STELLA. 20th Century-Fox, 1950. Ann Sheridan, Victor Mature, Leif Erickson, David Wayne, Randy Stuart, Marion Marshall, Frank Fontaine, Evelyn Varden. Based on the novel Family Skeleton (Doubleday Crime Club, 1949) by Doris Miles Disney. Screenwriter & director: Claude Binyon.

   If there is a noir film that’s also an out-and-out comedy, not a black comedy, this one might be it. Or at least it would if it had more than the 20% noirish elements to it than I’d gauge that this one has.

   Stella, as played by Ann Sheridan, is the center of the film, and if my 20% figure is right, she accounts for 95% of it. She’s Stella Bevans, in this one, the hard-working secretary of a real estate and insurance agent in an unnamed seashore community. By default, or so it seems, she’s also the “all but” fiancée of her boss, a rather uninspired if not inept fellow by the name of Fred Anderson Jr. (Leif Erickson).

   Stella is also the main means of support for the rest of her family, her mother, two sisters, and the respective husbands of the latter (David Wayne and Frank Fontaine), two gentlemen who work only during the summer season, then spend the other nine months on unemployment insurance.

   So Stella’s world-weary and disillusioned, and prone to fighting off her boss as he chases her around her desk after hours. Literally. Entering at precisely that moment is Jeff DeMarco (Victor Mature), an investigator from the home office, who’s been assigned to check up on Fred.

   The new man in town is attracted, she’s not and she makes no bones about resisting his advances. All of which has nothing to do with the story, which really is about Uncle Joe, Stella’s mother’s no-good brother-in-law, who was killed in an accident, but fearing they wouldn’t be believed, Stella’s family, unbeknownst to her, buries him and claims he’s off on another of his binges.

   And no matter how she turns, Stella finds herself getting deeper and deeper into supporting their story, the passing of time making it more and more difficult to tell the truth.

   Where does the humor come in? As more and more dead bodies are found, Stella’s two brothers-in-law keep claiming them to be Uncle Joe, who as it also turns out, had a $10,000 life insurance policy, with double indemnity kicking in in case of accidental death.

   I laughed out loud at least a couple of times, alone in a room by myself, and that almost never happens.

   But stuck with Fred, unable to act on her growing attraction to Jeff, and fed up with the antics of her family, Stella finds nothing to smile about, a heroine in a tidal wave that’s slowly taking her further and further out to sea.

   David Wayne’s knack for comedy I had not realized before, what with his wild schemes to collect the money (actually due them), he later to become Inspector Queen to Jim Hutton’s TV EQ. The other brother-in-law (Frank Fontaine) is the dopier one, but thankfully not as dopey later on as Crazy Guggenheim on The Jackie Gleason Show.

   But it is the charmingly disillusioned-with-life Stella, played by the richly deep-voiced Ann Sheridan who’s the star here. Victor Mature is her co-star, but even he diminishes in star power whenever he’s in the same room with her.

  MAN IN THE SADDLE.   Columbia, 1951. Randolph Scott, Joan Leslie, Ellen Drew, Alexander Knox, Richard Rober, John Russell, Guinn ‘Big Boy’ Williams. Screenplay: Kenneth Gamet, based on the novel by Ernest Haycox. Director: Andre de Toth.

  ERNEST HAYCOX – Man in the Saddle.   Little Brown, hardcover, 1938. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and soft, including Dell #120, pb, mapback edition, 1946 (shown); Dell #618, pb, 1956; Signet, pb, 1972; Pinnacle, pb, 1988.

   Four years after Ramrod (reviewed here ), director Andre de Toth did it again. Columbia’s Man in the Saddle (1951) is based very closely on the 1938 book of the same name by Ernest Haycox, but it seems more like a re-telling of the earlier film, and equally noirish despite the Technicolor.

   This time, Joan Leslie is the woman looking to escape a shiftless father by marrying a cattle baron (played with chilling detachment by Alexander Knox) though everyone knows she loves small-rancher Randolph Scott, a circumstance that leads to Range War and the shoot-outs, bar-fights, stampedes, chases, et al. repeated from the earlier film.

   Haycox’s novel is an easy read, even if his prose lacks the punch of Luke Short’s and he really doesn’t invest the action scenes with much energy. He’s very good, though, at conveying the growing tension of an eminent shoot-out, or the suspense of a forthcoming ambush, and in these bits the book really comes alive.

   Writer Kenneth Gamet adapted this to the screen, and he managed a few interesting wrinkles while staying close to the book, streamlining the action and bringing some of the minor characters into better focus, particularly John Russell as a socially-challenged outcast, contrasted against Richard Rober as a genial killer.

   There’s also an interesting twist at the end as two antagonists resolve their conflict, only to find themselves trapped in their clichéd roles as Good Guy and Bad Guy. In all, an interesting variation on the earlier film, and fun all by itself.

   Someone also pointed out another common theme in these films: both Ramrod and this one, they say, carry sexual connotations. Being young and innocent, I wouldn’t know about that, but it’s an interesting thought.

PHILIP MacDONALD – The Crime Conductor. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1931. British edition: Collins Crime Club, hc, 1932.

   One of the scarccr MacDonalds is The Crime Conductor, if the time it took me to find a copy is any indication. It is also, I feel, the least of all those of his that I have read.

   The “Crime Conductor” here is not one who directs crime but to whom crime is attracted — to wit, Anthony Gethryn. Gethryn is joking with his wife’s cousin, a surgeon, about crime occurring around him, and then the surgeon is asked by the police to examine a man who had drowned in his bathtub. Despite the locked bathroom door, the surgeon is suspicious of the death and, naturally, asks Gethryn to take a look.

   With some fancy deduction, Gethryn concludes it was murder and explains the locked room in the first third of the book. What he doesn’t explain is why a rich man, not known as a miser, would have lavish private bathing facilities but neither soap nor towels available. The rest of the book is not the typical MacDonald fair play.

   Read this one for Gethryn’s letters to his wife, with their delightful self-depreciation.

Editorial Comment: There are 27 copies offered for sale on Abebooks at the present time, with a reading copy available for only thirteen dollars and change. Even so, I’d have to agree that Bill was correct in terms of its relatively scarcity. There are 179 copies of Warrant for X, for example, just as a quickie comparison. The only softcover edition of The Crime Collector was of British origin; it never appeared in the US in paperback form.

   Regarding this latest discussion on Shiel, there is something to be said for both sides. Jess is clearly right that Asian villains appeared in lots of fiction before 1898 when Shiel got involved.

   But, David is also correct in suggesting that The Yellow Danger was something of a breakthrough novel in the genre. It was probably the first yellow peril novel to approach best seller status in England.

   I did a lot of research on the yellow peril topic 30 or so years ago for my essay in M. P. Shiel in Diverse Hands (1983), “Some Contemporary Themes in Shiel’s Early Novels: Part I, The Dragon’s Tale: M. P. Shiel on the Emergence of Modern China.”

   I read as much as I could find of the pre-1898 YP [Yellow Peril] fiction looking for influences on Shiel and a little of the later stuff looking for examples of Shiel’s possible influences on others.

   I concluded that he probably hadn’t read much if any of the prior YP stuff. I can’t speak to the Dime Novels which Jess knows, but the early US stuff originated on the West coast, was largely propaganda against Chinese immigration and may never have been distributed widely in America, let alone England. (For instance, the Woltor title Jess cites was an 82 page pamphlet issued by a California publisher.)

   The primary influences on Shiel were contemporary events. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 proved that a “colored” country could master modern weapons and raised the specter of Japan taking over or otherwise leading the untapped masses and resources of China into the modern world.

   At the end of the war Russia, Germany and France intervened to force Japan to accept a higher indemnity from China instead of Manchuria and other territories won with blood.

   In November 1897 two German missionaries were murdered in China, which provided Germany the pretext to demand control over the port of Kiao-Chau and the neighboring province. France and Russia responded with territorial demands of their own, leading to concerns about the pending break up of China. (Russia actually seized the very territory she had helped to force Japan to give up in 1895.)

   England feared the loss of its paramount position in the China trade, as well as the possibility that the concerted actions of Germany, France and Russia might indicate an active alliance among the three against England. There were debates in parliament about the crisis and speculation in the press that war might break out.

   Then Peter Keary hired Shiel to write a new serial capitalizing on public interest in the crisis. When the first installment of “The Empress of the Earth” was published in Pearson’s Short Stories on 5 February 1898, his original readers knew the background and recognized the cross-references to recent history and contemporary events.

   The first third of the serial literally was incorporating the previous week’s headline events as they occurred, including well-known politicians and other public figures as characters. The public loved it.

   And when the Boxer Rebellion broke out in 1899 it seemed to confirm Shiel’s vision of a hostile China declaring war on the West, and triggered a re-serialization of the serial and reissues of the book versions both in England and America.

    [There are three major versions of the text. Since it was so popular Pearson instructed Shiel to string the serial out to 150K words, about twice the original contract length. Shiel cut it back by a third for the Grant Richards edition, but had to rewrite the final chapter and make some further revisions to the order of the US publisher. From comments to Richards, Shiel seems to have preferred the Richards text.

    [Morse photo-offset the serial with lots of art in Volume I of his series, which is still available. Both the UK & US book versions have been reprinted in expensive series, but are available on Google as pdf downloads.]

   And Dr. Yen How, the Sino-Japanese mastermind, was not based on some prior figure from YP literature, or a shadowy criminal from Limehouse (as Rohmer would later claim about Fu Manchu.)

   He was almost certainly inspired by the Chinese revolutionary Dr. Sun Yat-Sen (1866-1925,) as I demonstrated in my old essay. (Follow the link.)

   Sun had first gained notoriety in 1896 when he was kidnapped and briefly held in the Chinese Embassy in London until screaming headlines roused public pressure on the British government to demand his release. Sun commented: “The reporters drew me into the hotel more forcibly than Tung drew me into the legation building, and they coveted news from me more anxiously than the Manchu government wanted my head.”

   Most modern readers who stumble across the book have no idea about any of this, assume Shiel was writing on a clean slate and simply made all that stuff up. Shiel himself considered the novel hackwork and seemed embarrassed about its success. It was the only work published in his lifetime which approached best seller status.

   The relative success of Danger as compared to his better work must have galled him. Faced with a steady decline of his income from writing from 1900-1911, he tried to recapture the success of Danger when Sun Yat-Sen came back into the headlines during the Chinese Revolution, culminating in Sun becoming the first president of the new Chinese Republic.

   Though it was a better book in most respects, The Dragon (1913, serialized in The Red as “To Arms!”) failed to interest the public and was a complete commercial disaster. Shiel fell into a pit of personal problems and didn’t write another novel for a decade.

   Shiel inscribed a copy of The Dragon:

   Finally, though Jess didn’t mention it, David’s review/essay also has some odd errors about the text of the book itself and other points. John Hardy did not die of consumption. He was killed in a duel. I speculate why in my essay, but I assume few of you are still reading at this point. I could go on, but enough is enough. I’ll stop for now, but there are depths to the book, and Shiel, beyond those suggested in the review.

GIVE OUT, SISTERS. Universal, 1942. Patty, Maxine & Laverne Andrews, Grace McDonald, Dan Dailey, Charles Butterworth, Walter Catlett, William Frawley, Edith Barrett, Marie Blake, Fay Helm, Donald O’Connor, Peggy Ryan, The Jivin’ Jacks and Jills. Director: Edward F. Cline. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.

   If a stiff drink at dinner didn’t help you recover from the dark byways of Hatter’s Castle (reviewed here ), this sunny musical would certainly have done the job.

   The Andrews sisters are the titular stars, but the storyline is fleshed out by an accomplished team of supporting actors, both well known (Butterworth, Catlett, and Frawley) and soon to be known (O’Connor and Ryan, as well as Tommy Rail, a member of the Jivin’ Jacks and Jills).

   Butterworth is the owner of a studio where a group of talented young performers is hoping for their big break, which will shortly come at a local nightclub run by William Frawley. The flaw in the plan is that their leader (Grace McDonald) is the ward of three stern aunts (Barrett, Blake and Helm), civic leaders who have no interest in Gracie’s theatrical aspirations.

   The brisk pacing with frequent breaks for musical “interludes” keeps things humming until the whole cast (including the three aunts) burns up the screen with a sensational finale, the “Pennsylvania Polka.”

   Another of the entertaining, little remembered Universal musicals of the 1940s. If only Turner would program these instead of the MGM classics that we all love but from which we would welcome a break.

M. P. SHIEL – The Yellow Danger. Grant Richards, UK, hardcover, 1898. R. F. Fenno, US, hc, 1899. Reprinted many times.

   Matthew Philips Shiel has to be one of the most eccentric writers of all time. Racist (despite the fact he was of mixed race himself), jingoist, and mystic, he is probably best known today for his Last Man on Earth novel The Purple Cloud and his stories about decadent sleuth, the neurasthenic Prince Zaleski, but for pulp fans he holds a special place — as the inventor of the “Yellow Peril” novel.

   Before Shiel the “Italian Peril’ had been the biggest trend in popular fiction. Guy Boothby’s Dr. Nikola had a long successful career plaguing a series of English heroes (Nikola deserves to be rediscovered, and all the books are available to read free on-line as well as others by the popular and talented Australian Boothby), and Italian villains with ties to ‘the Black Hand’ and other such secret societies had shown up in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Nick Carter, Sexton Blake, and books such as L. T. Meade’s and Robert Eustace’s The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (also available free on-line and worth checking out, a clever and entertaining thriller from an earlier age).

   The Yellow Danger is a novel in the sub-genre of stories known as invasion or future war novels that began with The Battle of Dorking and reached its highpoint with H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. William LeQueux made a near cottage industry of these, and classics of the form include Erskine Childer’s prophetic Riddle of the Sands and Conan Doyle’s Danger! (which predicted submarine warfare in WW I).

   Modern examples include Vandenburg by Oliver Lange, I, Martha Adams by Pauline Glen Winslow, SGB by Len Deighton, and films such as Red Dawn and Invasion USA.

   I won’t go into the historical reasons for the rise of the “yellow peril” novel here. Suffice it to say that as much as anything the Boxer Rebellion, in which a fanatic secret society with backing from the Chinese government led to the siege of the embassies in Bejing (see Peter Fleming’s The Siege of Peking and the film 55 Days in Peking), and the subsequent military action by allied forces of the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and Japan among others, and the growing population of Chinese in Western cities and the sensationalist reporting of the era on the activities of the criminal “tongs” and the “yellow peril” only needed the right book to set the whole thing off.

   The Yellow Danger was that book.

   The novel opens as England faces a crisis in the East at the hands of the Germans, Russians, and French (Shiel was an equal opportunity jingoist), but it is at a simple garden party for a charity that we first meet the source of “the yellow danger” —

   That “expansive majestic brow ” must surely remind readers of Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu Manchu and his “brow like Shakespeare.” And Shiel makes no bones about the doctor’s motives for his evil machinations —

   To say the least the horse was out of the barn and bolting. You can’t accuse Shiel of beating around the bush. He jumps in with both feet. It’s not long before the evil Dr. Yen How has the world crumbling and the West trembling as the hordes of the East (ever since Genghis Khan Asian armies always seem to move in hordes).

   Luckily for us England has men like Shiel’s Nietzschean hero John Hardy to call on —

   As the crisis rises and the Asian hordes sweep across the west the consumptive but heroic Hardy rises in short time from unknown officer to Admiral of the fleet.

   Under the English banner the treacherous Russians, Germans, French and others rally, and Kaiser Bill himself leads an army under the Union Jack in a great land battle, but it is Hardy who must destroy Dr. Yen How and his hordes, and his choice of weapon is perhaps the most far seeing and startling of Shiel’s predictions.

    Hardy uses the young woman, Ada Seward, who Dr. Yen How desires, to get to the leader of the Asian invaders and infects the Dr. and the invading armies with plague — a bit of payback since the invading Mongols introduced the disease to Europe in the first place back in the days of Genghis Khan.

   To be fair, mass murder weighs heavily on Hardy in a chapter entitled “Hardy’s ‘Crime'” —

   The Asian armies die by the millions, Dr. Yen How succumbs to his ‘unnatural desire’ for a white woman, and the triumphant Hardy, the beloved leader of the white race, dies of the consumption eating away at him, leaving the world in the safe hands of the Pax Britannica, all of Europe now under the firm hand of the Union Jack from the English Channel to the Russian Steppes.

   The Yellow Danger is relatively hard to find but you can download a facsimile in pdf format or read it on-line.

   It’s a remarkable book, not just for its distasteful jingoism and racism, but also because so many of the cliches and stereotypes of the sub genre are already present: the stalwart English hero; the inhumanly cold intelligence and yet base passions of the Asian villain; the fear of racial impurity; the swarming hordes of sub-human and alien forces; and the fear of the unknown.

   Nor is The Yellow Danger Shiel’s only contribution to the invasion novel and the paranoid fear of the foreign. Lord of the Sea is the story of an English Jew who conquers the seven seas and is ultimately destroyed by his desire for a pure English woman. Luckily the “Jewish Peril” didn’t quite catch on despite the nonsensical and wholly fictitious Protocols of Zion and rampant Anti-Semitism.

   No doubt about it, this can be unpleasant stuff, but it also has historical import both socially and to the genre as a whole.

   It was Shiel who moved the world’s eyes East and spawned a long line of “Yellow Perils,” a genre that still lingers long past the heyday of the Fu Manchu’s, Dr. Wu Fang’s, the Shadow’s Shiwan Khan, and Dr. No’s of yesteryear. The list of Asian super villains is impressive and still growing.

   The genre is far from dead even today (although the “yellow peril” currently has been replaced by the “Islamic peril”). Clive Cussler has written at least two novels that fall in this category (Dragon and Flood Tide) and is hardly alone. One hundred and twelve years later popular fiction is still haunted by the “yellow peril” stereotype.

   A new Fu Manchu novel appeared in 2009 (The Terror of Fu Manchu from Black Coat Press). There’s even a distaff “yellow peril” with Sax Rohmer’s Sumuru and Andre Caroff’s Madame Atomos (also being reprinted by Black Coat Press), and books like Alexander Cordell’s The Deadly Eurasian and Richard Condon’s The Whisper of the Axe send up of the whole thing offering a new take on old cliches.

   Richard Jacoma’s The Yellow Peril is a good example of having it both ways, a “yellow peril” novel seen through modern eyes, and K. K. Beck’s The Revenge of Kali Ra (reviewed here ) sends the whole thing up as well as taking shots at Hollywood and Sax Rohmer.

   But be warned: If you are easily offended or bothered much by what is or is not politically correct, The Yellow Danger may be hard going.

   Shiel was a very unpleasant man by all accounts and eccentric as both a writer and a human being. Still, if you are interested in the history of the genre and the origin of many of its stereotypes and cliches this one is hard to ignore.

   In its wake march armies of shadowy geniuses hidden in the foggy street of Limehouse or Chinatown and gathering their forces in distant exotic lands.

   We may have outgrown some of Shiel’s more obvious prejudices, but it may be a wise thing to compare them to our own modern flaws and ask ourselves if we have really moved that all that far in the one hundred and twelve years since The Yellow Danger first saw print.

   There are writers today — Brad Thor and John Ringo come to mind — often found on the bestseller list, whose popular books are, in their own way, no less sensationalist, jingoistic, and intolerant as Shiel’s work.

   We are in no position to condemn without first examining our own failings.

Note:  The anthologies It’s Raining Corpses in Chinatown and It’s Raining More Corpses in Chinatown edited by Don Hutchinson (Starmont House) offer a good selection of “Yellow Peril” stories from the pulps plus a good history of the genre and bibliography of “Yellow Peril” fiction from writers like Frank Gruber, Steve Fisher, Richard Sale and others for those interested.

COMMENT [02-17-10]   From Jess Nevins, author of Fantastic Victoriana —

   To be precise and in terms of the facts, Shiel didn’t invent the Yellow Peril novel. I believe that David has grossly overstated Shiel’s development of the trope. It was already commonly used by the time Shiel wrote his book.

   I wrote about this, at length, in Fantastic Victoriana, but, briefly:

   Numerically, the Italian Yellow Peril peaked with suspense fiction, in the 1870s. Anti-Asian sentiment rose from mid-century, and in both Britain and the US the 1880s were when it surged upwards, and not just in the U.S. It was Albert Robida, in France, who wrote “La Vorace Albion” (1884), with its various Asian villains.

   But in the US you’ve got Robert Woltor’s A Short and Truthful History of the Taking of Oregon and California by the Chinese in the Year A.D. 1899 (1882), you’ve got Emma Dawson’s “The Dramatic in My Destiny” (1880), Ellen Sargent’s “Wee Wi Peng” (1882), the various dime novel Yellow Peril villains (far outnumbering Italian villains), culminating in Kiang Ho (1892), enemy of Tom Edison, Jr.

   You’ve got Robert Chambers’ Yue Laou, in The Maker of Moons (1896), and you’ve got C.W. Doyle’s Quong Lung (short stories, 1897-1898).

   It was an established literary trope and even a cliche by the time Shiel got to it. It predated the Boxer Rebellion in non-fiction and fiction by, oh, about 40 years. Shiel *capitalized* on it, but he didn’t establish it. Yellow Papers were in the British story papers and American dime novels a full decade before Shiel.

RESPONSE [02-17-10]   David’s reply:

   I am not suggesting Shiel invented the idea of Asian villains in popular fiction. Certainly the influx of Asians on the Western Coast of the United States after the Civil War and the growth of Chinese sections of major cities in the West were major contributing factors in the growth of the field.

   This was complicated by the language and cultural barriers and the tendency of the Chinese and Japanese to stay in their own communities (not that they had much opportunity to move out of them if they had wanted to). Just as the Irish, Italians, and Jews all suffered similar demonization at various times as their communities grew in major cities.

   But The Yellow Danger is generally attributed by most critics (Don Hutchinson, Robert Sampson, Brian Aldiss, and others) as the book which put the “yellow peril” on the map of popular imagination. Historically Shiel’s book helped to move a vague prejudice from the background of popular culture to one of the most recognized stereotypes of 20th Century popular imagination.

   In any case no one can argue that Sax Rohmer and Fu Manchu “invented” the genre and yet no one can argue that the “yellow peril” would still be with us without the good doctor’s influence.

   First is not always important in popular fiction. Sherlock Holmes wasn’t the first detective, James Bond wasn’t the first post war secret agent, Fu Manchu wasn’t the first Asian super villain, the Virginian wasn’t the first western, Tarzan not the first feral man, John Carter not the first interplanetary traveler, and Zorro wasn’t the first masked caped hero with a secret identity — none the less their role is important and vital to the sub genres they represent. The Yellow Danger was neither new nor unique, but it was important in establishing a still existing sub-genre.

       LATER:

   I do regret loosely using “inventor” as if there had been no Asian villains before Shiel, but I do think Jess vastly underrates the importance of the Boxer Rebellion in the rise of the genre in the 20th century, and the importance of Shiel’s book — which is hardly unique to me, as I pointed out earlier.

   When I was researching Chinese secret societies and particularly the Boxers for Dr. John Y. Moon (former Foreign Minister of South Korea and head of the History Department of the University of Mexico in Mexico City), he brought the Shiel book to my attention as the “turning point” in the use of the “yellow peril” in fiction (ironically Dr. Moon was a Rohmer and Fu Manchu fan and introduced me to “yellow peril” fiction — though as he laughingly pointed out, Fu Manchu was Chinese, not Korean — and though he never missed a Wo Fat episode of Hawaii Five-O either). I grant his opinions and work influenced my article (and a life time interest in secret societies in general in fact and fiction).

DICK FRANCIS – Forfeit. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1969. Michael Joseph, UK, hc, 1969. Reprinted many times.

   Dick Francis not only uses his racing experience in his novels, but in many of them other facets of his life form the background. In Forfeit, his sixteen years as racing correspondent for the London Sunday Express is embodied in the hero, James Tyrone, journalist.

   Tyrone listens to a drunken tirade from an old-time colleague who then goes back to his office and nips out the seventh-floor window onto Fleet Street. With a nose for a good story, Tyrone smells a fiddle and starts some inquiries.

   He knows he’s on to a sure thing when he hears of blackmail and is met with unexplained violence. As a reporter, he is at great pains to protect his sources, but the dangerous headlines run by his “dreadful rag” of a paper focus the menace on him.

   In typical Francis style, the fast-paced writing brings out the individuality of the hero, even though it’s a typical suspense/thriller situation of a normal human being trapped in an abnormal situation. In another bit of autobiographical content, Tyrone’s wife is confined to a respirator and requires constant attendance (Francis’s wife once had polio).

   Unusual for a Francis novel, a true love story is depicted even though Tyrone feels that he lives a shadow life-full of “dust and ashes.” In his pursuit of racketeers who force owners not to start their horses in a race, he faces extortion, blackmail, and “high-powered thuggery” (more violence), along with a splash of racism.

   He confronts the villain in the Big Cats’ House in London Zoo, and comes face-to-face with an evil sociopath who’s in it for the money. In the end, Tyrone saves his wife while made drunk by the villains, and then must save himself.

   Forfeit won a well-deserved Edgar as Best Novel of 1969. Francis’s recent novels have all been large-scale best sellers. The Danger was one; others are Reflex (1981), Twice Shy (1982), Banker (1983), and Proof (1985).

         ———
   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.

DICK FRANCIS – The Danger. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, US, hardcover, 1984. Michael Joseph, UK, hc, 1983. Reprinted a number of times.

    For some time after he achieved bestsellerdom in the United States, it seemed that Dick Francis (according to some critics) was not keeping up the pace. But with The Danger, he is back in front, writing prose as crisp and taut and lean as a racehorse. This novel runs in the really big international thriller category, starting with “there was a Godawful cock-up in Bologna.” It’s about kidnapping with a touch of terrorism.

    Andrew Douglas works as a partner in the firm of Liberty Market Ltd., whose credo is to “resolve a kidnap in the quietest way possible, with the lowest of profiles and minimum action.” He successfully gets back the kidnap victim, Alessis Cenci, “one of the best girl jockeys in the world.”

    They go back to England, where he engages in some psychological rehabilitation. This leads to the next hurdle, another kidnap (literally, a kid this time), and he sees a thread of connection. Douglas has the opportunity to assess his opponent — “Kidnappers are better detectives than detectives, and better spies than spies.”

    Then, it’s a leap across the Atlantic, where the senior steward of the English Jockey Club is kidnapped in Washington, D.C. — a snatch related to the first two. Apparently Dick Francis likes the States, because he has his chief character say, “I feel liberated, as always in America, a feeling which I thought had something to do with the country’s own vastness, as if the wide-apartness of everything flooded into the mind.”

    Andrew Douglas finally comes face-to-face w,ith his adversary genius in an exciting climax.

         ———
   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.

DICK FRANCIS – Odds Against. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1966. Michael Joseph, UK, hc, 1965. Reprinted many times. Adapted as the first segment of The Racing Game, a six-episode TV series starring Mike Gwilym as Sid Halley.

   In most of his books, Dick Francis uses an ordinary man (usually connected with the racing world) as his protagonist, caught up in events that are so overwhelming and out of control that he must make heroic efforts to sort them out.

   But in Odds Against, Sid Halley has a job as a detective-the obvious choice for a tough man to right the world’s wrongs. He’s been doing the work for two years, and when he’s shot (on page one of the story), he realizes that a bullet in the guts is his first step to liberation from being of “no use to anyone, least of all himself.”

   He was a champion steeplechase jockey, that’s what makes him tough. A racing accident lost him the use of his hand and self-respect simultaneously.

   The action breaks from the starting gate and blasts over the hurdles of intrigue, menace, and crime. Halley is cadged by his shrewd and loving father-in-law into confronting Howard Kraye, “a full-blown, powerful, dangerous, bigtime crook.”

   On the track he encounters murder, mayhem, plastic bombs, and torture. But he endures, in some part to regain his self respect, and in some part because he believes in racing, the sport, and in putting it right.

   A fascinating chase through an empty racecourse defies the villain. In the end, despite his tragedy, Sid Halley sees himself as a detective and as a man.

   Dick Francis was so taken with the characters in this book that he went on to use them in a television series, The Racing Game (shown on Public Broadcasting). A second Sid Halley novel, Whip Hand, won the British Gold Dagger Award in 1979 and another Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America.

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   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.

DICK FRANCIS – Blood Sport. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1968. Michael Joseph, UK, hc, 1967. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and soft.

   From the winning world of British steeplechasing (where he was Champion Jockey in 1954), Dick Francis moved effortlessly into crime fiction with his first novel, Dead Cert, in 1962, and continues to be a front-runner.

   He has written twenty-some excellent thrillers full of old-fashioned moral polarity with strains of humor. These “adventure stories” (as Francis calls them) have amazing plots of clever evilness and feature nonrecurring heroes familiar with the racing game.

   Flawed, uninvolved, and soulless, each central character finds the value of vulnerability and returns to the land of the living through courage and love. As a central theme, it can be compared to that of the works of Ross Macdonald. As critic John Leonard said, “Not to read Dick Francis because you don’t like horses is like not reading Dostoevski because you don’t like God.”

   In Blood Sport, death lurks on a simple Sunday sail on the Thames. An American visitor is almost drowned, and his rescuer is convinced that it wasn’t simply an accident.

   Gene Hawkins, the rescuer and hero, is an English civil servant, a “screener” who checks employees in secret-sensitive government jobs. His training permits him to spot details that make “accidents” phony, and his knowledge of guns and listening devices comes in handy. The rescued man asks for help in locating a stolen horse that has just been bought for a huge price.

   Hawkins is relieved to use his vacation time to hunt for missing horses, because he is despondent, filled with a “fat black slug of depression.” This is the only part of his character that doesn’t ring true-after all, it’s only a failed love affair.

   The pace picks up, and the scene changes to the U.S.A. From the farms of Kentucky, the trail is followed to Jackson, Wyoming. Along the way, Hawkins gets people together for some psychological reconditioning and exposes a bloodline scam as the scene shifts to Santa Barbara, Las Vegas, and Kingman, Arizona.

   The U.S. tour is fast-moving, and Francis does not dwell on local-color background, especially not to make any points. He just gives the graphic, journalistic details of a place that push the story along

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   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.

DICK FRANCIS, R. I. P. (1920-2010).   Another giant has left us. Dick Francis died on Sunday at the age of 89. A long obituary appears online here at the Daily Mail website, but it is just one of many, not including dozens and dozens of tributes to be found on mystery-oriented blogs.

   Francis was the author of 42 thriller novels, all of them having horse racing as a major part of the story. In 2000 Queen Elizabeth II honored Francis by making him a Commander of the British Empire. During his long career he won three Edgar Allen Poe awards given by the Mystery Writers of America for his novels Forfeit (1968), Whip Hand (1979) and Come to Grief (1995).

   He also was awarded a Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers’ Association for his contributions to the field, and they made him a Grand Master in 1996 for a lifetime’s achievement.

   After a lengthy hiatus following the death of his wife, Francis recently began writing again, working with his son Felix to produce Dead Heat (2007), Silks (2008) and Even Money (2009). A new novel entitled Crossfire will be published this year.

Editorial Comment:   As I continue this tribute to Dick Francis, over the next couple of days I will be posting several more reviews of his work, all also by Thomas Baird and taken from 1001 Midnights. Their titles: Odds Against, The Danger, and Forfeit.