DONALD E. WESTLAKE – Nobody’s Perfect. Dortmunder #4. M. Evans & Co., hardcover, 1977. Detective Book Club, hardcover reprint, 3-in-1 edition. Fawcett Crest, paperback, 1979. Mysterious Press, paperback, 1989.

   I was talking about funny detective fiction a little while back. Standing and looking on from the sidelines, it’s obvious that it’s much easier to write a funny mystery story when you don’t have to work some detective work in to go along with it. Funny crime stories are a lot more common.

   Donald Westlake, while he doesn’t have a patent on it, does have a particular genius for this sort of thing. The caper story, that is. He’s written a number of them, and many of them have starred, if that’s the right word, a small-time thief, a crook named Dortmunder. Even his name is funny, but what makes the crimes he and his gang commit so funny is not that they’re so badly planned, for they’re not, but that all of a sudden, beyond a certain point, everything unavoidably goes wrong.

   In this book Dortmunder is hired to steal a painting. He’s hired by its owner, who can use the insurance money, but who is naturally reluctant to part with the painting itself. He’d also rather the insurance company didn’t get too suspicious.

   Somehow, however, the painting ends up in Scotland, of all places, and to save his very hide, Dortmunder has to commission a forgery, And steal that. Which doesn’t work out either.

   Now, all of this may sound as though it would be very easy to write, but a good part of what makes this story funny is Westlake’s way with words, a sardonically understated sort of slapstick, if you will. If Hollywood were to get their hands on it, or from the typewriter of a lesser mortal, you can bet it would end up just· being silly.

   Westlake also has a well-developed knack for describing a world and its inhabitants where the life of casual, amoral crime is nothing but another plane of existence. It’s almost funny, for example, to discover how easy it is to steal a typewriter just whenever you need one, but not quite, considering who always ends up paying for such petty pilferage. Sure. You and me. You better believe it.

Rating: B

REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

SILVER LODE. RKO, 1954. John Payne, Lizabeth Scot, Dan Duryea, Morris Ankrum, Harry Carey Jr. Robert Warrick, Dolores Moran, Emile Meyer, and Frank Sully. Written by Karen DeWolf. Directed by Alan Dwan. Available on DVD, YouTube and Amazon Prime Video.

   Probably the most explicit anti-McCarthy film of its time, and a pretty good “Town” Western besides.

   “Town Westerns” of course are those that largely forsake the wide-open spaces associated with the genre, and focus the action in and around a small community. They can get a bit static and talky, but there are some fine ones: FACE OF A FUGITIVE, DECISION AT SUNDOWN, BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK, RIO BRAVO…. Feel free to add your favorites in the list, but try to include SILVER LODE.

   The film opens with a quartet of Owlhoots riding into town, led by a stubble-faced Dan Duryea as a character named McCarty — could it get more obvious? Turns out that a well-loved local man (John Payne) is about to Marry Lizabeth Scott when Duryea/McCarty disrupts the ceremony. He has papers identifying hm as a US Marshal, a warrant to arrest Payne for murder, and a glint in his eye that says Payne will never make it to trial.

   What follows will be familiar to anyone who has seen HIGH NOON or its imitations: Payne’s friends rally to his side, then drop away one by one as suspicion mounts against him. To be fair to them, at one point he’s found standing over the murdered Sheriff (Emile Meyer) with a smoking gun, but director Alan Dwan keeps the talky parts commendably brief and un-preachy.

   Thus, SILVER LODE emerges as a well-crafted cat-and-mouse game, Payne trying to find some lever against Duryea, and Duryea chipping away at his reputation with innuendos and half-truths—character assassination in aid of physical murder.

   Karen DeWolf, a prolific writer of B Movies, makes it seem fresh by keeping the characters on the move, seldom seen on the same set twice, and never for very long. She also makes a fine job of giving Lizabeth Scott and Dolores Moran (as a tarty Saloon Gal) roles that are more than decorative. Without giving anything away, I’ll just say that they manage to shape the story without breaking character. Indeed, DeWolf uses their positions in the social strata of the town so well I began to wonder if this was a Chick-Western.

   No fear of that though. Dwan keeps up the pace and tension as few could, culminating in a bell tower chase-and shoot-out that caps the action perfectly. Where some Town Westerns tend to get verbose and self-important, SILVER LODE delivers its anti-McCarthy message with style and a disarming lack of pretension.

   I also want to put in a word here about Frank Sully. A busy character actor in films as diverse as THE GRAPES OF WRATH and THE BOOGIE MAN WILL GET YOU, he specialized in dumb cops, dumb hoods, dumb cowboys and the occasional yokel, and he always gave it his all. SILVER LODE features Sully as a rattled telegrapher, and he manages to inject his own sense of humor quite effectively into a scene played for tension.

ROBERT B. PARKER – Night and Day. Jesse Stone #8. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 2009. Berkley, paperback reprint; 1st printing, February 2010.

   I’ve read about a third of Parker’s Spenser books, one of his with female PI Sunny Randall, but this is my first encounter with Jesse Stone, long time police chief of a small town called Paradise, somewhere not too far out from Boston. This one’s number eight of nine of Stone’s adventures Parker write before his death in 2010, although other hands have since taken over, with ten more having since appeared (more than Parker himself wrote!).

   The emphasis in Night and Day is that of sexual adventure, or misadventure to be more accurate, starting with a high school principal who is caught checking her female students’ (eighth graders) underwear before a school dance. It also seems that the women in Paradise are being stalked by a peeping tom before he escalates his nightly rounds to daytime home invasions in which he forces the women to strip while he takes their photos.

   And as they say, wait, wait, there’s more. A young girl comes in to complain that her parents are members of a very active group of swingers. All of this comes at the same time that Jesse’s ex-wife, with whom he still has close relations, leaves for a job in New York City with what we might call a very close mentor.

   The book is filled with many many pages of Parker’s trademarked witty dialogue, but I have to tell you I was expecting more. The paragraph above is all there is. It is tough to recommend a book, one purporting to be a mystery novel, when the stakes are as small as this, so guess what. I won’t.

DEATH IN PARADISE “Beyond the Shining Sea: Parts One and Two.” BBC, UK. 07 & 14 February 2019. (Season 8, Episodes 5 & 6). Ardal O’Hanlon, Joséphine Jobert, Tobi Bakare, Shyko Amos, with Leemore Marrett Jr., Zackary Momoh, Nicôle Lecky, Indra Ové. Screenwriters: Sally Abbott (Part One), Roger Enstone (Part Two). Director: Jermain Julien.

   As you may recall, I unwittingly started watching this series with season eight, and I’ve continued on with it. There are now but two more to so, and then I will go back and do things properly and start way back at the beginning, with season one.

   I have, however, enjoyed all of them I have seen, and ranking them, after the first one of the season, these two come in a close second and third. It certainly helped that both episodes are based on the solution of “impossible crimes,” if not the small subset of that particular genre called “locked room mysteries.” In the first episode a young woman, a festival queen, is found stabbed to death after setting off in a small boat and around a headland then coming to shore where the villagers are eagerly waiting for her. Somewhere in that three minutes of time, while she was out of sight, she was murdered.

   There were no other boats in the area, and any swimmers or divers would have left wet footprints in the boat, and there are none. The solution is quite clever and is worked out perfectly, but after the killer is caught and confesses, there is more to the story. One prominent player is murdered and another seriously injured.

   The assailant can only be one of three people living on a rich man’s getaway island, but there is no boat on the island and there was no time for any of them to swim to shore, where the shootings took place, and return. The solution is a bit more contrived this time around, but it’s still quite adequately accomplished.

   It is only at the end of story that the viewer (me) realizes that what these two episodes were really designed to do was to pave the way for one of the players to make a dramatic exit from the series. This caught me by surprise. Personnel changes in a series as dramatic as this one don’t usually happen with two more episodes to go.

REVIEWED BY RAY O’LEARY:

C. DALY KING – Obelists Fly High. [Lt. Michael Lord & Dr. L. Rees Pons #3. Harrison Smith & Robert Haas, US, hardcover, 1935. Dover, trade paperback, 1986, 2015. Published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1935.

   A re-read of a book I probably bought when it was first reprinted. In this case, I didn’t remember anything about it, so it was like reading it for the first time.

   Dr. Amos Cutter, a prominent surgeon and brother of the Secretary of State goes to the Police after receiving a letter saying he will be murdered on the following day at noon central time. Cutter is going to Reno, where his sister is getting a divorce and his brother is in the hospital in need of an operation that Cutter is one of the few surgeons who can perform.

   The Commissioner assigns Capt. Michael Lord to protect Cutter as they fly across country with Cutter’s nieces: the beautiful Fonda Mann, who is fond of men and her sister Isa who is a lesbian. (Note that King wasn’t very subtle with his names). Also along is Cutter’s assistant Hood Tinkham. Among the passengers is Lord’s friend, psychologist Dr. L. Rees Pons, who is going to Hollywood to provide psychological background for a script involving two women in love with each other (obviously pre-Code.)

   There’s also author Hugh L. Craven, who is a friend of the girl’s father, a former British spy during the Great War and a believer in the theories of Charles Fort. (ASIDE: Some 30 or so years back I came across a one volume edition of Fort’s books and read it. Some of the stuff is pretty interesting in a Ripley’s-Believe-It-Or-Not sort of way. Other stuff is just damn silly.) Anyway, at noon central time as they’re flying over the mid-west, Cutter dies, and it’s up to Lord to find the killer before the plane reaches Reno.

   Of all the Dover reprints I’ve read this is probably the most poorly written. Characters and dialogue are mediocre at best and there’s an elaborate timetable provided that I couldn’t bother going through. However, King manages to pull off a big surprise midway through the book and then tops that in the final few pages. He also provides at the end a list of clues with the page and the line on that page where they were given so that the reader can go back and verify them.

Editorial Notes: Quoting from Martin Edwards’ blog and a review he wrote of Obelists en Route:

   “‘Obelist’ was a word that King made up. He defined it in Obelists at Sea as ‘a person of little or no value’ and then re-defined it in Obelists en Route as ‘one who harbours suspicion’. Why on earth you would invent a word, use it in your book titles, and then change your mind about what it means?”

   Another online review can be found here at the Invisible Event blog. (He gives it Zero stars.)

      The Obelists series —

Obelists at Sea. Knopf 1933.
Obelists en Route. Collins 1934. No US publication.
Obelists Fly High. H. Smith 1935.
Careless Corpse. Collins 1937. No US publication.
Arrogant Alibi. Appleton 1939

   Lt. Lord makes a solo appearance in Bermuda Burial (Funk, 1941)

NANCY SPRINGER “Milk of Human Blindness.” Mr. Jefferson #1. First published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, September 1996. Probably never reprinted.

   There can’t be a lot of business in Lancaster PA – the heart of Amish country – to keep a private eye in business, so it could very well be that this particular story was not only the first but also the last recorded case for Mr. Jefferson, as his client in this tale calls him. If so, that’s a shame, because as an introduction, it works fine, but it also leaves the reader (me) wanting more.

   Jefferson, by the way, is black, and he has kind of a sour outlook on life, with most of it taken up by doing repo and process serving. His client in this case is a young girl named Sarah, maybe eleven, twelve years old, and having found $200 on the street, she wants Jefferson to find out who her real parents are. Unfortunately when she discovers who lost the money (not drug money, as she thought), she needs the money back.

   And she agrees to go to work for Jefferson, to pay off her bill. And Jefferson, on his part, finds that yes, indeed, he needs the help, being as he is, not nearly as up to date in the new world of computers as he should be. By the story’s end and between the two of them, they have solved her case, and they’re ready for another. I hope there was one, but alas perhaps not.

PostScript: Nancy Springer is far better known as a fantasy writer, with several novels to her credit, but she also has written a long series of young adult mysteries about Enola Holmes, the fourteen-year-old sister of the far better known Sherlock Holmes, some twenty years older. A movie adaption of one the books is said to be currently in production.

REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

BIG JAKE. Batjac/CinemaCenter Films, 1971. John Wayne, Richard Boone, Maureen O’Hara, Patrick Wayne, Christopher Mitchum, Bruce Cabot, Harry Carey Jr, Hank Worden, Glenn Corbett, Jim Davis, and John Agar. Narrated by George Fenneman. Written by Harry & Rita Fink. Directed by George Sherman.

   George Sherman’s final feature film makes an altogether fitting end for a career that stretched back to the Three Mesquiteers: just as silly, just as vigorous and just as much fun.

   That’s not to say Big Jake is a very good movie – it ain’t. The first half is barely tolerable, what with “trendy” borrowings from Butch Cassidy and a story that slows to a grind in order to bring on the Duke and show us how tough he us. Duke’s acting here is painfully self-indulgent, and despite plenty of dramatic potential (an estranged father must work with his two sons to rescue his kidnapped grandchild) the screenplay goes out of its way to avoid anything like emotional conflict.

   But that’s just the first half. Once Duke and his party reach the rendezvous point, where Richard Boone waits with a small army of bad guys, Big Jake turns into a real scrapper. I particularly enjoyed the diminuendo effect of the final set-to, so let me see if I can explain that.

   In Laurel & Hardy Movies, action moves to a crescendo. The boys start out spilling coffee on someone and end up demolishing his car in a series of comic escalations. But Big Jake’s climactic battle opens with phalanxes of warriors, armed with shotguns, machetes, high-powered rifles and a semi-automatic pistol, then grinds them down till by the ending, the combatants are throwing lanterns and popping derringers at each other.

   Add to this that in Richard Boone, John Wayne finds an adversary worthy of him, and you get a movie that is, finally, enjoyable on the level of the old Republic B-Westerns. No more, but certainly no less.

STUART KAMINSKY – Never Cross a Vampire. Toby Peters #5. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1980. Mysterious Press, paperback, 1984, 1995.   ibooks, paperback, 2000.

   As a flight into the past, Stuart Kaminsky’s series of adventures starring Hollywood private eye Toby Peters has come now to be a regularly scheduled event. As in his previous four cases, this affair, which introduces both Bela Legosi and aspiring screenwriter William Faulkner as clients, is fairly dripping with nostalgia. With a capital N.

   The time is January 1942, just as the US was gearing up for its mammoth forthcoming war effort, and every so often we are obliged to sit down and listen to Peters recite his breakfast menu, brand name by brand name, and to read his newspaper along with him, item by item.

   This litany of places, names, and events, while marginally interesting, becomes very much suspect, however, the moment Peters mentions having listened to a program on the popular radio series Suspense. As it so happens, the first program in the series, which lasted until 1962, or some twenty years, was not broadcast until June 17, 1942, or not until six months after the events related here.

   Kaminsky has put more effort than usual into the plot this time, which includes, very briefly, a locked room murder, but sloppy and inaccurate time-tabling – not month and year this time, but the time of day – makes it a little difficult to do more than guess who done it.

Rating: C

   
      The Toby Peters series (with a tip of the topper to his page on the Thrilling Detective website) —

   NOVELS

Bullet for a Star (1977; Errol Flynn).
Murder on the Yellow Brick Road (1977; Judy Garland).
You Bet Your Life (1978; Marx Brothers).
The Howard Hughes Affair (1979; Howard Hughes).
Never Cross a Vampire (1980; Bela Lugosi).
High Midnight (1981; Gary Cooper).
Catch a Falling Clown (1982; Emmett Kelly).
He Done Her Wrong (1983; Mae West).
The Fala Factor (1984; Eleanor Roosevelt).
Down for the Count (1985; Joe Louis).
The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance (1986; John Wayne).
Smart Moves (1986; Albert Einstein, Paul Robeson).
Think Fast, Mr. Peters (1988; Peter Lorre).
Buried Caesars (1989; General MacArthur).
Poor Butterfly (1990; Leopold Stokowski).
The Melting Clock (1991; Salvador Dali).
The Devil Met a Lady (1993; Bette Davis).
Tomorrow Is Another Day (1995; Clark Gable).
Dancing in the Dark (1996; Fred Astaire).
A Fatal Glass of Beer (1997; W.C. Fields).
A Few Minutes Past Midnight (2001; Charlie Chaplin).
To Catch a Spy (2002; Cary Grant)
Mildred Pierced (2003, Joan Crawford)
Now You See It (2004; Harry Blackstone).

   SHORT STORIES

“The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance (1984, The Eyes Have It)
“Busted Blossoms” (1986, Mean Streets)
“Long Odds” (2002, Murder on the Ropes)
“Denbow” (2009, Sex, Lies and Private Eyes)

MADONNA OF THE DESERT. Republic Pictures, 1948. Lynne Roberts, Donald Barry, Don Castle, Sheldon Leonard, Paul Hurst, Roy Barcroft. Screenplay: Albert Demond. Story: Frank Wisbar. Directed by George Blair. Currently available on YouTube.

   This low budget film about crime and faith and retribution is almost the stuff of a good movie. Anyway it would be a good movie with just a touch here and there and a better director, cast, and budget.

   Nick Julian (Sheldon Leonard) is a slick dealer in dubious art who cheats and if necessary, steals the art he needs. He’s recently discovered that Joe Salinas (Don Castle) a New Mexico rancher owns a fabulous Madonna statue believed to be a product of the Renaissance brought here by his Conquistador ancestors.

   Nick wants the statue and will get it anyway he can, and after a trip to New Mexico ends in a failure to buy the statue cheap he decides to steal it, but not by main force. Instead he has his forger make an expensive copy and will have tough but slick Monica Dale (Lynne Roberts) work her way into the arms of veteran Salinas and switch the statues.

   If you think you know where this is going, you have obviously seen this plot unreel a few hundred times in books, films, and television episodes.

   Monica arrives and goes to work, while Nick and his hired thug Buck (Roy Barcroft) wait nearby in a cabin. When she tries to make the switch at a wedding where Joe has loaned the statue out, the altar bursts into flame and Monica’s dress catches fire. But the Madonna does not burn and miraculously Monica is not burned.

   About this time, Tony French (Donald Barry) shows up, a bitter con just out of prison who has found out about Nick’s plans. His appearance complicates things for Monica who is suffering doubts and a major change of heart and falling for Joe despite his foreman Pete (Paul Hurst) being suspicious.

   You can figure out from here than Nick and Tony will cancel each other out, and there will be a happy ending after a little gunplay. Joe even turns out to be less of a sap than you think.

   This is just barely a medium time passer so long as you aren’t actually paying to see it. Leonard and Barry could do this in their sleep, and don’t, but it’s a near thing. Roberts isn’t quite up to the lead here, or is betrayed by the direction and having no one better than Don Castle to play off of in her best scenes. In any case she falls flat both as a bad girl and a reformed bad girl, and has little to work with anyway.

   Castle is a nice looking guy, but he delivers his lines like he was in a high school play. That’s enough to kill the big emotional scenes where he talks about the Madonna saving him after he was crippled and in a wheelchair when he came back from the war. I’ve heard car insurance pitches delivered with more emotional impact. Roberts tries hard but must have been fighting a yawn the whole time.

   This kind of story requires more than just a flat presentation. Add some moody photography, a couple of leads with a modicum of charisma, and a push here and there to the corn, and it would work. This one is too cheap to even manage an inspirational musical score. There’s not even a closeup of the Madonna using effective lighting, just as well as it looks like a plastic replica from a Vatican souvenir shop.

   I’ve seen episodes of half hour syndicated television series from the Fifties filmed more imaginatively.

   It’s almost a good enough plot to work, almost a decent little movie. Unfortunately pros like Leonard, Barry, and Hurst can’t save it from Castle’s bland hero or Roberts miscast bad girl, and even a charismatic pair of leads would have trouble with this direction and unimaginative production.

   I will give it this, though. Barry puts some real energy into his scenes, and if the movie had concentrated on his character it might have been a solid little B crime drama. It doesn’t, and it isn’t, and nothing relieves the flat-footed production.

BLACK TIE AFFAIR. 29 May 1993. NBC, 30m. Bradley Whitford (PI Dave Brodsky), Kate Capshaw, John Calvin, Bruce McGill, Alison Elliott. Written & directed by Jay Tarses.

   Somebody thought the idea behind this show was a good one, at least at the beginning. A comedy spoof of a PI show? They must have thought laughs galore. And so not only did it make it onto the air, but it lasted all of five episodes before they decided that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all.

   Thirteen were on the schedule, with the story to be played out over the run. I’ve just watched the first one on YouTube, and as long as it stays there, you can, too. In it PI Dave Brodsky is hired to follow a husband whom his wife – and his client – thinks he is having an affair with another woman, and she wants him followed. Disguised as a bellhop at a convention in which the husband is to be given a Man of the Year award, Brodsky finds a woman dead in the room in which the liaison is to take place – but the dead woman, surprisingly enough, apparently is not the woman he planned to liaison with.

   End of installment one. Besides the fact that it is barely in focus, you don’t need to watch the embedded video if you don’t want to. There are some amusing lines, but everything is so overplayed, it’s not funny. Not even a laugh track would have helped. What’s most surprising is that it lasted five weeks.

PostScript: Every reference to the show I’ve found online (not many) is eager to point out that the working title for the series while it was in production was Smoldering Lust. Ha! False advertising there.