Prompted by a review by Ed Gorman of one of his early private eye stories for Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, author James Reasoner recently did some reminiscing on his own blog about the private eye characters he created back then, some 25 to 30 years ago.

   There were four “Markham” stories, he says, calling Markham “sort of a dry run for my private eye character Cody, who appeared in the novel Texas Wind and several short stories of his own.”

   James goes on to say that Markham “was the second private eye character I created for MSMM. The first was called Delaney … who appeared in a handful of short, very minor stories. Cody came along after Markham and I used both of them in stories for a while, but Cody last appeared in 1988, nearly twenty years ago.”

   If you hadn’t missed it, yes, all three detectives have only a single name.

   It’s a long post, and besides talking about his own characters, James also discusses the other authors who appeared in some of the same issues of MSMM as he did, writers such as Joe R. Lansdale, Edward D. Hoch, William L. Fieldhouse and others. Not only that, but he remembers the pair of editors who bought the stories as well: Sam Merwin, Jr., and Charles E. Fritch.

   I’ll have to dig out some of the back issues of MSMM I have in my own collection. James also did many of the “Mike Shayne” short novels or novelettes that appeared in every issue during this same era, including the one pictured here.

   It made the magazine one of the few places where you could be guaranteed being able to read a PI story anytime you picked one up. (The link above will take you to a list of many of the Mike Shayne stories that appeared in the magazine and who wrote them.)

   James concludes by saying, “I’ve thought at times that a volume collecting all the Cody, Markham, and Delaney stories would make a nice little book. Maybe one of these days.”

   If at all possible, make it sooner rather than later, James.

[UPDATE] 03-06-07. At the request of myself and a number of others, James has posted a complete list of all of his non- “Mike Shayne” private eye short fiction.

   He goes on to talk about a few of the stories, including some additional details about his various PI characters. James concludes by saying:

[UPDATE] 09-08-08. It’s a little late to be considered breaking news, but a collection of 17 of James’s 18 private eye stories was published earlier this year by Ramble House. The title is For Old Times’ Sake, and you can order it here.

DAVID HUME – Requiem for Rogues

Collins, UK, hc, 1942. Reprints: 1946?, 1952. Collins White Circle #380, Canada, pb, 1949.

   The author, first of all, is NOT David Hume (April 26, 1711 – August 25, 1776), who was a Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian, and according to at least one source, one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and of the Scottish Enlightenment.

   Nor is it his real name, for which see below. One does idly wonder why Mr. Turner chose it as a working by-line, though. It also makes it difficult to come up with information about him on Google, most of the searches picking up the wrong man, obviously.

   On one website, I did come across the following, however:

   From Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, which of course I turned to next, if not first, comes the following list of titles by Mr. Hume. These are the British editions only:

   I don’t know about you but these are all new names to me, both that of the author (and his pen names) and his characters. Back to Google, it seems. Here’s a snippet of a review from The Bookman, 1933, of the US Holt edition of Nicolas Brady’s The House of Strange Guests:

   Another snippet of a review, this one from The Librarian and Book World, date?, of Brady’s The Fair Murder:

   Seeing a few shorter works of fiction collected under David Hume’s byline, I checked out the online Fictionmags Index, with the following results. [* = included in CFIV list above, either as a novel serialized earlier in magazine form, or as a story collected later in book form]

   More googling, this time on Hume’s detective Mick Cardy. At this point I still knew nothing about him. On a website devoted to Inspector Maigret I discovered the following piece of art:

  1.   2.      3.      4.     5.   6.     7.       8.

   Maigret is the second gentleman on the left. Although they don’t have the original art, this cartoon came from the Storm-P museum in Copenhagen, and the curator, Jens Bing, identifies it as first appearing on the cover of the Danish pulp crime magazine Stjernehæftet in 1946. Bing sent a a copy to the Danish branch of the Sherlock Holmes Society, and here are the results they came up with for the others in the scene:

   I don’t think I would gotten many of those, assuming that these are the right answers. How would you have done? But no matter, it would seem that Mick Cardby was actually Inspector Cardby, but this is not so, as we shall see in a minute. I didn’t include them in the CFIV listings, but two of Hume’s books were indicated as being the sources of films based upon them. So off I went to www.imdb.com, where I found the following useful information:

   Plot summary for The Patient Vanishes (1941) aka They Called Him Death [The latter being the title of a 1934 book by Hume.]

   Aha. Mick Cardby is a PI, not a gent from the Yard at all. We’ve learned something. (And you who knew already can stop the knowing looks at each other.) One more movie from the IMDB:

   Too Dangerous to Live (1939) aka Crime Unlimited. [The latter being the David Hume title from 1933.] With Edward Lexy as Inspector Cardby, but no Mick Cardy listed in the credits, and no synopsis of the story.

   But from the All Movie Guide comes the following Plot Description:

   And from BFI, apparently there is a PI involved, after all:

   I am sure that if you were to find a copy to watch, all of this confusion may be very easily straightened out. But a question remains: Who was the more important of the two characters, Inspector Cardby or his son Mick? Should both of them be included in CFIV as significant Series Characters?

   And as you can easily see, Hume under his many aliases was extremely prolific. I’m sure you thought the same thing when you read through that list of mysteries up above. Could anyone who wrote so many detective novels so quickly be any good at it? Hold that thought. We’ll get back to it in a minute.

   Hume also died young, at only 45. Could war injuries have had anything to do with his death? Having no answers, only these questions and more, unless you can enlighten me, I’ll move on to the major business at hand, which is a review of Requiem for Rogues.

    In which the leading character in is neither Cardy, father or son, but rather Tony Carter, a wisecracking crime reporter who appeared in three of Hume’s adventures, of which this is the third. He’s rather full of himself as well, as one might put it. Here’s a piece of a conversation that takes place on page 22 between Carter and his immediate superior at the Echo:

   Suffice it say that Carter convinces Cartwright to give him a free hand in this case of the drive-by killing of one Percival East, dead by means of a bullet between the eyes on page eight, and right before the eyes of a later berated Detective Spriggs.

   By page 69, the police are confused enough – and well they should be – to give Carter a free hand as well, as the case is seemingly awash with far too many clues and then again, far too few. But the more Carter digs into the case, the more deeply Percival East is discovered to have roots in the world of crime: the rackets, blackmail, the works.

   Incidentally, totally relevant to nothing, I don’t know why everyone in this book refers to members of the police force as “splits.” It’s a new one on me, but the rest of the slang I managed to decipher with no particular difficulty. Conversations, though, which should have taken a page at the most to start and end invariably took four or five, which means that Hume was either a master of dialogue or he needed these long dialogues to fill the novel to a proper length. As for myself, I will not say padding, as I found these conversations to be rather imaginative, at the least.

   There is no detection in this mystery novel, per se. Carter runs around London a lot, meets with his crew of regular informers a lot, and in so doing irritates the killer a lot, and enough so to make him (or her) make moves and counterattacks he (or she) really shouldn’t have done. If Carter had only been left alone, one might think, the case would never have been solved. One might very easily be right.

   This probably also answers the question I asked up above but didn’t answer until now.

HAVING WONDERFUL CRIME. RKO, 1945. Patrick O’Brien, George Murphy, Carole Landis, George Zucco. Co-screenwriter: Stewart Sterling; directed by A. Edward Sutherland.

   Based on the novel of the same name by Craig Rice, which I haven’t read, but all the sources which I have read say that the movie is nothing at all like the book. Murphy and Landis play the newly wed Jake and Helene Justus, while O’Brien is their long-suffering buddy in crime-solving, lawyer Michael J. Malone. (It was John J. Malone in the books. That much I do know.)

   The story has something to do with a magician who disappears in the middle of his stage act, then reappears in a trunk brought to a lakeside resort by his female assistant – or does he? In spite of the trio’s suspicions, he’s not in the trunk, but not to worry – he eventually turns up dead and there really is a case to be solved.

   I couldn’t tell you one way or another if the plot (the motive and where the body is when) makes any sense, and truthfully I don’t think that anyone involved in this madcap sort of affair, near slapstick at times, really cared.

   Pat O’Brien doesn’t nearly match the image of Malone I have in my head – for some reason, I see him as a shorter, more somber sort of fellow – but George Murphy is right on as Jake Justus, and Carole Landis is even more perfect as Helene. Her beautiful, smiling face, her lithesome figure and (as Helene) her slightly scatterbrained approach to life and solving murder mysteries, makes me wonder why her career in the movies never went any further than it did. (Due to illness, among other factors, she committed suicide only three years after this movie was released.)

   Even though from a murder mystery point of view there is much to be desired from this particular film, the performances of the three main characters make this a must-see, especially to watch Miss Landis in such high form, high spirits and in high fashion.

THE GREAT FLAMARION. Republic, 1945. Erich von Stroheim, Mary Beth Hughes, Dan Duryea, Stephen Barclay. Directed by Anthony Mann.

   A curiously flat film noir with oft-time director Erich von Stroheim as Flamarian, a vaudevillian headliner who falls for the wiles of femme fatale Mary Beth Hughes, an assistant in his pistol markmanship act. Her husband, Dan Duryea, is the other assistant in the act, a man driven to jealousy and as a consequence, given heavily to drink.

   Flamarion is a stolid, impassive, lonely man, once thrown over in love by a double-crossing woman, who’s vowed to never allow it to happen again. Contemptuous, however, of the weakness he sees in Al Wallace and tempted by the flirtatious Connie Wallace, he at length lets his guard down, to his own disaster – and as it happens, to the others in this ill-fated triangle.

The long scene during which Flamarion waits for Connie in a hotel bridal suite in buoyant anticipation, only to realize the inevitable, is as painful to watch as anything I’ve seen in a film in some time. Duryea is perfectly cast in his role, slickly conniving yet weak-kneed and a somewhat pitiful excuse for a man – a fact that the viewer is quickly made aware of. It’s a part made just for him.

   I don’t believe I’ve seen Mary Beth Hughes in a movie before, although she was around throughout the 1940s in B-movies like this, though often in uncredited performances. Her body language in the role was as crucial as her spoken dialogue, and she made the best of both.

   But the reason I called the film flat? The main story is presented in the form of a long, uncomplicated flashback. When you know the fate of two of the characters from the beginning, and you can soon guess that of the third, it’s just about impossible for any movie or any director or any cast to generate a feeling of suspense, and The Great Flamarion is no exception.

   On the other hand, if it had been filmed linearly, which would have been the only alternative, there simply aren’t enough twists and turns in the plot for the otherwise lightweight tale to have gone anywhere at all. Mann made the best of two choices, in my opinion, but in spite of some more better than average performances from the players, the movie didn’t ring any bells for me.

ROAR OF THE PRESS. Monogram, 1941. Wallace Ford, Jean Parker, Jed Prouty, Paul Fix. Directed by Phil Rosen.

   What this Grade B murder mystery movie is more than it is a murder mystery is a comedy about crime beat newspapermen and their wives who never see them. Wallace Ford is the reporter (Wally Williams) who spots a body falling from the top of a Manhattan skyscraper on the day and his bride of one day come to the city to spend a few days honeymooning. Jean Parker, of Detective Kitty O’Day fame (in certain circles), is his bride Alice, who hails from a small town in New England and who quickly joins the club – that of the long-suffering wives of the other reporters on her husband’s newspaper.

   Dead is the head of a pacifist league, in case it matters, and it doesn’t much, which turns out to be a front for fifth columnists and saboteurs. When Wally finds yet another body before the cops do, the cops get sore, and rightfully so, as all of the clues are in the pockets of Wally. Jed Prouty plays Wally’s editor, who cleverly keeps him on the case, even with the lure of a dinner of corned beef and cabbage waiting for him at home. One would think that the slim and decidedly pretty Mrs. Williams would be lure enough, but not so.

   Paul Fix is the head of a numbers racket with a heart of gold, and thereby saves the bacon of both Mr. and Mrs. Williams when the gang of bad guys start to get overly worried about what Wally knows, which truthfully is very little, even with the clues he obtained before the police did.

   As for director Phil Rosen, who later directed a number of Charlie Chan films, he makes the best of also truthfully very little, and the result is surprisingly entertaining.

   One of my collecting interests for many years was what’s called Old Time Radio; that is to say, radio programming from before 1962 or so. I was one of the early birds in the hobby, starting in the mid-1970s I’d guess, with all of my shows on reel-to-reel tape.

   Which I still have, and they still are. I have close to 3000 of these tapes, with about 12 half-hour shows per reel. I never did switch over to cassettes, as most people did, thinking them too flimsy for long-term archiving. Once the Internet and MP3’s came along, reel-to-reel recorders were like dinosaurs, or living fossils. One CD, if the input is compressed enough, can now hold over 100 shows.

   And the shows often sound terrible. To me MP3’s usually sound shrill and sharp-edged in tone. I’m told that MP3’s, if processed correctly, can sound as good as these old shows did when they were broadcast live, but if that is true, then I’ve never heard one.

   In one sense, MP3’s have expanded the hobby tremendously, as the amount of money to amass a collection is a teensy fraction of what it cost me to put mine together. On the other hand, the ubiquitousness of MP3’s has done nothing to expand the number of shows that are in circulation. I’ve not been actively collecting for nearly 20 years, I would estimate, and the shows that were available then are still nearly all of the shows that are available now.

   The dealers who found new shows then no longer find it financially profitable to buy the disks, clean them up, and transfer them to tape or CD. Once available, the MP3ers, to coin a phrase, will have copies made and out and available for next to nothing, and the person who did the basic discovery and necessary groundwork is left out in the cold.

   So there are tons of OTR shows safely stored away in various archival bunkers across the country, or so I’ve been told. They’re just not going anywhere, and maybe they never will. The asking price for other collections in private hands is simply too high for anyone to pay the price, and so they sit.

   But if you are interested in listening to the shows and not necessarily in building your own collection, this is almost the Golden Age of Old Time Radio. Via the Internet, there are several sources of programming you can listen to absolutely free. Even with my own collection here at arm’s length away from me, it’s easier to turn on the computer and head for one of the following sites and listen to almost any program that’s in circulation.

   Being stored in the MP3 format, the sound is not always so very good, for the most part, but the price is certainly right. This is not meant to be a complete list. It consists only of the sites that I stop by every once in a while. For the person not wishing to download and store the shows, most of these sites have the option of “click and play.”

   I’ll list these in reverse order of recommendation:

1. www.freeotrshows.com. For mystery fans, a long run of Philip Marlowe shows; more moderate runs of Richard Diamond, Ellery Queen, Let George Do It, Nick Carter and several others.

2. www.otr.net More selection than the site above, but the sound generally does not seem as good. Here’s a sampling: 55 Sam Spade shows, 36 Casey, Crime Photographer, 84 Suspense, 14 Pat Novak, 201 Escape, 53 Green Hornet, and as they say, much more.

3. www.archive.org, then do a search on “Old Time Radio,” in quotes. Great selection, with varying sound quality. Not available on the previous two sites are a large number of The Shadow shows, which is one of the first programs I remember listening to as a child. I had to be less than 10 years old, more likely 8 or 9, and I still remember a whole new world opening up before my ears. Lots of Ellery Queen radio shows, plus The Whistler, Suspense, Inner Sanctum, and so on and so on. The site is not organized for easy locating of shows, and dates are not always given, but if you’re looking for a particular program, you’re more likely to find it here.

   And of course I have not mentioned at all programs like Jack Benny, Amos & Andy, Lux Radio Theater, Gunsmoke, X Minus One, Bob Hope, Vic and Sade, Cavalcade of America and Flash Gordon that you can find for free on the web.

   Just to name a few.

   Elliott Baker, a screenwriter and novelist with one book listed in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, died on February 9th. He was perhaps best known for his first book, A Fine Madness, which was made into a movie starring Sean Connery, Joanne Woodward and Jean Seberg.

   Described elsewhere as a “dark, picaresque” tale, A Fine Madness told the story of Samson Shillitoe, a poet forced to work as a carpet cleaner. Mr. Baker also wrote the screenplay for the fillm.

   Born Elliot Joseph Cohen, December 15, 1922, he changed his name when he began his writing career.

   His entry in CFIV is scant, as previously mentioned:

   The dash indicates a title of marginal crime content. The cover shown is that of the British edition. Some online reviews praise Pocock & Pitt but do not elucidate:

   Adderly, a series created for Canadian television by Mr. Baker, was based on a character from Pocock and Pitt, described by one source as being in the “humorous adventure” category.

   Excerpting from a synopsis from IMDB:

   Adderly aired in the US from September 1986 through March 1988 by CBS at 11:30 pm, opposite Johnny Carson and Dave Letterman, but it made little ratings headway against the two late night hosts.

   Excerpting from a NY Times review:

   I don’t know. I wish I’d seen it when it was on. I liked The Man from U.N.C.L.E. I even liked Get Smart. From the rest of the review, however, which is rather unfavorable, the chances of seeing the series on DVD are fairly slim.

   On the other hand, actors and other people responsible for putting the show on the air either won or were nominated for a number of Canadian Gemini awards, including Winston Rekert for best actor. Blame it on provincialism here in the US?

   Announced today was the death of Carolyn Hougan, 63, on February 25th. She was a highly praised thriller writer under her own name as well as “John Case,” a pen name she and her husband Jim shared together.

   The books she and/or her husband wrote were filled to the brim with contemporary terrorists, rogue CIA agents, high-tech science, voodoo magic, deadly viruses and secret conspiracies – the entire gamut of huge-stakes danger and the possible ways in which the world could be destroyed in a moment, or at least be brought to its knees.

    Of special note, Ghost Dancer, the couple’s most recent novel, has been nominated for this year’s Dashiell Hammett Award for Best Literary Crime Novel by the International Association of Crime Writers. (For the complete list of nominees, go here.)

  BIBLIOGRAPHY: [Based in part on her entry in Allen J. Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV.]

   Best known in combo with her husband as –

   On her own –

   And on her own under yet another pen name –

   Thanks to J. Kingston Pierce of The Rap Sheet for the link to her obituary on the Washington Post website.

   Covers for the 1945 mysteries are now included in the online Phoenix Press project. Right now 1945 begins a page to itself, so if you don’t mind, would you check to see that the links to all of the earlier years are working the way they’re supposed to?

VALERY SHORE – Final Payment

Major Books 3236, paperback original; copyright 1978; no other date stated.

   Next on the agenda, and the final book I read in 2006, is the only mystery written by the pseudonymous Valery Shore. Al Hubin in Crime Fiction IV says that Shore was the pen name of Lon Viser, born in 1932. All I’ve been able to come up with regarding Mr. Viser is that he had something to do with the American Art Agency, a publisher based in North Hollywood in 1965.

   From the small print inside Atualidades Globo Controle Da Natalidade, written in Portuguese and illustrated throughout, aka The Complete Book of Birth Control:

   It’s not a common name. Maybe it’s the same man. All that comes up for Valery Shore, in case you were wondering, are a few dealers offering this book for sale on eBay, or maybe it’s the same book offered at different times. I didn’t check.

   The dedication reads as follows: “To Yvonne, Rhoda, and Lon, without whose help this book could not have been written,” so I assume that Al is correct – not that there’s any reason to doubt him.

   The primary detective in Final Payment is a former Scotland Yard inspector by the name of Christopher Camel, still young, who’d recently been left a fortune by an aunt, in her day a sex symbol of the silver screen. Staying with Camel in his aunt’s Tudor-style Hollywood mansion is “his beautiful Eurasian companion, Kim Lee Chance.” I’m quoting from the back cover.

   In attendance upon them both is Potter Goodleigh, his aunt’s former lover and a long ago movie director who’d been exiled to the guest cottage, but who is now cook, butler and father figure to the two young people who are now “livening up the old museum,” as he puts it.

    It is Potter’s daughter Felicia who’s murdered, her body found in the piano in her living room. Unfortunately Felicia was also a blackmailer, and there are thirteen suspects that Camel, Kim Lee, and the local lieutenant of police named Davidson have to deal with. In spite of his new-found money and all of his resultant leisure time, there is no way Camel can be kept off the case, as you can well imagine if it had happened to you and sunny fortune had smiled your way in such a fashion.

    The story, as I’ve relayed to you so far, may also sound to you as the basis for a made-for-TV mystery movie. If so, you share my feelings exactly, and I have the advantage of having actually read the book. If you also were to suspect that on page 177 there would be a gathering of the suspects in the dead woman’s living room, in an attempt to recreate the crime, I would certainly begin to wonder about you. How could you possibly know that it was on page 177?

   As entertaining as made-for-TV mystery movies may be, and some more than others, in general I’ve always had a relatively low opinion of them. This one, I’ll conclude by saying, is better than most of them. If there had ever been a second book in the series, I’d make sure that I had it in my collection too.

UPDATE [03-01-07] Victor Berch has done some preliminary spadework on Lon Viser, and so far he’s come up with the following: His full name as Lorenzo Ludwick Viser, born February 26, 1932 in FL, died August 9, 1994 in LA. There was a Lorenzo M. Viser living with him in the 90s, probably a son. More later, if and when!

   I am Mort Wolson’s son, a psychoanalyst in Beverly Hills, and can tell you a lot about him. But first some corrections. He was living in Leisure World in Laguna Hills, with his wife Gaye when he died of congestive heart failure. He was 89.

   The William Bendix episode, “Prime Suspect,” was based on his story, “The Attacker.”

   His first published ‘pulp’ narrative was “I Guard Nudes,” when he was a bouncer at the Cuban Village in the 1939 World Fair in which he described his job protecting the strippers from overly enthusiastic men and putting wraps on their bodies as they left the stage. It was printed in the pulp magazine Black Mask in September, 1939.

   The Nightmare Blonde was based on a previous novella, “Softly Creep, Softly Kill,” which anticipated The Bad Seed. “Softly Creep, Softly Kill” was published in Detective Tales, August, 1947. Mort always felt that this work was plagiarized by the author of The Bad Seed.

   Mort always regarded his detective stories as puzzles in which he would constantly try to fool the reader, while the clues for the denouement would be embedded in the material. But they came easily to him and, unfortunately, he did not regard them as valuable as writing the great American novel. So he spent the bulk of his time and energy during the fifties and beyond writing what he regarded as “serious fiction.”

   One such attempt was about a dual personality. In in one internal world, the assumption prevailed that Hannibal had successfully crossed the alps and defeated the Romans, with civilization developing in North Africa, in which blacks became the majority population and whites, the minority. In the other split-off personality, the world was as it is today, with the clash between the worlds occurring in the individual’s mind.

   Another novel was entitled Nightmare Bullet, in which a scientist had discovered how to insert a nuclear device in a bullet, and this involved foreign espionage. Mort also wrote a book about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, called The Dragon Lady and I. He also wrote over a hundred sonnets to Gaye, his third wife, in the literary form of true Shakespearean sonnets.

   Clearly, he did best at writing pulp detective stories, and most of his stories published in Black Mask and Dime Detective, were the main feature, with the magazine covers representing their themes. He respected Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich and Dashiell Hammet, but had contempt for Mickey Spillane, feeling that he cheated to earn his fame by exaggerating blood and gore.

   The lapse in his writing was due to his efforts to earn a living as a furniture store owner, which occupied most of his time. In retirement, he was able to write The Nightmare Blonde and his memoirs.

   Mort was a very good-looking, manly, powerfully built, blond-haired individual, who smoked a pipe and loved to argue. He prided himself on being a divergent thinker, and loved to take the most oppositional point of view in any discussion, to the delight of some, and to the dismay of others.

   Thanks for your interest in him.

Steve:

   I don’t have the time to do a full write-up on John’s series characters, but in a nutshell:

   Bart Condor is a tough, violent New York private eye inspired by and patterned after Spillane’s Mike Hammer.

   Paul Cameron is a more cerebral P.I. built along the lines of Philip Marlowe, Thomas Dewey’s Mac, Bob Martin’s Jim Bennett; his bailiwick is southern California.

   Calhoun is a Vietnam vet who works for a shadowy U.S. internal security agency run by “The Man” and whose job is to “help lop off the many tentacles of the racket boys [i.e. Mafia]” by any necessary means, operating close to the law and without any official cover.

   The Paul Cameron series is the best of the three. For my taste, though, the best of all John’s novels are the two stand-alones, Death at Nostalgia Street and It Leads to Murder.