THE HIPPOPOTAMUS. Lightyear Entertainment, 2017. Roger Allam, Mathew Modine, Fiona Shaw, Tim McInnerny, Emily Berrington, Geraldine Sommerville, John Standing, Tommy Knight, Dean Ridge. Screenplay by Blanche McIntyre, Tom Hodgson, John Finnemore, & Robin Hill, based on the novel by Stephen Fry. Directed by John Jencks. Available on DVD, as well as streaming on Amazon Prime.

   To begin with, Ted Wallace (Roger Allam) has committed original sin, he’s a poet, worse still he’s a successful published poet even though it has been five years since the wrote a line. These days he makes his living at an even worse crime: he “commits journalism.” He is a theatrical critic.

   At least he is until he blows up during a particularly odious production and is escorted out by the police after having sucker punched the director.

   Ted is miserable and self destructive, and now he is broke as well, but Ted is about to be thrown a lifeline by an unlikely source, his goddaughter Jane (Emily Berrington) who is dying of cancer and recently in remission.

   Jane is convinced she has been saved by a miracle, the nature of which she will not reveal, but wishes Ted to investigate, at her Uncle, Lord John Logan (Mathew Modine)’s estate (“he did something unspeakable for Margaret Thatcher” to earn his knighthood, we are told).

   Ted is more than willing for the 25,000 Sterling offered, but things are a bit strained between him and his old school chum John, but then things are a bit constrained between him and Jane’s Mother, John’s sister (Geraldine Sommevile) too. In fact things are a bit strained between Ted and the world, but if he is just careful he can get by claiming to be concerned about his nephew young David (Tommy Knight) who is sensitive, awkward, and wants to be a poet.

   Those are just some of the odd things about David, as Ted will soon learn, because though there isn’t a corpse or a murder in sight, The Hippopotamus (Ted) is a manor house mystery in the mode of Agatha Christie replete with eccentric characters, carefully hidden family secrets, and a reluctant but acerbic and quite able sleuth in Ted himself.

   John Logan once saw his father save a man’s life, and he has believed his father had a gift all his life. Now he thinks it skipped a generation and is in his son David, who it seems has performed three actual miracles, starting my saving his mother’s life. John wants to protect David from being exploited, but is also a bit too in awe of that supposed gift.

   Just how David performed most of those miracles though is among the more hilarious and scandalous things about this tale.

   Most of the laughs here are of the quiet variety, but real enough. Despite the constant flow of acid and obscenity from Ted, the film is gentle as very nearly as everyone involved, but Ted has a desperate need to believe in a miracle that ultimately will do more harm than good. He is an unlikely hero, but before it is over he and several others will be saved, though not without cost.

   There is even a delightful great detective moment when kicking the bucket puts all the pieces of the puzzle together.

   Suspects include Tim McInnerny as a flamboyant homosexual who lives on the estate; Fiona Shaw as David’s protective, and sane, Mother; a house guest and her plain daughter who pose another threat to David; Jane’s mother who still loathes Ted after their breakup; and Simon (Dean Ridge) David’s sane nice brother.

   John Standing has a nice bit as Podmore, the aging and rather bored butler.

   All in all, it builds up to a satisfying conclusion with Ted even getting to play at Hercule Poirot at a gathering of the suspects when he puts the pieces of the puzzle in the right order that everyone else has jumbled up in their own needs and hopes. As in a Christie novel everyone sees the same things, but only Ted sees them as they are and not as everyone would like them to be.

   The novel is by Stephen Fry, himself an acerbic actor, comic, and commentator who has appeared in numerous movies, television shows (a semi regular role on Bones), was teamed with actor Hugh Laurie as Jeeves to Laurie’s Wooster and in a variety series, and who has written several novels, one a modern version of The Count of Monte Cristo. Fry is one of those jack of all literary and artistic trades that seem to appear when needed in British entertainment and enrich us all.

   It is almost impossible to describe anything from Fry without the words, wicked, delicious, delightful, playful, sinful, arch, amusing, intelligent, or barbed, and that perfectly sums up this bright tale where the laying on of hands becomes a different kind of miracle in the mind of an oversexed teen than you would ever expect.

   Feel the need to escape, but to do so without sacrificing brain cells, then this is perfect for you. Literate, well played, vicious and kind at the same time, arch and human, nasty and heartfelt, it is a delight as novel or film. There is a definite Ealing comedy feel to it, with a touch of Oscar Wilde, the zing of Monty Python, and just enough black humor (or at least dark gray) to leaven the whole thing.

   We are in those delightful British waters where dwelt Oscar Wilde, John Mortimer, P. G. Wodehouse, Kingsley Amis, Simon Raven, Iris Murdoch, George Orwell, Timothy Findlay, and in a comic mood Graham Greene, and it is refreshing indeed.

THE BRAVADOS. 20th Century Fox, 1958. Gregory Peck, Joan Collins, Stephen Boyd, Albert Salmi, Henry Silva, Lee Van Cleef, Herbert Rudley, Andrew Duggan, Ken Scott, George Voskovec, Barry Coe, Gene Evans. Screenplay by Philip Yordan, based on a novel by Frank O’Rourke. Director Henry King.

   This widescreen Technicolor western may not quite be a classic, but it comes close, and as the saying goes, I wouldn’t want to live on the difference. Directed by veteran Henry King and with a remarkable cast of actors, even for a Western from this period, it follows one man’s path to revenge and ultimately redemption.

   Jim Douglass (Gregory Peck) rides into a quiet and tense little town on the eve of a public hanging of four outlaws who shot up the place and killed several people. All he will say is that he is from a small town one hundred miles away and he is there to see the hanging. The law (Herbert Rudley) is nervous about strangers in town and waiting for the hangman, unsure of this quiet sullen man who has traveled so far to see four men die.

   Also in town is Josefa Valarde (Joan Collins, and quite good here) who knew Douglass five years ago in New Orleans. Through her we gradually piece together Peck’s nature and journey, his wife’s death, his six month quest to hunt down these four men he has never seen (that’s a key point later in the film).

   There are several small characters from the town drawn sharply, the young lovers and the girl’s disapproving father who wants more than small town life for her (Kathleen Gallant, Barry Coe, George Voskovec), a gullible good natured deputy (Ken Scott), Rudley’s lawman, padre Andrew Duggan (who knows the secret Douglass hides from everyone).

   During a church service the supposed hangman (Joe deRita — yes, that Joe deRita, unbilled and quite good in serious role) frees the prisoner, stabbing Rudley and getting killed for his efforts and the young girl Emma (Gallant), is taken hostage by the escaping killers.

   There’s a fine scene when the wounded Rudley stumbles bleeding into the church, eloquently shot and staged for full effect.

   In a scene that echoes The Searchers, Peck refuses to join the others in a pointless nighttime posse. He knows the hunt will be long and deadly.

   Peck’s performance here as a man grown deadly and possessed by his anger, grief, and need for revenge anchors the film.

   Boyd is his usual charming over-sexed sadist, a part he perfected (his showdown with Peck is well staged as less a duel than an execution), Salmi a vicious brute (a part he perfected), Van Cleef a hothead prone to losing his cool and a coward when it comes down to it (one of the stronger scenes key to the movie is when Peck’s character executes him in cold blood), and Silva the cool half-breed (Salmi: “I don’t trust the Indian. You never know what he’s thinking.”}, the key to this Western drama that proves to be much more than just the typical Western revenge Kabuki theater we are so used to.

   Uniquely for King, who usually composed his films like paintings, the camera work here is often nervous and edgy, especially when Peck is on screen. Shot by the great Leon Shamroy, who often worked with King, the film’s intelligence goes well beyond the screenplay and O’Rourke’s fine novel (he also wrote Two Mules for The Marquesa, the basis for The Professionals), to the films visual style which varies from wide sweeping shots to tense close ups.

   A tensely shot fight between Salmi and Peck in a shadowy grove of woods is one of the best uses of outdoor Technicolor filming you will see in a film and the dramatic scene when the posse finds Salmi hanging upside down from a tree a masterpiece of implied violence. You’ll notice Peck wears a black hat and dark blue and black clothes throughout the film and rides a black horse, visual shorthand for what he has become.

   What isn’t shown or even said is more eloquent than any dialogue could be in this film.

   The key to the film lies in the duel of wits between Henry Silva’s half-breed and Gregory Peck. As the killers circle towards the Douglass ranch never knowing it, a gentle neighbor of Douglass is killed (Gene Evans), and the girl attacked by Boyd, but left alive at Silva’s insistence when he interrupts her rape by Boyd to force him to flee. Even Collins, who has sought to curb Peck’s wrath is ready to see him kill them all when they find the girl in Evans cabin.

   Peck gives a subtle understated performance here. As the hunt goes on his humanity begins to reemerge, as he kills the men one by one until only he and Silva are left.

   The answer changes this film from what it began as, and gives it a remarkable turn rare in a Western revenge film, one Peck plays to the hilt, and one that leaves this film feeling remarkably modern and marks its rare intelligence. That is is also beautiful to look at and the cinematography is part and parcel of telling the story is also notable. There is also a fine score by Lionel Newman with contributions by Hugo Friedhofer and Alfred Newman uncredited.

   The suspense here is less whether Peck’s character will survive and more whether he will end up worse than the men he is hunting.

   Peck has a particularly good Western resume, from films like The Gunfighter, and Yellow Sky, to Only the Valiant and The Big Country and fairly late in his career, The Stalking Moon. This one fits well within the mold,

   And if you want to call it a classic, you won’t get an argument from me.

DAVID WALKER – Winter of Madness. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1964. Houghton Mifflin, US, hardcover, 1964. Pocket Cardinal 50176, US, paperback, 1965.

   So opens Tarquin Auchartt Duncatto, thirteenth Baron of Duncatto of Duncatto (“Tarquums darling”) from his Swiss hotel room as his beautiful not quite rich American wife Lois bathes nearby and he prepares to put to paper the recent events of the annual Christmas Party at his Scottish estate.

   And it is no weekend party with a nice polite murder or two à la Agatha Christie.

   All hell breaks loose, to be exact.

   Guests include: Harry Zanzibar Gilpin, American Ambassador to Chile; Baroness Duncatto’s best friend the oft married and widowed Grafin Gloria Von Wonne (an absolute humdinger of a little peach) and her homicidal child Theodore (plump and inscrutable); the mysterious and somewhat naive but nearly perfect Caesare Campari (great shot, great artist, and the nicest chap I ever knew); Bud Gravel and Mabel Boulding (the one in Microfission the other in Biotronics); the Duncatto’s oversexed daughter Tirene; possibly the Russians, the Mafia, a possible infernal machine, open warfare — some of it fought in armor on a private ski run — various servants like the outspoken gillie Hamish Geddes and Duncatto’s nearly perfect man Bray; and one other guest, big game hunter Colonel Tiger Clyde (“I’m Clyde. They call me Tiger. So do you.”), handsome, devastating to women — not the least Duncatto’s wife Lois and daughter Tirene — ruthless, and what you get when your friend, X of the Civil Service, decides you might have an infernal device in your backyard and James Bond is out of town.

   I was fifteen when I first ran across Winter of Madness in a Pocket Books edition, and I have to be honest that rereading it at seventy I get for more of the innuendo and double entendre now than I did then, but rediscovering it reminds more than ever why it is one of my favorite books of all time.

   Not many books read fifty-five years later can stand that test.

   Imagine, if you can, P. G. Wodehouse and Dornford Yates collaborating with Ian Fleming, Vladimir Nabokov, Leonard Wibberley, and Kingsley Amis and you get something of the idea of a book that is a delight from start to finish. Inventive, playful, darkly humorous, and all orchestrated like an Ealing Comedy crossed with a James Bond movie with a touch of Dr. Strangelove thrown into the mix.

   Only Richard Condon ever led me more happily down the garden path.

   David Walker was a Scottish writer best remembered for the beloved Wee Geordie, about a naive Scottish athlete who wanders down to London for the Olympics and takes home the gold. It was made into a hit movie with Bill Travers as Geordie. Then there was his altogether more serious novel Harry Black, the story of a hunt for a man-eating tiger in India that becomes a re-evaluation for the hunter, a man who has never faced anything greater than himself before. That one was filmed too as Harry Black and the Tiger with Stewart Granger.

   Over the years Black wrote a number of books from serious mainstream novels Where the North Wind Blows, to thrillers to more comedic books like this, Wee Geordie, and the Bond spoof Cab-Intersec. His short fiction regularly appeared in the Saturday Evening Post.

   Winter of Madness is well worth seeking out if you prize genuine humor, malice, and sheer fun in your escapist reading, though you may, like Tarquin, need a rest in the mountains after you finish.

   Bring tissue too, you will laugh until you cry.

MARTIN MEYERS – Spy and Die. Patrick Hardy #2, Popular Library, paperback original, 1976.

   Pat Hardy is an oversexed private detective, living the good life of luxury apartments and bosomy girls. When hired by the niece of a deceased jellymaker to find out how he died, he’s caught in a squeeze of national security and enemy agents.

   It’s all nonsense, of course. The highlight of the affair is a meeting with a fat head of security named Julius Foxx, and his assistant Mr. Archibald. There’s a lot of bouncing in bed and other places, a good deal of padding, and little else.

   
   The Patrick Hardy series —

1. Kiss and Kill (1975)
2. Spy and Die (1976)
3. Red Is For Murder (1976)
4. Hung Up To Die (1976)
5. Reunion For Death (1976)

    —
Bibliographic Update: In the 1990s, Martin Meyers teamed up with his wife Annette (as Maan Meyers) to write a series of historical crime novels following the lives of one family living in Manhattan over the years.

   Most of these entries are from Part 27 of the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. All but one of the books came from the lot I bought at the Windy City show, so the images of the covers you see were easy to come by.

   The one exception referred to in the first line above is the newly expanded entry for Alfred Mazure, which is as it appears now in Part 26.

COULTER, STEPHEN. 1914- . Pseudonym: James Mayo, q.v. British journalist and author; served in World War II as one of American General Eisenhower’s staff officers. Under his own name, the author of eight espionage/adventure novels included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, four of them published in the UK only.

LANCASTER, DONALD. Pseudonym of William (Leonard) Marshall, 1944- , q.v. The book below was commissioned to be written after the disappearance of the series creator, Ian Mackintosh, 1940-1979, q.v. The book is extremely scarce.
      The Sandbaggers: Think of a Number. Corgi, UK, pb, 1980. Novel based on the characters in the TV series. Add SC: Neil Burnside (Roy Marsden) & Willie Caine (Ray Lonnen).

MACKINTOSH, IAN. 1940-1979. Correct both dates and spelling of last name (from MacKINTOSH). Born in Inverness; commissioned in the Royal Navy. Author of eight crime and thriller novels included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV; among these, three were novelizations of TV series the author created (Warship) or wrote and produced: Wilde Alliance, and the book below, about an elite British Intelligence covert operations unit. Mackintosh himself died in mysterious fashion. According to a Wikipedia entry, during the third season of The Sandbaggers in July 1979, he and a girlfriend were declared lost at sea after their single-engine aircraft strangely disappeared near Alaska after a radioed call for help.
      The Sandbaggers. Corgi, UK, pb, 1978. Novelizes two episodes of the TV series: “Always Glad to Help” and “A Feasible Solution.” Add setting: London, Cyprus. Also add SC: Neil Burnside (Roy Marsden) & Willie Caine (Ray Lonnen). [Shown also in the cover image below is Diana Keen as Laura Dickens.] See the author’s entry for Donald Lancaster for a second book in the series.

MARSHALL, WILLIAM (LEONARD). 1944- . Pseudonym: Donald Lancaster, q.v. Under his own name, the author of many mystery novels included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. His best known series is the one that chronicles the adventures of the policemen who work out of the Hong Kong’s Yellowthread Station, beginning with Yellowthread Street (Hamish Hamilton, UK, 1975).

MAYO, JAMES. Pseudonym of Stephen Coulter, 1914- , q.v. Under this pen name, the author of eight spy/adventure novels included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, six of them with sexed-up British super spy Charles Hood, billed as “the toughest of tough agents.” Four of the Hood books were also published in the US.
      The Man Above Suspicion. Heinemann, UK, hc, 1969. SC: Charles Hood. Add setting: Windward Islands, France, Austria, London. [Shown is the cover of the 1970 Pan paperback edition.]

MAZURE, ALFRED (LEONARDUS). 1914-1974. Pseudonym: Maz, q.v. Under his own name, add the following titles. SC: Sherazad, a “sexy top agent of an ultra-secret organization,” in all titles.
      Sherazad on a Trip. Mayflower, 1972
      Sherazad Uptight. Mayflower, 1974
      Welcome Sherazad. Tallis, UK, hc, 1969. Setting: London, England. “The Mystery of the Vanishing Film Starlets.” [Also shown is the cover of the Panther paperback reprint edition.]

WHITE, ALAN. 1924- . Pseudonyms: James Fraser, Alec Haig, Bill Reade & Alec Whitney. Born in Yorkshire, England. Under his own name, the author of 18 spy and mystery novels included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, three of them marginally. Series characters include Detective Inspector Armstrong; and Captain Colson of the British Special Services, a veteran of numerous commando raids during World War II.
      The Long Midnight. Barrie, UK, hc, 1972. Harcourt, US, hc, 1974. Setting: Norway, World War II. Delete SC: Captain Colson. [Two men are sent to Norway, 1943, to uncover a traitor to the Nazi resistance. Shown is the cover of the 1973 Pan paperback edition.]

MICHAEL SHAYNE: PRIVATE DETECTIVE. 20th Century Fox, 1940. Lloyd Nolan, Marjorie Weaver, Walter Abel, Elizabeth Patterson, Donald MacBride, Douglas Dumbrille. Based on the novel Dividend on Death, by Brett Halliday. Director: Eugene Ford.

   Some random thoughts that may shape themselves into a review, and maybe not. What you see is what you get. The recently released DVD set of the first few Shayne movies calls them noir. Not so. It’s a good selling point, but when it gets to the point that every black and white movie made in the 1940s with a crime or mystery in it is called noir, the word simply no longer has any meaning.

   The first true noir film may have been The Maltese Falcon; I really haven’t thought about it too much, but it certainly could have been one of the first. I suppose it all depends on your own personal definition of noir.

   MSPD came out a few months before TMF, and it may have been a step in the right direction, but it’s way too light-hearted, and Lloyd Nolan is a little too goofy in the leading role, for the film, based on author Brett Halliday’s Dividend on Death, to be anything close to noir, using anyone’s definition. TMF is played straight, giving audiences the feeling for what a tough mystery film (as opposed to gangster movie) could really be like.

   At least, as I thought for a while, Michael Shayne doesn’t have a stooge for a sidekick in this movie — another step in the right direction — but on the other hand, Chief Painter (Donald MacBride) has a cop as his right hand man who is as dumb as they come, and Shayne does have Aunt Olivia (Elizabeth Patterson), who’s a dedicated fan of Ellery Queen, murder mysteries and The Baffle Book, to give him strong support when it counts.

   Nolan I called goofy, but he’s still immensely enjoyable in the role, as long as you don’t think of him as Brett Halliday’s Michael Shayne. Seeing the repo men moving the furniture out of his office at the beginning of the film, when cases have apparently been tough to come by for him, certainly sets a certain tone. And watching him cover himself with a blanket when Phyllis Brighton (Marjorie Weaver), whom he’s been hired to bodyguard by her rich father, catches him with his pants down, is mildly funny but hardly, I suspect, how the real Michael Shayne might have reacted in the same situation.

   Not that the real Michael Shayne was really truly tough-as-nails hardboiled or one of theose super-sexed PI’s who came along later, but Lloyd Nolan, he wasn’t either.

   Perhaps as the series goes along, given the TMF influence, the humor lessens and the mystery is played straight, but even if it doesn’t, I’m not going to be concerned about it.

   The story has to do with a gambling casino, horse-racing, a murder, a ditched dame, a possible suicide note, the switching of the barrels of two guns, a bottle of ketchup and a piece of jewelry that comes unpinned at the wrong time, perhaps even a couple of times. It really is a complicated case, I grant you that, which is one of the things I had in mind when I called this a possible transition into true noir from detective films that felt they also had to make the audience laugh.

   It’s remarkable, looking back now, how all of the plot is made to fit into a tight 77 minutes, which I have a hunch is a little longer than the average murder mystery movie at the time. I’ve watched it twice now, and there’s not a minute that’s really wasted. It was well worth the time, and if I may say so, probably yours as well.

   Elliott Chaze (1915-1990) was an old-school newspaperman who began his journalism career with the New Orleans Bureau of the Associated Press shortly before Pearl Harbor, worked for a time for AP’s Denver office after paratrooper service in WW II, and then migrated south to Mississippi where he spent twenty years as reporter and award-winning columnist and ten years as city editor with the Hattiesburg American.

   In his spare time he wrote articles and short stories for The New Yorker, Redbook, Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, and other magazines, and all too infrequently, a novel. In an interview he once stated that his motivation in writing fiction, “if there is any discernible, is probably ego and fear of mathematics, with overtones of money. Primarily I have a simple desire to shine my ass — to show off a bit in print.”

   His first two novels were literary mainstream. The Stainless Steel Kimono (Simon & Schuster, 1947), a post-war tale about a group of American paratroopers in Japan, was a modest bestseller and an avowed favorite of Ernest Hemingway.

   The Golden Tag (Simon & Schuster, 1950), like most of his long works, has a newspaper background, contains a good deal of autobiography, and is both funny and poignant; it concerns a young wire service reporter and would-be novelist in New Orleans who becomes involved with two women, one of them married, while reporting on a sensational murder case.

   His third novel was the one for which he is best remembered today, Black Wings Has My Angel (Gold Medal, 1953; also published as One for My Money, Berkley, 1962 and as One for the Money, Robert Hale, 1985).

   Black Wings Has My Angel is an indisputable noir classic, arguably the best of all the crime novels published by Gold Medal during its glory years. Barry Gifford, in an article in the Oxford American, called it “an astonishingly well written literary novel that just happened to be about (or roundabout) a crime.”

   The protagonist, ex-convict Tim Sunblade, is a quintessential antihero — an unrepentant bastard who executes a daring armed car robbery in Colorado with the help of a call girl, Virginia, whom he picked up in a backwoods Mississippi motel.

   The details of the crime and its aftermath are vividly described, and the love-hate relationship between Sunblade and the woman and the demons in both that lead to their downfall are masterpieces of dark-side character development. Unreservedly recommended.

   It was ten years before Chaze published another novel, and sixteen years before his next crime novel, Wettermark (Scribners, 1969). In its own quiet, sardonic way, Wettermark is every bit as good as Black Wings Has My Angel. Its setting is the small town of Catherine, Mississippi, a thinly disguised Hattiesburg, where the protagonist, the eponymous Wettermark, toils as a newspaper reporter for the local paper.

   Wettermark is a tragicomic figure, accent on the tragic — a tired, financially strapped, ex-alcoholic wage slave whose novelist ambitions have long since been shattered by rejection and apathy. His arrival on the scene of a recent successful bank robbery plants a seed in his mind, a “glimpse of the green” that is nurtured by circumstance and his private demons until it blossoms into a daring heist scheme of his own.

   Wettermark is by turns funny, sad, bitter, mordant, and ultimately as dark and unforgiving as Black Wings — a brilliant character study that is likewise unreservedly recommended and that somebody damned well ought to reprint.

   Late in his life, after he had retired from the Hattiesburg American, Chaze wrote three offbeat, ribald (occasionally downright bawdy), and often hilarious mysteries, all published by Scribners, featuring Kiel St. James, a well-meaning but somewhat bumbling city editor for the Catherine Call (Catherine having been mysteriously moved from Mississippi to Alabama for this series); Crystal Bunt, Kiel’s highly sexed young photographer girlfriend; and Chief of Detectives Orson Boles, a tenacious cop given to wearing hideous lizard green polyester suits ( “I like green, hoss”) and speaking alternately in Southern grits-and-gravy dialect and perfect English.

   Each of the three, Goodbye, Goliath (1983), Mr. Yesterday (1984) and Little David (1985), drew enthusiastic critical praise — The New Yorker called them “good, down-home fun [with] much flavorful redneck talk…plenty of excitement too” — but they seem to have been inexplicably neglected, if not all but forgotten, in the years since.

   The best of the trio is Mr. Yesterday, which deals with the murders of two eccentric old spinsters, one by a fall and one by a bizarre (very bizarre) stabbing. The motive for the two killings, and the method employed in one, are the weirdest, wildest, most inventive, most audacious (and yet completely plausible) ever devised in a mystery novel.

   Some readers no doubt did and will find the explanation offensive, even borderline obscene. I laughed out loud when it was revealed, which may tell you more about my sense of humor than you care to know, but I’m pretty sure the author would have approved.

   Elliott Chaze was a fine prose stylist, witty, insightful, nostalgic, and irreverent, and a first-class storyteller. If you’ve never read anything of his, or nothing except Black Wings Has My Angel, by all means hunt up copies of Wettermark, Mr. Yesterday, and anything else with his byline. You won’t be disappointed.