Like Trouble in Triplicate (1949), Rex Stout’s next Nero Wolfe collection, Three Doors to Death (1950), contains three novellas that first appeared in The American Magazine: “Man Alive” (December 1947), “Omit Flowers” (November 1948), and “Door to Death” (June 1949). In “Man Alive,” Archie informs us, “The only thing that shakes Wolfe as profoundly as having a meal rudely interrupted is a bawling woman. His reaction to the first is rage, to the second panic.” Wolfe allows that “I respect and admire Mr. Cramer,” despite his doing the former; the latter is their client, Cynthia Nieder, whom he must clear of suspicion in an haute couture murder…of a man reported to be a suicide a year earlier.

   â€œOmit Flowers” involves Wolfe’s lifelong friend Marko Vukčić, introduced in Too Many Cooks (1938; the accents appear inconsistently). Marko is “one of the only three people who called him by his first name, but there were other factors. Rusterman’s Restaurant was the one place besides home where Wolfe really enjoyed eating…Marko owned it and ran it…”

   He asks Wolfe to clear Virgil Pompa, under whom he’d worked at Mondor’s in Paris in his youth, which Wolfe does, sans fee, as a favor; Pompa, say Marko, “forfeited all claim to professional respect,” becoming the #2 of the AMBROSIA restaurant chain, and is accused of murdering the man who married the founder’s widow and tried to oust him.

   â€œDoor to Death” finds Wolfe desperately seeking a replacement for Theodore Horstmann, “tender and defender of the ten thousand orchids in the plant rooms on the roof,” called to his critically ill mother’s side in Illinois…indefinitely. He finds one in Andrew Krasicki, formerly employed—and recommended—by Lewis Hewitt, after braving wet December weather to poach Andy from the estate of Joseph G. Pitcairn in the Westchester village of Katonah. Offering to show off a Phalaenopsis Aphrodite in flower, Andy takes him and Archie to the greenhouse, conspicuously marked “DANGER-DO NOT ENTER-DOOR-TO-DEATH” due to the use of ciphogene, the deadly fumigant from “Black Orchids” (1941).

   Truer words were never painted—as those were by Mrs. Belle Pitcairn—for in addition to the P. Aphrodite sanderiana, they find her nurse and his fiancée, Dini Lauer, dead from it. Despite Wolfe’s pleading, Pitcairn’s prominence prompts Andy to be charged with first-degree murder by Ben Dykes, head of the county detectives; Lt. Con Noonan of the State Police; and Cleveland Archer, the county’s D.A. du jour after Anderson in Fer-de-Lance (1934) and Fraser in “Instead of Evidence” (1946). Well-meaning assistant Gus Treble says Dini “had given Andy the fanciest runaround he had ever seen,” and they have only Andy’s word for it that she had consented to marriage that day, so things look pretty bad.

   Archer is unable to complete a jealous love triangle with Gus, butler/chauffeur/handyman Neil Imbrie, or Pitcairn père et fils, Donald, but the p.m. shows she was knocked out with morphine, to which Andy had access, because the cook—Neil’s wife, Vera—suffers from facial neuralgia and had a now-missing box in the kitchen.

   According to Andy, they both planned to quit and head for New York after Dini broke the news to Mrs. Pitcairn, whose daughter, Sybil, helps care for her. Proving Andy innocent, Wolfe contends, rolling Dini under a bench overturned a pot in which he’d gotten a branch of Tibouchina semicandra to sport; “such a plant man” would automatically right it, as he did when she was found.

   Ordered out by Pitcairn, Wolfe sets up shop in Andy’s cottage, ostensibly to pack up his things, and probes Gus for dirt on the household (e.g., Joseph’s violent attack on paid-off ex-chippie Florence Hefferan) before Noonan ousts them. Wolfe, his mind “completely dominated by a single purpose,” has Archie summon Saul Panzer via Riverdale drugstore telephone to meet him at the Covered Porch near Scarsdale, eliciting Fritz’s disbelief that he isn’t coming home for dinner. His plan unfolds as the trio infiltrates the greenhouse in the dark—leaving Saul concealed under the bench where Dini’s body had been—then the house by the connecting door, compelling a chat with Joseph G. and children at gunpoint.

   Wolfe threatens to tell the newspapers about Florence, and how four colleges booted out Donald, whose lunge Archie has just slapped down when Belle—recovering from a back injury—appears, her $50,000 offer to shield them declined. At last allowed to inquire, he summons the Imbries as well, distracting everyone while Saul sneaks in and later makes a dramatic entrance, bearing a paper found under the Imbries’ mattress, a blackmail note to Joseph from Dini. It has, of course, been forged by Wolfe with the desired effect, leading to an attack on the father by Donald, who was threatened with disownment if he married Dini, and decided to kill her when she laughed at him and said she planned to wed Andy.

   Curiously, although Theodore was the object of the exercise in “Door to Death” (6/4/01), and a regular on the William Conrad series, he is never seen in this first-season episode—or any other—of A Nero Wolfe Mystery. Adapted by Sharon Elizabeth Doyle, it was the first directed by Holly Dale, and repertory player Kari Matchett’s first appearance as Lily Rowan, the sometime romantic interest of Archie (Timothy Hutton), not mentioned in the novella. Nicholas Campbell, who guest-stars as Andy in his second and final series role, had memorably portrayed serial killer Deputy Frank Dodd in the Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone (1983), one of his several collaborations with director David Cronenberg.

   Right from the title illustrations by Hutton’s then wife, Aurore Giscard d’Estaing (thanks to Mike Doran for pointing that out), a cousin of former French President Valéry, much is made of Wolfe’s comical outing. In Doyle’s opening, Fritz (Colin Fox) has Saul (Conrad Dunn) summon Archie, who has been tangoing with Lily, to help out in the crisis, and the next day, he drives Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) to Westchester. Ensuing events are rendered faithfully as Andy finds Dini (Kristen Booth); Archie encounters Joseph (James Tolkan), his two children (Christine Brubaker, Boyd Banks), and the Imries (Ken Kramer, Nancy Beatty); and they are interrupted by Noonan (Beau Starr) and Dykes (Michael Rhoades).

   After Archer (Hrant Alianak), unmoved by Wolfe’s logic, takes Andy away, Archie says, “I’d like to get back to New York before Christmas…I’m getting married,” a tale told by Dale and Doyle in the next episode, “Christmas Party” (7/1/01), but not by Stout for more than seven years! A tell-tale branch moving outside the cottage window tips him off that someone is spying on them; it turns out to be Gus (Steve Cumyn), who first believes they have betrayed Andy, but is only too happy to cooperate once persuaded they really are on his side. Cast as Belle was Marian Seldes, whose collaborations with playwright Edward Albee included A Delicate Balance (1966), earning her a Tony and him the Pulitzer Prize.

   Accompanied by a droll Michael Small score, Operation Greenhouse finds Wolfe heavily bundled up; lashing out with his walking stick at “Some kind of serpent!,” the branch that trips him up; and even wading a brook. Unfortunately, with garish make-up and minimal screen time, stage legend Seldes is wasted in a role that, albeit brief, had possibilities on the page. After all Wolfe went through to secure his services, Andy is surprisingly never seen again, although the local law-enforcement officials previously figured in the Arnold Zeck Trilogy (accounting for Lt. Noonan’s apparently unpleasant but unspecified history with Archie), which will be the subject of my next post—y’all come back now, ya hear?

            — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

      Up next: In the Best Families

   Edition cited —

         Three Doors to Death: Bantam (1970)

   Online source —

LEE HERRINGTON – Carry My Coffin Slowly. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1951. Dell #641, paperback, date?

   Barney Moffat is an investigator out of the DA’s office. A mother comes to see him. A mother of a dead young man. A dead, drunk young man, body mangled in a crashed-up Packard, a young woman’s corpse crumpled in his lap.

   Barney just got the crash photos. And he doesn’t know what to tell the lady. In our only glimpse into Barney’s head, we hear his stream of consciousness: “Your son. Your son had a bellyful of gin and he’s behind the wheel dead and the girl is dead there under the dash and your son had the wheel in his hands and it’s like a gun and you have to shoot it and there’s a loud noise and people coming running and there’s blood and tears and even the boys on the accident squad still gag in their throats when it happens…….”

   The balance of the book is that rarest of detective novel forms: third-person objective. Like The Maltese Falcon and Interface. That is to say that you don’t get in anyone’s head. All that you see is limited to the action within the four corners of the frame. And it must be so as one of the bad guys is masquerading as a good guy. But you yourself, dear reader, aren’t sure who it is until the end.

   It turns out that there are two sets of accident photos. One set as described above. Involving nobody that matters. Another set is incriminating to all the people in town that matter: the DA, the cops, the upper crust and their pocket politicos (whose positions hang in the balance). And blackmail starts to happen. And violent death. Lots and lots of death.

   It’s a tightly told procedural, doggedly investigated by the hardboiled, wise-cracking Moffat. It’s everything you want in a hardboiled detective story. Thanks again to James Sandoe, who pretty much never steers me wrong.

   According to Jim Doherty, there was one prior Barney Moffat story in Black Mask, but this was the author’s only novel, the author passing on from this world the year following publication.

  BOB HOPE PRESENTS CHRYSLER THEATRE “The Fatal Mistake” NBC, 30 November 1966 (Season 4, Episode 10). Roddy McDowall, Arthur Hill, Michael Wilding, Marge Redmond, Laurence Naismith, Alice Rawlings. Teleplay: Jacques Gillies. Director: Mark Rydell. Currently streaming online here.

   The Chrysler Theatre, often hosted by comedian Bob Hope, a fixture at NBC at the time, was a general 60-minute anthology series which ran from 1963 to 1967. Included among its offerings were musicals, dramas, comedies and mysteries. This (not surprisingly) is one of the latter.

   The two male leads, playing off each other magnificently throughout the show, are perfectly cast. Roddy McDowall plays a smarmy “insurance agent” who comes by the home of an accountant (Arthur Hill) to pick up a monthly blackmail check. There is something in Hill’s past he does not want either his wife or 17-year-old daughter to know about, much less the rest of the world.

   Posing as a friend of the family, McDowall showers the two women in Hill’s life with small gifts and flattery, while all Hill can do is stand there and take it, all the while seething inside. The fact that he keeps a small collection of reptiles in a back room, some rather deadly, tells the viewer exactly where the story is going.

   Which of course it does, with a small mild twist in the tale, unfortunately well telegraphed in advance. It’s a perfectly acceptable story, and well acted. (Roddy McDowell is superb, as always.) It’s just not quite up to the standards of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, for example, but then again, what is (or was)?

JACK LEWIS – Blood Money. Headline Books, paperback original, 1960.

   Good old-fashioned pornography.

   Well, maybe not good, but Blood Money wears the smarmy patina of what once were Dirty Books, before Literature went the way of All Flesh. And it’s the sort of thing they used to call “Gutsy,” sub-Spillane, like the Men’s Magazines in the Barber Shop, with fights, knifings, beatings, shootings, nasty bad guys and naked ladies teeming through its crowded pages like denizens of a Turkish Bazaar.

   The story, of sorts, is set in Los Gomez, one of those fictional Latin American nations so beloved of the sweaty men’s pulps, run by a coalition of local fascists, organized crime, and the CIA. It also may be hiding Adolph Hitler, which is the crux of the plot: three ex-GIs hunting der Fuhrer for a million-dollar reward.

   I use the word “plot” very loosely, because the story consists of the narrator finding a lead, a clue, or a mysterious “meet me at…” message, then getting sapped, arrested, beat up, or tripping over a dead body and leaving his fingerprints all over it — this duly followed by a naked lady coming on the scene and flinging herself at him, knees akimbo.

   But I have to say the prose in Blood Money is serviceable — I’ve read worse in “respectable” books — the characters colorful, if familiar, and the action fast and plentiful. And the Sex… well it’s quite tame by today’s standards, but it’s written with a hard-to-define… what’s the word I’m looking for…. it sounds naughty, like the author thought he was getting away with something, and it reads like it was meant to be read under the covers with a flashlight.

   So don’t go out of your way to find a copy of Blood Money, but if you chance across it — enjoy!

THE GOLD ROBBERS. London Weekend TV, 1969; 13 episodes. Peter Vaughan, Richard Leech, Arto Morris, Maria Aitken, Louise Pajo, Fred Bartman, Peter Copely Guests: George Cole, Ian Hendry, Patrick Allen, Roy Dotrice et al. Produced by John Hawkesworth.

   When five million pounds sterling being flown into the United Kingdom by the failing government of a Middle Eastern state is met by a highly organized criminal team and stolen, an international manhunt is set off led by Detective Chief Superintendent John Craddock (Peter Vaughan) of Scotland Yard and Detective Sergeant Tommy Thomas (Arto Morris), an effort that will put their careers and lives at risk.

   The Gold Robbers is a thirteen episode closed crime series that was remarkably dark, violent, and dour for British television of its time. It marked and early part for reliable character actor Vaughan in a rare lead as an all to human but doggedly intelligent policeman. It highlighted as well a number of British stars like Ian Hendry, Patrick Allen, Roy Dotrice, and others as individuals involved in the complex heist that leads Craddock across Europe and into the worlds of high finance, international banking, smelting gold, and politics. It was  where high finance and society met low crime and criminals before the downbeat and not wholly resolved conclusion.

   Filmed in black and white, this one is well worth catching, marked by intelligent scripts and naturalistic acting. In each  episode Craddock and his team focus on some element of the heist, a driver, gunman, crooked air traffic controller, mercenary soldier and their families and loved ones while closing in on slimy crooked casino owner Victor Anderson (Frederick Bartman) who ran the operation for an unknown Mr. Big.

   Along the way, Craddock’s relationship with his son and his mistress fall apart while he is taken under the wing of charming wealthy newspaper and airline magnate Richard Bolt (Richard Leech), whose airline flew the hijacked gold into the UK.

   The ruthless gang uses money, threats, and murder to protect itself as  Craddock tightens the noose, despite setbacks and maddening interference from his superior the Assistant Commissioner (Peter Copely) that gets worse as Craddock closes in on the men behind the crime including some in the government.

   Characters weave in and out of the series, some suspects temporarily get away, some are brutally killed before they can talk, and all the time Craddock’s career is threatened as much by success as failure.

   You can currently find the entire series on YouTube (Nostalgia channel), and it is worth watching for its gritty realism, tough minded characters, sharp writing, and increasingly complex plot that builds to a satisfying downbeat ending that ties all the plot threads while leaving somethings open. It is basically a thirteen part serialized story though, minus cliffhangers and with each episode self contained.

   Among those contributing to the scripts are producer John Hawkesworth, spy novelist Berkley Mather (co-writer of the screenplay for Dr. No), and Allan Prior (Softly Softly: Taskforce and novels).

   The Gold Robbers is plotted more like a really good police procedural novel than a television series with character arcs for police and crooks, and a sense of the cost and the allure of crime. Vaughan’s Craddock is a flawed but compelling protagonist. The series holds up well and has a good mix of suspense, detection, police work, crime, and romance (even with a bit of nudity; it is British television) as the plot unfolds through the characters and not just around them.

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. Warner Brothers/First National Pictures, 1944. Humphrey Bogart, Walter Brennan, Lauren Bacall, Dolores Moran, Hoagy Carmichael, Sheldon Leonard. Screenplay: Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway. Director: Howard Hawks.

   An American fishing boat captain in wartime Martinique finds himself caught between the forces of Vichy in control and the underground movement of the Free French. Complicating matters is the presence of a young woman stranded on the island without money.

   One of my favorite movies of all time. Its only flaw, as far as I’m concerned, is that it ends too soon, almost too abruptly, and (if it could be so) too easily. The movie is tough, suspenseful, and sexy – even though nobody’s clothes are ever off.

REX STOUT – Death of a Doxy. Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin #42. Viking Press, hardcover, 1966. Reprinted several times.

   The word “doxy” is no longer a common word, certainly not one in everyday language today. To get this review started, allow me to quote from page 45 of the 1995 Bantam paperback edition:
   

         â€œMy sister was a what?”

         “D, O, X, Y, doxy. I happen to like that better than concubine or paramour or mistress….”
   

   Or a “kept woman,” perhaps, but maybe that’s a phrase that’s outdated and old-fashioned, too.
   

      Dramatis personae:

Isabel Kerr, the doxy, formerly in show business
Avery Ballou, rich businessman and Isabel’s sugar daddy
Orrie Cather, private investigator
Jill Hardy, Orrie’s fiancée, an airline stewardess
Stella Fleming, Isabel Kerr’s sister
Barry Fleming, Stella’s husband, a mathematics professor
Amy Jackson, a.k.a. Julie Jaquette, a night club singer and Isabel’s best friend
Archie Goodwin, private investigator and assistant to
Nero Wolfe, private investigator
   

   Orrie Cather, one of three freelance PI’s Wolf calls upon when needed, is suspected of killing the doxy, with who Cather had has an ongoing relationship and who was using it to threaten his current engagement with Jill Hardy (see above). Conferring with Sanul Panzer and Fred Durken, the other two of Wolfe’s staff of standby PI’s, he and Archie agree that Orrie is innocent, and that they must take his case, even though he is not a paying client.

   And so they do. The real killer identifies him/herself quickly. Evidence to support their conclusion is non-existent. The problem is threefold: (1) find such evidence, but in such a way that (2) the sugar daddy (see above) is not identified, and if possible (3) get paid.

   All of which requires quite a bit of finesse, which is accomplished in a most exemplary fashion, assisted in large part by one of the most fascinating female characters I’ve ever encountered in one of Wolfe and Archie’s cases, that being Julie Jaquette, the dead woman’s best friend who agrees to pull off a huge bluff to entice the killer out into the open, a ploy that involves more than a hint of danger.

   Not only is she gutsy, but she’s a woman who’s also not shy, can think on her feet (listen in on her conversation with Inspector Cramer when he becomes a little too inquisitive, for example). She goes toe-to-toe in banter and other conversation not only with Archie but Wolfe himself. She may be the only woman who’s ever stayed in the brownstone overnight and called Wolfe “Nero” in the morning.

   And what’s more, the ploy works to perfection.

   Right now this has become my favorite Nero Wolfe-Archie Goodwin novel, and that’s saying something. I don’t want to crowd in on Matthew Bradley’s ongoing series about the TV adaptations of the books and stories, so I’ll just mention in passing that Death of a Doxy was shown in two parts on the A&E Nero Wolfe series, and that the first ten minutes of it (all I’ve seen so far) is pitch perfect in execution.

K. FERRARI – Like Flies From Afar. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, hardcover, 2020. Picador, softcover, 2021.

   So, yeah. I’m an idiot. A dupe. I fall for it every freaking time. Like a fish on a hook. But a quote out there on your dust jacket saying stuff like:
   

      “This amazing mix of crime novel and detective story—think Jim Thompson—is even more of a nightmare—think Kafka—stunning in its power and originality.” —David Keymer, Library Journal (starred review)

      “A darker shade of absurdist noir featuring an Argentine businessman, as contemptible as he is successful, who finds his life inexplicably falling apart . . . a madcap mixture of Kafka, Bukowski, and Jim Thompson.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Not only is Like Flies from Afar a tough, perfectly constructed novel, it was written with the understanding that the noir is the new protest novel of the twenty-first century.” —Paco Ignacio Taibo

      “This novel should come not with blurbs but with a hazardous-material warning: There’s bone and gristle here, be ready for that taste in your mouth you can’t spit out. First words to last, it’s strong stuff.” —James Sallis
   

   I fall for it every time.

   So nobody’s fault but my own I guess. But the book just isn’t that good. It’s not. When you throw Kafka and Jim Thompson out there you’re setting a pretty high bar, man. Be careful throwing that crap around or you lose your credibility. Right? You can’t give every restaurant five freakin’ stars. Amiright?

   So the book’s about a rich capitalist pig. The book opens with the blonde mane of his ‘secretary’ bobbing between his legs, telling his wife on the phone he’s gonna be a bit late.

   The pig, Machi is his name, but he’s so freakin’ 1-D cardboard you can see nothing but his front. He treats everyone like dirt, and when you see inside his mind it’s all dirt in there too.

   This is the one thing Thompson teaches us. Rule number 1. The bad guy isn’t a bad guy. The bad guy is just a guy like you and me. He’s doing the best he can. Knowing what he knows, thinking what he thinks, he’s NOT a bad guy. He’s making the only choice that makes sense to him at the time. You can almost see where he’s coming from. Yes, you know the protagonist probably deserves the hell that is his ineluctable fate. But you kinda root for him or feel sorry for him or at the very least, you can understand where he’s coming from and how he, as a human, came to behave the way he does.

   The idea that there is pure unadulterated evil in the world is a comfort. Because it allows one to repress the knowledge of the evil that resides in every single one of us. All of us have a dark side, a shadow side, a death instinct, however much we refuse to acknowledge it. (And ironically, those who doth protesteth too much are frequently the worst perpetrators of evil of all).

   So anyway, the capitalist pig Machi is a completely vulgar unredeemable swine. All he does all day is take a shit on his workers, literally screw every female subordinate in his staff every time his wife turns her back. And sometimes not even waiting til she turns. He alienates his kids and shits on them as well.

   And then, after having made everyone in the world hate him (and after hammering you on the head for an hour about what a horrible piece of crap he is you hate him too, dear reader; you’d have to), he starts to put the asshole thru purgatory.

   So of course you love it, right? Schadenfreude is fun! The detailed purgatory suffered by a one dimensional bourgeois scumbag is delightful. This is my problem with Tarantino’s recent output. Yes it’s great fun to watch Nazis and Slavedrivers and the Manson Family get their comeuppance. But the problem is that it’s bullshit. Not just historical bullshit. It’s bullshit in the sense that it makes the villains a caricature. (I won’t even mention Spielberg here as another grand offender)

   The scariest thing to acknowledge is that evil resides within. And the corollary: the most redemptive thing is to acknowledge is that goodness resides without. That is to say (without being an apologist for the atrocities of slavery, Nazism and Charles Manson) that there was not pure evil there either — nor anywhere.

   A wonderful example of this is the movie Das Boat. All you see in the film is the struggles of the people on the submarine to stay alive. That’s it. There’s no ideology. They just want to make it back home. It doesn’t even occur to you until afterwards that they were Nazis.

   There’s also a great Roald Dahl short story showing this poor Austrian woman having a terribly difficult childbirth, such a struggle to save the baby who surely will be stillborn. You’re rooting so hard to mom and baby both. Til he’s born and named Adolf Hitler.

   So anyway, to get to the point: The McGuffin in this book is that the asshole capitalist pig is driving down the highway when his tire blows out on his top of the line BMW. He checks the trunk for a tire and finds a dead body. He doesn’t wonder who it is because that’s the kind of guy he is. The body’s face is shot off. We never find out who it is either. Because the whole book is happening from the limited perspective of this asshole (along with occasional commentary from the author reminding us of what an asshole this guy is — in case we didn’t notice on our own).

   So the capitalist pig is thrown into great turmoil by his paranoia about who put the body in the car, why they put the body in the car, when did they put it in the car, how am I gonna get rid of it, and blah blah blah. He’s worried he’s being backstabbed. But why? He can’t understand it. He’s just a businessman. Why would anyone do this to a plan old ever-loving businessman? He’s got no enemies. (But again, montage this with one dimensional scenes from his past making mortal enemies left and right thru his cutthroat, tone-deaf, humiliating treatment of everyone in his orbit.)

   Anyway. I hate this book. I hate everything about it. To me, it’s everything that’s wrong with the world today. We dehumanize our political opponents. When you dehumanize someone it’s okay to torture them, to kill them, to put them thru the proverbial wringer. Because they’re not really human. There was a Nazi propaganda film called “An Existence Without Life” that tries to convince the viewer that mental defectives aren’t really alive — they simply exist. Thus rather than paying for mental institutions we should just incinerate them. It’s not really killing because they’re not really alive. They’re not really human. Same with Jews or any other scapegoated enemy.

   It’s coming to that today. To our current polity. On the right and on the left both. All over the world. It’s way too easy to dehumanize your adversaries and then to destroy them. You would never kick a dog. But Satan? Hitler? You turn your adversary into Hitler and all of a sudden all bets are off. Who gives a crap? Kill them. Do whatever. They deserve to die.

   Except they don’t. No one deserves to die. From their own perspective anyway. Most of the time.

   And until we acknowledge that our enemies are human too we will never understand them. And we will never have any peace. Just more and more wars with enemies we cannot understand and make no efforts to do so.

  HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION. Universal TV / NBC; made for TV, 1967.) Robert Wagner, Peter Lawford, Lola Albright, Walter Pidgeon, Jill St. John, Michael Ansara, and Len Lesser. Written by Gene Kearney. Directed by William Hale.

   This has an adolescent appeal I find irresistible, tinged with Man from UNCLE gimmickry, and a “This Week’s Guest Star” cast.

   Robert Wagner, pushing 40 and still exuding boyish charm, plays Jack Washington, all-American bad-luck-boy, who starts the show by falling into the clutches of arch-villain Walter Pidgeon — these were the days when arch-villains plotted in tacky resplendence, amid blinking switchboards and uniformed stuntmen who specialized in falling down — and then flashing back to the series of bad choices that got him where he is today.

   Wavy images, harp music…. and we’re somewhere on The Continent, or maybe the Universal back lot, where Jack, fresh out of the Army and bumming around, chance-encounters an old girlfriend (Jill St John) who invites him to spend a week on the Family Yacht with Mummy and Daddy (Lola Albright and Peter Lawford.)

   Which unravels quickly. Mummy has an unbreakable veneer of politeness, Jill looks to Jack for diversion, but Daddy doesn’t like him because… well there are any number of reasons, all centered around Jack being gauche, untalented, and not terribly bright… in short, a Loser. And Daddy shows what he thinks of losers, in a series of calculated humiliations that leave our hero looking foolish and insignificant – in short, like a teenager.

   And as in a teenage fantasy, Jack soon discovers that the man belittling him is evil. Objectively evil: a crook or smuggler of some sort, as well as a liar and a cheat. And here comes the adolescent appeal, because Jack sets out to bring down Lawford, armed with little more than a camera and notebook.

   The result is a messy thing, but firmly planted in the post-childhood-but-not-quite-grown-up swamp of youth. And it blossoms into gaudy fireworks entirely appropriate to that age range.

   Don’t let my affection for this silly trifle over-sell you; I’m not saying Vacation is actually any good – just that it once appealed to my pulp-fiction mind, and I remember it fondly.

EDWARD MATHIS – Dark Streaks and Empty Places. Dan Roman #2. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1986. Ballantine, paperback, February 1988.

   PI Dan Roman’s base of operations is a town in Texas called Midway City, but his cases seem to take him to all sections of the state, including the timberlands. Between 1985 and 1992 eight of these cases were recorded in print, with up to half of them published after author Edward Mathis’s death in 1988.

   The books made a small splash at the time, but I’m sure both the books and Edward Mathis have been long forgotten. (But not by me nor the people who frequent this blog. You can find reviews of three of the books on this blog. I’ll add links to then in the first comment.)

   Roman has had quite a few tragedies in his life, including the deaths of his first wife and their son. He seems to be handling it well, but it doesn’t mean he doesn’t get melancholy about it from time to time, and in that regard it can affect his perspective on life.

   In this case he’s hired to find the granddaughter of a high-powered businessman who’s now retired and has allowed her to become the CEO of his still remaining business holdings. Otherwise it’s a distinctively dysfunctional family, all of whom Roman gets to meet up close and sometimes personal. (Texas somehow seems to bring out the dysfunctionality in families, but in this case, more than perhaps is normal.)

   The book becomes surprisingly violent toward the end, but maybe I shouldn’t have been. Surprised, that is. Roman’s investigation is something akin to poking a stick into a hornets’ next and seeing what happens. It’s a valid way of proceeding if you survive it. (As well as Roman’s non-stop habit of lighting up another cigarette.)

   Rating on my recently reinstated H/B (had-boiled) scale: 7.2