SCENE OF THE CRIME. MGM, 1949. Van Johnson, Arlene Dahl, Gloria DeHaven, Tom Drake, Leon Ames, John McIntire, Donald Woods, Norman Lloyd, Jerome Cowan. Director: Roy Rowland.

   This was a belated attempt by MGM to jump on the Crime Noir bandwagon, but though the effort’s certainly there, the studio’s higher than usual production values seem to work in a conversely counterproductive fashion against any major success the film may have had.

   Van Johnson plays a homicide detective named Mike Conovan in this one, a guy who has to deal with two problems in his life at the same time. First of all, he has to solve the murder of a fellow policeman and a good friend who’s found murdered outside a bookie joint with over a thousand dollars in cash in his pocket.

   Secondly, he has a strikingly beautiful wife Gloria (Arlene Dahl) who loves him but who’s getting more and more fretful and worried about the danger he faces every day.

   The ringing of the telephone every night, calling Mike to duty, doesn’t help matters much, either.

   Surprisingly enough, she appears to be far less fazed when she learns that her husband is cozying up to a gangster’s glamorous girl friend named Lili (the equally glamorous Gloria DeHaven).

   If it weren’t for the fact that he keeps his wedding ring on, and that they keep their feet on the floor all the time, I think there’s more than a hint that something more serious could have been going on. (There wasn’t.)

   In another studio’s production, there may have been more sparks in that direction, just maybe. And yet, even without that particular scenario taking place, what remains is an early attempt at a Dragnet-styled documentary of an actual police investigation, but in unlike Dragnet fashion, one in which human and domestic touches are as much of Mike Conovan’s world as bringing justice into it is.

   There’s also an appreciable amount of violence in this film, certainly enough to make Gloria’s worries about him well-founded. There are also long stretches with no musical score in the background, a touch I always appreciate when I notice it, and I usually do.

   Arlene Dahl, as pointed out before, was exceptionally beautiful — but looking at her overall career, I am struck (and puzzled) as to how short it really was. Her movie career began in 1947 and was essential over by the mid-sixties.

   Absolutely perfect in her role was Gloria DeHaven, but after thinking it over, I don’t think that Van Johnson was quite up to his. Supposedly a tough cop torn between his job and his wife, he seems too bland, too youthful, and not yet having seen enough life to make us believe he had.

   Good, even very good, in other words, but far from exceptional.

LIFE BEGINS AT FORTY. Fox, 1934. Will Rogers, Rochelle Hudson, George Barbier, Richard Cromwell, Jane Darwell, Slim Summerville, Sterling Holloway. Screenplay by Lamar Trotti, adapted from the novel by Walter B. Pitkin. Director: George Marshall. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   Rogers was probably closer to 50 than 40 when he played Kenesaw H. Clark, a small-town newspaperman who loses his paper to banker George Barbier who calls in a loan after Rogers hires recently released convict Richard Cromwell, who had been convicted of stealing funds from Barbier’s bank.

   This is one of Rogers’ patented do-good roles as his rehabilitation of Cromwell includes proving he was framed for the theft and putting up lazy Slim Summville as an opposition candidate to Barbier in the upcoming school board election.

   Sterling Holloway plays dangerously close to a dead-on Caucasian Stepin Fetchit impersonation, with Hudson the schoolteacher who falls for Cromwell, and Darwell, greatness still ahead of her, doing her folksy (and very effective) maiden lady who may have an eye for perennial bachelor Rogers.

   The film’s portrayal of small-town America introduces some elements that almost veer into crime drama and an attempted lynching of Cromwell that casts an ugly shadow on this family comedy/drama.

   Rogers propelled these evocations of period America into box-office successes that may seem liked faded snapshots to some, but their genuine humor, warmth, and basic dramatic conflicts still have the power to engage and entertain.

DEAN OWEN – Juice Town.   Monarch 290; paperback original; first printing, December 1962. Cover art by Rafael M. deSoto.

   Over the years that he was writing, Dean Owen (born Dudley Dean McGaughey, 1909-1986) was perhaps better recognized for his westerns than for his crime fiction, but at the present time I doubt that he’s a well-known name in either field — except to regular readers of this blog, of course.

   If you follow the link that follows, though, you’ll find a fairly lengthy and what I hope is a complete checklist of all the fiction he wrote, starting out in the pulps, then moving on to writing paperback originals almost exclusively.

   Of the books already listed in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, I’ve found two errors. First of all, Juice Town is listed as only a marginal entry. Not so, as you will see in a minute. And A Killer’s Bargain (Hillman, pbo, 1960) is included, and I don’t believe it should be. From all I can tell without having it in hand, it’s a western, with no more crime elements than almost any other western has.

   And of the “sleaze” books Dean wrote, some may have definite crime elements, but while they’re included in the checklist, I don’t own any of them, so someone else will have to report in on those. (And in fact, two of the hard-to-find digests Owen wrote as Hodge Evens have since been confirmed as having substantial crime content.)

   It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book like this one. It starts out really, really tough and doesn’t let up until it’s over. It doesn’t matter too much if it’s also only a song with only one note. The one note is like a small incessant drumming in the background that just doesn’t go away until the book is finished.

   In a sense (speaking of westerns) this is a western in theme, at least, if not in reality. One guy in a white hat comes to town and cleans it up, one guy against the mob, one guy who’s left himself vulnerable with a wife and kids, but he does his job anyway.

   The guy in this book is Del Painter. Out of a job and looking for work – there’s a story behind that as well – he is persuaded to return to his home town of Southbay, California, and to join the same police department that he was so proud his Uncle Ray, now deceased, was a member of for so long.

   Little does Del know that his uncle was a crook, that the entire police department is crooked (and rather openly so), and that he on his first day on the job is expected to be a crook as well. Juice, in the sense of the title, means protection, as it is carefully explained to Del on page 34, and the police in Southbay make out very well, including the use of the services of the local ladies of the evening whenever they feel they have a need for them.

   Del has a hard head, though, and hard heads make for harder enemies in towns like this. He does make a few friends, however, although it difficult to tell at times – well, most of the time – on which side some of the friends are.

   Only 144 pages long, this book can be read in only one evening, and probably in only one sitting.

   And even though several weeks later you are probably not very likely to remember much of the details of what is admittedly a rather minor effort, this vividly jagged portrayal of a town with such a blatant disregard of the law may stick with you a whole lot longer than you think it will, when you’re done with it.

Hi Steve,

   I am starting to research the authors of the Herbert Jenkins publishing company, and wonder if you can help me by asking if anyone knows anything about four of their 1930s authors.

   Robert Ladline, Peter Luck and Gret Lane are pseudonyms of unidentified writers. The HJ archive tell me the contracts they hold are signed by different names, but won’t tell me without a search for descendants who would give permission for them to release the information! Since I have waited over a year so far for them to find such a descendant for another writer, that may be something to leave till all other possibilities have been checked.

   Garstin Begbie is the name on the contracts for books under that name, but a search of Ancestry etc has failed to produce anything.

   So would it be possible for you ask on your blog if the names mean anything to anyone? I know it’s a slim chance, but there’s always a chance someone might be looking for the names.

               Regards

                 John

Bibliographic Data [taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin] —

         BEGBIE, GARSTIN

    Murder Mask (Jenkins, 1934, hc) [Supt. Samuel Quan; England]
    Sudden Death at Scotland Yard (Jenkins, 1933, hc) [Supt. Samuel Quan; England]
    Trailing Death (Jenkins, 1932, hc) [England]

         LADLINE, ROBERT

    A Devil in Downing Street (Jenkins, 1937, hc) [J. A. (Rem) Remington; England]
    The Man Who Made a King (Jenkins, 1936, hc) [England]
    The Quest of the Vanishing Star (Jenkins, 1932, hc) [England]
    The Shoe Fits (Jenkins, 1936, hc) [J. A. (Rem) Remington; England]
    Sinister Craft (Jenkins, 1939, hc) [J. A. (Rem) Remington; England]
    The Sky’s the Limit (Jenkins, 1937, hc) [J. A. (Rem) Remington; England]
    Stop That Man! (Jenkins, 1940, hc) [J. A. (Rem) Remington; England]
    They Stuck at Nothing (Jenkins, 1935, hc) [England]
    When Fools Endanger Us (Jenkins, 1938, hc) [J. A. (Rem) Remington; England]
    When the Police Failed (Jenkins, 1933, hc) [England]
    The Wolf Swept Down (Jenkins, 1935, hc) [England]

         LANE, GRET. Given name probably Margaret.

    The Cancelled Score Mystery (Jenkins, 1929, hc) [Kate Clare (Marsh); (Insp.) John Barrin; England]
    The Curlew Coombe Mystery (Jenkins, 1930, hc) [Kate Clare (Marsh); (Insp.) John Barrin; England]
    Death in Mermaid Lane (Jenkins, 1940, hc) [Kate Clare (Marsh); (Insp.) John Barrin; England]
    Death Prowls the Cove (Jenkins, 1942, hc) [Kate Clare (Marsh); (Insp.) John Barrin; England]
    Death Visits the Summer-House (Jenkins, 1939, hc) [Kate Clare (Marsh); (Insp.) John Barrin; England]
    Found on the Road (Jenkins, 1926, hc) [England]
    The Guest with the Scythe (Jenkins, 1943, hc) [Kate Clare (Marsh); (Insp.) John Barrin; England]
    The Hotel Cremona Mystery (Jenkins, 1932, hc) [Kate Clare (Marsh); (Insp.) John Barrin; London]
    The Lantern House Affair (Jenkins, 1931, hc) [Kate Clare (Marsh); England]
    The Red Mirror Mystery (Jenkins, 1938, hc) [Insp. Hook; England]
    The Stolen Scar (Jenkins, 1925, hc) [Idaho]
    Three Dead That Night (Jenkins, 1937, hc) [Insp. Hook; England]
    The Unknown Enemy (Jenkins, 1933, hc) [Kate Clare (Marsh); (Insp.) John Barrin; England]

         LUCK, PETER

    Crime Legitimate (Jenkins, 1937, hc) [England]
    Infallible Witness (Jenkins, 1932, hc) [England]
    The Killing of Ezra Burgoyne (Jenkins, 1929, hc) [England]
    Terror by Night (Jenkins, 1934, hc) [England]
    The Transome Murder Mystery (Jenkins, 1930, hc) [England]
    Two Shots (Jenkins, 1931, hc) [England]
    Under the Fourth-? (Jenkins, 1927, hc) [England]
    Who Killed Robin Cockland? (Jenkins, 1933, hc) [England]
    The Wingrave Case (Jenkins, 1935, hc) [England]
    The Wrong Number (Jenkins, 1926, hc) [England]

CARTER BROWN – Lament for a Lousy Lover. Signet S1856, paperback original; 1st printing, 1960 [Baryé cover art]. Third printing: Signet D3162 [Robert McGinnis cover]. Also published in Carter Brown Long Story Magazine #19, Australia, Horwitz, 1961.

   The Australian writer Alan G. Yates, a veritable one-man paperback factory, has turned out hundreds of lightweight private-eye and police novels under the Carter Brown pseudonym. The books borrow liberally from the old Spicy Detective pulp formula: action, wisecracks, coarse humor, plenty of voluptuous un- and underdressed sexpots.

   This one is a bit unusual in that it features two of Brown’s regular series characters in one book: Al Wheeler, the skirt-chasing Pine City sheriff’s detective; and Mavis Seidlitz, an astonishingly endowed and astoundingly dizzy blonde who somehow manages to fmd work as a private eye.

   Their historic meeting was prompted by a suggestion from Anthony Boucher, the only mystery critic of consequence to regularly review Brown’s paperbacks.

   As is the case with many of Brown’s books, the background is Hollywood. Mavis is on location for the filming of a hit TV western series, hired to keep a couple of feuding starlets apart. The star is murdered (via the ancient wheeze of substituting live bullets for blanks), and Wheeler is assigned to the case.

   Everybody has a likely motive; another murder ensues; Mavis blunders around like an idiot; Wheeler lusts after the starlets and winds up with Mavis. The first-person narrative alternates between Wheeler and Mavis (Yates/Brown deserves extra credit for successfully managing to provide this burlesque caricature with a semi-plausible character voice).

   Among the dozens of other Al Wheeler novels are The Brazen (1960), Burden of Guilt (1970), and Wheeler Fortune (1974). Mavis Seidlitz also stars in None but the Lethal Heart (1959) and Tomorrow Is Murder (1960).

   Brown’s other series characters include L.A. private eye Rick Holman; Randy Roberts, a randy San Francisco lawyer; and Hollywood scriptwriter Larry Baker and his drunken partner, Boris Slivka.

         ———
   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: Other Carter Brown novels reviewed on this blog —

      Meet Murder, My Angel, by Geoff Bradley.

      The Deadly Kitten, by Stephen Mertz.

      Plus Toni Johnson-Woods on the CARTER BROWN MYSTERY THEATRE.

ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS. Orion Pictures, 1986. Patsy Kensit, Eddie O’Connell, David Bowie, James Fox, Ray Davies, Mandy Rice-Davies, Sade Adu. Based on the novel by Colin MacInnes. Original music: Gil Evans; cinematography by Oliver Stapleton. Director: Julien Temple.

   For me, this knockout of a movie musical was an absolute eye-opener. A veritable feast for the eyes and ears throughout, beginning with the opening narration by Colin (Eddie O’Connell):

   It is as if the war and the postwar recovery were over at last, and the world changed in a magical instant from black-and-white to vivid color. It is the summer of the teen-ager, brought to life and personified by Colin the photographer, and Suzette (Patsy Kensit) the model. Youth and young love and … money. Bright lights and glitter are always followed by trouble. No roads are ever easy, and there are always obstacles along the way.

   Success comes to Suzette first, and boy loses girl. Does that sum it up? Does boy win girl back? Don’t always be so sure.

   Beautifully photographed throughout, with the best of late 50s London pop and rock, as seen through the visual lens of 1986. If David Bowie and Ray Davies (of The Kinks) do not play your kind of music, as they do mine, this may not be the movie for you, but the flash and brilliant color may win you back.

   From the first sequence on, a melange of activity in a busy, thriving section of streets in a boisterous entertainment area in London, over two minutes long in one continuing shot filled with what looks like hundreds of musicians and dancers, I was caught up immediately. This is my kind of musical.

   Colin again:   “For the first time ever, kids were teenagers. They had loot, however come by and loot’s for spending. Where there’s loot, trouble follows.”

   Can you say “sell out”?

   And worse. The ending, incorporating as it does hints of class warfare (well, more than hints) and a well-choreographed racial riot that I’d have made several minutes shorter, but it is one of the four crucial parts of the book this film was based on, the events of which take place on four days in London — one a month — over an 18-year-old boy’s last summer as a teenager.

   Even so, some reviewers have said that this movie misses the whole point of the book, which I haven’t read, but I have a feeling they may be right, that any message the film may have intended is lost among the magnificent colors, vivid imagery, and above all, the music. An overload, in fact, but truthfully? I didn’t mind it for a second.

PETER CARTER BROWN – Meet Murder, My Angel. Horwitz-Transport, Australia, paperback, 1956.

   I’ve written before that one of my guilty pleasures is the Al Wheeler books of Carter Brown. Back in the 1950s and early ’60s, when I was an impressionable teenager, I read a lot of Brown in those large but thin Horwitz paperbacks.

   I found them to be fast, breezy and humorous reads and those few I’ve read in later days have been similarly entertaining.

   I saw this 1954 production — when Carter Brown was still Peter Carter Brown on the spine and title page, though he had morphed to just Carter Brown on the front cover — in a second hand bookshop and, though it was rather tatty, it was cheap and I couldn’t resist it.

   More fool me. When I got it home and started on it I expected a couple of hours of brisk humour but what I got was absolute rubbish. The story, narrated by Californian attorney Mike Stone, involves hidden treasures, old gangsters and beautiful women but is absolute tosh. Worse, it isn’t in the slightest bit funny.

EDITORIAL COMMENTS. I think it confirms Geoff’s judgment on this book to point out that unless it came out under a different title, this book was never published in either England or the US. It’s also a scarce book. There are no copies for sale anywhere on the Internet.

   Luckily Geoff kept the one he reviewed — I wasn’t sure after I read the his comments about the book! — so that’s the one you see up above. He adds: “The book is number 23 in the Horwitz series, and I believe it’s an Australian edition though the copyright page lists distribution agents for the UK, Ireland and Europe. The cover also has 2/- which is two shillings (or was in 1956).”

OLIVER BLEECK – The Brass Go-Between. William Morrow, hardcover, 1969. Paperback reprints include: Pocket, 1971; Perennial Library 1983,1987.

   Ross Thomas uses the pseudonym Oliver Bleeck for his entertaining Philip St. Ives books. These are fast-paced stories with first-person narration, reminiscent of many private-detective novels.

   But St. Ives is not a detective, he is a professional go-between — that is, he acts as an intermediary between such parties as kidnappers and the kidnap victim’s family, insurance companies and thieves, etc. He has built a reputation in this strange profession and people on both sides of the law seem to trust him.

   In The Brass Go-Between, the first book of the series, he is dealing with the Coulter Museum in Washington, D.C., attempting to recover a huge brass shield that has been stolen from the museum’s Pan-African collection.

   But there is more to the shield than meets the eye. Not only is it historically priceless, it is also a magnificent work of art. Add to this the fact that at least two opposing African nations claim rightful ownership and it becomes obvious many people would like to discover the whereabouts of the shield.

   Naturally, all this complicates St. Ives’s job as he encounters many of the interested parties along the way: Winfield Spencer, a rich and reclusive art collector; and Conception Mbwato, a giant emissary from the African nation of Komporeen, to name but two.

   This and the other Oliver Bleeck titles — Protocol for a Kidnapping (1971), The Procane Chronicle (1972), The Highbinders (1974), and No Questions Asked (1976) — are distinguished for their crisp dialogue, unusual backgrounds, and understated sense of irony. Qualities, of course, that Thomas also infuses into his novels published under his own name.

         ———
   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.

OLIVER BLEECK – Protocol for a Kidnapping.

Pocket, reprint paperback; 1st printing, June 1972. Hardcover edition: William Morrow, 1971. Later paperback: Perennial P646, 1983.

   Bleeck, as I’m sure you know, was the occasional pen-name of well-regarded thriller writer, Ross Thomas, whose five Bleeck novels all featured Philip St. Ives, by career a professional go-between, if you will. This is the second of them. (The first in the series, as a matter of fact, was The Brass Go-Between, 1969.)

   As a personal aside, the reason I know Thomas is well-regarded is because I once ventured the statement that I personally found his books less than always wonderful, and I was ragged on something fierce about this by several vociferous dissenters.

   Ah, well. So maybe I was wrong. Try again? Sure, and so here we are. Here’s my revised opinion. Thomas (as Bleeck) is good at describing atmosphere and setting — no make that better than good — and even better at creating characters. People who easily step off the page into your living room.

   But, and you know there was a ‘but’ coming, didn’t you? I didn’t think his plot held any more water than a bucketful of holes, and I didn’t think the mixture of lightness (if not humor) and the (for lack of a better work) bleakness at the end went together any better than milk and beer do, or ever did.

   The situation that St. Ives is called in on is that of a supposedly kidnapped American ambassador to Yugoslavia, in return for a imprisoned poet and his spectacularly beautiful granddaughter, and St. Ives’ expertise in similar criminal circumstances.

   The word ‘supposedly’ is correct, and I’m not revealing anything the reader doesn’t know by page 30, but I’ll issue a **PLOT ALERT** warning anyway, and say that there is some funny business going one and it’s all some kind of setup for what seems to be awfully far-fetched reasons, or at least in terms of why go to such lengths for such a small gain. **END PLOT ALERT**

   St. Ives’ two travelling companions, the fun-loving and seemingly carefree Winston and Knight — who reminded me of none other than Tommy Hambledon’s two associates, one of whose names was Campbell and I think I need some help with the other one — seem, as I say, to take it all as a lark, and so I did too.

   Until, that is, the body count started to stack up. I will have to read Manning Coles again. I am sure people died in his (their) books, but why do I remember the lightheartedness of the books, and not the bodies?

   I mentioned the granddaughter. There is another beautiful woman in the book — I almost said babe, but I refrained — Arrie Tonzi, an escort sent by the embassy to meet St. Ives and his party in Belgrade.

   Philip St. Ives does indeed like girls, as we soon discover, and I am sure Tommy Hambledon did also, but Manning Coles was, shall we say, of an earlier era, and we can only surmise.

   As long as I’m quoting, let me do a long one. I am impressed by Thomas’ way with words. From pages 73-74, when St. Ives and party first meet the granddaughter:

   I really wish I could write like that, and I really wish the plot had made more sense. Maybe I’ll read the book again. I really liked the good parts.

[UPDATE] 10-01-09. When I wrote the review I knew exactly what it was that didn’t work in terms of the plot, but I have to tell you, reading through this review again now, over six years later, I certainly don’t now. You’ll just have to take my word for it that the story has as many holes in it as I said I did.

   Do you trust me on this? I know I do, but then again, I have to live with myself.

WILLIAM P. McGIVERN – Very Cold for May. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1950. Reprint paperback: Pocket 786, April 1951. Trade paperback: Penguin, March 1987.

   Punny titles are among the earmarks of writers who got their start at the pulps, as did William P. McGivern, and his Very Cold for May is an example, once we learn that the name of the corpse is May Laval.

   The setting is McGivern’s home town, Chicago. (He would later in his career write primarily of Philadelphia, New York, and California.) May had been planning to publish a “tell-all” diary, and public relations expert Jake Harrison is hired to protect his friend Dan Riordan.

   When May’s lips and pen are permanently sealed, he turns detective to protect himself as well as his friend.

   If this book isn’t McGivern at his peak (as he is in Odds Against Tomorrow and The Big Heat), it is nonetheless a lively, tightly plotted book, and Penguin deserves thanks for reprinting it in their new Classic Crime series.