Sylvia Orman was my wife Judy’s mother, and she died this morning around 9 am.

   She was 96 years old. Every year you expect there will be another birthday, but this year there won’t be. We never lost hope, but when you’re that age and small problems begin, they start to add up quickly. She’d had a pacemaker installed about three weeks ago and was doing well in physical therapy until she got a viral infection which turned to pneumonia, and she had to return to the hospital.

   We saw her yesterday afternoon, which is when we said our last goodbyes. She was heavily sedated but she squeezed Judy’s hand when she talked to her, so we think she knew we were there.

   We’re sad today, of course, and still shaken up a little, but we’re glad that we had her living close by for so long. She lived in an assisted living facility, but until the end she was very independent and did everything pretty much on her own.

   Did the usual mother-in-law jokes apply? Not once. Not ever.

   I hope everyone has been following the long discussion that the most preceding post has developed into, especially if you’re interested in film noir, or even if you’re not. It will be a while longer, I’m sorry to say, before this blog gets back to its normal coverage of books as well as movies, but here’s a question that occurred to me after reading through the previous group of comments again.

   In discussing which movies are noir and which are not, both Walker Martin and David Vineyard (primarily, but not exclusively) have brought up a long long list of films to use as examples. Everyone knows which movies are noir and which are not — it’s all the in-betweener’s that cause the problems, no matter what definition you use.

   Here’s the problem. Reading through the comments, I’ve been adding movies to my “must see” list left and right, whether they’re noir or not. They all sound worth watching, but how? I’ve read somewhere that only 4% of the movies ever made are commercially available.

   And every time a new format comes along, more and more movies are left behind. From VHS to DVD, some movies didn’t make the upgrade. Now it’s DVD to Blue-Ray, and only those deemed most commercially advantageous will make that step up — and those generally seem to be recent movies in which I personally have little interest.

   Next, I presume, will be digital downloads, which in terms of commercial releases in cleaned-up editions, will probably bypass even more films not worth the attention of the giant conglomerates. Which leaves it to collectors and the underground market to keep many many old (and even recent) movies available for watching. For me, I’m going to stop with DVDs. No further upgrades for me.

   Which makes for a long preamble to my actual question. As Walker and David have pointed out, there are many books on Film Noir which list many films as being noir as well as many others deemed marginal. If you go to Amazon or similar sources, you won’t find them all, but if you were to go to ioffer.com or sell.com, many if not most of them do turn up — but not all.

   Here’s my question, directed primarily to Walker and David, but anyone else can jump in. What movies are there — and let’s stick to noir foremost, but why not include any crime movie — might you have been looking for and have not yet found a surviving copy to obtain on DVD as your own?

   What are the most wished-for crime films, ones that you’d most like to see, in other words, but so far don’t seem to exist, even as collectors-only copies?

   I’m going to go out on a limb here and say why I don’t think some films embraced as noir really belong there, then saw it off behind me by trying to define what noir is. But first the films that I don’t think really are noir despite having noir elements.

   I’ve already explained why I don’t think The Maltese Falcon is noir — Spade is hardly alienated, doomed, obsessed or the victim of mysterious forces. He’s in control of himself and the situation, and the closest he comes to a touch of noir is a pang of regret at sending Brigid up the river for killing Archer. The only bad nights Spade is going to have is getting Miles Archer’s widow off his neck.

   Laura is a bit more problematic, because the sleuth is briefly obsessed, but in the end he isn’t a noir protagonist either. Clifton Webb’s villain is alienated and obsessed, but in noir it’s the hero and not the villain that counts.

   I Wake Up Screaming would be noir if Laird Cregar’s cop was the hero, but the hero and heroine are PR man Victor Mature and showgirl Betty Grable, and if you remove the murder plot, the two would be perfectly served in a musical (in fact, they were).

   Johnny Eager is a slick MGM take on a Warner’s gangster movie, but again the hero, Robert Taylor isn’t a noir hero (his buddy Van Heflin is though, but that doesn’t count). There is nothing in Johnny Eager’s character different than the general run of gangsters in a hundred similar films.

   All of these films use the shadows and high contrast lighting of noir, but then so does the swashbuckler The Sea Hawk. They all have noir elements, but they lack the core elements that define noir. For that matter I would put Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt as only borderline noir (Teresa Wright is neither alienated, obsessed, nor beset by mysterious forces — she’s Nancy Drew caught in an adult mystery).

   Shanghai Gesture is an old fashioned German Expressionist melodrama, and not a noir though a contributor to the genre. An argument can be made however for You Only Live Once, Street of Chance, Mask of Dimitrios, The Stranger on the Third Floor, and Journey Into Fear.

   I’ll give them their points, and only point out that two of them are spy films and by that nature share elements with noir, and the two spy films are directed by Noir director Jean Negulesco and Orson Welles (though credited to Norman Foster). The elements of distrust, paranoia, and betrayal common to most spy films are noirish to begin with.

   But then what is noir? We’ve beat around the noir bush and come up with some general ideas — as Walker Martin points out it is a style — but it isn’t just a style, or every moody horror film would be noir, so I’m going to try to break down some key elements that I think define noir.

   First of all noir is defined by the protagonist, and the noir protagonist has some distinct characteristics. As often as not he’s a veteran who is having a tough time adjusting to the peace time world, but veteran or not he is always alienated in some way.

   In noir this means he is lost in a darkness he carries inside of him, but which is expressed by the world outside of him. He is inevitably an urban figure, usually in an urban setting (but even in a rural setting — On Dangerous Ground, Un roi sans divertissement — the hero is an urban figure).

   Above all he is opposed by a “mysterious force,” a situation or antagonist beyond his control which leaves him with a sense of fear, powerlessness, and isolation. He is faced with forces of chaos he can’t control and sometimes is even attracted to. The noir hero is at the mercy of forces he can’t control and can only hope to survive.

   The second factor key to most — but not all — noir is obsession. The noir protagonist is invariably obsessed — with the truth, revenge, a woman, power, money, or an impossible dream. He carries that obsession to the point it nearly (or does) destroy him (these definitions all define the female protagonists of noir as well).

   He is set apart by the obsession, and though he recognises the power it has over him he can’t escape. That inability to escape from one’s fate is another key element of noir. You can run from everything but yourself.

   Noir style is also important. High contrast lighting gives objects a certain sinister feel. Traffic lights, street lights, rain-soaked streets, narrow alleys, dark stairwells in cheap apartments, abandoned buildings, fire escapes, the sewers beneath the city, darkened warehouses — all these places and things take on a character of their own.

   The freighter where the final scene of Anthony Mann’s T-Men takes place, the bridge girders Arturo De Cordova flees onto in The Naked City, the tunnels beneath Union Station, the sewers of LA in He Walked by Night, the refineries in White Heat and Follow Me Quietly, the merry-go-round in Strangers on a Train, the office stairwell in Mirage‘s blackout, the bleak snowbound countryside in On Dangerous Ground and Murder Is My Beat, the baseball stadium in Experiment in Terror, the inner works of the Big Clock, the elaborate garden in Night Has 1000 Eyes, the claustrophobic corridors of the train in Narrow Margin, and the carnival fireworks of The Bribe are all as much characters in the film as any human. They are familiar and alien at the same time.

   In their book Film Noir (Overlook Press, 1979), Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward write that Noir “consistently evokes the dark side of the American persona … a stylised vision of itself, a true cultural reflection of the mental dysfunction of a nation uncertain of transition.” They put the classical noir period between the end of WWII and the end of the Korean Conflict when the country is in transition from the war and the influx of returning veterans adjusting to civilian life — and setting off the baby boom.

   Among the other staples of noir is the femme fatale. She is hardly new to literature (lest we forget Delilah or Madame De Winter), but the noir protagonist is uniquely unable to resist or recognise her (Sam Spade on the other hand, not only recognises her, but plays her and ultimately disposes of her).

   To this sexual confusion is added an atmosphere of violence, paranoia, and threat. The hero is vulnerable and beset by grotesque characters that seem to come out of a horror film at times (in The Big Clock Charles Laughton is shot in closeup with a wide angle lens that further distorts his already magnificently ugly features). Many of the characters in noir would be at home in Paris Grand Guignol or Dicken’s novels.

   Certain visual cues are important, high contrast lighting, shadows, disorienting angles, and the sudden threat of ordinary and even benign objects (in The Big Combo policeman Cornell Wilde is tortured by gangster Richard Conte with Brian Donlevy’s hearing aid). There is often a dream scene or a brief use of nightmare imagery, and frequently flashbacks that disrupt the narrative flow.

   Along with the grotesque there are frequently suggestions of perversion — twisted sexuality just beneath the surface (in The Glass Key William Bendix’s Jeff virtually seduces Alan Ladd as he beats him, calling him “Baby”), Clifton Webb’s aesthete villain in The Dark Corner is either asexual or homosexual (homosexuality is inevitably presented as perversion in noir, but then so are most forms of heterosexuality).

   The femme fatale in noir often seems to feed on and desire humiliation, and take a perverse pleasure in destruction like some strange incarnation of Kali or a Dionysian bacchanalia. It’s the old fear of female sexuality sharpened to a knife point.

   The films are also marked by a sort of hyper acuity of the senses. Blacks are deeper, light areas brighter, edges more defined. In Phantom Lady when Elisha Cook Jr.s’ hophead drummer plays a solo it rises in crescendo into a near sexual climax. The interior of the big clock in The Big Clock looks like an alien spaceship. When Philip Marlowe falls into a black pool it swallows him and the viewer. The sharpness of edges in noir is one of the most important visual cues, one that becomes startlingly clear if seen on the big screen or on today’s HDTV’s with superior digital DVD or Blu Ray.

   One last key element of many noir’s is narration. This can vary from the poetic hardboiled voice of Dick Powell’s Marlowe, Tom Brown’s doomed drifter, Chill Wills’ embodiment of Chicago in The City That Never Sleeps, or the dry baritone of Reed Hadley emotionlessly keeping us informed in the docu-noirs.

   The narration is at its most effective in Sunset Boulevard when William Holden’s Joe narrates from his own murder scene. The narration allows us inside the head of characters in ways that dialogue can’t always. At the same time it reminds us we are all to some extent trapped in our own mind.

   Not all of these elements are in every noir film, but enough of them predominate that they can be used to define the genre. There are always going to be films that are on the edge one way or another, and because of its nature I’m not sure noir can be defined precisely, but I’ll name seven key factors I think are vital.

      1. Alienation.
      2. Obsession
      3. Visual Style
      4. Destructive Sexuality
      5. Grotesque characters
      6. Narration
      7. Stylized violence

   Any four of those elements in one film and I think you have to grant it is noir, but three or less is problematic, and unless the psychological elements apply to the protagonist it probably isn’t noir.

   And one last rule that will certainly be controversial — I don’t think you can really claim it is the Hollywood noir school if it is made before at least 1944, though it may be an immediate precursor of the genre (This Gun For Hire, Street of Chance, Journey Into Fear, Citizen Kane …).

   I don’t think true noir exists without the catalyst of WWII and the returning veteran. Like the atomic genie, the war let loose a new twist in the American psyche as defined as Hemingway’s Lost Generation, and it is out of that and many tropes of popular literature and film that film noir arises, as clearly as the detective story comes into focus with Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes in ways it had not in the period from 1841 in Poe’s Rue Morgue until Holmes.

   Many of the elements are there, but until the right moment they don’t become a distinct form.

G. D. H. & M. COLE – The Corpse in the Constable’s Garden.

Collins Crime Club; UK, hardcover; 5th printing, 1933. US edition: Morrow, hardcover, 1931. Hardcover reprint: Grosset & Dunlap, no date (shown). Previously published in the UK 1930 as Corpse in Canonicals, Collins, hardcover, 1930.

   As was pointed out in both my review of the Coles’ Knife in the Dark and the one Bill Pronzini wrote for 1001 Midnights, which was posted here, most of the mysteries they wrote featured Superintendent Harry Wilson, of New Scotland Yard.

   He appeared in, among others, both their first novel (The Blanchington Tangle, 1923) and their last (Toper’s End, 1942), along with a few short story collections published during World War II and later — up through 1948 or so.

   And as usual for detective stories published during that particular time period, there’s not much said about Wilson’s private life, at least not in this book. The mystery’s the thing — but this is no sober and deliberate drawing room affair, either. It’s amusing, it’s droll, and in more than one scene, if it doesn’t cause out-and-out laughter, more than a few chuckles should result as well.

   There are some hi-jinks with a valuable necklace in the early going, and then the local constable discovers that someone has left a body in his garden. (I don’t think I gave anything away by disclosing this, did I?) The inspector on the scene is shadowed by an overly eager (and equally suspicious) mystery writer who lives nearby, not to mention three undergraduate chums on a walking tour who also decide to give the locals a bit of a helping hand.

   Maybe my sense of humor is different from yours. I’ll quote from page 96, and you can see for yourself:

   I simply can’t read that without cracking a smile, and I do every time I do. But if I found the previous book a little lax in the denouement, I certainly can’t say the same about this book. There is a closing scene with all of the characters in one room, and one by one Wilson eliminates them, just the way I would have, down to the final two — the only two I’d decided who could have done it — and then to the final culprit — the very same one I’d fingered for the job.

   Is that a recommendation, saying the author’s solution dovetailed in exact precision as yours? Or can you say that if it’s that obvious, it’s can’t be any good? I’m leaning toward the former, since it wasn’t obvious, and if it had been the other fellow, and I wasn’t at all sure it wasn’t, I’d have been caught flat-footed. As I almost always am.

   It’s sure a nice feeling when you get it right, though!

   While I never read any of the Mrs. Warrender stories I did read several of the Supt. Wilson ones, and eventually had to grant the chief criticism of the Coles put forward by Haycraft and others, that the Coles put together a fair puzzle but they were awfully dull. I’ll check out some of the Warrender tales and see if that still holds. Someone once said of Daniel DeFoe that he “employed dullness brilliantly” but that’s hardly a virtue in a detective story.

   The Coles were hardly alone in the category of being dull reads. I enjoy many of Freeman Wills Crofts’ books and those of John Rhode, but though both could get some action going, both could be pretty dull too. There’s a certain charm the first time you encounter one of Crofts’ timetables, but it grows thin fairly soon, and some of Rhode’s later Dr. Priestley books could be used to cure insomnia.

   One of the problems with the classical tec tale is it sometimes got so involved with the puzzle and the rules it forgot the rule about entertaining.

   The absurd length that this was taken to was in the Dennis Wheatley books, which presented you with characters, motive, even clues like cigarette butts, but you had to play the detective. Alas they pointed out the problem that murder wasn’t much fun without a good detective and things like a plot and real story. They might be fun for a party game but they weren’t much to curl up before the fire with.

   One of the reasons we still read Christie, Marsh, Sayers, and Allingham when so many others have gone the way of the dodo is that they weren’t afraid of a little melodrama, adventure, intrigue, romance, and action. Philip MacDonald was often criticized at the time for introducing too much suspense and action into his Anthony Gethryn novels, but as a result many of them are better reads today than clever puzzlers like Anthony Berkley’s The Poisoned Chocolates Case where everyone talks and talks and nothing much happens.

   Towards the end of the classical era even S.S. Van Dine felt the need for Philo Vance to get involved in a car chase and running gun fight (The Kidnap Murder Case). I never understood why dullness was supposed to be a literary virtue in the detective novel.

   That said, R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke stories and novels contain few thrills, but the structure of the plot, the joys of watching Thorndyke’s careful and methodical investigation, and the reconstruction of the crime by Thorndyke at the end hold the reader as well as any shocker or thriller.

   But then Freeman was, in Chandler’s words, “the best dull writer,” and Thorndyke a character who, while largely forgotten today, deserves to sit very near the top with Holmes, Father Brown, Poirot, and Maigret. In the right hands even dullness can be a virtue, though not one to be imitated by would be writers.

G. D. H. & MARGARET COLE – Knife in the Dark.

Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover; Dec 1941. The Macmillan Co., US, hardcover, 1942 (shown below).

   G. D. H. and Margaret Cole were extremely prolific writers between the two world wars: individually and collaboratively, they published well over two hundred books of fiction, nonfiction, and verse.

   G. D. H. was a prominent social and economic historian; his five-volume A History of Social Thought is considered a landmark work. Dame Margaret is best known for her biographies of Beatrice Webb and of her husband (The Life of G.D.H. Cole, 1971).

   The Coles co-authored more than thirty “Golden Age” detective novels, beginning with The Brooklyn Murders in 1923, and six volumes of criminous short stories. Knife in the Dark is their next to last novel, and the only one to feature Mrs. Warrender as its protagonist.

   “A naturally trim and tidy old lady,” Mrs. Warrender is the mother of private detective James Warrender (who affectionately calls her, among other things, “an incurably meddling old woman”). She is also solidly in the tradition of such “little old lady” sleuths as Miss Jane Marple and Hildegarde Withers, although less colorful than either of those two indefatigable crook-catchers.

   Knife in the Dark takes place at a mythical ancient English university, Stamford, during the dark days of World War II. Kitty Lake — wife of Gordon Lake, a teacher of Inorganic Chemistry whose mother is a cousin of Mrs. Warrender’s — is stabbed to death during an undergraduate dance which she herself arranged.

   Any number of people had a motive to do away with the mercurial Kitty, who had both a mean streak and a passion for other men; the suspects include her husband, an R.A.F. officer, a young anthropologist, a strange Polish refugee named Madame Zyboski (who may or may not be a Nazi spy), and a dean’s wife whom James Warrender describes as “an awful old party with a face like a diseased horse and a mind like a sewer.”

   Like all of the Coles’ mysteries, this is very leisurely paced; Kitty Lake’s murder, the only one in the book, does not take place until page 104, and there is almost no action before or after. Coincidence plays almost as much of a role in the solution as does detection by Mrs. Warrender (who happens to be staying with the Lakes at the time of the murder); and the identity of the culprit comes as no particular surprise.

   For all of that, however, Knife in the Dark is not a bad novel. The characters are mostly interesting, the university setting is well-realized, and the narrative is spiced with some nice touches of dry wit. Undemanding fans of the Golden Age mystery should find it diverting.

   Mrs. Warrender’s talents are also showcased in four novelettes collected as Mrs. Warrender’s Profession (1939). The best of the four is “The Toys of Death,” in which Mrs. W. solves a baffling murder on the south coast of England.

The Coles also created three other series detectives, none of whom is as interesting an individual as Mrs. Warrender. The most notable of the trio is Superintendent Henry Wilson of Scotland Yard, for he is featured in sixteen novels, among them The Berkshire Mystery (1930), End of an Ancient Mariner (1933), and Murder at the Munition Works (1940); and in the collection of short stories, Superintendent Wilson’s Holiday (1928).

         ———
   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.

   I agree the Chaykin and Hutton Nero Wolfe series is not only the best film version of Wolfe, but one of the best adaptations of a fictional sleuth to film (certainly to the small screen).

   Both Edward Arnold and Walter Connolly, who played Wolfe in early films, decided to play him as a jovial and bluff type much like the millionaires and politicians they usually played, and it didn’t help that Lionel Stander (Max on Hart to Hart) was badly miscast as Archie (much less John Qualen as Fritz).

   The sets were faithful to the books, though. (The two films were Meet Nero Wolfe, based on Fer de Lance, and The League of Frightened Men.)

   Television did much better with the pilot film Nero Wolfe (1979) that starred Thayer David and Tom Mason. Based on The Doorbell Rang, it was a superior made-for-television film, and David and Mason were both good. They even did the scene from the book where Wolfe’s client (Anne Baxter in this one) spots the portrait of Wolfe’s father (Sherlock Holmes).

   If memory serves Biff McGuire was Cramer and John Randolph played Lon Cohen. Frank Gilroy directed and scripted. The untimely death of Thayer David postponed the series, which eventually starred William Conrad and Lee Horsley, and the least said about that the better.

   Wolfe did somewhat better on radio where the role was played by Santos Ortega and Sidney Greenstreet. If you’ve never heard them they are well done, and not hard to find. But running only a half hour, the series episodes seldom adapted Stout’s material.

   As to why there is no American equivalent to Mystery or Masterpiece Theater, part of it lies in the fact the BBC is a government operation, and part the commercial nature of network and cable television. We’ll always get another version of Knightrider and seldom get a quality program like Nero Wolfe, and certainly nothing to resemble those adaptations of Lord Peter, Campion, Poirot, or Miss Marple.

   Another factor is that many British series only commit to six to eight episodes a season so budgets aren’t as restrictive, and the actors can do other work while doing a series without having to leave the series.

   That the Jim Hutton Ellery Queen, the Chaykin Wolfe, and the Spenser TV series were as good as they were and ran as long as they did are all minor miracles.

   Eventually there will be a revival of classical tec films (everything comes back to some extent), and we’ll get a new round of American-made Agatha Christie’s with some poor actress as badly cast in the part of Miss Marple as Helen Hayes was, or a Peter Ustinov struggling with diminishing budgets and scripts.

   But the sad fact is, it’s cheaper to generate material based on old series and follow trends than try to do something smart. It’s more cost effective to invent a tec series for the small screen than to buy the rights to a proven product and run afoul of fans’ preconceived ideas and the author’s desires.

   It probably doesn’t help that today’s honchos have a better understanding of comics, science fiction, fantasy, movies, and 80’s television than mystery fiction. Our only hope is that somewhere down the line another cable network decides to gamble on something like the Nero Wolfe series and produces something worthwhile instead of more reality series and tiresome comedies and dramadies. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

   And I know I’m gilding the lily here, but there seems to have been a suggestion that Perry Mason debuted sometime around the creation of the Raymond Burr television series. Of course Mason appeared for the first time in the late 1930’s when Gardner was already a highly successful pulp author. (H. Bedford Jones officially passed the title king of the pulps onto Gardner.) Mason pushed Gardner onto the bestseller list and made him one of the most successful writers of all time.

   Warner Brothers did a series of Mason movies with Warren William, Ricardo Cortez, and Donald Woods as Mason (at least one had Allen Jenkins as Paul Drake and Errol Flynn made his American film debut as a corpse in another). There was also 15 minute radio serial based on Perry, but it was never a particular success.

   It wasn’t until television and Burr’s incarnation of the character that Perry finally conquered another market. Fans will recall a second attempt to do Perry with Monte Markham that met an early and much deserved end, and of course Burr’s return to the role in later years in a series of made for television movies.

   Although Gardner was a major success as a mystery writer without Burr, it can certainly be argued that Burr so embodied the character that he took the whole thing to another level pushing Perry to a level closer to Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, and James Bond than the usual run of mystery icons. There is a good book, Murder in the Millions, that covers the mega sales of Gardner, Ian Fleming, and Mickey Spillane.

KATHLEEN MOORE KNIGHT – The Trouble at Turkey Hill.

Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1946. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club [3-in-1 edition], June 1946.

   My wife Judy and I moved to Connecticut in 1969. I’m a transplant from Michigan and not a native New Englander at all. I don’t know if there really is a Penberthy Island, where many of Kathleen Moore Knight’s books take place, and if there isn’t, while I can’t tell you which one she may have used as a model, Martha’s Vineyard certainly suggests itself.

   No matter. There has to be plenty of communities all along the Cape Cod coast that are just like it, and all of them are ideal places to live, too, if you don’t mind tourists. I count a total of sixteen Elisha Macomber murder mysteries, he being her most commonly used series character. On a per capita basis, I think you’d have to admit, Penberthy would have to be a terribly dangerous place to hang your hat.

   What Elisha Macomber does is operate the village fish market, but besides that, he’s also the chairman of the local Board of Selectmen. So in addition to being considered an autocratic father figure by the entire island, he’s also the investigative officer whenever another murder occurs.

   In this case he’s in charge of tracking down the killer of the wife of a recently returned war veteran.

   Telling the story is Miss Marcella Tracy, librarian and former school teacher. A lot of strange things happen to confuse matters, and even though everyone already has a sharp eye out into everyone else’s affairs, I got the feeling that calling all the suspects together into one big room to be confronted with all the evidence all at once might not have been such a bad idea. It’s that kind of story.

   I’m too embarrassed to say that I mucked the solution up something fierce, so I won’t.

[UPDATE] 02-28-09.   One of the corrections I made in the review was the number of Elisha Macomber books there were. The number above is now the right one. Kathleen Moore Knight also wrote four books between 1940 and 1944 with Margot Blair as the leading character. According to the Golden Age of Detection Wiki, Blair was a partner in a public relations firm called Norman and Blair.

   I don’t think I’ve read any of the latter’s adventures, but I have read (and as I recall, enjoyed) three or four of Elisha Macombers, which appeared over a long period of time, from 1935 to 1959. That’s a long run for a fellow who’s probably next to unknown to most mystery readers today. It is a shame.

   From the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here’s a list of all sixteen. Note that a couple of pre-war cases took place in Panama. Macomber then disappeared for six years while the war was going on. I wonder what that was all about.

MACOMBER, ELISHA    [Kathleen Moore Knight]

      Death Blew Out the Match (n.) Doubleday 1935 [Massachusetts]
      The Clue of the Poor Man’s Shilling (n.) Doubleday 1936 [Massachusetts]
      The Wheel That Turned (n.) Doubleday 1936 [Massachusetts]
      Seven Were Veiled (n.) Doubleday 1937 [Massachusetts]
      Acts of Black Night (n.) Doubleday 1938 [Massachusetts]
      The Tainted Token (n.) Doubleday 1938 [Panama]

      Death Came Dancing (n.) Doubleday 1940 [Panama]

      The Trouble at Turkey Hill (n.) Doubleday 1946 [Martha’s Vineyard]
      Footbridge to Death (n.) Doubleday 1947 [Martha’s Vineyard]
      Bait for Murder (n.) Doubleday 1948 [Martha’s Vineyard]
      The Bass Derby Murder (n.) Doubleday 1949 [Martha�s Vineyard]
      Death Goes to a Reunion (n.) Doubleday 1952 [Massachusetts]
      Valse Macabre (n.) Doubleday 1952 [Martha’s Vineyard]
      Akin to Murder (n.) Doubleday 1953 [Massachusetts]
      Three of Diamonds (n.) Doubleday 1953 [Martha’s Vineyard]

      Beauty Is a Beast (n.) Doubleday 1959 [Martha’s Vineyard]

THE BIG CLOCK. Paramount, 1948. Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Sullivan, George Macready, Rita Johnson, Elsa Lanchester, Harry Morgan, with uncredited appearances by Noel Neill and Ruth Roman. Screenplay: Jonathan Latimer, based on the novel by Kenneth Fearing. Director: John Farrow.

   I’ve not read the book, or at least not so recently that I remember reading it, but from what I have been able to tell, the movie follows the text fairly closely — except for one thing. In the movie George Stroud, the highly successful editor of a true crime magazine, does not go to bed with the woman whose murder he finds himself framed for.

   Otherwise the story apparently stays very much the same. The big kicker in both the book and the movie is that Stroud is put in charge of the ensuing investigation; that is, of finding the “killer,” himself, by his publisher, Earl Janoth, who in actuality — and in a sudden burst of abhorrence — really did commit the murder. The dead woman was Janoth’s mistress, and their relationship had been going sour for several weeks.

   If I’m wrong about the book, let me know, but Jonathan Latimer’s screenplay can stand on its own, regardless. Ray Milland plays George Stroud, a very capable, self-assured fellow, but a very foolish guy in hanging around with Pauline York (Rita Johnson) when he has a wife (Maureen O’Sullivan) who is still waiting for a honeymoon after seven years of marriage.

   Milland is very good as the man who finds himself more and more trapped in a web partly of his own making, as his own team of reporters continues to close in on him at Jaroth’s command.

   Even better is Charles Laughton as that very same fastidious publisher, prig and interminably stuffy, a haughty person obsessed with time and efficiency and minimal cost, only to startle himself (momentarily) into becoming a normal person afraid of being caught at something he later can’t comprehend having done.

   Maureen O’Sullivan doesn’t have a lot to do as Georgette Stroud, only to nag him (and rightfully so) and then stand beside him (at last) when he needs her most. Most viewers call this a classic noir film, and even if you haven’t seen it yourself, I hope my description of it will have you nodding your head and saying yes.

   Occasionally disrupting the dark and desperate mood, though, are a few moments of comic relief, mostly (but not solely) at the hands of Elsa Lancester as a wacky, bohemian artist with a flat full of kids who can identify Stroud, but for (very good) reasons of her own, decides not to.

   I certainly didn’t mind the comic interludes, but I wonder if purist noir aficionados do. The ending is a doubly happy one (I think), preceded by some very good detective work. Most entertaining, with emphasis on the “most.”

   I watched this movie about several weeks ago, and I just watched it again before writing up these comments. I enjoyed it immensely both times, but there is a lot going on in this movie that I haven’t even begun to mention, and it takes more than one watching to appreciate it all.

   I have it penciled in on my calendar to see it again in about a month from now.

PostScript: Ray Milland, Jonathan Latimer and director John Farrow teamed up at least one other time in Alias Nick Beal (1949), which I reviewed here last summer.

FRANK RAWLINGS – The Lisping Man.

Atlas Mystery/Hercules Publishing Corp.; digest-sized paperback; first printing, 1944; abridged. Hardcover edition: Gateway Books, 1942. Based on the short novel “Calling the Ghost,” the first appearance of the Ghost/Green Ghost pulp hero character, magician-sleuth George Chance, in The Ghost, Super-Detective, January 1940, as by G. T. Fleming-Roberts.

   For a longer and much more comprehensive look at the complicated background behind this story, go to Monte Herridge’s excellent article “Chance Without a Ghost,” located here. Monte goes into a considerable amount of detail in pointing out all of the changes that were made by Fleming-Roberts between the pulp story and the digest paperback, with a hardcover appearance in between.

   The most significant of these alterations turned out to have been all of the pulp hero apparatus that was abandoned for the novel — no secret identity nor hidden hideaway nor so on — leaving George Chance as only a magician by profession and a crime-solving sleuth as a sideline, only one step up from being a hobby, you might say.

   Monte did not believe that the story was very good.

   I agree. In fact, I thought it was quite bad, if not awful, but with reservations. Working pretty much in the dark, I’m inclined to lay a good chunk of the blame on the second set of changes: on whoever the editorial staff was whose responsibility it was for trimming a standard-sized hardcover down to a fairly slim paperback. The latter is the only version I have, and as it was for Monte, that’s all that I can base my comments on.

   So how much was cut, or whether it was done crudely or with any amount of skill, I do not know. The fact is that when a book is cut and trimmed and comes out as, well, ineptly as this one, it’s difficult to give the full responsibility to the author for how the final version reads, especially as in this case, when it does not turn out well.

   [FOLLOWUP: It’s not exactly a footnote, but Bill Pronzini, a fellow pulp fiction aficionado, will have more to say about this when I’m finished with the rest of the review, which follows. Keep reading.]

   I mentioned that crime-solving was an avocational passion for George Chance. A good example that I can use to demonstrate just exactly how obsessive and attracted Chance is to strange murder cases comes only one or two chapters into the book, as he leaves his new wife Merry on their wedding night to help Inspector Ames investigate the suicide of one Leonard Van Sickle, who apparently jumped (or was pushed) from a hotel room twenty floors above the pavement.

   What makes this a strange case is that Leonard Van Sickle had telephoned Chance only hours before, with no indication in the call that he was planning on ending his life. What is also strange is that he talked with a lisp. Hence the title. It also turns out (page 67) that the dead man had recently had all of his teeth extracted.

   Explains the dentist: