Search Results for 'capone'


From Page to Screen. by Mike Tooney:
DAMON RUNYON “The Lemon Drop Kid.”

   

DAMON RUNYON “The Lemon Drop Kid.” Short story. First appearance: Collier’s, 03 February 1934.

   Damon Runyon (1880-1946) used to be a household name. He was famous for two reasons: his reportage, often covering some of the most sensational stories of the first half of the 20th century, and his fiction, featuring thinly disguised real people in occasionally outlandish situations, written in a narrative style uniquely his own.

   Nowadays Runyon’s reputation rests almost entirely in his “Broadway stories,” such as Guys and Dolls. People who knew Runyon well claimed his hardboiled exterior concealed a cultured and sensitive interior. In any case, he was friends with the infamous (Al Capone was a neighbor) as well as the famous (in accordance with Runyon’s wishes, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker flew low over Broadway and scattered his ashes over the district).

   One of Runyon’s “ironic mini-comedies” involves a racetrack tout named The Lemon Drop Kid. A tout, for the uninitiated, is a hustler who pretends he has inside information on an upcoming race (when, in fact, he has none), and who by getting some sucker to get in on the betting is able to clear a few “bob” for himself, the sucker usually being happy enough to cut the tout in on the winnings  —  but being very unhappy when the tip doesn’t pay off as advertised.

   This is called “telling the tale,” and The Lemon Drop Kid is normally very good at it.

   But on this particular occasion, The Kid accidentally misdirects his mark, and through a major misunderstanding takes it on the lam to escape what he mistakenly assumes will be retributive justice in the form of The Kid’s tender flesh.

   And so he literally runs away from the racetrack, with his mark in hot pursuit.

   Eventually, The Kid will find love for the first time in his life, but the experience will prove bittersweet . . . .

   Runyon’s story has been filmed twice, once by Paramount in 1934 with Lee Tracy, Helen Mack, and William Frawley (remember the growly landlord in I Love Lucy?); and a second time by Paramount in 1951 with Bob Hope, Marilyn Maxwell, Lloyd Nolan, Fred Clark, and William Frawley again.

   The 1934 version, we are told, adheres more closely to the original story. Those who have seen it say it starts out a comedy and ends up on a more serious note, very much like Runyon’s tale. The claim has been made that Paramount suppressed this film in favor of the remake.

   The 1951 edition takes the idea of The Kid misinforming someone about a bet and runs with it; the whole thing is played for as many laughs as possible (e.g., The Kid initiating a scam on little old ladies, Bob Hope in drag; you get the idea).

   Hope’s film also introduced a song that became an instant Christmastime standard, “Silver Bells.”

   To give you an idea of how much the 1951 movie differed from Runyon’s story, get a load of this list of characters’ names that never appeared in the original tale: Sidney Melbourne, ‘Brainy’ Baxter, Oxford Charley, Nellie Thursday, Moose Moran, Straight Flush, Gloomy Willie, Sam the Surgeon, Little Louie, Singing Solly, The Bird Lady, and Goomba. “Sidney Melbourne” was the moniker they gave The Kid and “‘Brainy’ Baxter” was gorgeous Marilyn Maxwell.

Reviewed by TONY BAER:

   

MILTON “MEZZ” MEZZROW & BERNARD WOLFE – Really the Blues. Random House, hardcover, 1946. Reprinted several times since, including Dell D118, paperback, 1953, and Signet, paperback, 1964.

   â€œTo all the hipsters, hustlers, and fly cats tipping along The Stroll. (Keep scuffling.) To all the cons in all the houses of many slammers, wrastling with chinches. (Short time, boys.) To all the junkies and lushheads in twobit scratchpads, and the flophouse grads in morgue iceboxes. (R.I.P.) To all the sweettalkers, the gumbeaters, the highjivers, out of the gallion for good and never going to take low again. (You got it made, daddy.)”

   Mezz Mezzrow was a Jewish dude who longed to be a black jazzman. He lived a life that had him in the orbit of Louis Armstrong (he was Armstrong’s marijuana dealer), playing jazz with Sidney Bichet, Bix Beiderbecke and Gene Krupa, he played the clubs of Al Capone and Legs Diamond, he got hooked on heroin, jailed at Riker’s, lived in Harlem married across the miscegenation lines and lived to tell the tale.

   He was convinced to partner up with a writer to get the story down, “talking to me about writers I never heard of, Andre Gide, B. Traven, Céline, Henry Miller and guys like that, and reading parts of their books to me. He says, ‘Mezz, you’ve got a story to tell just like those writers did, and it deserves to get down on paper. watching the screwy kaleidoscope of American life jiggle and squirm over your head. Not very many people have gotten a good look at their country from that bottom-of-the-pit angle before, seen the slimy underside of the rock. It’s a chunk of Americana, as they say, and it should get written. It’s a real American success story, upside down: Horatio Alger standing on his head. It’s the odyssey of an individualist, through a land where the population is manufactured by the system of interchangeable parts. It’s the saga of a guy who wanted to make friends, in a jungle where everybody was too busy making money and dodging his own shadow. If I’d known I was being significant, instead of just hungry and beat, I sure would have changed my ways. This is the book. If it got in your mouth, don’t fault me. Like I said, it’s a story that happened in the U.S. of A.’

   At Riker’s, Mezz insisted on being classified as Black because “colored cons were different; almost any colored guy can land in jail, not just the soulless zombies who have already shriveled up and died inside and are just postponing their date with the undertaker’s icebox. Some of the finest, most high-spirited guys of the race landed in jail because of their conditions of life, not because they were rotted and maggot-eaten inside –far away from all this grimy, grating white underworld, up in Harlem where people were real and earthy.”

   Jazz, to Mezz, was the soundtrack of Roaring Twenties America: “jazz was only a musical version of the hard-cutting broadsides that two foxy studs named Mencken and Nathan were beginning to shoot at Joe Public in the pages of The American Mercury — a collectively improvised nose-thumbing at all pillars of all communities, one big syncopated Bronx cheer for the righteous squares everywhere. jazz, making itself heard above the rattle of machine guns and the clink of whisky bottles. The sprawling outside world, they found, was raw and bubbling, crude, brutal, unscrubbed behind the ears but jim-jam-jumping with vital spirits; its collar might be grimy and tattered, but it was popping with life and lusty energy, ready for anything and everything, with a gusto you couldn’t down. And jazz, its theme song. These kids went for that unwashed, untidy world, and they made up their minds to learn its unwashed, untidy music –all the decent, respectable citizens who were home in bed having decent, respectable nightmares instead of braying through their horns at the stars –jazz music was, in a way, practically the theme-song of the underworld because, thanks to prohibition, about the only places we could play like we wanted were illegal dives…..turbanned Hindus, ramrod-spined Englishmen balancing monocles, swarthy cattlemen from the Argentine, sugar planters from Batavia, sabre-scarred Prussian officers, bullfighters from Madrid, college kids with crew haircuts from Wilkes-Barre and Des Moines”.

    The book has a host of great hardboiled one-liners:

          ● He had more music in him than Heinz has pickles.

         ● It takes a long, tall, brown-skin gal to make a preacher lay his Bible down.

         ● Don’t look for no chitlins before you kill your hawg.

         ● I was locked up in a cage that would have cramped a canary.

         ● The poor guy squirmed and wriggled like a jellyfish with the d.t.’s.

         ● It’™s a hell of a life, said the Queen of Spain, Three minutes’ pleasure and nine months’ pain

         ● … as winded as Paul Revere’s horse.

         ● there wasn’t enough room in it for a midget to swing an underfed kitten,

         Â· corny? Sure, the husks are still on it

         ● Rotgut and remorse trickled through Uncle Sammy’s veins.

         ● … his face as long as a sigh

         Â· blow my nose and call me Snorty

         ● … frail as a nail and twice as pale

         ● That town was sad as a map and twice as flat

         ● … no bigger than a blink

         Â· the chorus lumbered around like a herd of asthmatic cows.

         ● … emotional pickpockets

         ● The days oozed by like a melted movie film, all run together.

         ● (ode to the dead): Plant you now, dig you later

         ● If you pried the lid off my skull with a can-opener, you might have spotted some weird eels snaking through the whirlpool I lugged around under my hat.

   In the end, after a life drug thru the wringer, jailed, drug addled, left out soggy in the rain, Mezz’s reward was to finally understand jazz and be able to finally play it:

    “F]or the very first time in my life, you see, I had fallen all the way into the groove and I was playing real authentic jazz, and it was right, not Chicago, not Dixieland. …Now I was no more afraid. All the rambling years behind suddenly began to make sense, fitted into the picture: the prison days, the miss-meal blues, the hophead oblivion, the jangled nerves, the reefer flights, the underworld meemies. They were all part of my education, had gone into my make-up until I was battered and bruised enough to stumble into the New Orleans idiom and have something to say in it ..We here, and we going to stay put … don’t recognize no eviction notices from the good green earth. Life gets neurotic and bestial when people can’t be at peace with each other, say amen to each other, chime in with each other’s feeling and personality; and if discord is going to rule the world, with each guy at the next guy’s throat, all harmony gone. Why, the only thing for a man to do, if he wants to survive, if he won’t get evil like all the other beasts in the jungle, is to make that harmony inside himself, be at peace with himself, unify his own insides while the snarling world gets pulverized. He carried his own environment around inside him.”

   His only dream remains: “I don’t aim to have my fillings and bridgework picked out, to fatten the Bull Durham sack in some junkie’s or lushhead’s pocket. Uh, uh. Just take my body and shove it in one of them blast furnaces, and when I’m melted down good, scrape out the dust and mix it up with some shellac and press it into a record with a King Jazz label on and then take it up to Harlem and give it to some raggedy kid on The Corner who hasn’t got the price of admission to see the stage show at the Apollo or a deuce of blips to buy himself a glass of foam. until he gets tired of it, and then let him throw it away and that’s that. Just do that, and you’ll know I’ll be happy. That’s memorial enough for me.”

         —

   I dug it. It lags in the middle when Mezz gets addicted to heroin and lands in the clink. But it’s real and the lag was a lag Mezz experienced and was important to his coming out on the other side. If, as Welles says, movies are life with the boring bits cut out,”this one leaves in the boring bits. But without the boring bits (for Kierkegaard tells us that “boredom is the root of all evil”) how are we to understand the motivation towards redemption. Towards some jazzy heaven Mezz Mezzrow bebops towards with every breath and footstep.
   

CLIFFORD RAYMOND – The Men on the Dead Man’s Chest. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1930.

   Most mystery fans surely know what a tontine is by now, but if not, what it is is a special kind of annuity that provides for a certain regular amount to be shared among several beneficiaries over a period of time, but with the principal held in trust for the final survivor.

   The implications are obvious, are they not? In fact, revenge can be made to reach from beyond the grave, as six former friends of an unsavory gentleman named Turner quickly discover.

   According to Who Done It?, this was the last 1nystery novel that Clifford Raymond wrote. While he did write three earlier during the period 1917-21, the influence of the new Black Mask style on his later work is obvious. The Chicago police lieutenant named Stanton who investigates the curious string of deaths caused by Turner’s will is cool and crisp, and incisively sardonic without ever actually being hard-boiled. This is the Chicago of prohibition and Al Capone, and the reader is never allowed to forget it.

   Numerous footnotes give an unusual air of documentary authenticity to the whole affair, but I have to confess that I didn’t understand the last one at all. The last page of a book is an awfully strange place to completely unexplain what until then had seemed a fairly straightforward tale of over-stimulated greed.

   Nevertheless, the. combination of tough gangster fiction with a hint of underlying amusement makes the author’s final bow decidedly above average. The episode of the Vermont lawyer in itself makes this book worth hunting down. Why Raymond never wrote another mystery someone else will have to say.

Rating: B

– Slightly revised from The MYSTERY FANcier, September/October 1978.

   
UPDATE: The last line may not be entirely true. One additional title is now listed in Hubin with a dash, suggesting that it is marginally criminous, that being Our Very Best People (Bobbs-Merrill, 1931).

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by John Lutz

   

MAX ALLAN COLLINS – True Detective. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1983 Tor, paperback, 1986; ibooks, paperback, 2003. Thomas & Mercer, softcover, 2011.

   In True Detective, Collins has created a brilliantly evocative period novel set in depression year 1933, Chicago, His hero, Nate Heller, is a cop who refuses to succumb to prevailing corruption on the police force. (This is a tightly woven blend of fact and fiction.) When Nate becomes involved in the shooting of gangster Frank Nitti, the corruption closes in on him. His testimony as to what happened in Nitti’s office during the shoot-out is vital to several parties; and given the climate of time and place, they all assume that Nate is for sale.

   Nate isn’t, as he explains to his pal, boxer Barney Ross. With no alternative to dishonesty other than to quit the police department, Nate goes private, working out of an office, complete with a Murphy bed, above Ross’s saloon.

   Nate has trouble and he has enemies, among them Chicago’s corrupt Mayor Cermak, the mover and shaker of the 1933 World’s Fair, and former vice president General Charles Gates Dawes, not to mention the unnamed but sufficiently dangerous Al Capone. It’s a good thing that Nate also has allies like Eliot Ness, Franklin Roosevelt, and even young sportscaster Dutch Reagan.

   The writing style here is hard-boiled and literate, and the novel is illustrated with black-and-white photographs of the book’s true-life characters and of depression-era Chicago. So artfully are photographs matched with text that they add wonderfully to the painstakingly created atmosphere of that almost-lost time.

   This novel won the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award as 1983’s best private-eye novel, and deservedly so. A lovingly and often elegantly written novel, this is marvelous entertainment and a must read for every fan of private eye fiction.

   A second Nate Heller adventure, True Crime (1984), involves the detective with J. Edgar Hoover and an FBI plot against the infamous John Dillinger, and is every bit as evocative and entertaining as True Detective. More Heller novels are planned for the future.

     ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

   

Editorial Update: There are now 20 books in the series, the most recent being Do No Harm (2020), in which Heller finds himself involved in the Sam Shepard case, which in real life occurred in 1954. (I believe that all of Heller’s cases have appeared in chronological order, both his time and our time.)

FIRST YOU READ, THEN YOU WRITE
by Francis M. Nevins


   Two of my recent columns (here and here) have been devoted to a once well-known but now largely forgotten writer named John Roeburt. This month is my third on the subject. And my last.

***

   Except for EARTHQUAKE (Random House, 1959), the mainstream novel supposedly co-authored by vaudeville/TV comic Milton Berle, all of Roeburt’s books during his last five years of creative life were paperback originals. THEY WHO SIN (Avon pb #T-321, 1959) and RUBY MacLAINE (Hillman pb #151, 1960) seem to have been sex-driven, and the title of THE MOBSTER (Pyramid pb #G566, 1960) speaks for itself.

   During these years Roeburt also turned out three media tie-in novels. THE UNHOLY WIFE (Avon pb #T-169, 1957) was based on the movie of the same name (RKO/Universal, 1957), which was directed by John Farrow and starred Diana Dors, Rod Steiger and Tom Tryon. As chance would have it, Steiger also starred in AL CAPONE (Burrows-Ackerman/United Artists, 1959), which was directed by Richard Wilson and featured Fay Spain and James Gregory. Roeburt’s novelization of the script (Pyramid pb #G405, 1959) followed soon after the movie’s release. His third and last effort of this sort was SING OUT, SWEET HOMICIDE (Dell pb #K105, 1961), which was based on the Warner Bros. TV series THE ROARING TWENTIES.

   That paperback marked the end of Roeburt’s career as a novelist. But before fading away he did crank out three quickie nonfiction books for softcover publication. GET ME GIESLER (Belmont pb #L92-536, 1962) was a biography of celebrity criminal defense lawyer Jerry Giesler, the Johnnie Cockroach of his generation.

   The subject of SEX-LIFE AND THE CRIMINAL LAW (Belmont pb #L92-560, 1963) is clear from the title. THE WICKED AND THE BANNED (Macfadden pb #60-147, 1963) had to do with books like LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER and TROPIC OF CANCER that were the subjects of obscenity prosecutions. I haven’t read this volume and can’t recall ever seeing a copy, but I feel safe in suggesting that anyone interested in the topic should turn instead to Charles Rembar’s THE END OF OBSCENITY (HarperCollins, 1986) or Edward DeGrazia’s GIRLS LEAN BACK EVERYWHERE: THE LAW OF OBSCENITY AND THE ASSAULT ON GENIUS (Random House, 1991).

   Those books were Roeburt’s last. As in CITIZEN KANE, let’s go back and explore our subject’s beginnings.

***

   After graduating from college—and from law school, if he ever went there—he held a variety of jobs. Apparently he drove a cab for a while, as one might have guessed from his three Jigger Moran novels, and worked in a few antique shops, making use of that setting in the second Moran exploit, THERE ARE DEAD MEN IN MANHATTAN (1946). His career as a radio writer came about as a result of his connection with one of the medium’s top producer-directors.

   Himan Brown (1910-2010) graduated from both Brooklyn College and Brooklyn Law School, although he never practiced law and never took the bar exam. In 1927, while still a student, he began reading poetry over a New York radio station and was soon hired for acting jobs that called for Jewish dialect. His earliest success as a producer-director was MARIE, THE LITTLE FRENCH PRINCESS (CBS, 1933-35), the network’s first daily soap opera.

   After several years doing soaps and action thrillers like DICK TRACY and FLASH GORDON, Brown created his first well-remembered series, INNER SANCTUM, a mystery-horror anthology show that ran on various networks between early 1941 and late 1952. For that series and others—including ADVENTURES OF THE THIN MAN, BULLDOG DRUMMOND, COUNTERSPY and THE FALCON—he needed a stable of writers, and among the literary workhorses who wound up in that stable was Roeburt.

   Exactly which Brown shows he worked on and how many scripts he wrote for each remains unknown, but by the mid-1940s he was so well established in the field of radio crime drama that he got tapped to write an article on the subject for a major magazine (“Bloody Murder on the Airwaves,” Esquire, September 1945).

   The earliest scripts known to be by Roeburt date from late 1947, and he turned out around two dozen for INNER SANCTUM between then and 1951, as well as three adventures of THE SHADOW. For one of Brown’s final radio series—BARRIE CRAIG, CONFIDENTIAL INVESTIGATOR (NBC, 1951-55, starring William Gargan)—he wrote at least 32 episodes.

   Among the less successful Brown shows he worked on were TALES OF FATIMA (CBS, 1949, starring Basil Rathbone), THE AFFAIRS OF PETER SALEM (Mutual, 1949-53), and THE PRIVATE FILES OF REX SAUNDERS (NBC, 1951, starring Rex Harrison).

***

   All this radio work didn’t keep Roeburt from dipping his toes gingerly in the Hollywood ocean. His earliest movie credit was JIGSAW (Tower/United Artists, 1949), starring Franchot Tone and Jean Wallace. Tone played crusading Assistant D.A. Howard Malloy, who runs afoul of an extremist group while investigating a series of murders. Fletcher Markle directed from a screenplay by himself and Vincent McConnor, based on an original story (perhaps a radio play?) by Roeburt.

   A few years later he became involved with two projects for independent producers Edward J. and Harry Lee Danziger and director Edgar G. Ulmer (1904-1972), a wild talent who’s best known as the master of ultra-low-budget film noir. Roeburt however wasn’t involved with any of the director’s movies in that category. His first and only screenplay for an Ulmer film (from an original story by George Auerbach) was the Runyonesque ST. BENNY THE DIP (Danziger/United Artists, 1951), starring Dick Haymes, Nina Foch, Roland Young and Lionel Stander.

   Roeburt received screen credit for additional dialogue on Ulmer’s Arabian Nights farce BABES IN BAGDAD (Danziger/United Artists, 1952), which starred Paulette Goddard, Gypsy Rose Lee, Richard Ney and John Boles. His work for the Danziger brothers also led, as we’ll see, to his being hired to write scripts for two of their TV series a few years later.

   His final screenplay was for one of the most obscure movies I’ve ever heard of. DEAD TO THE WORLD (National Film Studios/United Artists, 1961) was based on Edward Ronns’ novel STATE DEPARTMENT MURDERS (Gold Medal pb #117, 1951) and was directed by Nicholas Webster. In the leading roles were the immortal Reedy Talton and Jana Pearce. I dare you to find that pair in your reference books!

***

   As radio faded away and was replaced in the role of America’s home entertainment medium by TV, Roeburt did his best to go with the flow, but with how much success remains (dare I say it?) a mystery. Among the sparse TV writing credits for him documented by the Internet Movie Database, the earliest was the original story for “The Long Count” (FOUR STAR PLAYHOUSE, CBS, March 25, 1954), which starred Frank Lovejoy as McGraw, a PI with no first name.

   A few years later McGraw became protagonist of his own series (NBC, 1957-58), which Roeburt wasn’t involved with. It was also in 1954 that the connection with Himan Brown led to Roeburt’s writing at least four scripts for the short-lived syndicated televersion of the INNER SANCTUM series.

   The connection with the Danziger brothers also paid off for him when they hired him to write for two of their series which originated in England but were also seen in the U.S.: THE VISE (1955-59), which for most of its run starred Donald Gray as one-armed British PI Mark Saber, and THE CHEATERS (1959-61), with John Ireland as London-based insurance investigator John Hunter.

   Between series for the Danzigers, Roeburt worked at the position which first brought him to my attention, as story editor and occasional scriptwriter for NBC’s THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF ELLERY QUEEN (1958-59), a 60-minute live series. George Nader starred as EQ, with Les Tremayne playing Ellery’s father, Inspector Richard Queen.

   Credits for this short-lived series are hard to come by. The Internet Movie Database lists nothing, and I have far fewer than I’d like to have. As story editor for the series Roeburt was almost certainly responsible for the decision to buy TV rights to novels by a number of other authors—including Hillary Waugh, Edgar Box (Gore Vidal), Harold Q. Masur and William P. McGivern—and yank out their continuing characters like Box’s Peter Sargeant and Masur’s Scott Jordan so that EQ in the person of George Nader could be shoehorned into the continuity.

   Roeburt is not known to have done any of these scripts himself but he did write the TV adaptation of the 1950 Queen novel DOUBLE, DOUBLE (November 14, 1958). The basis of one EQ episode (December 26, 1958) was Roeburt’s own 1954 novel THE HOLLOW MAN, adapted by Howard Rodman and with Nader implausibly taking the place of Roeburt’s tough cop Johnny Devereaux. The cast included Frank Silvera, Whitney Blake, Murvyn Vye and Wesley Lau.

   Two other episodes were allegedly based on Roeburt material. In “Four and Twenty—To Live” (December 12, 1958; script by Robert E. Thompson), Ellery is confronted by a young woman with a gun who demands that he phone the governor and request a stay of execution for her condemned father. And “The Jinn City Story” (January 9, 1959; script by Nicholas E. Baehr)starts out with Ellery’s plane forced by heavy fog to make an emergency landing at a small-town airport where he’s approached by a strange old man who asks him to clear someone falsely accused of murder. Featured in the cast were Peggie Castle, Vanessa Brown and Brian Keith.

   Neither of these plots sound like any Roeburt novel I’ve read, although they might of course have come from original stories or radio plays. When the series moved from New York to Hollywood and from live to tape, with Lee Philips replacing Nader as EQ, Roeburt apparently declined to go along for the ride. There’s a character named Amos Roeburt in one of the Philips episodes but that’s hardly sufficient evidence that John was involved with the show’s second incarnation, which survived only a few months.

***

   As far as I can tell, Roeburt did not appear in print or any other medium after 1963. Aside from a screenplay based on his 1958 novel THE CLIMATE OF HELL, copyrighted in August 1969 but never produced, how he occupied his time between the year of the Kennedy assassination and his own death remains unknown. Perhaps he’d saved enough money not to have to work anymore.

   We do know that he was prosperous enough to maintain a summer home on Fire Island, where in 1972 he died. Anyone interested in pursuing Roeburt more deeply than I’ve done in these columns will find his papers at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.

***

   While working on this column I discovered to my surprise and delight that my copy of Roeburt’s movie novelization AL CAPONE, which I probably had never opened since buying it decades ago, was graced by an inscription in the hand of Roeburt himself—an inscription which I hope you can read below. Whether Roeburt was referring just to this one book as “horrendous” or was writing off his entire literary output remains unknown.

   As I hope this column and my earlier ones have shown, what he contributed to the genre we love is well worth at least a modicum of attention.


THE TORTURED HISTORY OF MANHUNT
by Jeff Vorzimmer

   The first issue of Manhunt appeared on newsstands in late 1952 and within two years became the widely acknowledged successor to Black Mask, which had ceased publication the year before. The stories in Manhunt captured the noir of Cold War angst like no other fiction magazine of its time and paved the way for television anthology shows such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone.

   Manhunt can best be described as a joint venture between publisher Archer St. John and literary agent Scott Meredith, both based in New York. In 1952, St. John published comic books and had recently ventured into and, in fact, developed 3D comics and graphic novels. His company, St. John Publishing, produced what is considered the first graphic novel, It Rhymes with Lust, in 1950, which was part crime, part romance, and followed that up later the same year with The Case of the Winking Buddha. Neither book sold very well and the line, dubbed “Pictures Novels,” was discontinued after the second title.

   Archer St. John, always an admirer of Black Mask magazine, the premier pulp magazine from the 1920s through the 40s, felt that since that magazine’s demise there was a void in the world of crime-fiction magazines and an opportunity. Of course, comic book publishers don’t usually have big editorial staffs nor do they solicit manuscript submissions. For that, St. John approached Scott Meredith, a literary agent who was beginning to turn the publishing world on its ear with practices such as charging would-be writers reading fees and submitting manuscripts to publishers simultaneously, creating an auction system of competing bids.

   For Scott Meredith it was an opportunity to get his stable of writers in print and create another stream of income. St. John served as the front man to avoid any ethical questions or conflict of interest charges that Meredith might otherwise face. St. John would manage the production of the magazine from layout and illustration to the printing and distribution of the magazine while Meredith’s office would supply a steady supply of fiction and editing.

   Of course, it was not a very well-kept secret within the publishing business. Those in the business, with even a passing familiarity with the roster of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, would notice a preponderance of his clients on the pages of Manhunt. In fact, all ten of the most prolific contributors to the magazine were Meredith authors who, between them, contributed over one-fifth of all stories that appeared in Manhunt over the course of its fourteen-year run.

   Manhunt has often been referred to, then and now, as a closed shop, only available to the Meredith stable of authors, but that’s not entirely true. As often as not, writers not represented by an agent would submit stories directly to Manhunt. These were forwarded to the Meredith office and occasionally published in the magazine, though the authors were not usually signed to a publishing contract on the strength of a single story.

   This would sometimes create awkward moments when a producer from a television studio such as Revue, producers of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and M Squad, would call up the agency looking to secure the rights to a story they read in Manhunt. The Meredith agent would stall the producer, scramble to locate and sign the author, then make the deal.

   Archer St. John originally wanted to call the magazine Mickey Spillane’s Mystery Magazine to compete with Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, albeit with grittier, more hard-boiled stories. Having Spillane’s name on the masthead would have been appealing to both St. John and Meredith in that, by 1952, Spillane’s first six books had combined sales of 20 million copies. His first book, I, The Jury had sold 3.5 million copies by 1953, when it was adapted for the screen.

   When Scott Meredith checked Spillane’s contract with his publisher, Dutton, he found a clause that gave the publisher total control of Mickey Spillane’s name in conjunction with any books or periodicals. If they were to use Spillane’s name on the magazine they had to get Dutton’s permission. However, Dutton balked at the idea.

   Dutton felt that short stories were a distraction for Spillane, and they wanted him to get back to the business of writing novels. At that point, it had been over a year since Spillane had delivered his last novel to them (and it would be ten years before he delivered his next one). The name of the magazine was changed to Manhunt, a named borrowed from a then-defunct crime comic book.

   St. John intended to kick off the magazine with a Mickey Spillane story. He had heard that Collier’s Magazine had turned down a novella Spillane had written, “Everybody’s Watching Me,” and offered to serialize the novella in the first four issues of the new magazine and pay Spillane $25,000 (equivalent to $237,000 today). If Spillane’s name could not be on the masthead, it would at least be on the cover of the first four issues.

   The print run of the first issue, dated January 1953, was 600,000 copies and sold out in five days. It was digest size (5½”x7½”), 144 pages and priced at 35¢ and $4 for a year’s subscription. In addition to the lead story by Spillane, the issue also included stories by Cornell Woolrich under the name of William Irish; Ross Macdonald, under his real name, Kenneth Millar; and Evan Hunter, later known by the pen name Ed McBain.

   It also included a story featuring Richard Prather’s detective Shell Scott, featured in six novels of his own over the previous three years, and, who rivaled Spillane’s Mike Hammer in popularity, and another featuring Frank Kane’s Johnny Liddell. Stories by Floyd Mahannah, Charles Beckman, Jr. and Sam Cobb (Stanley L. Colbert) rounded out the issue.

   St. John had his favorite artist, Matt Baker, a black man in the predominantly white world of comic book illustration, do the artwork for Manhunt. Baker was the artist who had done the panels for the first of the two graphic novels St. John had published, but brought an entirely new look to the Manhunt illustrations, heavy ink and each highlighted with a different spot color. Each story had one illustration on the first page in a style not unlike Manhunt.

Pages from the February 1953 issue of Manhunt with illustrations by Matt Baker

   Baker himself would do most of the illustrations for the first nine issues, thereby setting the style used for the entire 15-year run. Up-and-coming young artists such as Robert McGinnis, Walter Popp and Robert Maguire, as well as older, more established artists, such as Frank Uppwall and Willard Downes, painted the covers.

   The editorial note on the contents page of the second issue stated that the press run of the first issue probably should have been closer to a million copies. St. John apparently split the difference and ran 800,000 copies of the second issue. In addition to the second installment of “Everybody’s Watching Me,” the lead story was another by Kenneth Millar, a Lew Archer story titled “The Imaginary Blonde” under his new pseudonym John Ross Macdonald.

   There were also two more stories by Evan Hunter under the pseudonyms Richard Marsten and Hunt Collins, a Paul Pine story by John Evans, as well as stories by Jonathan Craig (Frank E. Smith), Fletcher Flora, Richard Deming, Eleazar Lipsky and Michael Fessier.

   In addition to the contributors of the first two issues, the third issue was notable in that it included stories by older, more established writers such as Leslie Charteris with a Saint story, Craig Rice (Georgiana Craig) with a John J. Malone story, as well as stories by William Lindsay Gresham and Bruno Fischer.

   The third issue also contained another two stories by Evan Hunter, one under the pseudonym Richard Marsten. In fact, Evan Hunter contributed 16 stories to the first 9 issues of Manhunt under his own name and various pseudonyms and 48 stories over the entire life of the magazine, making him the most prolific contributor by far. For a magazine that was supposed to be all about Mickey Spillane, it was turning out to be about Evan Hunter.

   By mid-1953, St. John, with Meredith’s help, started a campaign to lure big name authors to Manhunt. They approached James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Rex Stout, Erle Stanley Gardner, Nelson Algren and Erskine Caldwell. They offered as much as $5,000 (about $47,000 today) for a 5,000-word story. This was the kind of money writers could expect from the slick magazines, but not from the pulps.

   Many writers like Erle Stanley Gardner initially balked at the idea of publishing in Manhunt, but eventually succumbed. Gardner’s first response to his agent was, “I hate to turn down an offer of $5000 for a story, but, confidentially, I don’t like this magazine concept with which Manhunt started out. I think it is a definite menace to legitimate mystery fiction.”

   By the end of the decade all the big-name writers, including Gardner, had agreed to publish stories in Manhunt, though many appeared only once, the last being the only appearance by Raymond Chandler. His story, “Wrong Pigeon,” previously published only in England, appeared in the February 1960 issue.

   The year 1953 would be the peak year for St. John Publications. Manhunt was turning out to be one of its biggest-selling titles, spawning spin-off titles Verdict and Menace, and its 3D comics were selling millions of copies. The company had 35 different comic book titles with several lines of romance comics, Mighty Mouse and Three Stooges comic book lines, for a total of 169 issues published that year.

   Another of Archer St. John’s projects was a man’s magazine that would include articles of interest to men, photos of women in various stages of undress and quality fiction. However, he was concerned about the post office not allowing the mailing of what they would certainly deem pornographic material to subscribers. After Playboy appeared in December 1953, he was emboldened to move ahead with the project.

   In 1954, Archer brought in his 24-year-old son Michael to help run the business, while he focused on the new men’s magazine, Nugget. Again, he turned to his favorite artist, Matt Baker, to do the illustrations in the magazine. Although that year would turn out to be another good year for St. John Publications, there was trouble on the horizon.

   In the spring of 1954, there was a backlash against violence in comic books that were clearly aimed at children. The crusade was led by New York psychiatrist Fredric Wertham who published the now-infamous Seduction of the Innocent, a book-length study of the adverse effects of violent comic books on young minds, and led to a Senate investigation, which issued its own Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency Interim Report that included a list of comic book titles it deemed inappropriate for children. There were, of course, some St. John titles on the list.

   It was also apparent in early 1954 that 3D comics were just a passing fad. Sales of 3D comics plummeted to the point that, by March of 1954, 3D titles had all but disappeared. The sales of comic books in general were in a slump, brought on in large part by the scare created by politicians and PTA groups after the Wertham study.

   Other forces were coming to bear that would have a personal effect on Archer St. John and the fate of St. John Publications. In August of 1954, President Eisenhower signed The Communist Control Act, which outlawed the Communist Party in the United States. Anyone who had ever been a member of the Communist Party could face imprisonment or even the revocation of citizenship.

   Archer’s brother, the famous journalist Robert St. John, living a self-imposed exile in Switzerland and doing research for books on South Africa and Israel, was determined by the FBI to have been a member of the Communist Party. On September 24, 1954, Robert St. John was summoned to the American Consulate in Geneva and stripped of his passport. When Robert asked why his passport was being taken from him, the reply from the Consul-General was that it was because of his Communist Party activity.

   Robert turned to his brother Archer back in the States for help to get his passport reinstated and the necessary affidavits for the appeal. Over the following months Archer, who was very close to his brother Robert, became increasingly frustrated by the stonewalling he got from the U.S. government on his brother’s case.

   Adding to his personal turmoil was the fact Archer was separated from his wife and living at the New York Athletic Club. His employees at St. John Publications also suspected he was addicted to amphetamines in addition to being an alcoholic. By mid-1955 Robert’s case had still not been decided, though he had submitted numerous affidavits from noted citizens that affirmed that he was never a member of the Communist Party.

   In August, Archer told family members that he was being blackmailed, but didn’t give anyone any details. His son Michael told him not to give in to the blackmailers. Archer told his son that he was staying at the apartment of a friend but wouldn’t tell Michael where.

   On Friday night August 12, 1955, Robert St. John got a call in Switzerland from Archer in New York who told him, “Never in my life have I felt so frustrated. I feel like I’m banging my head against a stone wall. I see no possibility of my getting your passport back. I’ve done everything in my power to help you, but I’ve failed. I’m sick over this.” The next morning Robert got a call telling him that his brother had overdosed on sleeping pills, an apparent suicide. He was 54 years old.

   At times, Archer St. John’s life resembled a story from the pages of Manhunt — Al Capone’s gang once kidnapped him when he was young newspaper publisher — and his death was no different. The apartment where Archer had been staying was a duplex penthouse owned by an attractive, redheaded former model and divorcee named Frances Stratford. She had been sleeping in an upstairs bedroom and had found Archer downstairs lying next to the couch, unresponsive, at 11:30 a.m. that Saturday morning.

   A couple had been seen leaving the apartment the night before, and the police were investigating. On Monday, the New York Daily News reported, “A couple of shadowy West Side characters, a man and a woman, suspected of feeding dope pills to magazine publisher Archer St. John, were being hunted … by detectives investigating St. John’s mysterious death in the penthouse apartment of a former Powers model.”

   After St. John’s death, his wife, Gertrude-Faye, known as “G-F” or “Geff,” showed up at the offices of St. John Publications and promptly fired the entire staff, including Matt Baker. Apparently, she hadn’t wanted anyone around who knew about her husband’s affairs. The irony was that none of the staff knew anything about St. John’s private love life, not even Baker who was probably as close to him as anybody.

   Despite the failure of the previous Manhunt clones, Verdict, which lasted only four issues in late 1953 and Menace, which lasted two issues, the following year, Michael St. John decided to expand his own editorial staff and to introduce yet two more titles, Mantrap and Murder! in 1956. Unfortunately, the new titles suffered from the same lackluster sales of the first two spin-off titles and were discontinued just as quickly.

   Undaunted by the failure of four new titles in as many years, Michael kept searching for a formula that would repeat the success of Manhunt. What Michael and his business manager, Richard Decker, came up with was an opposite, more genteel, direction. They approached Alfred Hitchcock with an offer to license his name and image for a mystery digest.

   Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine was an immediate success and, in fact, sales would steadily increase throughout the rest of the decade while those of Manhunt were in steady decline, down to 169,000 by 1957. Its digest size, with two-column layout and heavily inked spot color illustrations, were identical to Manhunt’s.

   In an effort to boost sales of both Manhunt and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, St. John and Decker decided to increase the size of both magazines from their current digest size to regular magazine size to get, what they hoped would be, more attention on newsstands. What it got Manhunt was the unwanted attention of the Federal District Attorney.

   After only the second issue at the bigger magazine size, Michael St. John, Richard E. Decker, Charles W. Adams (the Art Director) and Flying Eagle Publications (a subsidiary of St. John’s Publications and holding company of Manhunt) were indicted on March 14, 1957, for “mailing or delivery copies of the April, 1957, issue of a publication entitled Manhunt containing obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy or indecent matter” in violation of United States Penal Code 18 U.S.C. §1461.

   In District Court in Concord, New Hampshire, St. John’s lawyers moved to have the charges dismissed on the grounds that the complaint didn’t identify what article was specifically being charged in the issue as “obscene, lewd, filthy or indecent.” They argued that “the indictment is so loosely drawn that it would not afford them protection from further prosecution.” District Court Judge Aloysius J. Connor agreed and threw out the indictments on August 7, 1957.

   Federal prosecutors promptly refiled charges with specific complaints: “All six of the stories have definitely weird overtones and can certainly be characterized as crude, course, vulgar, and on the whole disgusting. But tested by the reaction of the community as a whole — the average member of society — it seems to us that only the feature novelette, ‘Body on a White Carpet,’ and the illustration appearing on page 25 accompanying the story entitled ‘Object of Desire,’ could be found to fall within the ban of the statute as limited in its application by the important public interest in a free press protected in the First Amendment.” The defendants faced a fine of $5,000 ($43,000 in today’s dollars) and up to five years in prison.

The offending illustration by Jack Coughlin accompanying the story
“Object of Desire” on page 25 of the April 1957 issue.

   On December 1, 1958, the final verdict of the District Court jury was that Flying Eagle Publications and Michael St. John were guilty and fined $3,000 ($26,000 today). Judge Connor gave St. John a separate fine of $1000, a suspended sentence of six months in jail and two-year probation. Richard E. Decker and Charles W. Adams were acquitted. Michael St. John immediately appealed the verdict and the case went to Federal Appeals Court.

   On January 21, 1960, the Federal Appeals Court in Boston set aside the verdict of the District Court and ordered a new trial. Chief Judge Peter Woodbury found that the prosecutors had erred in their instructions to the jury by telling them that two defendants, Decker and Adams, originally listed on the indictment had “been separated from this action” rather than that they were acquitted.

   A year later the Court of Appeals upheld the decision of the Circuit Court on January 10, 1961, and Judge Bailey Aldrich upheld the original fine of $5,000. After three years and nine months of litigation, St. John Publishing was financially drained. The circulation of Manhunt had dropped to 100,000, and Richard Decker had split with St. John in the summer of 1960, taking Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine with him to Palm Beach, Florida.

   Scott Meredith had always been annoyed with what seemed to be chronic cash-flow problems at St. John, and it only got worse. The magazine limped along for the next six years, and fewer of Meredith’s writers appeared in the magazine. Only 33 stories by the top ten Meredith contributors appeared in the 1960s.

   Only three Evan Hunter stories appeared in Manhunt in the 60s, the last story, fittingly, in the last issue of April/May 1967. By then the circulation had dropped to a little over 74,000 copies. Michael St. John decided to get out of the publishing business entirely and sold off all the assets of St John Publishing, including Nugget.

— From the forthcoming book The Best of Manhunt, Stark House Press, July 2019

      Sources:

Aldrich, Baily, Circuit Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Flying Eagle Publications v. United States, 285 F.2d 307, January 10, 1961

Ashley, Michael, author, Kemp, Earl and Ortiz, Luiz editors, Cult Magazines A-Z: A Curious Compendium of Culturally Obsessive & Curiously Expressive Publications, 2009, Nonstop Press

Benson, John, Confessions, Romances, Secrets, and Temptations: Archer St. John and the St. John Romance Comics, 2007, Fantagraphics Books

Benson, John, Romance Without Tears, 2003, Fantagraphics Books

Fugate, Francis L. and Roberta B., Secrets of the World’s Best-Selling Writer, 1980, William Morrow and Company, Inc.

Carlson, Michael, “Interview with Mickey Spillane,” Crime Time website, June 29, 2002

Chicago Tribune, Chicago, IL, July 8, 1925, pg. 16

Collins, Max Allan and Traylor, James L, Spillane (to be published in 2020)

Cook, Michael L., Monthly Murders: A Checklist and Chronological Listing of Fiction in the Digest-Size Mystery Magazines in the United States and England, 1982

Horowitz, Terry Fred, Merchant of Words: The Life of Robert St. John, 2014, Rowman & Littlefield

Meredith, Scott and Meredith, Sidney, The Best From Manhunt, 1958, Perma-Books

Morgan, Hal and Symmes, Dan, Amazing 3-D, 1982, Little, Brown and Company

Morrison, Henry, Literary Agent and former Scott Meredith Literary Agency employee (1957-1964), Interview, January 29, 2019

Nashua Telegraph, Nashua, NH, January 22, 1960, pg. 2

Nashua Telegraph, Nashua, NH, January 11, 1961, pg. 2

New York Daily News, New York, NY, August 15, 1955, pg. C5

N. W. Ayers & Sons Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals, 1954-1967

The Ottawa Citizen, Ottawa, Canada, March 2, 1957, pg. 2

The Portsmouth Herald, Portsmouth, NH, March 15, 1957, pg. 7

The Portsmouth Herald, Portsmouth, NH, December 2, 1958, pg. 8

Quattro, Ken, Archer St. John & The Little Company That Could, 2006, www.comicartville.com

Waller, Drake, It Rhymes with Lust, 1950, 2007, Dark Horse Books

Woodbury, Peter, Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit, Flying Eagle Publications v. United States, 273 F.2d 799, January 21, 1960

REVIEWED BY DAVID VINEYARD:         


RIDE THE MAN DOWN. Republic Pictures, 1952. Brian Donlevy, Rod Cameron, Ella Raines, Forrest Tucker, Barbara Britton, Chill Wills, J. Carroll Naish, James Bell, Taylor Holmes, Jim Davis, Paul Fix, Roy Barcroft, Jack La Rue, Douglas Kennedy, Chris-pin Martin Screenplay by Mary McCall, Jr. based on the book by Luke Short (Doubleday Double D Western, hardcover, 1942; Bantam Books # 82, paperback, February 1947; first published as a Saturday Evening Post serial, April 4 through May 16 1942). Directed by Joseph Kane.

   Maybe it is because it is based on a novel by Luke Short (Frederick Glidden), but this fast moving tale of a range war has enough characters and plot for half a dozen films, and yet somehow never seems crowded or off balance, and that certainly has to do with an all star B cast and the sure hand of veteran Republic oater director Joe Kane at the helm.

   Shot in TruColor, this one boasts a literate script, tough almost hard-boiled characters (not surprising from Short who was one of the leading exponents of the hard-boiled Western and whose books inspired two of the better noir Western films — Blood On the Moon and Stations West), and solid motivation all around, and in this one it feels less like the old West than Capone era Chicago with horses and cowboy hats, as everyone in the countryside is out to steal from or kill the handful of good-guys. Odds against the hero of one of these have seldom been higher.

   This is one of several Rod Cameron and Forrest Tucker worked on at the studio with Cameron usually the hero and Tucker the heavy, though here he is only one of a formidable group surrounding the embattled Cameron and his handful of allies.

   The time is the early thaw of 1892 when Phil Evarts, owner of the Hatchet Ranch has just died, frozen to death in the harsh winter. Evarts was an unpopular man who carved his land out by sweat and bullets and few mourn his passing, particularly not Bide Marriner (Brian Donlevy), a fellow rancher, and neighbors Paul Fix, Roy Barcroft, Jack La Rue, and Douglas Kennedy, who all want the Hatchet grazing land, and Evart’s son-in-law-to-be Sam Danfelser (Forrest Tucker) who has other reasons to want Hatchet broken up. Even Sheriff Joe Kneen (J. Carroll Naish) is no mourner, and likely to be little help.

   Add to that Red Courteen (Jim Davis) as a renegade who sells whiskey and guns to the Indians and wants his piece of the pie, and there is a who’s who of Western bad guys gathered to destroy the Evarts legacy. Even the proprietor of the local general store Mr. Priest (Taylor Holmes) father of Lottie, the girl Hatchet foreman Will Bartlett (Rod Cameron) wants to marry (Barbara Britton), wants to get in on the deal. The Hatchet Ranch is surrounded by venal and violent vultures who want to feed on the body before its dead the characters almost as venal as a revisionist Western from a much later era.

   In fact, the only people who seem to care about Evarts and Hatchet are his weak brother John (James Bell), Phil’s strong daughter Celia (Ella Raines), and foreman Will Bartlett, and it quickly looks as if it will be the latter two against the whole territory as they fight to keep the Hatchet together against impossible odds and enemies inside and out.

   Sub-plots abound. Sam is jealous of Celia Evarts devotion to Bartlett; Lottie is jealous of Bartlett’s devotion to Celia; Sheriff Kneen is in Marriner’s pocket but the fit is increasingly binding; Ray Kavanaugh (Paul Fix) murders John Evarts and is witnessed by weak rancher Joe Kennedy (Jack La Rue) who flees the country pursued by Bartlett; Marriner wants Kavanaugh arrested and tried tying up the Hatchet in court and with it certain the locals who hate the Hatchet Ranch will set him free; Red Courteen (Jim Davis) hates the part Indian Bartlett who humiliated him; Lottie’s father Mr. Priest has bought interest in cattle owned by Courteen and now being held by the Hatchet because they were grazing on Hatchet land and he’s losing money; and, the only help Bartlett can hire is a couple of drifters top hand Ike Adams (Chill Wills) doesn’t trust.

   Meanwhile Sam tries to undermine Bartlett and force Celia to give into Marriner because he is unmanned by her wealth and power and resents her strength.

   That’s quite a bit of plot to work into just over ninety minutes and still get in a satisfying amount of action and gunplay, and granted Donlevy doesn’t really get as much film time as he might need to really make an impression as the bad guy, what with Tucker and Davis taking up so much of the bad air..

   And tough action there is, more brutal than you might expect from a Western of this era, but also room for the redemption of Sheriff Kneen and a shootout between him and Marriner; a couple of well done set pieces — a nice one of Bartlett trapped in the town run by Courteen having to shoot his way out against a small army of enemies — and enough bits here and there for the large cast to keep all the actors happy.

   It’s no lost classic, and frankly the print I saw was at best only serviceable, but it is a good example of what Republic could do with the Western, given a bit more to chew on than the usual oater script. The fact that the crowded plot never seems constrained by the running time and no one in the cast gets slighted shows capable hands at work. Just getting all those plot elements from the Short story into the screenplay without losing track of any of the characters or their arcs was no small achievement.

   It’s not exactly true that Republic never made a bad Western as they used to assert when I was a kid growing up, but they didn’t make many of them, and they hit the bulls-eye for more often than you might expect. This is a surprisingly meaty small A film with a Western fan’s dream cast, and more going for it than any fan has the right to expect. You got a lot for your dime or quarter in those days and no Western fan, kid or adult, was likely disappointed in this one.


STUART KAMINSKY You Bet Your Life

STUART KAMINSKY – You Bet Your Life. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1978. Paperback reprints: Charter Book, 1980; Mysterious Press, 1990.

   Hollywood private eye Toby Peters, whose previous clients have included the likes of Errol Flynn and Judy Garland, now heads for Chicago, to settle some gambling debts that Chico Marx strongly protests are not his.

   The inclusion of an aging Al Capone and a youthful Richard Daley in walk-on roles, as well as some other pleasurable surprises, continues to make this series a boisterously welcome romp in nostalgia, but like a good many pulp stories of the same era, the detective story involved relies far too heavily on far too many complications. Not quite hidden is the fact that the plot makes little or no sense at all.

   Next, however, an urgent job for Howard Hughes.

Rating:   C.

— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 3, No. 6, Nov/Dec 1979. This review also appeared earlier in the Hartford Courant.


[UPDATE] 09-14-11.   This was the third in a series of 24 recorded Toby Peters adventures. There’s no doubting the popularity of the character, and one of the reasons has to be sheer nostalgia. The clients he has and characters he meets while tackling their cases, mostly real-life movie stars but loads of other famous personalities of the 1940s as well, are guaranteed to catch any would-be reader’s eye.

   While I no longer recall the details of this one, the weaknesses of the plots in general are what I do remember. I read a lot of the books in the series, though, so I must not have minded too much!

JO DERESKE – Final Notice.

Avon, paperback original. First printing, November 1998.

JO DERESKE Death's Shadow

   This is the sixth in Dereske’s “Miss Zukas” series, and as usual in my random, non-systematic way of doing things, the only one of them that I’ve read before this one is the one that follows this one.

   And in fact, the incident that initiates that very same next one, Miss Zukas in Death’s Shadow, occurs on pages 18 and 19 of this one – she’s given a traffic ticket on the way to the airport to pick up her elderly aunt who’s coming in from Michigan for a visit.

   Being a reference librarian either reinforces Helma’s sense of what is correct and proper, or it is what caused her to become a librarian in the first place. And being given a summons for turning right on a yellow light definitely does not fit her sense of what is correct and proper. Allow me to quote:

    “I can’t sign this,” she told [the policeman].

    “It’s not an admission of guilt, ma’am.” His voice grew louder, higher pitched. “You’re only acknowledging receipt of the ticket.”

    “Then you’ll have to make it readable. You’ve spelled Wilhelmina incorrectly. I believe the time noted here is three minutes into the future. I can see your badge number is 087 but I’m unable to read your name: Olsen? Carolson? Camden? This document is too illegible for me to sign my name to. I’d like a rewritten ticket, please.”


   Sure enough, at the beginning of the next book, the only one before this one that I’ve read, Miss Zukas is doing community service at a homeless shelter. I hope you don’t get the wrong idea, though. Miss Zukas is in her 30s, I believe, perhaps almost 40, but unfortunately I didn’t make a note of where I saw a reference to her age. If I have it wrong, I’ll change this small piece of data, and unless you remember, you’ll never know I had it wrong.

   But the point is, she’s not a dottering old lady librarian, and while she’s not married, she does have a sort of boy friend in Bellehaven’s chief of police, Wayne Gallant. (Bellehaven is a fictional town, I believe, in Washington state.) This romance, if indeed that is what it is, is the strangest romance I’ve ever read about, as they are both rather reticent to speak about their relationship, even to each other.

JO DERESKE Final Notice

   When Wayne Gallant’s ex-wife comes to town in Final Notice to reclaim her former husband, though, things between them (Helma and Wayne Gallant) begin to come to a boil. If a relationship can boil at less than room temperature, this one does. (He is always referred to Wayne Gallant, by the way, and when he calls Helma on the telephone, he says, “Helma, this is Wayne Gallant.” I found that … strange. In a nice sense, mind you.)

   The dotty old lady in Final Notice is actually Helma’s Aunt Em, who back in Michigan (where she has lived her entire life, so far, or so Helma believes but soon discovers that it was not so) she had a “brain incident” and has become in behavior rather, shall we say, eccentric. And talkative. About her past. A past that Helma’s family had never talked about. Especially the time Aunt Em spent in Chicago during the rum-running days of Al Capone.

   Dead in Helma’s apartment building parking lot is the same man who tried to steal Aunt Em’s purse at the airport. The identification is clinched by the three stab wounds in his arm produced by Aunt Em’s hat pin. Coincidence? Not very likely, but who? And why?

   I enjoyed this, indeed I did. The detective work is minor, but it’s not dislodged, disrupted and disposed of completely. The characters are only mildly wacky and perhaps just as normal as any other group of people, including Miss Zukas’s fellow librarians, especially the director, a lady who believes that psychological color testing is a good way to maintain staff morale. Miss Zukas refuses. Naturally.

   Here’s a list of all of Jo Dereske’s novel-length mystery fiction. Ruby Crane is a graphologist by profession, a forgery expert at a California detective agency. I’ve not read any of her adventures, but I’m sure that I read somewhere that she may be a cousin of Miss Zukas. If so, I imagine the cases she solves may be as much of a sneaky pleasure to read as this one.

    Miss Zukas. All are Avon paperback originals.

1. Miss Zukas and the Library Murders (1994)
2. Miss Zukas and the Island Murders (1995)

JO DERESKE Island Murders

3. Miss Zukas and the Stroke of Death (1995)
4. Miss Zukas and the Raven’s Dance (1996)
5. Out of Circulation (1997)
6. Final Notice (1998)
7. Miss Zukas in Death’s Shadow (1999)
8. Miss Zukas Shelves the Evidence (2001)
9. Bookmarked to Die (2006)

JO DERESKE Bookmarked

10. Catalogue of Death (2007)
11. Index to Murder (2008)


    Ruby Crane. All are Dell paperback originals.

1. Savage Cut (1996)
2. Cut and Dry (1997)

JO DERESKE Cut and Dry

3. Short Cut (1998)

Acts of Betrayal

ACTS OF BETRAYAL. 1997, Conquistador Entertainment. Maria Conchita Alonso, Matt McColm, Muse Watson, David Groh, Susan Lee Hoffman. Director: Jack Ersgard.

   If you were to ask, I’d say that as a rough guess maybe 80% of this 90 minute action film is exactly that: non-stop action. There are more bullets flying in this picture than in many small revolutions, and at the end there are only two people left standing: star corruption witness Eva Ramirez (Maria Conchita Alonso) and stalwart, straight-as-an arrow FBI agent Lance Cooper (Matt McColm), whose thankless job it is to get her before the investigating jury.

   Opposing them is a veritable army of thugs, soldiers of fortune, outlaws, bikers and miscellaneous gunmen, organized and fortified by two individuals (one man with a tall, strikingly beautiful female assistant) in a well-equipped communications van, complete with state-of-the-art computers and backup plans and mercenary forces far beyond anything Al Capone ever dreamed of.

   Did I say that agent Cooper is straight-laced? What I didn’t say is that the lady he is escorting is uninhibited, a non-stop talker, an incessant chatterer, often suggestively and R-rated, and of course, as they most often do, opposites attract. Eventually. I love it. And of course they save each others’ lives more than once.

Acts of Betrayal

   For the kind of movie this is, on a scale of one to five, I would give this one a five. The acting is far above average, the dialogue witty, and while realism has no basis in the story line, realism is not exactly what people who watch movies like this are watching for.

   For the kind of movie this also is, there is no scale from one to ten. I do concede that movies like this do not deserve a scale that goes that high.

   I’ve not been able to find this movie on DVD in English — only in Spanish, or as a beat-up former video rental. I guess you’ve have to explain the economics of movie-making to me. I’m sure this never played in theaters, only on cable. Even a cheap five dollar DVD would recoup some of the production costs, wouldn’t it?