HERE’S FLASH CASEY. Grand National Pictures, 1938. Eric Linden, Boots Mallory, Cully Richards, Holmes Herbert, Joseph Crehan, Howard Lang. Based on the story “Return Engagement,” by George Harmon Coxe (Black Mask, March 1934). Director: Lynn Shores.

   A copy of Black Mask from 1934 with “Return Engagement” in it is going to be hard to find, if you don’t already own one, but you can also find it in a much more recent book about the leading character: Flashgun Casey, Crime Photographer: From the Pulps to Radio and Beyond, by J. Randolph Cox and David S. Siegel.

   I wish I had my copy at hand, because any resemblance of the Flash Casey in this movie and the Casey I remember reading other stories about is — to put it bluntly — none at all. Someone else is going to have to read it, the original story, that is, and be willing to tell us about it.

   I’ve also been hard-pressed to come up with posters or stills from the film. I have one of Eric Linden, who plays Casey, and some kind of trading card of Boots Mallory, who plays Casey’s girl friend of sorts, Kay Lanning, the society page editor of the newspaper where Casey, fresh out of college, lands his first paying job. (And at $18 a week, it is not much of a job. It is a wonder what Kay sees in him.)

   What you can do, however, is watch the entire movie online. Go to www.archive.org, click on the right spot, and there it is. Marvelous!

   In a matter of speaking, of course. I’m talking about Internet technology, not the quality of the film. Eric Linden, whose career lasted about ten years through the 1930s, plays Casey as a naive college kid for all it’s worth, which is maybe the dime it would cost you to see it back in 1938. And if I haven’t happened to have mentioned it before, this is a comedy film all the way, so it’s not Linden who’s responsible for his actions.

   What might possibly qualify this as a crime film? Almost nothing, as long as you’ve asked, but Casey does take some candid photos at a society affair that an unscrupulous gang of blackmailers alters and tries to make a bundle on. Bungling that, they kidnap Kay, and Flash comes to the rescue by commandeering an ambulance…

   Besides being an actress for a short while, Patricia “Boots” Mallory was also a good-looking dancer and an actress. Her film career ended in 1938, but she had married film producer William Cagney, brother of actor James Cagney, back in 1932, well before then. She later married actor Herbert Marshall, to whom she was still wed when she died in 1958.

   So, as you can see, here’s my review. Two paragraphs about the movie itself, surrounded by a lot of fluff. Go watch the movie itself and see if it deserves more.

   If there’s ever a biography of Ellery Queen—not of the detective character but of the cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee who created Ellery and also used his name as their joint byline—the following incident from Fred’s life deserves to be included.

   The first part comes mainly from one of the long introductions that he wrote for each story published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine during its early years; the follow-up was unearthed by radio historian Martin Grams, Jr. and will appear in one of his forthcoming books.

   In the spring of 1946, soon after being discharged from the Army at the end of World War II, Dashiell Hammett arranged with “a certain school of social science in New York City” to offer a Thursday evening course on mystery fiction aimed at writers and writer wannabees.

   At this time Fred’s main tasks in life were keeping EQMM afloat and, after his wife’s death from cancer, raising two young sons. He read the announcement of Hammett’s course and was impelled by curiosity to attend the first session, on May 2.

   Hammett invited him on the spot to co-teach the course and Fred agreed, each two-hour stint followed by “all-night bull-and-brandy sessions” between those giants of crime fiction. At the end of the May 16 class a young woman named Hazel Hills Berrien approached Fred and offered him the manuscript of a story she had begun writing after the first session.

   Fred, as always, suggested certain changes — “in the character of the detective, in the plot construction, and in the title,” he said later—but when they were made to his satisfaction, he bought the tale, which appeared in EQMM for September 1946 as “The Unlocked Room” by Hazel Hills.

   Then as now, magazines appeared on the stands some time before the publication month listed on their front covers, and the September EQMM had been available at least for a few weeks before August 31, 1946. That evening’s episode of the popular ABC radio series The Green Hornet was called “Death in the Dar” and dealt with a civil servant accused of embezzlement who is found shot to death in a room with the door locked and the window bolted. Newspaper publisher Britt Reid, a.k.a. the Green Hornet, rejects the obvious theory of suicide and eventually proves that the man was murdered.

   Hazel Hills Berrien wrote ABC four days after the broadcast, admitting that she hadn’t heard the episode but claiming she’d been told by a friend that it “bore a peculiar resemblance to a recently published short story of mine.”

   In this and several subsequent letters, each more threatening than the last, she demanded a copy of Dan Beattie’s script but refused to send ABC’s lawyers a copy of her story.

   Eventually Fred heard of the dispute and, on October 11, wrote to Green Hornet creator George W. Trendle, promising a copy of September’s EQMM and asking in return for a copy of Beattie’s script.

   Four days later and after reading “The Unlocked Room,” Trendle replied to Fred, rejecting any allegation of plagiarism but saying: “[H]ad Miss Hills handled the matter as diplomatically as you have, I think a copy of our script would have been in her hands long ago.”

   A later letter to Fred from Green Hornet attorney Raymond Meurer made the same point: “[W]e regret that the matter was handled so clumsily by Miss Hills…. [H]ad we received the request originally from you, we would not have hesitated a moment in supplying the script.” The tempest in a teapot quickly blew away since the only similarity between Hills’ story and the Hornet script was that both involved a murder in a locked room with a gimmicked window.

   As far as I know Hills never wrote another story, certainly none published in EQMM.

   Among the reprints in the EQMM issue that contained Hills’ story was one by Agatha Christie (“Strange Jest,” a Miss Marple tale originally published in 1941), again with an introduction by Fred Dannay, this one quoting a stanza from one of Christie’s poems.

   It comes from “In the Dispensary,” which was included in her collection The Road of Dreams (Bles, 1925):

         From the Borgias’ time to the present day, their power
            has been proved and tried:
         Monkshood blue, called aconite, and the deadly cyanide.
         Here is sleep and solace and soothing of pain—
            courage and vigour new;
         Here is menace and murder and sudden death—in these
            phials of green and blue.

   Okay, so it’s doggerel. Thanks anyway, Fred, for giving me this item for my column’s Poetry Corner more than sixty years ago!

   John Michael Hayes (1919-2007) never wrote a mystery novel or short story but, thanks mainly to his screenplays for several Alfred Hitchcock films, most notably Rear Window (1954) and the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), his memory remains green for us.

   I recently had occasion to read a deposition Hayes gave in August 1991 in connection with some litigation over Rear Window and was delighted to find some information about Hitchcock’s connection with Cornell Woolrich that I believe has never appeared in print.

   Among the six tales brought together in the second collection of Woolrich’s short fiction (After-Dinner Story, as by William Irish, 1944) were “Rear Window” (first published under Woolrich’s own name in Dime Detective, February 1942, as “It Had To Be Murder””) and “The Night Reveals” (first published in Story Magazine for April 1936).

   Hitchcock was interested in both. Shortly after Hayes began working on the Rear Window screenplay, “Hitch asked me…if I would read [“The Night Reveals”] and comment on it because he had [had] a choice between the two stories and wanted to know if he’d made the right choice. And I said he certainly had because “Rear Window” lent itself to intense suspense material and intense personal relationships which the other story didn’t.”

   Still and all, “The Night Reveals” is also marked by powerful suspense scenes and an intense relationship—between insurance investigator Harry Jordan and his wife, who he comes to suspect is a compulsive pyromaniac—and it’s a shame Hitchcock didn’t at least use it as source for an episode of his TV series. Preferably one directed by himself.

   I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but most of the recent posts, going back over the past month now, have not been newly written by me. Looking back through what appeared here in August, there were 34 posts, and only about a third of them consisted of new stuff from me. (Some of the reviews came from my “archives,” of course, and for the reviews written by others I’ve continued to add cover images, bibliographic data and so on, so it wasn’t as though I wasn’t doing anything.)

   I watched and reported on six movies, which isn’t bad, but what’s really frustrating is that I read only five books all month. You can go back, read the reviews and count them for yourself.

   This is an abysmal record. Even on a slow day I can go to Borders and buy twice that many without half trying. And I go maybe three times a week. (Not to mention books I order online from ABE, Amazon and Biblio.com.)

   What’s even worse, and so far I still haven’t been able to do anything about it, is the stack of unanswered email that stacking up on my computer. My apologies to everyone who’s still waiting patiently for a reply to something that you’ve sent me this month — a question, a piece of information, a comment about a blog post — if I answer immediately, you hear from me. Otherwise maybe you haven’t.

   But believe me, it’s just as frustrating on this end as I assume it is on yours.

   After I returned from Pulpcon at the beginning of August, my new endocrinologist started me on a new regime of medications, and to put it frankly, it just isn’t working. Worse, it’s hard to put any confidence in doctors who look at the blood tests and suggest doing new things without first asking how you’re feeling, even when they’re meeting you for the first time.

   It’s all trial and error, and so far, it’s mostly error.

   I hope I don’t have cut back on my own participation on this blog any further, but just in case, as I hope you have noticed, I have a lot of friends and other sources to help cover for me.

   And if you are waiting to hear back from me about something, I hope you can be patient a while longer. (I mentioned sharp pointed objects a while ago, in case I could use a nudge. They’re not needed yet, but maybe you should keep them handy, just in case.)

JAMES M. CAIN – Cloud Nine. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1984; paperback, 1987. Robert Hale, UK, hardcover, 1985. J. M. Dent & Sons, Canada, trade ppbk, 1987 (shown).

   In the 1930s and 1940s, James M. Cain was the most talked-about writer in America. His novels of that period, like the detective novels of Dashiell Hammett, a few years earlier, broke new ground in crime fiction.

   Until the publication of The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1934, sex was a topic handled with kid gloves and almost always peripheral to the central story line; Cain made sex the primary motivating force of his fiction, and presented it to his readers frankly, at times steamily. (Some of the scenes in Postman are downright erotic even by today’s standards.)

   But Cain, of course, was much more than a purveyor of eroticism. His lean, hard-edged prose caused critics to label him a “hard-boiled” writer, but he is much more than that, too. His best works are masterful studies of average people caught up and often destroyed by passion (adultery, incest, hatred, greed, lust). They are also sharp, clear portraits of the times and places in which they were written, especially California in the depression era Thirties.

   Cain’s success began to wane in the Fifties and Sixties, however, partly because of a desire to write novels of a different sort from those that had brought him fame, and partly because of a clear erosion of his talents (a seminal fear of all writers) brought about by advancing age.

   Cloud Nine is one of those “different” novels, written in the late 1960s when Cain was seventy-five. It was rejected by his publisher at that time and shelved. Resurrected for publication in 1984, seven years after Cain’s death, it was puffed by its publisher as “an important addition in contemporary American literature” and by an advance reviewer as “a minor masterpeice and publishing event of some note.”

   It is none of those things. It is, simply and sadly, a flawed novel of mediocre quality – a pale shadow of his early triumphs.

   The novel’s basic premise is solid. A teenage girl, Sonya Lang, comes to Maryland real-estate agent Graham Kirby with the news that his nasty half brother, Burwell, has raped her and that she is pregnant as a result. Through a complicated set of circumstances, Graham agrees to marry Sonya, initially for charitable reasons; but he soon falls in love with her.

   He then discovers that Burwell may be a murderer as well as a rapist, and that another murder may be part of Burwell’s future plans. The conflict between Burwell and Graham forms the central tension here, with Sonya as one catalyst and a million dollars in prime real estate as another.

   All the elements are present for a classic Cain novel, ones that should combine to keep the reader on tenterhooks, “anxious to find out what happens,” as Cain biographer Roy Hoopes says in an Afterword, “but always dreading the ending because of the horror [he senses] would be waiting – ‘the wish that comes true’ that Cain said most of his novels were about.”

   But the elements simply don’t mesh. The bulk of the novel is taken up with the relationship (much of it sexual) between Graham and Sonya, to the exclusion of everything else; Burwell doesn’t even appear on stage until page 108, and other major plot points are introduced sketchily and/or not developed until the final fifty to sixty pages.

   Graham is a rather dull and unappealing narrator, not at all one of “those wonderful, seedy, lousy no-goods that you have always understood,” as one of Cain’s friends described the protagonists of Postman and Double Indemnity.

   And the prose is anything but lean and hard-edged. It reads as if Cain, late in life, discovered and became enamoured of commas and clauses, as witness the novel’s opening sentence: “I first met her, this girl that I married a few days later, and that the papers have crucified under the pretense of glorification, on a Friday morning in June, on the parking lot by the Patuxent Building, that my office is in.”

   Not everything about Cloud Nine is weak; there are some crisp passages of dialogue reminiscent of vintage Cain, the character of Sonya is well developed, and there is power in the climactic scenes (although none of the existential terror and tragedy of the early books). But on balance, and like the other suspense novels Cain wrote late in life – The Magician’s Wife (1965), Rainbow’s End (1975), The Institute (1976) – it is minor and disappointing.

         ———
   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

WITCHCRAFT. Lippert Films / 20th Century Fox, 1964. Lon Chaney Jr, Jack Hedley, Jill Dixon, David Weston, Diane Clare, Yvette Rees, Victor Brooks. Director: Don Sharp.

   The year, 1964, is the same as the previous movie reviewed here on the blog, Devils of Darkness, with which it was recently paired in a recent DVD release, and both were filmed in England, but nonetheless there’s an ocean of difference between them.

   I don’t mean geographically. Devils was filmed in glorious color; Witchcraft was filmed in even more glorious black-and-white. The story in Devils appeared to have been put together at the spur of the moment; Witchcraft has a single focus — that of a witch being resurrected from the dead — and seeking revenge. The latter in particular makes a good deal of sense to me, if I’d been buried alive as a witch some 300 years or so ago.

   Beginning with the first scene, we (the viewer) are caught up in the story, as a bulldozer makes its way through an ancient cemetery, uprooting underbrush, dirt and (of course) gravestones, making way for a new development. Then we see the outraged Morgan Whitlock, (played by Lon Chaney, Jr., and the only American actor in the film) shaking his cane in the air and saying that there will be the equivalent of hell to pay.

   He’s right. Later the same evening a gravestone is pushed aside and Vanessa Whitlock climbs her way out of the ground. She’s played by a skeletal-looking Yvette Rees, who manages to be authentically shivery scary without being actively icky repulsive, a fact you can perhaps agree on by seeing the photo located to the right.

   It turns out that Vanessa’s wrath is not only directed toward the partner in the construction firm that desecrated the graveyard, but toward the family of the other partner, Bill Lanier (Jack Hadley). There has been a feud between the Whitlocks and the Laniers ever since Vanessa’s non-death, mostly fueled by resentment by the Whitlocks for being ousted from their family home.

   There’s also a Romeo and Juliet forbidden romance to keep the plot going — a return from the grave not being quite enough — so even without a whole lot of gore, there’s enough story to entertain us (the viewer) for the full 79 minutes of running time.

   I included Victor Brooks in the list of credits, even though he doesn’t have much time on the screen. He plays essentially the same role as he did in the later Devils of Darkness, that of the local police inspector who’s called in when the deaths begin to pile up. This time he’s totally puzzled; by the time he appeared in Devils, he was a whole lot quicker in picking up on the fact that the supernatural was involved.

   Too bad the same can’t be said about the characters in Witchcraft, if fault be found anywhere in this film. As usual, they do the most stupid things, such as leaving themselves (or their wives, grandmothers and girl friends) totally alone and vulnerable while all of these strange events are going on. It’s par for the course, of course, but I mention it because perhaps seeing characters doing stupid things bothers you more than it did me, this time.

   One last thing. The director of Witchcraft was Don Sharp. I didn’t mention him in my review of The Devil-Ship Pirates, but he was also at the helm of that film, and as it happens, it was the very same year, 1964. A few years later (1968) he also directed a few TV episodes of The Avengers, of which in terms of all-around watchability, this movie reminded me of a lot.

JAMES M. CAIN – Serenade. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1937. US Paperback editions include: Penguin Books #621, 1947; Signet 1153, 1954; Bantam S-3864, 1968; Vintage, 1978.

Film: 1956, with Mario Lanza and Joan Fontaine.

   Though lesser known than his more famous The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, Serenade is equally a masterpiece. Most of Cain’s best work is of novella length, but Serenade is an exception; a wider canvas is required for this more ambitious work with its subject matter that was daring even for Cain.

   The operatic undertone of Cain’s work comes to the fore here as an opera singer who loses his voice regains it by spending a night of lust and love with a Mexican whore in a deserted church during a thunderstorm.

   When John Howard Sharp returns to New York City and his singing career, the healing prostitute, Juana, is at his side; but they are soon faced with a threat from the past, the man whose homosexual liaison with Sharp had caused the singer?s traumatic loss of voice. In James M. Cain, there can only be one solution to such a situation: murder.

   But murder in Serenade isn’t born of greed and petty self-interest as it is in other Cain novels. The man and woman who share this sexual adventure are admirable and self-sacrificing. Their love is noble, and their tragedy is the deepest, most affecting in all of Cain.

   Cain wrote Serenade and his two other masterpieces in the 1930s; but his later, lesser (if interesting) works have tended to dilute his reputation. He is easily the peer of Hammett and Chandler, however, neither of whom wrote with Cain’s unabashed passion.

   Among his better later works are Past All Dishonor (1946) and The Butterfly (1947); they are, characteristically, in the first person. Mildred Pierce (1941) is the best of Cain?s third-person works. Several other completed novels are among Cain?s papers, and remain unpublished.

         ———
   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.

JAMES M. CAIN – Double Indemnity.

Avon Murder Mystery Monthly #16; paperback original, 1943. First published in Liberty magazine in 1936 as the eight-part serial “Three of a Kind.” First hardcover edition: included in Three of a Kind (Knopf, 1944) with “Career in C Major” and “The Embezzler.” Many other reprint editions, both hardcover and paperback, including Avon #60, 1945 (shown).

Film: 1944, with Barbara Stanwyck & Fred MacMurray; adapted for the screen by Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder.

   James M. Cain wrote of “the wish that comes true … I think my stories have some quality of the opening of a forbidden box, and that it is this rather than violence, sex or any of the things usually cited by way of explanation that gives them the drive so often noted.”

   Double Indemnity employs this same technique, already displayed in The Postman Always Rings Twice, with dazzling ease. Cain, making a quick buck writing a magazine serial in 1936, did not realize it at the time, but he was at the top of his form. Employing skillful, scalpel-like first-person narration, Cain tells his tale of love and murder from the point of view of a lover and murderer.

   Insurance man Walter Huff becomes embroiled in a plot to kill a beautiful woman’s husband. In addition to the sexual and financial incentives, Phyllis Nirdlinger manages to play upon Huff’s boredom and his pride – he knows the insurance game inside and out, and figures with his expertise he can beat it.

   The husband is murdered, according to Huff’s plan, without a hitch. But Huff is dogged by Keyes, a claims agent who also knows the insurance game inside and out. Huff begins to realize Phyllis is untrustworthy and just possibly insane, and falls in love with Lola, the daughter of the murdered man by a previous wife, who had very probably been yet another murder victim of Phyllis’s.

   Double Indemnity is a murder mystery turned inside out: We are forced inside the murderer’s skin, only to find it uncomfortably easy to identify with him, and then share his paranoia as the world crumbles piece by piece around him.

   Huff is a white-collar worker and he’s smart – smart enough to sense early on just how major a mistake he’s made. His sense of his own frailty and wrongdoing makes him a truly tragic protagonist, as does his sense of loss: “I knew I couldn’t have her and never could have her. I couldn’t kiss the girl whose father I killed.”

   Cain liked to explore the workings of businesses, and he never did it better than in Double Indemnity, through the characters of Huff and Keyes. But he also gave the pair an understated shared understanding of humanity (an aspect broadened in the widely respected Billy Wilder-directed, Raymond Chandler-scripted film version of 1944).

   In their final confrontation, Keyes says to Huff (renamed Neff in the film), “This is an awful thing you’ve done, Neff,” and Huff/Neff only says, “I know it.” And when Keyes says, “I kind of liked you, Neff,” Huff/Neff says, “I know. Same here.”

         ———
   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.

JAMES M. CAIN – The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1934. Paperback reprints include: Avon Murder Mystery Monthly #6, 1943; Pocket 443, 1947; Bantam, 1967; Vintage, 1978.

Films: 1946, with Lana Turner & John Garfield; 1981, with Jessica Lange & Jack Nicholson.

   This brutal little blue-collar love story was a shocking, sexy, “dirty” best seller and set the standard for tough, lean writing. It taught readers (and writers) that dialogue could propel a story by its own steam (and steaminess) with (as Cain himself put it) “a minimum of he-saids and she-replied-laughinglys.”

   From its famous first sentence (“They threw me off the hay truck at noon”) to its spellbinding final moments on death row, The Postman Always Rings Twice moves like a freight train, catching the reader up in a sleazy, unpleasant – and compelling – illicit love affair.

   Drifter Frank Chambers. finds himself in a roadside eatery called Twin Oaks Tavern (the first of many double images). Nick Papadakis, the friendly Greek who runs the place, has a wife who “really wasn’t any raving beauty, but she had a sulky look to her.”

   Soon Chambers is running the tavern’s gas station for the Greek; and by the end of chapter two, Frank and Cora have made a cuckold of him; by chapter four they are attempting Nick’s murder. And these are short chapters.

   Incredibly, the adulterers engage not just our interest but our sympathy, our collusion. Their lust (“I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth”) is contagious, and redeemed by the extravagance of their passion (“I kissed her … it was like being in church”).

   Yet Cain pulls no punches: Their intended murder victim, Nick, is not unsympathetic; Frank genuinely likes Nick, and after Frank and Cora succeed on the second try and kill him, cries genuine tears at his funeral.

   Frank and Cora – particularly Frank – are so out of control, so much smaller than the web of circumstance and human frailty in which they are caught up, that a strange sort of supportive interest develops for them. Cain feels for these small lovers who are doomed in so big a way.

   And so do we. When in the aftermath of Nick’s murder and the faked auto accident that follows, Cora and Frank indulge in a manic orgy of sadomasochism and passion at the scene of the crime, we are caught up in the moment with them. As Frank says: “Hell could have opened up for me then, and it wouldn’t have made any difference. I had to have her, if I hung for it.”

   Part of the enduring power of Postman is its evocation of the depression. Frank and Cora’s dream is the American one: They want a business of their own, a family of their own-simple goals that had been made so difficult in hard times. Their greed was small; their aspirations petty. Their love, and their crime, in James Cain’s tabloid opera, large.

         ———
   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.

MICHAEL INNES – Seven Suspects. Berkley F1158, paperback reprint, November 1965. US hardcover edition: Dodd Mead, 1937. First published in the UK as Death at the President’s Lodging, Victor Gollancz, hardcover, 1936. [Other US paperback editions include: Dolphin, 1962; Penguin, 1984.]

   Without a doubt, in terms of intelligence and general all-around erudition, Michael Innes has to be ranked in the top five mystery writers of all time. (I don’t know how you’d put this to a test, but I can think of only a handful I might start comparing him to, and the funny thing is, they’re all English.)

   In the beginning, though, he seems to have been too intellectual for his own good. Seven Suspects was his first mystery novel, and in spite of the great start and the fine setup, to get through the middle portion of the book involves some very tough slogging, to use the vernacular, at least by contemporary standards.

   The great start? Well, it’s not quite a locked room mystery, but it’s the next best thing. And speaking of which, what this (Berkley) edition of the novel needs, more than anything else, is a map, a map of St. Anthony’s College, where the President is found shot to death in his Lodging, with gardens and walls and locked doors all around, and only a limited number of keys with which to open them.

   There could hardly be a greater contrast between the two officers of the law involved, deliberately so. The local copper is the prosaic Inspector Dodd, far more comfortable with tracking down a gang of burglars than a shrewd and wily killer who leaves a puzzling trail of enigmatic clues behind.

   On the other hand, the nimble-witted Inspector John Appleby, sent down quickly by Scotland Yard, is perfect for dealing with the retinue of eccentric academics who never seem to speak before thinking twice (or thrice) about the implications of what they are about to utter.

   Being a native Midwesterner by birth, American style, I have to confess that some of the doings in the aforementioned middle portion of the book, carried out by a small company of carefree undergraduates of the college, were intended to be funny, but not to me. To the average Londoner at the time, they probably were — and maybe even hilarious. (It took me a chapter or two of such antics, but I did finally get into the spirit of things.)

   What is also true, as I came to realize toward the end of the book, is that not a single female appears who has a speaking part, and only one who’s in the book at all has more than a servant’s role. (In all truthfulness, it took Innes’s own observation of this patricluar fact for me to notice. Sometimes I really am slow.)

   And so, this combination of dry academic humor and a decidedly noticeable lack of authorial interest in Appleby the person — that is to say his personal life, his worries and concerns — it all makes this Golden Age gem far out of the mainstream of the mystery world today.

   But gem it is. There are some flaws — it’s a wholly artificial staging, of course — but the comings and goings the night of the murder, who did what when, and who saw what and who didn’t, whose voice that was, and whose it wasn’t, it’s a eye-popper and a mind-blower, and my head is still spinning.

   A gem that needs some polishing, then, but for an academic exercise in the pure pleasure of plotting, very very few of the thousands of mysteries ever published come even close to topping this one.

DEVILS OF DARKNESS. Planet Films/20th Century Fox, 1964. William Sylvester, Hubert Noël, Carole Gray, Tracy Reed, Diana Decker, Eddie Byrne, Victor Brooks. Director: Lance Comfort.

   As a direct competitor to the horror films being made in England by Hammer Films and others at and around the same time, the early to mid-1960s, this mishmosh combination of devil worship, vampirism, witchcraft and necromancy — whatever’s convenient for the plot line at the time — simply has no legs to stand on.

   Webster: mishmosh: a confused jumble, a hodgepodge.

   American actor William Sylvester plays Paul Baxter, a stalwart British, almost professorial type whose vacation in Brittany is interrupted by three strange deaths of three fellow Englishmen (two male, one female) in conjunction with an isolated village’s unusual rites in a local cemetery.

   His suspicions aroused, when he returns England planning to investigate further, but when the three coffins making the journey back with him mysteriously disappear, it makes his task all the harder.

   Unknown to him, by the way, is the talisman that he found and now has in his possession. Belonging to Count Sinistre (Hubert Noel), the leader of the cult of devil-worshipers, the latter wants it back in the worst way.

   And in vampire films, we know what that means.

   From what I’ve learned about this film, it may be the first British vampire film to take place in modern times. And if this means including a scene of with many assorted mod people doing the Twist or Watusi in a garishly decorated apartment filled with smoke of many sorts, then so be it.

   It makes them easy converts to cult activities of a more sinister sort, one supposes, including the wearing of red hooded robes and uttering various chants of servitude, standing in a circle in some grand manor’s basement.

   Carole Gray and Tracy Reed play rivals for the Count’s hand, the former in a fine gypsy rage, the latter (a redheaded cousin of Oliver Reed) largely in a trance, although strictly as demanded by the script mind you. (She was high in the running to replace Diana Rigg in The Avengers. I’d have rather she had.)

   It’s a talky affair, unfortunately, and surprisingly enough, even the inspector from Scotland Yard (Victor Brooks), seems all too willing to accept the supernatural at work, once he’s gained Baxter’s confidence and the latter reveals what he knows.

   A couple of scary moments are to be found in this not very scary movie, no more. A rating of PG could easily be appropriate.

   In summing up: pretty cheesy stuff, indeed, one designed perhaps for beginners in the genre, not long-time fanatics. The actors are fine. It’s the indecisiveness — and incoherence — of the story line that lets them down.