ROBERT CRAIS – Lullaby Town. Elvis Cole #3. Bantam, hardcover, 1992; paperback, 1993. Reprinted several times since.

   Crais is one of those writers who irritate the hell out of me. He is an excellent prose stylist, at least to my ear; witty, glib, adept at characterization, a lot of good things.

   So what’s not to like? Well, in his first two Elvis Cole books it was a pair of plots that made some of Parker’s macho excesses seem restrained. I didn’t buy this one for that reason, but waited until I came across it in the library.

   Peter Alan Nelson, wunderkind Hollywood director, dumped a wife and child early in his career, and now he wants them back. What he wants he’s in the habit of getting, so he hires Elvis Cole to find them for him.

   Our boy is nothing but efficient, so he finds her in short order in a small Connecticut town with a happy family life, a career, and a secret. The secret involves a New York mob family and the psycho son of the Godfather himself. Things get sticky quickly, so Cole calls for his Hawk-clone, Joe Pike, and you know what happens now, and who it happens to.

   The good or bad news, depending on your taste, is that nothing’s changed. Crais is still an excellent wordsmith, Cole is still wisecracking and caring, Pike is still deadly as a wino’s wakeup breath, and the bad guys are still really nasty. And once again, our boys defy reality and take on the mob and win.

   Of all the imitators that Parker has spawned, Crais is probably the most like him; except that he doesn’t even pay lip service to reality. He still pisses me off, and if I read his next, Free Fall, it’ll also be from the library. But if you like the kind of book he writes, nobody but Parker does it better.

MURDER IN TRINIDAD. Fox, 1934. Nigel Bruce, Heather Angel, Victor Jory, Murray Kinnell, Douglas Walton, J. Carrol Naish, Claude King, Pat Somerset, Francis Ford, John Davidson, Noble Johnson, Paul Panzer, Ivan Simpson. Screenplay by Seton I. Miller, based on the novel by John W. Vandercook. Director: Louis King. Shown at Cinecon 44, Hollywood CA, Aug-Sept 2008.

   It’s always good to see Nigel Bruce in a starring role without his fuddy-duddy mannerisms that came to characterize his on-screen persona, especially in as nifty a crime film as this one is.

   As fond as I am of Peter Lorre’s Mr. Moto character, Fox’s first try at a film version of the Vandercook novel is superior to the later remake, Mr. Moto in Danger Island. The characters (and perhaps the film audience as well) are put off by Bruce’s casual manner on first acquaintance, but there’s a sharp intelligence behind that exterior, as his antagonists will soon learn, to their regret.

   As detective Bertram Lynch, Bruce also has a pet monkey that probably contributes to the off-putting first impression, but the monkey might be seen as a metaphor for the position Lynch ultimately puts the murderer in. One of the highlights of the weekend.

      Previously on this blog:

JOHN W. VANDERCOOK and BERTRAM LYNCH, a double profile by David Vineyard.

FRANCES CRANE – The Cinnamon Murder. Random House, hardcover, 1946. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition. Bantam #130, paperback, 1947.

   I’m fairly sure that part of the reason mystery readers are attracted to Frances Crane’s novels is the colorful set of titles she endowed them with. That, plus the fact that someone who picks one up to read knows that there will be a mystery involved, one that will thoroughly puzzled over before being solved in the end, and that love will find its way.

   This one takes place in New York, just as Pat and Jean Abbott are about to return home to San Francisco. This leaves Jean with just one hat, and believe me, don’t we hear about that, and how inappropriate it is for “sleuthing.”

   Why she is allowed to tag along on Pat’s cases, on one pretext or another, I don’t know. Pat is the detective in the family, and Jean misses most of everything, even those clues that might be considered of a feminine nature — clothes, fingernail polish, that sort of thing.

   Unlike the cases that Mr. and Mrs. North get involved in, there is otherwise no overt comedy in the Abbott novels, but there are more red herrings than you can flail an oar at. Jean tells the story, but Pat tells her nothing, and so after being accustomed to being left in the dark with her, I admit to being caught totally unaware when the lights went on — and this time with the guilty party firmly in Pat’s grasp.

   Feather-headed sort of stuff, but OK.

      The Pat and Jean Abbott novels [thanks to Wikipedia]

* The Turquoise Shop – 1941
* The Golden Box – 1942
* The Yellow Violet – 1942
* The Applegreen Cat – 1943
* The Pink Umbrella – 1943 (aka The Pink Umbrella Murder)
* The Amethyst Spectacles – 1944
* The Indigo Necklace – 1945 (aka The Indigo Necklace Murders)
* The Cinnamon Murder – 1946
* The Shocking Pink Hat – 1946
* Murder on the Purple Water – 1947
* Black Cypress – 1948
* The Flying Red Horse – 1949
* The Daffodil Blonde – 1950
* Murder in Blue Street – 1951 (aka Death in the Blue Hour)
* The Polkadot Murder – 1951
* 13 White Tulips – 1953
* Murder in Bright Red – 1953
* The Coral Princess Murders – 1954
* Death in Lilac Time – 1955
* Horror on the Ruby X – 1956
* The Ultraviolet Widow – 1956
* The Man in Gray – 1958 (aka The Gray Stranger)
* The Buttercup Case – 1958
* Death-Wish Green – 1960
* The Amber Eyes – 1962
* Body Beneath A Mandarin Tree – 1965

   For more on Frances Crane’s life and career, see this essay about her by Tom and Enid Schantz on their Rue Morgue Press website.

MIRAGE. Universal Pictures, 1965, Gregory Peck, Diane Baker, Walter Matthau, Kevin McCarthy, Jack Weston, Leif Erickson, Walter Abel, George Kennedy, Robert H. Harris, House B. Jameson, Hari Rhodes. Screenplay by Peter Stone, based on the novel Fallen Angel by Howard Fast, writing under the pen name of Walter Ericson. Director: Edward Dmytryk.

   If you’ll check back nearly a year ago on this blog, you’ll find a list David Vineyard did of films that involve amnesia as a major portion of their plots. Mirage is the 16th film listed, but I don’t believe that David had rankings in mind when he came up with the list. I may be wrong, but I believe the list consists of those movies in order as they came in mind to him.

   The reason for pointing this out is that I’d personally have to put this movie in the top five, if not one of the top three. What Mirage is about, and almost nothing else, is what happens to David Stillwell (Gregory Peck’s character) after the lights go out in the New York City skyscraper he’s in when the lights go out and he has to make his way down the stairs in darkness, accompanied by a woman who recognizes him only when they reach the bottom and he has no idea who she is.

   But no one knows who he is either, nor can he find the fourth subfloor in the building again, the one he followed Diane Baker down after she ran away from him. His office, where’s he worked as a cost accountant for the past two years is no longer there; the tender behind the bar at his favorite watering hole does not recognize him; the refrigerator in his apartment is empty – two years of his life, in fact and as he discovers are Gone.

   Openings like these are never match up with the endings, no matter how clever they are, but Mirage is almost, but not quite, an exception. As Stillwell gradually learns, his predicament is closely tied to the death of a noted peace activist, who fell to his death just about the same time as his memory left him.

   Gregory Peck is stolidly confused and annoyed at himself and the situation he finds himself in, while Diane Baker does her best to care for him (apparently) and at the same time not tell him anything substantial about his past.

   The best performances are reserved to the character actors in the film, beginning with Walter Matthau as PI Ted Caselle, whose first case this is when Stillwell hires him out of sheer desperation and no one else to turn to. Add Robert H. Harris as a psychiatrist who thinks Stillwell is pulling some kind of fraud and throws him out of his office; George Kennedy as a bespectacled man with a gun who’s not afraid to use it; Kevin McCarthy as a sniveling sycophant (he always plays this role well); and House Jameson as a boozy doorway derelict with a purpose.

   Matthau is absolutely marvelous in his role, by the way, witty and far from pretentious; his was a part I remember vividly from the first time I watched this movie some 45 years ago. Over the time that’s passed, though, I discovered I’d pretty much forgotten the ending, which I think makes sense, although I’d have to watch the movie again to be sure.

   Filmed in black and white, Mirage veers close to the film noir category, but never quite makes it. The outdoor scenes are fine, but the indoor ones have the same production values at TV did at the time: cardboardy and dull.

   Overall, if you’ve read this far into the review, this is a film you should not miss. It’s no masterpiece, but as a crime drama with some sparks, it will certainly more than do until one that is comes along. (And who knows how long that will be.)

DOLORES HITCHENS – Fools Gold. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1958. Paperback reprint: Pocket #1239, 1959.

Film: BAND OF OUTSIDERS. Columbia Pictures, 1964. French title: Bande à part. Anna Karina, Danièle Girard, Louisa Colpeyn, Chantal Darget, Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur. Director: Jean-Luc Godard.

   Very similar in vein to Rififi in New York [reviewed here ], there’s Fools Gold, by Dolores Hitchens, a nasty piece of work about a nasty piece of work names Skip, barely graduated from juvenile delinquency, sho has enthralled a cute blonde named Karen and a dim ne’er-do-well named Eddie with whom he hopes to pull a major caper.

   But this thing has wheels within wheels, and when a big-time professional crook gets wind of the deal and decides to hijack it, that’s only the beginning of the complications that ensue.

   I never read any Hitchens before, but I found this quite well done. She has a good feel for letting the characters shape the plot, and she isn’t bothered by a bit of clutter and untidiness as things play out in a nicely cluttered and untidy finale.

   Fools Gold was turned into a rather unlikely film called Bande à part (Band of Outsiders) in 1964 by the legendary and quite mad Jean-Luc Godard, who threw out half the plot but stayed surprisingly faithful to the rest.

   Bande stars Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur and the lovely Anna Karina as the aspiring felons, and it’s played out on actual locations rather than sets, giving the thing that rough, seat-of-the-pants look typical of Godard and perfect for a gritty crime movie.

   There’s also a bit more attention to the characters here. Hitchens’ cast was well-drawn and believable, but — how shall put this? — you know how in pornography, the characters think about sex all the time? Of course you do.

   Well in crime novels the characters are pretty well occupied with crime. So it is in Hitchens’ novel, but not so in Godard’s film, Here, they have their secret thoughts, playful moments and private ambitions. And sometimes they break out of the story just to be young.

   The result is a film worth coming back to: mysterious, exciting, and highly satisfying.

HAKE TALBOT – Rim of the Pit. Bantam, 1965. Originally published by Simon and Schuster, hardcover, 1944. Reprinted several times in other editions.

   This book was chosen by Anthony Boucher for Bantam’s “World’s Great Novels of Detection” series, along with such classics as Christianna Brand’s Green for Danger and Ellery Queen’s Cat of Many Tails. Like those two, this is an excellent book that should be far better known than it is (it was not mentioned by Barzun & Taylor).

   The detective in Rim of the Pit is gambler Rogan Kincaid, who tries to determine a rational explanation of seemingly supernaturally caused murders.

   Many years ago Grimaud Desanat froze to death in the North Woods of New England. His wife Irene, a supposed medium, holds a seance to ask him about some trees he owned. During the seance Desanat appears and terrifies Irene, who is later found inside a locked room brutally murdered

   The question is, who murdered her? Was it another member of the house party or the spirit of Desanat himself acting through another’s body?

   More and more inexplicable events pile up that seem to favor the latter theory, including a second murder that seems to clinch it, but Talbot makes it all come clear in a brilliant ending.

   Talbot wrote only two detective novels, the other being Hangman’s Handyman (1942), which may help to explain why he is so little known today, but Rim of the Pit is a classic of the genre that bears out Boucher’s comparison with such more noted masters of impossible crime as John Dickson Carr and Clayton Rawson.

Editorial Comments:  Both of Talbot’s detective novels have recently been reprinted by Ramble House. Puzzle Doctor, on his/her blog, suggests that Talbot wrote a third, one that was never published and is now presumed lost.

GEORGE HARMON COXE – The Glass Triangle. Alfred A Knopf, hardcover, 1940. Dell #81, paperback, mapback edition, 1945; Dell #522, [1951], mapback. Jonathon Press Mystery #J23, digest pb, [1947]. Contained in Triple Exposure (with The Jade Venus and The Fifth Key), Knopf, hardcover, 1959.

    This is vintage Coxe, written while he was still fresh from toiling a decade or more for Black Mask and other pulps. I’ve never been sure why he switched to Kent Murdock as the detective in his early novels, rather than continue with Flashgun Casey, as they tend to blur in my mind into the same character, the tough successful news photographer who continually finds himself involved in murder.

    In this one Murdock introduces the sister of an old friend to a Hollywood crowd in town for a movie premiere, then feels it’s his obligation to protect her when the director, unliked by all, is murdered in his hotel room. There’s no moral consideration involved, just a newspaperman’s curiosity and what he owes on a promise to a friend.

    So, OK, call him medium-boiled. Coxe’s heroes are people who stick up for each other, easily inspire trust and confidence, and who are maybe just a little soft at heart.

    A piece of glass is the only tangible evidence Murdock has after the corpse disappears and his photographic plates are stolen, but only the careful reader will spot the additional clues Coxe slips in. I did name the killer, but that’s about all. The only question left unanswered is why the supremely detestable director was along on the junket in the first place.

GLADYS MITCHELL – The Death-Cap Dancers. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1981. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition. Originally published in the UK: Michael Joseph, hc, 1981. Paperback reprint: PaperJacks, Canada, 1986.

   Of all the many writers of the Golden Age of Detection, Gladys Mitchell’s career lasted longer than most of them. Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley appeared in most of her mystery fiction, with Speedy Death being the first, appearing in 1929, when she was 28. There were some 66 in all, and Dancers clocks in as a mere number 59, some 52 years later, when the author was 80.

   Over the years I can recall reading only one other one, which one I’m not sure, but it was toward the middle of the run and I can remember saying to myself, “My, that was a strange one.” (My review of the book may turn up one of these days, as I go through the old fanzines in which they appeared, and if so and when, I’ll be able to tell you more.)

   This one begins when a threesome of young women (in their 20s) on a rustic vacation together invites a fourth to stay with them in the cabin they’ve rented – the fourth, as chance would have it, being a niece of Dame Bradley.

   Which is of course the connection needed when a series of two murders and one nearly fatal attack on a third member of a traveling troupe of folk singers and players begins to occur. In each case, a deadly mushroom is placed in the victims’ wounds.

   The book is leisurely paced, with a rather minimalist approach to story-telling. Characters are wont to speak in huge chunks of dialogue, for example, with a rather straightforward and simple plot, not annoyingly so, but quite noticeably.

   Mrs. Bradley, a trained psychologist by trade, is not brought physically into the story until about the two-thirds point, presumably to protect her niece and her new friends from being under suspicion by the police. And even though the police have gone on to other suspects, the good lady stays on to give them a hand.

   Not that they especially need it. There is only one suspect who fills the bill, someone whom the rather bland Mrs. Bradley spots right away but refuses to name for unspecified reasons, a state of affairs that eccentric sleuths in the Golden Age were also wont to do.

   A not terribly impressive novel of detection, in other words, but strangely enough I enjoyed the book anyway. Other than Dame Bradley (also strangely enough) the characters are largely lively and vivid and you can tell them apart without a scorecard.

   This section might be called The Slicks and The Pulps. It seems that Radio and Cinema have always been at the heart of American entertainment. Well, at least since the late 1920s.

   In the beginning, there were four major US radio networks. Two were owned by NBC (which started broadcasting in 1926), one by CBS (from 1928), and one by MBS (Mutual Broadcasting System; from 1934). Between them, they accounted for an enormous national force.

   When it comes to Old Time Radio (OTR), I am a mere novice. My own copy of John Dunning’s wonderful On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (Oxford University Press, N.Y., 1998) is almost in well-thumbed shreds. But I am still on the nursery-slopes here. I very much enjoy listening to OTR programmes rather than collecting them (whereas my ever-growing DVD collection of Cinema and TV is virtually forcing me out of my home!).

   US radio dramatics were in their turn influenced by the exciting era of the Pulp magazines, roughly from about the mid 1920s to the early 1950s. (I imagine that Steve, a true Pulp magazine aficionado, would probably have more to say on the subject.)

   Hollywood, in its early Sound decades, was influenced (to a small degree) by the Pulps; just witness the glorious output of the serial studios like Universal, Columbia (whose 1938 The Spider’s Web remains surely the best serial ever), and Republic.

   Although the more high-class studios (like MGM and Paramount) acquired pre-publishing rights to produce film versions of contemporary “best sellers,” the published works of genre authors like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain were also scooped up.

   It is perhaps through filming these genre works that the Hollywood studios and their filmmakers happened upon the 1940s film style of Film Noir (as termed by French film critics after WWII).

   The first stage, the “experimental,” saw NBC transmit the very first Sherlock Holmes on the small-screen, The Three Garridebs, on 27 November 1937 (with Luis Hector as Holmes and William Podmore as Watson).

   On 17 May 1938, NBC (or rather RCA-NBC) showed The Mysterious Mummy Case, written and directed by Thomas Hutchinson. The 25-minute programme, about some mysterious deaths related to an evil-spreading mummy case, served as an experiment in engineering as an ally of dramatic narrative.

   At the end of 1941, NBC produced Blind Alley, featuring a gang of crooks taking over a psychiatry professor’s household. The TV version was based on James Warwick’s 1938 Broadway play, which was filmed by Columbia in 1939 and then remade as The Dark Past in 1948.

   Closing-down the early “experimental” period was The Item of the Scarlet Ace (NBC, 1941), adapted from the Blue Network radio series The Bishop and the Gargoyle. Crimebuster-and-sidekick, Richard Gordon (as the Bishop) and Ken Lynch (the Gargoyle), continued their radio roles.

   The documentary aspect came with, for example, Bureau of Missing Persons (DuMont, 1943), which demonstrated the activities of the NYC Police Department’s Missing Persons unit. A later example may be the intriguingly-titled Rackets Are My Racket (DuMont, 1948), designed to expose real-life frauds and confidence games.

   On the border between the actual and sheer drama was DuMont’s The Woman Who Was Acquitted (June 1944). The story deals with a psychological exploration into the guilt of an acquitted murderess who had confessed her crime while in a cataleptic trance.

   Crime Quiz (DuMont, 1944) was one of the earliest viewer-participation shows in which the studio audience/home viewer had to solve a routine whodunit. Armchair Detective (not to be confused with the British radio and TV series created by Ernest Dudley) was a 1948-49 CBS series which presented two whodunits within its half-hour and invited the audience to guess the solution.

   You Be the Jury (KLAC-TV, 1949) followed a similar path, this time from the viewpoint of a murder trial. Likewise TV Detective (NBC, 1949), with the camera acting as a private detective; much like the police detective drama The Plainclothesman (DuMont, 1949-54). Your Witness (KECA-TV, 1949) was perhaps the last of the audience-participation shows.

   Appearing around the same time as each other, in October 1945, were two similar crime-buster shows. Diary of Death (CBS) was a TV version of the popular radio series Casey, Crime Photographer (CBS Radio), a 30-minute murder mystery written for the small-screen by Lela Swift (from the radio play by Chuck Holden).

   Photocrime (CBS) started off on local station WCBW in an attempt to dramatize the photo journalism stories appearing in the general-interest Look magazine, before the series was networked by ABC in 1949. For the network series, incidentally, Chuck Webster played police Inspector Hannibal Cobb.

   January 1946 started off with the CBS dramatization of Lucille Fletcher’s Sorry, Wrong Number, directed by John Houseman (assisted by Nick Ray), and starring young Mildred Natwick as the seemingly neurotic one.

   One of the pleasures awaiting the genre fan in 1946 was the full-length TV play (some 100 minutes) of Mr. and Mrs. North (NBC, May), adapted from the Broadway production, which in turn was based on the Frances and Richard Lockridge The New Yorker magazine series. According to contemporary reviews, the TV version was awash with “whodunit qualities.” Maxine Stewart was the zany Pam North and John McQuade was the more shrewd Jerry North.

   US Radio, as a primary source in the early days, served up the NBC Radio suspense anthology Lights Out. In 1946 (June to August), NBC produced four TV Lights Out specials, all under producer Fred Coe.

   They involved (for the first time on TV) the effects, for example, of the camera itself as the murderer and then, later, the full use of the television split-screen process. The regular TV series ran on NBC from 1949 to 1952. Inspired later perhaps by radio’s Inner Sanctum Mysteries was Mr. Black (ABC, 1949), a ghostly mystery series supervised by the satanic title character.

   In November 1946, CBS produced Brief Pause for Murder, about a radio announcer obsessed with a plot to strangle his wife. The story was taken from the long-running 1942-55 CBS Radio series The Whistler.

   Another TV example was Lucky Night (WBKB Chicago, June 1948), featuring some atmospheric shots (stormy night, waves dashing against shore) at times pre-dating 1960-62’s Thriller. The script (by Russell Hughes) was lifted directly from The Whistler radio show. Incidentally, the drama was intended to act as a pilot for a TV suspense series to be called Boomerang (produced by MCA).

   The ongoing series’ format was slowly but surely beginning to creep into the TV production process.

   The industrious DuMont produced the half-hour Trouble, Inc. (July 1949), a whodunit pilot starring Earl Hammond and Carol Hill as an adventurous couple who team up in Trouble, Inc., an outfit that will do “anything, anywhere, anytime.”

   Another pilot project from DuMont came in the form of Hands of Murder (August 1949). Featuring Steve Eliot and Charlotte Keane, the story told of a desperate factory worker who was driven to murder his violent loan shark. It was presented as a part of DuMont’s Program Playhouse (June-September 1949). From the latter Playhouse, a little earlier, had come an early version of a based-on-the-files-of drama called Federal Agent (June 1949).

   From now on it was the series (and in some ways, the anthology) that commanded the genre.

   Frank Wood – Private Detective (WBKB Chicago) was a short-run 1947 series starring Joe Bellucci as the title sleuth. The Public Prosecutor (1947) became Crawford Mystery Theatre (DuMont, 1951) and appeared to be a combination of crime drama and quiz. Syndicated series Mystery Is My Hobby (1949) starred Glenn Langan as a police detective.

   Barney Blake, Police Reporter (NBC, 1948), it seemed, was under the thumb of sponsor Lucky Strike cigarettes (The American Tobacco Company). It was of course a live series in which our hero, a Front Page style newspaperman (played by Gene O’Donnell), solved each week’s whodunit mystery between ad breaks of marching cigarettes.

   Frederic Ziv had acquired the rights to the Boston Blackie property and produced a syndicated version starring an unlikely Robert Middleton in 1948. The more familiar series featuring Kent Taylor as Blackie was syndicated from 1951.

   The intriguing crime, mystery and suspense drama Chicagoland Television Mystery Players first appeared over WGN-TV (Chicago) in September 1948. It continued to feature Gordon Urquhart as the crime-busting hero when it was shown via DuMont in 1949-50, retitled Chicagoland Mystery Players.

   The next instalment here will look at the genre’s Adventurers, their often Foreign Settings, and Cold War Espionage. The turbulent period 1951 to 1956. Series will range from China Smith to The Man Called X.

Note:   The introduction to this series of columns by Tise Vahimagi on TV mysteries and crime shows may be found here, followed by:

Part 1: Basic Characteristics (A Swift Overview)
Part 2.0: Evolution of the TV Genre (UK)

THE BLOOD SHIP. Columbia, 1927. Hobart Bosworth, Jacqueline Logan, Richard Arlen, Walter James, Fred Kohler. Scenario by Fred Myton, based on a novel of Norman Springer. Producer: Harry Cohn; director: George B. Seitz. Shown at Cinecon 44, Hollywood CA, Aug-Sept 2008.

   This plays like a stripped-down version of The Sea Wolf, with a sadistic sea captain, but with none of the philosophical underpinnings of the Jack London novel.

   Bosworth is a discredited Captain who signs on to the ship, which we learn is helmed by Walter James, the man who robbed him of his own ship, and, more importantly, of his wife and daughter. The crew largely consists of hijacked seamen, along with Bosworth and Richard Arlen, a young sailor who catches sight of the daughter James claims as his own and impulsively signs on for the voyage.

   James’ first mate is played by Fred Kohler, who specialized in playing bad guys, and the two run a ship in which brutality and fear reign. With a little quiet time, you can figure out that the girl is the pivotal player, who unites the past crimes and present perilous situation in a way that precipitates the final conflict and resolution.

   Predictable but entertaining.