A couple of weeks ago, I posted an inquiry on the behalf of Charles Seper, who was looking for a photo of mystery writer Philip MacDonald.

   He had only a small one at the time, and Juergen Lull found another small one that he sent me, which I posted here.

   But from the back cover of the Doubleday edition of The List of Adrian Messenger, Charles was able to obtain what he was looking for, a large photograph of Mr MacDonald that he could use as part of a project he’s working on.

   I’m grateful to him for sending it along. I was sure I’d seen one somewhere over the years. I’m not sure that this is the one I remember, but if it’s not, it’s close:

THE SECRET SIX. MGM, 1931. Wallace Beery, Clark Gable, Lewis Stone, Jean Harlow, Ralph Bellamy, Marjorie Rambeau, Johnny Mack Brown. Screenwriter: Frances Marion (later the author of a novelized edition). Director: George W. Hill.

    I stumbled onto the last half of this crime film in Paris, while I was checking channels to find something other than the French-dubbed American TV series that seem to dominate French television.

    The film was shown in the original English-language version and featured an impressive cast, as enumerated above, including Johnny Mack Brown in a non-Western role.

    Beery and Stone form an unlikely pair as a crime Syndicate ganglord and a crooked lawyer opposed by a masked group of concerned citizens. Harlow is the good/bad girl, and Gable the undercover agent working to dethrone Beery and expose Stone.

    Pre-classic-period MGM films don’t turn up on American TV these days, and it was a pleasure to see even part of this skillful thriller by another director previously unknown to me.

[EDITORIAL COMMENT.]   This was written, of course, before Turner Classic Movies came along. The Dark Ages are over, and movies of the same era as The Secret Six can be seen on TV several times a week. Nor are films with stars such as this one obscure any longer, even if the stars weren’t stars at the time. With both Gable and Harlow in the film, it’s easy to find stills taken from it to go along with reviews like this one.

    Here’s another:

   You should be warned before venturing into Dornford Yates country that there is no middle ground. Either you will be charmed and drawn in to the never-never land of his mostly between-the-wars adventure tales set in a Europe that owes more to Anthony Hope’s Ruritania or George Barr McCutcheon’s Graustark (Yates own Ruritania was the mythical Carinthia) than Eric Ambler’s back alleys, or you will throw up your hands in disgust. There’s little in the way of gray area when it comes to Yates.

   Yates was in reality Major Cecil William Mercer (1885-1960), a solicitor and the son of a solicitor (two of the three writers Richard Usborne calls the “Clubland” writers, Yates and Buchan, are solicitors, which may or may not mean something) and a cousin of H.H. Munro (Saki), seems to have been a bit of a crank and certainly thoroughly unpleasant.

   Pawky, bossy, and quick to take offense, his reaction to World War II was largely to complain he had to leave his French home, and his reaction to Post-War England was so violent he picked up and moved to Rhodesia where he ensconced himself in a small personal fiefdom.

   Neither A. J Smithers’ biography (Dornford Yates, A Biography) nor O. F. Snelling’s biographical sketch (“The Disagreeable Dornford Yates” at Wes Britton’s SpyWise blog) manage to project a very likable individual, and Richard Usborne, whose book The Clubland Heroes is the major study of Yates, Sapper, and John Buchan’s fiction, recounts how Yates threatened legal action when contacted because Usborne misused the term cad. Luckily it is the fiction and not the man under review here.

    From the early twenties into the fifties, Yates wrote some of the most delightful books of his era. The Wodehousian books about Berry and Company are light-hearted romps featuring upper middle class Englishmen and women and their hijinks at home and abroad (smuggling of goods to avoid the duties was virtually a sport in Yates novels). The tone is light and playful, and the books retain much of their original charm.

   The thrillers feature much the same European settings, and Jonah (Jonathan) Mansel ties the two types of books together, but while he’s still bossy in the Berry books, the Mansel of the thrillers is an altogether more dangerous character who once killed a man (the splendidly named Barabbus) with a single blow of his fist. (William Chandos, Mansel’s second in command and hero of his own books also does for a villain with a single blow, though in his case, Goat, is only a henchman, not a master criminal.)

   The Mansel books and some non-series works usually team Mansel with William Richard Chandos, and George Hanbury, a pair of younger men who were sent down from Oxford after beating up some Bolshies (keep in mind this is written while the Russian Revolution was still making headlines).

   In the first of the thrillers, Blind Corner, Chandos and Hanbury are on the Continent when they stumble on a murder, and the dying Englishman leads them home where a clue in the collar of the dead man’s dog eventually leads to Mansel, who has the ear of the Foreign Office, Scotland Yard, the Surete, and it is suggested MI6.

   Soon they are up to their necks along with their servants Carson, Bell, and Rowley (no Yates hero would go abroad without a servant in company) in battle against Count Axel the Red, and before it’s over splitting a notable treasure among themselves and the servants.

   This adventure takes them to Carinthia and Castle Wagensburg, where Mansel notes with some pleasure: “If you fought a duel with a pair of Lewis guns nobody’d take the trouble to come see what it was.” (Incidentally that odd apostrophe d for “nobody would” is a typical Yates touch. He sprinkles them everywhere.)

   Names play a great role in the pleasures of Yates. Among the thrillers, titles like Cost Price, She Fell Among Thieves, Red Sky at Morning, Lower than Vermin, An Eye For a Tooth, Storm Music, and Perishable Goods promise what they deliver.

   Then there are the villains (rotters to a man) like Count Axel, Rose Noble, Duke Saul of Varvic, Barabbus, Casca de Palk (“the English Willie with a mouth full of teeth and an Oxford accent”), Lord Withyham, Oliver Bleeding, Erny Balch, Daniel Gedge, Douglas Bladder, Boris Blurt, Coker Falk (an American), Sycamore Tight, and Major Von Blodgenbruck among the rogues’ gallery, with helpers whose names are things like Jute Shade (a crooked private detective), Goat, Lousy, and Sweaty.

   Yates is also a great one for fine place names like the Castles of Gath, Midian, and Jezeel, and estates like White Ladies, Gracidieu, Break o’ Day, Poke Abbas, and Mockery Hall. There’s even a village named Broad i’ the Beam.

   Dickens’s lower middle class sentimentality probably didn’t sit well with Yates, but his character names most certainly did. He has a less than kind view of his own profession as well, with solicitors like Biretta and Cain, Aaron and Stench, and Oxen and Baal not uncommon. (It’s a wonder they ever got a client.)

   Whole volumes could be written about Yates use of the English language, but it suits the novels well. Berry, warned he will get his hands dirty during a bit of second story work replies:

       “That were impossible … If I massaged a goat in a coal-mine, I couldn’t get these hands dirty.”

or this from Mansel in Perishable Goods:

       “But for the whistle I heard, that it was not you, Chandos, would never have entered my mind.”

and:

       “Rose Noble may have a fine hand, but he knows us too well to sleep sound when we are out of his ken.”

and something must be said of Jonah’ highhandedness as in The House That Berry Built, when he has done for the wretch Stapely:

       “An unknown man is found dead, We can do for the details later, don’t you agree, Falcon? (Superintendent Falcon of the Yard)”

   Philo Vance or Sherlock Holmes could hardly have done it better. Falcon, naturally, agrees. Only villains ever balk at Jonah’s commands, and they usually end badly.

   Where women play little role in the novels of Sapper or Buchan, they are important in Yates world. Phyllis Drummond largely exists to be kidnapped in Sapper’s (H.C. McNeile) Bulldog Drummond books and Irma Peterson mostly to do the kidnapping and seek revenge for the death of her beloved Carl.

   Buchan’s women tended to be practical and boyish, but not particularly attractive, though Janet Roylance in John McNab and Kore Arabin in The Dancing Floor have their moments.

   This isn’t to suggest Yates is a proto-feminist, but the ladies who occupy his books are smart and attractive and well worth the risks involved rescuing them. There’s even a hint of sex that raises its head in Yates such as when Mansel has John Bagot and Audrey Nuenham registered as man and wife in French hotels while on the run after Bagot has already had to strip her unconscious form and rub her down after a near drowning.

   Or take Storm Music where the hero and heroine take refuge in an idyllic woodland cabin, take time out for a skinny dip in a remote forest glade, and spend the night together during a magnificent thunderstorm. Nothing is ever stated, but there is a good deal implied, or inferred by the reader. And the ladies often set their sights for Chandos or Mansel, though in Mansel’s case to no use.

   And there is no shortage of deadly traps in the books. Castle walls must be laid siege to, and some very nasty dungeons escaped. In Red Sky at Morning a remote schloss has a treacherous Judas floor that very nearly does our heroes in (a Judas floor is one built on a pivot that when released can drop you into a nasty inescapable dungeon underneath) and the threat of ending in some cold moat or down a Jacob’s ladder ala The Prisoner of Zenda is always present.

   Barzun and Taylor praised Yates for his use of “Sturm und Drang” in A Catalogue of Crime, and it’s an apt phrase, for weather and scenery and setting play a large role in the charms of the books. Storms roll across the tops of mountains, fogs hamper deadly races along treacherous roads, and natural wonders like waterfalls are always good for dispatching villains or first glimpsing a beautiful damsel. Yates took the term “blood and thunder” literally and never skimps on either. It’s almost impossible to write about Yates and not use the term full-blooded.

   Like most of the heroes of the era Mansel and company are a law unto themselves, and seldom waste time with the authorities, save for a bit of cleanup at the end. They have a particular disregard for customs authorities, and Mansel’s Rolls and Aston Martin both have secret compartments used to smuggle treasure, brandy, and his sealyingham terrier, Tester past nosy customs men. (It’s been suggested that Mansel’s Aston Martin inspired James Bond’s in Goldfinger.)

   The books are adventure, thrillers, not detective stories, though Yates did write one detective novel, Ne’er-Do-Well (1954) in which Superintendent Falcon relates a case to Chandos and Mansel, but Yates proves no threat to Agatha Christie. Clever puzzlers were not his forte. But most of the books, humorous and serious have criminous ties, and all are informed with an almost addictive sense of adventure as a form of play (as opposed to duty in Buchan).

   Readers interested in Yates will find A.J. Smithers book Dornford Yates, A Biography and Richard Usborne’s The Clubland Heroes invaluable. Usborne’s book is perhaps the only one to really study the phenomena of Yates, Sapper, and Buchan’s ‘shockers’ and is a classic in the field. Luckily it has been reprinted often enough that it isn’t hard to find or particularly expensive when found. I have relied on it heavily in writing this since my Yates books are currently still boxed up.

   For those wanting to dip their toes in, but not invest any money, several of the Berry books are available as free ebooks at Project Gutenberg and Manybooks to be read online or downloaded.

   One of the short stories from Brother of Daphne was adapted as an episode of the BBC series Hannay about John Buchan’s hero Richard Hannay, and the first episode of Mystery! shown in this country was She Fell Among Thieves, with Malcolm McDowell as Chandos and Michael Jayston (Nicholas and Alexandria and Quiller) as Mansel.

   There is also a musical with lyrics by Yates. Sadly the books were never adapted to film in their day, which is a shame, since they are cinematic and romantic, and the Berry books would make a wonderful television series, all done with a light touch.

   Yates isn’t going to be for every taste, but if you like a bit of adventure, the romance of low-slung cars on treacherous roads at high speeds, dastardly villains, clever heroes, and worthy heroines Yates is your man. True, the term Snobbery with Violence could have been coined to describe Yates novels, but if you are very sensitive to class consciousness you probably won’t be reading much between the wars fiction anyway.

   Yates is the kind of writer designed for a stormy night and a roaring fire with a cat snoring in your lap and or a good dog at your feet, even if you are really reading in bed with the television on for background noise. Reading Yates is the next best thing to a pipe and smoking jacket, and a good deal more comfortable and healthy.

   But I warn you. His particular brand of the whole Clubland scene can be addictive.

I SEE A DARK STRANGER. Individual Pictures/General Films, 1946. US title: The Adventuress. Deborah Kerr, Trevor Howard, Raymond Huntley, Norman Shelley, Garry Marsh, Tom Macaulay. Director: Frank Launder.

   This one was an eye-opener, I’ll tell you that first. In spite of From Here to Eternity, I’d always thought of Deborah Kerr as being the epitome of the pleasant matronly type, even when she was too young to be a matronly type. But when she herself was young, she was a shy but determined spitfire, or at least she could play one, as her role in I See a Dark Stranger most definitely shows.

   And in spite of being Scottish by birth, she could also play a young unsophisticated Irish lass so filled with hatred toward the British that when she was 21, she could travel alone to Dublin from her small village and ask to be signed up to fight them — not realizing that during World War II, Ireland was not exactly fighting the British.

   You noticed the qualification in that last sentence, I’m sure. To appreciate this movie more, you’d have to know that in World War II Ireland was officially neutral, and the Nazis had somewhat realistic hopes of using the enmity between the two countries to their own ends. (See my review of The Private Wound by Nicholas Blake for a mystery novel that also uses this small but hardly insignificant bit of history as its backdrop.)

   Turned down by an old comrade of her father’s in the continuance of her cause, Bridie Quilty turns to a German spy named Miller, played by Raymond Huntley with much worldly panache and aplomb, the cigarette in his mouth bobbing up and down in his mouth as he speaks as if it were alive and trying to escape.

   Fatally attracted to her, however, is Lt. David Baynes (Trevor Howard), who follows her clear across England and back to Ireland, hoping to (first of all) discover why she is acting so strangely — having to dispose of a dead body in the middle of the night will do that for a girl — and then try to extricate her from the troubles she finds herself up to her pretty neck in.

   Back when there was a long discussion on this blog about the definition of noir when it comes to films or books, a question was asked whether there was a satisfactory combination of noir with screwball comedy in the same movie. The Big Clock comes close (reviewed here), but here is another one.

   Or at least it is if two conditions are satisfied. First of all, that there are sufficient dark and sinister elements in this film that it could be actually be called noir. It’s currently described that way on many blogs, including Steve-O’s Noir of the Week blog, but I’m not so sure. It’s borderline at best — nor do I think the comedy is of the screwball variety.

   And this is where the movie went off the tracks, as far as I was concerned. The ending is pure slapstick, with pratfalls into a bathtub the highlight of all of the happy hijinks of the final reel. Till then, though, up to the point where both Bridie and Lt. Baynes are captured by German agents, it’s an exciting tale of espionage laced with humor, with the latter emphasized by Bridie’s complete wide-eyed seriousness. She’s determined to fight the British, and nothing will stop her.

   Strangely enough, she doesn’t have red hair. It’s brown, and she’s young and naive, and she has blue eyes, and if nothing else, she’s a sight for sore eyes, that is for sure. The large ensemble of British movie actors and actresses behind her, a stalwart group indeed, only adds in making this a very entertaining film, noir or no. (And make that whether the ending matches the rest of the film, or not.)

WILLIAM G. TAPPLY – The Vulgar Boatman. Ballantine, paperback reprint; 1st printing, September 1989. Hardcover edition: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987.

   This is the sixth of William Tapply’s series of Brady Coyne adventures, a series that last year reached 24 in number, which is a fairly spectacular record, nor do I think he (or either of them) is going to being retiring soon. Reviewed previously on this blog have been Cutter’s Run (1998) by me, and The Dutch Blue Error (1984), a 1001 Midnights review by Kate Mattes.

   Part of Tapply’s success as an author is a smooth writing style that’s just as adept in descriptive passages – sights and sounds in and around the Boston area – as it is in dialogue, which as real as it gets without having a tape recorder in your pocket.

   People come to life immediately in Tapply’s hands, in other words, in just a few broad strokes at first, then some much more finely drawn ones. The way they talk and act is a great part of what makes the Brady Coyne books so entertaining and read so quickly.

   In The Vulgar Boatman, Coyne is hired by a good friend who happens to be running for governor, and whose son is missing after the son’s girl friend has been found murdered. This is not good news for Tom Baron’s gubernatorial aspirations, of course. Coyne, not wishing to get drawn into politics, agrees to help, but only on a personal basis.

   Both Tom’s son and the girl friend were high school students, and the easy availability of drugs, even in a small suburban town, and crack in particular, soon becomes part of the case.

   I do not use the latter word to suggest that this is a detective novel, however. This is a crime novel, it’s a thriller, but a work of detective fiction, it’s not. While there are clues to follow up on, detective work is not in Brady Coyne’s arsenal of expertise.

   He blunders along and stirs things up, gets into trouble himself (from several quarters) and before you know it, the book is over, more or less happily. There are, however, three separate points in the story where Coyne fails as a detective. Well, let’s call the first instance a D Minus, but the other two are F’s for sure.

   I’d enumerate them in detail, but I’d have to reveal too much for the purposes of a mere review. I’d also be criticizing the book for what I’d want it to be, and not necessarily for the author’s failed intentions. Nor am I suggesting that you not read the book, as I enjoyed it anyway, and I think you might very well do so too.

RAMONA. Biograph, 1910. Mary Pickford, Henry B. Walthall, Francis J. Grandon, Kate Bruce, W. Chrystie Miller. Based on the novel by Helen Hunt Jackson. Director: D.W. Griffith.

   If cutting Crime and Punishment down to a 90 minute movie was a considerable feat, as discussed briefly here, a few posts back, then how about a 200 to 300 page novel that’s trimmed down to a very quick 17 minutes?

    It can’t be done, but it was, and the result is about as good (or bad) as you might expect.

   Starting with the positive, the photography is quite remarkable. But there are no dialogue cards, only brief statements of what the next scene is to display, and in the two reels, there’s only enough time to get the gist of things, no more.

   Subtitled “The Story of the White Man’s Injustice to the Indian,” a Spanish girl in California (Mary Pickford) marries an Indian (Henry B. Walthall), they have a child, and as the subtitle suggests, they do not live happily ever after. The gun-toting white settlers who keep moving the small family on do not come off at all well in this movie.

   This movie is to be watched for its historical significance, and — unless you tell me otherwise — for little other reason. Thankfully it still exists to be watched today, nearly 100 years later.

   British author John Arnold perpetrated five mystery novels during the golden age of the detective story, but The London Bridge Mystery (Jenkins, 1932) is not detection at all. It’s a thriller, almost from end to end a chase story – on foot, by car, by motorcycle, in the water, instalment after instalment.

   There’s very little credibility in any of it, but it is possible to get caught up in the continuous action. David Royle, an innocent accountant, is taking the underground home one evening when a girl, pursued by “toughs,” gives him a cloakroom ticket, whispers an assignation, and bolts. The toughs turn their malevolent attentions on our hero, who also takes to his heels.

   Various comic and perilous episodes ensue as several groups seek the booty (fabulously valuable Chinese statuettes stolen from the British Museum). At length Royle finds someone who believes his story (an attractive and unattached young woman, would you believe?), and together they scramble for a way out of the maze, with Scotland Yard also at their heels.

   Elliot Bailey, a 1930s British author never published here, wrote several novels featuring Detective Inspector Geoffrey Fraser of New Scotland Yard.

   The second of these, following Death in Quiet Places, is No Crime So Great (Eldon, 1936). Here we find him wedded to Mary, whom he rescued from a killer’s clutches in the first book, and attending to a curious series of murders. Someone is taking deadly offense to England’s athletic heroes: one by one they are shot, just as the light of public acclamation shines most brightly.

   They all seem without personal enemies; what twisted motive could be at work? Fraser fastens his eye on a lame newsman who seems always nearby when bodies are produced, but there are other possibilities… No Crime is typical stuff of its day, satisfactorily readable but not outstanding in narrative style or plot or unexpectedness of denouement.

   They don’t come much more obscure than The Glory Box Mystery (Angus & Robertson, 1937) by G. W. Wicking. Aside from the obscurity of the author (apparently an Australian, who did indeed write other books), what’s a glory box?

   It proves to be a dower chest. I gather a dower is a widow’s life portion of her husband’s lands and tenements. There’s some irony in this, for when a clerk shows the box to a prospective purchaser in Melbourne’s Home Furnishers Emporium, it contains the corpse of one of the owners.

   Enter detective Dick Greenwood of the Criminal Investigation Branch. What follows is a fairly routine affair, with gradual revelation of the murderer and a final resolution that’s a bit surprising for the 1930s.

   I’ve posted several times on this blog about J. V. Turner, aka David Hume, the most recent being some biographical notes provided by Judith Gavin, whose grandfather was Turner’s brother Alfred.

   Based on the information she provided, Steve Holland did some researching and has come up with a lot more, including Turner’s correct year of birth, 1905, not 1900, and that “he was, in fact, the third son and youngest of six children.”

   I’m quoting here from Steve H.’s Bear Alley blog, where besides all of the biographical data he’s uncovered, he adds a complete bibliography and a few covers that I’ve not seen before.

   Turner, under both his own name as and David Hume, was a thriller writer, more interested in guns and gangsters than sedate manor house detective stories. Steve also suggests that:

    “Hume’s Mick Cardby novels might be the first to feature a hardboiled British private detective. Not the first British hardboiled stories: Hugh Clevely, John G. Brandon, John Hunter and Edgar Wallace had already featured gangs and gangsters in London; nor the first British private detective of which there had been countless examples; he wasn’t the first fist-swinging crime solver, either, but Mick may have been the first bonafide British private eye fighting gangs and gunmen in the UK.”

   I don’t know if that’s grounds enough for you to give either Turner or Hume a try, but it is for me. I’ll soon be dipping into the small stack of their books that I’ve been accumulating for a short while now. But go read Steve’s piece. It’s worth the trip!

FRANK G. PRESNELL – No Mourners Present.

Dell 646, paperback reprint; no date stated, but circa 1953. (Cover by Robert Stanley.) Hardcover edition: William Morrow & Co., 1940.

   The jacket of the hardcover edition suggests that the book may have been published as by “F. G. Presnell,” but any final judgment on that would have to wait until the title page has been examined, the final and only arbitrator on matters of bibliographic importance such as this.

   Looking for more information about Mr. Presnell (1906-1967), I’ve not found anything on the Internet that either discusses him or his three mysteries in any way that’s significant. At the moment, all I can tell you about him personally is what Al Hubin says in Crime Fiction IV:

    “Born in Mexico; educated at Antioch College and Ohio State Univ.; designer and engineer; lived in Ohio for 40 years, then in Los Angeles.”

   Which is a start, but what it doesn’t say is why Mr. Presnell wrote two good books in 1939 and 1940, both with high-powered (and hard-boiled) practicing attorney John Webb, but then not another novel until 1951, and alas, Webb is not in it.

   For the record, here is a list of Presnell’s only contributions to the world of crime fiction:

      Send Another Coffin. Morrow, hc, 1939. Detective Book Magazine, Winter 1939-40. Handi-Book #39, pb, 1945.

      No Mourners Present. Morrow, hc, 1940. Dell 646, pb, 1953.

      Too Hot to Handle. M. S. Mill / Morrow, hc, 1951. Dell 593, pb, 1952.

   I had not known until I looked it up, but a movie was made of Send Another Coffin, one I’ve never seen, but I believe I shall have to purchase it. The title of the movie is Slightly Dishonorable (United Artists, 1940), and besides Pat O’Brien and Ruth Terry, whom you see below, as the two leading characters – I’ll get to that in the next paragraph – Edward Arnold and Broderick Crawford are also in the film, big names both.

   These photos were taken at different times, and neither time may coincide with the movie, but they will give you an idea at least of what Hollywood thought the characters looked like. (Since I was reading the Dell paperback, you can tell what I thought they looked like, when I was reading it. The scene on the cover, which you’ll see somewhere below, is in the book.)

   In the movie, Ruth Terry is credited only as “Night Club Singer,” but in the book she has a name: Anne Seymour. In the followup book, the one at hand, she has a brand new name, that of Anne Webb. A substantial part of No Mourners Present is the mystery novel, of course – and I’ll get to that in moment too – but another significant portion of it, one mixed up one with the other, concerns the domestic life of the two newlyweds.

   As it happens, the tough attorney John Webb is deeply in love with his wife. That much is apparent right away. He also seems to wonder how it is that he is so lucky to have her in love with him. Her background as a singer seems to be a concern to him as well: how well will she fit in with the wealthy set that he sometimes hangs around with?

   Without revealing too much, I think Anne Webb is smarter in many ways than he thinks she is, and that she can hold her own in his world very well indeed, and maybe even better. John has nothing to worry about in that regard.

   Of course there is no way of knowing. Two books with the Webbs, and that was all there were. As for Mr. Presnell, perhaps we must assume that the war intervened, and life and a family and earning a living.

   The town in which John Webb as an attorney also has considerable political clout is not named, I don’t believe, and since Hubin doesn’t suggest a setting (I just checked) neither do I believe it is a matter of my missing it.

   With very few preliminaries, the mystery gets into action right away, with Jake Barman’s murder taking place on page 15, one page after Webb very nearly slugs a radio news commentator for a remark he makes about Anne. Anne takes him to task reproachfully afterward. “Listen,” she says. “You’ve got to stop hitting people.”

   This fellow Barman is a partner in a building firm, or he was, and he also had ambitions of being elected governor. He is on the outs with his wife, however, which is a liability, especially since everyone knows that Julie Gilson, his secretary, is also his mistress. She’s also the leading suspect as well, especially after she disappears completely from sight after Barman’s death.

   Without a client, Webb is only incidentally involved until Julie’s brother comes to town are hires him to help protect her name. Once hired, Webb goes immediately into Perry Mason mode. See page 40, and you will see exactly what I mean.

   If you’re only in your 30s or 40s, it may not realize it – it’s probably too long ago – but in 1940 if your company bucked either the gangs or the unions, people were maimed for life. This is the sort of thing that gets Webb’s blood boiling as well. Here’s a long quote from page 45. He’s talking to the man he’s working for in charge of operations at a chain of cleaning establishments.

   I mentioned Perry Mason a short while back. Perry was tough in his early days, but not as tough as John Webb. Here is a portions of his thoughts, his philosophy of action, you might say, taken from page 61:

   As a word of warning, the book is a little too talky to be this tough all the way through, but when it is, it is. It earns high points as a detective novel as well, or at least it did with me, with plenty of twists and turns in the plot to keep Webb’s brain (and mine) working in as finely-tuned a fashion as his brawn.

   The solution is not nearly as finely worked out as one of Perry Mason’s, though, containing as it does one small gap I haven’t quite yet figured out.

   Nonetheless, even if the mystery itself is not a classic that anyone will remember for very long, if there’s any in mourning at the moment, it’s me, wishing that there were a next one to read, and as much for the characters, I would advise you, as for anything else. Sadly to say, one more time, there wasn’t a next one to read at the time, and there isn’t now.

BORDERTOWN. Warner Brothers, 1935. Paul Muni, Bette Davis, Margaret Lindsay, Eugene Pallette, Robert Barrat, Soledad Jiménez. Suggested by the book Border Town, by Carroll Graham. Director: Archie Mayo.

   This was recently shown as part of TCM’s Latino Festival that’s been going on all month long, and if I may say so, there’s something of mixed message made by this movie. The focus of the films in this series is how Latinos, in this case Mexican-Americans, have been portrayed on the screen.

   How it works out in this case, I’ll get back to — with a small CAVEAT that more of the story line is going to be hinted at, if not revealed, than is customarily done on this blog.

   Paul Muni, who was Jewish and a Hollywood superstar in the 1930s, plays Johnny Ramirez in Bordertown, a young resident of Los Angeles’s Mexican Quarter who after five years of hard work, earns his law degree from a small but apparently reputable night school. As in Crime and Punishment, reviewed here not too long ago, the opening scenes are of the graduating ceremony.

   And as with Raskolnikov in that other film, getting a degree is not the same thing as making a success of yourself. Johnny’s first appearance in court is a disaster. Summarily disbarred, he heads for Mexico and in a town just south of the border where he works his way up from a night club bouncer to a 25% partnership.

   And where the boss’s wife (a blonde and coolly calculating Bette Davis) has eyes for him, which is where the noir aspects kick in. Luckily for Johnny, he is unaware of what you’ve already probably gathered happens next.

   His eyes are instead on Dale Elwell, the female socialite who was on the other side of his one and only courtroom case (Margaret Lindsay), but who comes slumming down to see Johnny’s new casino, built with you-know-who’s money.

   As I warned you earlier, I’ve already told you more of the plot that I should and normally would, but I think in this case, no matter how little I told, you’d fill in much of the details on your own anyway – and besides, you need the Big Picture.

   The black-and-white photography is fine — even in the silent era, cameramen at the major studios really knew their business — but as for the story itself, there is not a subtle line or scene in this movie. Once started, you will have the continual feeling that you know what exactly will happen next, and it does.

   Not that that’s a real complaint. I enjoy stories with romantic — and deadly — triangles like this, and if they hadn’t been filmed many times before this movie was made, they’ve certainly been made many times since.

   So, except for the ending, I enjoyed this film. In terms of Latino images, there’s nothing too preachy about the injustices that poorer Mexican-Americans faced in a elite world of wealthy WASPs in the 20s and 30s, or at least I didn’t find it so, but the ending? It can take the wind right out of your sails. It took quite a few more years, apparently, before interracial romances would be deemed fitting and proper subject matter for movie viewers to see.

   Whatever message may have been intended before the final scene, if there was one, is quickly whisked away, and very nearly without a trace.

PostScript. I’ve just discovered an almost three minute trailer for the film on the Amazon page offering the DVD for sale. I suspect that you hunt around, you may find more of the movie available online. Check YouTube and similar sites.