MALDEN GRANGE BISHOP – Scylla. Ace Double D-40, paperback original; 1st printing, 1954.

   The author of Scylla, Malden Grange Bishop, is a writer better known for his non-fiction (including a book on LSD that pre-dates the psychedelic era).

   Scylla is considerably less groundbreaking, a standard tale of domestic murder, not very intelligently planned nor, surprisingly, found out. Its marginal virtues, in fact, lie in the very ordinariness of concept and execution.

   The book reads as if it were written to fill out the back half of an Ace Double (which it does; the flip side is William Irish’s Waltz into Darkness) with the standard elements of sex, murder and not much else, and the writing is never bad enough to quit reading nor good enough to be memorable.

   What emerges reminds me of what Raymond Chandler said about giving murder back to the kind of people who commit it: Scylla, the villain of the piece is just a half-smart housewife, bored with her husband. She kills him not so much for money as because he simply irritates her — one of the leading motives for murder, if truth be known.

   The killing, as I said, is far from ingenious and the detection suitably uninspired, but the tale itself gains a certain verisimilitude from its own mediocrity. This is murder as it’s really done, by the kind of people who really do it, and if the singer is not particularly skillful, the song is like a familiar folk ballad heard and never forgotten.

Bibliographic Note: This is the only entry for the author in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.

DOUGLAS PRESTON & LINCOLN CHILD – The Cabinet of Curiosities. Grand Central Publishing, hardcover, June 2002; paperback: June 2003.

   One in a series of novels by the co-authors, this features Pendergast, an enigmatic FBI agent, who is investigating old crimes that are suddenly made current by a series of murders in NYC that are either copycat killings or improbable crimes by the still surviving killer.

   A newspaper reporter plays the role of the HIBK heroine (although he’s male), walking into situations that any sensible character would stay away from.

   The bizarre nature of the crimes and the gradual unfolding of the killer’s identity and his rationale kept me reading but I ended the read with a feeling of dissatisfaction about the length of the book (629 pages) and lapses in narrative interest.

From Wikipedia: “Aloysius X. L. Pendergast, PhD is a fictional character appearing in novels by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. He first appeared as a supporting character in their first novel, Relic, and in its sequel Reliquary, before assuming the protagonist role in The Cabinet of Curiosities.”

Later novels:

      Still Life with Crows (2003)

     “The Diogenes Trilogy” —

           Brimstone (2004) (Book One)

           Dance of Death (2005) (Book Two)

          The Book of the Dead (2006) (Book Three)

      The Wheel of Darkness (2007)

      Cemetery Dance (May 2009)

ELLERY QUEEN – The Siamese Twin Mystery.

Frederick A. Stokes, hardcover, October 1933. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and soft, including: Pocket Books #109, 1st printing, June 1941; Pocket #109, 10th printing, 1950; Pocket 6135, 12th printing, 1962; Signet T4086, 1970. (All shown.)

   I don’t know how long I’ll last on this particular resolution, it not being New Year’s and all, but I’ve promised myself that if I can, I’ll go back and start re-reading some (not all) of the books I devoured while I was growing up.

   This is the first one, and you can mark me as I go, although I probably won’t always be mapping and pointing the trail out along the way.

   I don’t know when I read this one the first time — I didn’t even realize that you were allowed to have opinions about books and movies until I was in junior high — and I really thought about keeping records of what I read until 1970 or so.

   And all I remember from the first reading of The Siamese Twin Mystery is the fire that drives Ellery and his dad, Inspector Queen, farther and farther up a mountain, flames licking at their tires most of the way.

   Ellery was driving his Duesenberg, a model of car the name of which thrilled me in itself, and one so old that my spell-checker doesn’t even recognize it. The rest of the story was a blank, though. I didn’t remember a thing.

   J. J. McC.’s foreword states the locale as Arrow Mountain, a peak in the Tepee range, which Google says is in Wyoming, perhaps extending as far south as Utah, but most definitely “in the heart of the ancient Indian country.”

   There at the top of the mountain, with no route to safety open to them, they take refuge in (guess what) an isolated pile of a mansion in which (you guessed) a murder is about to take place, and in fact, eventually, two.

   And not only is this an “isolated county manor” sort of story, but there are two dying messages involved — both in the form of torn playing cards found in the hands of each of the victims.

   Bizarre circumstances, gruesome murders, eerie surroundings, this is a detective story that has it all, settingwise, even a pair of conjoined (Siamese) twins. (No surprise there.)

   The actual detection, though, I thought was a trifle labored in comparison. The edition (a 3rd printing Pocket paperback from 1941) that I just finished did not even have a “Challenge to the Reader.”

   Not that I have ever been up to the challenge of one of those, but for an Ellery Queen yarn, the explanation at the end made me think I might have gotten this one.

   Well, the solution was clever enough, but I would have been close. Or I might have, I’m sure, if I’d thought about it. Ellery Queen’s solution are always obvious. Afterward.

   There is a good legal question that arose at one point — and don’t take my bringing this up as my in any way letting slip the identity of the killer(s) — but if one of the Siamese twins had done it, how could he have been punished, without punishing the (possibly innocent) other?

   This is a question I remember reading about somewhere before. Was there another tale, short story or novel, by another author perhaps, where the question also arose, or is one of the other things I remember from this mystery — besides the Duesenberg working its way up the mountain, that is?

PostScript. Got a favorite cover among this choice of five? Is there one that stands out for you and would make you want to buy the book as soon as you saw it? At cover price? There’s one for me, that’s for sure.

ADRIANNE BYRD – If You Dare. Harper Torch, paperback original; 1st printing, August 2004.

   If there’s one kind of caper novel that I like to read, it’s one that takes place in the world of art. I’m not sure why, as the kinds of social circles the protagonists in such novels travel in are those which are way above my head. Or is that the attraction?

   Blue Smoke and Murder, by Elizabeth Lowell, which I reviewed here not too long ago, was one such novel, and If You Dare is another. Or I thought it was when I bought it, almost five years ago, and again when I finally read it, sometime last week.

   Billed as a Romantic Suspense novel, it turned out to be more highly oriented toward the Romantic end of the scale, and Steamy Romance at that, then it did the Suspense portion of the billing.

   Damien Black is one half of the tango – he’s a professional art thief – and the unbelievably beautiful Angel Lafonte is the other – she’s the new director at an Atlanta museum, although he does not know that when he switches cell phones on her at a gathering where first they meet, and he’s willing to turn down the job he was hired for (steal from her new place of work) when he does.

   It’s an interesting way to make sure you meet a lady again, that’s for sure, and the relationship between them heats up rapidly from there, with all of the usual complications. But in spite of all the plans, all of the hints and all of the talk, there is only one art theft that takes place, and that’s offstage, and we never get to see any of the actual operation itself.

   And that’s what I was waiting for – and didn’t get – but according to those who reviewed If You Dare on Amazon, Ms. Byrd certainly delivered the goods in terms of what her real audience was looking for. Did I say Steamy Romance?

   There are a couple or three decent twists in the storyline, but while the author’s readers having been asking for a sequel (there hasn’t been one), I didn’t find anything solid enough in this effervescently light souffle to tempt me back – not without checking the merchandise more thoroughly next time.

JAMES ELLROY – Suicide Hill. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1986; paperback, April 1987. Reprinted in hardcover with Blood on the Moon and Because the Night as L. A. Noir, Warner, 1998. Trade paperback reprint: Vintage, 2006.

   Readers and moviegoers of the nineteen forties and fifties didn’t know it at the time, but they were living through the first wave of the harsh, moody, downbeat suspense novels and films we now describe as noir.

   Since around 1970 we’ve been battered by a second wave of noir in print and on the screen: Joseph Wambaugh, George V. Higgins, Elmore Leonard, James Crumley, Dirty Harry, The French Connection, Death Wish, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, Body Double — only this time the imagery is in color, not black-and-white, the sex and violence are graphic, not poetic, and the sense of sleaze is overpowering.

   For better or worse, it’s the books and films of the neo-noir configuration that most vividly shape our perception of American urban life today.

   James Ellroy is part of that configuration. He was born in 1948 and marked forever at age ten when his mother was strangled to death by a man she’d picked up in a bar. He drifted into the hippie-druggie subculture of the Vietnam years.

    “From ’65 to ’77,” he says, “I lived mostly on the streets, flopping out in parks, with about fifty arrests for drunk, trespassing, shoplifting, disturbing the peace, and other Mickey Mouse, booze-related misdemeanors. I imagine I did a total of about six months’ county jail time.

    “I almost croaked from a series of booze- and dope-related maladies early in ’77. Realizing that it was live or die, I opted for life. I’ve been sober since August of ’77.”

   He began writing a year or two later. Suicide Hill is his fifth novel in as many years and the third of his police procedurals featuring L.A.P.D. detective sergeant Lloyd Hopkins, Los Angeles’ version of Dirty Harry.

   The Hopkins books are contrapuntally structured, with the alternation of perpetrator-cop-perpetrator-cop chapters borrowed from Wambaugh’s 1974 classic, The Onion Field, and are punctuated with blood orgies borrowed from neo-noir movie directors like Brian De Palma.

   By Ellroy’s standards the first half of Suicide Hill is quiet and almost sedate, introducing the sleaze ball cast — a white psycho, a Chicano psycho, the Chicano’s weak-willed kid brother, the coked-out porn video star by whom the white psycho is obsessed, a call girl with a master’s in economics and a habit of reading George Gilder’s capitalist manifestos between tricks — and setting us up for confrontations between each of these characters and Crazy Lloyd Hopkins.

   The blood and brains flow in earnest during the book’s second half, with five gruesome killings between pages 149 and 168 alone, as Hopkins comes closer and closer to the showdown which, for weird reasons of his own, Ellroy never lets happen.

   Crazy Lloyd is a walking time-bomb, clearly just as sick as the pervs and perps he deals with. He routinely commits burglary to obtain evidence and perjury to get convictions. He fantasizes maiming the people he hates, such as a left-wing lawyer or his estranged wife’s new lover, and every so often he makes good on his dreams.

   Ellroy draws all sorts of parallelisms between cops and creeps, but at the same time he wants us to accept Hopkins as a Jesus of the gutters, the way Wambaugh portrays his own police heroes. It’s one of Suicide Hill‘s many weaknesses that Ellroy never fuses the two sides of his protagonist’s character into a unity.

   There are other problems, too: key scenes that are nearly incomprehensible, slipshod construction in spots, constant grammatical flubs that betray the white heat in which the book was written. And yet with all its faults this book has power. Ellroy is a master of the single most crucial neo-noir skill: he can make the nightworld of sleaze and street monsters come alive on the page.

   At one point he has a character “wondering if the world was nothing but wimps, pimps, psychos and sex fiends.”

   For Ellroy, child of violence and the city, the answer is Yes, and so far he has not conjured up an effective redeemer. If you can stand the relentless assault, on every level from physical butchery to sex abuse to four-, ten-, and twelve-letter words to racist humor, this is a perversely fascinating evocation of a world gone mad.

Bibliographic Update:  The three novels included in L. A. Noir (see above), were the only appearances of Sgt. Lloyd Hopkins in print.

   The sixties and early seventies were the heyday of the made for television movie, and while most were tired and unimaginative, a few gems did emerge. The three films I’ll be covering in a series of upcoming posts featured excellent casts, intriguing plots, and above average production values.

   As far as I know none of them have been on VHS or DVD, but that should be changed. They were all superior entertainment. All three aired originally on NBC.

HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION. Made for TV. Universal/NBC-TV; telecast 07 Jan 1967. Robert Wagner, Jill St. John, Peter Lawford, Lola Albright, Walter Pidgeon, Michael Ansara. Teleplay: Gene R. Kearney; director: William Hale.

   Aging hip graduate student Jack Washington (Wagner) is in Europe living on the fringes of the Jet Set when he meets Nikki Pine (St. John) and begins to pursue her. At first her charming father billionaire Ned Pine (Lawdord) and mother (Albright) seem like nice people, but when Jack gets serious he finds himself out on his ear, framed for a crime he didn’t commit and roughed up.

   Out of revenge he begins compiling a dossier on Pine, and soon finds himself up to his ears in trouble with a army of killers out to get him led by Pine’s top man Pucci (Ansara). Lewis Gannett (Pidgeon) the Pine’s lawyer knows where the bodies are buried — literally — and is fed up with Pine’s murderous ways, Jack hopes to use him it get the secrets of who Pine is.

   Vacation is a slight but entertaining little fable that plays heavily on the charm and skill of its cast and is rewarded by being a fast paced film much slicker and better than many that found their way to the big screen. As Wagner’s Jack changes from aging hipster to amateur James Bond, the film grows darker and ends in a nice slam bang finale that leaves Jack in the catbird seat.

   This sort of fluff can go wrong quickly, but thanks to the cast and script doesn’t. Lawford does a nice sinister turn and Albright is darker than she is painted. Even St. John shines in what could have been a throwaway role.

Coming soon:

   Run a Crooked Mile (1969), with Louis Jourdan and Mary Tyler Moore.

    It took some cropping to do it, but my nephew Ben came up with a fairly decent photo of me taken the evening before his sister Joey’s wedding. It’s hidden in the comments following my previous post about the big day, three before this one, so you might not have known about it without my telling you. Don’t all rush there at once.

CLIFFORD KNIGHT – The Affair of the Fainting Butler.

Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1943. Hardcover reprint, Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, November 1943.

   There are those, and I am among them, who read mysteries primarily to find out if the butler did indeed do it. Unfortunately, these days there are few novels in which you can suspect the butler, a breed that has been an endangered and even vanishing species for years.

   This is one of the old-fashioned novels that still affords us that pleasure. And, yes, the butler does faint. In fact, he faints three times. Did he do it? That would be telling.

   Larry Weeks, agent — or flesh peddler, if you prefer — for Jenifer Janeway, who wrote magazine serials “that made worrying wives, whose husbands had young sophisticated secretaries, think of Reno,” goes to Janeway’s home to try to keep her from carrying out her threat to commit suicide. She is about to start writing screenplays, and she is his meal ticket.

   While Janeway and Weeks are in her garden, Sloan Hinckley, Shakespearean actor and Weeks’s other but lesser client, appears on the wall. He is Janeway’s neighbor — ah, coincidence, where would mystery writers be without you? — and has come to report that he has discovered a corpse on her grounds.

   No corpse, however, is to be found. When Janeway is visited shortly thereafter by an old friend, Hinckley claims that the old friend was the corpse.

   There are several murders of varying unlikelihood for equally unlikely reasons. The amateur detective, Prof. Huntoon Rogers, is a veritable nonentity. Though he is present throughout the novel and solves the crimes, if his name isn’t before you at all times, you tend to forget his existence.

[EDITORIAL COMMENT.] You can google Huntoon Rogers, Clifford Knight’s detective character, all you want, but you won’t find much out about him. He’s about as anonymous as Bill Deeck suggests, especially considering he was the leading character in 18 of Knight’s detective novels in an 11-year period between 1937 and 1947, all of which began with The Affair of …

   But think about it. Eighteen books in eleven years. That’s a pretty good track record for an author and a series character both of whom are all but forgotten now. (I read one once, and I can’t even tell you now which one of them it was.)

        Bibliographic data:

   Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

ROGERS, PROF. HUNTOON.    Series character created by Clifford Knight, 1886-1963.
      The Affair of the Heavenly Voice (n.) Dodd 1937 [California]
      The Affair of the Scarlet Crab (n.) Dodd 1937 [Ship]

      The Affair at Palm Springs (n.) Dodd 1938 [California]

      The Affair of the Ginger Lei (n.) Dodd 1938 [Hawaii]
      The Affair of the Black Sombrero (n.) Dodd 1939 [Mexico]
      The Affair on the Painted Desert (n.) Dodd 1939 [Arizona]
      The Affair in Death Valley (n.) Dodd 1940 [California]
      The Affair of the Circus Queen (n.) Dodd 1940 [Manila]
      The Affair of the Crimson Gull (n.) Dodd 1941 [California]
      The Affair of the Skiing Clown (n.) Dodd 1941 [California]

      The Affair of the Limping Sailor (n.) Dodd 1942 [California]

      The Affair of the Splintered Heart (n.) Dodd 1942 [Hawaii]
      The Affair of the Fainting Butler (n.) Dodd 1943 [Los Angeles, CA]
      The Affair of the Jade Monkey (n.) Dodd 1943 [California]

      The Affair of the Dead Stranger (n.) Dodd 1944 [California]
      The Affair of the Corpse Escort (n.) McKay 1946 [Los Angeles, CA]
      The Affair of the Golden Buzzard (n.) McKay 1946 [California]
      The Affair of the Sixth Button (n.) McKay 1947 [California]

PostScript: You probably do not want to know how much those books in dust jacket would set you back, but I’ll tell you anyway. Excluding the Dell mapback (approximately $15) perhaps mid-three figures each, on the average.

LORNA DOONE. Columbia/Edward Small Productions, 1951. Barbara Hale, Richard Greene, Carl Benton Reid, William Bishop, Ron Randell, Sean McClory, Onslow Stevens, John Dehner. Loosely based on the book Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor (1869) by R. D. Blackmore; adapted by George Bruce. Director: Phil Karlson.

   Cramming a long book into a 90-minute movie is not an easy task, but as far I know, the essence of the story is all there. The reason I’m hedging in that last statement is that all I’ve ever read of the book, which has never been out of print, is the comic book version, Classics Illustrated edition (#32), the cover of which I show you here.

   I had this comic book for many years, primarily for the cover, I think, but it finally went with the rest of my hoard of Golden Age comics about 15 years ago. I sold most of them off — unfortunately so, as I sorely miss them now.

   But speaking of the cover, I didn’t know this when I was young, but it was done by Matt Baker, famed GGA artist of the late 1940s and 50s. GGA stands for Good Girl Art, a statement with which (in Baker’s case) I heartily agree. (And do follow the link. The covers on that site are terrific.)

   The story of Lorna Doone takes place in an isolated valley in England in the late 17th century, isolated enough that the Doones rule the area at their whim, taxing the peasants unmercifully and punishing them viciously if they protest — roguish if not utterly outlaw actions which take place unknown to King Charles II.

   When John Ridd’s father is killed at the hands of the Doones while he is yet a young lad, he vows revenge. When he is older (and looks like Richard Greene — an obvious choice, the latter later becoming TV’s Robin Hood), he’s also in love with Lorna Doone, the granddaughter of Sir Ensor, the patriarch of the family.

   The movie is beautifully filmed — the colors are generally top notch, and the waterfall plunging downward near the Doone castle is rather spectacular — but it’s the actors that often seem to get in the way.

   I don’t mean that as disparagingly as it sounds. There’s enough action and romance to satisfy almost anyone who watches, and Barbara Hale (who later became Perry Mason’s Della Street) is as ravishing beautiful as a young royal damsel could be — a perfect replica, I thought, of a Matt Baker drawing.

   Otherwise, though, if you were to take another look through the cast, I think you will see as well as I what’s missing: no one of star quality. Workmanlike actors all, but no one with the flair of an Errol Flynn or an Olivia de Havilland (to pick a couple of obvious examples) who might have taken this film a step or two out of the ordinary.

   Pleasurable enough then, but still ordinary and not more than mildly satisfying. The book been made into numerable films and various TV movies and mini-series. I’ll try another of them sometime, I think, as well as see if I can’t find another copy of the comic book as nice as the one I had.

Wedding of Jocelyn Susannah Lewis and Sheldon James Morris.

      Ceremony on June 6th 2009 at Elsie Perrin Williams Estate, London Ontario.

This particular set of photos was taken by Joey’s brother Ben. I’m not in any of the ones I’m showing you. Someone in every picture I was in is grumpy-looking and/or has their eyes closed, not always me. If you want professionally-edited photos from special occasions, you may consider seeking photo retouching services.

Those who are also planning to get married should consider looking at a prenup example to learn what should be included in their own prenup agreement.

Sheldon, Joey, my brother Merwin and his wife Carol.

Sheldon and Joey after the ceremony.

Sheldon.

Joey.

Joey, Sheldon and a restored 1959 (or early 1960s) Triumph.