comic crime Archives

COOL FLICKS: Too Many Crooks (1959)

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Mar 192013

I've always loved Ruthless People, the 1986 comedy in which Danny DeVito tries to get rid of his harridan wife played by Bette Midler only to discover prior to killing her that she has been kidnapped. He is elated and taunts the ineffectual kidnappers by not paying them and daring them to kill her and put an end to all his troubles. Screenplay writer Dale Launer claimed to have been inspired by an O. Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief" about the kidnapping of an obnoxious child who causes headaches for the crooks trying to get money from his parents who don't want him back. Well, it appears that Launer really took the idea from an old Rank Organization/Pinewood Studios movie called Too Many Crooks. I only learned this a few days ago when Christopher Fowler mentioned it in passing on his blog here. So of course I had to find the movie and see for myself. Too Many Crooks has an awful lot in common with Ruthless People. But the 1959 British movie happens to be funnier, less vulgar, and has a sense of fun and hysteria that outshines the American film of the 80s.

Terry-Thomas, premier sputterer and cad of so many British and American farces, plays Billy Gordon, a greedy businessman who fears banks and the taxman. He keeps all of his money hidden in several safes and other secure spots out of the hands of his wife and the British government. A gang of inept thieves targets him for their latest caper, but they fail miserably at their group effort as masked yeggmen. So they turn to Plan B - kidnapping his daughter. Their ineptitude once again trips them up when they learn they have kidnapped not his daughter but his wife. And the joke is on them when Gordon has no interest in paying the ransom. Even when their gang leader Fingers (George Cole) attempts to barter on the ransom dropping it from £10,000 to £4,000 to a mere 200 quid Gordon will not fork over the money. When his wife learns that she is unwanted and not even worth 200 her meek demeanor gives way to vengeful Fury. No more Mrs. Nice Gal for Lucy Gordon played with wily charm by Brenda De Banzie. She lets loose with a display of military combat techniques on her captors and lets them know who's got the real brains and brawn. She convinces the gang of crooks to turn the tables on Gordon and rob him of every penny they can lay their hands on.

The movie is an all out farce with all the typical ingredients you expect from low comedy. Sight gags, goofy pratfalls and slapstick antics, silly disguises by the trunkful, shapely women in tight fitting costumes providing ample opportunity for lots of breast jokes. Cole shows off his skill at comic dialects yet his character always manages to slip into his native Cockney giving him away each time. But for every slapstick joke there are probably two or three genuinely witty lines in the very clever script by Michael Pertwee, son of playwright and novelist Roland Pertwee. The screenplay is also apparently based on a story by novelist and journalist Christine Rochefort and Jean Nery, who was a Cannes Film Festival judge though I can find nothing else about him.

Terry-Thomas is blackmailed by "Sgt. Sykes" (Cole),
one of the many disguises of Fingers, the gang's leader

As with any farcical comedy there are a number of bizarre complications, utter coincidences and convenient accidents that add to the chaos. Gordon is told if he doesn't pay up on the ransom his wife will be cut up into tiny pieces and distributed along the Great North Road. Not much later he will be handed a newspaper with a headline emblazoned WOMAN MURDERED ON GREAT NORTH ROAD and frantically jump to conclusions. A series of mishaps lands him in court where one of the silliest sequences takes place. Gordon's incoherent rambling of "Money, no money. Oh, I wish I were dead" at the scene of his house fire is misinterpreted as "Mummy, Mummy." Then turned around by his defense attorney to be "Bunny. No, Bunny." As the lawyer explains, "Bunny, his budgerigar." It goes on and on like the best kind of wordplay in a Marx Brothers movie or an Abbot and Costello routine.

The gang of crooks is made up of some veterans of the Carry On series, Sid James and Bernard Bresslaw, and Joe Melia in his screen debut. Melia plays a scrawny, wannabe weightlifter who speaks almost all of his dialogue sotto voce and is called, aptly enough, Whisper. The shapely women are blond bombshell Vera Day as the gang's moll Charmaine and Delphi Lawrence as Gordon's unnamed secretary. Lawrence may be recognizable to keen 1960s TV fans for guest appearances on many US and UK shows like Wild, Wild West, The Man from UNCLE and Gideon C.I.D. Each of these supporting players gets their chance to shine in the chaotic, incident filled story. Only Rosalie Ashley and Nicholas Parsons as Gordon's daughter Angela and her tax inspector fiance seem wasted as the symbols of sanity in this madcap world of criminal activity gone haywire.

FFB: The Sunday Pigeon Murders – Craig Rice

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Dec 212012

According to an ad from Simon & Schuster I found in a Saturday Review issue from 1942 Craig Rice "spent a hectic six days in New York" where she "accumulated more information about that town than we had learned in a lifetime of living in it." A bit of advertising hyperbole to be sure, but her activities included hanging out with the men of the Central Park chess clubs, discovering a newsagent who also had a sideline business of placing dime bets on horse races, and most inspiring of all she invited a street photographer home for dinner and got the lowdown on the photo racket. He must have been a colorful fellow for it led to the creation of her little known duo of Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak who make their debut in The Sunday Pigeon Murders (1942).

Rice also seems to be doing a good impression of Damon Runyon in this book. Bingo and Handsome speak, act, and dress like any of those small time hoods and grifters so well known from Guys and Dolls, Bloodhounds of Broadway and The Lemon Drop Kid. Bingo is the brains of their fly-by-night street photography operation with the grandiose title of The International Foto, Motion Picture and Television Corporation of America. They aren't doing too well with only $7.49 as their operating budget, one camera in a pawnshop, and a developing room in the bathtub, but they do their best with their meager set-up. An added bonus to the business is Handsome's special gift. He has an amazing eidetic memory and can instantly recall any newspaper layout of the past ten years when he worked as a news photographer and quote verbatim from those articles.

When Handsome spots a famous missing man ("The Sunday Pigeon" of the title) thought to have disappeared over seven years ago Bingo's scheming brain goes into overdrive. Thanks, of course, to Handsome's incredible memory Bingo learns of the $500,000 insurance policy Mr. Pigeon took out on himself and is soon to be claimed by his business partner in only few days when Pigeon will be declared legally dead. Bingo will put an end to that. He is going to kidnap Mr. Pigeon and blackmail the partner into handing over half of the $500,000 when they con the insurance company into thinking Pigeon is dead.

Kidnapping is not exactly accurate, though because this is a Craig Rice book. Pigeon is all too obliging as the kidnap victim. He moves in to Handsome & Bingo's tiny apartment and basically becomes a third roommate. Cooking up miracle dishes with the few scraps of food in their one room apartment, cleaning house, and not caring one iota about the fact he is involved in what amounts to insurance fraud. Does he have some ulterior motive for hiding out?

When the two photographers make their way to Pigeon's partner's apartment and find a dead body they think someone must've already caught onto their scheme. Someone who also is after the insurance money. Bingo thinks fast, jumping to many conclusions in the process. He decides to do what nearly everyone in a Craig Rice novel does when they find a corpse. He hides it choosing the refrigerator as the least likely place to look for a body. But soon they have a surprise visitor in the person of a shapely dame and the hide-the-body business turns into all out farce. They will be more people looking for Pigeon, more people turning up dead, more bodies being hidden before Pigeon reveals his secret and everything is resolved in the usual madcap Rice way.

Probably because it is Rice's first book set in New York rather than Chicago she spends a lot of time showing off her newfound knowledge and doing her best to emulate Damon Runyon. The result is a book with more endearing characters, a plot that is more cohesive than usual, and a solution that actually makes sense for a change. I'm looking forward to reading more of Bingo and Handsome in the second book The Thursday Turkey Murders.

IN BRIEF: Burglars in Bucks – G.D.H. & Margaret Cole

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Dec 062012

Burglars in Bucks (1930) is something of a threefold literary experiment. It is a detective novel without a murder, it has multiple points of view, and it attempts to tell a story in real time. I would also add that it reminded me more than anything of a P.G. Wodehouse novel even to the very Wodehousian title. Superintendent Wilson is on the case again in a raucous adventure subtitled "The Crime and the Poltergeist".

Essentially, the novel is presented as a chronological dossier of the written evidence gathered in the case of a burglary that occurred on Halloween night following a party in Peter Gurney's home. We are given the story through multiple accounts (both first and second hand) in a series of letters, telegrams, newspaper clippings, police memos and reports, plus a few fanciful recreations of phone calls and private conversations. In discussing writing up one of his cases with Wilson Dr. Michael Prendergast proposes the chronology idea. The case would have been solved sooner had Wilson been privy to some information not handed over until after the conclusion of the investigation. Wilson believes that any reader would be bored with a straightforward telling of a police case with only written evidence presented to him as it was received. He also thinks any reader would be able to outguess the police detective long before the solution is discovered. The doctor strongly disagrees.

This mystery without a murder proves to be intriguing. It's not just a simple story of a stolen emerald necklace. The plot will evolve into a multi-layered richness that includes con artists, false identities, black market antique trading, drug addiction, spiritualist trickery, and the looming threat of a murder charge when one of the characters is violently beaten and clings to life in a hospital for most of the book. There is even a message in code that amateur cryptographers might easily be able to break before the police do.

The Cole's surprising sense of humor is the real highlight of the book largely due to the inclusion of the amusing letters from Everard Blatchington, a recurring roguish character in the early Cole detective novels who might have stepped out of the halls of Blandings or Brinkley Manor. Detective novel fans who are also partial to the kind of waggish British wit and antics found in the works of P. G. Wodehouse are sure to get much enjoyment from Burglars in Bucks.

In the US the book was released as The Berkshire Mystery, but it is much scarcer than the UK edition. Though there are few copies of the UK edition I did find one reading copy for $20. It may not be there for long after this review. Better hop to it if you want it! The rest range from $40 to $100, though judging by the descriptions their condition doesn't merit those prices. Burglars in Bucks can also be found in the first Collins Crime Club Omnibus which also includes The Noose by Philip MacDonald, Q. E. D. by Lynn Brock, and Sir John Magill's Last Journey by Freeman Wills Crofts.

Singular Case of the Multiple Dead – Mark McShane

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Nov 272012

It's hard to believe that this utterly silly crime novel of the absurd came from the typewriter of Mark McShane. Better known for his deadly serious thrillers that mix the supernatural with the criminal McShane's early work bears little trace of the outlandish humor on display in The Singular Case of the Multiple Dead (1969). A melange of the surreal humor of Monty Python, Abbot & Costello's punny wordplay routines, classic slapstick and bedroom farce it seems that this book might appeal to everyone's idea of what's funny. Maybe I was hungry for nonsense because I happened to find its cast of lunatics and their kooky antics to be the perfect tonic for my late autumn blues.

Lady Madge Severn has collected a group of misfit wannabe artistes and formed a salon she dubs the Bloomsbury Group Junior. During their latest meeting they discuss a paltry tax of one shilling levied on theater seats. It is the latest in a series of insults upon the British public and serves as the proverbial camel's back breaking straw. Lady Severn is outraged and she hopes to incite her group into action. Something must be done. All nine members have a brainstorming session resulting in three possible schemes to oust the Chancellor of Exchequer, the man responsible for the tax. They will force him to resign through blackmail, create a scandal and get him fired, or -- as a last resort -- assassinate him.

The oddballs in the Bloomsbury Group are:

Tony Zero – a vain pretty boy who does absolutely nothing but pose and stare vacantly while imagining his latest discounted assignations in his failed attempts to be come a gigolo for hire.

Virginius Twyce - the Casper Milquetoast of the group. Twyce is so terrified of being caught when asked to perform a simple task like buying a lock and chain that he imagines exaggerated scenarios in which shopkeepers suspect him of plotting the overthrow of the nation. Understandably, this makes it difficult for him even to set foot in a store let alone make eye contact when handing over his money.

Minerva Droplet – watercolor artist who fantasizes with regularity how the gossip columnists will discuss her latest adventures.

Ace paperback gives the impression
this is a spooky chiller. Wrong!

Sid Fourpenny – a budding poet more interested in bedding down the women in the group than putting pen to paper. His impersonation of the C of E, however, is one of the highlights of the book.

Jean Quin – aspires to be the next Greta Garbo. Jean uses her consummate acting skills and her tempting body to ensnare staff members working in the C of E's office.

Relentable Cease - How's that for a name? A professional musician Cease creates anthems for the group and tends to sit back while everyone else does the dirty work.

Jem Gate – taciturn to the point of one word utterances, to get a full sentence out of Gate would be quite a feat. He's a gravestone carver whose specialty is getting the breasts just right on his inappropriately shapely angels. He is the one member intent on carrying out the assassination plan if only he can find a hitman willing to kill someone. Everyone he encounters will only injure, maim or dismember.

Have you noticed the uncanny similarity of each character's surname? The numeric similarities are a gimmick I thought would be a feature in the plot but it turns out to be yet another indication of McShane's penchant for silliness. I particularly liked when Fourpenny impersonates the C of E at a Swedish war toy convention and insults a food vendor by spitting out the tea cake he is sampling. Lady Severn was sure that this would cause an international incident of scandalous proportions making headlines and lead to the firing of the C of E. Needless to say it backfires monstrously.

This will give you an idea of the loopy fun McShane indulges in:

Amid all the nonsense members of the group are being systematically killed off, hence the strange title. Unbeknownst to the Bloomsbury Group Junior (but disclosed to the reader) is that each victim has been contemplating leaving the group prior to their sudden often bizarre demise. Apparently membership in Bloomsbury Group Junior is for life; resignations will not be tolerated.

The group seems to take the deaths all in stride, a mere side effect of the life of a political activist. Lady Severn sets aside a suitable mourning period of fifteen minutes for each shocking accident and asks that the surviving group members put their gifts and talents to use for the memorial services. Fourpenny provides solemn odes and Cease composes dirges, for example.

The police are conspicuously absent from the farcical proceedings leaving the detective work -- or more accurately the guessing game -- up to the reader alone. But figuring out who is behind the fatal accidents is not really the point in this comedy of errors. In its madcap pointlessness laughter may be all that McShane intended to produce. It worked for me, at least.

LEFT INSIDE: Cartoon Collection

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Aug 192012

A mini gallery of some of the crime and mystery related cartoons I've collected over the years. These haven't really been left inside a book, I just happen to keep them in the same box with all that ephemera and came across them the other day.

Here are four of the better ones that are still in good shape. If it's hard to read the captions, just click on the image for original size.

NEW BOOKS: Lucky Bastard – S. G. Browne

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Jul 122012

I was astonished at how this book undergoes a subtle and winning transformation from broad comedy to moving drama. Here we have the overworked trope of the wise acre private eye who has a talent for getting into trouble, can't keep his mind off of sex, and is always in need of money. He encounters a few wacky characters (nearly all of them unnamed - more about that later), more than his fair share of wild predicaments and all the while not changing one bit from his oversexed, overbearing, overgrown frat boy persona. Until one bizarre life threatening encounter forces him to re-evaluate his entire worldview. Nick Monday also has a special talent that sets him apart from your run-of-the-mill private eye. He can steal a person's luck -- good or bad -- with a simple handshake. His resolute worldview that you can't change luck, that you are either born with good luck or bad luck, however, is thoroughly shaken and turned inside out by the end of his surreal journey.

It all starts with the usual sultry woman entering the private eye's San Francisco squalid office. She wants to hire him for a hush-hush job. But instead of locating a missing sibling or husband she wants Nick to recover her father's luck. Her father turns out to be Gordon Knight, mayor of San Francisco, whose recent change of luck has transformed him from a golden boy of the news headlines to favorite topic of the scandal sheets. Nick can't believe that this alluring woman -- ridiculously named Tuesday Knight -- could possibly have known about his reputation as a "luck poacher" when he has done such a good job of keeping it secret from the masses. But it's hard to resist the job when she offers him $10,000.

Then Nick is approached in quick succession by a Chinese ganglord and an unnamed agent from an unnamed secret branch of the federal government. Both want to hire him for his luck poaching skills - Tommy Wong wants to amass as much good luck as he can in order to dominate San Francisco like any proper master criminal and the federal agent (who is a dead ringer for Barry Manilow) wants Nick's help in bringing down Wong's reign of terror. Nick has no choice but to give in to both when each of his potential employers resorts to blackmail and threatens his family.

These three plot lines are interwoven in a tapestry of coincidence and complexity to rival any webwork epic by Harry Stephen Keeler. Like Keeler there is an eccentric humor as well (though I found much of it in the early part of the book to be tiresome and sophomoric) and the action never lets up. To reveal any more would ruin the pleasure of discovering the many absurd plights Browne has planned for Nick.

I started out not really liking this book or the main character. Nick Monday is the kind of egotistic, womanizing, devil-may-care asshole I can't stand in real life. A fictional character with these traits who is saddled with a sense of humor that matched Kartman's of "South Park" wasn't going to get me to like the book any better. But with the introduction of one of the most endearing characters -- a wigga wannabe gangsta rapper named Doug (aka Bow Wow) -- Browne started to win me over.

It's the relationship between Doug and Nick that kept me reading to the end. Not only do they make for a truly eccentric Holmes-Watson partnership (Doug even calls his boss Holmes) they are something of a surrogate father and son duo. The scenes between these two raise the book from a weary, smart alecky parody to an offbeat buddy story with genuine charm and humor.

Slowly and slyly Browne veers away from his action-oriented parody and instead uses the fantastical elements of stealing luck, acquiring luck and becoming addicted to luck as a way to explore the universal tenet so succinctly put in Howard's End by E.M. Forster: "Only connect!" Nick eventually learns that luck can be changed, that life is richer and better when rather than distancing himself from relationships he genuinely connects to other people. He will soon be bidding good-bye to his smartass solitary life made up of nothing but empty one night stands with "corporate coffeehouse baristas" and lonely hours spent surfing the internet for lucky marks to poach from.

One of the most unique parts of the book is Nick's encounter with a mysterious Eastern European accented luck poacher who has the unfortunate fate of having become a Specter. That is, he poaches only bad luck. It's both creepy and poignant as we read of Nick's reaction to a poacher who has surrendered to the dark side and yet ironically reveals a deeper dimension to his hidden compassion for misfits and outsiders, something we've previously seen in Nick's kindness towards the homeless drunks who hang out in the alleys that line the streets of his favorite coffe joints. This is point when the book becomes richer, more dramatic, and -- most importanly -- more human.

All those unnamed characters further illustrate Nick's isolation and his chosen path of indifference. He never bothers to learn anyone's real name. He gives them nicknames like Scooter Girl, Thug One and Thug Two or dubs them with celebrity names based on their appearance like the fed who is Barry Manilow's twin or the Tommy Wong's cronies who resemble Jake and Elwood of Blues Brothers' fame. Few of the major characters receive full idenities. It seemed odd to me at first this cast of the anonymous or nicknamed. I thought Browne was a lazy writer, but by the end it all made sense. It proved to be one of the more clever aspects of the book by the time I finished it.

Here's a real original in the crime fiction world. A book that mixes comedy and thrills and fantasy into a work of fiction that's both wildly entertaining and uncommonly moving. Lucky Bastard is one of the better contemporary novels I've read in a long time. You'd be a lucky devil yourself if you decided to add it to your list of summer reads.

FFB: The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton – Russell H. Greenan

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May 112012

Algernon Pendleton's best friend is Eulalia. They have intimate conversations. She advises him on life's dilemmas. He compliments her on her musical voice and beautiful porcelain. That's not a porcelain complexion, though. That's literally porcelain. Eulalia, you see, is a Worcester pitcher. And she talks. But only to Algernon.

Russell Greenan's fourth book The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton (1973) is a rarity in the crime fiction world that these days clings to gritty and violent realism. It's a wryly humorous book and a wondrous amalgamation of the fantastic and the criminal. It's all done stylishly in the literate sometimes fussy voice of Algernon, Al to his friends, who narrates the novel.

Al may have spent far too much time alone in the house he inherited from his famous great grandfather, a noted Egyptologist. In his loneliness he has found companions in the hundreds of objects and a few plants that fill the cavernous home. The house has become a veritable museum of valuable and rare antiquities and treasures of the pharaohs. When Al's finances are in danger of plummeting to the poverty level he helps himself to one or two of those treasures, takes a trip to Mahir Suleyman's junk/resale shop where they haggle over a price, and Al leaves with a chunk of change in his pockets. Life is easy - chats with Eulalia, a few gossipy whispers from the philodendrons, selling an ushabti or statuette of Bast every now and then. Then Norbie drops in unexpectedly for a visit.

Norbie is apparently Al's only human friend. They go back several years to their army days. Norbie saved Al from drowning after their ship was bombed in the Pacific. Al owes a lot to Norbie. And when he comes with suitcases in hand and a hard luck story of a failed marriage and failing health Al can't turn him out. Norbie becomes his roommate for an indeterminate stay. One night Norbie introduces Al to the lost art of drinking absinthe (complete with sugar cube and special spoon) and when Norbie goes to retrieve that cursed liquor from his suitcase he inadvertently reveals a huge cache of money - $60,000 to be exact. The next day Al confesses his wonder at the mysterious amount of money to Eulalia and she begins to fill his head with criminal ideas.

Mahir will figure prominently in the tale. As will Madge Clerisy, a woman professor of archeology, who is suspicious of a junk store that has a regular supply of extremely rare Egyptian artifacts. Al succumbs to the temptations of Eulalia but gets in way over his head. Soon all three are inextricably linked in a conspiracy of blackmail and extortion. And there I had better stop. To reveal any more would ruin a reader's own discovery of the ingenuity and sheer originality of the story.

Greenan's first book It Happened in Boston? (1968) is something of a cult novel uniquely mixing the surreal, the absurd and the sinister in what has become his trademark in these rather hard to classify books. He went on to write several books each one utterly strange, utterly different. The Queen of America (1972) details the story of a couple of too smart for their own good teenagers, one of whom has a nasty habit of making tape recordings of his neighbors conversations, and the menacing female motorcyclist who becomes part of their lives. In Heart of Gold (1975), a story similar to Anthony Rolls' The Vicar's Experiment (aka Clerical Error), we learn of the life of a duplicitous, sometimes murderous, minister. Another story of antiques, theft and murder is The Bric-a-Brac Man (1976), a book which reveals Greenan's arcane knowledge of Japanese netsuke and the world of antiques in which he spent some time as a buyer and seller. Some of his latest fiction is now available via Smashwords. His work is vastly underrated and one of those rare writers who once sampled will be savored. I guarantee after reading any one of his books you'll be back for more.

For more about Russell H. Greenan visit this tribute website owned and maintained by his relatives.

FFB: Murder in the Moor – Thomas Kindon

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Apr 202012

The policeman on holiday has been done to death in the detective fiction genre, but Thomas Kindon's engaging and lively Murder in the Moor (1929) may be the quintessential example. You probably know the drill here – a policeman goes on vacation intending to be as far away from crime as he can manage yet invariably stumbles upon a corpse that is almost always a puzzling murder and he cannot resist uncovering the who, why, and how of the crime. What Kindon does with this well worn territory is very different and highly original on all levels. Best of all the book is wittily told and often hilarious when Kindon lets loose with his obvious fondness for outrageous humor and bizarre characters. Most appealing of all is his unusual detective Peregrine Clement -- aka Pithecanthropus -- Smith.

"Pithecanthropus? You mean like the Java Man?" I hear you cry.

Yes, indeed. For Smith is described in the third paragraph of the first page as "over six feet tall, and broad in proportion – and, moreover, very ugly…, for his face was astonishingly like a chimpanzee's." The illustration of Smith on the paperback edition shown on this page provides him with a much handsomer countenance than I would imagine Kindon intended. It is his apelike features that inspired a wiseacre copper who had recently attended a lecture entitled "What Evolution Means to YOU!" to bestow upon Smith the anthropological nickname which has stuck ever since. Even the crooks have learned to call him Pithy Smithy.

The very involved plot is far too complex to reduce to a summary of a few sentences or even a few paragraphs. And it's so enjoyable I would be tempted to describe all my favorite characters and go into great detail about the funniest moments and most ingenious plot devices. I better not do that! Suffice it to say that Smith is on a walking holiday in rural English countryside that resembles Dartmoor though the area is completely renamed with fictional towns and landmarks. Over the course of the story rich in incident and adventure he encounters not only a puzzling brutal murder, but an escaped convict, industrial espionage, counterfeiting, revenge, and a crazed inventor of bizarre clockwork devices.

More beautiful map endpapers from E. P. Dutton (click to enlarge)
Map artist: Frank Adams

From the opening pages when Smith meets up with the Scottish engineer Angus MacFee, in love with his prismatic compass and fond of calculating the proper hiking routes using his ordnance survey in combination with the compass, to the final thrilling pages in which Smith saves the convict Jimmy Toggle from a fiendish deathtrap created by the mad murderer the story is gripping, engaging, literate and witty. The detection is fascinating and also adheres to the fair play rules. We even get a bit of Oppenheimesque spy stuff and a pulp magazine bit of gruesome bizarreness in the final chapters that would be the envy of Edgar Allan Poe.

The cast of characters are far from the types of cliches you would expect from this era. Who could resist the kooky authoress, Cynthia Trebogle, who revisits the murder scene with Smith pontificating on her nutty theory that the murder was committed by "a priest of neolithic or druidical tribe" using a stone axe. Or the irascible Joshua Hubblesby who rhapsodizes on his idea of a real holiday being nothing more than riding his favorite train lines and sleeping. Even the police provide entertainment. Captain Hector Madan, Smith's superior, is a blustery impatient straight man providing many Margaret Dumont moments to Smith's insolent Groucho style quips. The officious younger inspector put in charge of the case is shown up many a time when he doggedly sets his eyes on MacFee as suspect number one while Smith points out he couldn't possibly be the killer due to the timing involved in MacFee's alternate route he took near the murder scene and suggests the inspector do the hike himself as proof.

But now the bad news. Thomas Kindon's 1929 detective novel is yet another of those books you will be hard pressed to find. I stumbled across my copy in the Chicago Public Library then wondered if any used copies are out there. My dutiful internet search turned up exactly ten copies in various editions for sale ranging from $35 to $158, plus one dealer in Germany who wants $197 for his copy (a US edition from 1929) that is just plain greedy. The book was reissued in Jacques Barzun's "Top 50 Classics of Crime" series published by Garland that was intended solely for libraries. I suggest you check your local library first. Chances are it may be there.

Smallbone Deceased – Michael Gilbert

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Apr 122012

Lawyers sure do have an edge when it comes to writing about crime. So many lawyers made successful crime writers. Among the earliest were Melville Davisson Post, John Buchan and Erle Stanley Gardner. A contemporary lawyer-turned-crime writer list includes Sara Woods, Sarah Caudwell, Scott Turow, John Grisham and Martin Edwards. And those are just the few I can immediately think of without resorting to an exhaustive internet search. I'm sure I could fill a three inch column with names. Add to that list Michael Gilbert who I have finally decided to read after years of thinking about it. I chose as my first book his most lauded work, Smallbone Deceased (1950).

This lawyers' office seems no different than many of the cubicle spotted, fluorescent lit, sterile environments I've endured over the past twenty or so years as an office drudge in a variety of hospitals, advertising firms and not-for-profit organizations. The backbiting, the secretarial gossip, the petty jealousies, the after hours office sex, the professional rivalry, the enforced weekend staffing to preserve good customer relations, and the utter absurdity of a bureaucratic office enslaved to indexing and filing systems that are continually improved upon to afford better efficiency - I have encountered it all. Nothing seems to have changed in the past fifty plus years. Even with the advent of computers and email and electronic necessities like fax and copying machines everything I read of in Gilbert's book still goes on. It's only natural that a dead body would turn up in such an atmosphere. That it should turn up in a life size deed box and that the dead body has been dead for several weeks should indicate to you the overall tone of the book. Gilbert's penchant for black humor is on exhibit in sharply drawn, acerbically funny scenes. And it's a welcome addition to this cleverly constructed puzzle.

Marcus Smallbone is the dead man in the deed box. He was a member of a trust – the Ichabod Stokes Trust to be specific. The box in which he was discovered should have held the documents for that trust. They've gone missing. An awful lot of paper to go missing, too. So who killed Marcus and what happened to those papers? Inspector Hazelrigg enlists the aid of Henry Bohun, a newly employed statistician, as a sort of informer/sidekick to get to the bottom of the dirty business in the firm.

Of the detective novels I've read from the vintage era I can only say that Murder Must Advertise comes closest to capturing the microcosm of business office culture so truthfully. Sayers also displayed her own brand of wit, but her book is too closely tied to the 1930s. Gilbert's book is timeless. Though the book takes place in 1950 with references to black market goods and post-WW2 life the book could have been written a few years ago.

Everything you may have read elsewhere (and it has been reviewed and discussed repeatedly all over the interweb) about this book being among Gilbert's best -- if not the best --is true. Add me to the list of readers who have dubbed it "highly recommended." Those of you out there who have endured a dreary office job, whether in a law firm or some other business, will find plenty to appreciate in the pages of Smallbone Deceased.

COOL FLICKS: How to Murder a Rich Uncle (1957)

comic crime, Movies Comments Off

Feb 142012

Charles Addams might have liked to introduce his ghoulish cartoon characters to the Clitterberns. They would have got along marvelously. Murder becomes an obsession in the household whether it is as lurid entertainment like the novels (This Is Indeed A Bloody Business is one title) that Mother Clitterbern finds so highly amusing or the means to solving their financially wrecked household. Fittingly the movie poster for How To Murder a Rich Uncle (at left) was designed by Charles Addams. The Rube Goldberg inspired deathtrap in the illustration is not Addams' exaggerated invention, but rather one of the many methods employed by the desperate Henry Clitterbern who is intent on knocking off his uncle so he can inherit his fortune and pay off his debt ridden estate.

Nigel Patrick (who also directed) as Henry, assisted by Edith, his compliant and devoted wife (Wendy Hiller in a flighty and odd performance) as well as Albert, his dunderhead of a son (Kenneth Fortescue), is determined that visiting Uncle George die a fatal accident. But Uncle George has luck and coincidence on his side as each carefully thought out murder plan is upset and backfires resulting in the death of a member of the family. It's sort of like Kind and Hearts and Coronets filtered through a kind of Murder for Dummies handbook.

The script by John Paxton is adapted from a French farce called Il faut tuer Julie by Didier Daix. Translated as We Must Murder Julie I have not been able to find anything about that play nor have I been successful locating it under its original French title. But I suspect that it is not the very British and macabrely funny story we watch in the movie. The script makes fun of American conventions like tea bags, corn flakes, banking and ridicules the old world of post WW2 English aristocrats still clinging to their entitlement and decaying mansions. I thought most of the cast was perfect especially Hiller, Athene Seyler as her mother (called Grannie in the credits) and Charles Coburn as the apparently oblivious Uncle George.

The scene stealing star of this movie is Katie Johnson in her final movie role. Her penultimate film and her most famous role came right before this when she appeared as the kindly Mrs. Wilberforce in The Ladykillers (1955) starring Alec Guinness. Here as Aunt Alice, Johnson presents herself as a soft voiced, fanciful dreamer taken for granted by Henry and family as nothing more than a doddering old maid. She has a habit of appearing out of nowhere and making some of the most pointed observations giving her, in addition to her childlike qualities, a bit of a spooky Sibyl persona that irritates and frightens Henry more than he is willing to admit. Later, we will learn she has no magical powers or gift for ESP but rather has a penchant for eavesdropping in a variety of secret hiding places. She is a delight to watch and I kept rooting for her to put an end to the madness before she too became an inadvertent victim. I was sure she would be the last one standing. Her final scene at the inquest is a marvel as she does a turn at spinster sleuth lecturing that rivals anything from Jane Marple.

Nigel Patrick is tutored in the art of the tea bag by Wendy Hiller

Aunt Alice (Katie Johnson) informs Henry she is onto his murder plans

Aunt Alice clears up the muddle at the inquest just like Jane Marple

Two actors who would go on to bigger and better things appear here in small roles. Musical theater actor and composer Anthony Newley is the boyfriend of Henry's daughter and he fancies himself an amateur criminologist who is sure that the accidents are murder attempts though he has the wrong culprit in mind. In a tiny role as Gilrony in which he utters only one syllable repeatedly ("Aye!" in some wretched accent of indeterminate origin) a ruggedly handsome and very blond Michael Caine makes his first credited film role. He's almost unrecognizable in this incarnation.

The breakfast scene in which Uncle George's corn flakes and tea bags create havoc and Edith suggests an extra ingredient they might introduce into Uncle George's tea can be watched here.

The entire movie, broken up into six parts, is available for free viewing at YouTube.

This is my contribution to this week's "Tuesday's Overlooked Film" hosted by Todd Mason at his blog. Be sure to visit Sweet Freedom and check out the rest of the insightful comments on unusual films, TV shows and video creations.