Bernard C. Gilford’s The Liquid Man

Bernard C. Gilford’s novel The Liquid Man appeared in Fantastic Adventures in September 1941.

Bernard C. Gilford (1920-2010) was an American writer, mostly in the suspense genre. The Liquid Man seems to have been his only novel (and it’s really not much more than a novella).

The Liquid Man begins with a murder. There’s a witness. It’s a dark night and it’s raining but somehow the killer doesn’t look quite human - more of a vague human-like shape with a disturbing liquid quality.

There’s another murder soon afterwards.

To the police it seems straightforward. A man named Ferdinand Silva thought his girl was two-timing him. He killed the faithless girl and the other man. A very ordinary murder, apart from the odd description of the suspect.

Juan worked in a laboratory, doing routine research on cleaning wax. It appears he was also working on some mysterious project of his own.

There are other murders, and all the witnesses insist that the killer seemed more like a man made out of liquid than an ordinary man. It’s ridiculous of course, but Lieutenant Quante starts to think that there really is something strange about these murders.

Of course tracking down and capturing a man in liquid form would present certain challenges. There’s also the possibility that such a man would be rather difficult to kill.

Even worse, such a man could find unexpected places to hide.

This liquid man seems intent on continuing his murderous rampage, so Lieutenant Quante is under plenty of pressure.

There’s also Priscilla. She is the only one of the liquid man’s victims who escaped, and Lieutenant Quante has fallen for her. There’s a possibility the monster may strike at her again.

The liquid man is a monster, but monsters have feelings too. They need love just like everybody else.

This is a straightforward monster terror tale with a science fictional gloss to it. The difficulties presented by such an unconventional manhunt are handled reasonably well by the author, with the police displaying considerable ingenuity and facing continual frustration.

The story does at least have the virtue of originality.

It’s a very pulpy tale, but that’s all it was ever intended to be. It’s a bit like a 1950s monster movie, but written more than a decade before such movies became popular.

Armchair Fiction have paired this title with Fritz Leiber’s short novel You're All Alone in of their terrific two-novel paperback editions.

This is not a neglected gem. It’s really not very good, but if you’re going to buy the book for the Fritz Leiber novel (and you should) then The Liquid Man might provide some mild entertainment if you’re in the right mood.

Bonnie Golightly’s Beat Girl

Bonnie Golightly’s Beat Girl was published in 1959. It’s included in Stark House’s three-novel Beatnik Trio paperback edition. I’m not at all sure how to categorise Beat Girl in genre terms.

Bonnie Golightly’s main claim to fame is that she sued Truman Capote for libel, alleging that Holly Golightly in his novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s was based on her. Her allegation was so flimsy that the matter never went to court. Bonnie Golightly wrote quite a few books. She later joined the counter-culture and wrote books about LSD.

One can’t help suspecting that the title Beat Girl was chosen (probably by her publisher) in a desperate attempt to cash in on the craze for all things Beat. There are beatniks in the book but they don’t appear until very late in the story.

Mostly it’s the tale of a rather mixed-up seventeen-year-old heiress, Chloe. After her mother’s death Chloe is packed off to an aunt in England. After a chance meeting with an old flame, a young American named Pritchard Allyn, Chloe decides to return to New York. Pritchard was the man to whom she lost her virginity some time earlier so he’s a bit special to her even though she’s since slept with countless men. Chloe at this stage is no beatnik but she is a bit of a wild child, and she’s a very rich wild child.

The entire book focuses on Chloe’s romantic dramas. Which is OK but if you’re expecting a sleaze novel or a hardboiled story or something noirish or beatsploitation (which are the kinds of things you would expect from a Stark House reprint) you’re going to be disappointed. It’s just a regular romantic melodrama with barely a hint of sleaze. I guess in 1959 a female protagonist who admits to promiscuity would have been shocking, and most sleaze fiction of this era is very tame, but in this case the actual sleaze content is close to zero.

And beatniks make only a very brief appearance, mostly as a warning to innocent young girls to stay away from these dangerous weirdos. Having the beatniks as dangerous weirdos might have been fun, except that they don’t seem very dangerous or very weird.

We get only the briefest of glimpses of the beatnik culture. We discover that they smoke joints and take their clothes off. That seems to be all they do.

Chloe is your basic spoilt rich brat. She’s the narrator and you may very well grow tired of her. She feels sorry for herself a lot. In fact most of the characters spend a good deal of time on self-pity. I guess being rich is pretty tough.

Of course nobody in Chloe’s family understands her. Her husband’s parents are horrible to her. They seem to regard her a spoilt rich brat. It’s hard to disagree with them. They’re also only moderately rich and didn’t go to the very best schools which makes them beneath contempt in Chloe’s eyes. We don’t know how Chloe feels abut the working class. She’s never met a working-class person. Apart from the servants of course. The servants look up to her, which is only right and proper as far as Chloe is concerned.

As you may have gathered it’s difficult to like any of the characters.

Chloe’s romantic woes are not especially interesting.

Overall the book just didn’t grab my interest very much at all. I don’t think I could seriously recommend it.

The other books in the Stark House Beatnik Trio are Dell Holland’s The Far Out Ones (which is very enjoyable) and Richard E. Geis’s Like Crazy, Man (which is so-so). I do think it’s cool that Stark House are making these very obscure beatsploitation titles available even if the genre does seem to be a bit hit-or-miss.

The House of Invisible Bondage

Between 1912 and 1934 American authors J. U. Giesy (1877-1947) and Junius B. Smith (1883-1945) wrote a whole series of novels, short stories and novellas featuring the exploits of occult detective Semi Dual. These were serialised in various pulp magazines. The House of Invisible Bondage was serialised in Argosy in 1926.

Semi Dual is a physician but he is also a student of various forms of esoteric knowledge including astrology. He has some limited telepathic abilities. He is a rich man who lives in luxurious and tasteful seclusion in a penthouse above the 20th floor of an apartment house. He has a passionate devotion to the righting of wrongs and a keen interest in crime-solving. He does not operate directly as a private detective but he has persuaded two trusted associates, Glace and Bryce, to set up a private detective agency. When a case interests Semi Dual he allows Glace and Bryce to do the legwork and the routine investigation while he directs things from the background, making use not just of his knowledge of esoteric lore but also his keen understanding of human psychology.

Semi Dual knows that Marya Harding is about to ask for his help. He has no way of knowing this, but he knows it nonetheless. Sure enough a few hours later she shows up seeking help. The help is actually for her friend Moira. Moira’s fiancé Imer Lamb has just been arrested for launching a murderous attack on his valet. It makes no sense. Imer is a healthy, outgoing thoroughly cheerful and good-natured young man. He has no serious vices. His valet is devoted to him and relations between master and servant have always been easy-going and cordial.

Nonetheless Imer is now behind bars. And it’s worse than that. The police surgeon has decided that he is an incurable homicidal maniac. Imer Lamb is likely to spend the rest of his life in a lunatic asylum. In the short term his brother has managed to get him admitted to a private psychiatric clinic.

Semi Dual agrees that this is extremely curious and once he has cast the young man’s horoscope he perceives that the case is much more complex and much more devious. He does not yet know what is behind it all but he does know that Imer Lamb is not a murderous madman.

There are family dramas involved, a has-been Hollywood starlet comes into the picture, there are questions of inheritance, there are various financial entanglements of a dubious nature and there is also the screaming woman at the clinic. On top of this there is another inexplicable outburst of violence, not on the part of Imer Lamb but involving someone closely connected to him.

Semi Dual is a patient man. He may not know the identity of the guilty party but he is weaving a web and that guilty party will inevitably become entangled in it. Semi Dual’s patience is matched by his confidence.

It’s a solid enough plot. The paranormal and occult elements are important and add some spice and flavour but they don’t overwhelm the story. Good old-fashioned detective skills are still required. And the story doesn’t rely on supernatural evil - this is a tale of very human evils such as greed and jealousy.

Semi Dual makes a fascinating hero. In his speech and behaviour he comes across like some kind of medieval wizard. He seems out of place in the world of the 1920s but in fact he is also a man of science and reason.

Bryce is a fun character - a hardboiled ex-cop who is nonetheless a true believer in Semi Dual’s mysterious powers. Moira is a likeable heroine who is determined to stand by the man she loves. There are several villains but they’re not necessarily motivated by pure evil. In this story it’s human weakness that drives people to act badly.

It’s all very entertaining and if (like me) you love occult detective stories you should be well satisfied. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed The Complete Cabalistic Cases of Semi Dual, volume 1, which contains the first three Semi Dual novellas. Most of the Semi Dual stories have now been reprinted in paperback by Steeger Books in their Argosy Library series.

Richard E. Geis's Like Crazy, Man

Like Crazy, Man is a 1960 sleaze novel by Richard E. Geis. It was his debut novel. It belongs to the small but fascinating beatsploitation genre.

Jeff (who narrates the tale) is the advertising manager for a department store in Portland, Oregon. At the novel opens he’s in California, in Venice Beach, looking for his wife Dawn. She ran off with a lesbian and now she’s living among the beatniks. It wasn’t a happy marriage but Jeff needs to get her back. His boss only employs married men. If he has no wife he has no job.

This is a fish out of water story. Jeff is a square and he finds the beatniks bewildering.

His efforts to get Dawn back get off to a bad start. Her butch girlfriend beats him up. He gets drunk, which is his standard response to setbacks.

He spends the night with a soft-hearted hooker named Shirley who offers him a freebie and a place to stay. He’s grateful for both. He’s such a square he had no idea she was a hooker. He also had no idea that she had a lesbian girlfriend, Lena. Lena does not like men and she does not like Jeff.

Jeff movies into an apartment house full of beatniks. They get him high. He gets drunk again. He gets seduced by a crazy sexually insatiable beatnik chick named Rill.

All of this is not helping him to regain his wife. A wild beatnik party doesn’t help either.

Jeff’s life spirals out of control. Squares like Jeff can’t dig the beat scene at all.

Dealing with beatniks and lesbians is enough of a nightmare for Jeff but he also has to face up to his very conflicted feelings about his wife. He isn’t sure he really wants her back. And in the space of a couple of days he sleeps with Shirley, Rill, Lena and Rosemary. They’re all complicated women with their own issues to deal with getting sexually involved with any of them is not exactly conducive to Jeff’s psychological or emotional stability.

The crazy world of the beat scene has also unleashed Jeff’s wild side. He’s not sure he can deal with some of the things he’s done. He feels there’s no way out for him.

Jeff is not exactly a likeable protagonist. His biggest problem is the booze but when he starts thinking about that he needs a drink. He is not a happy drunk.

Neither the squares nor the beatniks come out of this story looking good.

It was a common practice for sleaze writers (and exploitation film-makers) in that era to include a square-up that seemed to come down strongly on the side of traditional morality. Like Crazy, Man certainly appears to condemn deviant behaviour but it didn’t do the author any good. Like a lot of writers, publishers, editors, artists and photographers at that time he found himself prosecuted for obscenity, almost went to prison and was persecuted by the US Government for several years.

Richard E. Geis also wrote lesbian sleaze novels under the name Peggy Swenson and then went on to write some really outrageous stuff which suggests that the apparent championing of traditional morality in Like Crazy, Man was simply an attempted square-up. I believe that Geis wrote other beatsploitation novels as well.

There are elements in this novel which will have some modern readers foaming at the mouth in rage, but I can’t reveal what those other elements are without revealing crucial spoilers.

Like Crazy, Man is a reasonably entertaining entry in an oddball genre. Recommended.

Stark House have included this novel in their three-novel paperback volume A Beatnik Trio.

To Russia With Lust - The Lady from L.U.S.T. #6

To Russia With Lust is the sixth of the Lady from L.U.S.T. sexy spy thrillers written by Gardner Francis Fox (1911-1986) using the pseudonym Rod Gray. It was published in 1968.

Eve Drum is an ace agent for an ultra-secret U.S. intelligence agency, L.U.S.T. (the League of Undercover Spies and Terrorists). Her latest mission requires her to break into the Soviet Embassy to steal a code book. Her theft is going smoothly until she realises there’s something going on in the adjoining bedroom. What’s going on is that a senior Soviet diplomat is having some bedroom fun with a gorgeous brunette named Magda. While they’re coupling the girl steals a notebook from the diplomat.

Eve figures the notebook is probably worth stealing as well. So of course she steals it.

Later that evening when she meets up with her controller she discovers that she hit the jackpot. The diplomat is Serge Akonov, and he’s important. The notebook is much more important. It contains the whereabouts of a fabulous fortune which Rommel tried to ship out of North Africa in 1943. The treasure is five billion dollars in gold bullion. Of course the bullion was stolen but the U.S. Government now decides it wants to steal that bullion. The idea of returning the gold to its rightful owners doesn’t occur to anyone.

Eve’s job is to get further information out of Akonov and if possible persuade him to defect. She doesn’t know how she’s going to do that but she figures that seducing him will be a good start. Seducing men is one of Eve’s special skills. Eve has seen Serge Akonov in action in the bedroom and she was mightily impressed by his sexual prowess. Seducing him should be very pleasant. Mixing sex with duty is one of the things that makes Eve love her job as a spy so much.

Before Akonov can be seduced it will be necessary to rescue Magda. She’s about to be executed for pilfering that notebook. So Eve pulls off a daring underwater rescue.

Seducing Akonov is easy. Eve poses as a guide for an exhibition of American art in Leningrad and makes sure she attracts lots of publicity by wearing scandalously revealing outfits. That should attract Akonov like a Pooh Bear to a honey pot, and it does. He is so taken by her that he invites her to an orgy. Eve likes orgies.

Persuading him to defect will be less easy, until she comes across something that will be the perfect lever. Of course then she has to get him out of the Soviet Union and the KGB is likely to make that rather difficult.

Finding that treasure proves be a challenge as well. It turns out that knowing where it’s supposed to be isn’t enough.

Fox had a solid formula worked out for both his Lady from L.U.S.T. and Cherry Delight thrillers. Get your heroine naked as often as possible, feature lots of moderately graphic (but not too graphic) sex and include plenty of thrilling violent action scenes. And make sure it all moves along at a breakneck pace. But most importantly, make sure that despite all the sex the book still works as an exciting spy thriller. Make sure to include all the required spy fiction ingredients - double-crosses, betrayals, divided loyalties. Include lots of fight scenes and gunplay and explosions. Include cool gadgets.

In this case the formula works perfectly. We get helicopters battling ships, assassins running about everywhere, underwater action scenes, rocket backpacks and then there’s Eve’s secret weapon. I won’t tell you where she hides it.

In between all the spy action Eve still finds time to have plenty of sex. She has plenty of energy. And she’s a very imaginative girl and she’s always wiling to expand her knowledge base. The sex is described in an engagingly lighthearted cheerful way and is never graphic.

I’ve previously reviewed the first two Lady from L.U.S.T. books Lust, Be a Lady Tonight and Lay Me Odds as well as the first Cherry Delight book, The Italian Connection. They’re all great fun.

To Russia With Lust is high-octane entertainment. Sexy but good-natured and with a perfectly serviceable spy thriller plot. Not to be taken too seriously, but still highly recommended.

Ice City of the Gorgon

Ice City of the Gorgon is a science fiction novel by Richard S. Shaver (1907-1975) and Chester S. Geier (1921-1990), originally published in Amazing Stories in 1948.

As well as being science fiction this is also a lost world tale, one of my favourite genres.

A US Navy maritime patrol aircraft is engaged in a search in the Antarctic. A similar aircraft was reported missing a few days earlier. There is little hope of finding the two missing crew members alive but Lieutenant Rick Stacey and Lieutenant jg Phil Tobin are determined to try. They find the wreckage of the missing aircraft. No-one could have survived such a crash. And then Stacey’s plane suffers engine failure. It seems that Stacey and Tobin are destined for an icy grave as well. They do however manage to make an emergency landing.

And they find something very odd. A series of pillars, which they initially assume are pillars of ice. In the distance is what looks like a city. And inside the pillars are people. The first pillar they come to contains a beautiful naked girl. She has been chained. The other pillars all contain people as well.

The pillars are not made of ice but of some mysterious transparent substance. The most startling thing of all is that the people inside the pillars are still alive.

Things get stranger. A huge disembodied head appears, with snake-like protuberances. Rick Stacey knows his Greek mythology well enough for the similarities to the Gorgon to occur to him. And he’s on the right track. Rick and Phil are imprisoned in pillars as well, and Rick discovers that he communicate telepathically with the beautiful naked girl. She’s a princess. Her name is Verla. Rick realises that he’s going to fall hopelessly in love with her.

That disembodied head really was the origin of the Gorgon legend, but it is not of this world.

Then the high priestess Koryl appears. She’s just as gorgeous as Verla, except that she’s evil. And she clearly intends to seduce poor Rick. There’s a major power struggle going on in the city, and it’s complicated. There’s Verla, there’s Koryl, there’s Koryl’s lover Zarduc and there’s the Gorgon and they all have their own agendas.

Maybe it would be more sensible for Rick and Phil to try to escape. Their plane is still operational. But it’s not every day that a guy like Rick meets a stunning nude princess and it has an effect on him. He has to help her. Which means getting mixed up in that power struggle. The most difficult thing will be to prevent Koryl from enticing him into her bed.

Rick is a fairy standard pulp hero type and most of the characters are pretty much stock characters.

The style is pulpy and breathless, which is fine by me. The pacing is pleasingly brisk.

There’s nothing terribly startling here although the use of Greek mythology references is clever enough. But you have a brave hero, a beautiful virtuous princess in distress, a beautiful evil high priestess, a frightening monster, an exotic setting, a lost city, a labyrinth of tunnels under the city, a portal between dimensions, flying bubble cars, swordplay, knife fights, plenty of action and mayhem, a bit of sexiness. With those ingredients any halfway decent author could hardly go wrong, and Geier and Shaver are clearly quite competent. The result is lots of fun.

I liked Ice City of the Gorgon. Recommended.

Ice City of the Gorgon has been re-issued by Armchair Fiction in one of their excellent two-novel paperback editions, paired with Lester Del Rey’s When the World Tottered.

John Gardner's The Liquidator

The Liquidator, published in 1964, was the first of the Boysie Oakes spy thrillers. It was in fact the first work of fiction by Englishman John Gardner (1926-2007) who is perhaps now better remembered for having written more James Bond novels than Ian Fleming.

Ian Fleming earned some notoriety among disapproving critics with his habit of dropping brand names of luxury goods into the Bond novels. Within the first couple of pages of The Liquidator Gardner has dropped more brand name than Fleming would in an entire novel. Gardner does it so often that we immediately suspect that he’s having fun with us. That impression is confirmed when we discover that his spy hero, Boysie Oakes, is also a British secret agent with a licence to kill. Bond had one minor weakness - a fear of flying. Sure enough Boysie is afraid of flying as well.

And as the novel opens Boysie (his actual name is Brian Oakes but nobody calls him anything but Boysie) is off to the Riviera for a weekend of fun and sex with his boss’s secretary Iris, so he’s a womaniser as well. In fact a more shameless womaniser than Bond.

While Bond is routinely described as being good-looking but with a rather cruel mouth Boysie is good-looking but with rather cruel eyes.

Gardner is indeed having fun with us, and will have a great deal of fun turning the Bond formula on its head.

Bond does indeed have a licence to kill and he is prepared to do so if it’s necessary. He does not enjoy killing. There are times in the Bond stories when he dislikes it very much. Bond is a killer, but not a conscienceless killer. Boysie on the other hand thoroughly enjoys killing. He has no conscience at all. Mostyn realised this the first time he encountered Boysie, during the war. He saw Boysie kill two men. It was in the line of duty but Mostyn knew there could be no mistaking the positive joy in Boysie’s eyes.

Some years later, in 1956 in fact, Mostyn was a senior member of one of Britain’s intelligence agencies. A major espionage scandal had just erupted. The two spies involved had been suspected but there had been no evidence against them until it was too late. Mostyn’s superior decided that the best way to avoid such unpleasant situations in the future was to forget all this sentimental nonsense about rules of evidence and presumption of innocence and the rule of law. The best thing to do would be simply to liquidate suspected spies. Of course the Prime Minister and the Cabinet and the public might not approve, so it would all have to be done secretly. Mostyn is given the job of setting up a kind of government version of Murder Inc. Of course finding suitable personnel could be tricky. You’d need someone with no conscience whatsoever, someone who genuinely enjoyed killing people. And then Mostyn remembers Boysie. He does some digging around and is convinced that Boysie has committed several murders. The important thing is that he’s never been caught. He’s obviously clever as well as ruthless. Boysie becomes the British Government’s unofficial hitman.

Mostyn is not happy at all to discover that Boysie and Iris have gone away for a dirty weekend together. It has major security implications.

Boysie is looking forward to a weekend of bedroom bliss but it doesn’t turn out that way. Things start to go wrong when he leaves the hotel to buy cigarettes and meets a gorgeous blonde named Coral. The next thing he knows he’s getting hit over the head and knocked unconscious. He wakes up to find that he’s a prisoner (along with his blonde lady friend). He has no idea who was kidnapped him or why but he soon figures out that this is going to be a very unpleasant experience. That proves to be the case, although he does at least get to have sex with the blonde.

Things get worse. Having escaped from imminent death he finds that he’s been activated. He has an assignment. And he’s really not in the mood for it. He’s been beaten up and terrorised and he’s badly shaken and rather frightened and very confused. There are very nasty people trying to kill him. He’s so upset that he’s not even sure if he will be able to perform in the bedroom with Iris.

The fact is that Boysie is not a super secret agent. He’s a good shot and he’s had some training but he’s not a superb fighting machine. His one qualification for the job is his willingness to kill anyone he’s been told to kill. His job is to kill people whom Mostyn considers to be security risks (some of whom might well be innocent of any actual wrongdoing). Boysie’s victims are invariably unarmed and they have no idea that they’ve been targeted for liquidation. Boysie kills efficiently and he’s good at making his kills appear to be accidents or suicides but he’s effective because his victims don’t know what’s coming and are totally unprepared to fight back.

While Bond is an old-fashioned patriot Boysie took the job because it paid well and had attractive fringe benefits. He doesn’t kill for Queen and Country. He’s in it for the money. And the women.

Boysie isn’t particular brave. He doesn’t like the idea of being shot at himself. He doesn’t like that idea one little bit.

So he’s very much an anti-hero. He’s an absolutely deplorable human being. But we can’t help liking him. He’s a bit like Flashman. We know he’s a rotter, we know he’s a wrong ’un, but he provides us with a great deal of amusement. And, as is the case with Flashman, his total shamelessness and his unapologetic acceptance of his outrageous character flaws is oddly appealing. We like Boysie because he know he’s no hero.

And then we get halfway through the book and there’s a major revelation and we find that we’ve been cleverly and wittily deceived. Things are not at all as they appeared to be and we have to revise our assumptions. Boysie is indeed a scoundrel, but he’s not the type of scoundrel we thought he was.

The Liquidator could I suppose he described as a spy spoof but it doesn’t have the tone normally associated with spy spoof. It’s a very amusing book but it tends more towards black comedy rather than high camp. Gardner doesn’t try too hard to go for laughs. He lets the humour develop naturally out of the desperate situations in which Boysie lands himself. It’s more a wickedly sly satire that has fun twisting the conventions of spy fiction, rather than an outrageous campfest. Don’t be misled by that cover that describes it as zany. Zany is not the word I’d use. This is not Carry On Spying. The humour is rather more sophisticated than that.

It really does remind me a great deal of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books. It does for the James Bond-style of spy fiction what the Flashman books did for Victorian tales of adventure and military glory. And It’s worth pointing out that The Liquidator was published five years before the first of the Flashman books. Both The Liquidator and Flashman tapped into the sceptical cynical zeitgeist of the 60s.

The Liquidator is really rather clever in the way it cheerfully and wittily mocks the spy genre, while demonstrating a sound understanding of the conventions of that genre. Highly recommended.

Gardner eventually wrote eight Boysie Oakes books and I’m now rather keen to find out what else Boysie gets up to.

Erle Stanley Gardner’s Turn On the Heat

Turn On the Heat, published under the name A.A. Fair in 1940, was the second of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Cool and Lam private eye novels.

Gardner achieved enormous success in the 30s with Perry Mason but he started his career in the pulps so a series of hardboiled private eye novels was just the sort of thing he would be likely to be good at. And he was. The Cool and Lam PI novels were extremely successful.

It’s not absolutely essential but it helps a good deal if you start with the first of the Cool and Lam novels, The Bigger They Come (published in 1939). It gives you useful backstory information on this unusual PI partnership. Bertha Cool is middle-aged, overweight, penny-pinching and ruthless. Donald Lam is a young disbarred lawyer down on his luck but he proves to be the ideal operative for the Bertha Cool Detective Agency. Donald is a runt. He couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag. He’s an easy guy to push around. But pushing Donald Lam around is a seriously bad idea. He’s smart and devious and he knows nasty ways to get even.

Turn On the Heat starts with a fairly routine missing persons case. Dr Listig and his wife disappeared twenty years earlier. Now someone wants to find Mrs Listig. The obvious place for Donald to start looking is the small town in which the couple used to live, Oakview. They were part of the younger set in what was then a thriving town. Oakview isn’t thriving any longer.

Donald does pick up the trail and then the plot twists begin. Finding Mrs Listig is easy. Much too easy. Cool and Lam don’t have to find Dr Listig but they do find him and that complicates things. A murder complicates things even further. And that’s not the end of it. There’s blackmail and political chicanery.

Bertha and Donald don’t always see eye to eye. Mutual deception and manipulation are par for the course for these two. They also both tend to take the view that if they know something that doesn’t mean they should share that knowledge. Bertha doesn’t always know what Donald is up to and Donald often doesn’t know what game Bertha is playing. Despite this they make an effective team. They’re both very good detectives.

Erle Stanley Gardner had been a prominent trial lawyer and he knew the law from the inside. And the law didn’t impress him. He thought the system was rigged against accused persons. Which is why his lawyer hero Perry Mason feels justified in using every trick in the book to protect a client. Cool and Lam take the same view. The client’s interests come first and if that means lying to the police and the DA that’s no problem. In Gardner’s novels the police tend to be either over zealous and unethical or they’re lazy, inefficient and corrupt. District Attorneys are ambitious political hacks. The police and the DA’s office don’t care about justice, they just want somebody to get convicted. That’s even more true of the Cool and Lam books. The police and the DA’s office are obstacles that it’s best to avoid and it’s also best to tell them nothing unless you have to. If you have to tell them something a smart lie is usually a better policy than the truth.

This gives Gardner’s crime fiction of the 30s and 40s a decidedly cynical hardboiled edge, and even a touch of noir fiction sensibilities.

As usual with Gardner the plotting is intricate and effective.

The real drawcards here though are Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. They really are delightful characters. They have lots of character flaws but one can’t help liking them and being amused by them. There’s plenty of barbed hardboiled dialogue, and there’s humour as well.

And there are hints of romance. Bertha is constantly amazed by Donald’s ability to charm women. In this case he romances Marian Dunton, a reporter on the local Oakview paper and also, incidentally, a key witness to that murder. Is Donald merely using Marian or does he really care for her. It’s hard to be sure and it’s probably a bit of both. He’s cynical enough to manipulate women but decent enough to try not to hurt them.

Gardner used small California towns as settings to great effect in some of the Perry Mason stories. It works extremely well here. I think it’s fair to say that Gardner was not a big fan of small towns.

Turn On the Heat is a fine fast-paced hardboiled PI yarn with an excellent mystery plot as well. What more could one ask for? Highly recommended.

Robert van Gulik’s The Red Pavilion

The Red Pavilion, published in 1961, is one of Robert van Gulik’s wonderful Judge Dee mysteries. It follows the usual pattern, with Judge Dee investigating three cases at the same time. And this novel includes a locked-room mystery!

Judge Dee had figured in a classic 18th-century Chinese detective novel, Dee Goong An, which van Gulik translated into English as Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee. The character of Judge Dee was based on a real 7th century magistrate of the Tang Dynasty. Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee was a major success and van Gulik subsequently wrote a series of modern Judge Dee novels, written partly at least in conformity with the conventions of the 18th-century Chinese detective story.

The Red Pavilion opens with Judge Dee and his faithful reformed-criminal assistant Ma Joong passing through Paradise Island. Paradise Island is an entertainment resort. The entertainment comprises high-stakes gambling and high-class prostitutes. It’s all perfectly legal and while Judge Dee doesn’t personally approve he takes the sensible attitude that prostitution conducted in an orderly manner is overall a benefit to society.

There’s a festival going on and the only accommodation available is the Red Pavilion. It turns out to be most comfortable although the judge is puzzled by the fact that the interior doors haver locks on him. It is explained to him that those who rent the Red Pavilion value their privacy.

The judge encounters a young woman on his verandah. She’s hard to miss. She’s very beautiful and she’s wearing a robe so thin as to be almost transparent. At the moment the robe is wet so it’s entirely transparent and the judge notes that she is wearing nothing whatever underneath the robe. Dee is mildly annoyed until the young woman informs him that she is the current Queen Flower. The Queen Flower is selected from amongst the island’s most celebrated courtesans. It’s not jut an empty honour. It carries great social weight on an island devoted to pleasure. The reigning Queen Flower is not a person one should offend and Dee has great respect for the social conventions. After making sure that Dee has had a really good look at her near-naked body she departs but the judge notices that she seems nervous.

Dee intended to stay just one night on Paradise Island but his old friend Lo, the local magistrate, asks him to take over the investigation of a case of suicide. A young man named Lee, a newly appointed Academician, cut his throat over love for the courtesan Autumn Flower. Autumn Flower turns out to be none other than the Queen Flower Dee has already met. It’s a straightforward case. Young men kill themselves over women all the time. And Autumn Flower is an exceptionally beautiful woman well versed in the art of love so it’s not unreasonable to suppose that she could drive a man to madness and suicide. It all seems very straightforward until Dee makes a horrible discovery in the Red Pavilion. The discovery of this corpse raises serious doubts in Dee’s mind about the supposed suicide of Academician Lee.

Dee is even more concerned to learn that there have in fact been three mysterious deaths in the Red Pavilion. All appeared to be suicides, but Dee now suspects that all three were cases of murder. Dee starts to wonder about a few other things as well, such as the rapid departure of an important local official.

Dee painstakingly constructs fairy satisfactory theories to account for all three deaths, but there’s always at least one clue for which the theories do not account. Those clues simply cannot be accounted for at all. That means that Dee’s theories must be partially, or even completely, wrong.

The three murders are all related in some way but are they directly related? Is there one killer or several? Dee is not sure. And this is a Robert van Gulik Judge Dee mystery, which means it is an attempt to conform party to the conventions of the classic western puzzle-plot mystery and partly to the conventions of Chinese detective stories. The reader cannot be entirely certain that assumptions about the solution based on the conventions of western mysteries will prove to be correct.

There are both physical clues and psychological clues in abundance. Autopsies conducted on two of the victims provide Dee with headaches because they reveal things he expected and things he didn’t expect. The Red Pavilion itself provides some important but deceptive clues.

With van Gulik you also get more than just a mystery. You get some fascinating glimpses into Chinese history, culture and jurisprudence (subjects on which van Gulik was extremely knowledgeable), an occasional aside on the subject of Chinese art (on which van Gulik was an acknowledged authority) and some reflections on love, sex and marriage (and van Gulik wrote an important scholarly work on that subject as well).

In this case you certainly get an intricate plot. There are three locked-room puzzles. Two are childishly simple. The third is much trickier. This book is not really a locked-room mystery in the sense of having a locked-room puzzle as the central element. It does however serve a vital plot purpose. The plotting is quite effective with an ending that probably won’t be at all the sort of ending you’re expecting.

As always Ma Joong provides some entertainment. He falls in love with a courtesan named Silver Fairy but that gets complicated as well. In this novel love and sex make life very complicated. More fun is provided by Crab and Shrimp, two oddly likeable strong-arm men employed by the island’s warden.

This is van Gulik at the top of his game - a good mystery but a novel that offers a bit more than a straightforward mystery. Very highly recommended.

You might also want to check out TomCat’s glowing review at Beneath the Stains of Time.

Bruce Graeme’s House With Crooked Walls

House With Crooked Walls, published in 1942, was the second of Bruce Graeme’s book-themed Theodore Terhune mysteries. The first, the delightful Seven Clues in Search of a Crime, played around with the conventions of the genre in a very clever manner. House With Crooked Walls is a whole different ball game. It starts off appearing to be a gothic chiller about a haunted house. In fact it is a genuine mystery but that takes a while to become apparent.

Mild-mannered bookseller and occasional amateur detective Theodore “Tommy” Terhune is approached by a very exotic South American, Dr Salvaterra. He has an equally exotic twin sister. Dr Salvaterra is considering the purchase of House-on-the-Hill, sometimes referred to by the locals as the House With Crooked Walls. This very old house has a very evil reputation. It has been untenanted for decades and no-one will go near the place.

Dr Salvaterra wants to buy the house not in spite of its sinister reputation but because of it. He is a scholar, a student of the psychic and the occult. He wants to find out just what it is about the house that fills people with dread. He needs Terhune’s help since Terhune is reputed to possess a very impressive collection of books, new and old, on local Kentish history and on notable houses of the district. And of course Terhune has his reputation as an amateur detective. Terhune’s job, for which he will be handsomely paid, is to discover everything that can be discovered about the history of the house and its occupants over the years.

Terhune is intrigued because he has to admit to himself that he doesn’t know why the locals shun the house. The locals don’t know either. There are no colourful legends attached to House-on-the-Hill. People just hate and fear the house.

The first two-thirds of the book is occupied by Terhune’s efforts as a literary and historical detective. With some help from the acid-tongued but beautiful and oddly fascinating Julia MacMunn he finds out that the house has been associated with two very mysterious disappearances, a couple of sudden unexplained deaths and a certain amount of scandal. The most notable scandal dates back to 1074 and involves a wicked monk named Robert the Hermit (and you can’t get much more authentically gothic than wicked monks).

At this stage there has been no crime committed. It is possible that crimes were committed at House-on-the-Hill in the past although that is by no means certain either. Robert the Hermit disappeared nine centuries earlier but he may simply have left the district. The odd deaths may not have had any sinister aspects to them at all.

What is happening is that Theodore Terhune and Julia are becoming more and more drawn under the spell of that old house. Perhaps there were crimes committed there, perhaps not, but the history of house is full of bizarre incidents and extraordinary characters. There are historical puzzles to solve. Theodore loves this sort of stuff. Julia thought she wasn’t the least bit interested in such matters but her curiosity has been kicked into overdrive.

The house had been in a very dilapidated state. Salvaterra has had it magnificently restored. Now that the house is full of light and life is it still sinister. Terhune thinks it is, in a way, but he also thinks that he’s being irrational.

Of course eventually we do get a modern puzzle to add to the historical puzzles, and there is the possibility of some ink between those long ago events and events in the present day. But again the matter is ambiguous. Everything in this book is ambiguous.

There’s also the question of romance. Theodore and Julia have been thrown together and when you add a shared obsession the possibility of romance is obvious. But Bruce Graeme does not like being obvious.

And of course there are books. Terhune is a man who looks to books for answers but in this case the books just seem to raise further questions.

Terhune is a likeable although very bookish young man. Julia is a wonderful character - she has all the ingredients to make her a nasty piece of work and yet she isn’t. She has her own demons to wrestle with. She’s a wildly contradictory but totally believable character.

Is it fair play? The answer to that has to be ambiguous as well. Graeme was trying to write a mystery but he was consciously trying to make it unconventional. If you expect this novel to conform rigidly to the conventions of golden age detective fiction then you’re misunderstanding the author’s intentions. But, as in his first Theodore Terhune novel, Graeme might play with the conventions, he might play with them quite a bit, but he isn’t trying to overthrow them.

House With Crooked Walls is a gothic novel and a detective story and (very much) a book for bibliophiles. I thought it was odd but rather wonderful. Highly recommended.

The Theodore Terhune mysteries have been reprinted by Moonstone Press, with introductions by J.F. Norris.

Robert van Gulik's The Chinese Nail Murders

Robert van Gulik (1910-1967) was a Dutch diplomat, orientalist scholar and writer whose first literary endeavour was his translation into English of the 18th century Chinese detective novel Dee Goong An. Published as Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee in 1949 it was a major success. The Chinese novel had been based on the career of the famous real life magistrate and statesman of the Tang Dynasty Dee Jen-djieh (630-700). The success of Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee inspired van Gulik to try his hand at a series of detective novels featuring Judge Dee. His idea was to keep as much of the flavour of traditional Chinese detective fiction as possible (such as the device of having Judge Dee working on three more or less unrelated cases simultaneously) while making his books more palatable for modern readers by largely dropping the supernatural elements.

The fifth of van Gulik’s Judge Dee novels was The Chinese Nail Murders, published in 1961. Dee has just been appointed magistrate of Pei-chow in northern China. In Imperial China the magistrate acted as a combination of judge, jury, district attorney and police detective. As usual Dee is assisted by the faithful Sergeant Hoong and his three underlings Ma Joong, Chiao Tai and Tao Gan (all reformed criminals).

And as usual Judge Dee has three cases to deal with, the most troubling being the discovery of the headless body of a woman. The woman’s husband has been accused of her murder. Judge Dee always pays close attention to the scene of a crime and he finds a number of puzzling items.

There is also the disappearance of a young woman in broad daylight. While his investigations into the first two cases are still proceeding the third case comes along, the poisoning murder of a very respected citizen. He may have left a very cryptic (and clever) dying clue.

There are some tenuous links between at least two of the cases. There’s also a minor case involving blackmail and two girls sold into prostitution which sheds unexpected light on one of the main cases. Of course it’s possible that other links between the three cases may come to light.

Judge Dee and his assistants undertake their investigations in a rigorous and logical manner. Autopsies are performed. Care is taken that crime scenes are not prematurely disturbed and the crime scenes are thoroughly searched for clues. Witnesses are interviewed. All possible leads, no matter how irrelevant they might seem, are followed up. Most importantly Judge Dee does not jump to conclusions. He is very much aware that things are not always exactly how they seem to be. In other words the novel can be seen as a kind of police procedural.

While the Dee Goong An was set in the days of the Tang Dynasty, in the seventh century, it was written a thousand years later and the historical background was a mixture of various time periods. In his Judge Dee novels van Gulik was also not overly concerned to get the historical details of the Tang period absolutely correct although he was certainly knowledgeable enough about Chinese history to have done so. He wanted to preserve the same mixture of elements of different historical eras that he had found in the Dee Goong An.

Chinese detective tales often had very strong supernatural elements, with vital evidence being provided by the testimony of ghosts. Van Gulik realised that modern readers of detective stories would be alienated by such devices but at the same time he was writing about historical periods in which the supernatural was taken for granted. In The Chinese Nail Murders Judge Dee discovers that sorcery is still practised in Pei-chow. This plays no actual rôle in the story but does add a hint of an exotic flavour. There is a kind of prologue however which contains much stronger hints of the supernatural.

Van Gulik’s Judge Dee novels were detective fiction but they were also historical fiction. There is absolutely no point in an author’s writing historical fiction unless he makes a genuine attempt to convey the differentness of the historical period he has chosen. If the characters are just 21st century characters wearing historical costumes the whole thing is a waste of time. Which is why it is no longer possible to write historical fiction. Today publishers insist that the characters must be 21st century characters with 21st century attitudes, values and social and sexual mores. In the 1950s and 1960s it was however still possible to attempt actual historical fiction and van Gulik does make a genuine attempt to convince us that we are reading about a different culture in which people really do have beliefs, values and social and sexual mores that are sharply differentiated from ours.

In The Chinese Nail Murders we encounter a system of criminal justice that is in its own way efficient and just but there are certain things that Judge Dee takes for granted that would hardly be accepted today - such as flogging uncooperative witnesses. And a key point in the novel hinges on a very dramatic difference between the Imperial Chinese legal system and modern systems (although I can’t offer you any hint as to what that difference is without revealing a vital spoiler). Judge Dee can be merciful but he can also be (to modern ways of thinking) extraordinarily severe. And even his ideas on being merciful will seem alien in many ways.

Judge Dee is a devoted family man and loves all three of his wives. He loves them in his own peculiar unsentimental way. For Dee everything comes down to duty - duty to family, to one’s ancestors and to the Imperial Government. Personal happiness is of little importance. Dee is not bothered by prostitution but he is shocked and enraged by the thought of a man having sex with his fiancée before the wedding.

Van Gulik took many of his plot elements from ancient case-books or from traditional Chinese detective stories and he very deliberately tried to emulate the style and structure of those stories although adapted to modern tastes (Chinese detective stories were usually inverted mysteries but van Gulik preferred the more conventional western method of concealing the murderer’s identity until the end and he tried to make his novels as fair-play as he could). The somewhat sparse and formal style of his novels is a conscious choice.

The Chinese Nail Murders offers much to enjoy - three clever murder plots, an exotic setting, a unique detective hero and a glimpse into a very different culture. Highly recommended.

Bruce Graeme's Seven Clues in Search of a Crime

Seven Clues in Search of a Crime is a 1941 mystery by Bruce Graeme and it’s a bookish mystery - the amateur detective hero is a bookseller. It’s the first of his eight Theodore Terhune mysteries.

Graham Montague Jeffries (1900-1982) was a fairly prolific English writer, mostly in the crime genre. He wrote under a variety of pseudonyms, including Bruce Graeme. He achieved a great deal of early success with his Blackshirt novels (written under the Bruce Graeme pseudonym). Blackshirt was part of that rather appealing literary genre, the gentleman rogue. It’s a genre that began with Raffles and would reach a peak of popularity with the Saint and the Baron. Blackshirt was more than just a reformed thief, he was a reformed thief turned crime writer.

The idea of writing books about people who are involved with books was one that seemed to obsess Jeffries and it was a fruitful obsession.

The hero of Seven Clues in Search of a Crime is not just a bookseller but also an aspiring writer (and naturally he is an aspiring writer of detective stories). Theodore I. Terhune (known to his friends as Tommy) has a bookshop in Bray-in-the-Marsh in Kent. Bray-in-the-Marsh is the kind of sleepy idyllic small English town (not much more than a large village really) which you just know is going to be the setting for murder and mayhem.

We learn early on that there is more to Tommy Terhune than meets the eye. He looks like a very harmless, very meek, bespectacled youngish man. In fact he looks exactly like a mild-mannered bookseller. Looks can however be a bit deceptive. When he encounters a young woman who is being attacked by no less than five ruffians he has no hesitation in leaping from his bicycle and wading into the attack. He manages to hold off the attackers until a policeman arrives. As you might expect, the young woman (whose name is Helena Armstrong) now thinks that Tommy is pretty darned wonderful.

The puzzle that remains is why Helena was attacked. The ruffians seemed to be looking for something in her car, but she had nothing whatsoever that was worth stealing. Helena is the paid companion of Lady Kylstone. Now it might be plausible that the attackers mistook Helena for Lady Kylstone except for the even more puzzling detail that they made it obvious that Helena really was their target.

Tommy Terhune might have thought no more about this odd incident. After all Helena is quite unharmed. Then he discovers a clue. It’s a clue that interests Lady Kylstone almost as much as it interests Terhune. It concerns the Kylstone family burial vault but why anyone would be interested in that vault is more than anyone can say.

And then, quite by accident, Tommy uncovers another clue. This clue interests Detective-Inspector Sampson of Scotland Yard a good deal. Sampson cannot actually do anything about the perplexing events in Bray-in-the-Marsh. The Chief Constable of the district has not asked Scotland Yard for assistance and it would be most improper for Sampson to start working on a case in such circumstances. On the other hand Sampson points out that there’s nothing to stop Tommy Terhune from doing a bit of investigating on a purely amateur basis, and if he should report any findings to Sampson on a purely informal basis - well that be hardly be improper, would it?

Before long Tommy finds a third clue.

What makes this such an interesting (and slightly unconventional) example of golden age detective fiction is that Terhune soon has quite a collection of clues but there is no crime to which to link those clues. There’s no real evidence that any crime has been committed. On the other hand the clues definitely point to a crime of some kind. Possibly a crime in the past, or possibly a crime yet to be committed. What the nature of that crime might be is yet another mystery.

The author manages pretty successfully to keep both Terhune and the reader mystified. Are there any suspects? How can you have suspects when you don’t know what the crime is and you aren’t even certain that there is a crime? How can you tell if someone has a motive for an unknown crime?

This is not a comic detective story but it does have a great deal of wit and a certain playfulness. Bruce Graeme is having quite a bit of fun playing around a little with the conventions of the genre. The reader, like Tommy Terhune, has no clear idea what’s going on but like Terhune we’re having a fine time playing the game. And Graeme plays fair with us to the extent that we have at our disposal the same clues that Terhune has. The difficulty is in finding the common thread that ties together such disparate clues as the key to the Kylstone family vault, an obscure genealogical manuscript (once again the author’s interest in books comes to the fore), a company that manufactures automobile tyres, an American gangster and a woman known as Blondie. The common thread is there and all seven clues do finally fit together.

In the course of his adventure Terhune will meet two women. There’s Helena Armstrong, a thoroughly charming woman. And then here’s Julia MacMunn. She’s definitely a vamp (and a very entertaining vamp). Terhune is attracted to both of them. Which of them he prefers is another puzzle that he will have to unravel.

I’ve read and enjoyed a couple of Bruce Graeme’s Blackshirt novels, Blackshirt And Alias Blackshirt, but I had no idea that he’d written conventional detective stories (although it could of course be argued that there’s nothing very conventional about Seven Clues in Search of a Crime). The good news is that Moonstone Press have reprinted several of the Theodore Terhune mysteries. It was J.F. Norris’s glowing review of Seven Clues in Search of a Crime that inspired me to grab a copy, which proved to be a very good decision. He also contributed the introductions to these reprints. There's also a very positive review at the Cross Examining Crime blog.

Seven Clues in Search of a Crime is a delight from start to finish. It plays around with the conventions of the genre whilst still respecting them. It’s clever without being too much in love with its own cleverness. Very highly recommended.

Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Stuttering Bishop

Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Stuttering Bishop is a Perry Mason mystery published in 1936.

It opens with a Church of England bishop from Australia asking Perry Mason for some legal advice regarding manslaughter and the statute of limitations. Which is a slightly odd thing for a bishop to do. If he is a bishop. You see this bishop stutters, and as everyone knows bishops don’t stutter.

The case, as it develops, involves a rich man named Brownley whose son contracts a marriage the old boy doesn’t approve of. There is indeed a case of manslaughter involved, and there’s a grand-daughter. Or rather there are too many grand-daughters. And there’s an enormous inheritance, and of course there’s murder. Paul Drake of the Drake Detective Agency is as usual involved but there are other private detectives poking around as well and they may be up to no good.

There are alibis aplenty, there are all sorts of questions of identity, there are witnesses but there’s the matter of what they actually saw and more importantly what it meant. There are lots of ruthless people and lots of tangled motives.

It’s pretty unusual for Perry Mason to get mixed up in a fist-fight. It’s even more unusual for Della Street to be involved in a fist-fight or involved with guns. But both those things happen in this story (and Della gives a pretty good account of herself). There’s quite a bit of action in this story and it’s worth remembering that Gardner started his writing career as a member of the hardboiled Black Mask school. And this is quite a hardboiled story at times.

It is usual for Perry and Paul Drake to indulge in a few minor activities that are perhaps not strictly legal, such as breaking and entering and burglary, and of course they do so in this tale. And Della does a few mildly naughty things as well, just little things like grand larceny. This is a 1930s Perry Mason story after all.

This time Mason gets himself in really deep trouble by, as always, not worrying too much about legal ethics. He’s in so deep even he thinks he could end up being disbarred or prosecuted or both and although he has some nice theories they have holes in them and he has no idea how to plug those holes. The only way out involves doing something he really dislikes doing.

The courtroom scenes are, as is quite often the case in the Perry Mason novels, involve preliminary hearings rather than actual trials (perhaps because this gives Gardner the chance to allow Mason to play a bit more fast and loose with procedures than would vie the case in a trial). He doesn’t face District Attorney Hamilton Burger in court but he does face him behind the scenes.

The solution is complex, with a lot of plot strands that somehow have to be woven together. Fortunately Gardner does this pretty well.

The Case of the Stuttering Bishop is typical 1930s Erle Stanley Gardner with Perry Mason flying by the seat of his pants and it’s hugely enjoyable.

I’m continuing with my project of comparing Perry Mason novels with the television adaptations from the 1957-66 TV series. My review of the relevant episode can be found here at Cult TV Lounge.

Erle Stanley Gardner’s pulp fiction, part 2 - the Lester Leith stories

Erle Stanley Gardner is best remembered for the Perry Mason mysteries. Aficionados of golden age detective fiction also know him as the creator of other series characters such as private detectives Cool and Lam and DA Doug Selby. Before achieving immense success as a novelist Gardner had been an unbelievably prolific writer of short stories and novelettes for the pulps and had created several other series detectives who gained huge followings. One of the most popular was Lester Leith who appeared in around sixty short stories between 1929 and 1943.

Lester Leith is a gentleman thief. He’s also a hero rogue rather in the style of the Saint. Such heroes were immensely popular in the 1920s (Blackshirt being a prime example). He is a thief who preys on other thieves. He is a rich man and most of the money he steals goes to charity although, like the Saint, he keeps enough of his ill-gotten gains to maintain a very comfortable lifestyle for himself.

And as is the case with the Saint the police go to great lengths to bring Leith to justice but he’s always one step ahed of them. They have even planted a police spy on him, posing as his valet. This amuses Leith. He nicknames the spy Scuttle. While his charitable donations are sincere he seems to be motivated primarily by the sheer joy of irritating the police. Of course Leith has a nemesis, or at least a would-be nemesis, in the person of Sergeant Ackley. Ackley regards himself as a pretty clever fellow and he is convinced that sooner or later he is going to catch Leith. The trouble is that while Ackley is sneaky and devious the truth is that he’s not all that smart, and perhaps not all that honest.

Ackley’s invariable method is to get his spy to tempt Leith into attempting to solve a carefully selected case

False Alarm was published in the 5th November 1932 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly.
Leith has become interested in a crime involving a phoney fireman. While a fire raged in one house the foeman slipped next door and cracked the safe belonging to George Crampp, a retired businessman who claims to be penniless but who is suspected of having had a considerable amount of dishonestly acquired money in that safe. For this case Leith will need to buy up every single fireman’s costume in every single costumers’ in the city. He will also need a hundred dollar bill soaked in gasoline, crumpled up and then ironed flat. And last but by no means least, he will need to find an attractive red-headed woman with an evil temper and some training in boxing.

Sergeant Ackley thinks that this time he is finally going to nail Leith. Leith has spotted a clue that no-one in the police department has spotted and he has a fair idea of the solution to the mystery, and how to profit from it. It’s a typically clever little Gardner story.

The Seven Sinister Sombreros is another Lester Leith case, published in Detective Story in February 1939. This time Sergeant Ackley hopes to use the case of the drugged guard to trap Lester Leith.

A man named Bonneguard has formed a new political party, or perhaps it would be truer to say a new political cult. Whether Bonneguard has any actual interest in politics is uncertain but his new party is proving to be very profitable for him. Profitable enough that he has over $100,000 in the safe in his home. Or rather he had $100,000. The money has now been stolen. It was not just a guard who was drugged - two guards and a guard dog were immobilised but the source of the drug is a mystery.

Leith issues his instructions to Scuttle - to allow Leith to save the case Scuttle must procure for him a monkey wrench, half a dozen 1936 Fords, a ukulele, some cowpunchers, seven cowboy hats and a miniature replica surfboard. And of course, a hula dancer. In fact, several hula dancers.

There are really two plots here. There’s the search for the solution to the crime and then there’s Leith incredibly devious scheme to relieve the thief of the money without getting caught himself. Both plots are intricately constructed, especially the latter. A very entertaining novelette.

Gardner’s genius lay in coming up with a successful formula and sticking to it while at the same time making his plots ingenious enough to prevent the formula from going stale. He had a formula for the Perry Mason books. And based on these two books it appears that he had devised a perfect formula for Lester Leith stories. Sergeant Ackley tries to tempt Leith into investigating a particular crime, Ackley sets a trap, Leith orders Scuttle to obtain a collection of outrageous props, Leith stays one step ahead of everybody and there is always a colourful dame in the case.

These are light-hearted stories combining humour with skilled plotting. They’re great fun. There is a paperback collection of some of the Lester Leith stories. It’s long out of print but copies can be found if you hunt around for them. I know nothing about and I have no idea which stories are included but based on the two Lester Leith stories I’ve now read it might be worth looking into.

Graham Greene's The Basement Room (AKA The Fallen Idol)

The Basement Room is a 1935 short story by Graham Greene and it’s best known for being the story on which Greene based his screenplay for Carol Reed’s superb 1948 film The Fallen Idol. The Basement Room is available in an edition along with Greene’s The Third Man.

A young boy named Philip lives in a large house in Belgravia. He has limited contact with his parents but that doesn’t worry him, because he has Baines. Baines is the butler. Baines is very fond of the boy. For his part Philip hero-worships Baines who regales him with stories of his adventurous youth in Africa (some of the stories may even be true). It would all be wonderful, except for the presence of Mrs Baines. Mrs Baines rules the household and has little time for boyish nonsense.

What Philip doesn’t realise is that Mrs Baines is as much a nightmare to Baines as she is to him. You see Baines has a lady friend. Which is a big secret that Philip must not tell Mrs Baines.

Philip is seven years old and he’s just beginning to discover life. And he doesn’t like it at all. The rules seem to be very complicated and there’s a lot of unpleasantness. Grown-ups don’t really seem to be all that happy. Grown-ups also have a lot of secrets and it’s very confusing for a young boy when he becomes privy to some of those secrets. Secrets can be very dangerous things. Keeping secrets can be dangerous and not keeping them can be dangerous also.

It’s a neat little story with a nice little sting in the tail. And it's recommended.

The film version most follows the short story until it gets to the end which has some subtle but actually very significant changes. It’s a fine short story but the film version is much richer.

You can find my review of the film version, The Fallen Idol, at Classic Movie Ramblings.

Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Curious Bride

The Case of the Curious Bride was the fifth of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason mysteries, appearing in 1934.

Perry Mason is of course famous for the flexibility of his legal ethics and in the early novels he pushes that flexility to extremes. He’s always careful not to cross the line into illegality but he sure does go very very close to that line. In this story he pulls some delightfully fancy tricks, persuading the Prosecution to torpedo its own case.

As usual Perry Mason gets involved before the murder takes place. A woman comes to his office to ask for legal advice of behalf of a friend. Obviously she is asking for the advice for herself and Mason makes it clear that he’s well aware of this and he’s not prepared to play such gamers. This hurts the woman’s pride and she storms out of the office. And then Mason, who despite being a lawyer does have a conscience, feels guilty. The woman needed help and he didn’t give it. So he decides he’s going to have to track her down before she gets herself into trouble.

Mason was certainly right to be worried that she’d get herself into trouble. Soon she’s facing a murder rap.

Rhoda Montaine’s problem is her marriage to Carl Montaine, a marriage that may or may not be invalid. This is because she presumed that her first husband Gregory Moxley was dead, but he’s far from dead and he’s going to be very troublesome. She has other problems as well. Carl’s father is a multi-millionaire, he dominates Carl completely and he does not approve of Rhoda. Carl himself is a big problem. Rhoda, a trained nurse, nursed him through a drug problem. He’s over the drug problem but it seems to have left his character even weaker than it already was. There’s also Dr Millsap, who is in love with Rhoda.

It’s no great surprise that Gregory Moxley winds up dead, permanently dead this time. Rhoda is the obvious suspect. The evidence seems overwhelming and Deputy D.A. Lucas can’t believe his luck - this time he can’t possibly lose, not even against Perry Mason.

Most lawyers faced with such clear-cut evidence against a client would despair but Perry Mason has some amazingly devious tricks up his sleeve this time. Seeing an unbreakable alibi destroyed is always fun but this novels offers a very clever variation on the theme. Of course it will only work if he can persuade the Deputy D.A. to walk into a trap, and there may be some minor ethical quibbles. In fact there may be some gigantic ethical quibbles.

And that marriage question will play a huge part in the trial as well.

District Attorney Hamilton Burger does not feature in this story. His first appearance will be in the sixth Perry Mason novel, The Case of the Counterfeit Eye. In The Case of the Curious Bride Perry’s adversary is Deputy D.A. John Lucas, a similar although perhaps slightly more abrasive character. While we’re used to seeing Perry play fast and lose with legal ethics it has to be said that Lucas comes up with some dirty tricks of his own. The question is whether he can play such games as well as Perry Mason plays them.

Neither Lieutenant Tragg nor Sergeant Holcomb appear in this story, in fact there is no significant part payed by any particular police officer. Della Street and Paul Drake on the other hand were regular characters in the novels right from the start.

Gardner really is in fine form in The Case of the Curious Bride. Courtroom scenes can be dull in the hands of lesser writers but they’re never a problem for Gardner - he knows how to build up to the inevitable display of legal pyrotechnics from Mason. We can see that Mason is about to pull a rabbit out of the hat but we have no more idea than the luckless Deputy D.A. as to how he’s going to do it. This is a lovely piece of plotting and a very very enjoyable tale. Highly recommended.

The Case of the Curious Bride was adapted for the second season of the Perry Mason TV series so I thought that having just read the book it would be fun to watch the episode immediately afterwards. You can read my thoughts on the TV adaptation at Cult TV Lounge.

Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case of the Buried Clock

The Case of the Buried Clock is a 1943 Perry Mason novel by Erle Stanley Gardner.

Harley Raymand, recovering from a war wound, is staying at the mountain cabin owned by banker Vincent Blane. Raymond has made a curious discovery. A buried clock. Why would anyone want to bury a clock? And the clock is still running. He also makes another discovery - a dead man in the cabin. The dead man is the husband of Blane’s daughter Millicent. He’s been helping himself to funds from Blane’s bank.

Since Millicent seems likely to strike the local sheriff as an obvious suspect Blane retains Perry Mason’s services. There’s actually a wide choice of suspects. There’s Millicent’s sister Adele, who hated the dead man. There’s a brother and sister, Burt and Lola Strague, and there’s wildlife photographer Rod Beaton. They were all on the scene. As was glamorous widow Myrna Payson.

Perry agreed to take the case because the clock angle intrigued him and he’s even more intrigued when he realises the clock is keeping sidereal time, not solar time. Setting a clock to do that is the kind of thing you’d do if you wanted to track the position of a star. Perry has no idea how that might tie in to the murder but he has a feeling that if he can find the connection he’ll crack the case. Also puzzling is the bullet. There isn’t one. There’s no exit wound so the bullet has to be in the body, but it isn’t. And then there are the tyre prints. And the family doctor who tells an amazing number of lies.

Deputy District Attorney McNair is young, ambitious and arrogant and he has a watertight case. He just can’t lose. If only Mason would stop carrying on about that damned clock.

There’s plenty of misdirection in this tale and Perry Mason (and Paul Drake) fall for quite a lot of it. The solution is more complicated, and more simple, than it appears to be.

Perry gets to express his feelings about police ethics, his view being that the police don’t have any. For their part Paul Drake and Della Street are a bit worried that Perry’s legal ethics seem to encompass everything from concealing witnesses to breaking and entering but when you work for Perry Mason you just have to get used to such things.

Perry likes to set traps for prosecutors to walk into but this time it seems like he may have met his match as he blunders into some very subtle traps laid by Deputy D.A. McNair. A lesser man might have been daunted but this sort of thing just gets Mason more motivated. He’s going to have to be very motivated indeed to win this case. Gardner always handles courtroom scenes with great skill and this book contains enough devious legal manoeuvrings to please fans.

Gardner’s method in the Perry Mason novels was to stick to the very successful formula he’d established but add enough twists to keep things fresh and interesting and in the 40s he was at the top of his game. It seems impossible that he can connect so many bizarre clues into a coherent plot but he does so.

The Case of the Buried Clock is not perhaps in the absolute top tier of Perry Mason stories but it’s still fine entertainment. Highly recommended.

My latest project is to pick the episodes of the 1957-66 TV series based on Erle Stanley Gardner’s novels and read the novel, then watch the TV episode and do parallel reviews of both. My review of The Case of the Buried Clock TV episode can be found here at Cult TV Lounge.

Graham Greene’s The Third Man

The genesis of Graham Greene’s The Third Man is rather interesting. In 1948 The Fallen Idol, directed by Carol Reed and written by Graham Greene, had been very successful at the box office. Since it also proved to be a happy collaboration it’s no surprise that Reed and Greene were anxious to do another movie together. That movie would eventually become The Third Man, one of the greatest movies ever made. But at the time he agreed to do the film Greene had only a single sentence scrawled on the back of an envelope - the mere germ of an idea about a man who is surprised to see an old friend named Harry Lime pass him in the street - surprised because he’d attended Harry’s funeral a few days earlier.

Greene was an excellent screenwriter but felt that he could not write a totally original screenplay. He preferred to adapt one of his stories or novels. Since in this case he had no story to adapt he would have to write one. So he sat down and wrote a story. Now he had something on which to base a screenplay. The story (a bit more than novella length) was never intended to be published. It was merely a quarry from which he would mine the materials for his screenplay. When the film was released in 1949, to international acclaim, his publishers persuaded him to allow the novella to be published.

It is of course essentially a first draft of a story. The completed screenplay differed from the novella in a number of ways. In his preface Greene is at pains to point out that the changes were not forced upon him. Once he sat down to write the screenplay he realised that some changes would be needed and he made them. He did not however revise the novella, which is what makes it so interesting. You can see the way that Greene’s ideas about the story evolved. The changes are actually not all that great. Greene was naturally a very cinematic writer and most of the scenes in his books lend themselves to film.

But the subtle changes are interesting. In the book the central character is Rollo Martins, an English writer of pulp westerns (the fact that he is an Englishman who has never set foot in America is part of the joke). In the movie he becomes Holly Martins, an American writer of pulp westerns. The Rollo Martins of the book is in some ways even more of a failure in life than the film’s Holly Martins, although perhaps marginally less naïve and marginally less self-righteous.

The only condition producer Alexander Korda imposed on Greene and Reed was that he wanted the background to the film to be the four-power occupation of Vienna (the city being divided into British, French, American and Russian zones). This was no problem - the war-ruined city dominated by corruption, with almost everyone involved in some kind of black market, was ideal Greene territory. This is very much Greeneland.

Many of the most memorable scenes in the movie are here in the novella - the encounter on the Ferris Wheel, the chase through the sewers - and while they’re better in the film they work extremely well on the printed page.

Greene felt that the film was better than the book and he was right but the book is still in its own way classic Greene and it’s still pretty good. When comparing the novella and the movie you always have to keep in mind that the story was right from the start intended to be filmed. The novella is essentially an extended rather literary film treatment. So the set-pieces naturally work better in the movie - Greene was creating scenes that would have more impact on the screen than on the page.

Greene was fascinated by themes of betrayal but it’s interesting that both The Third Man and The Fallen Idol deal specifically with the betrayal of illusions, and our reluctance to believe that our illusions are being betrayed. Even more specifically, they deal with the betrayal of childhood illusions. Harry Lime was the boyhood idol of Rollo/Holly Martins. Letting go of the illusions of childhood is part of growing up so logically Martins should finally grow up when he realises that his hero is a fraud and a monster. But this is a Graham Greene story so things are not necessarily going to work out so neatly. Nothing works out neatly in Greeneland.

The Third Man was published in an edition that also included the short story The Basement Room on which the film The Fallen Idol was based. My review of the film version of The Third Man can be found at Classic Movie Ramblings.

The Third Man is essential reading for fans of the film and for Graham Greene fans. Highly recommended.