THE CASES OF EDDIE DRAKE. TV series. Thirteen 30 minute episodes. Created and written by Jason James (Jo Eisinger). Cast: Eddie Drake: Don Haggerty, Dr. Karen Gayle: Patricia Morison (nine episodes), Dr. Joan Wright: Lynne Roberts (four episodes), Lt. Walsh: Theodore Von Eltz. Produced by Harlan Thompson and Herbert L. Strock. Directed by Paul Garrison.

   Eddie Drake was your typical hardboiled PI of the time, from his attitude to his roving eye for anything in a skirt. Eddie shared the details of his cases with beautiful Dr. Karen Gayle, perhaps television’s first psychologist. She was writing a book about criminal behavior and wanted the point of view of a hardboiled PI. After nine episodes, Dr. Joan Wright replaced Dr. Gayle.

   The Cases of Eddie Drake began on radio as The Cases of Mr. Ace. George Raft was New York PI Eddie Ace who each week sat down and told Dr. Gayle about his latest case.

   Note that the film Mr. Ace (1946) starring George Raft as political kingmaker Eddie Ace had no connection to the radio series.

   The relationship between Ace/Drake and Doctor Gayle was different in the radio and television versions. On radio, Dr. Gayle makes it plain she is willing to get personal, while Ace has problems asking her out for dinner. On TV, Drake does everything but chase her around the desk.

   The body count was high for both Ace and Drake. Dr. Gayle once noted Eddie’s cases were full of “heaters and cadavers.” Of the three surviving radio stories, Eddie’s cases all ended in gunfire and nearly everyone dead.

   Behind both series was Jason James, Edgar award winner (with Bob Tallman for the radio series Adventures of Sam Spade in 1947). Heavily influenced by the writings of Dashiell Hammett, the scripts for Ace and Drake never came close to the quality of James’ work on Spade. But then, Raft and Haggerty were no Duff or Bogart.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————–

THE CASES OF MR. ACE. Radio. Syndicated. Aired June 4, 1947 through September 3, 1947 on WNEW-New York (*). Paragon Radio Production. 30 minutes. Cast: Eddie Ace: George Raft. Written, directed and produced by Jason James (Jo Eisinger).

“Key to a Booby Trap,” June 4, 1947 (aka “Key to Death”)
   Tough guy Ace meets Dr. Gayle and tells her about his latest case. A Frenchman confesses to Ace he killed a man who was bothering his wife. He pays Ace to give a key to his lawyer. The lawyer says the Frenchman is innocent, but his wife is eager to watch her husband die. When the key leads to more death, Ace wants to know why.

“Man Named Judas,” June 25, 1947 (aka “Lost Package”)
   Ace is hired to deliver a package but fails. When he returns, he finds the client dead. Then third-rate versions of Cairo and Gutman (Maltese Falcon) arrive wanting the last surviving Judas coin.

“Watch and the Music Box”
   Only the last half survives. Script was reused as the Eddie Drake episode, “Shoot The Works”.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————–

   One episode of Eddie Drake remains available to be viewed on the internet or DVD.

“Shoot the Works.” (First aired date unknown.)
   Drake tells Dr. Gayle about his recent case. A woman hires Drake to get her watch back. It had been stolen during a gambling club robbery where a man was killed. She had been with a man who was not her husband, and she is worried, if the police recover the watch, her husband will find out.
   Drake visits the club owner, a wild Russian “Prince” who is desperate for Drake to find the woman he loves, a woman he has only seen on a nickel peep show. The bodies begin to pile up when the thief arranges to sell the watch to Drake.
   After the story, Eddie takes the beautiful Doctor out for drinks. There the actors break character and tell the audience the episode’s credits.

   Much like other syndicated TV Film programs of the time, Eddie Drake was nothing special beyond mildly entertaining. Eddie was a character who was interchangeable with the countless other hardboiled PIs of the time.

   The creative idea of a psychologist using the point of view of a hardboiled PI for a book about criminal behavior was wasted as a weak framing device to tell typical hardboiled mysteries. The acting was professional but average, never adding anything new or of depth to the characters or stories. The only truly unforgettable part of Eddie Drake was “Dave,” Eddie’s new car, a three-wheel 1948 Davis Divan.

   Which leads us to Part Two, coming soon: “The Mysteries of the Making of The Cases of Eddie Drake.”

   Common knowledge about the TV series today is that CBS filmed nine episodes in 1949 and then never aired it. DuMont is supposed to have filmed the final four episodes and broadcast all thirteen in the period from March 6 to May 29, 1952. Before that, according to one source, NBC aired the series between June 4, 1951 through August 27, 1951 (13 weeks).

   Did CBS shelve the series for three years? Why did Lynne Roberts replace Patricia Morison after nine episodes? Why would DuMont film the final four episodes then wait six months to show it? When did Eddie Drake first air, 1949 or 1951? How much of what is currently believed about this series wrong?

      SOURCES:

Billboard archives available for free reading at Google e-bookstore.

Episodes of The Cases of Eddie Ace are available to listen to at various sites on the internet. I did my listening at Internet Archives (archive.org)

(*) New York Times radio logs can be found at www.jjonz.us/RadioLogs

The television episode “Shoot the Works“ is also available around the internet and on DVD, Best of TV Detectives – 150 episodes. I watched it at Internet Archives and Classic Television Archives (which also has an episode log).

http://www.archive.org/details/The CasesOf EddieDrake-ShootTheWorks1949

http://ctva.biz/US/Crime/EddieDrake.htm

THE PANTHER’S CLAW. Producers Releasing Corp. (PRC), 1942. Sidney Blackmer (Police Commissioner Thatcher Colt), Ricki Vallin (Anthony “Tony” Abbot), Byron Foulger, Herbert Rawlinson, Barry Bernard, Gerta Rozan, Joaquin Edwards. Based on a story by Anthony Abbot (Fulton Oursler). Director: William Beaudine.

   Thatcher Colt was a character who appeared in a number of detective novels by Anthony Abbot in the 1930s and early 40s, beginning with About the Murder of Geraldine Foster in 1930. According to IMDB, though, The Panther’s Claw was based on the short story “The Perfect Crime of Mr. Digberry.”

   On the other hand, the American Film Institute says it was based on the story “Shake Hands with Murder.” But since Mr. Digberry is definitely a character in Panther’s Claw, and Shake Hands with Murder is a totally different (non-Thatcher Colt) film made by PRC in 1944, we’ll say IMDB has the advantage here.

   There were two earlier film adaptations of Thatcher Colt novels, both of them with Adolphe Menjou in the starring role: The Night Club Lady (1932) and The Circus Queen Lady (1933).

   I’ve seen neither of these, but I think the solid, mostly no-nonsense acting of Sidney Blackmer fits the role of the definitely hands-on police commissioner better. In fact AFI states that Panther’s Claw was intended to be the first in a series. If so, the plans did not work out, as there never was a follow-up.

   Blackmer was the leading man, with top billing and all that goes with it, but believe it or not, it was Byron Foulger, the unlikeliest of movie stars, who gets the majority of the screen time. He plays Mr. Digberry, a mild, meek, milquetoast of a man (meaning that Foulger was perfect for the part) with a 180 pound wife and five daughters. (They’re out of town, though, throughout the movie. We only get to see Digberry’s reaction whenever he realizes that they’ll be back soon.)

   We see first meet Digberry as he’s being caught by the cops sneaking out of a city cemetery at night. It seems he’s received a note that requested he leave $1000 on a gravestone, signed by “The Panther” along with a paw print in ink at the bottom.

   The cops get a big chuckle out of this, as well as the audience, even though Digberry is not the only one to have received such a message. There is more to the case, though, as the “Panther” portion of which is quickly solved, and as it happens, there are more strings to the bow of the greatly bewildered and befuddled Mr. Digberry than first meets the eye.

   There is a murder to be solved, in other words, that of a female opera singer … and I won’t tell you more, but there is a lot more plot in this 70 minute movie than there is in a many a present-day double-the-running-time extravaganza with lots of action and special effects, none of which are present here. The Panther’s Claw was produced on what is obviously a bare-bones budget.

   While the movie’s still running, it is difficult to follow the business of the wigs and the rival wigmakers, or how important it is, but it all makes sense in the end. At least I think so. Overall this film makes for a very enjoyable viewing experience, in my moderately humble opinion. I also imagine there is more humor to be found in the movie than in the short story, based primarily on Foulger’s performance, but I suppose I could be wrong about that.

THEODORE STURGEON – Some of Your Blood. Ballantine 458K, paperback original, 1961. Reprinted several times.

   Speaking of tough, fast and scary, following my review of Jim Thompson’s Savage Night, I revisited Theodore Sturgeon’s Some of Your Blood, which has all that and is also by way of being one of the most compassionate books I’ve ever read.

   The tale of a bloodsucking freak is told as a psychological detective story, with an overworked Army shrink trying to delve into the psyche of a likable but mysterious GI, “George” whose personal correspondence is the catalyst of the case. Along the way we uncover serial killings and some other things not suitable for a family show, but Sturgeon never loses sympathy for “George” and the result is a uniquely chilling and memorable story.

   Bombay Mail was screened at Cinevent in Columbus, this past weekend. I certainly agree with Steve’s assessment of the film, reviewed here, which is fun but cluttered with too much plot and too little development of the large cast of characters. This might, however, repay a visiting, and Steve, I’d be interested in your take on the film after a second viewing.

   There were several crime films screened, and, of the ones I saw, I was most impressed by The Under-Cover Man, a 1932 Paramount Publix release, that gave George Raft his first starring role. He had no great range as an actor, but the role, that of a small-time crook who goes undercover for the police to help them catch the murderer of his father, nicely suited his talent. It also helped that he had a strong supporting cast that included Nancy Carroll, Lew Cody, David Landau, Gregory Ratoff and Roscoe Karns.

   I was less impressed by a British film, Appointment with Crime (a British National release, 1946), a grim little drama that was marred by a badly written climax that may have been scripted to satisfy a morality code demanding a “suitable” punishment for the criminal lead (Kenneth Harlan). There were some striking performances, most notably that of Herbert Lom as an upperclass villain, standing out among the lowlifes he dealt with.

   An oddity was Blondie Has Servant Trouble, an old house mystery in the long-running Columbia series based on the even longer-running newspaper strip. I’ve seen the movie more than once (and I did see it on its original release) and it’s probably the only one of the series that I would watch again.

   An enthusiastic Variety review is quoted, and, with even a modicum of encouragement, I will pull the film from my box set of the complete series (now you know the probably awful truth about my taste in films) and see if it’s held up for me.

   For the record, the films I most enjoyed at the convention were Dick Turpin (Fox 1925; John G. Blystone, director; starring Tom Mix); The Virginian (B. P. Schulberg Productions, 1923; Tom Forman, director; Kenneth Harlan (The Virginian), Florence Vidor (Molly Woods), Russell Simpson (Trampas), and Pat O’Malley (Steve); and Mare Nostrum (MGM, 1926; Rex Ingram, director; Alice Terry and Antonio Moreno).

   I will add that Ellery Queen’s Penthouse Mystery (Darmour Inc./Columbia release, 1941; James Hogan, director, Ralph Bellamy, Margaret Lindsay, Charley Grapewin, and Anna May Wong, among a cast of familiar faces) seemed to me a silly travesty of the EQ character, with Bellamy dithering through much of the film over Nikki Porter’s “meddling” in a murder investigation instead of sticking to her typewriter and working on his latest novel.

   After the screening, when a friend asked me what I thought of the film, and I told him, it was only then that he told me that, fired by his enjoyment of the film, he had bought a complete set of the Queen films from one of the convention dealers. Not one of my more comfortable moments during the convention.

   If you’re a fan of Old Time Radio (The Green Hornet, The Shadow, Sam Spade) and Early TV (The Twilight Zone), then you already know Martin Grams’ name. But you may not know that he’s started his own blog: http://www.martingrams.blogspot.com/

   So far he’s been posting only once a week, but each post is long and jam-packed with vital information to collectors and connoisseurs of, well, Old Time Radio and Early TV shows, information you will find nowhere else, I guarantee it.

   Topics covered so far, working backward:

Boris Karloff: The “Lost” Radio Broadcasts
Cincinnati Old Time Radio Convention
Batman: The TV Series
Cavalcade of America, A History in Pictures
Duffy’s Tavern: Year One

   In its ongoing attempt seemingly to wring every last pound of profit out of the Agatha Christie literary estate, HarperCollins has recently reprinted The Floating Admiral, the collaborative detective novel (originally published in 1931) by fourteen members of the then recently formed Detection Club (each writing a successive chapter).

   Although Agatha Christie’s contribution is a chapter of eight pages (in my 1979 Gregg Press edition) — 3% of the book — she gets top billing, with only Dorothy L. Sayers and G. K. Chesterton (the latter of whom contributed, by his own admission, a strictly ornamental prologue of five pages) also being mentioned by name, in much smaller letters. Such are the publishing perks of fame and continued books sales!

   To my mind, the detective novel, requiring as it does the most scrupulous planning, is not really a form that is receptive to “round robin” treatment. Case in point: The Floating Admiral. Overloaded with complications from too many eager hands, the tale in my opinion begins to take on water and sink well before reaching its conclusion (tellingly entitled by Anthony Berkeley, “Cleaning Up the Mess”).

   Nevertheless, if one is interested in authors of Golden Age detective fiction, The Floating Admiral is in many ways quite interesting, whatever its artistic failings.

   Things go pretty well for the first five chapters (written by Canon Victor L. Whitechurch, G.D.H. and Margaret Cole, Henry Wade, Agatha Christie and John Rhode), with the authors refraining from over-elaboration. Unfortunately the calmly floating boat is upset by water violently churned by Milward Kennedy (his chapter, which follows Rhode’s “Inspector Rudge Begins to Form a Theory” is impertinently entitled “Inspector Rudge Thinks Better of It” — the good Inspector should not have).

   Dorothy L. Sayers tries to straighten everything out that had tangled with a thirty-seven page chapter but she only makes things worse.

   Ronald A. Knox’s chapter, “Thirty-Nine Articles of Doubt” (Chapter Eight) warningly raises thirty-nine problematical points that have accumulated for the authors following him to consider and Freeman Wills Crofts in Chapter Nine politely notes that, among other things, the body (allegedly of the admiral of course) was never adequately identified or an inquest arranged. But all to little avail.

   Clemence Dane complains in her notes to her Chapter Eleven, the penultimate chapter, that the mystery has become “quite inexplicable to me” — and she likely has not been alone in that sentiment over the years.

   Anthony Berkeley’s conclusion has been praised heartily by over-generous critics. I deem more like the curate’ egg — good in spots but essentially rotten. But to be fair to the poor fellow, he was handed the devil of a job.

   The fun for me in reading The Floating Admiral is not in reading a cogently plotted detective novel (it simply isn’t one), but in seeing the narrative approach each author takes in his/her chapter:

    ●   G. K. Chesterton writes rich prose.

    ●   Canon Whitechurch introduces a charming vicar.

    ●   Henry Wade develops appealing and credible relationships among his policemen.

    ●   Out of the blue, Agatha Christie introduces a garrulous, gossipy lady innkeeper.

    ●   John Rhode discusses tidal movements (the admiral was floating after all) and sympathetically expands the role of the retired petty officer, Neddy Ware.

    ●   Milward Kennedy overcomplicates the story, as does Dorothy L. Sayers (the ingenious Sayers should have been given the opening chapter — she and Kennedy both clearly wanted it).

    ●   Ronald A. Knox makes a long list.

    ●   Freeman Wills Crofts checks alibis and has his inspector travel by train.

    ●   In his notes to his chapter, Knox amusingly declares, “I once laid it down that no Chinaman should appear in a detective story. I feel inclined to extend the rule so as to apply to residents in China. It appears that Admiral Penistone, Sir W. Denny, Walter Fitzgerald, Ware and Holland are all intimate with China, which seems overdoing it.”

   In her recent Guardian review of the new edition of The Floating Admiral, Laura Wilson deems Agatha Christie proposed solution for the tale “as you would expect, the most ingenious” of all the solutions. Certainly it’s more tricksy than, say, the solution proffered by John Rhode (without a complicated murder means, Rhode is unable to play to his greatest strength here). It’s also absolutely absurd.

   Here’s how Christie envisioned the state of affairs in the Admiral’s household     (*** SPOILER *** to Christie’s proposed solution follows, obviously):

   The Admiral’s niece is really his Uncle’s nephew masquerading as the niece. He has been doing this in his Uncle’s household for weeks, and is able to get away with it because he “has been an actor at one time” (that Golden Age crutch for the unlikely accomplishment of great disguises) and because the Admiral has not seen the niece since she was a child (he has seen the nephew more recently, however). The servants are fooled as well, as are the various beaux of the neighborhood, whom the nephew “takes an artistic pleasure” in vamping.     (*** END SPOILER ***)

   Ingenious or rather ridiculous? You decide for yourself, but I know what I think.

   On the whole, I much preferred Double Death, a round robin novel with chapters by Dorothy L. Sayers, Freeman Wills Crofts, Valentine Williams, F. Tennyson Jesse, Anthony Armstrong and David Hume that originally appeared in the Sunday Chronicle in (I believe) 1936 and was published in book form by Victor Gollancz.

   It is often stated to be a Detection Club production, but I do not see how this could be, since only two of the six writers, Sayers and Crofts, were members of the Detection Club.

   In her introductory chapter to Double Death, Sayers sets up a compelling possible domestic poisoning situation, followed by a death at a railway station, at the evocatively named town of Creepe.

   Freeman Wills Crofts embroiders on this opening situation ably (he even provides a stunning map of Creepe and Creepe station), as does Valentine Williams, though the latter is more known for his “Clubfoot” thrillers than his (underrated) detective novels. Unfortunately the later authors are less concerned with cluing, so that as a fair play mystery the tale ends up rather a bust (especially if you read the silly prologue, added later).

   However, the writing and overall emotional situation remains compelling throughout Double Death, thus making the tale more of a success than the The Floating Admiral.

   It’s interesting to note that in Double Death, written in the mid-thirties, all the authors are concerned with maintaining love interest; whereas in The Floating Admiral all the characters are sticks in whom one could not be expected take the slightest interest (well, there’s the vamping transvestite nephew, as envisioned by Christie).

   As the 1930s progressed, the Golden Age detective novel began to put more emphasis on emotional situations and less on ratiocination. In the end, it is this shift in emphasis that makes Double Death more interesting than The Floating Admiral, in my view. Admiral depends for artistic success on detection and too many hands on deck sink the craft.

   Yet with less than half the people involved, Double Death might have managed to work as a true fair play detective novel. Certainly Sayers, Crofts and to a lesser extent Valentine Williams made an admirable start of it.

   I rather wish the novel could have been kept a collaboration simply of two: Sayers and Crofts. The two authors corresponded over the opening chapter of Double Death in the spring of 1936, with Sayers requesting and Crofts supplying pertinent points of railway station detail.

   Sayers had already written her railway timetable novel The Five Red Herrings (1931) as a sort of homage to Crofts’ Sir John Magill’s Last Journey (1930) — these two brilliant books continue to stand today as the ne plus ultra of railway timetable mysteries. Double Death in their hands might well have been a classic product of the Golden Age. As it is, it is still a good read.

MODERN LOVE. Universal, 1929. Charley Chase, Kathryn Crawford, Jean Hersholt, Anita Garvin. Screenplay by Albert DeMond and Beatrice Van. Director: Arch Heath. Shown at Cinecon 44, Hollywood CA, Aug-Sept 2008.

   Long considered to be a lost film, but “recovered” by researchers at Universal, this Charley Chase feature was filmed during the transition from silent to sound and includes silent episodes with intertitles, interspersed with some talking sequences.

   In this modern comedy of manners, Charley’s young wife (Kathryn Crawford) is forced to keep her marriage a secret to hold on to her job. When a client (Jean Hersholt) arrives from France, Crawford is obliged to give a dinner party, with Charley serving the meal.

   This extended sequence is the comic highlight of the film, with Hersholt, unfamiliar with American table manners, willingly following Charley’s lead at using what he imagines to be proper etiquette. The other guests, not wanting to embarrass Hersholt, imitate his bizarre performance to Crawford’s consternation and Charley’s barely concealed delight.

   Charley gives a charming performance, nicely supported by Crawford, and if the film lacks the inspired playfulness of his best shorts, it’s still a very entertaining demonstration of Charley’s comic skills.

   Another rare Chase film was screened during the weekend, The Awful Goof (Columbia, 1939), the first of four shorts that completed Charley’s contract at Columbia.

   This is one of those marital comedies at which Charley excelled, which often consisted of two married couples involved in misunderstandings that put Charley on the receiving end of some unwelcome attentions from a husband who suspects him of playing around with his wife.

   This short was, in part, a remake of a classic short, Limousine Love (1928), and not a very successful one. The audience loved the short, while I found it a sad reflection of past glories.

JON A. JACKSON – The Blind Pig. Random House, hardcover, 1978. Dennis McMillan Publications, softcover, 1988. Dell, paperback, 1995. Grove Press, softcover, 2000.

   If you’ve ever spent any time in or around Detroit, you surely know what a blind pig is. You also know how Detroit is a city awash with guns. Sergeant Mulheisen works for the Detroit Police Department, and guns are part of his everyday working life. And where else but in Detroit would a train be hijacked to steal a boxcar containing over two million dollars’ worth of rifles and ammunition?

   The case begins with a pair of street cops mowing down a gunman hiding in a darkened garage, and it grows to include a gang of Cuban revolutionaries as well as the constant underlying presence of the local Mafia.

   Mulheisen, whom we met previously in The Diehard, no longer seems plagued by self-doubt, and the subtler
aspects of his character have disappeared. Loosely put together, for a detective
novel, and vaguely dissatisfying.

Rating:   C plus.

[UPDATE] 06-01-11.   In spite of my only so-so comments about The Blind Pig, and even though it took 12 years for the next in the series to appear, Jon Jackson has gradually put together a sizable reputation for tough, hard-boiled crime fiction, including this one. I don’t remember reading any of the books following The Blind Pig, but there have been seven more:

      The Detective Sergeant Mulheisen series:

1. The Diehard (1977)

2. The Blind Pig (1978)
3. Grootka (1990)
4. Hit on the House (1993)

5. Deadman (1994)
6. Dead Folks (1996)
7. Man With an Axe (1998)
8. La Donna Detroit (2000)
9. No Man’s Dog (2004)

HIGHWAY 13. Screen Guild Productions, 1948. Robert Lowery, Pamela Blake, Clem Bevans, Michael Whalen, Gaylord Pendleton, Lyle Talbot, Maris Wrixon, Mary Gordon. Director: William Berke.

   If you were to go looking for this film on DVD, you’ll find it easily enough in an inexpensive box set of noir films recently released to the market.

   Noir? Don’t believe everything you’re told. Even though there are noirish elements to it, there aren’t any more than you’ll find in any black and white crime film made in the 1940s or early 50s, and that’s all that this movie is. No more — or no less.

   It turns out that California’s Highway 13 is a death trap for truckers, with six accidents having occurred in as many weeks. The problem is that the accidents have happened only to the drivers working for one company, the one that Hank Wilson (good-looking and well-built Robert Lowery, soon to become serial-world’s Batman) has hired on for. Sabotage is suspected.

   Most of the movie takes place in or around Pops Lacy’s isolated restaurant and truck stop somewhere along that same Highway 13 where Wilson’s steady girl friend Doris (Pamela Blake) works as a waitress behind the counter. Pops himself is a sour cantankerous old cuss played by Clem Bevans, who is (no surprise) perfect for the part. The players are fine, in other words; it’s the story that doesn’t match up.

   Most other reviewers of this film rate it a whole lot higher than I do, but personally I don’t care for crime films in which the culprit(s) is/are obvious; the scenes while individually fine are jammed together in haphazard fashion; and the reason for the whole affair doesn’t make any more sense than a chicken caught in a fence.

   It isn’t really all that bad, but reading that last sentence back again, almost.

HERBERT KERKOW  [VAL LEWTON] – The Fateful Star Murder. Mohawk Press, hardcover, 1931.

   Just about anyone who admires vintage black and white films, in particular those made during the 1940s, is familiar with the name Val Lewton.

   From 1942 to 1946, while head of the horror unit at RKO Pictures, Lewton (born Vladimir Leventon) produced nine memorable films that, despite their low budgets and often lurid, studio-mandated titles, were of considerable quality, including: Cat People and Curse of the Cat People (made even though or possibly because Lewton had a morbid fear and hatred of cats), The Leopard Man, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Seventh Victim.

   Not quite so many aficionados are aware of the fact that Lewton published several novels prior to taking a writing job with MGM in New York and eventually migrating to Hollywood. These appeared under an array of pseudonyms: Cosmo Forbes, Carlos Keith, Herbert Kerkow, and Val Lewton. Most had contemporary settings, at least one was a historical, all were distinguished (if that’s the right word) by their explicit sexual themes, and all are exceedingly scarce.

   Very few people at all, I’ll wager, know that the novel published as by Herbert Kerkow is a detective story. Fortunately, it was Lewton’s only foray into the field. I say fortunately because The Fateful Star Murder is of a distinct alternative bent, though not quite bad enough to join the classic titles at the top, or rather the bottom, level of the pantheon.

   The most interesting thing about this lumbering, disjointed mess of a mystery is its kinky and remarkably graphic (for 1931) sexual content. There are enough lustful elements in its 239 pages to make the stories in the Spicy pulps seem tame by comparison, and to make this reader wonder how the novel managed to escape the wrath and censorship crusades of the era’s blue noses.

   Possibly what saved it was the fact that its publisher, Mohawk Press, was an obscure outfit whose offerings had miniscule printings. (The only other mystery published by Mohawk during its short life was Stuart Palmer’s first and rarest book, the gangster saga Ace of Jades.)

   The “fateful star murder” victim, one Dawn Loyall, is a nymphomaniac who,we are told, is so obsessed and debased that she enjoys sleeping with clients of one of Seaside City’s most notorious whorehouses free of charge. Her nineteen-year-old sister, Sybil, having been deflowered at age 13 by the same sexual predator who deflowered Dawn, is either casually or desperately promiscuous (it isn’t clear which) and in danger of becoming a nympho herself.

   One of the suspects in Dawn’s death by shooting, drowning, and/or poison is the aforementioned sexual predator, a middle-aged politician whose hobby is molesting prepubescent girls. Another suspect is a “cured” sadist who gets his jollies by beating up and burning women of all ages. And one of the nominal protagonists has a girlfriend named Gwenie who operates a whorehouse and is “a queen between the sheets.”

   As if all of this wasn’t enough to satisfy the most prurient reader, there are two gratuitous on-stage sex scenes between Sybil and her newspaperman lover, Maurice Martin, both of which are described in what for its day was explicit detail.

   In the second of these, for good (or bad) measure, Martin coldly and calculatedly interrupts his lovemaking at a crucial moment to accuse Sybil of bumping off her sister.

   The rest of the novel is made up of: Chapters and events that don’t quite connect with one another. Some highly dubious psychological observations and motivations. Ridiculous methods of amateur detection. A questionable explanation of the effects of ricin, the poison extracted from castor beans. The activities of a low-life gangster of (gasp!) Italian extraction, Giacomo the Wop.

   More: A gratuitously poisoned Siamese cat, on the corpse of which the protagonist gleefully performs an autopsy in his office. And some pointless astrological commentary, possibly tossed in to justify the title, for Dawn is said by her mother’s live-in lover to have been“murdered under a fateful star.”

   The autopsy-performing “hero” of the piece is one Luigi Rothmere, an allegedly eminent psychiatrist who thinks nothing of confiding intimate personal details about his patients to anyone who’ll listen, and who predicts Dawn’s violent demise by claiming “the woman who is a spendthrift of her love courts death.”

   He is given to making other “learned” observations throughout, such as this little gem of cerebral insight: “Women are the most savage murderers. Criminology teaches us to look first for a woman when we find that the victim’s body has been brutally mutilated or dismembered.”

   Rothmereis aided in his sleuthing by a pair of newspapermen, neither of whom is introduced until a third of the way through the book. Maurice Martin, Sybil’s lover, a horny columnist who once dreamed of being a “male harlot” so he could have all the women he wanted; and Henry Deal, a dipso reporter so far gone that he needs to consume a quart of brandy in the morning (!) in order to steady his hands so he can tie his tie.

   Dr. Rothmere, Martin, and Deal conduct their investigation by eliminating one suspect after another through mostly illogical reasoning, until only one name is left on the list – the most likely suspect with the least satisfying motive for dispatching Ms. Roundheels.

   Do Rothmere and his cohorts then turn the murderer over to the police for due process? They do not. The good doctor self-righteously knocks off the villain himself to ensure that justice is done, after which his friend, a politically ambitious District Attorney, absolves him of any wrongdoing.

   The pair then collude to officially write off the shooting, drowning, poisoning death of Dawn Loyall as a suicide so as to protect the remaining members of her family.

   And there you have The Fateful Star Murder. An alternative mystery, to be sure. Deserving of only two stars, though, because of a low risibility factor.