ALEXEI PANSHIN – Star Well. Anthony Villiers #1. Ace G-756; paperback original; 1st printing, October 1968. Cover by Kelly Freas. Reprinted by Ace, paperback, August 1978. Cover by Vincent Di Fate.

   An Anthony Villiers adventure, a costume piece of the 15th Century, common reckoning, or the year 3418 AD. Villiers himself remains an unknown quantity, but he has that something about him that causes events and crises.

   In this instance, a smuggling operation working out of Star Well, a planetoid in the Flammarion Rift, is broken up by the coincidental visit of Villiers; an Inspector General; and a group of girls being chaperones to Miss McBurney’s Finishing School.

   Emphasis on customs and costumes; clothes make the man, custom eliminates decision-making. Which will become more and more difficult as pressures of society grow and grow.

   A conversational style of writing is used. Here and there, it reminded me Lafferty , and also of Delany. The story, not told precisely in chronological order, but never mind, is slight, and the effort may not hold up over an entire series.

Rating: ****

         The Anthony Villiers series –

1. Star Well (1968)
2. The Thurb Revolution (1968)
3. Masque World (1969)

   A fourth book in the series. The Universal Panthograph, was announced but never published and perhaps never finished.

GEORGE HARMON COXE – Focus on Murder. Kent Murdock #15. Knopf, hardcover, 1954. Dell 970, paperback, February 1958.

   A newspaper colleague of Ken Murdock, a reporter named Stacy, is found murdered in his apartment. Murdock had been with him earlier in the evening when he had been shot at in his car, and two women had been looking for him after that, at least one with a gun.

   What is amazing is that the next morning Murdock is shocked to hear of the man’s death. It also take him to page 61 [of the paperback edition] for him to realize that the dead man was doing a brisk sideline business in blackmail. Other than that, the mystery is solved in typically good Coxe style.

ELLERY QUEEN “The Adventure of the Seven Black Cats.” Ellery Queen. First published in The Adventures of Ellery Queen (Stokes, hardcover, 1934). Reprinted in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, January 2016, the opening story in the first month of the magazine’s year-long 75th anniversary celebration.

   Ellery stops at a pet store thinking perhaps to buy a dog and ends up solving a very strange case involving cats, seven of them, all black, all purchased from the store at a rate of one a week by a bedridden older lady named Euphemia Tarkle, who is known to hate cats. Ellery’s curiosity is aroused. What is going on?

   The owner of the story is one Marie Curleigh, young and very pretty. Realizing he needs assistance in any sort of investigation to follow, Ellery asks: “Miss Curleigh, I’m an incurable meddler in the affairs of others. How would you like to help me meddle in the affairs of the mysterious Tarkle sisters?”

   And of course she does. The story that follows is meticulously planned out, and will be a lot of fun to read by any mystery fan who likes, no loves, following along with the clues. One negative note should be mentioned, however. The culprit at the end can easily be discerned by the judicious process of elimination. Too few suspects there are, that is. (Not that I did, but I could have, and should have.)

   And if asked, I could come up with a couple of other notes. The superintendent of the building where Miss Tarkle lives is named Harry Potter. And Miss Curleigh is such an agreeable assistant in this case that one wishes she might have appeared as well in other tales in Queen canon. I don’t believe she did. She should have.

THE RIVER’S EDGE. 20th Century Fox, 1957. Ray Milland, Anthony Quinn, Debra Paget, Harry Carey Jr., Chubby Johnson. Director: Allan Dwan.

   Ray Milland and Anthony Quinn face off in The River’s Edge, a contemporary western/thriller directed by Allan Dwan. Filmed in Cinemascope with some terrific on location shooting in Mexico, the movie tells the story of Nardo Denning (Milland), a scoundrel and criminal who shows up out of the clear blue sky at Ben Cameron’s (Quinn) small, modest farm.

   His plan? To win back the affections of Cameron’s wife, Meg (Debra Paget) and to abscond across the border to Mexico with stolen loot. It doesn’t take long for Meg to agree to her proposal, bored as she is by the quiet, but challenging, life on her husband’s farm.

   What Meg doesn’t quite realize is how her affections for Nardo are misplaced and that the guy is a cold blooded, heartless killer. After Nardo kills a state policeman, he convinces Cameron at gunpoint to take both him and Meg across the border, first by truck and then by foot. This gets to the heart of the movie, a story about a woman torn between two men, one of whom is very dangerous.

   Overall, I somewhat enjoyed watching this one, even though I don’t think there was enough material in it to sustain some ninety minutes or so of screen time. It’s also not quite clear what genre the movie fits into. In many ways, it’s both a contemporary western and a thriller. But it’s also a drama and a romance. One wonders who the exactly intended audience was.

   Final assessment: a relatively minor film in the scheme of things, but with Milland and Quinn as the leads, you can do far worse.

JACQUES FUTRELLE – Best “Thinking Machine” Stories. Dover, softcover, 1973.

   The career of Jacques Futrelle was heroically cut short by his choice of holiday transportation — he sailed aboard the Titanic. Before that, however, he created one of the most notable eccentric detectives in crime history, Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen (with plenty of degrees after his name), “the Thinking Machine.”

   The professor is a famous scientist with an enormous, domelike head (he wears a hat size 8); a wilderness of straw-yellow hair; and squinty, watery blue eyes. He has thick spectacles, long white hands, and a small body. His henchman and gofer is Hutchison Hatch. a newspaper reporter. Most of the Thinking Machine’s cases arc brought to him by Hatch, who knows that to get a good story, one brings it to the man who can get to the bottom of an “impossible crime.”

   The professor, in the fine tradition of armchair detectives, knows that any puzzle has a logical explanation. His sententious principle is “two and two always make four — not sometime but all the time.” Much of the legwork is done by Hatch off stage; the professor himself is a phone fanatic — he often goes into his little phone room and returns with the complete solution.

   The Best “Thinking Machine” Detective Stories are a dozen collected from The Thinking Machine (1906), which contains seven stories, and The Thinking Machine on the Case ( 1907). Two of Futrelle’s tales were shown on public television in The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.

   The Thinking Machine was introduced in a story, much anthologized, called “The Problem of Cell 13.” From a simple arguing point, a challenge is proposed. The professor undertakes, on purely scientific grounds, to escape from a death cell in the penitentiary in one week. And does so.

   Other stories contain puzzles about dying messages, perfect alibis, buried treasure, and an occult legacy. Excellent “locked-room” variations are presented in “The Stolen Rubens,” “The Phantom Motor,” and “The Lost Radium.” Another, “Kidnapped Baby Blake, Millionaire,” where a person vanishes from footprints in a snow-filled yard, is not quite up to snuff.

   In “The Missing Necklace,” the crook is about to give Scotland Yard the bird except for the intervention of the Thinking Machine. He is able to sum up one case thus: “The subtler murders — that is, the ones which are most attractive as problems — are nearly always the work of a cunning woman. I know nothing about women myself.”  Shades of Sherlock Holmes.

———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

PIN-UP GIRL. 20th Century Fox, 1944. Betty Grable, John Harvey, Martha Raye, Joe E. Brown, Eugene Pallette, Dave Willock. Director: Bruce Humberstone.

   A secretary poses as Broadway star during wartime to win the love of a sailor. Dave Willock plays the sailor’s buddy, and as a team Martha Raye and Joe E. Brown display a bit of denture work.

   Lots of large-scale production numbers add to the proceedings, but not much to the story, which is low-scale. Just in passing, I wonder if Betty Grable would be a glamour girl today. I’m not trying to be awkward. I just think standards have changed.

LEN DEIGHTON – XPD. Alfred Knopf, hardcover, 1981. Ballantine, paperback, 1982. First published in the UK by Hutchinson, hardcover, 1981.

   Speaking of movies, this is going to be a good one. Stories about World War II, and about the Nazis, and with lots of killing and loads of intrigue — sure fire box-office. And nothing less than Winston Chirchill’s reputation is at stake in this one.

   Here it is, four decades later. Len Deighton’s somber recitation of events may lack a little something in the way of providing the sheer joy of reading that good writing is capable of, but in solid-documentary-like fashion, his main thesis is nothing but convincing.

   At least, it could have happened. In 1941, Churchill could have gone to Germany, hat in hand. He could have offered Hitler concessions in Africa and around the world. To end the war, he could have offered the Nazis joint control of Ireland. Is it fact, or fiction?

   If it were true, emphasis on the if, it would certainly be embarrassing if it were to be found out today. It’s no wonder the secret organizations of at least three countries — no, make it four — desperately want to locate the evidence.

   In the wrong hands, it would shake the world.

   The movie that will be made from the book will probably be mostly flash, with little substance. Deighton’s dry, almost academic style, complete with occasional footnotes, has always seemed just the reverse to me. The action comes in spurts, nor, strangely enough, does it really seem to provide the main thrust of the story.

   You can easily end up reading this almost solely for the characters involved: the British agent whose divorced wife is the daughter of the director general of MI6 and his immediate superior; the Jewish ex-soldier who accidentally stole the documents in question from Hitler’s secret cave, today a successful California businessman whose son is falling for the daughter of an ex-Nazi guard now in the movie business; and that ex-Nazi’s superior, the spy who plays it three ways against the middle.

   The relationships are all a tangle, as you can plainly see. Everyone who enters this world of shadows and sudden violence falls at once into a boggy quagmire of manipulation.

   But, then, that’s what you expect from a Len Deighton spy thriller, and that’s what you get.

   What else can I say, other than he’s done it again?

Rating: B minus.

NOTE. From Wikipedia: “The title is the code used by the Secret Intelligence Service in the novel to refer to assassinations it carries out, short for ‘expedient demise’.”

GERALD KERSH “The Ambiguities of Lo Yeing Pai.” Vara the Tailor #4. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July 1968, Not known to have been reprinted,

   I have not read much of the novels and other short fiction of Gerald Kersh, but based on what I have read, including this one, he was a magnificent writer – a man born to write. His Wikipedia page is here:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Kersh

   Even better, here’s the first page of another summary of his life and career, as posted by SF writer Harlan Ellison, champion of his writing like none other:

      https://harlanellison.com/kersh/index.htm

   Assuming you have now gone and come back, I will now be content to talk only about this one short tale. It’s a minor piece in many ways, and yet a completely fascinating one. Vara is a tailor, plying his trade somewhere in Manhattan, and as the tale begins, he is busy declining the advances of a salesman offering a fantastic deal on a neon sign for his shop.

   To further his explanation of why he is not interested in the offer, Vara tells the salesman and another man (who may be Kersh himself) a story of a murder, that of one of two Chinese partners in the ownership of their own shop, also somewhere in Manhattan – but one that was close by.

   As I say, it’s any ordinary tale, a mystery, one with a happy ending, more or less, a puzzle of words, you might say. The magic is in the telling, though, a magical way of talking about events that had already happened. What it was that made me smile every so often were the diversions that Vara takes his listeners along upon.

   I shan’t say more. If you ever happen to pick up this particular issue of EQQM, make sure you read this one. Don’t pass it by. It’s the last story in the issue; make sure you read it before setting the magazine down for good.
   

      The Vara the Tailor series —

The Incorruptible Tailor (The Ugly Face of Love and Other Stories, 1958)
The Geometry of the Skirt (EQMM, 1965)
Old Betsey (The Hospitality of Miss Tolliver and Other Stories, 1965)
The Ambiguities of Lo Yeing Pai (EQMM, 1968)

BOTANY BAY. Paramount Pictures, 1952. Alan Ladd, James Mason, Patricia Medina. Cedric Hardwicke. Screenplau by Jonathan Latimer, based on the novel by Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall. Director: John Farrow.

   Alan Ladd and James Mason face off in this 1950s swashbuckler/adventure film about the founding of Australia as a penal colony for English convicts. Ladd portrays American medical student Hugh Tallant, who has been unjustly imprisoned in Newgate Jail for theft.

   He, along with others, soon learns that he will be shipped to a penal colony in New South Wales. Mason, for his part, takes the role of Paul Gilbert, the sadistic captain of the Charlotte, the boat that is to take Tallant  and others to their final destination in backwater Australia. Patricia Medina rounds out the cast as a female prisoner caught between her affection for Tallant and the predations of Captain Gilbert.

   Both Ladd and Mason do their best with the source material, even when it runs a little dry. Botany Bay may not be the most exciting feature film of its kind, but it has a lot going for it. The set design and costume design, along with the bright color scheme are all very impressive. In many ways, this John Farrow-directed feature reminded me of a Hammer Production. That’s high praise coming from me. Plus, there are even koalas and a kangaroo at the end!
   

MILES BURTON – Death at Ash House. Inspector Arnold #26. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1942. Published earlier in the UK as This Undesirable Residence (Collins, hardcover, 1942).

   Inspector Arnold of Scotland Yard is called in when a man’s secretary is murdered, done in by a large piece of iron – dropped from an upper floor of an unoccupied[ed house. When a missing stamp collection is found, the only motive seen for the crime has disappeared.

   It is hard to imagine how two detectives sitting around for pages theorizing about the crime could be entertaining, but it is. I love it. And the, with two chapters to go, a revelation is made which in one stroke, illuminates everything. Absolutely terrific.