LES ROBERTS – Full Cleveland. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1989; paperback, 1990.

   Full Cleveland, the second of Les Roberts’ novels about private investigator Milan Jacovich, doesn’t have the high appeal for me that the first (Pepper Pike) did, but it’s agreeable enough.

   Jacovich, a former cop like most PI’s, operates in Cleveland and mourns his lost family (his wife divorced him, and his sons, particularly the older, are drifting away). He consoles himself with no-commitment sex and here accepts what seems a simple and tranquil assignment: track down a downscale swindler who ripped off a bunch of would-be advertisers in his won’t-be magazine.

   But complications soon arise. Milan’s client, a lakeside hotel, invested an incredible amount for an ad, and said hotel proves to have mob connections whom Milan has unhappily met before. Said connections provide Jacovich with a most unwelcome assistant. And why should businesses so little in need of publicity have invested in advertising space?

     The Milan Jacovich series —

1. Pepper Pike (1988)

2. Full Cleveland (1989)
3. Deep Shaker (1991)
4. The Cleveland Connection (1993)
5. The Lake Effect (1994)

6. The Duke Of Cleveland (1995)
7. Collision Bend (1996)
8. The Cleveland Local (1997)
9. A Shoot In Cleveland (1998)
10. The Best Kept Secret (1999)
11. The Indian Sign (2000)

12. The Dutch (2001)
13. The Irish Sports Pages (2002)
14. King of the Holly Hop (2008)
15. The Cleveland Creep (2011)
16. Whiskey Island (2012)
17. Win, Place, or Die (2013) (with Dan S Kennedy)

Note: Between 1987 and 1994, Les Roberts also wrote six mysteries featuring an LA-based PI named Saxon. More recently he has has published two standalone crime novels and one collection of short fiction, The Scent of Spiced Oranges (2002).

ROBERT GEORGE DEAN – On Ice. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1942. Superior Reprint M654, paperback, 1945.

   Bill Griffith, private eye, had been tailing a man who had some diamonds to sell for a refugee. Now he is tailing the same man, who is picking up the money for the diamonds. Unfortunately, the man with the money is found sitting at his desk with no money and no life, his throat having been slit.

   Fearing that he might be suspected of involvement in the murder, since he is broke and is working for an almost bankrupt agency, Griffith asks his friend and former co-worker at the Imperator Schmidt Agency, Tony Hunter — one of Robert George Dean’s continuing characters — to he!p him out of this jam.

   A great deal happens in a short time. Hunter’s dog thinks she is going to have puppies; the dead man’s fiancee, for whom everyone is searching for various reasons, turns out to have predeceased her betrothed, and by the same murder method; the refugee who owns the diamonds acts strangely, and Hunter finds various females attractive.

   The detection here is good, the clues fair, the characters fairly interesting. I thought I knew who did it, but I was wrong. Not a great or a memorable mystery, but one that ought not be passed up if you fortuitously come across it at a reasonable price.

    The Tony Hunter series —

Murder Makes a Merry Widow (n.) Doubleday 1938.
A Murder of Convenience (n.) Doubleday 1938.
A Murder by Marriage (n.) Scribner 1940.
Murder Through the Looking Glass (n.) Doubleday 1940.
Murder in Mink (n.) Scribner 1941.
Layoff (n.) Scribner 1942.
On Ice (n.) Scribner 1942.
The Body Was Quite Cold (n.) Dutton 1951.
The Case of Joshua Locke (n.) Dutton 1951.
Affair at Lover’s Leap (n.) Doubleday 1953.

   Author Robert George Dean also wrote four mysteries under his own name featuring series character Pat Thompson, about whom I know nothing, and one stand-alone. As “George Griswold” he wrote four early 1950s espionage novels (I believe) with a mysterious Mr. Groode appearing or mentioned in all four, but the leading characters (with two appearances each) in reality being Jim Furlong and William Pepper.

AARON MARC STEIN – Hangman’s Row. Doubleday/Crime Club, hardcover, 1982. $10.95.

LESLEY EGAN – Random Death. Doubleday/Crime Club, hardcover, 1982. $10.95.

BERNARD ST. JAMES – The Seven Dreamers. Doubleday/Crime Club, hardcover, 1982. $10.95.

   One of the best days of the month, as far as I’m concerned, is the day that the latest selection of review copies from Doubleday’s Crime Club comes in. Now, as most of you already probably know, this is no book club in the ordinary sense of the term. The Crime Club has no dues (save the ever-increasing price of the books), no membership rolls or requirements of any kind, no free enticement offers — only books. Since 1928 or so, they’ve been publishing mysteries and detective stories,at the rate of three or four a month — and there’s no let-up in sight.

   Generally speaking, the books published by the Crime Club are prime examples of what’s called “category publishing,” aimed at a pre-set market. Most of them are gobbled up directly by libraries. Few show up anywhere else but the specialized mystery bookshop. There are few that reach the heights of ever being considered for an award of any kind, but there are few that are out-and-out losers, either.

   I’m writing this in March, and last month’s selections would have to be considered as pretty typical of what the Crime Club is producing today. There are two books by authors who have become long-time favorites, and one by a relative newcomer.

   Aaron Marc Stein, for example, has been writing books, under three different names, for over forty-five years. He never seems to get much notice for his labors, but he can always be depended upon to tell a good, solid story. As Stein, writing about free-lance engineering expert Matt Erridge, his books tend more toward adventure than detection. As rumor has it, this is the way the publishers like it. Book after book, Erridge stumbles across mystery after mystery, and without half trying.

   In Hangman’s Row Erridge is in Amsterdam, helping a girl he first meets in the Van Gogh museum. Her boyfriend, it seems, is a decent artist himself. He is also a vociferous spokesman for various liberal causes, and he is in trouble with the police. An artistic array of protest effigies has been spoiled by the addition of a real body to the collection.

   Although no more than a minor work at best, the story is enhanced considerably by the expertise Stein displays in local geography and customs. This is like a visit with an old friend — totally relaxed and comfortable leisure-time reading.

Rating: C plus

   Leslie Egan, on the other hand, usually has a lot more axes to grind in her books. Like Stein, she has been writing for many years now, and under several different pseudonyms. Her severest critics make much of her open support for various right-wing causes, and in one way or another her mystery novels, most of them police procedurals, usually reflect that same conservative point of view.

   Random Death is one of her stories of the Glendale police force. All of the detectives are featured, but the cases of Vic Varallo and Delia Riordan are the ones followed most closely. The use of a policewoman as a main protagonist does not imply any feeling or support for ERA on Egan’s part, however. Ms. Riordan deeply regrets her choice of career as it’s worked out — no husband, no family, none of the things it is “most important for a woman to have.”

   Whether you agree or disagree, what makes Egan’s books so alive is the strength of her convictions. As a suburb of Los Angeles, Glendale now seems to be under constant siege by criminal elements. Egan is simply unmatchable in terms of providing a voice of sympathy for the victims. Are the courts listening?

Rating: B plus

   As for the third book of the month, its author, Bernard St. James, has written one earlier novel featuring Chief Inspector Blanc of the Paris police. As yet, however, I’d be surprised if either author or character were other than a brand new name to anyone but the most fervent mystery fancier.

   The time is sometime in the early to mid-1800’s, making The Seven Dreamers almost as much a historical novel as it is a detective story. Someone — a mesmerist, Blanc quickly deduces — has slit the throats of everyone attending a small dinner party, while they were all sound asleep. Blanc’s problem is not so much to discover who the guilty party is as it is to uncover the link between the victims which gives the culprit his motive.

   And here’s where the history lesson comes in. As a mystery novel, The Seven Dreamers seems badly paced and badly padded. As historical fiction, it ends with a note of lofty idealism, viewed with a necessary bit of perspective. The success of the book, it would follow, would depend greatly on how strongly you are in agreement.

Rating: B minus

   Feeling tired and lazy in these dog days of early autumn, I began asking myself whether I could cobble together a respectable column from the mystery reviews I wrote for my eyes only back in the Sixties and Seventies. To provide a soupcon of unity I decided early on to limit myself to U.S. writers and to novels I wasn’t terribly happy with. Shall we see how the experiment came out?

   Baynard Kendrick’s Blind Allies (Morrow, 1954) begins promisingly as a seedy character who claims to be but obviously is not the son of an oil tycoon retains blind detective Captain Duncan Maclain to go to his dad’s mansion at 3:00 A.M. and open a safe whose combination is in Braille.

   May I jump to the first murder? The lights go out in the old dark house, all the suspects run around like buffoons, the lights go on and voila! a body. Back in 1968 I couldn’t find a single kind word for this disaster of a book, which struck me as wretchedly organized and plotted and written, stuffed with implausibilities and contradictions, padded beyond endurance, and resolved by blatant guesswork.

   My reaction would probably be the same were I to re-read it today, but if you’ve tackled this or any other book discussed here more recently than I and think I was too harsh, please say so.

   In recent decades dozens of female private eye novelists have flourished, most if not all of them writing about female private eyes. But back when Chandler ruled the genre the only woman in the field was M. V. (Mary Violet) Heberden (1906-1965). She seems to have been heavily influenced by Brett Halliday, and her PI Desmond Shannon is best described as Mike Shayne seen through a woman’s eyes.

   His problem in The Lobster Pick Murder (Doubleday, 1941) is to find out who stuck the pick into the sadistic plastic surgeon’s medulla oblongata. Nothing about this exercise — plot, prose, characterizations, upper-crust Long Island setting, theatrical milie — rises above the drearily competent, and most readers will identify the perp about 200 pages before Shannon. Some of the later Heberdens I’ve read are much better but they’re not on the table this month.

   The writer who was born Milton Lesser (1908-2008) and is best known as Stephen Marlowe, creator of globe-trotting PI Chester Drum, also used other bylines. Roughly 90% of his Find Eileen Hardin — Alive! (Avon #T-343, PBO, 1959), signed as by Andrew Frazer, is the mixture as before.

   Private dick and former football hero Duncan Pride returns to his alma mater when his old girlfriend, now married to his old coach, begs him to help find the coach’s missing teen-age daughter, who’s rumored to have become a call girl. The search brings him up against criminal enterprises like prostitution, abortion (remember this was a dozen years before Roe v. Wade), the enticing of innocent virgins into a life of sin and the fixing of college athletic events, not to mention murder.

   Frazer does give us a few reasonably vivid scenes at a deserted oyster cannery and the old Idlewild air terminal, but the book is too long and full of cliches, much of the motivation would not be out of place in a soap opera, and the sniggering attitude towards sex is a turn-off.

   The success of Mary Roberts Rinehart, Agatha Christie and countless others disproves the thesis that sexism forced all or most women mystery writers of the pre-feminist era to adopt male bylines. But it was common practice for women writing the sorts of mysteries generally associated with men, like M.V. Heberden with her PI series, and also like DeLoris Stanton Forbes (1923- ), whose novels about police detectives Knute Severson and Lawrence Benedict appeared under the name Tobias Wells.

   Dead by the Light of the Moon (Doubleday, 1967) is a readable but uncompelling semi-procedural about the murder and de-breasting of an old woman in a Boston apartment building during the great East Coast blackout of 1965. Wells has just finished spreading suspicion evenly among various fellow tenants of the victim when suddenly and arbitrarily the guilty party confesses. Sure, real-life crimes often end this way, but a fiction writer must do better.

   The novels of Robert Portner Koehler (1905-1988) were published almost without exception by a house at the absolute bottom of the literary food chain, although it does hold the distinction of having been the last U.S. publisher of that great wack of American literature, Harry Stephen Keeler.

   Koehler’s The Hooded Vulture Murders (Phoenix Press, 1947) deals with two hapless California PIs who stumble upon the murder of a blackmailing journalist while driving through southern Mexico on the uncompleted Pan American Highway. Naturally the bumbling native officials welcome with open arms the intrusion of these brilliant Anglo sleuths, although readers may wish the boys had stayed home.

   Koehler paints local color vividly enough but the book is ineptly plotted, woefully written, pathetically characterized, laughably clued, and all in all a pretty lame excuse for a whodunit.

   Enough for one month. It took more time and work than I expected to unstiffen the language of these ancient jottings without changing anything substantive. But it’s good to know that I have enough material in the archives for a few more columns if I get to feeling tired and lazy again.

GAMBLING SHIP. Paramount, 1933. Cary Grant, Benita Hume, Jack La Rue, Roscoe Karns, Glenda Farrell, Arthur Vinton, Marc Lawerence. Screenplay: Max Marcin, Seton I. Miller. Adaptation: Claude Binyon. Based on the serial “Fast One” appearing in Black Mask magazine by Paul Cain (Peter Ruric). Directors: Louis Gasnier and Max Marcin.

   That passage from the Paul Cain novel is as close as this movie gets to the hardboiled classic it was based on, Fast One, though more than a bit of the basic plot is used — just not to the same effect as in the book.

   How Fast One, a novel that was so terse and stacatto it made Hammett read like a Victorian triple decker, became this romantic dramedy with Cary Grant and Benita Hume is one of those mysteries only a Hollywood producer could explain — or justify — but that’s what happened on the classic Black Mask serial’s way to the big screen as Gambling Ship.

   Gone are Gerry Kells, the tough as nails gambler and gunman, and Grandquist (Kells looked at the woman. She was blonde — but darkly, warmly. Her mouth was very red without a great deal of rouge, and her eyes were shadowed and deep. She was a tall woman with very interesting curves. Fay said: “This is Miss Granquist.”), a femme fatale so fatal and tough she could give lessons to Hammett’s Diana Brand and Brigid O’Shaunessy as well as Chandler’s Velma, and in their place we have a tough but much smoother Cary Grant as Ace Corbin (replete with gray at the temples and a streak in his wavy dark hair), a New York gambler finding it hard to go straight and Benita Hume as the most lady like (if not entirely wholesome) moll you can imagine (well kept too, her apartment in Los Angeles has a bathroom the size of most bedrooms).

   Gambling Ship opens in New York where the newspaper boys are hawking the extra that gambler Ace Corbin has just been acquitted of a murder charge, a fact that seems to amuse police and public alike:

   Kells has similar problems in the book:

   That pretty much sums up this semi-tough film that might be a dress rehearsal for one of Cary Grant’s later iconic roles as gambler Mr. Lucky. Here Ace Corbin is sick of New York and the rackets, and having walked from a frame set up by hood Pete Manning (Jack La Rue), all Corbin wants is to head to the coast and take a vacation.

   Not so easy, as flunky Marc Lawerence points out when one of Ace’s men tosses Ace’s shoulder holster and gun in his bag: “Sometimes even a good man has to blast his way loose.”

   It’s hard to imagine Kells having to be persuaded to “blast his way loose”:

   On the train to the coast Ace meets beautiful society girl Eleanor Kiniston and a romance blossoms, Ace introducing himself as Bruce Grahame. Ace isn’t the only one with a secret. Eleanor is really Eleanor La Vere, girlfriend of Joe Burke (Arthur Vinton), a west coast gambler who runs an off shore casino.

   Burke’s in a bind for money, thanks to his chief competitor hijacking his customers for his own ship, Pete Manning’s Paradise. Once home Eleanor finds out what a bind Burke is in, and being to noble to walk out on him drops Bruce.

   Meanwhile Burke’s henchman Blooey (Roscoe Karns) is an old friend of Ace, and tries to convince Ace to go in with Burke, a chance to buy into a good deal and take revenge on Manning, but Ace is in love and wants none of it.

   But Manning won’t leave Ace alone so he agrees to go in with Burke. and starts by hijacking back all the players Manning hijacked in the first place.

   That does sound like Kells.

   Again, this hews close to the novel:

   His first night on the ship Eleanor shows up and finds out he’s Corbin, but he still thinks she’s a classy society woman, an illusion that will have to stay in place when Manning fire bombs the ship.

   The ending is well done and exciting, and being pre-Code, neither Ace nor Eleanor have to repent or suffer for the error of their ways. A clinch, a kiss, and Ace is ready to turn that vacation into a honeymoon, assuming he still has marriage on his mind after finding out who she is. This being the pre-Code era, happily ever after didn’t always need a license and a justice of the peace. It’s a very different ending than Fast One.

   Gambling Ship has a bad reputation among fans largely because it is based on Fast One, the legendary hardboiled extravagansa of flying bullets and McGuffey’s reader prose by screen writer Peter Ruric (The Black Cat, The Raven, Grand Central Murder …) writing as Paul Cain.

   Granted it would have been nice to see his novel get the pre-Code treatment with Grant as tough-as-nails lethal gambler gunman Kells (though reading the book I always have Alan Ladd in mind), but that aside this isn’t a bad little film and like any decent pre-Code film (or is that indecent?) it’s interesting to note the little touches like the teasing dialogue bordering on double entendre, the suggestion of nudity (Hume outlined fairly clearly in a pebbled glass shower), skimpy lingerie (and not a lot of it), and a cavalier attitude to sex, without moralizing or due punishment, that could only be hinted at in later films.

   To be fair, any movie that has both a journey on a train and a gambling ship can’t be all bad.

   It’s interesting to note as well just how much of the Grant persona and the familiar gestures and slow takes are already established even at this point. It’s not hard to see watching this how Leslie Charteris and Raymond Chandler both could envision the Saint and Philip Marlowe as played by Grant (who was also a pick to play James Bond). He dominates every scene without doing much of anything but being Cary Grant, and for an actor at this early stage in his film career that’s no mean feat.

   Gambling Ship is no masterpiece, but it is a swift moving well done film with crisp direction, a smart script filled with clever quips, a first class cast, and an exciting finale, as well as good camera work by Charles Lang.

   If you can manage to forget what it might have been considering its source you will likely enjoy it. And it’s not like Hollywood reserved this treatment for Ruric’s book, or have we forgotten Satan Met a Lady, the second version of The Maltese Falcon?

   That said, once or twice toward the end of the film you get a glimpse of how Grant might have played Kells, and you have to at least think about what might have been, Fast One is a very violent book that reads more like it was written with a tommy gun than a typewriter.

   Machine gun country is where Ruric’s book would feel at home, if not the film based on it.

Note: The novel Fast One has been reviewed by Bill Pronzini some time back on this blog. Check it out here. And both the novel and the author are discussed in depth by Walker Martin in his review of The Complete Slayers, by Paul Cain. It’s worth your reading again, or for the first time, if you haven’t already.

LYNN BROCK – The Kink. Harper and Brothers, US, hardcover, 1927. First published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1927, as Colonel Gore’s Third Case.

   Lt.-Col. Wyckham Gore, D.S.O., senior partner of Gore & Talley, Confidential Agents, and his firm have failed to find a missing husband and a missing brother for two clients. One of the missing men turns up In a nursing home, having had, so he says, an accident necessitating the amputation of an arm; he is also missing a significant part of one ear and almost all of his nerve.

   When the Hon. Mrs. Ronayne, whose name had appeared in connection with both mysterious disappearances, calls upon Gore to begin a constant surveillance of her husband, a famous Irish poet who may be involved with the IRA, but does not say why she wants his movements watched, Gore’s interest is piqued.

   He is even more intrigued when her father, Lord Haviland, former Prime Minister, asks him to investigate the theft of what would seem to be some fairly insignificant items from his study, with the peer’s daughter and the poet both suspects.

   As Gore begins his investigation, he meets other members of the family and discovers that they all are more than a bit peculiar, as are some of the servants. Pornographic movies and orgies would seem to be the worst of it, but then someone is brutally murdered.

   Gore is a moderately interesting character, with a dry wit that should have been more in evidence, and a slightly more than adequate investigator. He gets things straightened out, at the risk of his life, in a rather complex but not particularly engrossing case.

    The Colonel Wyckham Gore series —

The Deductions of Colonel Gore (n.) Collins 1924; Harper, US, 1925.
Colonel Gore’s Second Case (n.) Collins 1925; Harper, US, 1926.
Colonel Gore’s Third Case (n.) Collins 1927; reprinted in the US as The Kink, Harper, 1927.
The Slip-Carriage Mystery (n.) Collins 1928; Harper, US, 1928.
The Mendip Mystery (n.) Collins 1929; reprinted in the US as Murder at the Inn, Harper, 1929.
Q.E.D. (n.) Collins 1930; reprinted in the US as Murder on the Bridge, Harper, 1930.
The Stoat (n.) Collins 1940 [no US edition]

    Under his Lynn Brock pen name, Alister McAllister (1877-1943) also wrote three books about Sgt. Venn, none of which have been published in the US, and two stand-alone mysteries. He also wrote two crime novels as by Anthony Wharton.

BERNARD CAPES – The Skeleton Key. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1919. US title: The Mystery of the Skeleton Key. Doran, hardcover, 1918. Also available in several current POD editions, and can be read online at archive.org.

   If Hugh had returned from hunting by another path, or if he had left his gun behind him, or if one could have told just when the shot was heard, perhaps the murder of beautiful Annie Evans might have been cleared up without so much effort on the part of the famous Sergeant Ridgeway from Scotland Yard, or so much mutual suspicion on the part of the various guests assembled at the Hall.

   Baron Le Sage of doubtful fame might have gone on playing chess, and pretty Audrey’s love affairs might not have become so tangled. But it’s just as well as it is, perhaps, for the result of all these complications is a thoroughly exciting detective story.

Biographic Note: From Capes’ Wikipedia page:

    “Capes was a prolific Victorian author, publishing more than forty volumes – romances, mysteries, poetry, history – together with many articles for the magazines of the day. His early writing career was as a journalist, later becoming editor of a paper called The Theatre, which was well known in late nineteenth century London. Other magazines for which Capes wrote included Blackwood’s, Butterfly, Cassell’s, Cornhill Magazine, Hutton’s Magazine, Illustrated London News, Lippincott’s, Macmillan’s Magazine, Literature, New Witness, Pall Mall Magazine, Pearson’s Magazine, The Idler, The New Weekly, and The Queen.”

JAMES ELLROY – Brown’s Requiem. Avon 78741, paperback original, 1981, $2.50.

   It took me a while to track this book down — Avon’s distribution system did not seem to reach the Northeast too effectively for a while last fall — but I’m glad I finally did. In recent months Avon has been doing some of the best mysteries to be published in paperback, particularly in the realm of first edition originals, and this is one of them.

   I’m almost tempted to say it’s also a private eye story for people who hate private eye stories, but there are also some people whom I’m sure would rather die than admit to liking the things, even if they did, and so I won’t.

   Fritz Brown is the P.I., and his client is a crazy caddy named Fat Dog who flashes hundred-dollar bills and wants Brown to keep an eye on his sister, an aspiring cello player living with an elderly Jew named Kupferman who is now in the fur business.

   In a way, the whole book is just as slightly looney as this may sound, which is part of its cockeyed charm. What is meant for dialogue often consists of long, one-sided monologues, and if you let it it could easily drive you nuts. Ellroy’s version of Los Angeles is a sad, seedy one, described by someone who knows, brightened only by the green oases of its many available golf courses.

   Brown’s life story, a lonely one, whether he admits it or not, naturally becomes interwoven with the one he gradually unravels and inexorably ties back together. Like a “literary” novel of more recognizable form, bits of philosophy and the deeper implication of things like the perquisites of power and the demands of those who pursue it, are integral ingredients of the story Ellroy tells, and he takes the time and space to tell it well.

   What I find strange, however, is how much more I seem to be appreciating the book now — two weeks later- than I remember that I did while I was actually reading it. I don’t want to push the musical comparison too greatly, but the fact remains — profane as it may seem at times, this book sings.

Rating:   A minus.

[UPDATE] 10-27-13.   This was Ellroy’s first book, and while you can pay to $300 for a unsigned copy in nice shape, you can also find others in VG condition for $15. (It is hard to tell, though, on the less pricey ones. Booksellers on ABE no longer are very good in providing bibliographic details.) Nonetheless, I am wondering if perhaps I should have purchased as many copies as I could have, back when the book first came out.

H. C. McNEILE – The Island of Terror: A Jim Maitland Adventure. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, 1931, as by “Sapper.” US title: Guardians of the Treasure, Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1931.

   There sounds the true voice of the 1920’s thriller, a bit of P. G. Wodehouse, a touch of Arabian Nights (at least the Stevensonian type), and the social conscience of a gnat. But if you can get past 21st Century guilt and self loathing from the left and the right and read this as entertainment, as it was meant to be read, there are pleasures to be found, certainly in H. C. McNeile (Sapper)’s two books featuring Jim Maitland, a far less frothy and blathering fellow than Bulldog Drummond or Tiny Carteret.

   Maitland is the puhka sahib type, more likely to haunt seedy waterfront bars in seedy waterfronts from Uraguay to Singapore than London’s stuffy gentlemen’s clubs. Maitland was a type — Somerset Maugham or Conradian gentleman in foreign ports. Roger Conway in Lost Horizon was one of the breed, and in real life they had names like Rhodes, Raffles, Gordon, and Burton, and nicknames like the White Rajah — who once haunted popular fiction.

   It was the Jim Maitland’s George MacDonald Fraser’s Harry Flashman so deftly skewered. They were the backbone of that empire the sun never set on. They might be ruthless, certainly racist, but they did things like end slavery in the Sudan, find the source of the Nile (yes, I know that was Speke), crush piracy in the Malay Peninsula, and destroy thugee, a criminal conspiracy whose victims numbered in the millions — and often with surprizingly little help. Many were a good deal like Sapper’s description of Maitland:

   By the 1950’s he had gotten a bit sodden with gin and tonic, had a bit of malaria, and seemed more interested in trysts with women he should have left alone, but the lure was still there.

   Maitland first appeared in a collection of novellas that ended with him saving a virginal girl from a fate worse than death from a nasty Egyptian chap (he was a spy too), and seemed headed toward the kind of blissful country manor life Dornford Yates’ Boy and Berry and Jonah were always departing for a bit of smuggling and humorous rescues of fair damsels in the Anthony Hope Ruritainian mode. Maitland was made of sturdier stuff, just read the story “The Temple of the Crocodile” from Jim Maitland. Hugh Drummond would have run home to Phyllis to change his nappies.

   But come Island of Terror Maitland seems to have forgotten his former love, and he’s soon off for adventure in the wilderness. And wild it is.

   Of course Miss Draycott is an English rose in full bloom, and Maitland’s not blind behind that monocle. And someone did take a shot at him in the dark.. On to Chapter Two … After consulting with a respectable businessman Maitland once saved from the gangs of Marseilles — before respectability caught up with him — Maitland gets on to Clem Hargreaves who knows everything worth knowing about the underworld.

   It takes a while to get out of England headed toward Lone Tree Island, “south of Santos.” And quoting Robert Service to Judy Draycott we’re off: Have you ever stood where the silences brood/ And most of the horizons begin … Splendid stuff. Bulldog Drummond never got anywhere more exotic than Switzerland — and even then he never got near a Alp.

   There’s a blind dwarf (the villain), a tribe of intelligent white apes (I suppose some of Tarzan’s cousins from the Great Apes immigrated), a little golden idol, a crude temple, a near run thing, a lost brother (a Balliol man I’ll wager — it always is in these things — never trusted one myself when I was at Oxford — nice respectable Christ’s College man you know), a ruby the size of a hen’s egg, and a hint lone Tree Island holds more mysteries …

   Well, not Sapper, because having married off another hero we never hear from Maitland or his monocle again. But, if you only know McNeile from Drummond and Ronald Standish, get ahold of Jim Maitland and Island of Terror. Critic Richard Usborne called Maitland McNiele’s finest work in The Clubland Heroes, and I’m inclined to agree.

   And next time you delve into the latest Rollins, Cussler, or Bell adventure you may understand why they were all McNeile fans.

   Note too that “sometimes o’ nights,” that’s the true voice of the era, Haggarded Haggard’s, Kipled Kiplings, and Servicable Service, an age when adventure didn’t have to be accompanied by a social conscience, and you could enjoy some Godforsaken hell hole in the back of the beyond without wanting to pave the roads and build a school.

   Those are noble things to do in real life, but just once I’d like to do a little armchair adventuring without the nagging voice of social awareness. I suppose someone would have tried to rescue those white apes, make them learn how to read, put shoes on them, and hook them up to the Internet.

   If I wanted real life I’d be outside doing it, not inside getting vicarious thrills from our own breed of Imperial heroes like Dirk Pitt, Painter Crowe, or Alex Hawke … Somehow I think a “pane of glass” would improve any of them.

MYSTERY WOMAN. Made for TV: The Hallmark Channel. First telecast: 31 August 2003. Kellie Martin, Robert Wagner, J. E. Freeman, William R. Moses, Constance Zimmer. Written by Michael Sloan. Director: Walter Klenhard.

   I missed this when it was first shown, and since I try to keep an eye out for good, solid detective movies, even though I’m not always able to watch them at the time, I’m not sure how that might have happened. After all, if the basic premise is someone inheriting a musty old mystery bookstore and using that as a basis to solving murders, how could I resist?

   That someone is Samantha Kinsey (Kellie Miller), and Jack Stelling (Robert Wagner) is the true-crime writer whose death by hanging in a locked room is the suicide that Samantha does not think is, um, a suicide.

   Assisting her are a grizzled old geezer named Ian Philby (J. E. Freeman) who is a carryover employee of Samantha’s uncle in the bookshop, and Cassie Tilman (Constance Zimmer), who as an Assistant DA is good at assisting (and seems to have no other regular working hours, other than being on hand when Samantha is out searching for clues).

   Convinced that the death is indeed a suicide is police lieutenant Robert Hawk (William Moses), conveniently ignoring all of growing evidence otherwise, but on the other hand, it is equally hard to ignore the door that is solidly bolted on the inside.

   There are a lot of the other vintage bits and pieces of the vintage detective story, a la MURDER, SHE WROTE, combined with the Carolyn Hart stories in which Annie Darling runs a mystery bookstore as well as solves mysteries in the “Death on Demand” series. There is also a bit of what – I hate to use the term – is called “woo woo” when psychic impressions of a murder committed 10 or 15 years earlier are needed to understand why an author of true crime books might need to be silenced today.

   As a mystery buff, Samantha also has the skills needed to pick locks when the time is needed. This almost goes without saying. I thought Kellie Martin was too young for the part – she looks and acts in this movie as though she were 18 – but I am afraid that it is I who am (is?) getting old. She is 29 and has been in a host of various other TV series and dramas that I have never seen, including being nominated for an Emmy for her role as Becca Thatcher in LIFE GOES ON, ABC, 1989-1993.

   The character I enjoyed the most was the relatively aged Philby, a man of the gutter who continued to surprise Samantha with his knowledge and abilities – definitely a man of some mystery beneath that weather-beaten and faded facade. (I don’t suppose I identified with him, or anything.)

   No mystery film with references to Ed McBain, Anthony Boucher and John Dickson Carr can be all bad, but neither does it rise to more than knee-high to any of them. Extremely derivative in nature, in other words, but other than the “woo woo,” is a well-natured, pleasant to the palate sort of way. Sloan, the screenwriter, started his career with McCLOUD (1970) and HARRY O (1974), so it isn’t as though he’s never been around the block before.

   And, I have discovered – since it was so obviously left open that way – that if not a weekly series, there is another Hallmark movie with (many of) the same characters coming, starting in production as of Fall 2004. Robert Wagner won’t be in it, for example, but other than that, and reading through the lines of what I said and what I didn’t say, I’d say that you should be on the lookout for it.

[UPDATE] 10-21-13. Advice, that for better or worse, I did not take myself. I may have purchased some of the later MYSTERY WOMAN movies when they came out on DVD (it did indeed become a series), but I never watched them. I believe the reason to be this. When I learned that J. E. Freeman was replaced by Clarence Williams III in the ten later episodes, I discovered that I wasn’t interested any more, or certainly at least not as much.