Reading Those Classics #12

Classic Courtroom Drama. The legal drama a.k.a courtroom drama can be a classic involving moral questions such To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Compulsion (1956), or Inherit the Wind (1960). But elements of the courtroom drama can also be more sensational as in a mystery such as Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and Gardner’s Perry Mason novels.

A Woman Named Anne – Henry Cecil

This 1967 mystery hinges not on murder but on adultery. In a divorce case, the title character is accused of consensual sex with Michael Amberley, the husband of unhappy wife Jane. The main thread of the novel narrates the cross-examination between widow Mrs. Anne Preston and the barrister Mr. Coventry, conducted to ascertain whether or not she engaged in amatory pleasures in a hotel room and in a parked car with Mr. Amberley.

This is always entertaining even though the reader might doubt that a single cross-examination will sustain a full-length novel. Cecil’s crystal-clear prose uses everyday vocabulary and grammar so smoothly that the book is a pleasure to read. His humor is gently cynical as if his years of observing the antics ordinary people get up to have taught him to be skeptical and tolerant. Cecil has the ability to surprise in abundance, making his plot twists wonderful. For these reasons, the story is un-put-down-able.

In fact, however, Cecil does introduce a few diverting digressions. The omniscient narrator gives interesting and funny backstory on the unhappy couple and the barrister Coventry who finds Anne’s beauty distracting. The characterization of the titular character is the glue that holds the story together; he makes us feel sorry for her though, along with most of the other characters, we doubt her veracity.

A county court judge himself, Cecil gives insight into how judges think and why they “win" virtually every exchange with attorneys. Cecil also explains aspects of the British legal system that may confuse lay observers. He discusses why, given the vagaries of the legal system and its practitioners, we should expect justice only about 75% of the time. In curious aside we can apply generally, he discusses the necessity of not being a worrier for judges and legal professionals.

So, while this is not a conventional mystery novel, it still has the elements of a courtroom thriller and keeps our attention till the very last page. Highly recommended for vacations or situations where light but engaging stories are needed.

Click on the title to go to the review.

Prize Winning Classic: The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

Classic Novella: Old Man – William Faulkner

Classic Epistolary Novel: Augustus – John Williams

Classic Comic Novel: Thank you, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse

Classic Short Stories: New York Stories – John O’Hara

Classic Air Pilot Memoir: Wind, Sand, and Stars - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Classic Set in the Big Apple: Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos

Classic 19th Century Novel: Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite – Anthony Trollope

Classic Police Procedural: Wolf to Slaughter – Ruth Rendell

Classic War Memoir: Flight to Arras - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Classic American Mystery: Might as Well Be Dead - Rex Stout

Movie: My Brain was Handcuffed

Fear in the Night

1947 / 73 minutes

Tagline: Last night I dreamed I KILLED a man!...I DIDN'T WANT TO DO IT, BUT...MY BRAIN WAS HANDCUFFED!

The screenwriter based this early noir movie on a short story by William Irish, the pen-name of Cornell Woolrich, of Rear Window and The Bride Wore Black fame. Woolrich had a knack for writing strange, scary crime stories set in a world of cruelty, revenge, greed, and violence.

So, a young DeForrest Kelly (Bones on Star Trek 20 years later) has a bad dream in which he kills a guy with an awl. The next morning, he freaks out when he notices thumb marks on his throat, blood on his wrist and in his pocket a key that he doesn’t recognize. He takes his story and evidence to his homicide detective brother-in-law, played by Paul Kelly. The down-to-earth in-law snarls and scoffs and warns him not to tell goofy stories and upset his pregnant sister.

However, as events unfold, we find the nightmare comes true. I’ve not read much Woolrich, but my impression is that Woolrich has knack for making the outlandish all too plausible in his fiction. Recall the scene in Rear Window when Jeff (James Stewart) persuades Lisa (Grace Kelly) that Thorwald (Raymond Burr) has probably knocked off his wife. Once Lisa opens her mind, the possibility that what happens only to other people is happening right across the courtyard grows into a frightening probability. This movie has a plot device that requires us to suspend much belief, but once we do, it makes sense. Kinda sorta.

For me, in noir, the voice-overs rarely satisfy, but I like the lack of polish that comes with the territory in B movies. Produced on a very low-budget, the movie has a technical crudeness that hard-core fans of early noir – like me -- will savor.

In his first movie role, Kelly is just okay, somewhat histrionic. This is probably just confirmation bias on my part, but I thought it odd how his Bones McCoy persona already seems in place. That is, his character is smart, warm, compassionate but impressionable and tightly strung. Easy to influence, his character finds himself, like a typical noir character, doing things totally against his own best interests, for reasons he can’t understand himself, much less control.

The older and more experienced actor Paul Kelly was much more impressive. The scene of him reading Bones the riot act has a lot of power; his character’s latent angry aggression bursts out in a genuinely menacing way. Born in 1911 in Brooklyn, Kelly was a movie actor from the age of 11, a silent-era child-star even before Jackie Coogan. In the late Twenties, he did two years and a month in Q on a manslaughter conviction; Kelly, six-foot and a light heavyweight, “put [another actor] in a headlock and bashed him in the face six or seven times” so the victim later died of a brain hemorrhage. The year after he made this movie he won a Tony Award for Best Actor in Command Decision. 

I’d recommend this one only to serious fans of noir or people who still get that kiddish thrill out of watching shoddy old movies on a black and white TV.

Helen West #2

Not That Kind of Place aka Trial by Fire – Frances Fyfield

It is 1990. Our protagonist, Helen West, is a lawyer working as a crown prosecutor in the town of Branston about a dozen miles outside of London. She lives with her significant other, Geoffrey Bailey, who is a detective superintendent. They are both from London, used to handling urban horrid deeds from the point of view of professionals in criminal justice. Neither like Branston because it is not-country, not-suburbia and in such a no-where of a place they are not acting like themselves.

The murder of a local woman occurs. The circumstantial evidence against the accused looks convincing. But Helen sees it as pat. She can’t believe this particular high school English teacher, the lover of a friend of hers, could be guilty of bludgeoning and stabbing a woman to death. Bailey has vague doubts about accused’s guilt but he buries them deep, figuring that if you hear hoofbeats, it’s horses, not zebras. Inevitably, Helen and Bailey don’t talk about their doubts and this ruffles their relationship. She feels that since she is not permanent she just ought to keep a low profile in the office of the crown prosecutor and stay out of the bristles of her male chauvinist pig of a boss.

In their own way, Helen and Bailey gather information about two local families. One family, the upper middle class Blundells, consists of the widower of the victim and his 14-year-old daughter. Their relationship has existing troubles only worsened by the murder of the wife and mother. The other family, the working class Featherstones, run a shabby restaurant-motel and have a 20-something son with a raft of cognitive and emotional issues.

In the end, this is an inverted mystery in that by the half-way point one knows whodunnit. But the author ratchets up the suspense and action so that the reveal is totally unexpected. The goings-on and characters are rather more dark than I’m used to in a mystery, with some scenes for mature audiences  that can handle a dash of Ick and a splash of Yuck.

I give this a guarded recommendation. During the first quarter of this book, the author provides backstory to the West-Bailey relationship, the Family Blundells, and the awful Family Featherstones. She describes vividly locations such as the murder victim’s house and the weird Featherstone summerhouse.

This information feels superfluous, slowing things down more than I like at the beginning of a mystery. Though I debated bailing out, I learned to trust that the writer needs to introduce characters clearly and completely for the parts they are going to play in getting the story to where it is going to end. Like Ruth Rendell, for Fyfield the characterization is really important in making the fireworks of the ending persuasive because it’s so incredible. And she uses the time-honored tactic of the two heroes not sharing information so the reveal is delayed.

Qualifying as a solicitor, Fyfield worked for the Crown Prosecution Service, which enabled her to learn about murder at second hand. She gives interesting insights into office politics for female lawyers in the early 1990s. The author observes all the male-female relationships with an intense sympathetic eye.

Unique American Mystery

Blanche on the Lam – Barbara Neeley

 This 1992 novel is the first full-length mystery with a black woman as the main character. Making this worth reading, then, is as different a protagonist as we’ve ever met in detective fiction. Blanche White is middle-aged, overweight, not a Christian but spiritual, and embracing her curls. Also against expectation, she is contentedly working as domestic. She has a problem with close supervision: “For all the chatelaine fantasies of some of the women for whom she worked, she really was her own boss, and her clients knew it. She ordered her employers’ lives, not the other way around.”

Blanche has returned to her hometown of Farleigh, North Carolina. She is now mother to her niece and nephew as her sister died of cancer. She worries that her no-nonsense Christian mother Miz Cora will take over custody of the kids, while Miz Cora worries that Blanche will be taken away as a revolutionary due to her natural hair.

The book opens with Blanche going through a rough patch. She is unlucky enough to draw a judge in an especially grouchy mood who sentences her to a month on a bad-check charge. Shocking herself, she slips away from the deputy escorting her to jail. That she could be picked any time adds suspense to the action.

On the lam, Blanche ends up cooking, cleaning and caring for a white gentry family at their summer home in Hokeysville. Southern Gothic with fireworks, they are out a William Faulkner novel. Miz Grace is highly-strung with OCD, her husband Everett is a do-nothing irritable under pressure, and wealthy Aunt Emmeline holes up in her room putting away gin.

Cousin Mumsfield, a person living with Down Syndrome, is binned by Miz Grace and Everett as an invisible like Blanche, not worth considering as a real human being that counts. To her surprise, Blanche connects with “Mumsfield, honey,” able to telepathically sense his comings even before he shows up, a prescience she only feels with people closest to her.

This connection bothers Blanche since she is wary of what she calls “Darkies’ Disease.” She knows that indulging the human urge to help the afflicted will make her lower her guard of rational self-interest and undermine her ability to navigate an economy based on exploiting the vulnerable, especially women of color. As for getting close to employers, their problems, their tears 

 Blanche was unimpressed by the tears, and Grace’s Mammy-save-me eyes. Mammy-savers regularly peeped out at her from the faces of some white women for whom she worked, and lately in this age of the touchy-feely model of manhood, an occasional white man. It happened when an employer was struck by family disaster or grew too compulsive about owning everything, too overwrought, or downright frightened by who and what they were. She never ceased to be amazed at how many white people longed for Aunt Jemima.

Blanche gets a strange kind of feeling from the house and its objects, a feeling that something dreadful is going to happen to the family. She witnesses a will just changed by Aunt Emmeline. Disturbed, she activates the intelligence network in The Community only to find out information that only adds to her alarm. Everett may have murdered his first wife to get his hooks on her money, and may do the same to Miz Grace, who loves him too much to see through him.

Class clashes, race relations, and gender roles are examined in original ways. For example, a grocery delivery boy acts with obnoxious disrespect. Blanche utters words in Yoruba she picked up in her travels. She tells him because of the hoodoo she’s thrown his way he should not to be surprised if his privates start to shrivel. And the ploughboy believes her and straightens up in later encounters.

Highly recommended as a unique mystery. When this novel was released in 1992, it won the Agatha Award and the Anthony Award for Best First Novel, and the Macavity Award for Best First Mystery.

The Ides of Perry Mason 49

Note: On the 15th of every month, we run a column related to Our Favorite Lawyer in the mysteries or on the tube in the original series. This month is a departure, a merciful one, for the sake of variety. And in future I'm going to run reviews of Gardner's other notable series, the PI adventures starring miserly hard-charging Bertha Cool, her office manager Elsie Brand, and Donald Lam, sensitive subtle disbarred lawyer all the city girls in a peck of trouble inevitably fall for.

Dead Men’s Letters – Erle Stanley Gardner

The creator of Perry Mason learned to be a professional writer in the 1920s by writing literally millions of words for pulp magazines such as Black Mask. Writing under the pen name of Charles M. Green, Gardner wrote 72 short stories starring Ed Jenkins, the Phantom Crook. This 1991 collection by Carroll & Graf pulls together six stories that were first published during the height of the Jazz Age.

Our hero is wanted in three countries and six states for unspecified crimes, but he enjoys immunity in the Golden State because of a legal technicality. But the cops and crooks know who he is, as does the general public since the yellow press gleefully runs stories about him in their Sunday supplements.

No scandal sheet will resist an outsider that lives by his own rules, beholden to no higher authorities, friend of the downtrodden and vulnerable, and chivalrous to flappers. Jenkins is a timeless figure in the American popular imagination, shrewd ancestor to one-man armies like John Wick and Jack Reacher.

But wait.

There’s more to Jenkins than a deadly left jab and a lot of attitude. Fluent in Cantonese, he maintains friendships with Southern Chinese both good and bad in Frisco’s Chinatown. He’s the world’s greatest cracksman because he has invented his own hi-tech safecracking device. He carries a cane that features not only the inevitable sword but also a burglar’s kit. He has a canine sidekick, the wonder-dog Bobo who helps him scout, track, flush, guard, and get in good with flappers. As if all these hallmarks of a super-hero don’t impress our inner ten-year-old enough, Jenkins is a master of disguise. 

Shades of Sherlock Holmes!

Gardner spends more words describing characters’ appearance than he was to in Mason novels, but he must have done so because I think making heavies vividly hideous was a pulp convention. Also in the tradition: the setting is always in a city, the time of day is always after dark, the cops are always flat-footed. A professional that believed in the delivering what the audience expected, Gardner ratchets up the action till it’s nearly non-stop.

I suppose pulp fiction from the Twenties is not everybody’s cup of tea. And some readers – like my no-canine-is-a-stranger wife - will be put out that Bobo appears in only two stories. But readers who are looking for non-stop thrills and getting a kick out of corn as a side-dish won’t go wrong with Ed Jenkins, Phantom Crook.

Reading Those Classics #11

Classic American Mystery. Rex Stout was an American writer best known for creating the larger-than-life fictional detective Nero Wolfe. Stout wrote a total of 33 novels and 39 collected novellas or short stories, and is often accused of being a weak plotter, poor at characterization and too formulaic. While this may be true of too many of the novels, many of his novellas are entertaining, well plotted and contain good characterization.

Might as Well Be Dead - Rex Stout

In this 1956 mystery hardware titan James Herold comes all the way from the Gateway to the West – Omaha - to the Big Apple to hire famous PI Nero Wolfe and his wingman Archie Goodwin. The mission is to find his son Paul Herold. Paul was unjustly accused of theft by his father James. Taking the injustice to heart, Paul left home and maintained contact with this mother and sister only by sending birthday cards.

James Herold has the guilts now that the real thief has been discovered and wants to make amends. He thinks Paul is someplace in the New York City area. Finding somebody in the Apple that doesn’t want to be found is like finding a white cat in a blizzard. So Wolfe resigns himself to placing an ad for a P.H. How ordinary! Or better – how quotidian, as the big-word loving Stout may say but doesn’t in this case thought he does have the woman-hating Wolfe use “hoyden” (rowdy girl) in another connection.

Commonplace or not, the ad shakes the tree. Wolfe finds a P.H., who unhappily happens to be one Peter Hayes, convicted of first-degree murder on day two of Wolfe’s investigation. Hayes’ lawyer thinks that he has been framed but does not have the resources to do any sleuthing. Hayes’ girlfriend, also the murder victim’s wife, suspects he is indeed the culprit and this colors her thinking and actions. Archie Goodwin thinks Peter Hayes could be Paul Herold.

Wolfe’s ego is on the line because one of his employees was killed on this job. So, this makes it personal, as the tried and true line goes. This is better than average Wolfe novel, even to me who prefers the novelettes over the novels. The creative dialogue is a draw because Stout is a master of the wisecrack and quip. An ex-insurance guy, Stout has a strong sense of rules and procedures in the business world and the default settings of business executives that give the mysteries verisimilitude.

Coincidences play a bigger role in this one than I like, but what the hay because the scenes we enjoy are in place. What makes Wolfe stories especially cheering are his confrontations with police nemeses like Cramer and Stebbins and his inevitable gathering of suspects in the office in the brownstone. I don’t know why sending Cramer on his way in a rage or plunking persons of interest in the red leather chair is so soothing and entertaining. But there it is.

Click on the title to go to the review.

Prize Winning Classic: The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

Classic Novella: Old Man – William Faulkner

Classic Epistolary Novel: Augustus – John Williams

Classic Comic Novel: Thank you, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse

Classic Short Stories: New York Stories – John O’Hara

Classic Air Pilot Memoir: Wind, Sand, and Stars - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Classic Set in the Big Apple: Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos

Classic 19th Century Novel: Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite – Anthony Trollope

Classic Police Procedural: Wolf to Slaughter – Ruth Rendell

Classic War Memoir: Flight to Arras - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Movie: Low Rent Noir

Shock!

1946 / 84 minutes

Tagline: He never dreamed what it would all lead to...and she didn't care!

Low rent noir movie from 20th Century Fox. A young delicate wife (Anabel Shaw) witnesses a husband beat his wife to death with a candlestick. The young wife goes into shock. Her husband (Frank Latimore) finds her a psychiatrist (Vincent Price), who, unluckily, turns out to be the wife killer. The shrink’s illicit squeeze (Lynn Bari) is a nurse in the private sanitarium that the young wife is transferred to. The devil in disguise wants the doc to either drive the young wife nuts so nobody will believe what she says or, failing that, knock the girl off.

The setting includes the familiar elements that will scare adults who were scared brickless by madhouse movies when they were kids. Sterile rooms. Needles. White coats. Blandly professional faces. I mean, sensitive viewers will squirm at the prospect of diabolical caregivers messing up patients’ minds for their own greedy ends. Terrible to contemplate being helpless under somebody else’s power.

Another interesting point is that the movie touches on the effects of stress on civilians in war time. The young wife is highly strung because she first informed that her husband was KIA, only to find out later he was taken as a POW. Fearing what prison camps were like, she worried about him for two years. Talk about being run through the mill.

Finally, Vincent Price brings depth to the part of doctor gone off the Hippocratic rails. He didn’t premeditate murdering his wife, but the moment got the better of him. But the cover-up and the urgings of his bad to the bone nurse-girlfriend drive them both down a path of destruction. Noir movies are relentless when it comes to the slippery slope of one bad act leading to another. 

Momentum, baby, it's a bear.

But the movie does end up dragging. I found myself longing for the end. Not a waste of time, but not near a classic either.

Inspector Montalbano #11

The Wings of the Sphinx – Andreas Camilleri

Not the best Salvo Montalbano mystery because the mystery plot is a little superficial, the reveal feels rushed, and the characterization is less psychologically astute than usual. But the 11^th of this thirty-book series is undoubtedly worth reading, with the lush evocation of Sicily and the short chapters driven by brisk rhythm and tempo. With scenes seamlessly woven together, the action is so easy to take in that the book feels shorter than it really is.

The story begins in a tragic way when a murdered young woman whose face was devastated by a bullet is found naked in a landfill. She has traces of gold leaf on her body and the tattoo of a sphinx moth on her left shoulder. Montalbano manages to follow the trail that will involve three other girls with the same moth tattoo. He will discover the culprit and the reasons for the murder even though his investigation is always at risk of being hindered by influencers at the top.

The comic subplot concerns Mr. Picarella, a man who probably stages his own kidnapping but whose wife insists the police are not taking the case seriously enough. Montalbano’s subordinates, Fazio and Augello, are skeptical because no ransom demand has been received. They are vindicated when a rich guy visits the station.

...Francesco Di Noto. Decked out in Armani, top-of-the -line loafers worn without socks, Rolex, shirt open to a golden crucifix suffocating in a forest of unkempt, rampant black hair.

He was surely the idiot tooling around in the Ferrari. But the inspector wanted confirmation.

"My compliments on your beautiful car."

"Thanks. It's a 360 Modena. I've also got a Porsche Carrera."

Double cretin with fireworks.

Di Noto produces a photo of Picarella partying in a nightclub in Havana. Mrs. Picarella later calmly rejects this evidence and gets Montalbano in dutch with his pompous superior Bonetti-Alderighi. The scene of them pressing each other’s buttons is, as usual, hilarious.

As usual, the main attraction is the hero Montalbano, an ordinary middle-aged man aging ungracefully, subject to dark moods and flying off the handle not to mention poorly managing his long-distance relationship with his GF Livia. It’s enjoyable to sit down with out on the veranda of his house in Marinella and enjoy Sicilian cuisine home-cooked by his housekeeper Adelina. In rigorous silence, mind you, so as to enjoy the food better.

Camilleri captures and maintains readerly interest not only with the stubborn, ironic and penetrating character of Montalbano. The supporting cast includes the pragmatic and meticulous character of Fazio, with the compliant yet daring character of Augello, and the strong-willed character of Livia. A brilliant comic creation is the naive and sincere character of Catarella who maddens Montalbano by never getting people’s names correct and writing indecipherable telephone numbers.

Some scenes are really comic, such as when Montalbano pretends to be an anti-mafia investigator in an amazing two-chapter interrogation. The only cautions are that this book feels too short and the savvy reader will see where the story is heading. But we don’t read Montalbano novels for the story or the reveal but for Camilleri's mastery in narrating a story with perfect seams and atmosphere and characters of a world so clearly realized.

 

Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg #1

The French Key - Frank Gruber

Frank Gruber was a professional writer that wrote for the pulps, radio, and movies. In two novels of his I’ve read, the mood is hard-boiled without violence and darkness of spirit, starring believable characters, and having an air of verisimilitude that will please those of us into 1930s and 1940s Americana.

In The French Key (1939), Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg’s ostensible job is selling a book on physical fitness at county fairs and carnivals. Johnny, the brains of the outfit, acts as the spieler and Sam, the brawn, exemplifies the benefits of fitness by breaking a chain wrapped around his chest. They experience financial ups and downs because they are not as scrupulous as they should be about saving and making money. Having decided to stiff the hotel for the tariff, they must get their luggage out of their room.

However, they discover the body of a man on the bed, clutching a gold coin in his cold hand. Fletcher, seizing the opportunity, grabs the coin and later is informed by a coin dealer that it is the most valuable US coin ever minted. Johnny, over Sam’s protests, decides to play private detective in order to clear them of suspicion of murder. Doing so, they are caught up in a gold hoarding scheme.

Like many pulp writers, Gruber held many jobs before he turned to writing: ploughboy, soldier, bell-hop, ticket-taker at a theater, and writing hack. His descriptions of fifth-rate hotel rooms and sleazy rooming houses are totally convincing. The background touches give us a confident feeling that the author is writing about people, places, and things that he knows all too well. The antique slang and turns of phrase (“When are we going to put on the nose bag?” grouses a hungry Sam), the hustler’s grave chivalry toward the ladies, and careful naming of streets in New York City feel authentic. The characters are very old-school American – plain, warm, outgoing, confident, resourceful.

Two anachronisms startled me in the 1939 novel. One character had a “Beatle haircut” – in February of 1964, TIME magazine referred to the hair of the Fab Four as “mushroom haircuts.” Two characters fought it out like “Sonny Liston and Cassius Clay” – February, 1964. Coincidence? I think not. But I have no explanation since the Capital pocket paperback edition I read is from October, 1972 – the cover picture indeed looks very Seventies. Maybe Gruber himself updated it – he passed away in 1969, acknowledged as one of the “Kings of Pulp Fiction.”