Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 73, No. 3. Whole No. 424, March 1979

Grime Dossier by Otto Penzler[11]

HOLMES MOVIES: Is it possible to overpraise a wonderful book? By whipping out every conceivable superlative and heaping it on a single volume, is credibility strained? There are times when the risk must be taken. The Films of Sherlock Holmes (Citadel, $14.95) by Chris Steinbrunner and Norman Michaels requires one simply to use those words which reviews ought generally to avoid: brilliant, distinguished, magnificent, etc. To fail to use the words would do this volume an injustice. Here is the opening sentence: “The place is a room in Baker Street, somewhere on the edge of eternity.” Can you doubt that you are in for a treat?

Meticulously researched and exquisitely, colorfully written by Steinbrunner, one of the country’s foremost film scholars, and enhanced by hundreds of both familiar and very rare photographs tracked down by Michaels, the book is one of the few indispensable Holmesian books of the past several years. And, although it is said that comparisons are odious (well, there are some who say it), it is only fair to point out that The Films of Sherlock Holmes is not the only book on the subject. Last year Bramwell House published Holmes of the Movies, and the very first chapter provides fair warning of what lurks ahead. Holmes’s address is given as 221 Baker Street (instead of 221B), Poe’s landmark story is given the title “Murder in the Rue Morgue” (instead of “The Murders”) and a character is described as “Edgar Allan Poe’s Arsene Lupin” (whereas Poe created the detective, C. Auguste Dupin, and Maurice Leblanc invented the thief, Arsene Lupin). Beware!

If you like Sherlock Holmes, or movies, or mysteries, or just good books which provide hours of intelligent and literate fun, The Films of Sherlock Holmes is recommended as the book of the year.

A DANGEROUS THING: For anyone fortunate enough to live in San Francisco’s Bay Area, several mystery courses are scheduled for the upcoming months. “Agatha Christie: Queen of Crime” will be taught at St. Mary’s College, Moraga, California, in two day-long sessions in March. “Divine Mysteries” will feature clergyman sleuths, in the winter session at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. And if you hurry you might still get into classes on “The International Detective” and “Women of Mvstery.” All courses are taught by the same femme fatale, Janet Rudolph, who can be reached at (415) 548-5799.

OH, SHOOT: I have to admit that western fiction isn’t my cup of bovril. But the nice thing about having a prejudice is that you can retain the capacity for being surprised when something excellent refutes your negative expectations. The Ox-Bow Incident and Night of the Hunter, for example, are sort-of westerns that cannot fail to give pleasure. When a great storyteller goes to work, he can force you to turn pages in any genre. Edgar-winning Brian Garfield began his writing career with westerns before turning to mystery, crime, espionage, and suspense thrillers, and he has reverted with a charming big book called Wild Times (Simon & Schuster, $11.95). To prepare you for this splendid entertainment, you should know that it is a novel with the subtitle: “The True and Authentic Life of Col. Hugh Cardiff,” the famous dime-novel hero. Told from Cardiff’s point of view, the second sentence sets the tone: “I mean to set down an account... as straight as I can but you have to keep in mind that I used to have something of a reputation as a liar.”

Bloody Visions by Chris Steinbrunner[12]

All the festive excitement in the last few months over the fiftieth birthday of Walt Disney’s beloved Mickey Mouse has tended to obscure the fact that — at least during much of his active comic-book career — Mickey was deeply involved in mystery and melodrama. His triumph over the dreaded shape known as the Phantom Blot has become a legendary metropolitan crime story, and the hulking, sinister Pegleg Pete appeared and reappeared across more than two decades (as the mouse’s nemesis, each time at the helm of some new criminal venture) to establish himself as a classic childhood villain. Now Abbeville Press presents us with a huge, pictorial volume, Walt Disney’s Best Comics: Mickey Mouse ($15.95), tracing the early years of the rodent’s newspaper-strip appearances — first in mere gag situations, writer-illustrator Fred Gottfredson informs us, but after the first few months graduating to melodrama continuity.

And what razzle-dazzle continuity it is! The very first adventure, Mickey in Death Valley (1930), involves a lost will, a lost mine, and the epitome of a Depression crooked lawyer, Sylvester Shyster. Grin-faced Mickey breathlessly rushes on to open up a private detective agency (“Hot dog! Our first case! Our first clue!”) to round up a gang of counterfeiters, saves a caliph’s sacred jewel from infidels, campaigns against machine-gun wielding gangsters with his very own big-city newspaper, unmasks a coven of seven “ghosts” spooking an old manor house, flies his own tiny plane against air pirates, and is generally up to his ears in mystery doings. A companion volume of Donald Duck strips from the forties has similar thrills. For a children’s hero Mickey is throughout surprisingly adult, always sensible in his assessment of people and situations, never-failingly cheerful, and a charmer. Now merely a bland amusement-park host and television king, we wish him one more tangle with the Phantom Blot.

A new feature film involving Sherlock Holmes is on the horizon, and from advance reports it is to be spectacular. Murder by Decree pits Holmes and Watson once more (as did A Study in Terror) against the most notorious real-life murderer of the 19th century, Jack the Ripper. The star of this Anglo-Canadian co-production filmed in London is Christopher Plummer, who was superb as the detective in the recent Learning Corporation of America half-hour adaptation of The Silver Blaze (also filmed in England, and intended for network television, but as yet unreleased). The supporting cast is first-rate as well, and quite intriguing: James Mason as Watson, David Hemmings as a police inspector, Frank Finlay as Lestrade, Anthony Quayle as the Commissioner of Scotland Yard, Sir John Gielgud as the Prime Minister, as well as Genevieve Bujold, Donald Sutherland, and Susan Clark in other roles. A great deal of authenticity has gone into the swirling fog and squalor of East End London, as well the more elegant corners of the city. Young director Bob Clark, known previously for zippy modern terror films, and screenwriter John Hopkins insist they have retained the flavor of the plot and the two main characters, but with a difference. “This is a passionate and caring Holmes. The key was to develop a real Holmes and Watson, with motivations that you really cared about.”

As well, comedy team Peter Cook and Dudley Moore have done a new British version of one of the world’s best-known mystery novels, The Hound of the Baskervilles — as outrageous parody. Cook is a popinjay, Fagin-accented Holmes, and Moore’s Watson is so abysmally stupid he makes Nigel Bruce’s portrayal approach Einstein level. (Moore also plays Holmes’s tyrannical mother, who insists on calling her dismayed son “Sheri.”) However, throughout this travesty the bare bone of the famous story still surfaces; Terry Thomas is a surprisingly thoughtful Dr. Mortimer, and Joan Greenwood a bewitching (in more than one way) Beryl Stapleton. The moor sets are picture-postcard good. So far no American release has been announced, but given the current popularity of both Holmes and Moore, it probably will be. Beware this Hound — it’s a dog.

Interview: Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block is one of the rare practitioners of mystery fiction who manages to successfully combine humor with crime — arguably the most difficult type of mystery story to achieve. Most recently, he has written about two series characters — burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr for his novels (he is the title character of Burglars Can’t Be Choosers and Burglar in the Closet, both Random House, $6.95) and Ehrengraf for his short stories.

EQMM: You have written a great number of books involving series characters. Why do you prefer to write about the same hero again and again?

BLOCK: Their worlds evolve as the books accumulate. If I like a character, I want to stay with him. Also it is due to a general failure of imagination. It’s easier than dreaming up a new character for each book.

EQMM: It seems as if a large proportion of your series characters are crooks, or at least work outside the law. What is your attraction to the criminal mind?

BLOCK: Well, the characters are outsiders, certainly; they have that in common. When I conceived Matt Scudder, I first decided that I’d make him a member of the police force. Then I realized that I couldn’t really be comfortable writing about somebody working within an organization. I also did a foreign intrigue type of series (seven books) about a character named Tanner who was also very much an outsider, who played a lone hand.

EQMM: Do you understand specifically what makes you return to this type of personality?

BLOCK: Beats me! I do believe it’s possible that this is my way of dealing with that aspect of myself — by writing about it. When I wrote the first “Burglar” book I was at a very low point in my career. I was living in Hollywood, I was not writing, not making any money, and trying to figure out what to do. So I considered, with a certain degree of seriousness, burglary. It had several things to be said for it, several things in common with free-lance writing: it’s equally uncertain, you set your own hours, you work alone, you avoid human contact. It was not without appeal to me. You get in and you get out. And the pay is much better, there’s less haggling. I tried picking my own lock in the hotel, to learn various techniques. It’s hard for me to know exactly how serious I was, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

EQMM: What prevented you from actually putting your idea into practice?

BLOCK: Cowardice. It’s much easier to write about violence than to go and have our bodies injured.

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen[13]

Of the giants of the British detective novel between the World Wars — such names as Christie, Sayers, Crofts, Berkeley, Allingham, and Blake — I believe only two remain: Michael Innes and Ngaio Marsh. Pessimists who thought the title of Dame Ngaio’s 1977 novel, Last Ditch, was an indication that the New Zealand writer was abandoning the genre after forty-odd years were, they will be glad to know, gravely mistaken. Furthermore, the twenty-eighth novel about Chief Superintendent Roderick Alleyn shows him close to top form.

**** Ngaio Marsh: Grave Mistake, Little. Brown, $8.95. This is an English village mystery, with all the requisite characters from vicar to village idiot. Marsh’s style has a mellow charm and wit; her characters are vividly drawn; and her puzzle plot both plays fair and surprises. She displays the traditional mystery writer’s overconfidence in the ability of nearly any object to give forth multiple identifiable fingerprints, but this assumption doesn’t invalidate the plot.

**** Robert L. Fish: Pursuit, Doubleday, $10.00. Few of the novels in the current glut of Nazi fiction begin with as ingenious a premise as this one: as Germany faces inevitable defeat, a war criminal takes the identity of an imprisoned Jew to escape postwar punishment. Working on a larger canvas than usual, Fish reaffirms in this powerful novel his standing as one of the crime field’s great story-tellers. (As so often with this publisher, the jacket copy is overinformative to an almost criminal extent.)

**** Ruth Rendell: A Sleeping Life, Doubleday, $7.95. In what must be accounted an exceptional month, another of the big guns hits a bullseye. Chief Inspector Wexford, though troubled by his married daughter’s blossoming feminism, solves a murder through his understanding of the ambiguities of male and female roles and relationships. Rendell handles the tricky plot with almost Christie-like skill.

*** S. S. Rafferty: Fatal Flourishes, Avon, $1.95. Though you might not guess it from the title, this volume collects thirteen of the stories about Captain Jeremy Cork and his amusing “financial yeoman” and Watson, Wellman Oaks. Their adventures, set in Revolutionary-era America, comprise a series nearly as ratiocinatively distinguished and historically intriguing as Lillian de la Torre’s Johnson-Boswell stories. Though most of the tales have appeared in EQMM or AH MM, a few, notably “The Curse of the Connecticut Clock” and “The Massachusetts Peep-O’Night,” are original to this volume.

*** William Hjortsberg: Falling Angel, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $8.95. In a neat cross-breeding of seemingly disparate species, Hjortsberg introduces genuine occult elements into a vividly written New York-based private-eye novel. The result is a performance as flashy as the eyecatching gold dustjacket.

*** Richard Condon: Death of a Politician, Richard Marek, $9.95. Like the author’s earlier Winter Kills, this novel features some very thinly disguised recent political figures in a satirical whodunit. Not surprisingly, the lampooning outstrips the detection. For readers not too outraged by bad-taste humor, the book offers entertainment and occasional insights.

*** Nick Christian: Homicide Zone 4, Signet, $1.95. In the first of a new procedural series, two psychopathic killers (connected in an unusual and ironic way) are the quarry of New York cops. It’s familiar ground mostly, but Christian travels it very well.

Peter Israel: The Stiff Upper Lip, Crowell, $8.95. Traditional private-eye stuff — gangsters, drug-trafficking, etc. — in a Parisian setting. The most unusual element is the background of French professional basketball. The constant use of racial epithets limits detective B. F. Cage’s likeability.

** Ann B. Ross: The Murder Cure, Avon, $1.50. For most of the distance, this is routine romantic suspense, redeemed somewhat by interesting observations on hospital life by the nurse-narrator. The conclusion, though, is quite striking and (in a gothic) unusual.

** Victor Miller: Hide the Children, Ballantine, $1.95. This novel of a kidnaped busload of school children rouses ambivalent feelings. The numerous sadistic passages seem distastefully exploitative, giving the enterprise a sleazy air, but some of the scenes and characters (adult and child) are quite nicely done.

** Don Pendleton: Monday’s Mob, Pinnacle, $1.50. To many, Mack Bolan (the Executioner) symbolizes everything that is wrong with the contemporary crime novel. While Pendleton is no stylist and the philosophy of vigilanteism his novels espouse may revolt many, the man can tell a story. To me, the Executioner’s philosophical self-justifications are more interesting than the ample bloody violence.