Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 77, No. 7. Whole No. 454, June 17, 1981

Crime Beat by R. E. Porter

© 1981 by R. E. Porter

MYSTERY CONTEST: Prize contests sponsored by publishers were once a fairly common part of the business, and at least one publisher even held an annual contest for the best mystery novel. We haven’t seen many contests lately, and that’s why it’s a special pleasure to note the announcement of the Scribner Crime Novel Award, to be given to the best first novel by an American author or a permanent resident of the United States.

The award will be $7,500, consisting of a $2,500 cash prize and a $5,000 advance against royalties, with the winner announced early in 1982. Books may be classic detective stories, historical reconstructions, fictionalized true crime, espionage, police procedural, or private-eye novels. The only categories specifically ruled out are the supernatural and pastiches or parodies — Sherlockian or otherwise. The manuscripts submitted must be complete, and addressed to Charles Scribner’s Sons, 597 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10017. Envelopes should be marked for the Scribner Crime Novel Award. Deadline for submissions is September 30, 1981.

Scribners has a long history of launching successful mystery novelists, having published S. S. Van Dine, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Simon Brett, and P. D. James. The publisher hopes its contest will encourage new authors, and will offer to publish other acceptable first novels in addition to the prize winner.

LITERARY DETECTIVE WORK: Until now it was generally believed that only three novels were published by the highly regarded pulp writer Raoul Whitfield (one of whose stories was reprinted in EQMM’s April 22nd issue). Now author Bill Pronzini has engaged in some literary detective work to establish that Whitfield published two other mystery novels during his lifetime — Five (1931) and Killer’s Carnival (1932) — both under the pseudonym of “Temple Field.”

Pronzini thought the characters in a Black Mask serial, “Laughing Death” by Raoul Whitfield, sounded familiar. He compared the text with a copy of Five and found the stories were identical. Further investigation revealed that the second Temple Field novel, Killer’s Carnival, was also serialized in Black Mask as “The Skyline Murders” by Whitfield. No doubt they’ll be joining Whitfield’s previously known mystery novels, Green Ice, Death in a Bowl, and The Virgin Kills, in future bibliographies.

FATHER BROWN DISCOVERY: Speaking of discoveries, the G. K. Chesterton Society has come up with a dandy — an unknown Father Brown story written by Chesterton in collaboration with a British magazine publisher back in 1914. The publisher, Sir Max Pemberton, wrote part one of “The Donnington Mystery” for the October 1914 issue of his magazine, Premiere. Chesterton wrote part two the following month, in which Father Brown solves the mystery.

Both parts were reprinted for the first time in the February 1981 issue of The Chesterton Review. Subscription to the quarterly journal is $12.00 a year, from The Chesterton Review, 1437 College Drive, Saskatoon, Canada S7N OW6.

TELEVISION PILOTS: Ed McBain is working on the pilot show for a possible new television series about the 87th Precinct. An earlier series ran for thirty weeks on NBC-TV back in 1961.

And another new TV pilot, Murder Ink, involves a woman bookstore owner whose husband is a policeman. The pilot, directed by John Avildsen (who made Rocky), was filmed at New York’s Mysterious Bookshop in February.

POLICE PHOTOS: A new trade paperback by photographer Leonard Freed, Police Work (Touchstone, $9.95), brings together 124 stark black-and-white photos of New York police officers going about their daily business. Captions are minimal, and the photos speak eloquently of the dangers and rewards of police work.

COMING ATTRACTIONS: An unusual and perceptive European view of the mystery is contained in The Whodunit: An Informal History of the Detective Story, by Italian writers Stefano Benvenuti and Gianni Rizzoni. The heavily illustrated trade paperback will be published by Macmillan in November, complete with a Who’s Who section of leading authors and characters. A final chapter on contemporary writers from an American viewpoint has been added to the original text.

One of the unjustly neglected writers of the 1940s, Matthew Head (pseudonym of art critic John Canaday), will be available again in paperback when Harper & Row reprints The Cabinda Affair and Murder at the Flea Club in June.

Coming from Ticknor & Fields this fall will be two unusual collections — the first gathering of P. G. Wodehouse’s crime tales, Wodehouse on Crime, edited by Don Bensen with an Introduction by Isaac Asimov, and Critical Observations, a collection of criminous and literary essays by Julian Symons.

It’s a big year for fans of Robert B. Parker’s Boston private eye, Spenser. In February there was Early Autumn, and coming in July (also from Delacorte) is the new Spenser novel, A Savage Place.

Bloody Visions by Chris Steinbrunner

© 1981 by Chris Steinbrunner

The colossal failure of the stage play Frankenstein, which recently opened and closed at New York’s Palace Theater in a single evening, has become a Broadway legend: with a price tag well over two million dollars, it was the costliest disaster in American theater history. It was also an ambitious undertaking, a titantic drama of murder and vengeance so visually stunning it deserved a better fate. As EQMN was present during much of its pre-opening difficulties and talked with many of its creative participants, we will try to stage this spectacular-but-doomed production for you in the theater of the mind.

The show is eye-filling from the very first scene: a gigantic glacier cliff looms over the stage, almost lost in swirling snow, while struggling near its edge lumbers first Frankenstein’s monster and then his creator, Victor. We see them for a moment, then they disappear. (Few in the audience realized that the figures trudging across the ice are actually life-size puppets — the only way the effect could be achieved.) Mist and smoke obscure the stage, and we are suddenly in a Swiss village churchyard as a ghastly moon looks down on two grave-robbers about their grisly work. (The swiftness of the scene-changes is possible because the cavernous Palace Theater has a gigantic revolving stage.)

The next scene is Victor’s baronial home, massive doors and French windows sloping upward to vaulted ceilings in dizzying false perspective. The young scientist is anxious about his approaching marriage and the secret experiments he is conducting in the cellars beneath the castle tower. The subterranean laboratory with its giant vials filled with colored fluids, crackling electrodes, and sparkling, smoking reactors is mind-boggling: here, amid slashes of lightning bolting down from the tower’s open battlements, he brings his creation to life and it escapes.

We find the creature next stumbling toward a blind hermit’s cottage deep in a forest. The hermit (John Carradine) befriends him, teaches him to read from the Bible, but in the next scene is killed by the villainous grave-diggers as the creature flees again and the cottage burns to the ground onstage! And that’s just the first act.

After intermission we follow the now maddened creature on a single-minded course of vengeance against his creator — embittered because Victor cannot bring himself to construct a mate to relieve the monster’s loneliness. In yet another forest setting he kills Victor’s young brother, a crime for which the governess Justine is accused and hung. He kills Victor’s best friend and aide, Henry, and on the night of Victor’s wedding murders his bride, Elizabeth. The bedchamber setting, Gothic and looming, where the creature bursts through a vast hanging tapestry, is a knockout. Finally we descend to the cellar once more, as Victor and his creation are destroyed when the laboratory explodes and the castle walls come crashing down. Much of the production’s $2-million budget went to elaborate, gargantuan stage wizardry — harking back actually to the melodrama theater before the invention of the movies, where chariot races and burning mills were often scenic treats — but on a sweep and scale never seen on Broadway before.

The play’s young author, Victor Gialanella, told EQMN that he hoped this first effort (produced originally at a St. Louis regional theater, but without any spectacle) would last perhaps as long as the recent Broadway revival of Dracula. Alas, Dracula seemed to thrive on undercurrents of erotic camp, while Gialanella’s Frankenstein was a straight, sober tale of murderous revenge. “I go much closer to the Mary Shelley story than any movie version; none of the movies have ever done the book properly,” he declares with pride — yet surely the pyrotechnical laboratory scenes were more inspired by Universal Pictures than Shelley, and the play ignores the book’s climactic death on the ice-floes as well.

The play was in trouble from the start. Because of the massive sets it could not undergo out-of-town tryouts; at one point the New York Fire Department closed it down because of the hazardous electrical effects; the actor playing Victor was replaced (by David Dukes, the killer Sinatra stalked in The First Deadly Sin). Finally, the major critics savaged it as just another melodrama enlivened by high-voltage staging.

The producers decided there were not enough advance sales to risk keeping the play open. But it was fun (with almost as many murders as Sweeney Todd) and might have caught on. Sad that such an electrifying theatrical disaster — one that will be remembered for years to come — was an attempt to revive the bloody visions of melodramatic stage spectacle.

Interview: Jack Ritchie (1)

This is the first part of an interview that will be concluded in the next issue.

EQMN: You share your birthday, February 26th, with Victor Hugo, Buffalo Bill Cody, Jackie Gleason, Johnny Cash, Godfrey Cambridge, and George Randolph Chester. What do you think of that?

RITCHIE: I do vaguely remember staring at a calendar as a child and seeing Buffalo Bill’s picture in my place. Victor Hugo? As a teenager, I happened to be reading his 1793 when suddenly the world before me began jumping up and down and acting crazy. I thought I was having a stroke of some kind, but it turned out that I was merely suffering eye spasms and needed glasses badly.

Jackie Gleason, Johnny Cash, and Godfrey Cambridge, I, of course, recognize. But who in the world is George Randolph Chester? Has he ever been to Sheboygan?

EQMN: You attended Milwaukee Teachers’ College before entering the army during World War II. Did you ever teach school?

RITCHIE: I attended Milwaukee State Teachers’ College because, at that time, it was the only public four-year college in Milwaukee. I could go there and still room and board at home. It was then the practice of many students to go there for two years, taking a general course, and then — after they’d also been working part time, saving money, and living at home — to transfer to the University of Wisconsin in Madison for the last two years and a more prestigious sheepskin.

The admissions people at Milwaukee State Teachers’ were well aware of this practice and did their best to discourage it. They made it just about necessary to swear on the Bible that you really, but really, intended to remain there for the full four years and become a teacher before they would admit you.

I only half lied. I had no intention of ever, ever becoming a teacher, but on the other hand I wasn’t going to switch to Madison after two years either. I just didn’t want to be pushed into the work force so soon after high school.

After the war, I tried going back to college under the G. I. Bill, but it didn’t work out. I was also in no particular hurry to go anywhere and I figured that after 3 years, 3 months, and 21 days — but who counts? — in the army I was due for a long vacation. So I settled for working in my father’s tailor shop for room and board. I’ve always suffered from a sinful lack of ambition. All I’ve ever really wanted was a quiet day, no fuss, and time to myself.

It wasn’t really a bad life at all, but eventually I was forced to face the fact that the tailor shop wouldn’t go on forever and neither would my father. And I wasn’t all that keen to take over the shop anyway. My father would say — in continuing astonishment — “I’ve been a tailor for forty years, and I still don’t like it.”

EQMN: How did you come to write?

RITCHIE: At about this time, my mother, as a hobby, joined a local writer’s club and one thing led to another and she got an agent, Larry Sternig. I had never given serious thought to writing before. Up until that time I had never written anything at all except for a few themes at school. When I got A’s it was usually for neatness.

But there I was in my early thirties and it was about time I settled upon some congenial trade. So I sat down and wrote a sports story about an ambidextrous pitcher and when Larry showed up one day to talk to my mother I handed him the story. He had that “Oh, God, everybody thinks he can write” expression on his face. But he showed up the next day with a smile and that started the whole thing. I decided I’d write 50 short stories, one a week, while still working in the tailor shop, and if none of them sold during that year, then the hell with it. The eighth story sold and that settled the question. So did most of the other seven eventually, including the sports story.

EQMN: Where did Larry make that first sale?

RITCHIE: To the now defunct New York Daily Mirror, for fifty bucks. That was large money in those days.

EQMN: And you’re still with the Sternig Agency.

RITCHIE: Yes. I’ve always regarded Larry as much a friend as an agent. And perhaps I’ve just been fortunate or Larry’s an exceptional person, but I think that a writer should stick with one agent. So many writers, it seems, change agents like hats, and I don’t think it pays off in the long run.

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

© 1981 by Jon L. Breen

For a decade before his creation of Perry Mason, Erie Stanley Gardner was one of the best and most prolific contributors to the pulp magazines, usually but not always in the mystery-detective genre. Two new collections of his pulp novelettes demonstrate the deceptive versatility of a writer many associate only with the Mason and Cool-Lam formulae.

**** Erle Stanley Gardner: The Amazing Adventures of Lester Leith, edited and with an Introduction by Ellery Queen, Dial Press, $9.95. Leith, who solves crimes by reading the newspaper accounts and then concocts elaborate schemes to appropriate the loot (20 % for himself, 80 % for charity), is one of Gardner’s best series characters. He can be likened to a juggler or a magician, and his adventures are triumphs of misdirection as surely as the works of John Dickson Carr and Clayton Rawson. He accomplishes his Robin Hood exploits despite the presence in his employ (as valet) of a police spy.

These five cases have not appeared in any previous Gardner collections. The sixty to seventy uncollected Leith stories must include enough good ones to fill several more volumes, and I hope they will.

*** Erle Stanley Gardner: The Human Zero: The Science Fiction Stories of Erie Stanley Gardner, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh, Morrow, $12.95. Though all seven of these novelettes (from Argosy, 1928–1932) are creditable examples of the pulp writer’s craft, the urban s.f.-detective hybrids (the title story and “A Year and a Day”), reminiscent of some of Murray Leinster’s early work, will probably interest mystery readers more than the Burroughs-type jungle adventure yarns. The one interplanetary tale, “The Sky’s the Limit,” is the weakest of the group.

*** Patricia Moyes: Angel Death, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, $10.95. Scotland Yard’s Henry Tibbett gets plenty of vacations, but he is no more successful than any other fictional detective in managing a crime-free holiday. He and Emmy again visit the fictitious British Seaward Islands and become involved in a complicated and dangerous drug-trade case. This is more a thriller — rather in the Tuppence and Tommy mode — than a formal detective story, but Moyes’ writing is as charming as ever.

*** James McClure: The Blood of an Englishman, Harper and Row, $10.95. The greatest attractions of the Kramer-Zondi series are the characters and the trenchant observations on South African society. But with the social commentary, McClure offers plots as intricately constructed and detective work as carefully described as a practitioner from the formalist Thirties.

*** Doris Shannon: The Punishment, St. Martin’s, $12.95. In a compelling and cunningly crafted novel of horror, the Quiller family (an odd assortment indeed) hold a family reunion on a remote island off the coast of Maine — in an old house with a history of violent death and depravity. Shannon will keep you reading, but my gothic consultant thought the climax was marred by one Talent too many.

*** Victor Canning: Fall from Grace, Morrow, $9.95. One question is at the center of this book: has the charming sociopath, John Corbin, a poetry-quoting sometime writer working on a history of the family gardens for a Church of England bishop, really been reformed by love, or is he still (as we somehow hope) the despicable rogue we met at the outset of the novel? As always, Canning’s writing is smooth, civilized, and eminently readable.

*** John Wainwright: Man of Law, St. Martin’s, $9.95. Two college friends — one now a Q.C., the other a psychiatric expert witness — do courtroom battle. The usual twists and turns of a Wainwright plot are here in abundance, though his trial may demand quite a bit of artistic license.

*** David Williams: Murder for Treasure, St. Martin’s, $9.95. The proposed takeover of Rigley’s Patent Footbalm by an American conglomerate brings banker-sleuth Mark Treasure to Wales. Williams delivers a measure of wit, action, and puzzle-plotting worthy of the British answer to Emma Lathen’s John Putnam Thatcher.

*** Joe L. Hensley: Outcasts, Doubleday-Crime Club, $9.95. The novels about midwestern lawyer Donald Robak seem to be getting better and better. Hensley’s writing is marked by an ability to capture character with precision and economy. The murderer here is interesting and surprising but takes some believing.

** Tom Murphy: Auction, Signet, $2.95. This is a good honest job in the “bestseller” genre, featuring a well rendered background of a New York auction house, mini-series dialogue, stock characters presented in detail if not depth, and the usual blockbuster padding. The fairly predictable latter stages would benefit from more mystery. The novel is fun to read but ultimately delivers less than its 400-page length warrants.

John Dunning’s Looking for Ginger North (Fawcett-Gold Medal, $1.95), missed by this department on its appearance over a year ago, may be tough to find now, but it’s worth the effort. Besides an intriguing plot, it offers the best and most believable depiction of a racetrack backstretch and its people I’ve found in any mystery novel.