TOP O’ THE MORNING. Paramount Pictures, 1949. Bing Crosby, Ann Blyth, Barry Fitzgerald, Hume Cronyn, John McIntyre. Screenplay: Edmond Beloin & Richard L. Breen; director: David Miller.

   Trivia experts likely know that William Levinson and Richard Link created the character of Lt. Columbo for Bing Crosby, but they may not realize Bing had played a detective before, and in fact a private detective in this 1949 musical comedy with a touch of noir.

   Music and murder had mixed before — Charlie Chan at the Opera, Murder at the Vanities, The Princess Comes Across, and Lady of Burlesque come to mind, but those were backstage mysteries, and the singing was confined to the stage. This may be the only full blown musical comedy murder mystery ever filmed.

   It begins with a murder and a shocking theft — the Blarney Stone — which bequeaths the gift of gab on anyone who kisses it — has been stolen. The stone is part of ancient Irish lore and it’s theft could well visit disaster on the entire nation. Finding the stolen stone and restoring it and the killer is of vital importance.

   Enter top American insurance investigator Joe Mulqueen (Bing Crosby), a laid back pipe-smoking crooning detective, sent by Inspector Fallon (John McIntyre) to Ireland find the ancient rock and save the company from having to pay off on the priceless relic.

   But that pits Joe against Sergeant Briany MacNaughton of the Irish Garda Civil, and his fiery daughter Conn (Ann Blyth), and further complications ensue because Joe’s arrival seems to fit all too well a prophecy about who the lovely Conn will marry.

   Top o’ the Morning is by its nature schizophrenic. When Bing isn’t crooning familiar tunes or those written for the film by Burke and Van Heusen, romancing the lovely Blyth, doing the usual Irish shtick with Fitzgerald and most of the cast, and exploring the legend of the Blarney Stone, he’s playing detective investigating a brutal murder.

   Toward the end of the film the mood turns dark and even noirish, and the screenplay acknowledges a nod toward G. K. Chesterton and one of Father Brown’s most famous cases, “The Invisible Man,” as Joe and Sgt. MacNaughton close in on the killer.

   Indeed these scenes almost make you wish the film had been played as a straight detective story, and they have a quiet power as well as a dark noirish look, thanks to Miller’s direction.

   Top o’ the Morning is more of a curiosity than a success. You can’t fault the cast or even the screenplay; the two forms just don’t really work that well together.

   Bing does get to show a little steel beneath the crooning in a few scenes, and he’s always worth watching playing off Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald, who played almost as many cops and professional Irishmen, gets to exercise both his specialties here, and Blyth is both lovely and convincing. A special nod to Hume Cronyn as Biddy O’Devlin, who gets to shine briefly in an offbeat film.

   Still Top o’ the Morning is well worth catching, and noir fans will recognize some excellent work toward the end of the film. It’s one of those films that you may find you like far more than it really merits.

GIL BREWER – The Squeeze.   Ace Double D-123, paperback original; 1st printing, 1955.   [Paired with this novel, tête-bêche, is Love Me to Death, by Frank Diamond.]

   A fortune in illicit cash, a sinister gambling joint operator, a gorgeous redhead, and enough double-crossing to last a lifetime … these are the building blocks of The Squeeze, a fast-moving novel by Gil Brewer.

   Written in 1955, The Squeeze is centered around Joe Maule, a Chicago transplant to the southwest Gulf Coast of Florida, the site of many Brewer tales. Joe is in debt to the tune of $12,000, a fortune at the time.

   He owes it to Victor Jarnigan, owner of a nearby illegal casino. Jarnigan, who has cheated Joe out of the money, has concocted a plan to allow him to clear his debt. All Joe has to do is get cozy with Caroline Shreves, local femme fatale.

   Caroline lives with her sister and her husband, who has apparently squirreled away $300,000 in cash. She’s eye-popping, and is given to hanging around local cocktail lounges on weeknights. Joe’s instructions are to develop a relationship with her, then get into the house and try to grab the money.

   Well, Joe gets tight with Caroline, all right, according to the plan, but he falls in too deep. As with most Brewer protagonists, he’s blinded by his lust for this alluring woman who knows all the moves. She appears to fall for him, too, and before you can say “Judas kiss,” the two of them are plotting to grab the money for themselves and split town.

   This is the kind of well-written story that made pulp fiction work back in the day. It’s the kind of novel that immediately draws you in, continuing its hold over you with a steadily building story line and no-frills plotting. It’s pure noir: Joe is screwed from the first page, but he’s the only one who doesn’t know it.

   Brewer’s formula of lonely-guy-meets-beautiful-dish works again, thanks to clever variations in his theme. He pushes all the right buttons in this little gem, which unfortunately has been left in the dust of the last half-century.

Steve,

I just ran across a comment from Bill Crider on the rara avis site about Harlequin censoring the six recent mystery vintage paperbacks that they republished. This really annoys me. See this site for more and a link to the Harlequin site where they cheerfully announce the censorship:

I wish I was joking but I’m not.

Best, Walker

Excerpted from the Harlequin blog:

Remember, our intention was to publish the stories in their original form. But once we immersed ourselves in the text, our eyes grew wide. Our jaws dropped. Social behavior—such as hitting a woman—that would be considered totally unacceptable now was quite common sixty years ago. Scenes of near rape would not sit well with a contemporary audience, we were quite convinced. We therefore decided to make small adjustments to the text, only in cases where we felt scenes or phrases would be offensive to a 2009 readership. Also, grammar and spelling standards have changed quite a bit in sixty years. But that did entail a text edit, which we had not anticipated. AND, we had to clear those adjustments with the current copyright holders, if we had been able to locate them.

And of course, the covers: Though we used the original covers, they had to be scanned and touched up.

Here’s the comment I left:

I’m a collector of old vintage paperbacks, and I have been since I bought them new off the circular racks in drugstores and supermarkets when I was growing up.

This business of sheltering our eyes from things you think might offend us now is absolute nonsense. Who do you think we are, a bunch of weak-kneed sissies? Even if it makes us uneasy every once in a while to look at our past, history IS history, and it’s ridiculous to try to cover it up.

Please do us a favor, and keep publishing your X-rated romance novels, and leave the mystery and noir genres well enough alone. You say you’re delighted to have been able to reprint these books. I think you should be ashamed of yourselves, trampling on the work of others, especially when (as far as I can tell) it’s been done without their permission.

[UPDATE] 01-17-10. David Rachels has done us all a great service, and for doing so, I thank him. He’s taken a copy of one the James Hadley Chase books that was one of the six that Harlequin reprinted, and done a line-by-line comparison with the original.

Not too surprisingly, considering Chase’s reputation (which the editors at Harlequin obviously knew nothing about), not only were there words, phrases and the occasional sentence removed, but entire chunks of text.

Needless to say, unless done with really skilled hands, besides the fact that’s tampering with the author’s intentions, it also hardly makes for smooth reading. See David’s blog for full details.

P. G. WODEHOUSE – The Code of the Woosters. Herbert Jenkins, UK, hardcover, 7 October 1938. US First Edition: Doubleday Doran, hc, 1938. Reprinted many times.

TV Adaptation: The book is the basis for the first two episodes of the second season of the ITV series Jeeves and Wooster. “The Silver Jug (or Jeeves Saves the Cow Creamer)” 14 April 1991, and “The Bassetts’ Fancy Dress Ball (or, A Plan for Gussie)” 21 April 1991.

    A rip-roaring novel length yarn in which Bertram Wooster and his faithful manservant end up at the stately Totleigh Towers, where Bertie finds himself deep in the soup trying to help friends and family, and it is up to Jeeves to pull him out.

    It all starts when Aunt Dahlia asks Bertie to procure a silver cow creamer from an antique dealer, and in the process of helping his “old flesh-and-blood,” he crosses paths with Sir Watkyn Bassett who suspects him of larceny. Bertie goes face to face with a hat-stealing curate, a fascist with a secret, and an Aberdeen Terrier with an attitude.

    The book has a few funny literary references. Bertie asks Jeeves about “the cat chap” (Shakespeare for Lady Macbeth’s comment: “Letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would,’ Like the poor cat i’ the adage.”)

    The novel ends with Bertie falling asleep as he tries to recall the words of Robert Browning, something with a snail and a wing and all being right with the world. When you finish reading a book like this, you know that the snail is on the wing, and the lark on the thorn, and God is in His heaven, and all is right with the world

K — THE UNKNOWN.   Universal, 1924. Virginia Valli, Percy Marmont, Margarita Fisher, John Roche, Maurice Ryan, Francis Feeny. Screenplay by Louis D. Lighton and Hope Loring, from the novel “K” by Mary Roberts Rinehart. Director: Harry A. Pollard. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   The credit for Mary Roberts Rinehart took fellow attendee John Apostolou and me by surprise, since neither of us had ever heard of the source novel. The St. James reference guide includes the 1915 publication not with Rinehart’s crime novels, but with her “Other Publications,” although if the screen version is at all faithful to the original novel it is, like much of Rinehart’s work, a romantic suspense drama.

   It draws on Rinehart’s early career as a nurse and her skill at dealing with small-town settings (with no use of “rube” humor as claimed in tile program notes) into which she injects a generous dollop of melodrama that centers around a mysterious stranger (Marmont) who is in love with Sidney (Valli), his landlady’s niece, also the object of affection of two adolescents and a famous doctor, the pride of the local hospital.

   Both the stranger and the doctor have secrets, as does the doctor’s chief assistant (Margarita Fisher), and at least one of them is capable of murder.

   This entertaining film succeeds thanks to its good cast and intelligent direction, and some fine photography that the American Film Index credits attribute to Charles Stumar.

   Stumar would remain at Universal into the 1930s when he would be principal photographer on The Werewolf of London, The Mummy, and The Raven (1935 version).

   Both John and I thought this was a genuine “sleeper.”

Editorial Comment: For what it’s worth, the novel “K” is not included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, not even with a dash. Is this an error? I shall ask and find out.

   Commentary on books I’ve covered in the New York Times Book Review.   [Reprinted from The Armchair Detective, Vol. 1, No. 4, July 1968.]

    Previously on this blog:
Part 1 — Charlotte Armstrong through Jonathan Burke.
Part 2 — Victor Canning through Manning Coles.
Part 3 — Stephen Coulter through Thomas B. Dewey.
Part 4 — Charles Drummond through William Garner.
Part 5 — Richard H. Garvin through E. Richard Johnson.
Part 6 — Henry Kane through Emma Lathen.

NORMAN LEWIS – Every Man’s Brother.   William Morrow, US, hardcover, 1968. UK edition: William Heinemann, hc, 1967. Bron Owen, an epileptic released from a prison sentence served for unremembered crimes, runs unresistingly into a murder charge in this compelling novel set in Wales.

ROBERT MacLEOD – The Iron Sanctuary.   Holt Rinehart & Winston, US, hardcover, 1968. UK edition: John Long, hc, 1966, as Lake of Fury. This is a cut or two above the run-of-the-trenchcoat spy story, featuring Talos Cord’s second peace-keeping mission for the UN, this time in East Africa where rumbles of arms buying have been heard.

A. C. MARIN – The Clash of Distant Thunder.   Harcourt Brace & World, US, hardcover, 1968. Paperback reprint: Pinnacle, 1971. UK edition: Wm. Heinemann, hc, 1969. This is a compelling first novel, a vividly believable search for revenge for an ancient wrong and the resulting encounter with some contemporary Nazis in Europe.

STEPHEN MARLOWE – Come Over, Red Rover.   Macmillan, US, hardcover, 1968. A splendid novel about a double agent, a willful daughter and East German machinations, with the added treat of fine characterizations.

Editorial Comments:   Three cover images out of four this time, and which was the one I was sure was going to be the easiest to find? Right.

    Norman Lewis, no relation, I’m sure, wrote 15 espionage and adventure thrillers between the years 1949 and 1987, five of them listed as marginal in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. He’s a brand new name to me, though, until today.

    Nor had I heard of Robert MacLeod, or so I thought until I looked him up in CFIV. MacLeod is a pen name of the much more well-known (and extremely prolific) Bill Knox, who also wrote as Michael Kirk and Noah Webster. This is the second of six recorded adventures for Talos Cord, out of some 24 mysteries written by Knox under this name.

   Another pseudonym is A. C. Marin, whose real name was Alfred Coppel. After three books as Marin, Coppel had another eight books in CFIV under his own name, all apparently thrillers of one subgenre or another.

   Collectors of vintage Gold Medal paperbacks will certainly recognize Stephen Marlowe‘s name, as he wrote a long list of “Chester Drum” detective and spy novels for them between 1955 and 1968. When paperback series spy fiction showed signs of slowing down, he switched over to hardcover thrillers like this one. A tribute to Stephen Marlowe by Bill Pronzini appeared here on this blog at the time of his death.

PETER RABE – Kill the Boss Good-By. Gold Medal #594, paperback original; 1st printing, August 1956. Reprint edition: Black Lizard, pb, 1988.

   Kill the Boss Good-By is typical of Peter Rabe’ s best work. Fell, boss of the San Pietro rackets, has mysteriously dropped from sight. In his absence, his number two man, Pander, decides to take over and run the show.

   Naturally, Fell returns, but he returns from a place where racket bosses seldom go — a sanatorium where he has been under treatment for manic psychosis.

   The rest of the novel, although it contains the necessary paperback-original action and scenes of sharp, effective violence, is really a psychological study of Fell’s gradual decline into genuine madness.

   As he begins to lose his tenuous hold on reality, becoming more and more confident of success as his mental powers decline, he destroys himself and most of those around him.

   Like many of Rabe’s novels, this one builds to an emotionally shattering climax. Rabe is one writer who always delivers where it matters most — on the last page.

   Notable among Rabe’s other non-series softcover originals are Benny Muscles In (1955), A Shroud for Jesso (1955), Journey into Terror (1957), Mission for Vengeance (1958), Girl in a Big Brass Bed (1965), and Black Mafia (1974).

   Also excellent is his only hardcover, Anatomy of a Killer (1960), a tale of unflagging tension and psychological suspense about a “jinxed” hit man named Sam Jordan.

         ———
   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.

PETER RABE – Dig My Grave Deep. Gold Medal #612, paperback original; 1st printing, October 1956. Reprint: Black Lizard, pb, 1988.

   Contemporary reviewers compared Peter Rabe favorably with both Chandler and Hammett, and with some justification. Rabe’ s best work achieves a harsh objectivity that is typical of Hammett in such books as The Glass Key.

   Rabe’s specialty was the hard-boiled gangster novel, though he also published a series of comic spy novels in the 1960s, a fine “mad avenger” book, and a truly offbeat novel about an American gangster in a foreign environment, as well as a series of novels about a “retired” gangster named Daniel Port, beginning with Dig My Grave Deep.

   In theory, of course, no one retires from the rackets and lives to tell the tale, but Port is intelligent as well as tough; he has a plan that will allow him to leave alive. But first, out of loyalty to his old boss, Port decides to help fight off the challenge of the so-called Reform party, a group that is trying to achieve political as well as criminal power in Port’s city.

   He does so with brains as well as violence, though there is certainly violence in this book. Rabe’s matter-of-fact, understated style is particularly well adapted to describing violent encounters, including violent sexual encounters, and he does a quietly effective job of doing so in Dig My Grave Deep.

   What is unexpected in the book is its humor, of both the tongue-in-cheek variety (Rabe’s character names are always worth a second look) and off-the-wall variety (Port’s bodyguard is involved in several hilarious incidents).

   The successful mixture of violence, humor, and effective storytelling makes one realize that Rabe’s works are worthy of more attention than has been accorded them in recent years.

   Other books in the Daniel Port series, all worth seeking out, are The Out Is Death (1957), It’s My Funeral (1957), The Cut of the Whip (1958), Bring Me Another Corpse (1959), and Time Enough to Die (1959).

         ———
   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.

Editorial Comment:   On the primary Mystery*File website is an lengthy interview that George Tuttle did with Peter Rabe not too long before his (Rabe’s) death. Following their conversation is a complete bibliography I did of all of Rabe’s fictional work, including plenty of cover images.

  PETER RABE – Stop This Man! Gold Medal #506, paperback original; 1st printing, August 1955. Reprint editions: Gold Medal #763, circa 1957; Hard Case Crime, July 2009.

   For reasons best known to themselves, Gold Medal packaged Peter Rabe’s Stop This Man! to look like one of their rustic melodramas (Hill Girl, Swamp Hoyden) when in fact it’s a savvy, mostly urban tale of a robbery and its aftermath that prefigures the best of Westlake/Stark’s “Parker” novels.

   Catell, the more-or-less hero of the piece, is a career criminal very much in the tough, calculating Parker mold, before there was a Parker mold to fit into, and Stop This Man! deals with his efforts to get away with a brick of radioactive gold and somehow dispose of it at a profit.

   Rabe knows how to do this thing right: straight-up and savage, with that paperback toughness that typifies the best of the hard-boiled writers.

   The action scenes are fast and inventive, the characters engagingly seedy, and the plot controlled and energetic as a race-horse.

   If there’s any problem at all, it lies in the mood of the times, when an informal censorship mandated that Justice Must Triumph in this sort of thing, and Rabe is clearly more interested in his small-time hoods, strippers, lushes and oily promoters than in the lawmen who put in token appearances like time-out-for-a-word-from-our-sponsor.

   The result is a rather contrived ending, but it comes late in a book that is mostly pretty enjoyable.

  ANTHONY GILBERT – Death in the Blackout. Smith & Durell, US, hardcover, 1943. Paperback reprint: Bantam #51, 1946. Previously published in the UK as The Case of the Tea-Cosy’s Aunt: Collins Crime Club, hc, 1942; Collins White Circle, pb, 1944.

   It has been twenty years or so since I read an Arthur Crook novel by Anthony Gilbert, and those I had read had been from (I shall use the masculine gender to avoid confusion, though Gilbert was, of course, a female) his later period. The novels were supposed to be amusing, and I seldom found them so. Gilbert apparently did better in his earlier works.

   Death in the Blackout is one of the early cases of Arthur Crook, lawyer. Whether Crook is a solicitor or a barrister, should anyone be curious, is information not provided by the author in this novel. Frankly, I don’t recall his ever appearing in court; he seems to be primarily an investigator.

   Crook’s flat is in a building with several other occupants who are almost as strange as he is. A woman who sees spies in the most improbable disguises occupies the ground floor and basement, while flat No.3 boasts the presence of T. Kersey, whom Crook immediately begins calling “Tea-Cosy” and who is a bit unsteady when it comes to the nature of time. Flat No.2 is unoccupied.

   Tea-Cosy asks Crook to help him check out his flat when he finds his key is missing. Therein he and Crook find a hat of sort that could belong only to Tea-Cosy’s aunt, but the aunt is not there. Later on, a young lady checking out the unoccupied flat in the hope of renting it discovers the aunt’s body.

   Tea-Cosy disappears before the body is found. Since Crook has adopted Tea-Cosy as a client, and Crook’s clients are always not guilty even when they are, Crook begins investigating. Even when Tea-Cosy, or someone dressed to look like Tea-Cosy, nearly kills the young lady who comes back to the supposedly unoccupied apartment a second time, Crook knows that Tea-Cozy is innocent.

   And, of course, Crook is right. Since there are only a few suspects, the guilty are rather evident, but it is quite interesting, and occasionally amusing, how Crook works it all out from the author’s fair clues.