HENRY KANE – Trinity in Violence. Avon 618, paperback original, 1955; reprinted as Avon T-264. Signet G2551, pb, October 1964.
Here we have three novelettes featuring Henry Kane’s long-running New York detective Peter Chambers. The Chambers stories tend to be pretty routine private-eye capers, but Kane’s handling of this stock material is quite unusual. The characters deliver their lines in a peculiarly arch fashion, which veteran PI fans are equally likely to find either refreshingly novel or plain silly.
Also, in the midst of typical guns-and-gangsters melees, Chambers is wont to toss off sly asides to the readers, saying, in effect, “How about this for a typical private-eye cliche?” The Chambers books can provide enjoyable light entertainment if the reader finds Kane’s quirky, playful approach palatable.
Best of these tales is “Skip a Beat,” with one of those once-popular story ideas you don’t see anymore: A famous newspaper columnist is about to announce that a leading citizen is actually a closet Commie, but he gets knocked off before he can spill it; Chambers cleans it up.
Slapdash plotting comes to the fore in “Slaughter on Sunday,” in which a prominent hood hires Chambers to extricate him from a murder frame; it involves a sort of locked-room problem (a transparent one, at best), a gimmick for faking paraffin-test results, and several gaping plot holes.
“Far Cry” finds Kane’s durable “private richard” romancing a hood’s mistress and breaking up a hot-car exporting racket.
Some of the better Chambers novels include A Halo for Nobody (1947); Until You Are Dead (1951); Too French and Too Deadly (1955; another locked room opus, better than the one above, but no challenge to John Dickson Carr) and Death of a Flack (1961).
Chambers’ female counterpart, Marla Trent, appears in Private Eyeful (1960),and the two collaborate in Kisses of Death (1962). Avoid at all costs the dreadful X-rated Peter Chambers novels published by Lancer in the early 1970s!
HENRY KANE – The Midnight Man. The Macmillan Co. (A Cock Robin Mystery), hardcover, 1965. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, September 1966. Paperback reprint: Raven House #9, 1981.
Henry Kane is best known as the creator of Peter Chambers, a tough but urbane New York “private richard” whose adventures were quite popular in the late Forties and throughout the Fifties.
(Some of the early Chambers short stories appeared in the sophisticated men’s magazine Esquire, which once devoted an editorial to Kane, calling him an “author, bon vivant, stoic, student, tramp, lawyer, philosopher … the lad who works off a hangover conceived in a Hoboken dive by swooshing down large orders of Eggs Benedict at the Waldorf on the morning after … the man who can use polysyllables on Third Avenue and certain ancient monosyllables on Park Avenue.”)
Kane wrote dozens of novels and scores of stories featuring the exploits of Peter Chambers; and yet, ironically enough, his most memorable private eye is not Chambers but a 250-pound ex-cop named McGregor. In fact, his three best mystery novels are those in which McGregor is featured — The Midnight Man, Conceal and Disguise (1966), and Laughter in the Alehouse (1968).
Like Chambers, McGregor is urbane, literate, and a connoisseur of beautiful women, gourmet food, and vintage booze. Unlike Chambers, he is prone to pithy literary quotes instead of suave wisecracks, and prefers to use wits and guile in place of guns and fists to solve his cases.
He is not a career PI with an office and a secretary; he is a newly retired New York City police inspector, “pushing fifty, ramrod-straight and robustly handsome,” known around headquarters as “the Old Man,” who dabbles at private investigation (he has a license, of course) just to keep a hand in.
He is more likable than Chambers, has more depth and sensitivity, and his three cases are less frivolous and more tightly plotted than any of the Chambers stories.
In The Midnight Man, McGregor has undertaken the job of closing down an illegal after-hours enterprise at a fashionable Upper East Side nightclub. The case begins as a simple one — the club’s neighbors don’t like the idea of drunks carousing in the wee hours — but it soon turns complicated: The after-hours operation is being run by a major New York mob figure named Frank Dinelli, whom McGregor would love to put in the slammer.
When the late-night doorman, whom McGregor has bribed and who was instrumental in a successful raid on the club, is shot to death practically in McGregor’s presence (he arrives just in time to grapple with the killer), the case becomes personal.
Working with his pal, Detective Lieutenant Kevin Cohen, he follows leads that take him to the studio of millionaire photographer George Preston, to the offices of Park Avenue dermatologist Robert Jackson, and to a fancy loan-sharking operation that Dinelli is sponsoring.
They also take him to a second murder, this one featuring an ingenious method of execution, which McGregor solves through the same combination of deduction and guile with which he wraps up the rest of the case.
Kane has a fine ear for dialogue; there is some witty repartee here, especially between McGregor and a variety of New York cabdrivers. Of course, cops don’t really talk the way McGregor and Cohen do, but that’s a minor flaw.
As the jacket blurb says, “If high crime in high society is your cup of tea, you’ll especially relish this fast, crisp, upper-echelon saga of mayhem in Manhattan.” And from Anthony Boucher: “Kane has, as usual, a pretty sense of story-shape and a nice way with clues. There is a cleverly gimmicked murder, a lot of colorful night life, and much fun (and good food) for all.”
HENRY KANE – A Corpse for Christmas. Dell #735, reprint paperback, no date given [1953]. Originally published in hardcover by J. B. Lippincott, 1951.
Also reprinted in paperback as Deadly Doll, Zenith ZB-19, 1959; and as Homicide at Yuletide, Signet D2877, 1966; and under its original title by Lancer in 1971.
Seasons greetings! Private richard Peter Chambers gets mixed up with a dead man with a red beard and a false identity, a gorgeous lady PI, several more luscious women (some with husbands, some with not, it doesn’t seem to matter), a mobster, and a box of missing jools.
The story is told with lots of short, snappy dialogue, sometimes a page or so at time, which is neat, but sometimes it is so short and snappy that it can also give you a headache if you’re not careful.
Also [WARNING: Plot Alert] beware of the gimmick of the clocks that are stopped at the scene of the murder. Maybe it wasn’t old hat at the time, but I think it was.
COMMENT: Here’s a prime example of a PI novel that you can enjoy while at the same time realizing what kind of lowbrow, generic entertainment it really is. Kane should be commended for writing a completely adequate Fair Play Detective Story, however, with lots of clues for the reader to pick up on. And even though I knew the killer’s identity some time before Peter Chambers did, I was surprised to learn I hadn’t spotted them all!
— Reprinted from Mystery*File #35, November 1993,
slightly revised.
[UPDATE] 06-12-10. For some reason I seem to sound embarrassed to have been caught reading a low level paperback for its entertainment value only.
If that was the case, and it certainly sounds as though I was, then I apologize and shame on me!
I am glad to see, however, that I pointed out Kane’s ability to write a Fair Play puzzle story at the same time as he was doing a lowly PI novel, at least in his early days of his career.
One of his best efforts in this regard was Too French and Too Deadly, an Avon paperback from 1955 and a Peter Chambers novel that was reprinted in its entirety in Hans Stefan Santesson’s The Locked Room Reader (Random House, 1968).
Bill Crider, by the way, likes this book, too. You can read his review of it over on his blog.
To be posted here shortly, reviews of Trinity in Violence (Avon, 1955) and The Midnight Man (Macmillan, 1965), the former with Peter Chambers, and the latter one of Kane’s trio of McGregor novels.
Signet S1835; paperback reprint, August 1960 (Barye Phillips cover). Hardcover edition: Simon & Schuster, 1951. UK editions: T. V. Boardman, hc, 1952; ppbk, 1953. Earlier US paperback edition: Dell 580, 1952, mapback (Victor Kalin cover).
In order of publication, Until You Are Dead was either the sixth or seventh of Henry Kane’s series of detective tales featuring a suave Manhattan private eye named Peter Chambers. (The reason I’m not more definitive on this is that there were two of Chambers’ adventures in 1951. With nothing else to go on, I’m going to suggest that this one is #6, since it was came out from Simon & Schuster, who published the first five, and A Corpse for Christmas appeared from Lippincott, suggesting a change in publisher. The Christmas aspect of the latter also suggests that it was published later in the year, once again making Until You Are Dead the earlier one.)
Such is life in the fast armchair-detective lane.
Also of note is that Kane’s first three short stores, one of which, “Kudos for the Kid” (May 1947) may have been the overall first appearance of Peter Chambers, were published in Esquire, which was a prestigious magazine to be in at the time.
After 1951, though, all of Kane’s novel length fiction in the US, most but not all adventures of Peter Chambers, came out as paperback originals, first from Avon, then Dell and many of the others including Signet, before both Kane and Chambers ended up in a series of X-rated books from Lancer in 1970.
Oops. I see I erred in one thing I just said. There was a series of novels about Inspector MacGregor that appeared in hardcover from Macmillan between 1965 and 1968. These all took place in New York City, but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen any of them. (I no longer remember all of the books I’ve seen.)
It’s not clear how sharp an operator Chambers is, and how close to the legal edges he usually runs, but he seems to know his way around and to know a lot of people who come close to running the town. Really running the town, that is. But either way, he draws the line at aiding and abetting a jazz musician turned blackmailer — the guy had seen a killing in a night spot men’s room, a guy high in the rackets who tossed Kermit Teshle (that’s his name) a hundred dollar bill and left.
Teshle wants more. Chambers says no. Enter Ivy Teshle, his sister, a girl who dances for a living while trying to make it to Broadway. (See either of the two covers shown.) She meets him in his office, worried about her brother, on page 15, and on page 17 she is kissing him. Chambers says yes.
It is that kind of book, and Chambers is that kind of private eye, and Henry Kane is that kind of writer.
Kermit ends up dead, and Chambers is in it up to his neck.
As a writing stylist, Henry Kane is pretty good. Not in Raymond Chandler’s league, but he can rattle off the dialogue when he wants to, which is often, and he can go into philosophical matters with equal ease. Once in a while these discussions become what in the vernacular might be called full-fledged rants, or here in New England, “wig-outs.” Example, pages 85 and 86:
I went to the cabinet and broke out a new bottle of Scotch (here he goes again). I peeled the cellophane off the top and clipped off the cork. I poured into a shot glass and swallowed it. I poured again and put the bottle away. I held up the glass and looked at amber glistening in the sunlight and mused. People say I drink too much. The hell with them. People say that nobody can drink that much. The hell with them, I know people who drink more. People say I’ll have no liver left when I’m old. The hell with then, who wants a liver when you’re old? Literary critics rant. The … (excuse me). Let them rant (between drinks). I like to drink. So far, it agrees with me. When it stops agreeing with me, I’ll listen to the literary critics, as I sorrow under the burden of cirrhosis. There are all kinds of people. It makes for an interesting world. There are people who smoke three packs of cigarettes before they really get going for the evening in the night clubs. There are prime ministers who smoke eighteen fat cigars a day. There are people who buy pornographic books which they read every day but Sunday. There people who push against people on subways. There are people who play footsie with strangers at movies. There are people who drink four ice cream sodas at a smack. There are secret eaters of constant pickles. There are people who go for smoked tongue with mustard by the heap. There are people who slush through a pound of cream candies during one chapter of a thick book with significance. There are pistachio nut eaters. There are marijuana smokers. There are opium addicts. There are movie goers (including matinees). There are people devote celibate lives to devising instruments of mass destruction. There are soda-pop drinkers. There are frankfurter nuts. There are sun-bathers, vegetable eaters, vitamin girls, hormone boys, sidewalk psychiatrists, neon hunters, nylon oglers, stamp collectors, headline readers, glass crunchers, five-mile hikers, deep breathers, left-handed pitchers, sweepstake winners, golf players, winter swimmers, and guys that make parachute jumps at the age of a hundred and nine. There are even philosophical detectives.
Me. I like to drink (among other things). So what?
Whew. He caught me there, but only twice, thank goodness. (How about you?)
With a passage like that to recommend this book, I wish the mystery had an ending to match. It’s OK, don’t get me wrong. It just isn’t up to the one I’d been waiting for. (I don’t think it could have.)
â— HENRY KANE. My Darlin’ Evangeline. Dell First Edition B198, paperback original; 1st printing, 1961. Revised and reprinted as The Perfect Crime (Belmont, paperback, 1967). TV Adaptation: As “An Out for Oscar,” The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, 05 Apr 1963 (screenplay by David Goodis).
â— HENRY KANE. Death on the Double. PI Peter Chambers #13. Avon #761, paperback original; 1st printing, 1957. Signet D2644, paperback, 1965.
A week or so ago I looked through my vast, well-organized (HAH!) bookshelves and noticed some books about which I could remember nothing. Intrigued, I pulled a few out and….
Henry Kane is best-remembered for his character Pete Chambers, Private Eye (Or Private Richard, as Chambers put it.) but My Darlin’ Evangeline is a stand-alone about meek bank clerk Oscar Blimmey, who meets and falls in love with a globe-trotting town tramp, Evangeline Ashley. They meet in Miami, where Kane also rings in Bill Grant, a small-time heel who dreams of becoming a big-time cad. When Evangeline and Bill run afoul of a local drug lord, he takes a powder, and she quits the scene by marrying the closest available chump — Oscar Blimmy.
That’s just the beginning of Oscar’s woes though, because he happens to be in charge of the cash handed out on Thursdays to several large payroll accounts; this was the early 60s, remember, when lots of cash money changed hands, banks were built like marble tombs, and bank tellers were trained to use firearms. So when Evangeline re-connects with Bill, and they….
Write the rest yourself. Any decent writer could, and many did it pretty well, but Kane stumbles in his portrait of the central character. Besides being a perfect schlemiel, Oscar is also built like an Adonis but shy with women, proficient with guns and fists, but a confirmed pacifist and a devout coward. The contradictions in character are just too many and too convenient to the story to make it at all convincing.
Death on the Doubleconsists of two novelettes featuring Peter Chambers. The writing in the first, “Watch the Jools,” is agreeably glib, but the plot is something Keeler would have rejected as overly fanciful. Something about a rare gem with a curse on it, a man found drowned in his locked (and quite dry) private office, a costume party where everyone must dress in the costume dictated by an eccentric millionaire, and… well by the time Kane rang in the sword-swallowing Master Criminal, I was ready to call it quits. “Beautiful Day,” the second half of Death on the Doubleawaited, but I had a Fredric Brown next on the pile….
— Note: Updated to include information about the TV adaptation of My Darlin’ Evangeline. (See comment #3.)
A LOVELY WAY TO DIE. Universal Pictures, 1968. Kirk Douglas, Sylvia Koscina, Eli Wallach, Kenneth Haigh, Sharon Farrell, Ralph Waite. Screenplay by A. J. Russell. Directed by David Lowell Rich. Currently available on YouTube.
I confess I like this slightly smarmy, somewhat generic private eye tale more than it has any right to be liked.
I hadn’t seen it since the mid-eighties, and then on television with commercials, so it was a pleasant surprise to find it on YouTube and discover it was pretty much the film I remembered, with all the caveats above including a few new ones about how quickly it veers from near comedy to melodrama like a leaf in the wind.
Kirk Douglas is Jameson “Skye†Schuyler, a New York City cop who as the film opens resigns from the force after busting one too many heads. Schuyler is that staple of the movies, the tough cop whose methods are too direct for his own good.
He’s no Dirty Harry or Popeye Doyle. He’s about as generic tough guy cop fed up with bureaucracy as you can imagine. That’s okay because it only takes up about three minutes of plot time anyway.
He’s also a womanizer and a bit of a rat as the opening scene demonstrates, but this isn’t film noir by any stretch. His playboy lifestyle is played strictly for comedy up to the point he spots some made men in a bar and busts heads.
To be honest I don’t think anyone involved with this other than Douglas or Wallach would know film noir if it bit them.
No sooner is Douglas out of a job than he gets a call from Tennessee Fredericks (Eli Wallach), a smooth talking Southern Fried criminal defense lawyer who never lost a case and isn’t planning on doing so with his latest client, Rena Westabrook (Sylvia Koscina), whose husband took a bullet in their pool after they argued while she was out on the town with playboy Jonathan Fleming (Kenneth Haigh).
Now Rena and Fleming are about to go on trial for murder and Fredericks wants Schuyler to baby sit her on her estate, keep Fleming away, and do a little private investigating into anything Fredericks can use, including the only witness he has, local tree trimmer Sean Maguire (Ralph Waite) who saw the couple outside a local bar when the murder happened.
It’s pleasant work, pleasant wages, and pleasant scenery in the person of Rena and her maid (Sharon Farrell) who liked to wear her clothes and flirt with her husband. Farrell has nothing to do, but she fills out a maid’s uniform nicely.
Rena is a bit of a kook, honest to a fault that she married her husband for his money and didn’t love him or even like him. Her nickname is Gypsy, and it fit her even if her in-laws meant it as an insult. She wears it as a badge of honor.
And Fredericks is too slick by half: “Would you trust someone who hadn’t been south of Mason-Dixon since he was eight and talks with that accent?†Schuyler asks him.
Things start going wrong almost as soon as Schuyler moves in. It’s hard to keep Fleming away and Rena doesn’t cooperate much. Then Maguire disappears, their only collaborating witness, and there is something going on at the neighboring mansion of a reclusive Englishman that has men with guns hanging around and a body in a freezer.
Still, even with all that going on Schuyler and Rena start to flirt and play at the edges of things.
Rena: You’re really a terrible man, did you know that?
Schuyler: You’ve got some admirable qualities yourself.
You know they are going to end up horizontal, and true to the somewhat bi polar nature of the film there is a funny morning after scene when Schuyler does the walk of shame back to his room barefoot past the staff.
As the trial goes on there is an attempt to kill Schuyler, then a body shows up and the police want to question him, but slowly he starts to put the pieces together, and finds a tie other than Rena and Fleming between her husband and the tree trimmer. Meanwhile Rena is lying about Fleming and sneaking out to see him. Did she murder her husband after all?
The film is pretty to look at. New York seldom looked prettier outside of one of those glamorous Doris Day pictures from a decade before, though the sets are pretty generic. Douglas seems to be having fun in a much lighter mode than usual, and Koscina in a series of bikinis, sleek outfits, and negligees is more than worth looking at in widescreen technicolor as well as good on screen.
She seldom got to act in American films, but she was certainly worth watching.
Basically this is the film equivalent of a Frank Kane Johnny Liddell book or a lesser Peter Chambers novel by Henry Kane. There’s nothing special, but the mystery isn’t bad, there’s some action, only one really big slap up the head moment I won’t give away, pretty girls in various states of undress, and big name stars like Douglas and Wallach having fun without phoning it in.
In the years since I first saw this in the theater it still holds up for me. I will not be shocked if it doesn’t for you. It’s not any kind of a classic, not special in any way, not overly witty, or exceptionally well directed or photographed (some of it looks like it was made for television as too many films of that era do).
I just happen to like it, smarmy as it may be. It does its job for its running time, doesn’t embarrass itself, and says goodnight politely without leaving a bad taste, but I admit freely I might not like it half as well if I had first seen it at thirty and not eighteen.
You might want to keep that last thought in mind if you seek it out.
(Give Me That) OLD-TIME DETECTION. Autumn 2020/Winter 2021. Issue #55. Editor: Arthur Vidro. Old-Time Detection Special Interest Group of American Mensa, Ltd. 36 pages (including covers). Cover image: The Radfords’ Who Killed Dick Whittington?
As is his usual wont, in this latest edition of Old-Time Detection Arthur Vidro has once again delivered a valuable compendium of information about classic detective fiction, resurrecting long-forgotten pieces as well as showcasing up-to-date commentary about the genre.
When, in 1951, Howard Haycraft and Ellery Queen (the editor) got together to compile a list of what they considered to be a “Definitive Library of Detective-Crime-Mystery Fiction,” they probably had no idea that their compilation (commonly called the “Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones”) would still be worth consulting seventy years later. One of their choices for the list is Clayton Rawson’s locked room classic Death from a Top Hat (1938), which receives Les Blatt’s scrutiny. Another “cornerstone” is Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden (1928), which Michael Dirda, in contrast to the usual consensus opinion, does not regard as “the first modern espionage novel.”
Two now largely forgotten detective fiction novelists worth spotlighting are the married writing team of E. and M. A. Radford; they receive their due attention in Nigel Moss’s essay, which sadly notes that despite a long writing career “the U.S. market eluded them.” Moss also highlights the play, that rare theatrical bird, an honest-to-goodness whodunnit, derived from the Radfords’ sixth novel, Who Killed Dick Whittington? (1947).
While he was still living, impossible crime expert Edward D. Hoch turned his attention to Agatha Christie’s short fiction and found most of it praiseworthy: “If the short stories often are not the equal of the best of her novels, they still sparkle on occasion with her vitality and ingenuity, reminding us anew of the pleasure of a well-crafted tale.”
Dr. John Curran, the world’s foremost expert on all things Christie, has nice things to say about Mark Aldridge’s Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World, in his opinion a “must-have book for the shelves of all fans of the little Belgian and his gifted creator.” Curran also includes little-known facts about Agatha, only a few of which yours truly was aware.
Continuing with the Christie theme is a talk by Leslie Budewitz aptly entitled “The Continued Influence of Agatha Christie”; “she was,” says Budewitz, “first and foremost a tremendous storyteller.”
Then come a couple of apposite reviews, both by Jay Strafford: Sophie Hannah’s The Killings at Kingfisher Hill (2020), starring Hercule Poirot; and Andrew Wilson’s I Saw Him Die (2020), the fourth in a series of novels making the most of that Queenian fictional trope of featuring a detective fiction writer as, well, an amateur detective.
The center piece of this issue of OTD, both figuratively and literally, is Stuart Palmer’s entertaining story “Fingerprints Don’t Lie” (1947), in which Hildegarde Withers, sans Inspector Piper, solves a knotty murder in Las Vegas.
Continuing with Charles Shibuk’s series of paperback reprints from the ’70s (at the time a noteworthy and welcome trend for classic mystery buffs), he highlights works by Nicholas Blake (Mystery*File here), Charity Blackstock (Mystery*File here), John Dickson Carr (of course!; Mystery*File here ), Agatha Christie (also of course!; Mystery*File here), Raymond Chandler (ditto; Mystery*File here), Henry Kane (Mystery*File here), Patricia Moyes (Mystery*File here), Ellery Queen (Mystery*File here), Dorothy L. Sayers (Mystery*File here), Julian Symons (Mystery*File here), Josephine Tey (Mystery*File here), and editor Francis M. Nevins’s (Mystery*File here) nonfictional The Mystery Writer’s Art, “obviously the logical successor to Howard Haycraft’s The Art of the Mystery Story (1946) . . .”
Several pages of contemporary reviews of (mostly) classic mysteries follow: Jon L. Breen about Robert Barnard’s School for Murder (1983/4) and Evan Hunter’s “factional” Lizzie (1984); Harv Tudorri about Ed Hoch’s Challenge the Impossible (2018); Ruth Ordivar about Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Angry Mourner (1951); and two reviews from Arthur Vidro about Barbara D’Amato’s The Hands of Healing Murder(1980) and John Ball’s In the Heat of the Night (1965): “with maturer re-reading, I am dazzled . . .”
The issue wraps up with letters from the readers and a befitting puzzle about Agatha Christie.
All in all, Issue 55 is definitely worth adding to your collection.
If you’d like to subscribe to Old-Time Detection:
Published three times a year: spring, summer, and autumn. – Sample copy: $6.00 in U.S.; $10.00 anywhere else. – One-year U.S.: $18.00 ($15.00 for Mensans). – One-year overseas: $40.00 (or 25 pounds sterling or 30 euros). – Payment: Checks payable to Arthur Vidro, or cash from any nation, or U.S. postage stamps or PayPal. – Mailing address: Arthur Vidro, editor, Old-Time Detection, 2 Ellery Street, Claremont, New Hampshire 03743.
PETER CHEYNEY – This Man Is Dangerous. Lemmy Caution #1. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1936. Coward McCann, US, hardcover, 1938. Reprinted many times. Film: Sonofilm, France, 1954, as Cet Homme Est Dangeureux.
Peter Cheyney (1896-1951) never visited the United States in his life and knew next to nothing about Americans, but in the late 1930s he became an instant success in his native England and in Europe, especially France, a writer or fake-American hard-boiled novels. In This Man Is Dangerous and ten subsequent titles, he chronicled the adventures of rootin’-tootin’-two-gun-shootin’ Lemmy Caution, an indestructible FBI agent who downs liquor by the quart, laughs at bullets flying his way, romances every dame in sight, and blasts away at greasy ethnic-named racketeers and (in thelater novels) Nazi spies.
Americans, of course, saw these ridiculous exercises for what they were, and only the first few were ever published here.
Certainly no one would read Lemmy Cautions for their plots, which are uniform from book to book — all 1hc nasties double-crossing each other over the McGuffin — nor for their characterizations, which are pure comic strip. But mystery fans with a taste for lunacy may be attracted by Cheyney’s self-created idiom. Lemmy narrates his cases in first person and present tense, a wild-and-crazy stylistic smorgasbord concocted from Grade Z western films, the stories of Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon, eyeball-poppers apparently of Cheyney’s own inventor (like “He blew the bczuzu” for “He spilled the beans”), and a steady stream of British spellings and locutions.
Nothing but quotation can convey the Cheyney flavor. From This Man ls Dangerous:
I says good night, and I nods lo the boys. I take my hat from the hall and walk down the stairs to the street. I’m .feeling pretty good because I reckon that muscling in on this racket of Siegella’s is going to be a good thing for me, and maybe if I use my brains and keep my eyes skinned, I can still find some means of double-crossing this wop.
From Don’t Get Me Wrong (1939):
Me — l am prejudiced. I would rather stick around with a bad-tempered tiger than get on the wrong bias of one of these knife-thrown’ palookas. I would rather four-flush a team of wild alligators outa their lunch pail than try an’ tell a Mexican momma that I was tired of her geography an’ did not wish to play any more.
From Your Deal, My Lovely (1941):
Some mug by the name. of Confucius – who was a guy who was supposed to know his vegetables – once issued an edict that any time he saw a sap sittin’ around bein’ impervious to the weather an’ anything else that was goin’, an’ lookin’ like he had been hit in the kisser with a flat-iron, the said sap was suffering from woman trouble.
Lemmy Caution became. so popular on the Continent that Eddie Constantine, an American. actor, portrayed him in a series of French films. These films were so successful that Jean Luc Godard used Constantine as Caution in his New Wave film Alphaville.
Eventually Cheyney launched a second wave of novels, written in a spare ersatz-Hammett style and featuring Slim Callaghan, London’s toughest PI. But for those who love pure absurdity, and appreciate the wild stylistic flights of Robert Leslie Bellem and Henry Kane and Richard S. Prather, a treat of compatible dimensions is in store when they tackle the adventures of Lemmy Caution.
CHRISTMAS AND MAYHEM:
Five Seasonal Mystery Reviews
by David Vineyard.
’Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even the corpse…
Wrapping paper, ribbons, candy canes, and Christmas tree ornaments aren’t the only things that pile up around the holiday season, so do bodies, and almost from the start of the genre, the holiday of peace and love has also produced no few crimes and criminals.
Sherlock Holmes made his debut back in A Study in Scarlet in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887, and crime and murder were popular themes in numerous competing Christmas Annual‘s over the years. Since books had long been a traditional gift at Christmastime, it was no surprise as the genre became more popular publishers often scheduled their bestselling mystery writers books around the holiday season hoping readers would pick up a copy of the new work for themselves and as a gift.
It was an ideal time for the genre in the Golden Age with families and friends gathered in tense stately mansions for a little mulled wine and cyanide, and the holiday often featured in classics of the genre.
Here are just a few examples over the years from classic Golden Age to modern thrillers.
NICHOLAS BLAKE – Thou Shell of Death. Nigel Strangeways #2. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1936. US title: Shell of Death. Harper, hardcover. 1936.
Nigel Strangeways is kept busy in his second outing, where he he encounters his wife Georgina for the second time, with no courting involved, and takes on a complex mystery that depends on a good use of snow and an adventurous finale.
MICHAEL INNES – Appleby’s End. John Appleby #10. Gollancz, UK, hardcover, 1945. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1945.
Appleby’s End is a train station, not the finish of John Appleby, where young Detective Inspector John Appleby of Scotland Yard is deposited and becomes involved in the affairs of the Raven family in one of Innes’s best fantasmagorical outings. There are curses, pulp fiction, seeming lunacy that is eventually explained, actual lunacy no one can explain, Appleby meets and proposes to Judith Raven, the future Mrs. Appleby, while both are naked in a haystack, the wit and chuckles are genuine, the mystery good, and the end result a cross between an Ealing comedy and Agatha Christie.
Granted your taste in eccentricity may get strained, but in his tenth outing Appleby and Innes are in fine fettle for the holiday celebrations. When he wanted to no one wrote a wittier mystery than Innes. The chuckles and chortles here are deep and real.
ELLERY QUEEN – The Finishing Stroke. Ellery Queen #24. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1958.
From 1958, this late entry in the Queen saga is the American equivalent of the Great House mystery and incidentally a late recounting of Ellery’s first case.
Granted it is a bit hard to reconcile this Ellery with the one of The Roman Hat Mystery much less Cat of Many Tails, but there is a rhyming killer whose poesy predicts murder to follow and a case that takes Ellery his entire career to successfully solve.
Not the best of the Queen books, but nowhere near as much of a failure as some critics would have it.
DAVID WALKER – Winter of Madness. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1964. Houghton Mifflin, US, hardcover, 1964.
It’s back to Ealing, with a bit of Monty Python thrown in, as Lord Duncatto hosts a Christmas guest list at his Scottish estates that includes his beautiful and easily charmed wife and daughter, an Oxford educated son of a Mafia don, Russian spies, a mad scientist, an android, and Tyger Clyde, the idiot second best man in the British Secret Service (007 is busy) who spends more time seducing Duncatto’s wife and daughter than actually helping as all comes to a head on Duncatto’s private ski slope with a roaringly funny shoot out.
Walker is best know for his humorous novel Wee Geordie, about a naive Highlander come to London to compete in the Olympics, and Harry Black and the Tiger about the hunt for a man-eater in Post War India, both books made into films.
IAN FLEMING – On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. James Bond #11. Jonathan Cape, UK, hardcover, 1963. New American Library, US, hardcover, 1963. Film: Eon, 1969.
James Bond, 007, celebrates Christmas with a spectacular escape on skis from Ernst Stavro Blofield of SPECTRE’s Alpine HQ Piz Gloria and an encounter with Tracy, the daughter of Marc Ange Draco capo of the Union Corse, and soon to be future Mrs. Bond, foiling a plot to destroy British agriculture, and setting up a New Years Day raid to free Tracy and finally do away with Blofield and SPECTRE — almost.
It’s one of the best of the Bond books, and ended up the only Bond film to introduce a genuine Christmas song (“Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grownâ€).
It isn’t Christmas until James Bond throws a SPECTRE henchman into a snow blower cleaning the train tracks.
These are just a few examples of the genre celebrating Christmas in its own special way. Everyone from Sherlock Holmes to Hercule Poirot to Henry Kane’s Peter Chambers has taken on a holiday mystery. Even the 1953 film of Mickey Spillane’s first Mike Hammer mystery I, The Jury has a Christmas setting, as does the Robert Montgomery Philip Marlowe film of Lady in the Lake.
Maybe it’s because so many of us remember awaking to a special book on Christmas that we associate the genre we love with the holiday, maybe the canny Christmas release schedule of publishers, perhaps Mr. Dickens and his ghost story led us to wonder why there couldn’t be murder for the holidays if there were ghosts. Whatever the reason, the red in the holiday isn’t always from candy canes and Santa’s suit, and most of us are perfectly happy to associate a bit of mayhem with the eggnog and turkey.
Hopefully this Christmas morning will find you unwrapping a happy murder or two under your tree.
COP HATER. United Artists, 1958. Robert Loggia (Detective Steve Carelli), Gerald O’Loughlin, Ellen Parker, Shirley Ballard, Jerry Orbach. Screenwriter: Henry Kane, based on the novel by Ed McBain. Director: William Berke.
In his introduction to the Pocket edition, Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) lays out his case that Cop Hater was the first ever ensemble police procedural, in which the focus is not always on the same detective from book to book, that the detectives involved would even not only come and go, but those who stayed would grow as individuals as time went on.
I have no reason to disagree. There were police procedurals of course before he came along, but none that I know of that follow the pattern he established with the 87th Precinct books. (You can read more about the history of this particular subgenre of crime fiction here.) Nor can you argue against the success of the series. There were 55 in all, the final one being Fiddlers, which came out in 2005, the year Evan Hunter died.
Cop Hater, as well as all of the other books in the series, takes place in the fictional city of Isola, which for all intents and purposes may as well be New Your City. Again in his introduction McBain explains why he decided to go the Isola route: He thought he was taking up too much of time of the various detective he was in touch with trying to be sure his facts were as correct as possible.
This, the first book, takes place in the middle of a heat wave, day after day in the 90s, with air conditioned homes and offices at a premium, including the 87th Precinct’s station house. Compounding the problems of the officers who are headquartered there is that they have a series killer on their hands, someone who hates cops and is taking out that hatred the hard way.
The count is up to three before they get a break in the case as well as in the weather. Most of the work is done by dogged on-the-ground police work, dead ends and false leads included. A great start to an even better series overall. To my mind, anyone who’s a fan of police procedurals can really ought to own as many books in this series as they can.
As drenched in sweat as the book is, the movie is even more so, when we can see the effects of the heat if not feel it ourselves. I think that this a movie that’s actually helped by not having a big budget to spend on expensive sets — the cheaper they are, the more authentic they seem — or even the money to spend on bigger name actors, which as it turns out, wasn’t needed anyway. All the people in this film are dead=on perfect.
The movie follows the book almost exactly as well, except for one added scene in which Carelli (Carella in the book) and his girl friend Teddy (who is deaf) go out on a double date with his partner Maguire (Bush in the book) and his wife. I’m not sure why this was included. I may have misinterpreted the scriptwriter’s intention, but to me it made the ending feel tacked on, rather than coming as a logical conclusion, as it does in the book.
Don’t put a lot of meaning to this. If you enjoy the 87th Precinct books, all I can say is don’t miss this filmed version of the very first one.
