Elliott Chaze (1915-1990) was an old-school newspaperman who began his journalism career with the New Orleans Bureau of the Associated Press shortly before Pearl Harbor, worked for a time for AP’s Denver office after paratrooper service in WW II, and then migrated south to Mississippi where he spent twenty years as reporter and award-winning columnist and ten years as city editor with the Hattiesburg American.

   In his spare time he wrote articles and short stories for The New Yorker, Redbook, Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, and other magazines, and all too infrequently, a novel. In an interview he once stated that his motivation in writing fiction, “if there is any discernible, is probably ego and fear of mathematics, with overtones of money. Primarily I have a simple desire to shine my ass — to show off a bit in print.”

   His first two novels were literary mainstream. The Stainless Steel Kimono (Simon & Schuster, 1947), a post-war tale about a group of American paratroopers in Japan, was a modest bestseller and an avowed favorite of Ernest Hemingway.

   The Golden Tag (Simon & Schuster, 1950), like most of his long works, has a newspaper background, contains a good deal of autobiography, and is both funny and poignant; it concerns a young wire service reporter and would-be novelist in New Orleans who becomes involved with two women, one of them married, while reporting on a sensational murder case.

   His third novel was the one for which he is best remembered today, Black Wings Has My Angel (Gold Medal, 1953; also published as One for My Money, Berkley, 1962 and as One for the Money, Robert Hale, 1985).

   Black Wings Has My Angel is an indisputable noir classic, arguably the best of all the crime novels published by Gold Medal during its glory years. Barry Gifford, in an article in the Oxford American, called it “an astonishingly well written literary novel that just happened to be about (or roundabout) a crime.”

   The protagonist, ex-convict Tim Sunblade, is a quintessential antihero — an unrepentant bastard who executes a daring armed car robbery in Colorado with the help of a call girl, Virginia, whom he picked up in a backwoods Mississippi motel.

   The details of the crime and its aftermath are vividly described, and the love-hate relationship between Sunblade and the woman and the demons in both that lead to their downfall are masterpieces of dark-side character development. Unreservedly recommended.

   It was ten years before Chaze published another novel, and sixteen years before his next crime novel, Wettermark (Scribners, 1969). In its own quiet, sardonic way, Wettermark is every bit as good as Black Wings Has My Angel. Its setting is the small town of Catherine, Mississippi, a thinly disguised Hattiesburg, where the protagonist, the eponymous Wettermark, toils as a newspaper reporter for the local paper.

   Wettermark is a tragicomic figure, accent on the tragic — a tired, financially strapped, ex-alcoholic wage slave whose novelist ambitions have long since been shattered by rejection and apathy. His arrival on the scene of a recent successful bank robbery plants a seed in his mind, a “glimpse of the green” that is nurtured by circumstance and his private demons until it blossoms into a daring heist scheme of his own.

   Wettermark is by turns funny, sad, bitter, mordant, and ultimately as dark and unforgiving as Black Wings — a brilliant character study that is likewise unreservedly recommended and that somebody damned well ought to reprint.

   Late in his life, after he had retired from the Hattiesburg American, Chaze wrote three offbeat, ribald (occasionally downright bawdy), and often hilarious mysteries, all published by Scribners, featuring Kiel St. James, a well-meaning but somewhat bumbling city editor for the Catherine Call (Catherine having been mysteriously moved from Mississippi to Alabama for this series); Crystal Bunt, Kiel’s highly sexed young photographer girlfriend; and Chief of Detectives Orson Boles, a tenacious cop given to wearing hideous lizard green polyester suits ( “I like green, hoss”) and speaking alternately in Southern grits-and-gravy dialect and perfect English.

   Each of the three, Goodbye, Goliath (1983), Mr. Yesterday (1984) and Little David (1985), drew enthusiastic critical praise — The New Yorker called them “good, down-home fun [with] much flavorful redneck talk…plenty of excitement too” — but they seem to have been inexplicably neglected, if not all but forgotten, in the years since.

   The best of the trio is Mr. Yesterday, which deals with the murders of two eccentric old spinsters, one by a fall and one by a bizarre (very bizarre) stabbing. The motive for the two killings, and the method employed in one, are the weirdest, wildest, most inventive, most audacious (and yet completely plausible) ever devised in a mystery novel.

   Some readers no doubt did and will find the explanation offensive, even borderline obscene. I laughed out loud when it was revealed, which may tell you more about my sense of humor than you care to know, but I’m pretty sure the author would have approved.

   Elliott Chaze was a fine prose stylist, witty, insightful, nostalgic, and irreverent, and a first-class storyteller. If you’ve never read anything of his, or nothing except Black Wings Has My Angel, by all means hunt up copies of Wettermark, Mr. Yesterday, and anything else with his byline. You won’t be disappointed.

  Hi Steve,

   Flynn died in Deal, Kent on 5th February 1958. He must have been writing right up to the end as his last two books followed later in 1958.

   Unfortunately, that is the sum of my findings. Kent record office know nothing about him. But I do have a couple of suggestions to follow up.

   [As far as Brian Flynn is concerned as a writer] Barzun in Catalog of Crime, says of the one book he lists “Straight tripe and savorless. it is doubtful, on the evidence, if any of his others would be different.”

   I know nothing about him and reckon he is what I would call a journeyman writer, writing prolifically to make some money. Though he must have some effect to have written 50 books, which is 49 more than lot of people. Perhaps being so prolific, and keeping the same character throughout, was his error.

   He wrote for what we call library publishers, publishers whose aim was to produce books which libraries would buy – often by quantity rather than by author. If libraries bought his books, he would keep on writing. Sadly, just because libraries buy one’s books it does not necessarily mean you are a good writer. Most books, especially fiction, will find library readers because “they have read everything else on the shelves” (This is personal experience speaking, having worked for 3 decades in a public library and seen some right rubbish get elevated to “I must look out for the next one”!) I suppose some library borrowers will read anything as they don’t need to buy it.

   Sadly, I get the impression that Flynn was one of the lucky ones who found his niche and carried on till he died (and two books did come out after he died).

   How good was he actually? No idea. Barzun condemned him on one book, right or wrong. But I simply think he was writing for the library market and that could be a limitation as far as style and improvement would be concerned. In those 50 books there may have been a good writer struggling and failing to improve his lot.

   Anyway, will let you know if I find anything else.

EDGAR WALLACE – The Clue of the Twisted Candle

George Newnes, London, hc, 1917. Small Maynard & Co.,Boston, hc, 1916. Numerous reprints in both hardcover and paperback. TV Film: An episode of The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre, 15 August 1960, with Bernard Lee as “Superintendent Meredith.”

   Assistant Commissioner of Police T. X. Meredith, a man of unorthodox though successful methods of detection and best friend of mystery writer John Lexman, has been investigating Remington Kara, an extremely rich Greek with something of a turbulent history and a former suitor for the hand of Lexman’s wife.

   Kara was almost murdered years ago, and such is his fear of another attempt being made his bedroom is “practically a safe.” It features burglar-proof walls, reinforced concrete roof and floor, an unreachable window, and its sole door has in addition to a lock “a sort of steel latch which he lets down when he retires for the night and which he opens himself personally in the morning”.

   Of course Kara is eventually found dead, locked in this safe-like room. How was Kara’s murder accomplished, why did his secretary disappear and his manservant run away, and for that matter who killed the dog in the basement of his house? Was Kara killed by the men he has feared for years or someone else, and if so, who was it and why?

   Answers to these conundrums are revealed at a gathering at the end of the book in which All Is Explained, including how the challenge presented by the locked room was overcome.

   My verdict: On the negative side I felt there were perhaps one too many coincidences and the identity of the murderer was not as well hidden as it might have been. On the other hand, the locked room explanation is ingenious, clues to how it was accomplished are revealed in a fair fashion in the narrative, and I confess I did not foresee one of the final twists. I would sum it up as a diverting, light read.

   Etext available online.

FLY AWAY GIRL. Warner Brothers, 1937. Glenda Farrell, Barton MacLane, Gordon Oliver, Hugh O’Connell, Tom Kennedy.

   It must have been Glenda Farrell Day sometime last year at Turner Classic Movies, or at a minimum, Torchy Blane Day, since I’ve just discovered that I taped a complete sequence of the Torchy films that day, all eight of them. I watched a few of them last year, decided I didn’t want to overdose on them, put them aside – and promptly forgot about them until a couple of days ago when I came across them again.

   This one’s number two in the series, in case you’re counting. I can’t exactly tell you what the appeal is with these movies, since the mystery plots are kind of sappy and so are the characters, to tell you the truth. It’s been a while since I watched the first one, Smart Blonde (1937), so I’d rather you didn’t quote me on this, but I have the feeling that the detective element was the strongest in that one, before the comedy became more and more significant. Since it’s also the only one that was based on a Frederick Nebel pulp fiction story, I think I’m safe enough in saying so.

   Torchy Blane is an ace newspaper reporter, and she must have been quite a model for plenty of young girls in the late 30s and early 40s, because she is an ace, female or not. Her boy friend (or fiancé, more or less) is Lt. Steve McBride (Barton MacLane), who has an ordinary mind for police work and who (therefore) is no match for Torchy. You might consider him lunk-headed, but I think that is why Tom Kennedy is in these movies, as Sgt. Orville Gahagan, a poor poetry-spouting sap who lives for nothing more to use the siren whenever he’s whisking McBride off to the next scene of the crime. Gahagan makes McBride look positively Holmesian in comparison.

   The plot in this particular episode in their lives centers around the murder of diamond merchant in his office, but Torchy’s choice for the killer, a reporter with a rich father, seems to have an iron-clad alibi. When her candidate for a killer takes an around-the-world tour as a newspaper stunt, Torchy talks her editor into allowing her to tag along, hence the title.

   Actually, I do know what the appeal is for these movies. It’s Torchy herself, or rather Glenda Farrell who plays her: fast-talking and fast-thinking, brassy without being bold, funny and wisecracking, but her mind on only one thing, her story. The photo of her that you see above didn’t come from this movie. I couldn’t find any, I’m sorry to say, but I thought this publicity still would do fairly well in its place.

   After Vince Keenan and I finished our email conversation on Mike Shayne and the actors who have played him over the years, I didn’t think it was going to take long for Vince to go through all four films on the first DVD set, once I knew they were in his hands, and I was right. Even though not especially looking the part, Lloyd Nolan was very impressive in the role, he says, making me all the more anxious for my copies to get here in the mail.

   I’ll have to send you over to his blog, though, but it’s only a click away and it’s well worth the trip.

   Vince also sent me an email about the Mike Shayne radio show I set up a link to. His response:  “I listened to the Shayne radio show and enjoyed it quite a bit. Jeff Chandler may look nothing like that portrait of Shayne, but he’s got the attitude down pat. And that ending — what a corker!”

    Given that kind of reaction, I figured I ought to do something about it. If you go this OTR Archives page, you will find links to around 30 or 35 of them. Just click and play, or download and burn to CDs if you wish. I haven’t listened to the sound quality of all of these, but the higher the Kbps, the better, I think — try those in the column furthest to the right first. Jeff Chandler’s the star in all but the first one (from 1946) and the last (from 1953).

   A few months ago I was asked if I had any information on writer Mary McMullen, who wrote nineteen mysteries between 1952 and 1986, when she passed away. Most of these books were published by Doubleday’s Crime Club imprint and can be generally classified as being in the “malice domestic” genre. Without a series character to maintain readers’ interest in her stories, she’s on the verge of being forgotten, but no one writes that many works of crime fiction without having had a substantial following at the time.

   What’s the most interesting about Mary McMullen, perhaps, is her family. When I did a bibliography for mystery writer Helen Reilly following Michael Grost’s excellent analysis of her crime fiction, I said:

   Helen Reilly’s primary character was Inspector Christopher McKee. In Mike’s essay on her, he considers the McKee books as very early police procedurals, but he also connects her work up with the Black Mask style of writing, in the hardboiled pulp tradition.

   My impression of Ursula Curtiss’s books is that they are much like her sister Mary McMullen’s, but stronger on the suspense. If you’ve read any of them recently, though, and can tell me otherwise, I’d surely like to be corrected. Ursula Curtiss is listed in CFIV as the author of 22 novels and one collection of short stories, the books appearing at regular intervals between 1948 and 1985.

   Besides James Kieran, the brother mentioned above, there was another well-known member of the family, John F. Kieran, the sportswriter who was a long-time panelist on radio’s Information Please in the 1940s, among other accomplishments.

   James Kieran’s impact on the world of mystery fiction is small, but the reason will soon become clear. He has only one entry in CFIV, as follows, in slightly expanded form:

   About this time, Victor Berch, whom I’d asked for assistance on the original inquiry about Mary McMullen, sent me the following email:

   I was following the discussion about Mary McMullen, and when the subject of James Kieran came up, I decided to look into him. Don’t ask why. Maybe, it’s because he’s a Gold Medal author and I have the two printings of Come Murder Me (GM 150 and 419).

   [In Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV] James Kieran’s dates [are given] as 1911-1986. I think this is the wrong James Kieran. Out of curiosity (more likely habit), I decided to check with the Copyright Office. Come Murder Me was first registered March 7, 1951. The copyright was renewed Feb. 15, 1971 by Mrs James Kieran. his wife. Then the thought crossed my mind “Why should his wife had to renew the copyright if he was still alive?

   Anyhow, the record also gave her full name as Dagmar N. Kieran along with the Mrs. James Kieran appelation. So, I ran a check on her. She was born May 10, 1908 and died Sep. 22, 1985 according to [Social Security records].

   However, there is another data base that I sometimes check. It lists people coming in to the USA from foreign ports, both citizens and aliens. The data taken from passports usually give the name of the person, the birth date, place of birth and present address.

   And so I found Dagmar N. Kieran and her husband James M. Kieran returning from a trip to Curacao Dec. 7, 1936. James M. Kieran’s birth date was given as September 23, 1901, born in NYC. A check through the NY Times led me to an extensive obituary, which I’ll send along [soon]. He died January 12, 1952. So, his dates and full name should be Kieran, James Michael, Jr., 1901-1952.

   He died, that is to say, only year after his only mystery novel was published. As for his family, a brief article in Timemagazine also mentions the Kierans (December 25, 1939):

   Some excerpts from the NY Times obituary for James Kieran will follow, one of them toward the end very interesting, especially if true. It does not seem as though the statement would be in the obituary, if it were not. Of course the degree of involvement is not specified, and it may have been minimal. But here, read for yourself:

   If anyone knows more, we’d love to know about it.

KENDALL FOSTER CROSSEN – The Tortured Path

Permabook M4099; paperback reprint, June 1958. Hardcover edition: E. P. Dutton, June 1957. One chapter appeared earlier in Stag Magazine under the title “The Treatment.” Later paperback edition: Paperback Library 64-706, 1971, as by “M. E. Chaber writing as Kendall Foster Crossen.”

   That last byline is rather strange, if you think about it. Kendall Foster Crossen was the author’s real name, and M. E. Chaber was the name he used to write his “Milo March” novels. Paperback Library had been publishing these in uniform editions, all with hugely attractive covers by Robert McGinnis. They must have done well with them, because they when they ran out of Milo March’s adventures to print, to capitalize on Chaber’s popularity, they started doing some of Crossen’s other work in the same numbered format, including this one and several he wrote as by Christopher Monig.

   Milo March was basically an insurance investigator, but he also had connections with the CIA, and his adventures took him all over the world. [For more on March, check out his page on the Thrilling Detective website.]

   Major Kim Locke, the primary protagonist in The Tortured Path, had even more direct connections with the CIA, and I’ll go into the details in a minute. First, though, here’s a list of the books he appeared in, taken from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

   Why the switch in bylines, I don’t know, but it may have had something to do with the switch in publishers. The Big Dive is scarce; it was never reprinted in paperback, and at the moment, there are only two copies of the hardcover edition offered for sale on the Internet. While The Gentle Assassin never had a paperback edition either, it is fairly common in hardcover. It’s also easily available in a three-in-one Detective Book Club edition.

   Here are the first couple of paragraphs from The Tortured Path, which will give you more information about Major Locke’s background. It will also supply you with a glimpse of the author’s writing style, or so it’s my intention:

   His assignment? To get himself caught by the Chinese Communists, be brainwashed and undergo any other form of torture they might devise for him, and then rescue an American officer who has secrets that mustn’t fall into enemy hands.

   Which he does. End of book. Well, not quite, but almost. Getting in is far too easy, getting out is another matter, sort of the scorched-earth approach, if you ask me, crude but effective. Crossen has a quiet, breezy style of story-telling, beginning (as you will have seen) with page one onward. The resulting adventure is readable in about a night or two. It is also largely forgettable in about the same length of time.

ON THE ISLE OF SAMOA. Columbia, 1950. Jon Hall, Susan Cabot, Raymond Greenleaf, Al Kikume. Directed by William A. Berke.

   Jon Hall made a career out of making movies (and television shows) taking place in jungles, deserts, and South Seas islands, and obviously this is one of them. Checking out his biography on IMDB, among other items of interest I learned that he was of Swiss/Tahitian descent, and that his mother was a Tahitian princess, and I believe that explains a lot.

   And which makes a movie like this one right up his alley, except that as a B-movie it rated a sub-B budget and (as the old saying goes) it probably escaped rather than being released. Hall is also a villain, which is hard to take, given that I remember him most as the star (and hero) of Ramar of the Jungle on TV, episodes of which I believe are available on DVD. I’ve hesitated in picking them up, however, as I’ve been disappointed before in watching what was wonderful when I was ten or twelve and might not be quite so wonderful today.

   As badly-tempered Kenneth Crandall in this short film, barely over 60 minutes long, he flees the successful burglary of a nightclub in Australia in a stolen plane, only to crash on an uncharted island during a hurricane (which was more likely a typhoon, if anyone had taken the time to check). The island is inhabited by beautiful women, strong men and one aged missionary (Raymond Greenleaf), who does his best to convince Crandall to renounce his evil ways. But even with the beautifully vacuous Moana (Susan Clarke) as a love interest, Crandall stays remarkably thuggish and unpersuaded.

   The only suspense in this film is how long he will resist. To avoid giving away the ending, let me suggest to you that he may never see the error of his ways, and he dies before his heart (and mind) ever softens at all.

STAR IN THE DUST. Universal, 1956. John Agar, Mamie Van Doren, Richard Boone, Leif Erickson, Colleen Gray, James Gleason, Terry Gilkyson, Harry Morgan. Based on the novel Law Man (Ballantine #51, 1953) by Lee Leighton (Wayne Overholser). Directed by Charles F. Haas.

   A “B” western, perhaps, but it packs a lot of drama into its 80 minutes. Folksinger Terry Gilkyson, soloing on his guitar, frames the story from time to time, the tale of a bad man named Sam Hall (Richard Boone), who is to be hanged at sundown at the end of the single day in which the this film takes place.

   But why is a review of a western movie here in the first place, on a website dedicated to crime and mystery fiction, you may ask. And I reply, in almost every western, whether in print or on film, there is a crime, and as a bonus, there is often a crime to be solved.

   The mystery in this case is, who hired Sam Hall to kill three farmers who (the ranchers say) crossed over the creek into their lands? The sheriff (John Agar), who’s been staying neutral and keeping the peace, has his own battles to fight, trying to live up to his father’s reputation on the job, for one, and salvaging his wedding to the sister (Mamie Van Doren) of the banker (Leif Erikson) who’s the head of the cattleman’s association (see below).

   And (as fate would have it) this would-be brother-in-law is his leading suspect as well. It’s a tough job, but Sheriff Jorden seems up to it. You might think that Mamie Van Doren would be out of place in a western drama, but I certainly didn’t mind. It also seems to me that throughout his career James Gleason always played skinny old men, and at the age of 74, when he made this one, he’d finally grown into the part. Richard Boone may have made a better western villain than he did a western hero (Paladin), and even if you may not agree, he’s at his best (that is to say, his nastiest) in this one.

   There are a few twists and turns in the tale, more than I expected, but as far as the identity of the man who hired the killer is concerned, unfortunately there is no twist at all. There’s plenty of full color action, though, for those who look for that in their westerns, including one sprawling fight between two ladies who are no ladies at the time at all, neither of whom is played by Mamie Van Doren, who is always very definitely a lady.

   The entry for Gertrude Walker in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, looks like this, or at least this is how it looked until this past week, supplemented slightly by the information on the paperback editions:

   WALKER, GERTRUDE (1920- )
      * * So Deadly Fair (Putnam, 1948, hc) [Minnesota]. Bestseller B105, digest pb, abridged, 1948. Popular Library 424, pb, 1952.
      * * Diamonds Don’t Burn (Jenkins, 1955, hc)
      * * The Suspect (Major, 1978, pb) [Los Angeles, CA]

   So Deadly Fair has a modest reputation among fans of hardboiled mysteries, but otherwise is probably little known. I don’t remember seeing a copy myself, in any of its various editions, although it’s not uncommon, at least in paperback form, so I probably have.

   From the blurb on the hardcover edition: “When the Minneapolis-bound freight train pulled out of the small Middletown, Minnesota, freight yard, it left behind it very little of importance: a few rolls of barbed wire, some packing cases, and me. And god knows I wasn’t important. I wasn’t important to anyone. Not even to myself.”

   An investigation into both the book and the author began with an email from British bookseller Jamie Sturgeon to Al Hubin:

   Al sent the email on to me, along with his reply, and I’ll get back to that in a minute.

   Taking a look at Walker’s credits in the film-making industry, the following caught my eyes, all more or less in the crime fiction genre:

  Mystery Broadcast, 1943. “A radio detective (Ruth Terry) sets out to solve an old murder case, with the help of her sound man and another radio detective.” [Additional dialogue.]

  Whispering Footsteps, 1943. “A bank clerk in a small town returns home from a vacation in Indianapolis, and hears a story on the radio about a girl found murdered there. The description of the killer fits him exactly, and when two girls are murdered in his town, suspicion falls on him…” [Co-screenwriter.]

  Silent Partner, 1944. “Reporters investigating the death of a friend begin to suspect that their newspaper’s editor may have been responsible for it.” [Screenwriter.]

  End of the Road, 1944. “A crime writer believes that a man imprisoned for committing the notorious ‘Flower Shop Murder’ is innocent of the crime…” [Co-screenwriter.]

  Crime of the Century, 1946. “Ex-convict Hank Rogers is searching for his brother Jim, a newspaperman, and becomes involved with a group of people trying to conceal the death of the president of a large corporation…” [Screenwriter.]

  Railroaded!, 1947. “Sexy beautician Clara Calhoun, who has a bookie operation in her back room, connives with her boyfriend, mob collector Duke Martin (John Ireland), to stage a robbery of the day’s take.” [Original story.]

  The Damned Don’t Cry, 1950. “The murder of gangster Nick Prenta touches off an investigation of mysterious socialite Lorna Hansen Forbes (Joan Crawford), who seems to have no past, and has now disappeared…” [Based on Gertrude Walker’s story, “Case History.”]

  Insurance Investigator, 1951. “When a businessman who has had a double indemnity policy taken out on him dies mysteriously, his insurance company sends an undercover investigator to town to determine exactly what happened.” [Screenwriter and co-author.]

   Some of these I’m sure you may have heard of, others most probably not, but they all seem to fit the category of black-and-white film noir, some more than others, of course. Walker also has a few miscellaneous credits in television, including a stint on The New Adventures of Charlie Chan (1958).

   The IMDB link that Jamie provided actually leads to biography of Charles Winniger, long-time comedian and song-and-dance man. Here’s the key line: “Divorced from wife Blanche in 1951, Charlie subsequently married stage actress-turned-novelist and screenwriter Gertrude Walker whom he originally met on Broadway when he returned to “Show Boat” in 1932 (Gertrude played the role of Lottie).”

   Here now is Al Hubin’s reply to Jamie, as sent on to me:

   The birth and death dates now having been established with a certainly, it was time, I thought, to take a closer look at the books she wrote.

   The link Jamie provided to the “Rara-Avis” group was also the only one that I found that was of any great use. It was a message posted by Etienne Borgers, in response to another’s request for information about her. It reads as follows:

   There’s some duplication of information here, so please forgive me for that. I haven’t yet looked into the short fiction that Walker may have written. Etienne’s mention of a book entitled The Face of Evil, one that Al Hubin didn’t seem to know about, was what attracted my attention the most. That the date (1978) was the same as the book The Suspect (Major, 1978) made me wonder if perhaps the two books were the same. Neither one showed up for sale on the Internet, but knowing that Bill Pronzini collects the paperbacks published by Major, I emailed him.

   In a moment, the results of that inquiry.

   In the meantime Jamie had sent me a scan of the jacket blurb for the book he had, the British hardcover, Diamonds Don’t Burn. My thought was that perhaps the British edition was simply retitling of the earlier US book, So Deadly Fair, but Jamie said no, the in book he had mentioned the first one by title. I think the scan is readable, and it looks as though the book itself would be worth reading. Why it was never published in the US is a question as yet unanswered.

   An email reply from Etienne Borgers was in essence an apology that he hadn’t any more information about Walker than was posted earlier, but no matter. He had already posted more information about Gertrude Walker than was available anywhere else.

   Etienne offered to double check with friends, but by this time, I’d heard back from Bill Pronzini. One of the questions I’d asked him is whether of not The Suspect, the 1978 paperback from Major, actually existed, there being no copies offered for sale on the Internet:

  Steve:

   Al is surely right that Gertrude W. Winninger and Gertrude Walker were one in the same individual, and that her correct birthdate is 1902, not 1920.

   Attached is a photo of Gertrude Walker from the back jacket of her first novel, So Deadly Fair. The accompanying bio calls her “a young woman,” and the photo indicates the same, but my guess is that it’s just publicity hype and the photo an old one.

   My copy of the book includes a separate publicity photo in which she looks older, closer to her age at the time the novel was published, 46.

   The Suspect does indeed exist; attached are scans of the front and back covers. If it’s a novelization of a 1943 screenplay, it was definitely updated to the 70s milieu. I can’t say for sure, but The Suspect is probably a retitling, either by the author or Major Books, of a manuscript submitted as The Face of Evil. I don’t know of any novel by Walker or anybody else published in 1978 or thereabouts under the latter title.

   Diamonds Don’t Burn and So Deadly Fair are definitely separate books. Fair is a sort of hardboiled and frenetic road novel that jumps from Minnesota to New York City and points in between and is narrated by a male protagonist named Walter Johnson.

  Best,

   Bill

   Here’s the front cover of the Major book. It’s obviously a tough book to find. If it’s on your want list, good luck to you!

   But what’s more important is the back cover. Check the plot synopsis of the movie Whispering Footsteps up above, and read the back cover again:

  

   Bingo. We have a match.

       —

[UPDATE] 03-27-07. Excerpted from an email I received this morning from Victor Berch, suggestions which I’ve accepted with many thanks:

  Steve:

   You might want to consider adding these to Gertrude Walker’s repertoire:

1935–Mary Burns, Fugitive.
   Had a minor acting role in this crime film.

1943–Danger! Women at Work
   Described as a homefront comedy, but the hijacking of trucks is part of the plot. GW responsible for the story along with Edgar G. Ulmer.

1945–Behind City Lights.
   Described as a crime drama with songs. GW responsible for the adaptation.

1946–My Dog Shep
   Described as an animal and youth drama. (involves a kidnapping plot). GW was screenwriter.

Best,

   Victor

 

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