to expound on why it’s so, but the fact is that the only rational reason to read Higgins is that you love to hear his characters talk. There’s always some story (and maybe a little more here than usual), but never enough to carry a book.  He made his reputation with dialog, monologues, and speech patterns, and that’s basically that’s all there is.

   Every new character is introduced with three or four pages of monologue from someone, and that’s Higgins’ form of characterization, and that’s Higgins’ way of telling a story. It’ s obviously good enough for a lot of people; me, I get irritated at best and at worst and more often, bored.

   This was a case of “at best,” and I just got occasionally irritated. I really don’t think he’s that much better at authentic speech patterns and realistic dialog than a number of others, either. *Grump.*