WADE MILLER – Guilty Bystander. Farrar & Rinehart, hardcover, 1947. Paperback reprints include: Handi-Book #65, 1947; Penguin Signet #677, 1948, with many later printings.

   Guilty Bystander is the second book by the Bob Wade / Bill Miller team, and the first of six featuring private eye Max Thursday. At the beginning Thursday is a down and out ex-private eye working as a house detective in a shady hotel and drinking constantly.

   His ex-wife Georgia, now remarried, comes to him for help when their son Tommy is kidnapped. Max must sober up and use all his not inconsiderable skills to figure out the confusing scheme (whick involves a million dollars worth of pearls) and rescue his son.

   As always in the Miller books, the San Diego scene is vividly done, and Max is a sympathetic protagonist we want to succeed. Max gets some help from Homicide Lieutenant Austin Clapp (hero of Miller’s first book, Deadly Weapon) and Smitty, an ex-madam who owns the hotel where Max works.

   It is a fine book that all hard-boiled fans will enjoy — Miller and Wade are excellent writers.

   Does the name T.S. Stribling ring any bells? He lived from 1881 until 1965, and in the early FDR years he was considered one of the foremost authors of the American South. Before that he’d written extensively for pulp magazines like Adventure, which in the mid-1920s ran five stories of his about Professor Henry Poggioli, an American academic solving (well, trying to solve) various exotic crimes while traveling in the Caribbean area on sabbatical.

   In “A Passage to Benares,” the last and best-known of the quintet, Poggioli was hanged as a murderer. But that wasn’t the end of the saga. About three years after his demise, and without a hint as to how he came back from the dead, he returned in a new series of tales, published in Adventure and other magazines from 1929 through the years of Stribling’s literary reputation.

   A few years after winning the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Store (1933), he was eclipsed forever as America’s Southern novelist by William Faulkner and the publishing world dropped him like a hot rock.

   I was a teen when I first discovered Poggioli in the supersized Ellery Queen anthologies like 101 Years’ Entertainment and To the Queen’s Taste and in a number of the annual Queen’s Awards anthology volumes of the late Forties.

   Later, when I began collecting back issues of EQMM, I found that Fred Dannay had reprinted a Poggioli story in Volume 1 Number 1 (Fall 1941) and had bought fifteen new stories about the character that appeared in the magazine between 1945 and 1955.

   Then I discovered that in his last years Stribling had corresponded regularly with that certified mad genius of 20th-century literature, Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967).

   Recently I’ve been reading Kenneth W. Vickers’ T. S. Stribling: A Life of the Tennessee Novelist (University of Tennessee Press, 2004), which amply covers Stribling’s correspondence with Fred Dannay (whom Vickers insists on calling a “young” editor even though Fred was about 40 when he began running Poggioli originals in EQMM) but says little about the correspondence between Stribling and Keeler.

   The biography nudged me to re-read the first five Poggioli tales, collected as Clues of the Caribbees (1929), and to sample the later tales from EQMM, many of them collected in Best Dr. Poggioli Detective Stories (1978).

   My reaction was similar to what it had been more than half a century ago when I was first exposed to the saga. In my teens I couldn’t make up my mind whether I liked these stories, and as I slipslide into senescence I still can’t. There seems to be something off-the-wall about every Poggioli story I tackle. Could his affinity for Keeler be a case of kindred spirits?

   Stribling often called himself a satirist, and it seems clear that his intent was to poke fun at mystery fiction’s virtuosos of deduction like Holmes and Poirot. Since the first several Poggioli stories predate the debut of Ellery Queen as author and detective in The Roman Hat Mystery (1929), it’s clear that the polysyllabic literatus created by Fred and his cousin Manny Lee was not Stribling’s target.

   But his is such a deadpan satire, so far removed from, say, Robert L. Fish’s send-up of Holmes and Watson in his Schlock Homes parodies, that many readers don’t get the point and remain in a state of head-scratching puzzlement.

   As chance would have it, the closest to Stribling’s brand of satire that I’ve ever comes across is a brief passage from his buddy Harry Stephen Keeler. In The Steeltown Strangler (1950), an industrial plant beset by posters defaming its CEO is visited by author deKoven Blystone, creator of that brilliant Oriental sleuth Sharley Shang.

   Blystone claims that he can provide a thumbnail description of each of the twenty linemen suspects if given their nicknames. In Chapter VII of the novel he proceeds to do just that. Offered the monicker of Strumberries, Blystone describes him as “A Greek with an unpronounceable name, but blue-eyed instead of brown.”

   â€œHow — how do you know that Smyro Smyroyannis has got blue eyes?” “If he had brown ones,” Blystone replies, “He’d have gotten called Zupp.”

   Chapter VII of The Steeltown Strangler is chock-a-block with off-the-wall reasoning like this — which strikes me as close cousin to the off-the-wall stuff in the Poggioli stories.

   The affinity between Stribling and Keeler — each man highly regarded for a short while and then so completely forgotten neither could find a U.S. publisher for anything they wrote — runs deep.

   This column wasn’t intended to end here. I had planned to say more about some of the oddball events one finds in Stribling — for example, a man being put on trial for murder the same day he’s arrested.

   I also wanted to discuss “The Mystery of the Paper Wad” (EQMM, July 1946), where Poggioli reveals at the denouement that two men, languishing in adjoining jail cells because they couldn’t afford to pay their estranged wives’ alimony judgments, had made a deal whereby each would kill the other’s spouse.

   This may well have been Patricia Highsmith’s inspiration for the murder-swapping scheme in Strangers on a Train (1950).

   What kept me from finishing this column as I had planned was that late in the evening of Sunday, March 6, my own Patricia died, very suddenly and unexpectedly. The death certificate gives the cause as sepsis, with pneumonia and stress-induced cardiomyopathy as contributing causes.

   She never even knew she had pneumonia. A few weeks earlier she’d been suffering from what she took to be flu but she was, or at least seemed to be, completely over it, so much so that on Thursday the 3rd she’d put in nine hours of hard labor at the cat shelter where she volunteered one day a week.

   She was fine on Friday the 4th also but started to feel ill that evening. From then on it was horrible: all night Friday, all day Saturday, all Saturday night. She refused to let me take her to the emergency room, saying hospitals never do anything on weekends but charge people.

   Patty had been terrified of hospitals ever since her mother died in one after going in for something minor. At dawn on Sunday morning, the 6th, I made her go with me. She must have felt as if I were driving her in a tumbril to the guillotine.

   A few hours later her internist told me that I had done the right thing and probably saved her life. In the emergency room I was told that she was having a heart attack right then and there but the medical people later changed their minds. She was taken to the cardiac catheterization lab where all sorts of tubes were stuck into her and all sorts of shots given to her but her blood pressure was so low that they were afraid to give her anything to relieve her pain.

   Late that afternoon they told me to go home and come back in the morning, saying that she’d need to stay in the hospital for a week to ten days. That night, around 11:00 P.M., they called and told me to get out there at once: she had taken a turn for the worse. I had her health directive and showed it to them and there the story ends. She died about half an hour before midnight.

   Our coming together, late in the 1970s, was almost a mathematical progression. First she had read my stories in EQMM, then she’d discovered from an article about me in the Post-Dispatch that I was a St. Louisan too, then we were introduced.

   At that time she was living in suburban Webster Groves with three cats, a dog and a black spider monkey named Tar Baby. I had never heard of a domesticated monkey before and began reading literature from the Simian Society of America, of which Patty was an officer.

   The result was “Black Spider,” which first appeared in EQMM (August 1979) and was later translated into several languages.

   I named my fictional monkey after the real one, and whenever I received a copy of the story in another language the first thing I looked for was what the translator had done with the monk’s name, which is meaningless outside the U.S.

   In Spanish she became Azabache, which means black as coal. The Japanese simply transliterated the syllables, turning the name into gibberish. That story would never have been written if I hadn’t met Patty and Tar Baby. It may be the foremost monkey mystery in the genre — mainly because there are no others.

   I’ve often said that TB wasn’t a monkey but Patty’s daughter by an earlier marriage. They were as close as a mother and daughter, and she was devastated when her child died.

   Afterward all her pets were cats, and I’ve dedicated several books to her and whatever animals were our housemates at a given time. The last cats in her life and the last four-legged dedicatees of a book of mine were Rico and Squeako. If cats had saints, she would be St. Patty.

   Anyone reading this column has probably heard the story of Mr. Flitcraft and the falling beam as Hammett told it in The Maltese Falcon. A beam fell on Patty that Sunday night, and on me, and on everyone who knew and loved her.

BILL PRONZINI – Blowback. Random House, hardcover, 1977. Paperback reprints: Dale Books, 1978; Foul Play Press, 1984.

   As you may already know, this is the one that begins with the nameless private detective as he waits for the report on his lungs to come through. It is a tumor, he knows that now, but is it malignant?

   He means to sweat it out alone over the weekend, but a call for help from a friend takes him a short way out of himself, up into the mountains, to mix a little fishing with business.

   There are six men at the camp, and one woman, which is just the right mixture to provoke a murderous amount of jealousy and hatred, but how do a stolen Oriental carpet and a lone peacock feather enter in to it?

   Pronzini enjoys doing a tough-edged version of classical detection, and he may surprise a few who haven’t been paying close attention; but he adds something more — a rare view of someone confronted with and facing his own mortality, analyzing his life, comparing it with those of the pulp heroes he emulates.

   The fact that he, and others, still read their adventures makes certain their kind of immortality, and while I can’t tell you what the doctor’s report says, even without a name to call his own, there is a private eye who now can be added to the list of those who may in time be forgotten by many — by not by all.

MAN OF THE WEST. United Artists, 1958. Gary Cooper, Julie London, Lee J. Cobb, Arthur O’Connell, Jack Lord, John Dehner, Royal Dano, Robert J. Wilke, Dick Elliott, Frank Ferguson, Emory Parnell, Chuck Robertson. Screenplay by Reginald Rose, based on the novel The Border Jumpers by Will C. Brown. Music by Leigh Harline. Producer: Walter Mirisch; director: Anthony Mann. Shown at Cinecon 44, Hollywood CA, Aug-Sept 2008.

   This film was chosen as an example of the films produced by Mirisch, beginning inauspiciously with the “Bomba the Jungle Boy” series, then in collaboration with his brothers in the Mirisch Production Company, advancing light years to the production of films such as Some Like It Hot, West Side Story, The Magnificent Seven, and In the Heat of the Night, garnering three Oscars for Best Picture, as well as numerous other awards.

   Mirisch had just written his autobiography, I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History, copies of which were available at a lobby signing.

   Mirisch was born in 1921, but the only concession to his age was the scheduling of his screening interview before instead of after the film. He was an engaging interviewee, with apparently total recall of his films, and the Cinephiles award was presented to him by George Chakiris, who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in West Side Story.

   Man of the West was an early Mirisch film (and not a financial success), a dark Western in which Gary Cooper plays a reforned outlaw who, escaping a train holdup with two fellow passengers (Julie London and Arthur O’Connell), stumbles into the hideout of his former gang, led by his uncle (played by the decade-younger Lee J. Cobb).

   Cooper has to convince Cobb that he’s back to join the gang, which is planning a bank robbery. The climax of the film, the robbery in what turns out to be nightmarish ghost town, is an exciting and unconventionally shot shoot-out against what appear to be overwhelming odds for Cooper.

   There is something of an air of implausibility about the film (written by notable TV scriptwriter Reginald Rose) that may have contributed to the film’s failure at the box office. Nonetheless, the film has a fine cast and director, and whatever its shortcomings, it was still great fun to watch.

ELLERY QUEEN – Ten Days’ Wonder. Little Brown & Co., hardcover, 1948. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover & paperback. Film: La décade prodigieuse; French, 1971. Released in the US as Ten Days’ Wonder. Anthony Perkins, Michel Piccoli, Marlène Jobert, Orson Welles. Director: Claude Chabrol.

   I tried Ellery Queen back in High School and quickly tired of him/them because it wasn’t Raymond Chandler. But when someone hereabouts recommended Queen’s 1948 mystery Ten Days’ Wonder, I decided to give it a look.

   Well, Queen-as-author doesn’t exactly sparkle, and Queen-as-character never really comes alive on the page, but I found Wonder a pretty well crafted thing: something about a friend of Queen’s with a god-like father, sexy young step-mom, desire-under-the-elms, blackmail, blackouts and criminous suspicions.

   Given that Queen’s friend/suspect is a sculptor, the overall pattern of the thing (and hence the killer) is pretty transparent, but — given that pattern and the morality it references — there’s something sort of subversive in the way Queen-the-character keeps morphing: from sleuth to accomplice, from celebrity to pariah, then back to celebrity, all without himself changing.

   And there’s an odd sub-text flirting with the nature [**WARNING**] of a God who imputes our fall to sin. Lenny Bruce put it more succinctly when he observed that if man is sinful, the fault lies with the manufacturer, and Fredric Brown put it more sharply with the God-as-comic-punster ending of The Screaming Mimi, but Queen’s handling of the notion has its merits.   [**END OF WARNING**]

   In 1972 Claude Chabrol did a pretty faithful movie version of Ten Days’ Wonder; Michel Piccoli plays a suitably colorless detective (here a philosopher, but for the French it’s pretty much the same thing); Anthony Perkins is neatly cast as the unstable sculptor; Marlène Jobert the cute step-mom; and Orson Welles, in the fakiest fake nose of his career, simply perfect as God-the-Father.

   Like most Chabrol films, it’s thoughtful rather than gripping, definitely watchable, but damn! that schnozz they stuck on Orson; I’ve seen better noses on a pair of Groucho glasses.

HEAT LIGHTNING. Warner Brothers, 1934. Aline MacMahon, Ann Dvorak, Preston Foster, Lyle Talbot, Glenda Farrell, Frank McHugh, Ruth Donnelly, Jane Darwell, Edgar Kennedy. Based on a play by Leon Abrams & George Abbott. Director: Mervyn LeRoy.

   There is some similarity between Heat Lightning and the much more famous The Petrified Forest, but the latter came along later (1936) and the plots (in my opinion) diverge rather quickly. But if you’re familiar with the later film, see how much alike the settings are: Heat Lightning takes place in the middle of the Mohave desert and an isolated gas station/restaurant/tourist camp is miles from the nearest town.

   Two women, sisters, own the place. The older (and wiser) has a past she would like to think is forgotten (Olga, played by the efficient but rather glum and weary-looking Aline MacMahon), while Myra (Ann Dvorak) is looking forward to a future involving men and romance that she’s not likely to have, not as long as her older sister has any say about it.

   For such an isolated location, there is a lot of traffic that goes by, but perhaps because it is one of those places that a sign saying “Last Gas for 20 Miles” is the absolute truth. Some come in, add water to a radiator, gas up and have a couple of Cokes (for a grand total of $3.65) before heading off again, while others hang around for a while.

   The latter include a pair of fleeing would-be bank robbers — or make that killers, since at least one guard was killed in the process — one of whom knows Olga from before; and in fact they knew each other very well. Also staying overnight are two wealthy divorcees (Glenda Farrell, Ruth Donnelly) returning from Reno, along with their hardworking chauffeur (Frank McHugh), who on occasion is called upon to do other jobs as well.

   Criminals on the run, an old flame, and two rich women make for a combustible situation, and the 63 minutes of running time is almost not enough to fit it all in. This was one of the last movies made before the Code came into being, and while there are no overt sexual scenes, there are several times there is no doubt what was going on when the cameras weren’t around and weren’t rolling.

   The overall plot may be a little predictable, but not entirely. How will Olga get rid of George (Preston Foster) or will she fall for him again? The drama itself unfolds in fine fashion, with more than a dash of humor saucily tossed into the boiling kettle, figuratively speaking. The photography and staging are more than fine, enhanced by the equally fine remastering job done to the film before it was recently released on DVD.

   Recommended.

MIKE JAHN – The Quark Maneuver. Ballantine; paperback original; 1st printing, March 1977.

   Add yet another liberated lady to the growing list of female action sleuths we have seen recently. Her knowledge of karate helps save the lives of a pair of cops at the mercy of two blacks with automatic rifles underneath the Queensboro bridge and involves her in their subsequent pursuit of a Quark-carrying madman capable of bringing on World War III.

   What’s a Quark? Only a portable surface-to-air missile powerful enough to bring down the plane carrying Hua Kuo-feng, the premier of China, into New York City for a UN summit conference.

   Her name is Diana Cantardo, and she runs a pretty fair restaurant on 59th Street, but she soon finds that romance and adventure are much more fun. I concur whole-heartedly and hope that that won’t be the last we see of the delightful Miss Cantardo, truly a beauty with brains, as she tackles more cases with her new friend Lieutenant DiGioa, who is not as old as he first appears.

   I do have one gripe, though, about an ending that’s both too loose and yet too tightly plotted. See if you don’t agree.

Rating:   B.

[UPDATE] 04-15-11.   The Quark Maneuver was Michael Jahn’s first mystery novel, and it won an Edgar for Best Paperback Original in 1978. Nonetheless, this was Diana Cantardo’s first and only appearance in book form. I kept looking for a followup at the time, to no avail.

   In 1982 with Night Rituals, Jahn began a series of novels featuring Bill Donovan, head of Manhattan’s West Side Major Crimes Unit. Over the years Donovan has been promoted to Chief of Special Investigations for the NYPD, with ten in the series so far and the 11th due next year.

WARREN MURPHY & RICHARD SAPIR – Destroyer World: The Movie That Never Was. Unproduced screenplay based on the novel Created The Destroyer. Ballybunnion Books, trade paperback, 2004. Kindle edition currently available on Amazon.

   In the foreword of this book featuring Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir’s unsold spec screenplay, Warren Murphy explains how, when, and why they decided to write a screenplay based on their popular paperback series, The Destroyer.

   In the mid-1970s, after turning down Chuck Norris agent’s request for film rights (back when Norris was most known as a karate champion), Murphy and Sapir decided to try writing their own screenplay. The script shows their inexperience at the time with the movie business. For example, no professional screenwriter would include camera angles or instructions for the actors how to act.

   The script’s best feature is the Murphy and Sapir writing style that made the books so popular. Both understood their characters better than those involved with the 1985 film or the 1988 pilot for an ABC-TV series.

   Someone is starting riots in major American cities. Mr. Smith of top-secret organization CURE hires the Master of Sinanju to train CURE’s new lone assassin. The last Master of Sinanju, Chiun may look like a tiny frail old man, but he can walk up walls and rip apart steel with his hands.

   Selected to be CURE’s assassin, without his knowledge, Remo is framed and executed for murder. With Remo “dead,” Chiun trains Remo to become The Destroyer. Remo’s first case, if he is ever ready and willing, is to stop the madman behind the riots.

   Sadly, the script is a mess. The book begins where the would-be movie should have, with Remo’s “death.” Why is Conn MacCleary the focus of so much of the first half of the story? This movie should be about Remo and Chiun. Visually, Remo or Chiun or the bad guys should be in every scene.

   Most of the movie is over by the time Remo turns from jerk to hero and goes after the lame villain Buddy Bower, owner of a hamburger fast food chain, who plans to become President by creating civil unrest (his method for creating the riots would have been visually laughable).

   Murphy, in his foreword, wrote he thought what went wrong with the 1985 film Remo Williams was the lack of a Big Villain. A problem this script shared. Maybe Buddy Bower could have been a Big Villain if the script had spent more time showing him and his evil plan at work. Instead, the script had characters talk about the riots while showing such pointless scenes as the President deciding to approve CURE’s assassin, Chiun traveling on an airplane, and every detail of the frame of Remo including his trial.

   Why didn’t the script take the obvious path? After Remo “dies,” fetch Chiun, show more of Remo’s training and less talking, while visually establishing the evil power of the villain, and then send our hero out to stop the bad guy. If Murphy and Sapir’s script had followed that path, they might have created a Destroyer movie series to rival the 1970s Bond movies.

JAMES ANDERSON – The Affair of the Blood-Stained Egg Cosy. McKay Washburn, hardcover, 1975. Avon, paperback, 1978. Poisoned Pen Press, trade paperback, June 2006.

   Fans of the typical English house party mysteries of the 1930s, rejoice — the Golden Age is back! James Anderson’s book has it all, including a list of characters and a plan of the house and, as the worried Inspector Wilins puts it: “Foreign envoys. International jewel thieves. American millionaires. European aristocracy.”

   Though he keeps saying he is not sanguine, Inspector Wilkins manages to unravel the many-stranded plot and sort out a head-spinning series of complications, with the help of a (semi-)amateur assistant.

   Guests at the Earl of Burford’s stately home include his diplomat brother Richard and some foreign envoys trying to work out an agreement; an American oil millionaire interested in the Earl’s fabulous gun collection and his wife; a strangely enigmatic and beautiful Baroness; society bore Algy Fotheringay, who gets his just desserts; an early-Christie type ingenue, down on her luck; and possibly the Wraith, a society jewel thief.

   As might be expected, Anderson has a lot of fun with this, though he does it affectionately without playing for laughs. There are ultimately two murders, which naturally take place during a violent thunderstorm when no one stays in his room.

   Egg Cosy has all the joys, and some of the weaknesses, of the classic mysteries of the Golden Age. The latter include a few poorly delineated characters and the convention of having a culprit launch into a long and detailed confession upon being accused, rather than clamming up and sending for a lawyer.

   On the plus side are the situation itself, the marvelously convoluted plot and its multi-part solution, somewhat reminiscent of early Queen. There is even a secret passage!

   If the the events of the night in question and the whereabouts of all the people and guns are just about impossible to keep straight, that’s all part of the game. There are indications of a possible sequel at the end — I hope there is one, as it’s a fun book, well worth reading.

       The Inspector Wilkins series —

1. The Affair of the Blood Stained Egg Cosy (1975)
2. The Affair of the Mutilated Mink Coat (1981)
3. The Affair of the 39 Cufflinks (2003)

FUGITIVES FOR A NIGHT. RKO Radio Pictures, 1938. Frank Albertson, Eleanor Lynn, Allan Lane, Bradley Page, Jonathan Hale, Russell Hicks, Paul Guilfoyle, Ward Bond. Screenplay: Dalton Trumbo, based on a story Richard Wormser. Director: Leslie Goodwin.

   Matt Ryan (Frank Albertson) is a would-be actor who ends up as a stooge for the studio [a “yes man” who does anything he’s asked], pushed around by studio head Maurice Tenwright (Russell Hicks) who assigns him first to arrogant heart throb John Nelson (Allan Lane), who wants out of his contract with Tenwright, then fading but charming and gentlemanly leading man Dennis Poole (Bradley Page), who Tenwright is using as weapon against Nelson.

   Poole is a real change from Nelson, he can’t even stand to use the term stooge when referring to Matt, but his star is rapidly blinking out, and his only real value is to be held over Nelson’s fat head as a threat since his last two films did terrible box office.

   Matt’s girl, publicist Ann Wray (Eleanor Lynn), has seen enough of Hollywood and just wants Matt to open a hamburger stand and get out of the dirty racket. Anything other than stay in the demeaning job as stooge — a menial and soul-numbing position as a punchline for everyone else’s joke.

   And she may be right. At an illegal casino in the desert where all the studio big wigs are gathered along with nasty gossip columnist Monks (Paul Guilfoyle), there is a police raid, and in the confusion Tenwright is shot and killed.

   Wry police Captain Jonathan Hale suspects Matt, who with help from Ann escapes into the desert night. Now wanted by the police for murder, Matt has to prove he didn’t kill Tenwright and reveal who really did.

   The suspects, along with the police Captain, gather at Poole’s house as Poole tries to stall them to give Matt a chance to escape, but Matt and Ann are headed right for Poole’s because they think they know the killer.

   There is nothing special here; this is a solid B movie with an attractive cast and capable direction, moving at a pace, but what’s notable is how much of Trumbo’s voice makes it onto the screen. The film is cynical, bitter, sardonic, and almost no one is decent or even likable.

   Tenwright is manipulative and backstabbing, Nelson arrogant and self absorbed, Monks a snarling coward, and for most of the film Matt all too willing to be everyone’s doorstep. Even Hale is star struck, vain, and full of himself, last seen in the film admiring himself in the mirror while quoting “all is vanity.”

   This is by no means film noir, but it is bitter, cynical, and fairly nasty in tone for a B programmer, and you have to imagine that was Trumbo’s doing.