FIRST BOOKS: Somebody's Walking over My Grave - Robert Arthur

I may be cheating calling this a First Book, but it most definitely is this writer's only crime novel written for an adult audience. So it's a qualified First of sorts. And yes, it's the very same Robert Arthur who gave us The Three Investigators and many anthologies attributed to Alfred Hitchcock filled with stories intended for younger readers. I had to visit the tribute website for Arthur to verify this book was written by the same man I knew from that boy sleuth series of books I devoured when I was a pre-teen. There I also learned that it's actually a revised and expanded version of an earlier novella written for Mercury Magazine (more on that later.) 

Somebody's Walking over my Grave (1961), a much better title than the original, is influenced by and descended from the long line of fictional American private eyes.  Max London, our detective protagonist, supplements his income as a private investigator with work as a photographer and journalist.  At the start of the book Max is helping his brother with a story on the death of his brother's girlfriend. Pete London is convinced that she was murdered by a notorious gangster Tony Reiner who will end up having a large role in the case L Max will soon be handed.  The story of Max, Pete and the death of Millicent, Pete's fiancee, serves an extraneous subplot that will ultimately reveal a secret that Max is hiding.

When the novel opens we find Max taking photographs of model Selma Carle lying on the beach completely nude as the ocean waves "curl up to lick daintily at her naked body." Her risque poses are meant to duplicate the sad death of Millicent who drowned when she supposedly fell off Tony Reiner's yacht.  Max and Pete think she was thrown over.  Selma seems like an extraneous character, too, but she'll turn up later in the story in a surprising link to the multiple crimes that are committed throughout.  She's the character who utters the line which gives the book its title when she feels an unnatural chill on the sunny beach where Max is photographing her.  She mentions the superstition of somebody walking over your grave when you get a chill as something her mother used to tell her.  It's a not only an apt title it's an eerie foreshadowing of Selma's fate.

The main plot involves Max trying to buy back some IOUs for Jonothan Grigsby, a wealthy businessman and innovative inventor in the world of television sets. Grigsby has invented "a lens that will change any black-and-white television broadcast into color at the receiver."  Patricia Parson, Grigsby's business partner,  attempts to explain it all to Max but he tells her to skip it. I was glad he did that because the television invention is another subplot element that, in the end, also has nothing to do with the real story either.  And the few sentences Patricia starts to rattle off sound like science fiction than anything resembling real physics.

Dally with a Deadly Doll by John Mill
is the other book you get in the Ace Double
with Arthur's revised novel

 

 

It's those IOUs left behind by Grigsby's first wife Larraine that the story is all about. Larraine was considerably younger than Rigsby (what else is new?) and addicted to life in the fast lane. She spent most of her brief life drinking, driving fast, gambling and spending time with men other than her husband. One night after a hedonistic night of roulette, poker and booze she drove off the road, crashed her car and died in a blazing car wreck. Now Grigsby needs to clean up the mess she left behind and pay off her debts

Max wheels and deals with gambling hustler Marshall Dunn to buy back the IOUs at a bargain basement price.  Dunn wants an outrageous $50,000 (more than the total debt) but Grigsby is certain Dunn will accept only a portion of that.  He knows that Dunn is desperate for money because he too owes someone.  And it turns out to be none other than Tony Reiner.

Shortly after Max gets Dunn to accept the discounted pay-off  Dunn turns up dead.  Max is found at the scene of the crime unconscious and his gun prove to be the murder weapon used to kill Marshall Dunn. It appears to be one of those messy frame-ups private eyes are always falling victim to.  Max then has to work his tail off trying to prove he was set up and find out who killed Dunn and made off with the money he was carrying to buy back the IOUs.

For the most part Somebody's Walking over My Grave is typical of private eye novels of this era.  Plenty of violence, fistfights galore, Max survives several conks on the head, women are put in peril, he beds a couple of them and we get one dirty joke about an erection from one of his sex partners. This made me laugh out loud but at the same time seemed more like something you'd find in a 1970s book and not one from 1961...or even 1956. (Yes, it's in the original version. I had to check.)

As a detective novel it works well and there are even some clever and innovative clues like one involving cigarettes that are stamped with someone's name. Max first thinks the letters left behind on the butt of the used cigarette are s-o-n perhaps indicating Patricia Parson was at the scene of Dunn's murder.  But when he finds a box full of new cigarettes with the same personalized stamp and can examine the full name he finds that he was mistaken in what he thought the letters were. It was a rather nifty clue based on typography that is just like the kind of arcane, barely noticeable thing the Golden Age writers loved to employ in their detective novels.

In the final chapter Arthur decides to use the old gather the suspects and lecture to them scene once again hearkening back to the Golden Age.  The denouement, typically long winded in explaining all the details of the several murders, comes with exactly the sort of shocking pronouncement you'd find in Carr, Christie, Queen or Brand.  I had guessed two aspects of the solution but had not realized that both those aspects were intertwined.  Max talks about a dead giveaway clue that should have tipped him off much earlier and might have prevented one of the deaths.  And when he describes that one clue I practically slapped myself on the forehead for missing it.  It's so obvious that it would never have made the twist in the final chapter a surprise at all.

FIRST VERSION: Robert Arthur's first adult crime novel originally appeared under the title Epitaph for a Virgin in Mercury Mystery Magazine (Sept. 1956) as the lead story.  You can see Selma on the front cover illustration over there on the left. Though she is lying on the beach at the start of the book she's been decently clothed in a swimsuit or negligee in the photo and not scandalously naked.  Took me a while to locate a cheap copy of this magazine.  Several ignorant and greedy sellers are asking ludicrous amounts for reading copies of this digest sized magazine that contains nothing of any real value other than this oddity by Robert Arthur.  I didn't read this version from start to finish, but rather flipped through the pages and I found nothing about Pete or Millicent. Apparently the original ending was slightly altered in Somebody's Walking Over My Grave but I didn't do a strict comparison of the two books. Later tonight I'll look it over and revise this section if I find anything drastically different.

THE AUTHOR:  While perusing the pages of the Robert Arthur page on a website that celebrates The Three Investigators I discovered that Arthur was also a veteran writer of  for the pulp magazines which I don't think I knew at all.  Maybe I saw the name on the cover of a pulp years ago but probably thought it was some other Robert Arthur. Now I know it was the very same man. Robert Arthur (1909-1969) wrote over 100 stories using his own name and dozens more using a variety of pseudonyms that include Andrew Benedict, A. A. Fleming, Robert Forbes, Jay Norman and Pauline C. Smith. His work regularly appeared in nearly every pulp magazine that specialized in crime stories.  From 1933 though 1948 Arthur was published in Clues, Dime Mystery, Baffling Detective, Thrilling Detective, Double Detective, Popular Detective, and Detective Fiction Weekly. I even found his name on the cover of an issue of the seminal Black Mask. Throughout the  1950s and 1960s his stories appeared in three top selling mystery magazines that sported the names of Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock and Mike Shayne in their titles. His work as a radio script writer won him an Edgar award and he would go on to helm the editorial staff at Mysterious Traveler Magazine based on the radio program he worked on from 1942 to 1953. His radio work led to some script writing for TV shows including Thriller and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  Television and his Hitchcock association culminated in his work as editor for some of the first Alfred Hitchcock short story anthologies (for which he wrote introductions in the style of the Master of Suspense) and the creation of the series featuring the boy sleuths known as The Three Investigators.

More on Robert Arthur can be found on his daughter's tribute website here and various author pages on The Three Investigators fan site.

Only Couples Need Apply - Doris Miles Disney

Jay & Gretchen are looking to relax after a series of “projects” they’ve finished in various states across the country. They find a charming furnished coach house in Connecticut after seeing an ad that states Only Couples Need Apply (1973) and successfully rent it from Mrs. Mercer. They'll stay here before heading to Maine where they intend to retire from their “business.” All is well until we discover that those projects were elaborately planned robberies that drained the bank accounts and financial investments of several unmarried senior citizens. Gretchen gets herself hired as a secretary or companion, inveigles her employer to turn over control of their finances to her and with the help of Jay she robs them blind. The project usually ends (quite unnecessarily) in murder. Are the couple planning to do the same to Mrs. Mercer? It doesn’t seem that way. In fact, nothing much happens at all until Jay gets the egotistical idea to go solo, but this doesn't happen until well past the halfway mark.

When Jay tries burglary on his own mayhem ensues. But all this action and genuine suspense comes too late.  And the tying up of the unusual plot complications is very rushed.

If nothing really happens until the last three chapters then what is the book about? Character study -- and it's mostly in the past. More than three quarters of the book is the story of the five different “projects” that Gretchen and Jay have already completed. Disney attempts to compare and contrast the criminal worldviews of Gretchen and Jay. We get the horrible childhood Gretchen had that led her to stealing and her first thrilling murder. Jay is nothing more than a puppy in training and he’s bitter and resentful in his role of last minute hitman and getaway driver. He wants his own “project” and sees his chance when they land at the coach house in Connecticut. But the needless repetition of these projects with the same M.O. with the same kind of gullible and lonely victim gets increasingly tiresome and dull. Only when the penultimate project is described and we have a very cautious daughter overseeing the interview and hiring process for her invalid mother is there any real variety and a modicum of suspense in what amounts to a litany of thefts and death by gunshot.

And converting the stolen money into traveler’s checks?! It seems such an old person’s habit --especially in the 1970s -- not the practice of a hip young woman in her 30s. Gretchen only makes things more difficult for herself. She has three different sets of traveler’s checks all with different signatures of fake identities. Far from clever this absurd idea unsurprisingly proves to be her biggest mistake.

This is the most hardboiled of Disney’s books I’ve read. I thought she did malice domestic really well, but here she allows the 1970s vibe to intrude in a way that she can’t quite handle. Her dialogue gets stilted when she means Gretchen and Jay to be harsh and cruel. The sex scenes are laughably tame when I think she intended them to be steamy. But the violence and torture is right on target for a hardboiled crime novel. A truly odd mix from this writer.

All the while the entire plot is utterly preposterous. Through a series of plot contrivances Gretchen always manages to find people who do no background checks on her, never see her out of her disguise (a brunette wig, nerd glasses and fat suit) and allow her to take over their money managing as if she were hired to be their CPA. That Gretchen thinks she needs Jay as an accomplice is the biggest flaw of the story. She has a disguise, he does not. She does all the work prior to him stepping in for the final theft and execution of the victim. In the final stage (always the same) he shows up, points a gun at the victim, while Gretchen demands that her employer call the bank and allow her to close the account and leave with cash. Then after all that is done they tie up and shoot their victim. If Gretchen has so cleverly managed to drain the bank account on her own all those weeks why is it necessary for her to ask permission to get the last portion in cash? And why does she have Jay walk in with a gun and not bother with even a simple disguise? He uses the same gun for each murder. Never bothers to get rid of it. His fatal mistake for the book just as Gretchen had hers.

The final three chapters are mixture of suspense and sloppiness. Disney excels at creating tension in parallel scenes like the cinematically inspired section when Jay is committing a burglary in the main house while Mrs. Mercer is on her way home. This particular book, however, is overloaded with plot contrivances and last minute background info that comes at the most inopportune moments. We learn of a deep, dark secret in Mrs. Mercer’s past that changes the way she behaves for the rest of the book. It was a bit outlandish and would have made better sense had we been told the secret much earlier in the book. As it occurs everything from the climax onward to the finale is rushed and compacted. Crucial scenes are condensed to a few sentences that should have taken several paragraphs to lay out. Disney spent so much time on the history of her antihero couple that she seemed to have run out of patience with her characters. Eager to get everything over and done with she has the FBI enter the picture and prove to be super agents in connecting all the murder/theft cases and doing it all in what seems like a couple of hours. They prove Gretchen guilty for all of the murders thus allowing Mrs. Mercer to live happily ever after. Never mind that she herself is guilty of something horrible.

Betrayal. Amanda Blake as Mrs. Mercer
at the mercy of cruel Gretchen played
by Tisha Sterling (in wig cap)

In the end so much of this book is either disappointing or dumb.  Only Couples Need Apply – a title, by the way, that has no real significance – comes very late in Disney’s career, her fourth to last novel. She must have been running out of ideas and watching too many made for TV movies.

Interestingly, many of Disney's books were adapted for TV -- including this one! Only Couples Need Apply was made into the TV movie Betrayal (1974). Amanda Blake (best known as Kitty, the saloon owner, from the ancient but long running western TV series Gunsmoke) stars as Mrs. Mercer with Tisha Sterling and Sam Groom (both 1960s-1970s TV stalwarts) as Gretchen and Jay. You can watch it on Amazon Prime but even with its minor improvements -- only one "project" is shown with Jay as the aggressor in the duo, Gretchen is trying to reform, Mrs. Mercer's secret makes more sense and is introduced earlier in the story [just as I suggested!] -- it still doesn't change the overall ineffectiveness of this sadly unexciting suspense novel.

Magpie Murders TV Series Coming Soon!

This just in...

Magpie Murders, the meta-mystery novel by Anthony Horowitz about a mystery novel manuscript within a novel, is coming to Masterpiece on PBS here in the US. This most likely means it's already scheduled for UK television and will probably air before we get it over here. 

Unlike the recent spate of mangled Christie programs this is one TV adaptation I'm looking forward to seeing. It will be scripted by Horowitz himself so we can surely expect a faithful adaptation with no ludicrous monkeying around with characters and plot. I'm fascinated to see how a book so much about writing and manuscripts will be translated to the television screen. Can the very excellent Daniel Hawthorne mystery novels also written by Horowitz be next on the slate?

For more on this six part (!) series in co-production with Eleventh Hour Films see this publicity piece on the PBS Masterpiece website.

Magicians and Mediums and Murder! Oh My!

Magic fans, impossible crime aficionados, and those interested in the parallels between mystery writers' use of misdirection and a magician's sleight of hand talents might be interested in the latest podcast from JJ's on going series "In GAD We Trust." Of course in that punny title the letters GAD stand for Golden Age of Detection.

Not too many recognizable detectives turn up in this discussion because frankly most of the magician detectives from the Golden Age are found in the pages of long forgotten pulp magazines from the the early 20th century. Too few of those thousands of stories have been reprinted in collections for 21st century readers. But we do cover The Great Merlini created by magician mystery writer Clayton Rawson as well as another of Rawson's magician detectives who appeared only in pulp short stories. The impossible crime mystery masterpiece The Rim of the Pit by Hake Talbot, also a magician turned mystery writer, is discussed with admiration too.


We travel all over the magic in mystery spectrum with a somewhat chronological exploration starting with some pulp stories from the very early days of that business and my discovery that Charles Fulton Oursler (aka Anthony Abbot) had been writing weird mysteries, many with magician detectives, between 1919 and 1929.  Ken Crossen and Bruce Elliott turn up, we segue into talk of seances, mediums and the fraudulent spiritualists of the early 20th century a topic that popped up in many novels of the era. The rarely mentioned, quite forgotten, American mystery writer Henry Kitchell Webster makes a long overdue appearance when I discuss his excellent crime novel The Ghost Girl and the talk of seances and mediums in books gives way to TV shows and movies that feature either magicians or seances.

It's quite a hodgepodge of a discussion. We have a lot of fun, there's much more laughter than in the other talks. (It's the American with no real filter talking, after all.)  And you will finally hear what I sound like, why I'm so odd, and why I have been drawn to macabre genre fiction since I was a child.

Why not have a listen! Click on this link Episode 4: Magic, Mummery, and Misdirection.

FFB: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? - Henry Farrell

On March 5 the first episode of Feud aired on the FX cable network. This mini-series features Susan Sarandon as Bette Davis and Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford and over the course of the next eight weeks viewers will watch as they re-enact the turmoil and havoc created by those two diva movie actresses on and off the set of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? I’ve seen that cult classic, the grandmother of the badass biddy or hagsploitation suspense movies of the 1960s and 1970s, dozens of times. But I’ve never read the book. Now is as good a time as any to see how closely the movie script sticks to the original forgotten novel.

I expected some similarities but I didn’t expect such a reverent translation from page to screen. The first two thirds of the book are literally exactly the same as the movie, from prologue at the turn of the century to the unexpected murder of a supporting character in the Hudson house. There are minor tweaks here and there like the 50ish housekeeper Mrs. Edna Stitt who has a much larger part in the book being transformed on screen into a younger African American housekeeper named Elvira now relegated to the background with only two key scenes. Edwin Flagg also has a larger supporting part in the book and we learn a lot more of his pathetic unambitious slacker life and his sick co-dependent relationship with his mother Del. But other than those minor alterations, the addition in the movie script of one extra surprise meal for Blanche, and a more interestingly rendered finale at the beach in the last two chapters what you see in the movie is exactly what’s in the book. Which is better? If I’m allowed I'd like to take one half of each -- preferring the movie version of Baby Jane and the book version of Blanche. Overall, I’d say that the movie improves upon the story of the book immensely. Lucas Heller, the scriptwriter and adapter, definitely understands suspense in cinematic terms much better than Farrell does in his novel.

For those of you uninitiated here’s my briefest possible summary.  (Those who know the story already can skip this paragraph.) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1960) tells the story of two sisters who live together in relative seclusion following their previous success as actresses. Blanche Hudson, the older sister, now crippled for life as the result of a car accident and confined to a wheelchair is under the care of Jane, a former child actress. Jane was a headliner throughout her childhood and the breadwinner for the Hudson family in the days of vaudeville but her fame quickly faded as the sisters grew older.  Blanche became a star of Hollywood romantic comedies, had a much longer career in the 30s and 40s while Jane was consigned to bit parts thanks to a charitable clause written into all of Blanche’s movie contracts that gave her sister those jobs.  Now in their twilight years Jane finds herself acting as nursemaid and waitress to her invalid sister and resenting her more and more each day. A bitter rivalry and jealousy long dormant will now explode in a display of cruel psychological and physical tortures as Jane prepares to make her comeback in a delusional belief that she will finally outshine Blanche though both their stars have long since been extinguished from the Hollywood firmament.

Henry Farrell’s novel offers the reader a chance to know both Blanche and Jane in ways that Davis and Crawford only hinted at in the movie. There are long passages of interior monologues in which their present lives and former lives are described. We know their thoughts more than a close-up can provide. Blanche as an invalid has a rich interior life in which she retreats into her past just as Jane does, but it seems to be more of a longing for what could have been if not for the crippling accident. Jane as depicted in the novel is actually less interesting than what Davis brought to the screen. She’s more loathsome in her delusions rather than the pitiful creature Davis managed to make Baby Jane in the movie. What little empathy we can conjure up for her comes far too late in the final heartbreaking scene in which the truth about the car accident is finally made known.

Jane has one section that I think is the triumph of the novel. She has a true epiphany about how her retreat from reality and immersion in a fantasy life was actually a descent into madness. Her horror of the realization at the monster she has become, how what she valued most -- the love of her sister -- was perverted and abused, and how she has reached a point where she cannot ever go back and try to repair what could have been mended between the two women. The book has a subtly nihilistic viewpoint at this point and it succeeds as a true noir. Prior to those few pages in Chapter 14 (out of a total of eighteen) the book sustains its momentum and macabre fascination with scenes intended alternately to shock and repulse.

QUOTES:  Blanche turned her gaze upward to the ceiling and her lips twisted in a smile of wry amusement. Against a field of vivid blue an artful scattering of stars winked down at her dully. Her smile faded, and she let her eyes fall to the mantel and the framed photograph of the blank-faced girl who had once believed she could actually possess the sky and the stars and had ordered them fixed upon her ceiling. What a vain, profligate child that one had been. What a contemptible fraud, really. And hardly in a position to charge Jane with poor taste.

[Jane] had dwelt for a time in a world removed, utterly, from reality. [...] She was like a child who had shocked herself out of her own temper tantrums by inadvertently breaking a treasured piece of china; the angry delirium was past, but the calm present was made even worse by the imminent threat of some terrible retribution.

She was lost in hell, she told herself in sudden anguish, lost and doomed forever to a burning hell of unavailing remorse. Her madness had begun in her fear of losing Blanche, of losing, at last, Blanche's forgiveness. [...] What was the use of anything? Of anything at all?

The only real criticism I have are in the sections where we see the physical struggles and the intense agony that Blanche suffers in doing something as simple as getting out of her wheelchair. There are three separate scenes where she must act quickly in order that Jane not catch her out of the chair or out of her room or both but her paralysis is her curse. Blanche can't move quickly at all obviously. Farrell goes into intricate detail describing every minute movement as she raises herself up, slips, falls, stumbles, misses a handrail... One scene lasts four pages describing her arduous journey from the gallery on the second floor to the first floor hallway where the only working phone is kept. Another scene goes on for two pages as she lifts herself out of her chair and clutches at the grillwork barring her bedroom window while simultaneously trying to get the attention of the neighbor working in her garden below to whom Blanche wants to toss a handwritten note. I guess this is Farrell's idea of suspense, but those sections are extremely unnerving to read. A few paragraphs could easily have conveyed what Farrell chooses to spread out over pages. There's a kind of sadism on display in his lurid focus on her pain and agony.

MOVIE:  Davis fares more successfully in her grotesque portrayal of the overweight, slovenly, and alcoholic Jane Hudson. Paradoxically poignant in her childish regressions into her past and a fury of hatred in her explosions of unrestrained violence. She was willing to let herself go in way I think she never had in her early career. She understood the character thoroughly, even better than Henry Farrell. Deservedly, she earned her 11th and final Academy Award nomination as Best Actress for her performance as Jane Hudson. The bizarre business surrounding her Oscar nomination for this movie while Crawford got nothing is the focus of one of the episodes in Feud.

Crawford, always more of a movie star than an actress, does a fine job but there's something missing. Her acting has always struck me as artificial style consisting of her limited gallery of facial expressions and vocal tricks. She was belittled by Davis for wanting to appear glamorous even though her character is a recluse confined to a wheelchair who had never been outside her home in over twenty years. Crawford's obsession with her looks and her reliance on camera close-ups to do her acting for her were her undoing. She never fully inhabits Blanche, there's a surface element that is more apparent with repeated viewings of the movie. Crawford is too self-conscious of her performance, never surrendered, and wore a mask of fear and paranoia while adopting poses.

Victor Buono made his movie debut in a supporting role in this movie. He brings to life everything that Edwin Flagg is in the novel and moreso. Buono succeeds in making Flagg a lot more human and humorous than Farrell's caricature of a morose, cynical, mother hating boy-man.

In adapting the novel to the screen Lucas Heller (who would go on to collaborate with director Robert Aldrich on five more movies) masterfully makes use of the novel's best scenes, does a little tinkering with story chronology by moving some scenes that occur late in the novel to earlier points in the movie. And he structures the script with parallel storytelling and editing to make the most of cinematic suspense. The movie is pretty much all about Jane and her transformation from bully to murderer to madwoman. Blanche still has her important dramatic scenes as well, but Jane's story as performed by Bette Davis is what everyone remembers even after one viewing.

EASY TO FIND? Approximately 50 copies, mostly of paperback reprints, are available for sale at the usual bookselling sites. Both US and UK hardcover editions are scarce and are not surprisingly priced in the "collectible range" primarily due to the cult status of the movie. I imagine some unscrupulous sellers will raise the prices as soon as they find out about the TV series. No recent reissue came up in my research which seems a genuine missed opportunity for a new edition as a tie-in with the series.

Feud is airing every Sunday night from March 5 to April 23 on the FX cable station. Though the story in the first episode sometimes drags to a standstill in the interview sequences which serve as superfluous narration, whenever Sarandon and Lange are on screen they are riveting. Episodes can be watched after their initial air date via streaming on the FX network website.

COVERING THEIR TRACKS - "Whodunit?"- Tavares

Whodunit?
Who stole my baby?
Everyone in the room looks shady
...It's a bedside mystery!

Ah, the disco era! Platforms shoes, bell bottom pants, pooka shell necklaces, the "Dry Look", feathered hair, sequins and mirror balls. And all that wild and crazy music. Remember Tavares? Well, frankly neither do I. But this is another fun tune. I can't imagine this filled up the dance floor if it ever was played in the discos of days gone by, but I'd be among those laughing and smiling had I heard it. 

This may be the prizewinner for a pop tune mentioning fictional detectives and not only from books. Toward the end there is a long list of TV show detectives: Baretta, McCloud, Kojak, and Ironside. And just before the fade out you'll hear: "Tell Dirty Harry we're supposed to get married."



Hey, where's the phone to call Sherlock Holmes
[Somebody took my baby]
I've been framed by what's-his-name
And he's gettin' away
Charlie Chan, see if you can
Help me find those two, won't you?
Where were you on the night of the 12th?
[I was by myself]
She went dancin' in the dark,
Somebody stole her heart
Ellery Queen, if you're so keen
Won't you help me find my sweet thing? (Yeah, yeah)

Written by Frederick J. Perren, Keni St. Lewis
© Universal Music Publishing Group

The Monkey's Raincoat - Robert Crais

Here’s a brief run down on Elvis Cole, the private eye super hero of The Monkey’s Raincoat (1987), for those of you unfamiliar with him. He’s a Viet Nam vet. He practices yoga, tai chi and tae kwan do. His smoldering good looks somehow manage to remind women of both John Cassavetes from 1967 or --of all people-- Andy Summers of The Police. Two men who I think look nothing alike. Let’s see…what else…He can cook up some interesting gourmet dishes on a whim. He’s fascinated with Walt Disney animated movies especially Pinocchio (a clock of the boy/puppet and a couple of Jiminy Cricket figurines decorate his office) and Peter Pan visions of whom helped him survive the horrors of war. That part is still puzzling to me.  I sort of understand the metaphor of the boy who never grew up applied to soldiers, but it seems awfully weird notion to me for such a tough guy. Maybe I missed something there. And of course he’s a wise acre of the first class.  Every other line of dialogue is a smartass comeback or insult. So he just reminded me of so many other characters – Spenser with his love of gourmet cooking, Marvel comic book superheroes with the martial arts stuff, and (name any American private eye character of the past fifty years) with his smart aleck comments.  The book only got interesting for me when Joe Pike, Cole’s partner in the private eye agency, stepped out of the background and took on a meaty supporting role.

For the first five or six chapters of The Monkey’s Raincoat (1987) I just couldn’t figure out what was so special about this book. Why was this book included as one of "The Century's 100 Favorite Mysteries"? Never mind that the label given that list is hyperbolic just by itself. I saw nothing really groundbreaking or even original in the book. In fact, the whole thing reminded me of hundreds of TV shows I’ve seen in my lifetime. On a whim I went to Robert Crais’ website to verify that this was not only the first Elvis Cole book but also his first novel and then I discovered something not altogether surprising. Robert Crais spent close to ten years writing scripts for US TV cop shows before turning to novels. Baretta, Cagney & Lacey, Quincy, Miami Vice and a couple of others show up on his long resume. Aha! So that’s why the book seemed just like a TV show. Smart aleck dialogue, brand name dropping like some kind of verbal product placement gone wild, jokes based on TV pop culture, and two gratuitous sex scenes one of which seems completely out of character for the two people involved. With all the 1970s TV commercial references -- Virginia Slims cigarettes, the Shell Answer Man, Mr. Goodwrench, the Löwenbräu beer jingle "Here's to Good Friends" -- I thought the book might have been written a decade earlier and polished up over time. Crais assures us on his website that he started the book in 1985. I'm not so sure. Buried in all the distracting TV references, Sunday newspaper advertising brand names, and truly lame jokes is a compactly told story with typical macho fight scenes and brutal violence. I began to see what Crais intended this to be. It turns out to be a repackaging of the old Gold Medal paperback originals. Sex and smart aleck humor and violent fist fights and lots of bloody gunplay.

Elvis Cole...uh...rather
John Cassavetes as Johnny Stacatto

It’s a find-the-husband plot with mousy wife Ellen Lang being manipulated into seeking out the help of a private eye by her bossy loud mouthed (but of course irresistibly sexy) best friend Janet Simon. The story takes place in Los Angeles and Hollywood, USA is featured front and center for most of the book. Mort Lang, the missing husband, is a talent agent with a roster of D list actors and actresses as his clients. The rest of the cast includes a sleazy drug dealing movie producer, his bodyguard hired because of his extracurricular activities, an airhead starlet with a killer figure, and her hot tempered boyfriend equally stupid and alluring. There are a couple of cops, both LAPD and FBI, too. And because this is the 80s when cocaine was almost a required plot feature of a crime novel we get Domingo “Dom” Duran, a comic book drug lord obsessed with toreo (that’s bullfighting to all us ignoramuses) as his guiding principle and his army of trigger happy thugs and goons beating, torturing and murdering on his orders. Duran’s missing two kilogram package of “pure” cocaine serves as the Macguffin in a subplot that will connect the Hollywood characters with the gangsta characters.

I wasn’t thrilled with the plot at all. Never was enthralled with fistfights (or martial arts fights, I guess) that go on for paragraphs and graphic depictions of shoot outs that describe where all the bullets go and what damage they do to human bodies. And Elvis just doesn't do it for me. At least not in his debut. A poor man's Philip Marlowe (Crais even makes a White Knight reference) with too much sarcasm and too little restraint. It was the slow (but predictable) transformation of Ellen Lang from trampled housewife to vigilante Mom that kept me reading to the final pages. Oh! and the introduction of Joe Pike in the action filled final pages. Even though he's Cole's partner Pike is a background character, a near cipher, in the opening chapters, but he comes into his own in the finale. Pike is the best character in the book. Mysterious, brooding, taciturn and dangerous. None of his dialogue contains a single ounce of wiseacre humor. He gives the book its much needed gravitas and makes a unexpected bond with Ellen Lang.

Interestingly, Crais says on his website that if he were to recommend any book as a place to start LA Requiem, his eighth book, is the one he’d like people to read first. The Monkey’s Raincoat is definitely the work of a rookie novelist: uneven prose style, a tendency to indulge in sophomoric humor, formulaic basic plot, cookie cutter characters. In an effort to try to reinvent the private eye he ends up emulating lots of well known crime writers. And he doesn’t think twice about letting his influences show. Elvis Cole has Valdez Is Coming and other Elmore Leonard titles on his shelves, books we learn he returns to again and again. Those familiar with Leonard’s violent jokey crime novels and westerns may find themselves drawing comparisons between the two writers. Even before the reference I thought Crais was most like Leonard. However, in this outing Crais doesn’t come close to inventing characters as original and quirky as Leonard’s though he does manage to spin a few artful sentences.

There was enough here for me to seek out one of the later books featuring Joe Pike. I'd like to believe that Crais is right when he says, "I am intensely proud of those early novels — but my newer books are richer, broader in scope, and way more complex in structure, so I believe them to be more representative of the work I am doing today."

 *   *   *

I read this as part of Rich Westwood's "Crime of the Century" reading challenge for which each month we read a book published in a specific year. July's year was 1987.

FFB: The Deadly Climate - Ursula Curtiss

"How very losable your identity was, Caroline thought, lulled and drowsy. Stripped of your social security card, your charge plates, that old, old reminder from your dentist, you became nobody, or anyone at all."

Caroline Emmett has been sent to a rest home in Wicklow, Massachusetts upon orders from her doctor. There she will recuperate from pneumonia and mental duress following her discovery of her husband's dallying with a woman half his age. Walking in the countryside she finds to be more therapeutic than any treatment from her nurses and doctors at the rest home. One evening she takes a detour from her regular path and climbs up a hill. She witnesses the brutal beating of a woman at the hands of a bulky figure wearing a man's raincoat. Or so she thinks. He shines his flashlight on her leaving it there for several minutes and Caroline flees. Bad weather -- rain and wind -- force her to seek shelter before she can return to her room. She manages to gain entry to the home of the Olivers where she tells her story while they listen with a mixture of disbelief and curiosity. She'll remain here for the next twelve hours while the killer in the raincoat tracks her down.

This is familiar territory to be sure -- the eyewitness to a crime who seems to have imagined everything. Of course no body is found where Caroline said she saw the attack. But don't expect the story to fall into the trap of a well-worn formula and an obvious unfolding of events. Enter Carmichael, the editor and owner of the local newspaper, with a nose for news and a healthy dose of common sense. He is the only one who believes Caroline. With the permission of a lackadaisical and skeptical policeman named Trunz the newsman heads out to the crime site to do some real work. He quickly finds two sets of footprints in the mud and a woman's patent leather shoe. Size 9. Something bad has happened he is sure. And he begins his dogged search for the woman with one shoe. Or her dead body.

Ursula Curtiss was the daughter of Golden Age mystery writer and police procedural pioneer Helen Reilly. She came to writing fiction late in her life unlike her prolific mother, but seemed to have inherited her mother's talent for tight plotting, lively and original characters, and well rendered settings. She surpassed her mother with an enviable talent not too easily mastered in crime fiction.  Curtiss' mastery in nearly all her books is her skill in creating mounting dread and terror. In The Deadly Climate (1954) she creates a household of suspicion and paranoia. Caroline seems to have found a haven from the mysterious attacker but no one, not even the practical minded and forthright teenage daughter Lydia Oliver, is really on her side. Over the course of a single night the killer stalks Caroline, makes two attempts on her life, disables the only car available to the Olivers and turns their would-be refuge into one of peril. "It was infinitely worse...with the shades drawn," Curtiss writes of Caroline's racing thoughts. "Like breaking uncontrollably into a run, or giving way to tears, this hiding from the night let down the frail barrier of pretense."  Dread builds to the point where even a rambler rose scratching up against a makeshift cardboard window pane gives rise to fearful glances from the characters and a chill or two from the reader.

The world Curtiss creates is also one of arbitrary happenings, oddities and the just plain weird. While Caroline is attempting to gain allies in the Oliver family two strangers interrupt the night's already chaotic events. A young man appears selling storm windows and a middle-aged woman comes collecting donations for the Red Cross. Coincidence or devilish design? Everyone who makes an entrance in the story is questionable in their apparent innocent motives. Who sells storm windows during a storm? Only the most opportunistic of salesman, right? Is he even a salesman? Why does a woman go ringing doorbells in the rain asking for charitable donations? And why does Lydia insist that the woman is not Mrs. Vermilya as she claims she is?

Carmichael's investigation of the victim is the highlight of the story. Here Curtiss shows she knows how to spin a good detective novel. We watch him turn to the newspaper clippings in the morgue and ask for help from his reporter colleagues as far away as Pennsylvania. He begins to put together a jigsaw puzzle of the past that sheds light on a crime involving an illegal abortion operation and a suspicious suicide. Not that it's all fun and games for Carmichael. One of the more interesting moments is the unease and discomfort he experiences while rummaging through the victim's belongings in her hotel room. His discovery that she mended all her clothes including a wispy and intimately sheer nightgown allows him a moment of sadness mixed with shame. He sees her as a lonely woman who cared too much for her clothes but clearly had no money to spend on herself.

This book so skillful in its building of suspense and tension not surprisingly proved tempting for scriptwriters. It was adapted and filmed for television twice in Curtiss' lifetime. Once for the 1950s anthology program Climax! with what sounds like a great cast -- Nina Foch as Caroline, Kevin McCarthy as Carmichael and Estelle Winwood as Mrs. Oliver.  It was done again in 1968 for the British anthology series Detective about which I know nothing.

The Deadly Climate in the words of Anthony Boucher is "a throat-clutcher in the absolute, tightly and economically written." A better summation I could not devise myself. Copies of the book are readily available in both hardcover and paperback (four reprint paperback editions at my count) in the used book market. I'm sure her books will be found in your local library. Curtiss was quite popular in her day and was the kind of writer that librarians loved to keep on their shelves. None of her books, to my knowledge, are currently in print. More's the pity for lovers of excellent crime fiction.

The Devil Made Them Do It

Ira Levin, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer all must be doing gymnastics in their graves.

A few nights ago I saw a trailer for the upcoming TV movie remake of one of my all time favorite novels and horror movies -- Rosemary's Baby. I screamed, "What? Are you kidding me?" at my television once again upsetting Joe who dislikes it intensely when I talk to the TV.

Jason Isaacs, so compelling as Jackson Brodie in the recent UK TV series based on Kate Atkinson's crime novels, has been cast as Roman Castevet. Way too young for the role. Minnie has been renamed Margaux and is played by French actress Carole Bouquet. Minnie is gone! Now I know this is going to suck. Clearly, the producers have decided to rejuvenate another classic and market it to a younger TV viewing audience with no memory of the original film.

Zoe Saldana, an actress I am not impressed with, is Rosemary. Mia Farrow IS Rosemary Woodhouse! To my mind only an immensely talented actress could surpass Farrow's performance. Certainly not someone as mediocre as Zoe Saldana.

Canadian actor Patrick J Adams is playing Rosemary's husband. He appeared on a cable TV series called Suits most recently. Never seen him in anything. Beats me if he has the stuff to even match Cassavetes' portrayal of the overly ambitious actor Guy Woodhouse who makes a diabolical pact in exchange for success on the Broadway stage. Looks like so many baby-faced young actors these days. He's got that trendy scruff to make him look older for this part.

I'm not impressed by the TV script adaptors credits either: Final Destination 3, Queen of the Damned, and that train wreck of a TV series American Horror Story. The only saving grace might be director Agnieszka Holland who made such memorable movies as Europa, Europa and The Secret Garden (w/ Maggie Smith) and who most recently has been making a career of directing cable TV shows like Treme, The Killing, and The Wire.

The movie -- a four hour, two parter -- will be broadcast in May on NBC. For more info see this webpage at NBC.com.

Anyone else think this is a horrid idea? Anyone planning to watch this? I'm not sure I'm even mildly curious about what they've done to update it. Some movies should never be remade. This, I think, is one of them.

VIDEO: Water's Edge - Robert Bloch

One of the few examples of true noir that show up on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour "Water's Edge" (season 3, episode 3 - 1964) is adapted from the short story by Robert Bloch. The story originally appeared in Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine in 1956. Interestingly, the story was rejected by Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and ironically appeared in an anthology of short stories called Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories They Wouldn't Let Me Do on TV published in 1957.  Apparently several of those prohibited stories did eventually make their way to the anthology series.

Rusty Connors (John Cassavetes) is about to be released from prison. For months he has listened to the stories of his cellmate Mike Krause, bank robber and killer, who has been obsessed with his bombshell of a wife Helen. Now as Mike is dying of pneumonia he makes a deathbed confession. The money he stole years ago is still with his partner Pete. As soon as Rusty is out he plans to find the sexy Helen who he hopes to charm and seduce and that she will lead him to Pete and the money. When Helen turns out to be played by Ann Sothern Rusty immediately sees she has not kept her ravishing figure over time. He nearly scraps his plan. After an exchange of less than flattering remarks she agrees to meet Rusty.  Later, the two team up to locate Pete and the stolen money. You can be sure things do not work out as planned.

The script almost exclusively is a two character piece with a fascinating reversal on the noir trope of the sexy femme fatale and her gullible mark. This time we get an overweight frump and a slick and greedy Romeo. Cassavetes does a fine job, but it is Ann Sothern's interpretation of a character so completely against her usual type that makes this episode one of the highlights of the series. When Rusty first meets Helen in the diner she eats scraps off a customer's plate and licks her fingers; a perfect touch. Rusty is disgusted that he may have to seduce this slobby, porcine ex-sexpot. As the story progresses Sothern's subtle facial expressions hinting at her hidden motives are a nice contrast to Cassavetes' more overt emotional displays. You just know that this Mutt and Jeff team are out for themselves and not each other. The violent finale set in a rat infested, waterfront shack is one of the most gruesome and brilliantly filmed among the Hitchcock TV shows.

Albert Hayes wrote the teleplay adaptation that sizzles with sarcasm and irony. Bernard Girard, who began his career as a screenwriter back in 1948 and later became a prolific director for TV, brings top notch cinematic techniques to this above average entry in the series.

Highly recommended. The entire episode can be watched below.

FFB: The Kind Man - Helen Nielsen

A recent post on Friday's Forgotten Books host site, pattinase, asked us "Do Men Read Women?" I know I do, but I thought I read a lot more women writers than I have done so far this year. Out of my total of 45 books in 2013 I have read only a measly twelve books by women writers. With Mother's Day around the corner and my guilty conscience nagging at me I thought I'd write up another overlooked and very good crime writer who is a woman.

The Kind Man (1951) is Helen Nielsen's debut novel and eerily it shares quite a bit with another book by a woman writer published that year and previously reviewed on this blog -- A Gentle Murderer by Dorothy Salisbury Davis. In both books we have a young man quite obviously troubled, possibly mentally ill, and haunted by his past. In both the two young men are obsessed with killing and a specific murder weapon. In Nielsen's book the tortured soul is Marty Weaver and he has knives on his mind almost all the time. Make that a specific knife. One that he happens to find and take home with him. And he thinks he must use it over and over to kill the people he loves. He's clearly not well, my friends. But is he really guilty of the murders that take place?

What makes this particular knife so special is that also happens to be a piece of evidence that went missing from a murder trial many years ago. That it should happen to turn up now and is used to commit another murder on a person who Marty barely knew is what drives the plot. Nielsen is fascinated with the effects of crime on the people who are left behind. Do the survivors manage to forgive? Can they learn to heal themselves after violence has ripped their inner lives to shreds? Can families ever be the same? Marty's anguished past becomes the key to understanding his obsession with violence, knives, and murder.

Helen Nielsen (from the DJ of Obit Delayed)
Photo by Amos Carr/Hollywood

Though it sounds like a variation on the kind of thing Patricia Highsmith made famous a decade or so after, The Kind Man has its roots in detective fiction. Down to earth Chief of Police Homer Snyder serves as the detective of the piece. His reporter pal Max is a sort of Watson. With some prodding from Snyder Max goes digging into newspapers archives and uncovers Marty's notorious past. Under a different name Marty made headlines when he was a teen and so did the knife, a grisly weapon with a handle fashioned from an animal bone. That knife seems to be an exact replica of the one used to kill Francis Palmer.

The "kind man" of the title is Sampson Case, owner of a cannery business. His much younger wife Lola turns out to be one of those philandering temptresses that populated the paperback originals of the 1950s. Snyder soon discovers she is linked to the murder victim, Palmer, an avid gambler who was relentless in collecting his debts. For a while it looks as if Palmer's death is nothing more than gambling and gangster stuff. Several thousand dollars has gone missing and the search for the money and who took it from the corpse makes up a secondary part of the murder investigation. The case gets rather complicated when the man who discovered Palmer's body, a poor Mexican Sampson Case took pity on, is also murdered with that ubiquitous knife. Now it looks as if Snyder has a homicidal maniac on his hands. Sampson Case will play an important part in the unusual finale and the title of book will have greater significance than merely describing his demeanor.

Nielsen tells a great story. It's a multi-layered, complex plot riffing on the old-fashioned detective novels of the 30s and 40s but with a keen insight into the ravages of violent crime and its long ranging effects on those who have to pick up the pieces in its aftermath. The manner in which Marty's past keeps intruding, and the presence of the eerie knife make for an almost supernatural element controlling the characters. At times Nielsen is so masterful in her writing that she makes the murderer appear to be a menacing omnipresent force haunting Marty and not a real human being at all. And there is mounting suspense in the last eight chapters with gripping incidents following in quick succession. Impressive work from a novice to be sure.

James Farentino can't resist Vera Miles in "Death Scene"

 Helen Nielsen went on to write  more crime fiction including the noir novels Detour (not the basis for Edgar Ulmer's movie) and Sing Me A Murder, both made well known when they were reprinted by the original Black Lizard imprint prior to its purchase by Vintage Books. Her short stories appeared regularly in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine throughout the 1960s and she also wrote frequently for TV, notably two episodes for Perry Mason and several teleplays for both incarnations of Alfred Hitchcock's anthology series. Her story "Death Scene" as adapted by James Bridges for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour starred Vera Miles as a femme fatale mixed up with the chauffeur (James Farentino) for her Hollywood movie director father (John Carradine) and is one of the better episodes in the entire series.

Helen Nielsen's Crime Fiction
The Kind Man (1951)
Gold Coast Nocturne (1951) aka Murder by Proxy (UK hardcover) and Dead on the Level (US paperback)
Obit Delayed (1952)
Detour (1953) aka Detour to Death
The Woman on the Roof (1954)
Stranger in the Dark (1955)
The Crime is Murder (1956)
Borrow the Night (1957) aka Seven Days Before Dying
The Fifth Caller (1959)
False Witness (1959)
Sing Me A Murder (1960) aka The Dead Sing Softly
Verdict Suspended (1964)
After Midnight (1966)
A Killer in the Street (1967)
Darkest Hour (1969)
Shot on Location (1971)
The Severed Key (1973)
The Brink of Murder (1976)

FFB: Someone Like You - Roald Dahl

A recent post at Patti Abbott's blog (also the host blog for this weekly tribute to forgotten and overlooked books) asked us which writers' short stories we find ourselves coming back to again and again, or which particular volume we often find ourselves re-reading. I surprised myself when I answered Roald Dahl, a writer who I think was my very first introduction to the strange and the weird in adult fiction. I read him long before I discovered the writers found in Weird Tales. In many ways I think it is Dahl's writing moreso than any other writer that led me at such an early age to seek out the weird and the outré in crime fiction.

Most people know Roald Dahl as a children's book writer and creator of fantastic, weird and wonderful characters like Willy Wonka, James and the Giant Peach, the Fantastic Mr Fox. The kid's books have their fair share of wickedness and cruelty as well, but his adult fiction is just as weird and fantastic and lays it on a bit thick in the wicked cruelty department. Those stories introduce us to murderers who escape police detection,  greedy gamblers willing to make terrible sacrifices to get what they want, bickering married couples who resort to murder to end their long standing disagreements and intense dislike of each other, and nightmarish inventions that are the undoing of their curious creators. Someone Like You (1953) is only Dahl's second collection of his adult short stories with original magazine publication dates ranging back to 1948, but I think it is his best.

Take a look at the table of contents which includes such immediately recognizable titles as "Lamb to the Slaughter," "Man from the South",  and "A Dip in the Pool" -- all three having been adapted for television as part of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents anthology series. Dahl more than any other writer is the person whose stories Hitchcock himself directed for the series. Of the five stories adapted from Dahl's work four were directed by the master of suspense, a testament to the storytelling skill and originality on display in Dahl's writing. Hitchcock was never one to take on the mundane or cliche.

In Someone Like You Roald Dahl tries his hand at a variety of genres and moods. While many of the tales involve crime there are also examples of social satire, fantasy, and even two fine stories that could be classified as science fiction. "The Sound Machine" is one of his inventor tales in which a man discovers his machine intended to explore the secret world of inaudible sound has accidentally allowed him entry into a disturbing world of plants he never could have imagined. Among the satires are "Taste" about a wine tasting contest that goes a bit too far and "Skin", a perfect burlesque of art collecting mania and the grotesque extremes one painting enthusiast undertakes to get what he wants. The crime stories are, not surprisingly, my favorites.  How can you not get a little thrill out of the cops talking in the kitchen in "Lamb to the Slaughter" or the grisly final sentence of "Man from the South?"

I was so enthralled with Dahl when I was a teen I wrote him a fan letter. Though sadly the letter was lost with a lot of other treasures when my parents sold our Connecticut home back in the 1980s I still remember verbatim his curt reply to me.

Thank you for your letter which contained many questions none of which I propose to answer. A writer receives many such letters in his life and often cannot take the time to answer them. I am glad you enjoyed the stories.

Roald Dahl

I shouldn't have been surprised that a man who could create such delightfully nasty people would be that brusque with a fan letter from a high school aged American boy. Though I was taken aback and disappointed initially, over time I grew to admire the chutzpah of that reply.  Dahl's letter writing has never diminished my appreciation for his fiction writing.  I still read his stories. And you should, too. At least once.

BLAST FROM THE PAST: Lee Thayer on "What's My Line?"

Thanks to a lively discussion on Lee Thayer related to my previous post on The Mystery of the 13th Floor and the 1001 Midnights Thayer article that Steve Lewis posted at Mystery*File we now have this video Mike Grost found. At the time Thayer was over 80 and had written 57 books. She nearly stumps the panel!