You probably won’t recognize Rod MacLeish, nephew of poet Archibald MacLeish and noted NPR commentator who died in 2006, as having written a novel that was nominated for an Edgar by the Mystery Writers of America, but as it happens, he did.

   Here’s his complete entry in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, only slightly expanded:

   MacLEISH, RODERICK (1926-2006 )
      * The Man Who Wasn’t There (n.) Random House, hc, 1976; Fawcett Crest, pb, 1977 [Washington, D.C.]
      * Carnaby Rex (n.) Weidenfeld, UK, 1976; See: The Man Who Wasn’t There (Random House,1976)
      * Crossing at Ivalo (n.) Little Brown, hc, 1990, as by Rod MacLeish. Zebra, pb, 1992.

   In case you may be wondering, it was the latter that caught the eye of the MWA. One online seller describes it thusly: “The principal architect of the Soviet ‘Star Wars’ system is kidnapped and his abductors offer him for sale to the Soviets and Americans. The Russians don’t want anyone to have him and the Americans want to learn all that he knows.”

   His earlier book having crime-related components, The Man Who Wasn’t There, is cryptically described by one seller thusly: “Millionaire film star, claiming to be his twin, reads of his death.” A second synopsis provided by another seller, probably from the back of the book itself, says: “From the quiet elegance of Georgetown to Hollywood and Paris, this novel moves inexorably toward the innermost recesses of a man’s mind. The suspense builds to a terrifying pitch in a climactic scene – a scene no reader will soon forget.”

   Another book, this one with no criminous overtones, is A Time of Fear (Viking Press, 1958), the “story of a small town in the way of development.” Yet another, a science fiction fantasy thriller, is Prince Ombra (Congdon & Weed, hc, 1982; Tor, pb, 1983) in which the title character, “Prince Ombra is the lord of every mortal nightmare. He has appeared in the world a thousand times, and the rememberers have given him a thousand names – Goliath, the murderous Philistine; Mordred, enemy of Camelot. The heroes of legend have offered their lives in confrontation with the evil one. Among them have been David and Arthur, king of the Celts.”

   Or in other words, a book about a boy with magic powers in modern-day New England. During his journalist days, Mr. MacLeish also wrote a non-fiction book, The Sun Stood Still, about the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

   According to an National Public Radio [NPR] tribute to one of their long-time contributors:

Here’s the entry for her as it presently appears in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

STONE, ELINORE COWAN (1884-?) Born in Michigan, raised in Pittsburgh and Boston; newspaperwoman, teacher, magazine short story writer; living in Pittsburgh in 1930s.

* * *Fear Rides the Fog (Appleton, 1937, hc) [Pittsburgh, PA]

The entry is not impressive in itself, but the biographical notes added by Al suggest that there was more to her life than the one mystery novel. What’s nice to be able to do, when it can be done, is to discover the story behind the story, as it were. To that end, the following, which was sent to me by Al a day or so ago, does exactly that.

Article from unnamed newspaper, dated Thursday, March 22, 1973:

Here’s Al’s followup note:

It appears CFIV is one year off on her birth year (should be 3/22/1883, if the article is correct). I’ll now see if I can track down a death date, now that I have that date and know that they were last living in Morehead City, North Carolina.

[Later] I’ve found her record in the social security death benefits. And this gives her birth as 3/22/1885 (and death in November 1974). Looks like the article was premature in calling her a 90-year-old … and she didn’t quite make it to that milestone, as it turns out, though her husband did.

Obituary from The News-Times, Morehead City, Beaufort, NC, Thursday, Feb. 1. 6, 1975, pg. 9-A:

>> As of 11:30 this morning, no copies were found of Mrs. Stone’s mystery novel offered for sale on the Internet. About five copies of The Laughingest Lady were found. About one the seller adds: The name “Irene L. Cowan” is on the flyleaf (possibly related to the author?).

The short story “The Devil-Fish, by Elinore Cowan Stone, appears in A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine, October 1950. Probably a reprint. [See UPDATE 01-25-07]

From The FictionMags Index, here is a partial list of her other stories:

* * All in the Day’s Work, (ss) The Century Sep 1927
* * Be My Valentine, (ss) Woman’s Home Companion Feb 1927
* * The Gritty Little Devil, (ss) The American Magazine Jul 1930
* * Hands Off, (ss) McCall’s Nov 1931
* * Leetla Dog, (ss) Woman’s Home Companion Jul 1925

Also, from Good Housekeeping, February 1926:

“Lonch [sic] for Two” by Elinore Cowan Stone is a short story dealing with the “Americanization” of Hispanic children.

O. Henry prize-winning stories:

1925. Elinore Cowan Stone: “One Uses the Handkerchief” Women’s Home Companion, November 1924.

[UPDATE 01-25-07] Victor Berch did some further investigating into the life of Mrs. Stone, and the results have been posted as a separate entry. Besides uncovering evidence that she was born in 1883 and not 1885, as the Social Security records show, Victor has also added a large number of stories to her bibliography. These should be added to the ones above.

In terms of the story “The Devil-Fish,” a cry for assistance from the members of the Yahoo FictionMags group produced the following response from Ned Brooks:

Thanks, Ned. My instinct was correct. It’s highly unlikely that Mrs. Stone would have stopped writing in the 1920s only to write a single fantasy story 20 or more years later. I’m not too concerned about the copyright date, assuming that when Popular bought out a magazine that had folded, they transferred all of the copyrights along with it. The question remains, however, which presumably non-genre magazine in 1926 was it that the story first appeared?

[UPDATE 01-27-07] From a posting by Mike Ashley on the Yahoo FictionMags Group, the answer is now known. He said, and I quote:

    “The Devil-Fish” by Elinor Cowan Stone first appeared in Argosy [All-Story Weekly] for 6 March 1926.

And from Ned Brooks again, a description of the story itself —

LESLEY EGAN – A Case for Appeal. Harper & Brothers, hardcover, 1961. Popular Library, paperback, date?

   Lesley Egan is a pseudonym for Elizabeth Linington, who also writes under the name of Dell Shannon. The author is well known for her three series of police procedurals done under these names, and while the procedure is very sound, it is interest in the recurring characters’ lives and personal problems that seems to draw readers to these popular books.

   A Case for Appeal introduces Jewish lawyer Jesse Falkenstein and his policeman friend Captain Vic Varallo. Varallo has called Jesse away from Los Angeles to the little southern California valley town of Contera to defend accused murderess Nell Varney — a woman Varallo has arrested, but whose guilt he doubts. As the story opens, Nell has just been convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of two women upon whom she supposedly performed illegal abortions. Jesse — who was called in too late to do any investigation or prepare a solid defense- intends to appeal the case. But to make a case for appeal, he must find the woman resembling Nell who really performed the abortions.

   With Varallo’s help, Jesse gets to know the families of the victims and the town of Contera itself — no small chore for a Jewish lawyer from the big city. And as he sifts through the testimony, it becomes apparent that deathbed statements from the aborted women can be taken in more than one way, and that someone is manipulating the interpretation of them. A nice romance between lawyer and client, plus Varallo’s conflict about staying in this town where he has come because of his family, a reason no longer valid — provide the provocative personal background that is typical of Egan.

   Falkenstein has an odd style of speaking that at first is confusing, but once the reader becomes familiar with it, the story — told largely through dialogue — moves along nicely.

         ———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

   When I interviewed Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) in 1994, he explained the genesis of his novel The Halloween Tree (1972), whose youthful protagonists were based directly on his own childhood experiences and friends, “In many ways, or experiences I had later in Mexico. It’s an amalgam of memories and my interest in Halloween. I painted a picture [in 1960] called The Halloween Tree, a large tempera painting, it’s about three feet by four feet…I was having lunch with Chuck Jones, the animator, one day…It was the day after Halloween and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown [10/27/66] had been on, which I hated, and all my children ran over and kicked the TV set because they promised you the Great Pumpkin and [then] he never appeared.

   â€œWell, you can’t do that to kids, you know. You cannot promise them something that exciting, you’ve got to have [him] appear. Maybe it’s an illusion, maybe it’s a trick, whatever, the children think they see [him] and we the audience know that they don’t see him. But nevertheless, one way or the other [he’s] got to show up.

   “So I was complaining about this to Chuck [who made the classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (12/18/66) for MGM], and he said, ‘Well, hell, why don’t we do our own film on Halloween and do it right?’ [So] I brought him my painting and lugged it over to the animation studio and he said, ‘My God, that’s it, that’s the genetic tree, that’s the family tree of Halloween.

   â€œâ€˜Let’s go back in time to the caves and the Greek and Roman myths, and come on up through Europe with the Druids and into Ireland and Scotland and England and America and Mexico. You write the screenplay,’ which I promptly did in the fall of [that year], I believe.

   “And in about two months I had the thing ready to shoot, at which point MGM tore down all of its animation studios and fired everyone. We were all out on the street suddenly. I peddled the screenplay around and optioned it to various animation studios off and on for many years, and it took a good part of twenty years to finally get someone else interested,” during which he converted it into a novel illustrated by Joseph Mugnaini.

   In “a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state,” Tom Skelton and seven other boys dressed for All Hallows’ Eve are perplexed by the absence of Joe Pipkin, “the greatest boy who ever lived.” Emerging from his home pale, unmasked, and holding his right side, he pledges to catch up with them at “the place of the Haunts” in the inevitable ravine, whose tall, black-clad resident, Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud, slams the door with a “No treats. Only — trick!”

   Behind the house, they see the titular tree hung with 1,000 jack-o’-lanterns, and after rising from a pile of leaves in the guise of a skull, he offers to reveal “all the deep dark wild history of Halloween…”

   For this, they must travel to the Undiscovered Country (i.e., the Past), and when they say they must await Pip, he appears, feeling unwell, but in the ravine, his pumpkin light goes out, and he vanishes. Moundshroud says Death has “borrowed” Pipkin, “perhaps to hold him for ransom,” and taken him to the Undiscovered Country, so the lads can “solve two-mysteries-in-one.”

   He has them build a kite out of circus posters covering an abandoned barn, a pterodactyl with the boys (including Ralph Bengstrum and Wally Babb) as its tail, followed by a scythe-carrying Moundshroud, his cape serving as wings; they fly over the town and into Egypt, 2000 B.C., where food is left on doorsteps for homecoming ghosts.

   Deducing that the youthful mummy in the funeral procession they are watching is Pip, his friends are eager to save him, but Moundshroud cautions patience, proceeding to explain how fire got the cavemen through the night, wondering if the sun would rise the next day. Atop a pyramid, they see similar offerings being made in ancient Greece and Rome; from there, the wind blows them off to the British Isles to see “England’s own druid God of the Dead,” Samhain, who turns the dead to beasts for their sins. A dog amidst this maddened menagerie, Pip eludes them again before they watch animal sacrifices being made by the druid priests, cut down by Roman soldiers who themselves are cut down by Christians…

   In the Dark Ages, the boys are carried off by brooms, prompting a lesson in how “anyone too smart, who didn’t watch out,” was accused as a witch; they “liked to believe they had power, but they had none…”

   In Paris, Pip is chained as the clapper of a bronze bell on a huge scaffolding, and as they ascend to free him, Notre Dame builds itself beneath their feet, its giant shadow banishing the witches. Reaching the top and finding Pip gone, they whistle for gargoyles to ornament the cathedral, realizing that one figure is Pip, who says he is not dead yet, with parts of him in the places they’ve been and “a hospital a long way off home,” but a lightning bolt knocks him off before Pip reveals how they can help him.

   Moundshroud says they must reassemble the Autumn Kite and fly to Mexico, the night’s “last grand travel” and a place of powerful association for Bradbury, who was frightened by the mummies in the catacombs of Guanajuato and set several stories there.

   On El Dia de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead Ones), the boys see the graveyard filled with people singing and placing flowers, cookies, sugar skulls, candles, and miniature funerals on the graves of their loved ones. Opening a trapdoor in an abandoned cemetery, Moundshroud says they must bring Pip up from the catacombs below, where they find him at the end of a long hall, both he and they too terrified to run the gauntlet with 50 mummies on a side.

   Moundshroud proposes a bargain: breaking a sugar skull bearing Pipkin’s name in eight pieces, he says they can ransom him if each gives a year from the end of his life, so they agree and eat the bits. Freed, Pip races right past them and disappears, so Moundshroud transports them back to Illinois, noting that “It’s all one…Always the same but different, eh? every age, every time. Day was always over. Night was always coming….Summer and winter, boys. Seedtime and harvest. Life and death. That’s what Halloween is, all rolled up in one.” The boys learn that Pip’s appendix was taken out just in time and, after decorating his porch with lit pumpkins to await his return, drift back to their own homes.

   Continued Bradbury, “finally David Kirschner…of Hanna-Barbera, came into my life. We talked about it for a year or so, and then finally two years ago he came back and said, ‘Hey, we got the money, Ted Turner’s one of our new bosses, and we want to buy The Halloween Tree. Will you freshen up your screenplay?’ I said, ‘I sure will.’

   “So I spent a couple of months [on it]…and that was it…Nothing was changed after that. We added a little more narration…They said, ‘Look, you’re ignoring your own best qualities here. Let’s add more of your individual voice, and let’s have you read it, hunh?’ And by God they were right. I went into the studio and read the narration, and it’s a nice addition.”

   The film halves the trick-or-treaters to Jenny (voiced by Annie Barker), replacing Henry-Hank Smith in the Witch costume, Tom (Edan Gross; Skeleton), Ralph (Alex Greenwald; Mummy), and Wally (Andrew Keegan; Gargoyle).

   Backed with evocative music by John Debney, an Oscar nominee for The Passion of the Christ (2004) who’d also worked with producer — and in this case director — Mario Piluso on Jonny’s Golden Quest (1993), the narration is almost verbatim from the book. After seeing Pip (Kevin Michaels) taken off in an ambulance, they find a note urging them to “Go ahead without me,” but seek to visit him instead; a shortcut through the ravine takes them to Moundshroud (Leonard Nimoy).

   Pip’s ghostly form takes a pumpkin bearing his likeness from the titular tree, vanishing in a tornado; this becomes a concrete cinematic MacGuffin rather than his peripatetic person or spirit, continually eluding Moundshroud, who seeks his soul.

   After the kite takes them to ancient Egypt, a more kid-friendly druid episode — sans Samhain, sacrifices, or Roman soldiers to “Destroy the pagans! ”— is set in Stonehenge, segueing via the Broom Festival to Notre Dame, which Moundshroud says, echoing Quasimodo, offers “Sanctuary!” The gargoyles’ connection with the monster mask worn by oft-aghast Wally (a drinking game based on each time he gasps, “Oh, my gosh!” would imperil the liver) is now established.

   Evoking Bradbury’s Playboy story (September 1963) and Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode (10/26/64) “The Life Work of Juan Diaz,” the final stop finds a more assertive Tom braving the mummies to reach Pip, taking the blame for wishing that something would happen to make him the group’s leader. But at the moment of forgiveness, Moundshroud grabs the pumpkin: “Children, it’s business. With his illness, his rent came due, and there was no payment. He’s mine now,” leading Tom to suggest the bargain instead. Pip flies off with his pumpkin and they are all whisked home, where it is found adorning his porch rail, Pip having narrowly survived the surgery, while Moundshroud delivers his summation about the universality of Halloween, and flies away with the remaining pumpkins from the tree.

   â€œ[I]t’s a nice film, and I…won an Emmy for it [it was also nominated for Outstanding Animated Children’s Program]. I had a wonderful relationship with the studio, and no problems, no friction. The film is…available…so people can buy it, and it’s been on two years running…It’s hard to find the damn thing. They’ll have it on in the middle of the afternoon or late at night, and I hope maybe next year they’ll have it at a decent hour.”

   But I’ll leave the last word to his literary characters: “They were stopped by a final shout from Moundshroud: ‘Boys! Well, which was it? Tonight, with me — trick or treat?’ The boys took a vast breath, held it, burst it out: ‘Gosh, Mr. Moundshroud — both!’”

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

   Excerpted from the forthcoming (God willing) The Group: Sixty Years of California Sorcery on Screen.

      Edition cited:

The Halloween Tree: Bantam (1974)

      Online source:

https://archive.org/details/the-halloween-tree_202106

   “The Market Basing Mystery” (The Sketch, October 17, 1923; The Blue Book Magazine, May 1925) was collected in the U.S. in The Under Dog and Other Stories (1951), and in the U.K. first in Thirteen for Luck! (1966), a catch-all volume for young readers, and then in Poirot’s Early Cases (1974). It was expanded into the title novella (aka “Mystery of the Dressing Case”) of Murder in the Mews and Other Stories (truncated as Dead Man’s Mirror; 1937), which debuted in Redbook Magazine (September & October 1936). With his formidable “little gray cells,” Agatha Christie’s Belgian super-sleuth, Hercule Poirot, perhaps found the mystery itself less baffling than that barrage of appearances and titles!

   First mentioned here, and thought to be based upon Basingstoke and/or Christie’s future home of Wallingford, Market Basing would be the setting for stories and novels featuring Jane Marple, Superintendent Battle, and Tommy and Tuppence Beresford; Poirot himself returned there in Dumb Witness (aka Poirot Loses a Client; 1937). Inspector Japp, while off duty “an ardent botanist,” suggests a weekend with Poirot and Hastings in that “little country town,” where he craves anonymity: “Nobody knows us, and we know nobody.” But Constable Pollard, transferred from a nearby village where he’d met Japp through “a case of arsenical poisoning,” interrupts them over an English breakfast at the local inn.

   He summons them to “rambling, dilapidated” Leigh House, rented eight years ago by the virtual recluse Walter Protheroe, shot through the head; the locked door, bolted windows, and pistol in his hand suggest suicide, but per Dr. Giles, the bullet entered behind his left ear — yet the gun was in his right hand, the fingers not closed over it. There is no obvious motive, with the only apparent suspects his devoted housekeeper of 14 years, Miss Clegg, and his recently arrived guests from London, Mr. and Mrs. Parker. Examining the scene, Poirot focuses on two aspects: the smell — or lack thereof, inconsistent with Protheroe’s being a heavy smoker — and the handkerchief he had carried in his right-hand coat sleeve.

   The former suggests that the window had been open all night, and the latter indicates that he was left-handed; a broken cuff-link found by the body is identified as Parker’s by Miss Clegg, who says they were neither expected nor welcome. A tramp who often slept in an unlocked shed reports overhearing Parker attempting to blackmail Protheroe, revealed as an alias for Wendover, a Naval lieutenant who “had been concerned in the blowing up of the first-class cruiser Merrythought, in 1910.” Put on trial, Parker is cleared by Poirot, who gets Miss Clegg to admit that having found Protheroe a suicide, she blamed Parker, implicating him by repositioning the gun, bolting the window, and planting the cuff-link.

   Almost six times as long as the original, “Murder in the Mews” was adapted in 1989 with David Suchet on Britain’s ITV in Agatha Christie’s Poirot, which unsurprisingly omitted “Market Basing.” The third-person novella features Japp (now a Chief Inspector) but not Hastings, while Pollard and Giles have been supplanted by Divisional Inspector Jameson and Dr. Brett, respectively. This marks Jameson’s only literary appearance; played, as he was in “Mews,” by John Cording, he was interpolated into their 1990 adaptation of “The Lost Mine” (The Sketch, November 21, 1923; The Blue Book Magazine, April 1925) from the collections Poirot Investigates (1925) — here in the States — and Poirot’s Early Cases.

   Taking a shortcut through Bardsley Gardens Mews to Poirot’s flat on Guy Fawkes Night, he and Japp remark that it would be perfect for a murder, since the fireworks marking the plot to blow up Parliament would hide the sound of a shot. The next morning, Japp asks Poirot to accompany him back there when summoned by Jameson to the scene of what at first seemed a suicide; he and Brett, who forced open the door, show them the body.

   The set-up, with the misaligned wound and gun, is the same, but Christie rings her changes on the victim — young widow Barbara Allen, who lives with her friend Jane Plenderleith and is engaged to Charles Laverton-West, “M.P. for someplace in Hampshire” — and suspects.

   Charles, with no apparent motive yet a flimsy alibi, resents being questioned, due less to guilt than to being, says Japp, a “[b]it of a stuffed fish. And a boiled owl!”; housekeeper Mrs. Pierce merely provides a torrent of chatter. Blackmailer Major Eustace met Barbara years ago in India and knew that “having borne an illegitimate child who died at three” she invented a fictitious late husband, a revelation she feared would damage Charles’s career.

   Carried over are the clues of the smokeless room (Poirot invokes Conan Doyle’s “curious incident of the dog in the nighttime,” which did nothing) and cuff link, with a wristwatch replacing the handkerchief, supported by a writing table that has the pen tray on the left.

   Eustace admits visiting Barbara, ostensibly to offer investment advice, but the neighbors report his saying goodbye to her at 10:20; his subsequent movements are accounted for, yet when it is realized that nobody actually saw or heard her half of the conversation from inside the doorway, he is arrested. Confronted with the truth, Jane reluctantly agrees that she cannot let Eustace — already facing a long prison sentence for an unrelated swindle — take the blame for Barbara’s death. Jane admits finding her body and suicide note, which she burned, and restaging the scene to frame Eustace, so despite its title, the case remains, as Japp puts it, “Not murder disguised as suicide, but suicide made to look like murder!”

   Among her clever recombining and expanding of elements, Christie adds one that nicely shows the ingenuity of Jane, who professes first perplexity at the possibility and method of Barbara’s suicide, and then outrage at the notion of murder. Visibly discomfited when asked to unlock a cupboard full of umbrellas, golf clubs, and tennis racquets, she displays anxiety over an attache case containing old magazines and other trivia. She is later seen throwing it into the lake by the golf course, whence it is retrieved, now empty, but this is a superb piece of misdirection: she had diverted their attention to the case when her real concern was Barbara’s left-handed clubs, tossed into the undergrowth along the course.

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: “Dead Man’s Mirror.”

Edition cited —

      “The Market Basing Mystery” and “Murder in the Mews” in Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories: William Morrow (2013)

CORNELL WOOLRICH – Hotel Room. Random House, hardcover, 1958. No paperback edition.

   The novel’s protagonist is Room 923 of the St. Anselm Hotel in New York City.

   A nice, fresh, new and sparking hotel, the room was christened June 20, 1896, by newlyweds.

   Crossing the threshold, the bride tells the groom, on the inevitability of aging, ‘I can’t imagine it ever happening to me. But when it does, it won’t be me any more. It’ll be somebody else….. An old lady looking out of my eyes…  A stranger inside of me. She won’t know me, and I won’t know her.’

   â€˜Then I’ll be a stranger too,’ responds the groom. ‘Two strangers, in a marriage that was begun by two somebody-elses.’ He closed the door. But for a minute or two his face seemed to glow there where it had been. Then it slowly wore thin, and the light it had made went away. Like the illusion of love itself does.

   Down the bride’s face, “a thin shining line down each cheek like silver threads unraveling from her eyes. ‘Don’t let the day come. Don’t let it come yet. Wait till he’s back first’… mercilessly the night thinned away, as if there were a giant unseen blackboard eraser at work, rubbing it out. ‘But now tomorrow’s yesterday…. Oh, what happened to tomorrow? Who took it away?’

   Next we are catapulted in time to the day Wilson declares war against Germany, April 6th, 1917. A young enlisted man comes, seeking a room on his last night. Everything’s booked. But an elderly German couple are in 923. Screw the krauts, screw the Kaiser, says the desk-man. And kicks them out. It’s the patriotic thing to do. Everyone “broke out in a rash of patriotism, like hives.”

   The young enlisted man calls a pretty girl he knows just vaguely and needles her into a date. He pressures her into giving herself to him. It’s the patriotic thing to do. And she does. Fervently. Oh what passion. What patriotic passion. And they immediately afterwards run out and wed. Promising not to speak to each other again until the war is over. And that day meeting again. At Room 923.

   Now it is Armistice Day, November 11, 1918. And the clandestine couple meets again. And they don’t recognize each other. The patriotic passion is spent. They don’t really care for each other at all. And they agree to an annulment. To let it go.

   And now it’s February 17, 1924. The last night in the life of a Mafioso who has lost his grip. Who has lost his hold on his territory. He’s done but doesn’t know it.

   His mother comes to see him. “’D’you remember when I was a kid, and you used to make lasagne for Vito and me, and bring ’em hot to the table—?”

    ‘Quella non ero io . . .That was not I, that was another woman, long gone now. A woman whose prayers were not answered. Io non sono piu tua madre . . .’ she whispered smolderingly. ‘Mother, no. Just a woman who bore a devil. The woman who once bore you says good-bye to you.’

   And then there was death, the great know-nothing part of life. Or had life perhaps been only the brief knowsomething part of an endless all-encompassing death?”

   The next time we come to Room 923, it is the evening of the stock market crash, October 24, 1929. And the man checking in, a powerful Wall Street man. At least he was so that morning. And now he’s squat.

   The hotel’s become second rate, with time. “’[N]ever been in a hotel like this before…. Oh, not for a long time, anyway, And that was another me… My life slipped out of its room and beat its bill, and there are no tracers anywhere that can find it and bring it back.’

   The bellboy performed all the little flourishes, turning the light behind it on, then off again, shed a spark for an instant, and then remain out as it had been before.

   He looks at a photo of his daughter, inscribed: “’To Daddy from his loving Ruth’. And there was something so polite….. greetings from a distance, from a thousand heartbeats away, from which all the warmth has escaped en route, they had so far to go.”

   Opening the window to jump out, “Like an extra dimension, that had been lurking about him all the while, but whose existence he had never suspected until just now….. glass behind which all life is supposed to be lived, to be allowed to run its course, unknowing — he knew now — of the strangeness on the other side. The glass that, without that, shatters easily enough”.

   Next is the night before Pearl Harbor, December 6, 1941. A mixed couple, a Caucasian girl and a Japanese boy, have run away together to NYC—to escape the anti-miscegenation racism of their parents. To start on their own. To elope. And begin their lives……

   And last, we are left on September 30, 1957. The evening before the demolition. The hotel to be razed for an office tower.

   The blushing bride we met back in 1896 has come back. To bookend her life, and the life of the room.

   She thanks her departed husband “for not slowly aging before my eyes, as I would have slowly aged before yours, until finally neither of us was what the other had married, but somebody else entirely. Some unknown old man. Some unknown old woman. Thank you for staying young. And for letting me stay young along with you. A lifetime of youth. Eternal spring.”

’[H]otel rooms,’ amended the maid, ‘are a lot like people.’”

   I liked it. A bit wistful and sad, with dominant sense of geography and loss. It’s an interesting idea for a novel: having the location as the main character, letting the setting stay still, slowly aging, and having the times and people change, in accelerated action at momentous times. It would make a good play.

   I’ve often felt the strange gap where you visit a familiar place, a house you grew up in, or a town, a restaurant, great memories, so intensely real, but gone and gone forever. And the place remains, seemingly unscathed.

   But is it? Is the place unscathed? Or are all of the memories and events somehow contained therein? Redeemable in time?

   I don’t have any of the answers. And neither does the novel. But there are evocations and suggestions of meaning. Which is the only honest response anyway.

   Woolrich dedicated the novel to his dear mother, his roommate until the end:

         To Claire Attalie Woolrich

            1874-1957

         In Memoriam

            This Book: Our Book

   Woolrich also wrote at least a couple of other stories taking place at the St. Anselm Hotel. One of the stories, “The Penny-A-Worder,” also takes place in room 923, and is about a pulp mystery writer assigned a rush order to write a cover story to match a cover that has already been produced — set to go to the printers tomorrow morning. This story was intended to be included in Hotel Room — but the publishers decided that it didn’t fit in with the rest of the stories.

   “Mystery in Room 913,” written twenty years earlier, occurs right down the hall. It’s a pretty typical, but well-told story about a mysterious ‘suicide room’. Every single man who checks in seems compelled to throw himself thru the window. The cops buy it. Why complicate things? It’s the depression! But the hotel dick doesn’t believe it at all. And he uses himself as bait!

               —–

   Barry Malzberg , Woolrich’s last agent, set me onto Hotel Room with his recommendation of ‘The Penny-A-Worder’. But I’d suggest to readers to save that story until after reading Hotel Room. It has just the right dream within a dream quality that gives the rest of the book its intended phantasmic effect. And it should have, to my mind, have been included as an epilogue to the book.

   Malzberg, in a reminiscence contained in The Big Book of Noir, edited by Ed Gorman, Lee Server, and Martin H. Greenberg, recalls complimenting Woolrich on Phantom Lady. Woolrich’s response was that the man who wrote that novel has been dead for years.

   It’s an interesting take on life. That the person that you are and the person that you were are strangers to one another. It’s a dissociation shared by all of the characters in Hotel Room. You could retitle the title: ‘In Memoriam to Identity’ (to steal from Kathy Acker), or, to coin a phrase: ‘The Dissociation Association’. But perhaps Hotel Room is right. It’s anonymous. And it fits you. At affordable rates. It may even be a vacant now. Make your reservation. Room 923 awaits.

   Just as Holmes had his Moriarty, and the 87th Precinct had its Deaf Man, so Nero Wolfe had… Arnold Zeck, who figured in three consecutive Rex Stout novels: And Be a Villain (1948), The Second Confession (1949), and In the Best Families (1950). Beginning with Full House (1955), Viking Press — his publisher for the last three decades of his life, and my future employer — assembled three books apiece into eight omnibus editions, five of which contained two novels and one of his collections (themselves generally comprising three novellas, occasionally two or four). All but one had poker-themed titles, the books seemingly selected at random, but the last bore the delicious moniker Triple Zeck (1974).

   A little history: my high-school geometry teacher, whom I will forbear to name, did not excel at her job, but I owe her an incalculable debt, for it was she who — knowing I loved mysteries — lent me her Triple Zeck (I now have my own copy). So entranced was I with Wolfe and Archie that I proceeded to devour all 46 books, plus the spin-off Red Threads (1939), that year. Mind you, in 1981, I was also amidst other series: Lord Peter Wimsey (7 books), Tarzan (4), Barsoom (1), George Smiley (4), Horatio Hornblower (1), Mike Hammer (the only one not to stick; 1), and Len Deighton’s anonymous spy (1); hard to believe that at 18, I had so much time for reading …  while falling in love with my wife!

   Backtracking a bit, the trilogy follows Too Many Women (1947), in which a disharmonic convergence of two virtually unthinkable events occurs the night the second victim, Kerr Naylor, is killed. First, Naylor loses Saul when he abruptly ducks into a taxi, and second, after Naylor takes it to Wolfe’s brownstone and, without leaving a name, asks for Archie, who is out for the evening, Fritz forgets to tell Archie upon his return.

   â€œThat Saul Panzer is the best tailer in New York. I don’t for a minute believe he lost Naylor! He don’t lose ’em! Even if he did, when Naylor came here, wouldn’t you have had him tailed when he left, since you were interested in him?,” bellows the understandably incredulous Cramer.

   The curtain goes up on And Be a Villain (Hamlet, Act I, Scene V) as Wolfe — goaded into action by IRS payments — suggests that radio star Madeline Fraser hire him to investigate the poisoning of horse-race tipster Cyril Orchard on her show, in a sponsor’s product, yet.

   Lina would pay only expenses, plus a deductible $20,000 if he nails the killer, to stop the bad publicity, although Tully Strong, secretary of the Sponsors’ Council, says the makers of Hi-Spot, the doctored beverage, might wish to do the hiring. It is decided that said fee will be split unequally among Hi-Spot; the network, the Federal Broadcasting Co. (FBC); Fraser; and other sponsors White Birch Soap and Sweeties: cue assembling the suspects.

   Refusing to work for Sweeties, Wolfe reassigns their 2% to the FBC and hosts Lina; her “stooge and feeder,” Bill Meadows, and manager, Deborah Koppel; script writer Elinor Vance; Nathan Traub, ad exec for the agency handling three sponsors; and Strong. Gate-crashing are Hi-Spot’s president and p.r. man, respectively Walter B. Anderson and Fred Owen, and FBC veep Beech.

   Absent are Columbia mathematician F.O. Savarese, the ill-fated broadcast’s surviving guest, otherwise engaged, and Nancylee Shepherd, the “nosy little chatterbox” and “pain in the neck” who organized the country’s largest Fraser Girls’ Club, kept at arm’s length as much as possible, while being tolerated by Lina to a degree.

   All deny remembering who’d uncapped the bottles, one containing cyanide — with which Fraser’s husband, Debby’s brother, allegedly killed himself six years earlier — and placed it in front of Orchard; it is unclear if he was a deliberate target. With Nan and her mother shipped off to the Ambassador in Atlantic City, impervious to Saul’s charms, Wolfe grills Savarese, an expert on probability who knew Orchard, and asked to join him on the show, to no end. Archie’s faked telegram from Al Shepherd lures his family to the brownstone, where Wolfe catches Nan lying, forcing her to admit that nearly a year ago, clear glasses were switched to opaque blue … and Lina’s bottles were always marked with Scotch tape.

   The inference is clear: Lina hasn’t been drinking Hi-Top, which gave her indigestion, a ruinous fact if revealed, and Bill says that Traub — naturally unaware of the substitution — unwittingly gave Orchard Lina’s poisoned coffee. Wolfe tells Cramer enough to have his army of men investigate who might have it in for Lina, and if his fact is deemed essential to catching the killer, he will collect that fee.

   Even this seems fruitless until Beula Poole is shot dead in her office; she and Orchard published, for the unheard-of weekly price of $10, sheets giving, respectively, “inside advance information on political and economic affairs” and race-track tips, and Cramer reveals that both their offices were cleaned out.

   Then, it happens: answering Wolfe’s ad seeking subscribers to What to Expect or Track Almanac is a voice “hard, slow, precise, and cold as last week’s corpse”; he has heard it before, with advice on a job for General Carpenter, and to advise him to limit his “efforts in behalf of a Mrs. Tremont,” which he did, but only “because no extension of them was required to finish the job I was hired for.”

   Zeck, who has a place in Westchester, is not pleased to learn that Wolfe knows his name — ascertained by Del Bascom’s agency with no word to Archie, whom he did not want to involve — and warns him to drop the matter. Cautioning Archie to forget his name and stay away from him, Wolfe drops a bombshell.

   â€œI’ll tell you this. If ever, in the course of my business, I find that I am committed against him and must destroy him, I shall leave this house, find a place where I can work — and sleep and eat if there is time for it — and stay there until I have finished. I don’t want to do that, and therefore I hope I’ll never have to.”

   Then it’s back to the matter at hand, and he learns that said sheets were an ingenious blackmail racket. A disobedient Archie calls Lon Cohen at the Gazette — introduced in The Silent Speaker (1946) — to ask about Zeck, whom Lon has heard “owns twenty Assemblymen and six district leaders … if you print something about him that he resents your body is washed ashore at Montauk Point…”

   Comparing notes with Cramer, Wolfe posits that the éminence grise behind the sheets has “units” nationwide, ensuring success both with modest payments and by rigidly adhering to one-year “subscriptions” sans renewals. He suggests focusing on subscriber Vance — whose namesake is “Eleanor” in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) — and says one of Zeck’s cutouts may know the murderer’s identity.

      He refuses a unilateral attempted firing by Anderson, who is enraged at associations with blackmail after Archie gives Lon the story (naming no names, natch) and withdraws his sponsorship; Wolfe also stirs the pot by faking an “anonymous” letter that implicates Elinor in a suspicious death.

   At least that’s the plan, but as Archie waits for the interested parties to wind up a summit meeting to select the replacement for Hi-Top, Debby eats a sample of Meltettes candy, to disprove Nan’s assertion that “It’s dangerous!,” and promptly drops dead.

   Unfortunately, when Archie refuses to be frisked like the others, Deputy Commissioner O’Hara (invoked yet unseen in Too Many Women) has him hauled downtown, where the forgery is found. He is sprung to forestall the release of an announcement sent to Fraser’s station, WPIT, that Wolfe “has solved the murder cases, all three of them, with no assistance from the police,” and can soon tell the D.A., so Cramer and Stebbins start rounding up suspects…

   The blackmailers cleverly implied knowledge of fabricated dirty laundry but, by the law of averages, inevitably put the bite on someone who really had a deadly secret they would kill to protect. Lina faked Lawrence’s suicide and made herself seem to be the target, not Orchard; Anderson was scared off by Strong, who showed her the accusatory letters and deduced her guilt.

   When Zeck calls to “congratulate you on keeping your investigation within the limits I prescribed,” and Wolfe responds, “I permit prescription of limits only by the requirements of the job. If that job had taken me across your path you would have found me there,” he says, “Then that is either my good fortune — or yours,” and hangs up.

   Act II, The Second Confession, opens as James U. Sperling, chairman of the board of the Continental Mines Corp., tries to hire Wolfe to do what Bascom has not: prove there is, and if possible get, evidence that layer Louis Rony is a Communist. He wants to prevent Rony, a “champion of the weak and downtrodden,” from marrying his younger daughter, Gwenn; Wolfe and Archie agree with her that communism is “intellectually contemptible and morally unsound.”

   Wolfe says, “Why not hire me to reach your objective, no matter how — of course within the bounds permitted to civilized man?,” but Del’s reports reveal that Rony was seen at Bischoff’s Pet Shop, “a branch of Zeck’s far-flung shenanigans…”

   â€œAndrew” Goodwin infiltrates to photograph Stony Acres, Sperling’s country home near Chappaqua, for a corporation portfolio and steal shots of Rony, at whom Connie Emerson is making a pass, while Archie fears that war widow Madeline may do so at him, tangling a possible diversionary run at sis Gwenn.

   Also present are James, Jr., economist Webster Kane, and Connie’s husband, Continental-sponsored WPIT newscaster Paul, despised by Wolfe as a veritable fascist. Fiercely protective of Gwenn, Madeline recognizes “Andy” from a news photo and intuits that his object is Rony; offering him a ride back to the city, Archie plots for him to be knocked out in an ambush, simulated by Ruth Brady and Saul.

   Rony carries an American Communist Party membership card for a “William Reynolds,” which Archie photographs, and eight keys, of which he takes impressions, giving Saul his cash to maintain the fiction. On his return, Wolfe is reporting a warning from Zeck to let Rony alone when the plant rooms are blasted with gunfire, leaving Theodore traumatized but unhurt.

   Enlisting Andy Krasicki, Lewis Hewitt, and G.M. Hoag to salvage what they can, Wolfe is driven — literally and figuratively — to Westchester, where he enlightens the Sperlings regarding “X,” leaving Gwenn to decide if she insists on proof regarding Rony, whatever the cost; stalling for time, she makes a rendezvous to tell Rony they’re through.

   The victim of an apparent hit and run, he’s found behind a bush by Archie, and Wolfe has Sperling, who rehires him to solve it, report the death, bringing local law Dykes, Noonan, and Archer — introduced, like Andy, in “Door to Death” (1949).

   Archie deflects Archer’s interested in the faux holdup as best he can, while the antagonistic Noonan is thrilled that Wolfe’s car is found to have killed Rony, which Kane confesses he did by accident while borrowing it to mail some letters in Mount Kisco. Archer is satisfied, but not Wolfe, who refuses to consider Sperling’s $50,000 pay-off (including orchid-damage) final and, back home, receives the same amount in an anonymous package, obviously on behalf of Zeck.

   He calls wishing luck to Wolfe, who asks Doc Vollmer to seek any sign on Rony of being knocked out before he was run over, with inconclusive results. He sends Archie and Saul with duplicate keys to his apartment, fruitlessly searched just when Jimmy and his mother turn up, looking ostensibly for letters from Gwenn, but presumably for a threat Rony held over them.

   Telling the ’teers that any information will be used — or not used — at his sole discretion, he asks Saul and Orrie Cather to learn the hold, and Fred Durkin to probe their servants in an effort to glean who doped a drink meant for Rony yet consumed by Archie, who had done the very same thing, and switched them in the hope of searching his room.

   Connie suspiciously materializes just as Archie locates a stone that — per Weinbach of the Fisher Laboratories, introduced in “Cordially Invited to Meet Death” (1942) — hit a man’s head. Saul learns that Jimmy contributed to the Committee of Progressive Business Men, a “funny front” for former Vice President, 1948 Progressive Party candidate, and alleged Communist “fellow traveler” Henry A. Wallace, his check one of several photostatted by a possible spy.

   Wolfe is visited by Gwenn, who reports hearing an argument between the Emersons that implicated the jealous Paul, and “Mr. Jones,” a mysterious contact within the Communist party whom Archie has never met, and then has Archie call off the boys.

   Deducing that Reynolds is not Rony’s alias but the killer’s, Wolfe ghost-writes articles on the party’s inner workings (leaked by Jones) for Lon, now second in command at the city desk; his anonymous letter fingering Reynolds as their source leads high-ranking Harvey and Stevens — one of whom may be Jones — to sign a document identifying his photo.

   At the climactic confab, Wolfe forces Web to retract his first confession, only to reveal he is Reynolds, his stunned look the titular admission. In what Archie calls “the tail,” Sperling repays Wolfe by pulling Paul off the air, where he’d insulted Wolfe, and a satisfied Zeck sends him $15,000, replacing what he’d paid Jones, all set aside by Wolfe as a war chest.

   Wolfe finally makes good on his vow in Act III, In the Best Families, which begins when wealthy Sarah Rackham visits with cousin Calvin Leeds and hires him to learn the source of second husband Barry’s new income. As cover, Archie is to be called in on a valuable dog’s poisoning at Calvin’s Hillside Kennels, and invited with him to dine at her adjacent Westchester estate, Birchvale.

   That morning, Wolfe is expecting a sausage delivery from Bill Darst that he and Fritz plan to share with Marko Vukcic, but the box instead contains a cylinder of tear gas, a warning from Zeck to lay off Barry, suggesting an answer to Mrs. Rackham’s question; Wolfe hangs up when Zeck offers to replace her $10,000 with cash.

   â€œThis episode will be repeated. [The telephone] will ring, and that confounded voice will presume to dictate to us. If we obey the dictate we will be maintaining this office and our means of livelihood only by his sufferance. If we defy it we shall be constantly in a state of trepidant vigilance, and one or both us us will probably get killed.”

   Wolfe refuses to ignore the third threat, as does Archie, who advises that the household begin the “trepidant vigilance” and heads off to Westchester, casing Eastcrest, Zeck’s mansion. At dinner are Sarah’s widowed daughter-in-law, Annabel Frey; banker, Dana Hammond, her admirer; and secretary, Lina Darrow, as well as her admirer, state assemblyman Oliver A. Pierce.

   That night, Nobby, a Doberman pinscher given to Sarah by Calvin, crawls to Hillside and dies with a steak knife stuck in him; his mother, Hebe, gets the scent, leading Calvin and Archie toward Birchvale, but on the path is Sarah, stabbed with the same knife. Archie is candid with Archer, if omitting Zeck, and Leeds says, “It happens in the best of families” before he races home, where Wolfe has bolted, leaving three notes. Two offer Theodore and Fritz employment with Hewitt (who takes the plants) and Marko, respectively, while one reads, “A.G.: Do not look for me. My very best regards and wishes,” and a Gazette ad announces his retirement, referring only clients having “unfinished matters” to Archie.

   Marko reveals that Wolfe has given him a power of attorney, told him “to offer the house and its contents for sale [with] confidential instructions,” and bidden Archie “to act in the light of experience as guided by intelligence.” New millionaire Barry contradicts Archie, claiming that Sarah was going to consult Wolfe about possible mishandling by Hammond of her affairs, and disbelieving Archie’s ignorance of Wolfe’s whereabouts, Archer locks him up.

   Before Wolfe’s lawyer, Nathaniel Parker (mentioned, by surname, in The Silent Speaker), springs him, Archie is offered a job in the “organization” by his cellmate, Max Christy, who per Lon sets up “little weekend roundups … Anything men risk money for.”

   Bequests also go to distant relatives, servants, Lina ($200,000), Annabel (Birchvale plus $1 million), and Leeds ($500,000), whose corroboration of Archie is disbelieved as well; like him and everyone else, Cramer thinks Archie knows how to reach Wolfe but, having deduced the truth, he says Wolfe should return Sarah’s fee and Zeck “is out of his reach.”

   Archie decides to open his own office at 1019 Madison Avenue, with Annabel as his first client, who asks him to a gathering of the suspects … none of whom will cooperate. Max invites Archie to meet a man he thinks might be Zeck, but it is bearded Pete Roeder from L.A., who wants Archie to tail Barry and has his driver, Bill, take them up to 1019 to talk.

   There, he is revealed as Wolfe, who’d spent “the most painful month of my life — except one, long ago,” in Texas, and has lost 117 pounds. Like Charles Forbin in D.F. Jones’s Colossus (1966), he knows his only guarantee of privacy is to feign the need for female companionship, so Lily Rowan hosts a five-hour confab in her E. 63rd Street penthouse, necking with “Pete” en route to sell it.

   Having planted a seed of suspicion in Zeck, Pete has Archie hire the ’teers for the job, deliberately letting themselves be spotted, and when confronted by Barry, Archie accepts $6,000 to reveal that they are working — indirectly — for Zeck, whom he conjectures “is getting set to frame you for the murder of your wife.”

   Archie claims to have told Barry he was working for Annabel in his daily reports to Max, who takes him to an audience where Zeck denies seeking Wolfe, but tries to recruit him; with the threat of a murder rap, he wants to force Barry to help them duplicate Roeder’s successful L.A. operation locally.

   Summoned to Archer’s office, Archie encounters Lina (a name Stout, typically casual, used for two characters in the trilogy), jilted by Barry and peddling the tale of a fictitious whistle-blowing call from Wolfe to Sarah that gave him a motive. “About all that [his] ticket to the electric chair needed was my endorsement,” yet however deserved, it would end the anti-Zeck scheme, so he shoots the story full of holes.

   Persuaded that his only out is an accommodation, Barry is taken to Zeck by Archie — now nominally on the payroll — and Pete, with a gun beneath his briefcase’s false bottom, used to cover Barry when they abruptly bind and gag Zeck. He agrees to trade evidence Wolfe has assembled against him for evidence that will convict Barry, who grabs the gun Archie “carelessly” put down to free Zeck, kills him, and in turn is killed by henchmen.

   Back in the brownstone at last, Wolfe earns Sarah’s fee by revealing that Calvin tipped off Zeck, and only he would be trusted by Nobby enough to stab him after killing his new mistress; vacationing with Lily in Norway, Archie learns that Leeds has hanged himself in his cell.

   The only book in the trilogy to be adapted, “In the Best Families” (3/6/81) was directed for the William Conrad series — which, oddly enough, I was not watching while reading the books during its original January 16-June 2 run — by the prolific George McCowan and, like “Before I Die” (1/30/81), scripted by Alfred Hayes.

   I hope you’ll agree that to summarize the first two in detail gave the third an essential context! Guest stars Linden Chiles (Leeds), Burr DeBenning (Max), and Diana Douglas (Sarah) each made multiple appearances with Conrad on Cannon; DeBenning, the ill-fated scientist in The Incredible Melting Man (1977), was also later seen on Matt Houston opposite Lee Horsley (Archie).

   Even before Sarah and Leeds arrive, a messenger (Chuck Tamburro) delivers the fateful package from Arnold Dorso (Robert Loggia), “king of the spiders,” who knows Wolfe is out to change his untouchability. Defying this third warning, Wolf takes the job; Hayes excises several characters, but otherwise follows Stout closely with the Westchester trip, the introduction of Annabel (Juanin Clay) and Barry (Lawrence Casey), and the murder.

   Once again, Archie returns home to find the door wide open as Fritz (George Voskovec) and Theodore (Robert Coote) wait with the notes, yet no sooner has he been summoned to Rusterman’s than Marko (Alex Rodine) takes him to Wolfe, hiding in the meat locker.

   The spectacle of a chipper Wolfe in chef’s garb, singing opera, is a far cry from the folds of skin bespeaking “Pete’s” crash diet, and if he truly sought to disappear, hiding out with his oldest friend seems less than secure. It’s as if Hayes said, “Let’s adapt Gone with the Wind, but leave out all that nonsense about the Civil War”; why, with 46 to choose from, select and then vitiate the book whose distinguishing characteristic is Wolfe’s imposture?

   Archie rejects an offer from Annabel, who believes Barry is guilty, but accepts one from Max (now a Christy/Roeder amalgam), ostensibly bitter over his abandonment by Wolfe, whose dispute with Marko’s chef over seasoning is interpolated as supposed comic relief.

   The rest of the plot, and even the dialogue, remain faithful, with Archie flying solo in the climactic confrontation, and Annabel assuming some of Lina’s functions, just as Max did Pete’s. When the normally unsentimental Wolfe hands Leeds over to D.A. Emory (Arnie Moore) and his assistant (David M. Zellitti), his outrage over Nobby’s betrayal is true to Stout; in a lame tag, Archie refuses a delivery from another messenger (Bennett Roberts). Loggia’s toymaker in Big (1988) was a change of pace from crime stories, e.g., Scarface (1983), Prizzi’s Honor, Jagged Edge (both 1985)  — earning Loggia an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor — Innocent Blood (1992), Lost Highway (1997), The Sopranos.

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: “Disguise for Murder”
   

Editions cited:

   Too Many Women: Bantam (1955)

   And Be a Villain, The Second Confession, In the Best Families in Triple Zeck: Viking (1974)
   

Online source:

   In Part Two, I continue the episode-by-episode description of the 1961-62 television series, The 87th Precinct, based on the characters created by mystery writer Ed McBain in a long list of very popular police procedurals. If you missed Part One, you can find it here.

   â— Interestingly, two episodes were based on works by other authors, with Helen Nielsen adapting “The Very Hard Sell” (12/4/61) from her own story (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May 1959). An apparent suicide, a salesman is found shot dead in the car whose prospective buyer (Leonard Nimoy) duped him into transporting drugs during a test-drive; getting wind of this, he tried to make a citizen’s arrest with his own gun, which was then turned on him. Nimoy has little screen time, and his scam is convoluted and far-fetched, making this one of the less satisfying episodes.

   â— “Feel of the Trigger” (2/26/62) was adapted — again minus its initial article — from one of Donald E. Westlake’s Abe Levine stories (AHMM, October 1961), collected in Levine (1984); Hawkins gives Abe’s obsession with heart health to Meyer. During a confrontation with a youthful killer, Meyer faces him mano-a-mano and, after subduing him with judo — mentioned frequently in the novels, particularly as a defining characteristic of Det. Hal Willis — suddenly feels fine. Neither of McBain’s minority detectives, African-American Arthur Brown or Puerto Rican Frankie Hernandez, was seen on the show, but this episode gets points for matter-of-factly including black Officer Kendal (Bernie Hamilton) without making an issue of his race.

   The show’s original teleplays largely maintained the style and spirit of the books, periodically introducing a lighter tone, as did McBain. Obviously excepting Havilland 2.0, they captured both the personalities of and the dynamics among his characters, stressing the grindingly methodical, sometimes tedious nature of police work; the frequency with which luck and coincidence played an equally large role in the outcome; and the important contributions of the police lab, with which the detectives enjoy a pleasant raillery. Also like McBain, the scenarists populated the squadroom with colorful characters whose vignettes enlivened the proceedings.

   â— McBain contributed “Line of Duty” (10/23/61), which he later recycled for Ironside as “All in a Day’s Work” (2/15/68), and uses his character of stoolie Danny Gimp (Walter Burke). Bert sees a theater held up, then kills the perp who fires at him while the other drives away, described as a good boy by all who knew him; when Carella and Kling are given a lead by Danny, Bert freezes and is wounded before Steve shoots the fugitive, who reveals the “good boy” was his accomplice on 14 jobs. Unsurprisingly, McBain does an excellent job of focusing on Kling’s maturation as a detective, struggling to cope with the first time he is forced to kill.

   â— Cinematographer James Wong Howe directed Finlay McDermid’s “The Modus Man” (10/16/61), with Havilland and ex-detective Bill Brewster (John Anderson) — now a used-car salesman — recognizing the m.o. of a smash-grab as Maxie Greb’s … but he’s in prison. Carella’s investigating a second-story job, unmistakably the work of Blinky Smith…whose alibi checks; Roger and Kling raid the apartment of Greb’s former partner…who died a week ago. Brewster has microfilmed their m.o. cards, but slips up by telling a victim to shut up while impersonating a crook who can no longer speak.

   â— Winston Miller’s “Occupation, Citizen” (10/30/61) concerns a Hungarian refugee (Ross Martin) whose pregnant wife, fearing reprisals, stops him from identifying two mob killers, but after a second killing, he agrees to serve as bait. Immigrants feature prominently in McBain’s precinct, whose population, per Killer’s Wedge, “was composed almost entirely of third-generation Irish, Italians, and Jews, and first-generation Puerto Ricans.” This episode has a valuable lesson in citizenship applicable to all Americans, yet especially these aspiring citizens, with Steve reminding them of their civic duty to their unborn child’s adoptive country.

   â— The first of two teleplays by David Lang, “The Guilt” (11/13/61) finds Meyer clobbered by childhood friend Artie Sanford (Mike Kellin), who is bitten by a used-car salesman’s guard dog while trying to make a getaway. Dismissing news reports that it is rabid as a trick, he persuades sometime girlfriend Estelle Vernola (Norma Crane) to transport him in her uncle’s truck. Meyer records Blaney’s warning about the urgent need for treatment, and Estelle plays it for Artie in the back of the truck, prompting a spectacular, eye-rolling freak-out by Kellin before she drives him to the Emergency Hospital, where Meyer awaits.

   â— In Lang’s “Ramon” (4/9/62), the eponymous boy (Danny Bravo) can’t stop showing his appreciation after Havilland sends flowers to his mother’s grave, while his father, Villedo Morales (Edward Colmans), is conspiring to assassinate a visiting Central American prime minister, who plans to address his people in front of the precinct house. Roger collects $20 to send Ramon to camp, but Villedo, reconsidering when Havilland touts ballots over bullets in another of the show’s solid moral lessons, pulls Ramon from camp to leave town. Fearing he won’t see Roger again, the boy eludes him, his destination obviously the 87th, and Villedo, arriving just before the speech, fingers the conspirators.

   â— In Anne Howard Bailey’s “My Friend, My Enemy” (11/27/61), a woman lies to alibi her son, Andrew Mason (Dennis Hopper), who strangled a classmate in the park, and the suspicious Carella has an undercover Kling befriend him. Daniels urges caution when Bert risks the jealousy of Claire — killed off in Lady, Lady, I Did It! (1961) — to make a double date with two policewomen. With Hopper providing an early taste of the manic energy he brought to Apocalypse Now (1979), the unbalanced youth learns that Kling is a cop, and threatens him with his own gun before being disarmed.

   â— The first of four scripts by Donn Mullally, “Run, Rabbit, Run” (12/25/61) marks Paul Genge’s debut as Lt. Jim Burns (Peter Byrnes in the novels). The only surviving witness to testify against an executed mobster, Toots Brendan (Alfred Ryder) is betrayed when he tries to sell his interest in “the operation” to help finance his disappearance. Not above deception, Steve tells secretary Yvonne English (Barbara Stuart) — who is sweet on Toots — that he’s been killed, so she reveals her duplicitous boss’s address, enabling the detectives to intervene.

   â— Pete Rugolo and Jerry Goldsmith, respectively, pinch-hit on Mullally’s “Man in a Jam” (1/8/62) and Katkov’s “Step Forward” (3/26/62) — both directed by Twilight Zone vet James Sheldon — for Goldsmith’s protégé, Hawaii Five-O legend Morton Stevens; all three scored Thriller, another Hubbell Robinson Production. “Jam” concerns a man who claims he killed his fiancée during a drunken black-out, in reality a premeditated crime for which he forged I.O.U.’s from her to fictitious other men of whom he was supposedly jealous. Unfortunately, the Byzantine nature of his scheme threatens credulity.

   â— A somewhat whimsical departure, “Step Forward” finds the underpaid Carella accepting a job as a bank’s security chief; he chafes at the symbolic post, humoring rich clients, but provides two of them with valued advice. Kling drops in as the Carellas and Meyers enjoy cocktails, nicely showing how the detectives remain friends off-duty, and when he gets a tip on a payroll robber, the three head out to pick him up. Despite the extra money and the prestige of his own staff, Steve admits policing is “more fun,” his new job obviously forgotten as they question the suspect.

   â— Kling asks local baseball hero Larry Brooks (Michael Dante) to start a baseball clinic to get the local kids on the right path in Mullally’s “Idol in the Dust” (4/2/62). Larry tries to extricate his parole-violating brother Joe (Al Ruscio) from a crooked poker game, and in the ensuing mêlée, Joe pushes one crook out the window to his death; for their mother’s sake, Larry confesses to involuntary manslaughter, upholding the code of silence. This makes him a hero to the local punks, but when Bert assembles them and the clinic kids to see Larry, Carella brings Joe, who agrees to take his own rap, advising them to avoid his fate — guidance that could also serve viewers well.

   â— In Mullally’s “The Last Stop” (4/23/62), Mike Power (Victor Jory) is scapegoated after being shot in a taxi by Stu Tobin (Bern Bassey) while the latter silences a squealer, then asked by long-ago partner Burns to run out the retirement clock at “the Eight-Seven.” In an effective performance by Jory, he rubs everyone the wrong way, but his hunch is borne out that a rash of crimes by a shotgun-wielding woman is a hoax. Correctly confident that he won’t be recognized, Stu brazenly sits beside Powers in a bar; as Mike accosts him to return a lighter left behind, a departing Stu misconstrues and shoots it out, but Powers survives again and is retired, effective immediately.

   â— Written by Alfred Hitchcock Presents mainstay William Fay, “Main Event” (1/1/62) has Meyer’s pal “Sonny” Fitzgerald (Brad Weston) beset by a booby-trapped punching bag and spiked rubbing solution. The culprit is revealed as gofer Bobo Felix (Arch Johnson), an ex-pug who was used up and thrown away by — and is trying to frame — a notoriously crooked rival manager, resenting Sonny’s success. But the subtleties of Bobo’s plan seem at odds with his punch-drunk persona, making this another problematic episode.

   â— In Jonathan Latimer’s “Out of Order” (1/22/62), ex-con Jerry Curtis (Charles Robinson) is suspected of bombing a phone booth when his construction foreman reports a dynamite theft, and although cleared when another blast goes off during questioning, he decides to cash in, believing it’s useless to try going straight and voicing a familiar complaint about persecuted parolees. Bombing a café and emptying its register, he adds theft to the m.o., but Meyer finds evidence in the phone company’s crank letter file that helps identify the original bomber, who denies the thefts. Jerry is apprehended after shooting a man with a gun concealed in his “bomb” while bluffing a betting parlor.

   â— Rik Vollaerts received a story and shared script credit (with Raphael Hayes) on “The Pigeon” (1/29/62), with Peter Falk well suited to the typical oddball role of Greg Brovane. Coincidentally, the 87th entries So Long as You Both Shall Live (1976) and Jigsaw (1970) were respectively repurposed into his Columbo episodes “No Time to Die” (3/15/92) and “Undercover” (5/2/94). Aspiring to the big time like his father, Greg has been hypnotized to think he made it, confessing to two killings in a supermarket heist he didn’t pull and fingering three nonexistent accomplices.

   â— James Bloodworth also had story and shared script credit (with Collins) on “A Bullet for Katie” (2/12/62), the new bride of cop Bill Miller (Ed Nelson). Gantry (Harold J. Stone) excoriated Bill when left by his wife while in prison, but a co-worker recants his alibi for Katie’s shooting after Gantry refuses to be blackmailed into concealing factory theft. Providing extra nuance, Bill is well portrayed as abrasive and hot-headed, gunning for vengeance when he learns that Gantry is about to be picked up, but just in time, a boy admits wounding Katie while playing with an “unloaded” gun borrowed from a friend.

   â— In Sheldon’s “Square Cop” (3/12/62), written by Robert Hardy Andrews, Otto Forman (Lee Tracy) is suspected after the weapon that killed his partner is identified as his, reported stolen, and the description of the wounded perp matches his estranged son. When Burns says, “he fell down, failed, right in his own family,” Steve replies, “that happens to a lot of fathers,” alluding to Larry Byrnes, revealed as an addict and murder suspect in The Pusher. Tracy brings a nice gravitas to the role, dramatizing the classic duty vs. family conflict, with the viewer uncertain which way he leans until he decks the youth, who had tried to force his father’s help.

   â— Collins wrote the last episode, “Girl in the Case” (4/30/62), in which a millionaire dies after dictating a will to stenographer Cheryl Anderson (Janis Paige), offered $100,000 to swear that he was not of sound mind. It’s revealed that an ex-member of his law firm had planned to split $3 million left to a family member in a previous will. Havilland wines and dines Cheryl, but is chagrined to learn that she plans to marry the man’s ne’er-do-well son, who might actually become something with her help; this makes her a nicely complex character, seeming far less like a mere gold-digger.

   The “conglomerate hero” device aided the scenarists in mixing and matching characters from any book after Killer’s Choice to circumvent Roger’s absence. A Casanova, McBain’s Hawes often bedded any babe he saw, an aspect that not only was downplayed on the show but also ruled out the married Carella and Meyer and engaged Kling, leaving Havilland his default stand-in, e.g., romancing Cheryl. Roger’s literary successor, Andy Parker, fought with Steve over racist remarks to Hernandez, who is slain in See Them Die (1960) while trying to prevent a besieged killer’s becoming a barrio martyr.

   The 87th has since had mixed success onscreen, although as with noir authors David Goodis and Cornell Woolrich, French filmmakers, e.g., Claude Chabrol, favored these romans policiers. With Burt Reynolds (Carella), Jack Weston (Meyer), and Tom Skerritt (Kling) relocated to Boston, Richard A. Colla’s Fuzz (1972) was a misfire, despite being adapted by McBain-as-Hunter. His 1968 novel had brought back the Deaf Man — Yul Brynner, like Vaughn one of The Magnificent Seven (1960) — and Det. Eileen Burke (aka McHenry; Raquel Welch); the latter, unseen since The Mugger, became a major character starting with Ice.

            — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

      Editions cited —

The Mugger: Warner (1996)
Killer’s Choice: Avon (1986)
All others: Signet (1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1989)

   It began, I suppose, with Lord Peter Wimsey. Early in the Golden Age of English detective fiction between the World Wars, Dorothy L. Sayers’ first Wimsey novels created the sub-branch of the genre whose hallmarks were donnish wit, literary allusions and a contemporary sensibility. Near the end of the period in which this type of whodunit flourished, the mantle passed from women authors like Sayers to men, notably Nicholas Blake, Michael Innes and, a few years later, in the middle of World War II, Edmund Crispin.

   All three names were pseudonyms, the mystery-writing bylines of gentlemen with other careers. Blake, the one we are following today, was equally well known as C. (for Cecil) Day-Lewis (1904-1972), who along with his friends W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender was ranked among the foremost young poets of the post-WWI generation. Lovers of that form of literature remember him as England’s Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death, and for movie buffs he’s perhaps best known as the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis.

   I can’t remember when I began reading Nicholas Blake novels or even whether it was before or after we read the Day-Lewis translation of the Aeneid in high school. In any event it was generations ago. Recently I decided to revisit Blake and see how his work stands up today.

   His debut novel, A QUESTION OF PROOF (1935), opens at Sudeley Hall, a preparatory school of the sort in which Day-Lewis spent several years as an instructor. Of the eighty-odd boys that it houses, the richest and most despised is Algernon Wyvern-Wemyss. His classmates refer to him as a squit and a worm, and if THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS hadn’t taught Brits to love the sweetly singing little amphibian known to biologists as Bufo bufo, no doubt they would have called him a toad.

   On the end-of-term day when the inmates’ parents are invited to the school for fun and games, this young fiend is found strangled to death inside a hollow haystack which a few hours earlier had been the scene of a passionate rendezvous between one of the school’s instructors and the lovely young wife of its pedantic and tyrannical headmaster, who is also the dead boy’s uncle and only living relative.

   Could the lovers have been caught in the act by the kid, and could one or both of them have strangled him to keep his mouth shut? There are of course more than two suspects, including some other instructors and the headmaster, who inherits most of his swinish nephew’s money. (With his complete lack of interest in law, Blake does nothing to explain how this came about.)

   But the young man who visited the haystack is so deeply under suspicion that he sends to London for his old Oxford friend Nigel Strangeways, a Holmes-like consulting detective.

   At first Nigel comes across as something of a silly-ass character, demanding endless cups of tea, singing an aria from Handel’s ISRAEL IN EGYPT during a wild auto chase (the first of many physical action scenes in Blake novels), submitting to a schoolboy secret society’s initiation rite that involves, among other things, putting a chalk mustache on the statue of a “nimph” in the village square.

   But most of the time he plays his detective role well, preferring psychological to physical clues (of which there are none), recognizing that one unanswered question—why was the dead boy not seen by anyone in the hour or so before his death?—is the key to his murder.

   When a second murder takes place, a stabbing with an improvised stiletto during a cricket game between the students and their fathers, he concludes that the answer to another question—how was the stiletto made to disappear?—will solve both this crime and the earlier one. For Yanks there may be a bit too much schoolboy and cricket jargon but on the whole this is an excellent debut novel, deserving all the accolades it has garnered since its first publication.

   The title of the second Strangeways exploit and much of its plot are taken from an obscure (except to specialists) Jacobean melodrama. THOU SHELL OF DEATH (1936) is a quotation from Cyril Tourneur’s THE REVENGER’S TRAGEDY (1607), a play which becomes increasingly relevant as we progress through the book.

   On a recommendation from his uncle, an Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, Nigel travels to rural Somerset a few days before Christmas to investigate three threatening letters that have been sent at the rate of one a month to Fergus O’Brien, a World War I air ace who, somewhat like Lawrence of Arabia, has retired to the countryside.

   The most recent letter prophesies that O’Brien will die on the day after Christmas, also known as Boxing Day and the Feast of Stephen, the day on which good king Wenceslas in the carol went out. The reclusive war hero is uncharacteristically hosting a house party over the holidays, a party consisting of a woman explorer whose life he had saved in Africa, her financially desperate brother, a shady roadhouse proprietor, O’Brien’s discarded mistress, and an old Oxford don who had been one of Nigel’s professors.

   Sure enough, O’Brien is found shot to death on Boxing Day morning, and over the next few days there’s another death, this one by poison inserted in a peanut, and a near-fatal bludgeoning. Many chapters are filled with complex alternative theories of the crimes, propounded by Nigel and a Somerset officer and Inspector Blount of Scotland Yard, but the reasoning remains on a speculative level until Nigel travels to rural Ireland in search of O’Brien’s mysterious pre-war past.

   SHELL is more of a full-blooded detective novel than A QUESTION OF PROOF, with a particularly brilliant “player on the other side” (although how this adversary came to know so much about the works of Cyril Tourneur remains unexplained) and abundant quotations and allusions ranging from the tale of Hercules and Cacus and the epistles of St. Paul through Shakespeare (and of course Tourneur) and finally a few of Day-Lewis’s contemporaries.

   Nigel no longer guzzles tea by the potful as he did in his first outing but at one point, having missed his dinner, he snarfs a gargantuan impromptu meal—a pound or so of cold beef, ten potatoes, half a loaf of bread and most of an apple pie—-and later, just as in A QUESTION OF PROOF, he breaks into song during a wild auto chase.

   American readers might be put off by the number of minor characters who speak in regional or ethnic dialects as if they were in a Harry Stephen Keeler novel, but at least the accents are more authentic than the ones HSK dreamed up. (*)

   The poisoned peanut in the second Blake novel is (dare I say it?) a mere bag of shells compared with the murder method in the third. There were signs in that second book that Nigel was beginning to fall in love with Georgia the daredevil explorer. At the start of THERE’S TROUBLE BREWING (1937) they’re married. Nigel is still a consulting detective but has developed a sideline as an authority on poetry, and on the basis of his book on the subject he’s invited to deliver a lecture before the Literary Society in the Dorsetshire town of Maiden Astbury.

   The Big Daddy of the place is the owner of the local brewery, whom, if I weren’t so fond of Bufo bufo, I’d describe as a toad of the first water. He bullies his wife and all but cuts her out of his will (which I don’t think possible under either English or American law, but we’ve seen before that Blake has zero interest in legal issues).

   He also sexually harasses young women, requires his laborers to work inhuman schedules, makes life hell for his socially conscious younger brother, blackmails into silence the local doctor who has documented the brewery’s unsafe working conditions. He even beats his fox terrier! It’s because of this dog, who was found two weeks earlier in one of the brewery’s pressure vats, literally boiled to death, that the Big Daddy character prevails on Nigel to stay in Maiden Astbury for a while and investigate the animal’s murder.

   Nigel spends the next day touring the beer factory and interviewing its principals but his detection is interrupted by the discovery inside the same pressure vat of a human skeleton, apparently that of Big Daddy, although Nigel and the local police inspector seem to be familiar with Conan Doyle’s THE VALLEY OF FEAR and the early Ellery Queen novels since they seriously consider the possibility that the boiled corpse is someone else.

   Suspicion spreads among various characters and several highly speculative alternate theories of the crime are articulated. In due course come two more murders and a midnight climax in the eerie brewery that may remind some readers of a 1930s cliffhanger serial, although Blake is careful to keep Nigel from acting like a serial hero.

   With each chapter prefaced by a literary quotation—from Shakespeare and Bacon and Ben Jonson through 19th-century figures like Byron and Coleridge and Dickens to the poet A.E. Housman, who had died in 1936—this is a fine example of the kind of detective novel whose earliest protagonist was Lord Peter Wimsey.

   Blake’s fourth novel was the only book of his that became the basis of a feature-length film by a prestigious director. I’ll discuss both the book and the movie when I return to Blake later this year. His fifth novel was almost made into a movie by another prestigious director—or more precisely by a young man who quickly became one of the most prestigious directors of all time. When I take up Blake again I’ll tell that story too.

DONALD HAMILTON – The Steel Mirror. Rinehart & Co., hardcover, 1948. Dell #473, paperback, mapback edition, 1950; cover by Robert Stanley.  Gold Medal, d1617, paperback.  Film: United Artists, 1957, as Five Steps to Danger.

   So, I know I’m supposed to read Donald Hamilton. And I know this isn’t the one you’re supposed to start with. But it’s one I happen to have in paperback. And we’re on vacation on the beach in North Carolina this week. And reading vintage Gold Medal’s on the beach, sitting on a lawn chair, with an ice cold can of beer, while one’s children run around building sand castles, jumping waves, flying kites and collecting shells, is one of the most truly wonderful experiences in the world.

   And I’ve been meaning to read the guy. So, why not?

   This man Hamilton can really write. And grab you. He’s really good.

   Problem is, I’m not sure if in the end he has anything to say. Which is to say that, to me, it feels like the plot is just scaffolding to hold terrific prose.

   In terms of plot, the book is pretty heavy on the postwar paranoia Russian spy angle. And that’s not really my bag. Though current events may bring this sub genre back into style.

   John Emmett has a month off between jobs. He had a job in DC, but it was a temp job filling in for a returning soldier. He got a new job in Bakersfield and bought a cheap junker to take a slow meander cross country to his new gig.

   Unfortunately it breaks down in Iowa. And the cost to fix it outstrips the value of the car. So he’s resigned to taking the train when an overheated pretty lady in an overheated car stops into the garage. When he finds out she’s heading west one of them picks up the other, it’s not clear which, and they head off in her convertible.

   Turns out she’s recently come out of the loony bin, having PTSD from being held in a Nazi concentration camp as part of the French resistance. She has amnesia about whether or not she ratted out her resistance comrades, leading to their demise.

   She finds out that a former co-prisoner is now a professor in Denver — so she’s headed there to try to fill in the blanks in her memory.

   Unfortunately, Russian spies don’t seem to want her to meet the professor. And will do anything in their power to stop her from reaching her destination.

   The story is pretty enthralling until you finish it. You turn the pages as quickly as you can. And then, by the end, you wonder why you wasted your time.

   I mean it was fun and everything, I guess. But looking back it kinda reminded me of the ending of Neil Simon’s Murder by Death in which the murderer confesses at the end and then takes off mask after mask after mask, where by the end every single character has plausibly confessed.

   It’s not quite as ridiculous as that. But the depth of supposed Russian double agent state infiltration runs so deep it makes McCarthyism seem understated.

   Anywho, like I was saying, this Hamilton guy can really write. And one thing I really came to appreciate from the guy is how he makes setting descriptions a part of the story itself. He doesn’t use metaphor to show what a great poet he is. He uses it to advance the tension and move the story. Which is something too few writers do. Nothing makes me shut a book quicker than a cliched, unnecessary metaphor.

   Let me illustrate just how good Hamilton is at this:

   First take the title itself:

   
   Protagonist confusion:

   
   The girl escapes capture, the protagonist wonders where she’s gone:

   
   Marching at gunpoint:

   
   Racing thru the mountains, tailed by villains:

   
   As the protagonist figures out a major clue in the mystery:

   
   The relationship between boy and girl starts to unravel: